by James Church
“If you think so, Superintendent. Tell me, though. You must know something, even a scrap about the planning.”
“Christ almighty. No, I don’t. Not a thing. I can speculate, anyone can speculate. If I speculate, will that get me a doctor?” He licked his lips. “We needed help on the inside. Only two ways to get that. Commitment and money. The first came with the Germans. Old diehard revolutionaries; they convinced someone here, someone big in your leadership, that they opposed the changes in your system and would help to snuff them out. The incident with the British official would bring down the roof on change, that was their sales pitch.”
“And money?”
“Easier. There are always people willing to supply money, especially if they think it will save souls.”
“Good Christians?”
“In the name of the goodness, they will do plenty, Inspector.”
“Why did you put me onto the Germans?”
“I didn’t.”
No, he was right, Miss Chon did. “But you wanted to make sure we could get them.”
“They’re half crazy, Inspector, too rabid for my taste. I see their type at home—different era, same lethal focus on the ideal. We all agreed, once the Germans did their job, they were expendable. They’ll probably never leave this cemetery. That’s the plan. I wanted them out of the way earlier. We could have avoided this sort of a blowup at the end.”
“Maybe that’s why they’re shooting at you, they just caught on.” I got up on one knee and looked around. No one shot at me. “The old man at the temple showed me how the place had been rebuilt over an underground room for a meeting place. Three rifles still packed in shipping crates. A bag of euros, small bills, mostly. And two pairs of stockings. He said a young woman had been there.”
Boswell groaned and grabbed his leg. “None of that interests me, Inspector.”
“I couldn’t tell whether it was the bank clerk or Miss Chon. He said she was speaking in a foreign language. It might have been German, but the old man didn’t know for sure.”
“Miss Chon doesn’t know German, I’m sure of that.”
“Well, what does she know?”
“You haven’t figured her out, have you? She’s working for the Russians, as far as I can tell. Very simple work. Make sure loans get funneled to Koreans who want to do business with Russian companies. Try to keep up with the Chinese. Establish some contacts for later.”
“Why would she work for them?”
Boswell licked his lips. “Why do you think, Inspector? They went to the Kazakh government and told them to find out what would make her sign on. It wasn’t hard.”
“Her son.”
He shrugged. “She told you? That means she wants you to help her.”
“Do what?”
Bosworth shook his head. “There seems to be a lull in the action. Why don’t you do something besides sit and talk?”
“Alright, I’ll go for the phone. If there’s no more shooting, I’ll be back in around five minutes, maybe ten.”
“Stay down. Dieter is a good shot with that hunting rifle.”
“Well, we know he can hit a dog at point-blank range. What’s the pen in his pocket?”
“Don’t try to write with it. It’s explosive, so he won’t be captured. Pulls the cap and bang! It’s supposed to blow his head off.”
“Hell of an operation,” I said. “Sounds like one of ours.”
3
I ran back, keeping as low as I could. “Found the phone, Superintendent.” Boswell was sitting up, facing the statue. He started wheezing just as he pitched forward. I turned him over. His right hand was shattered where he’d tried to block a bullet. There was a hole in his throat, and another in his cheek, just under the eye. He blinked at me and moved his good hand, so I thought he might have a chance, but then he shuddered and was still. None of the wounds was big; they were from a small-caliber pistol. There was the pop of a shot off to my left. It seemed far away, but in these hills, you couldn’t be sure.
I moved off in the direction of the sound, rested against a stunted tree for a moment while the sweat poured off my face, then scrambled across an open area to the top of a small rise covered with azalea bushes. I poked my head around the side. At the bottom of the opposite slope, I could see someone sunning himself, his shirt off. It seemed odd, under the circumstances.
I stood up and walked slowly down the hill, a stupid target, a stupid way to come down a hill on this spring day, the sky too high, the light too crisp, a breeze so slight that it barely rustled Yang’s hair. He lay on his back, one arm stretched away from his body, the other flung across his chest. He had shot himself in the heart, not an easy thing to do, but I had no doubt it was important for him, to aim at what he thought he had long ago lost. He had held the pistol close, there were powder marks, but still visible was the small tattoo over his heart, an aiming point he’d paid to have burned into his skin so he would not miss when the time came.
I knew that whatever had been in him, all color, all experience, everything from a lifetime of pain, was drifting out, bit by bit, even through that tiny hole in his chest. If there was any laughter, it had left long ago. I picked up the pistol he had dropped and put it in my belt. The sound of children’s voices floated upward. He’d held those until the end, and now they were free.
4
When I walked back to the top of the hill, the man in the brown suit was waiting, looking down at Yang’s body. “Let him be,” he said. “He did us a favor, killing the Scotsman. I knew you wouldn’t do it. Though you should have, Inspector, it was your job.”
“My job? My job was solving the robbery. I almost did it, too.”
“Forget the robbery, Inspector. In fact, forget this whole thing.”
“Sure, forgetting is good.” I thought of Miss Chon. “A good habit, forgetting. But first I need to know a few details. Gives me more to forget, if that makes any sense. I think it does to you.”
“I owe you nothing, Inspector. But go ahead.”
“Who does Han work for?”
This made the man in brown smile. “Believe it or not, Inspector, I don’t really know. He doesn’t work for me. Beyond that, it was something I had on my list of things to find out. That’s why no one else is going to know about Yang’s death, or Boswell’s, no one but us for a couple of days. I want to see who scrambles around, trying to find them. No one is to know, not even SSD.”
“Han is SSD?”
“Very unlikely. He’s too clever, in his own way. He’s just attached to them for the moment.”
I nodded. “What about the special group, the ones with new shirts?”
“Might be connected to the army, might not. This much I know, they did a better job dressing them than training them. The group wasn’t as efficient as someone hoped. Apparently, it was formed to support the overall operation, and to tag people that needed to be eliminated at some point.”
“You know who’s on the list?”
“Better not to know, Inspector. Those sorts of lists are always upsetting.”
“Can I give you a theory? The bank robbery was just a diversion.”
“Nice theory, but wrong. They were serious about the robbery; at first they thought it would be enough, but then they got worried and decided to add a layer. Layers are always bad. They knew someone on the outside was playing, but they thought they had control of the whole operation. You, as it turned out, were a complicating factor.”
“Not by choice.”
“They knew you’d hang on, even if you said you wanted to dump the case. You are one hell of a problem, Inspector, for everyone.”
“I’m the one who tipped you off, remember?”
“We must have been at different sessions. You weren’t very helpful at all. You spent most of the time sparring with me, although the information you passed on about the temple having been rebuilt recently turned out to be useful. My people suspected you were in the middle of it. No one could believe you kept drifting into
our sights like you did.”
I remembered that afternoon when I had the sense that I was someone’s prey. “You had people on me all the time?”
“Now and then. After you drove the Scotsman around the city, the concern spiked. And when the door to his room at the Koryo closed with you inside, it was almost decided to pack you off to the mountains.”
“But someone objected.”
“Someone did.”
There wasn’t much sense in saying thank you again, so I didn’t.
“Now I have a question, Inspector. He mentioned Prague to you?”
“I don’t think he said anything, no.” On the hilltop, looking at Yang’s body, it didn’t seem like a good idea, discussing Prague.
The man in the brown suit nodded. “If you say so.” Not that he believed me for a moment.
“You knew Boswell?”
“Me?” He smiled. “Until he showed up here, I never met the man. He wasn’t a policeman, though I know you eventually realized that. Based on how he went about his business, it looks like he had other connections. He acted more like an internal operative than he did someone who was used to being overseas. Of course, I’ll never know for sure.” The man in the brown suit laughed. “I rarely know anything for sure. You impress me as someone who doesn’t suffer from that same fate, Inspector.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Let me rephrase my question. Did Boswell say anything to you before he died?”
“No.”
The man in the brown suit looked at me. “You two were up there for quite a few minutes. You must have talked about something.”
“We did. Scotch eggs.”
He thought about this for a moment. “You realize, they decided to neutralize you. That’s why they let it be known you’d been talking to someone named Molloy, thinking you’d run into their arms.”
I figured it was time to change the subject. “Why were you on the train, staring at me that day?”
“I wasn’t staring, Inspector. I was just observing, quietly.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No, it isn’t, is it? Let’s just say, I’d already heard something about Prague, and I needed to get a sense of who you were. The question was starting to gnaw at me, what would happen when those same rumors reached you. I wasn’t sure; after I raised it during our”—he paused—“our session, either you would get mad at me, or you would get mad at them. I bet on the latter.”
“Am I so predictable?” The breeze had died, and the sun was hot. It occurred to me that spring never lasted as long as I hoped. “I’m just an insect in one of those webs?”
“Even insects fly off in strange directions. No, that’s why it was a bet, and all I could bet was that your grandfather’s blood runs in your veins.”
“My grandfather?” I looked over at the rows of graves on the hillside. “I thought you said we should let the dead rest in peace.”
“We’ve just had a shootout in a cemetery, Inspector. I don’t think anyone is sleeping soundly.”
“One or two more questions. Do you mind?”
“We’re on the top of a hill with no one around, no one that can still hear us, anyway. We both live by asking questions, Inspector, go ahead.”
“What if I ask you about silk stockings?”
“The Russian.” There was no hesitation. “He works part-time for SSD; the rest of the time he works against them. I don’t worry much about him, as long as I know where he is. I’ve never heard a single piece of information that came from him that could be trusted.”
I looked down at Yang. The man in the brown suit took off his jacket and hung it neatly over his arm. “What about Pang?”
The man in brown paused. “He didn’t want to come back in. He said he’d done enough already. But he couldn’t resist women with small waists.” So, Pang worked for him, and he didn’t care if I drew the conclusion about who had broken Pang’s cover.
“And Miss Chon? She seems to be in the center of a lot of this. If you drew one of your spiderwebs, she’d be the spider in the center. Though that wasn’t the way it was on the chart you showed me.” I didn’t believe Boswell’s story about her working for the Russians, channeling money. She was too complicated for something that simple. No one would waste her talents on that.
The man in brown turned abruptly and led the way back to the cars. When we got there, he put his hand on my right shoulder. “I’d say that it’s over, Inspector, except it never happened.”
5
The next morning, Han was sitting in the office; Min was looking out the window. Neither spoke, and from the way the air was not moving, they hadn’t said much in the last several minutes. Han looked exhausted, like he had been up all night. When Min turned around, he had a bandage on his forehead.
“What happened to you?” I waited at the door.
“Don’t stand there, Inspector. Come in and sit down.” Min put his hand to his head. “No one believes it, but I fainted. About three o’clock this morning, I finally got home and opened the door. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor. Not fainted, exactly. I’d say it was more like I collapsed, keeled over.” He paused and waited.
“Swooned.” Han shrugged. “In the middle of the biggest damned incident of the century, your chief inspector fell over. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.” He stood up and straightened his cuffs. His shirt was clean, fresher than he was. “Someone might think you did good work on this one, Inspector. I don’t. So I’ll tell you what. Say something nice about me in your report, I’ll do likewise. Of course, they’re going to come down hard on you about Yang, but that will be for your ministry to deal with. There are enough problems to go around.”
I wasn’t in the mood to be threatened, not by Han. “What report? I’m not writing anything. You were in the lead, Han. That means you get to explain all the shot-up trees in the cemetery, and why nobody can find two Germans, one of whom has a hunting rifle and is an excellent shot. You took over the investigation, you deal with it. I suppose your report will include something on the bank manager. Like who she really is. Or did she work for you?”
Han shook his head slowly. “That woman came out of nowhere. And she’s protected, I don’t know by whom. You were right, she doesn’t have a file, or if she does, whoever has it is keeping it out of sight.”
“No one comes out of nowhere, Han. What about the clerk, for example? She came from somewhere. Who approved her for the bank? She didn’t just walk in the front door and ask for a job. Something’s missing from her file, incidentally. She was inside for the bank robbery, wasn’t she?”
“Her?” Han put on his sunglasses. “No, she was working for us the whole time. At least we got that much right.”
“That’s what you’ll put in your report, I suppose. Actually, did you know she was working for Boswell?”
“For Boswell? Very unlikely. In fact, impossible.” Though he didn’t seem completely sure. “What makes you think that?”
I hadn’t liked Han from the beginning, and I didn’t like him now, especially because I still didn’t know who he was working for. “Boswell was part of whoever it was on the outside that planned the bank robbery, which you probably knew. He was well acquainted with the Germans, which you might have known. And he was here to supervise the assassination attempt, at least make sure the final steps came off smoothly, which you may have guessed. You were supposed to disrupt the plan, watch it as it developed, and then disrupt it at the end, the very end. I was just along to give you an excuse to stay close. Yang was the bait; he was supposed to get as many wolves after him as possible. The man was so confused, he was willing to do it. You must have made sure Yang was at the scene, at the guesthouse, because Boswell didn’t. In fact, Boswell was unhappy Yang was in the car; he was suspicious about who Yang was working for.”
Han sat down and took off his glasses. “What does that have to do with the bank clerk?”
“The clerk was seen with the Germans in the hills, at t
hat temple. I don’t think she was there to make a donation.”
“The old man has disappeared. We need to talk to him.”
“You need to talk to a lot of people, especially Boswell, but he’s dead, and so is Yang.” The man in brown wouldn’t be happy I told Han. Not that I cared.
Han seemed to relax. “Well, well.” He stood up again and walked to the door. “Remember that desk, the one in the bank? You were right, it was pine on the outside. But inside it was something else.”
“Like what?”
“Something hard, sort of pretty. Rare, maybe. The desk was rebuilt so it could handle special equipment. All new.”
“SSD?”
“Don’t make me laugh. Since when does SSD know how to handle special equipment? They can’t even deal with their own phones.”
“What about the wood? You mind if I take a look?”
“I don’t mind, but I don’t think it will do you any good. After we took the desk apart, I told them to burn it.” He smiled, then turned to go. “I never fixed your cell phone, did I, Inspector. Sorry, it looks like you’re stuck with it.” He fluttered his hands delicately. “Oh, and one more thing. Yang and the bank clerk were related, did you know that? She was his niece. Her aunt died in that fire.”
Min put his head in his hands.
6
I overslept and had to drive fast to the airport. Whether she was in the middle of everything that had happened or just wandered in, I still didn’t know. Pang, the man with the shoulders, might have figured it out; maybe that’s why he ended up floating in the river. Dead men didn’t seem to upset her; she hadn’t seemed upset when I told her that Boswell had died in the cemetery.
“It may seem cruel, Inspector, but I discovered a long time ago that he was evil, in his own way. I vowed I would never forgive him, and I never will. Anyway, that’s what cemeteries are for, isn’t it, dead bodies?” She was tidying up papers at the bank, shredding some documents, putting others in stacks on a desk. “They took away that other desk again. I can’t work when the furniture keeps disappearing, but that’s not the point. You see, Inspector, I’ve decided this banking business isn’t what I want to do.” She gave me a rueful smile, only I could tell it wasn’t rue that was driving her thoughts.