by James Church
Min glumly turned that idea over in his mind. “Sure, and how do we know this isn’t a test of my honesty? They want to see what I’ll do. What am I going to do?”
“But what if it’s real?”
“You just said Yang wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Yes, but they don’t know that. They may think the information is real, and they need to know if we can be trusted.”
“Inspector, we can go on like this for hours. Anything is possible.”
“Get rid of it. The Blue Paper. Get rid of it.”
“But if they planted it . . .”
“Trust me, Min, I was just thinking out loud. They didn’t plant it. It was a mistake, an unintentional security breach. If you report it, the clerks in the central mailroom will be put through hell. As soon as they realize it’s missing, they’ll fix their logs. No one else will know it’s gone. It’s happened before. But we have another problem.”
“I don’t want to know.”
Min knew the problem, he just didn’t want to hear it out loud. We had to do something about the case in order to bury these crazy reports that someone in our office—and by implication, all of us who dealt with that person—was involved in a plot against a foreign visitor. It was so ridiculous it could only be a cover for something else. I put a gag in my subconscious before it could say what I was thinking.
“You do what you have to do,” Min said. “If it doesn’t work, don’t forget, I won’t be there to wave when the truck drives away.”
“Don’t worry, if it doesn’t work, we’ll both be in the back of the truck.”
2
Even a man with short legs will take long strides. He walks along the street, you tag along behind, simple as can be. A man can be followed at a reasonable distance, comfortably. I once followed someone we suspected of trafficking in bad medicine for two days. The weather was good. It was a pleasure to be outside. I almost bought him dinner afterward, he made it so easy. But women are different. They amble, they saunter, they stop for no particular reason to look at nothing at all. It is impossible to adjust your pace, to anticipate what they will do, and so you end up running up their backs if you aren’t paying attention. It does no good to find yourself standing next to the woman you are tailing. She won’t turn her head to look, but she’ll notice you out of the corner of her eye, and then you might as well go home.
If I was going to get serious about the bank robbery case, I had to make up for lost time. Someone didn’t want us to be on it, whoever was floating those stories about Yang and the British visitor. But someone else did want us on it. The only thing I had to go on was the weeklong silence, and the fact that people who seemed to be connected with the robbery, or to know something about it, were disappearing. Or turning up dead. Silence never meant quiet, not on these sorts of cases. It meant a frantic, ferocious struggle in offices I never visited, on phones I never called, in places I had no wish ever to see.
Getting Yang in the clear, and pulling everyone else in the office to a safe place, required our getting traction on the robbery case. Whether that meant actually solving it, I didn’t yet know. Either way, we had to be seen pursuing it, and to do that, we had to start up the active investigation with something simple. Jumping too far ahead would suggest that we realized this was more than a robbery. The easiest, safest thing at this point was checking each one of the bank clerks. Little Li was too conspicuous. Yang didn’t like crowds, and anyway I couldn’t put Yang out on the street now; he’d be followed by a train of people from a special group whose purpose and place in the scheme of things we didn’t know. It was unlikely there would be a move against him; it was too soon for that. But sometimes people get desperate out of sequence, and if they did, they might try something against Yang.
Luckily, the weather was good, and I liked walking at sunset this time of year. The light was pure, and the air was very soft. How bad could it be, following a young woman and watching the sun go down?
I picked up the first clerk as she left the bank at dusk. The files said she came from an unremarkable family, and there was nothing in her background to excite suspicion, except that her grandfather had gone south during the war. There was a vague note about tragedy on her mother’s side, but no details. You’d have thought someone would have included a page on that; maybe it had fallen out. Tragedy was leverage, or weakness. Her school records seemed fine. She wasn’t married, but she lived in her own apartment rather than with her parents. That was a little unusual; it probably meant that someone was keeping her. The one thing in the file that grabbed me was the entry under her employment. She had been hired at the bank about two months ago.
The clerk had long hair and wore a trench coat that went to her ankles. It was slit in the back. The tiny picture in her file showed her to be plain looking—small oval face, sharp chin, wide-set eyes, high forehead. I couldn’t see her face very well as she came out of the bank, but I thought I recognized the chin. She had on dark brown high-heel shoes but couldn’t walk in them very well, so it meant we would not be going too fast. It wouldn’t be much trouble to keep her in sight, even as the light faded and the moon climbed into the night. I kept back about seven or eight meters. Once I dropped my keys and pretended to hunt for them while she stopped to talk to an older man. I didn’t get a good look at him, but when he walked away, he moved slowly, as if his feet hurt.
From the route she was taking, I felt pretty sure that the clerk was headed for a bus stop near the train station. That was a guess, but it seemed a good one. If nothing else, it let me walk as if I really had a destination in mind in case she started noticing me. If I needed to, I could drop back a little. I didn’t even have to look at her anymore; to anyone watching, it would appear we simply happened to be heading to the same place.
Getting too congratulatory over your own technique is never a good idea. Keeping back is smart, until it isn’t. I lost her for a long minute in a crowd of people unloading onto the sidewalk from a broken-down tram, but I just kept walking toward the train station and finally picked her out of the gloom again about ten meters ahead.
When she went down the steps of an underpass, I gave her an extra twenty seconds. The underpass was dark, and you could lose someone in there. I wanted to see her come up the other side. A minute passed, then two. She didn’t emerge. People were streaming up and down the steps, but she wasn’t one of them. Finally, I went down. No one was stepping over a body; people weren’t swerving to avoid someone standing still. She wasn’t there, she hadn’t climbed up the other side, she hadn’t doubled back and come up the steps where I was waiting. She was gone.
3
As I walked back to the office, bad thoughts kept running through my mind. My skills might be getting rusty, but I would not lose a woman on high heels unless she was very well trained. And she wasn’t alone, it seemed. What was it I’d heard at the bank party about Miss Chon, that she was good at slipping away? Away to where?
After losing the clerk in the underpass, I doubled back to make sure she hadn’t ditched me and gone for a bowl of noodles somewhere. She hadn’t, at least not along the route we’d covered. I might have missed her as she climbed the underpass steps; she might have come up the other side exactly at the moment I went down. There is such a thing as coincidence, but the Ministry doesn’t favor it as an explanation. Frankly, I didn’t, either, not in this instance. Who had trained her? Why would a bank clerk need to know how to lose a tail? Worst of all, was my technique getting so bad that she spotted me, even in the dark?
By the time I got up the stairs and into the hallway leading to Yang’s office, I knew it would be impossible to solve this case by putting together a clue here and a clue there. There simply wasn’t time, especially if everything was as complicated as it now appeared. The first thing I had to do was pin Yang up against the wall and make sure none of that crazy conversation we’d had the other night led anywhere. I wasn’t worried that he was involved, though I made it a point never to be sure about any
thing until I was. The fact was, he was mentioned in a report where he shouldn’t have been, and we needed to know why. Despite my first reaction, I knew it couldn’t be the Russians who had floated his name. Someone in our unit appeared in a Blue Paper, in the middle of everything that was going on—coincidence? Not a chance. This wasn’t from a foreign service. It was from the inside, people who knew something about Yang. They might have picked his name at random, but that would have been out of character. When they wanted to use someone, even for target practice, it was for a reason. If they put his name in a Blue Paper, they had thought about it, researched, weighed other options and other people. What was there about my melancholy colleague that rang bells for them, whoever they were?
I didn’t bother to knock. “Yang, I’m going to phrase this as delicately as I can. Whatever you’re up to, it’s not courage. It’s foolishness.” Yang was at his desk, staring off into space with a sad look in his eyes.
He glanced up and acknowledged me standing in his doorway, but he didn’t change expressions. “So, you figured out who was driving that car with the special plates,” he said. He waited, but I didn’t reply. Only then did he nod for me to sit down.
The visitor’s chair had one leg shorter than the others. It had been that way for years. Sooner or later we’d fix it or get another chair. “Did I?” I said, trying to stay upright. “Did I figure it out?”
“They’ve been watching you in order to watch me. And once they spotted me at your apartment, they became doubly interested.” Yang hunched over his side of the desk. He and Li shared an office; they sat on either side of a single worktable. Li was at the Traffic Bureau, checking reports on bus accidents. I hoped he might be able to shake something loose, where I had not.
“Alright, tell me. Why are they watching you?”
Yang shrugged, a minor movement of his shoulders. He blinked slowly while he took a breath. It was like a mask of death, his face when he closed his eyes. For a moment, I almost thought he had died right in front of me. Then he moved slightly and opened his eyes again. “You’d have to ask them.”
“Look, Yang, if I had the time, I’d probably play this game with you for weeks. I raise a subject obliquely. You parry implicitly. I tiptoe to the side door. You slip out over the roof. Back and forth. We’d even begin to look forward to it. Every day, a new line of attack; every afternoon, a new line of defense. But we don’t have time, and I just lost someone in a tunnel, which I always hate to do. So, I need to know why you are being followed. I need to know urgently, am I clear?” It made me uneasy to push him like this, but I didn’t have much choice.
“I told you, O, I don’t know. How would I? How would I know why anyone follows anyone else in this country?”
“ ‘In this country,’ Yang?” I smiled so broadly my cheeks hurt. “What would that mean?”
Yang stood up and took a half step toward me. “Nothing, O,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t worry, I’m not afflicted with a sudden dose of courage. I can see. But I can’t act. It’s a sort of moral paralysis. Many people have it, I’m beginning to understand.”
“My friend, nothing you’ve said in the past two minutes makes me feel better, put aside that most of it doesn’t make any sense at all.” There wasn’t any decision to make. It had nothing to do with believing Yang or not. I wasn’t going to throw him to the lions. “Alright, if you didn’t do anything, and you aren’t about to do anything, then how do we get this special squad off your neck?”
“Don’t bother,” Yang said. “It’s not worth your time.”
“I’m not bothering for your sake. The person I’m worried about is me. If they don’t like something about you, then it rubs off on everyone nearby, and I’m pretty near. I have enough to worry about. Don’t forget, the guy who was in here the other night said I stole his wallet. Min says the guy was well connected, and you told me he was pulled out of here by people with guns and funny plates on their car. He turns up dead, they go down a list of suspects.”
“No one is going to touch you, O. You lead a charmed life.”
I laughed.
4
“I’m only going to tell you this one more time. Sit up when I’m talking to you.”
I sat up, not because I knew why, but because when I hear someone using that tone of voice and my hands are tied behind me, it is automatic.
A hand shot out and hit me across the face. “Not fast enough. When I say something, you do it, don’t stop to think.”
It was too dark for me to distinguish any details, though whoever had just hit me didn’t seem to have the same trouble. I sat as straight as I could and tried to look intelligent. Sitting straight seemed to clear my head. A simple question bobbed up: Where were we? I took a breath, and the oxygen helped me decide it was the wrong time to ask. Whoever had just smacked me wasn’t there to answer questions.
“Good, now at least you are with us.” It was growled, the way people with big bones sound. Probably not someone I wanted to annoy.
A door opened off to the right, and then a lamp clicked on. The light was subdued. It was soothing in a way, though I would have liked to be able to see more. A tall man dressed in a brown suit took a step out of the darkness in front of me. He stopped just at the point where I would have been able to see him clearly. When he talked, he hung back a little in the half-shadow, so I couldn’t watch his eyes. “I’m sorry we had to hit you like that, but you seemed to be dozing off.” He spoke slowly, in a pleasant voice, low and flowing. You might think he was the host, carefully considering the needs of a guest. “Would you care for a drink of water?” Very amiable offer.
“Who are you?” I knew the technique. Start soft. Maybe the man in the shadows would give me an answer. He was moving like one of those interrogators who try to establish “trust” at the outset. For sure, things weren’t going to get any better, so I might as well ask my question before they got worse. At least I’d know whose toe I’d stepped on.
“Now, Inspector, let’s put a few simple rules on the table. Lay them out, get them straight between us, and then not have to concern ourselves with them anymore. I know who you are; you have no need to know who I am. I ask the questions, by and large. You answer what you can, as honestly as you can. If I think you are lying—well, you have a reputation for being straightforward, so I won’t worry about it.” All said pleasantly, as if these rules were well understood by every guest but needed to be reviewed anyway.
“A drink of water would be fine. But I need my hands free. I only drink when I hold the glass.” I needed to set my own rule, if only a little one.
The man in the brown suit moved a millimeter into the light, just enough so I caught a glimpse of a smile. “That is exactly what I would say in your place, Inspector. I think we will get along quite well.” He nodded to whoever was standing in the darkness beside me, and as he nodded, the shadows played on his face. The cuffs were removed from my hands, and I closed my eyes as my arms regained feeling. “There, you see, Inspector, already the situation has improved.”
“I’ll take that glass of water now.” The glass appeared in front of me. I put it to my lips and drank enough to wet the inside of my mouth. I held the glass out, and it was taken away.
“When you want more, Inspector, you need only ask.”
“I thought I was supposed only to give answers.”
There was a low growl behind, but from in front of me I heard a faint laugh. “Fair enough. Let us say I give you blanket permission to ask for water. In fact, any creature comfort that is lacking, you need only ask. I can’t promise to supply everything, but what I can get for you, I will. Shall we proceed?”
“Let me say something, if I may.”
There was silence. The man in the brown suit was studying my face. I couldn’t see him, but I knew what he was doing. Finally he said, “Of course you may, Inspector.” He stepped back, completely into the shadow.
“You have the wrong person.”
It was quiet
for a moment, then an explosion of laughter echoed around the walls. “Really, Inspector,” the man in the brown suit said when he got back his breath. He let me see that he was drying his eyes with a handkerchief. “That is what everyone says, but you say it so matter-of-factly. One could almost believe it.”
“And you don’t?”
“I don’t have any basis for making a judgment. If you are completely the wrong person, we will establish that soon enough.” I never disliked the word “completely” so thoroughly as when the man in the brown suit said it. “If you are the wrong person, but only because circumstances have not yet made you the right person, we will establish that as well. And if you are the wrong person, but have tendencies that impel you in the very direction you say you have not taken, well, then let’s find out beforehand and save us both a great deal of trouble.”
“In other words . . .”
The man in the brown suit leaned forward slightly, another millimeter, enough so I would feel the space between us had diminished. “There are no ‘other words,’ Inspector. Those words you just heard me speak are the words which convey what I need you to know. Words are what we have, and we will use them with great respect, you and I, in our conversation. In particular, you will notice that I am precise in what I ask. A precise question deserves a precise answer.”
“Not always. What if you ask the wrong question?”
Again, from behind, I heard a growl. The man in the brown suit moved his legs, a gesture of annoyance, though I could not tell if it was at me or at the mastiff in the rear. He took back the millimeter we had gained. “I have no doubt you will correct the question, Inspector. I’m in no hurry to proceed, incidentally. I have all day, and all of the next day, and the next. We can sit here until summer, and it gets quite hot in these rooms in summer, believe me. The sooner we get started, the sooner we will be done. But it is all up to you.” He brushed something off his shoulder, perhaps a stray bit of unwanted light.