by James Church
“And?”
“Special. No traces.”
“You wouldn’t kid me.”
“No, I was surprised as hell. They didn’t dress like anyone I ever saw from around here. Greasy shirts, though not like his. They had funny accents.”
“I’ll bet.”
“The guy made a lot of threats, O.”
“Scared you? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you scared.”
“He made me angry more than anything. That’s what’s wrong with—” Yang choked off the thought abruptly. He waited a moment until it was gone, or buried back where it had been. “Anyway, he left this, though he didn’t know it at the time.” Yang put a small identification wallet carefully onto the desk. “He may be looking for it by now. But maybe not.”
“He left it?” If Yang didn’t know the man in the red shirt was dead, I figured it wasn’t my place to tell him.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You lifted it from him? And you don’t think he’ll miss it?” I opened the wallet and thumbed through the contents. “Why is that?”
“All phony. Pretty good, but phony. The residence address is given as Huichon.”
“Swell.” When I got to my office, I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. “Hey!” I went back to Yang’s office. “Huichon. That’s in Chagang.”
Yang looked up. “You should get out of Pyongyang more often, O. Of course it’s in Chagang. Where’d you think it was, Scotland?” He smiled at me. I should have felt good, to see him smile again after so long, but somehow it gave me a funny feeling.
5
The stairs down to Club Blue were dark, but the treads were supremely quiet. Concrete stairs don’t make a lot of noise. There’s no give to them, either. They crumble sooner or later and break off in ugly chunks, but for stealth, nothing is better. Metal stairs are probably the worst. They clang when you stumble, which happens in the dark. In absolute darkness, wooden stairs are best. They may creak a little, but if you know enough to walk where they have support, you can minimize the sound. And the stairs near the top and the bottom have a different feel to them. With concrete, you never know for sure where you are, which might be why I missed a step and grabbed for the handrail.
At the bottom of the stairs, I kept close to the wall, found the door to the club, and then, as I rounded the corner, could finally see from a thin streak on the floor that the light was turned on in the office. The office door was shut, but I could hear voices from the inside. One of them was the owner, anxious but still with a polish to it. The other, high-pitched, insistent, and full of fear, was the bartender. Nothing else; the place was silent, no clinking of glasses, no laughter, no customers.
I could have tried the handle, but if for some reason the door was locked, it would have given them time to react. So I just kicked it in. It was a cheap door, but the hinges were even cheaper, put in with screws that must have been made of tinfoil. The hinges came out of the frame, and the door sailed across the room.
“Anyone home?” I strolled in as if I were paying a friendly call. The bartender had been hit on the back by the door. It probably hurt a little, but from the look on his face, it scared him more than anything. The owner stood up, and as he did so he reached to open the top drawer.
“If that’s a gun in there,” I said, “leave it. Right now, you’re not in any trouble, nothing you can’t get out of, anyway. But if you pull a gun on me, I’ll make sure you regret it.” I don’t know why I kept imagining the owner had a gun. He looked like someone who knew how to use one, or had used one.
“If you’re still around.” The bartender looked at me balefully.
“I’ll be around, don’t worry your ugly face about it. I’ve got news for you, if you’re in the room when he pulls a gun on me, you’re in it, too. Only you probably don’t have the money to bribe the camp guards, so they’ll work you until you drop, if they don’t rape you first.”
“What?”
“Don’t listen to him.” The club owner still had his hand on the drawer handle, but I could tell he had already decided not to open it. He just didn’t want me to think I’d scared him. “No one’s going anywhere, isn’t that right, Inspector? This is just a friendly call to collect that drink I promised you. If you wait around a little, the girls will start showing up. Might be there’s one that likes cops.”
“Yeah.” The bartender smiled, so that the scar across his jaw writhed like a snake. “She probably likes all sorts of barnyard animals.”
I walked up close to him and bent down until my eyes were drilled into his. “Get out of my sight, now.”
“Go get ready for the first customers.” The club owner nodded his head toward the bar. “I’ll handle this.”
The bartender turned and walked into the dark barroom. He clicked a single light on and, from the sound of it, started sweeping.
“Inspector, what is this? Surely it’s not the license causing you to break in here. That’s not what you boys care about. But I can see I do need some protection—look at how that door came off the hinges. Let’s say a hundred euros a week, and drinks anytime.” He had his wallet out and was thumbing through some bills. “We can make the first payment a little higher, just to get things started on a good note.”
“You always open up so late? Hard to make money, if you don’t have any customers. Or are you running something else on the side?”
The manager counted out a few more bills. “You really are a bold one, aren’t you, Inspector? A real shakedown artist.”
“There was a body found in the alley next to your club.”
“You don’t say.”
“Friend of yours?”
“Everyone is my friend, Inspector, but since I don’t know what body you’re talking about, I’m not prepared to say whether I knew him.”
“Him?”
“What was this, er, body wearing? No identification papers? Now, that would be strange. In the alley next to the club, you said? There were no fights in here. Maybe it was a robbery.” He held out the bills.
“Put away your wallet. Wait, on second thought, let me see it.”
The club owner smiled. “Why settle for some when you can have it all, that’s the game now?”
“Sit down and keep quiet, would you?” I flipped open the wallet and looked at the money. All small euro bills, all in order, from highest to lowest, back to front. “Pretty meticulous, aren’t you?” I threw the wallet back at him. “The body had a knife in the back. I just thought I’d warn you. Maybe you want to get some extra security out front.”
“You volunteering?”
“Me? No, I don’t stand in front of rat holes.”
PART II
Chapter One
Things went quiet for about a week. They do that sometimes. Like a sheet has been thrown over a whole case, and no one wants to lift up a corner to see if it’s dead or just sleeping. More than ever, I wanted to get rid of the whole thing, if I could figure out how. Three murders. I didn’t think it was coincidence that the bus had been there when the robber stepped into the street in front of the bank; I still didn’t buy the finding of “heart failure” in the noodle restaurant; and a knife in the back is pretty conclusive. Three murders and a bank robbery, all in my sector. Three murders but one body missing. And SSD, or somebody, breathing down our necks before I’d even sharpened my pencil.
On top of this, a foreigner with a funny past and no file. It was possible, a Kazakh-Korean woman with a British passport getting a job in a bank in Pyongyang. Barely possible. And hers the bank that was robbed, not that we had so many banks. I couldn’t picture it, her standing meekly while the robbers did what? Told everyone to lie on the floor? Went in the back room and cleaned out the euro bills? She hadn’t volunteered any information, just seemed offended that I was asking questions. She’d probably told the robbers to keep their voices down.
I wandered around the office, wrote a few reports, watched the willow trees across the street soak up t
he afternoon sun, and then I got tired of waiting. Nobody answered the phone at the morgue, or maybe the line was out of order. I tried the Ministry, but they still claimed to have no reports on the murder of the man in the red shirt. Not a surprise; if you’re well connected enough, a knife in the back can be kept pretty quiet. We hadn’t even opened a case file and the incident had been yanked out of our jurisdiction. That was fine, I didn’t want to know anything about the politics or the personalities, but I needed to find out a couple of details, enough to reset my operations if that’s what had to be done. Maybe Han would have some information. When I called SSD, the phone clicked once, and then the operator said he was “out of range.” I asked when he’d be back, and she said that was not for me to know. Okay, I said, have a nice day.
I picked up the Interpol notes on Kazakh bank robbery rings and read through them again, maybe for the fifth time. One sentence kept catching my eye. It said that some of the robberies had been aided by informants in the bank, usually women who were hired only a few months before, then disappeared. The rest of the report was mildly interesting. The list of countries where robberies had taken place included everywhere in Western Europe except Portugal and England. The only country where more than one bank had been robbed was Germany. The Germans had experienced three of these apparently related robberies, two at the same bank in Köln and one in Dresden, but that one—the latest—was more than four years ago. The overall spate of similar robberies had started in 1991; the pattern was one bank got hit every fourteen months. Two robbers had been caught but died mysteriously while undergoing questioning in a Berlin jail. Another, after the second robbery in Köln, got through the police roadblocks but was killed a day later when his stolen motorcycle went out of control and ended up in the Rhine. The most recent robbery had been in Sweden, five months ago, in the middle of a snowstorm.
That seemed like a pretty quick transition, from Sweden to Korea in only five months. I called SSD again. The operator said she would pass Han the message and he would call me back. The words were okay, but the tone of voice said not to call and bother her anymore. It took a few minutes, but finally the phone rang. When I answered, there were no clicks, just Han’s voice, good and clear.
“You know anything about a body with a knife in the back?” I figured I’d get straight to the point, skip the pleasantries.
“No.” A short silence, which can mean a lot of things. “What are knife handles made of, Inspector?” he asked, finally.
“I assume this is completely unrelated to my question.”
“Simple query, isn’t it? What kind of wood? I thought that was right up your alley, wood.”
If I wanted to know where he was going with this, the easiest thing seemed to be to answer the question. “A knife handle could be anything. It might not be wood.”
“Thank you for that. Your Ministry is known for offering alternative theories, Inspector. But let’s say it was wood. Can we do that?”
“Like I said, could be anything.”
“What if it were birch? Where would it have been made?”
“Birch? Probably not from around here. It could have been made in Russia, that’s the obvious candidate.”
“Recently?”
“Hard to tell. Besides, how would I know, over the phone? You’d have to look at the wood, maybe chew on it a little.”
“You kidding me?”
“Just slightly.”
“So, there is a way to tell how old it is. I mean, you’re saying it’s not impossible.”
“Few things are impossible, Han.”
“What if it wasn’t really a knife?”
“More like a bayonet, you mean.”
“What then?”
“Then it might depend on the marks on the blade. If the handle is birch, somewhere up north is a good guess. Like I said, Russia, maybe. Then you would want to look at the marks on the blade, to see if they point in the same direction.”
“Birch trees don’t grow in rich people’s gardens where it’s warm?”
“They do, but rich people don’t cut down the birch trees in their gardens for lumber to make bayonet handles.”
“Could it be Japanese?”
“No. Almost certainly not. No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Very.”
“Then why is there Japanese on the blade?”
“Because it’s Finnish.”
“What?”
“The Finns bought Japanese rifles in the 1920s, along with the bayonets. If the handles broke, they were replaced with birch.” I wasn’t making this up; I just happened to read it somewhere and it stuck in my memory. “The Red Army probably made off with a few of them when they were running from angry Finns. Now one of them has ended up in someone’s back. You want a guess, just idle speculation? It could have been put there by a Russian. Or someone who worked for the Russians. Someone born in Odessa, say.” I didn’t think Logonov was capable of murdering anyone, but I wanted Han to know I hadn’t forgotten about the Russian just because I had been warned off seeing him again.
“That’s the other thing your Ministry does, speculate on the basis of nothing. It’s not very smart.”
“Don’t tell me, you think it’s a sign of insecurity. If you’re finished, I have another question for you. Do you still have the bank lady’s file?”
“According to you, it’s not a file, only a cover page.”
“I changed my mind.”
There was a long silence. This was not always a bad sign. Some people think when they aren’t talking.
“Still with me, Han?”
“Inspector, if you need something, just ask, alright? I hate it the way you Ministry people tiptoe around.”
“That’s a wonderful image, the Minister on tiptoe. Nothing at all like you, asking straight out and flatfooted about knife handles. Tell me this. Does the file say when the lady entered the country?”
Another silence.
“You there?”
“I’m here.”
“Well, when did she enter the country?”
“It doesn’t say.”
“Isn’t there a copy of her entry visa?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I guess it must not be a file. Good-bye, Inspector, I’m busy.” The phone clicked twice, and the operator came on the line. The connection wasn’t as good; Han must have been calling from somewhere else.
“Anything more we can help you with, Inspector?” Same tone of voice, edgy, maybe condescending, though with all the SSD buzzes and clicks this time of day you couldn’t be sure.
“Yes, tell your technicians congratulations. They’ve almost fixed those clicks.”
“That’s it?”
“I don’t suppose you know anything about cell phones.”
“No.”
“How about silk stockings?”
The line went dead. I went out to find some cold noodles in a quiet restaurant where people didn’t fall over dead or end up with knives in their back, knives with birch-wood handles.
2
After lunch I strolled around a few back streets. For April, it was hot, but it was still better outside than sitting in the office staring at the ceiling and pretending not to be thinking about a case I couldn’t even figure out if I was supposed to solve. If things were so quiet, something must be wrong. If no one was prepared to let me know which way to jump, then it was going to be a very long way down. I dodged a woman on a bicycle who pedaled as if she were daydreaming, and kept walking to nowhere in particular. Just as I turned a corner, I suddenly got that feeling—I was being watched. Someone had marked me, there was no doubt in my mind. Harmless glances, uninterested stares don’t register with me. This was no longer little warning flags flapping in front of my eyes. This was a skin-prickling, hackle-raising klaxon that somewhere, relatively near and directed specifically at me, was a pair of eyes brimful of death and destruction.
I never made a careful study of it, bu
t I’ve looked at a few books about survival behavior. At one point in my career, it seemed a wise thing to do. The theory is that an animal—or a person—marked as prey can sense an intense look that pierces the invisible force surrounding everything living. The heart jumps, chemicals pour into the bloodstream, muscles tense. If it’s a deer, then the deer is ready to run, run for its life, crazy with fear, breathless to escape. I never altogether bought the theory; how could there be anything physical about looking? It sounded like death rays. Yet I knew the physical reaction was real enough. Theory or not, somehow when I was being watched, I sensed it.
With my heart pounding, I stopped to tie my shoe; it usually works better than bounding away like a frightened roe deer. When I stood up again, I walked slowly in the opposite direction. There was no one around who seemed to be paying attention, not even anyone who seemed conspicuously inattentive. I wandered aimlessly for about twenty minutes, long enough to be sure the lion, or the wolf, or whatever it was, had dropped away. Being followed doesn’t bother me, but I never like knowing I’m someone’s prey. At least now I knew where things stood. I was in someone’s sights. Whether that was because I was getting too close or not close enough remained to be seen. It was becoming vital to know which, but I hadn’t figured out yet exactly how to test the waters without getting swept away. I thought about it as I walked, but every conclusion suggested its opposite. Maybe it was the weather. It’s hard to be decisive when the air is so clear that you can see the buds on an old tree’s highest branches turning to the sun.
It could have been just coincidence, or a subconscious compass at work, but my wandering ended up at the top of the stairs leading to Club Blue. As long as I was there, I figured, I might as well go down and chat. The bartender was bound to know something useful. Whether he would volunteer it was another matter. Besides, it was hot and I was thirsty. The place was quiet when I sat down at the bar. No music playing. I looked around, then got up and poured myself a glass of beer.