by James Church
The man at the bar reached for his ear but missed. It was early, but he was already drunk. If he fell off the stool, he might knock himself out. That wouldn’t be a loss as far as I was concerned.
“Sure,” I said, “the picture was taken back home. Don’t worry, I know plenty.”
“Do you see the man at the bar?”
“The drunk? He seems unusually interested in us. A friend of yours?”
“No, not a friend. We work together sometimes. He has few talents, but he follows orders.” She lowered her voice. “He’s not watching me. He’s watching that couple. They’re South Koreans. They’ve been tailing me for days. By now, they’re getting bored and stupid. As for the man at the bar, he’s not as drunk as he looks.”
A waitress came out of a back room and marched up to the table. She skipped the pleasantries. “You’re going to have to order,” she said. “If all you want to do is talk, there’s a nice bench outside. This isn’t a bus station, it’s a restaurant.”
I wasn’t about to be chased away by a waitress, especially in front of the Kazakh lady. “That couple over there doesn’t seem to be ordering anything. They’re just sitting and pretending to be infatuated with each other.”
“Tell me about it.” She crossed her arms. “You want coffee?”
“No, I don’t want coffee. What about juice? You have any in this place?”
“Juice? Orange, tomato, and apple.”
“How about orange? Is it fresh?”
“Honey,” she said, “it’s fresh. I squeeze it all night long.” She gave me a bland look. The man at the bar wheezed a laugh.
“I’ll have the apple juice.” I nodded at the woman across from me. “You want something?” I asked.
“Vodka.” She ignored me and spoke to the waitress. “Polish. None of your Mongolian rot. Bring the bottle. Maybe two glasses. Mr. Apple will have some, too, won’t you?”
When the waitress walked away, I grabbed several paper napkins off the next table. They were tiny, but I can write small. “All right with you if I take a few notes?”
She shrugged. “It would be better with a minitape-recorder. You ought to have one. It’s more professional.”
“Sure, I ought to be driving a shiny car and have shoes with new heels, but I don’t, so do you mind?”
At that point, who should appear but my uncle? He was carrying a tray with a bottle of vodka and three tall water glasses. “The waitress asked me to bring these over. She’s on a break, she said. If you ask me, she was in a hurry to leave. A little early for drinks, isn’t it?”
“Not where I come from.” The woman took the bottle, twisted the cap, and half filled each of our glasses. As she did, she sang in perfect English:
“It made him very sad to think
That some, at junket or at jink,
Must be content with toddy.”
I started to ask what the hell she meant by that, but my uncle quickly broke in.
“Cheers,” he said.
“Cheers.” She lifted her glass in a toast, drained it in one go, and poured herself another. She nodded at our glasses, untouched. “It’s rude if you don’t drink. In the rural villages, it’s even an insult. That’s how blood feuds start in my country.”
My uncle rose to the occasion. “Never be rude in a strange land,” he said to me. He turned to the woman and bowed slightly. “Here’s to finding your mother.”
“To your seal,” she said and downed her drink. She looked hard at my glass. “Mr. Apple, I can’t talk until you drink.”
“Go ahead, nephew, don’t disappoint Miss Kim.” My uncle held out his glass to the woman. “Another? I have heard many times that Kazakh women are beautiful,” he said.
“You’ve been with one?” She poured. “I thought your people were partial to Hoeryong girls. Very delicate, they say.”
“Yes, quite delicate, though for some reason it’s easier to get white apricots in season.”
“Am I missing something?” I hadn’t even smelled the vodka and the conversation was drifting away. We got reports from sources in Hoeryong all the time, but none ever mentioned apricots.
“It’s a saying,” my uncle explained, before downing his vodka in two swallows. He took a breath and seemed intent on clearing his vision for a moment. Then he continued. “The northern part of my country, especially the area around the city of Hoeryong, is noted for its beautiful girls and white apricots. The girls are all right, but at my age, I begin to prefer apricots.”
I nearly spilled my drink.
3
From the window of our hotel room I spotted a statue of Lenin. His back was to me, and as far as I could tell, he was hailing a taxi. I decided to make a mental list of what we’d learned and hadn’t learned up to now about what we were supposed to get accomplished in Mongolia. The list was lopsided. The list of things we hadn’t learned was much longer. Meanwhile, the forty-eight-hour deadline was shrinking fast.
Staring at Lenin’s backside gave me an idea. “That seal we’re after is being used to stamp phony decrees.” It wasn’t meant as a conclusion based on any evidence, but with only forty hours left, we needed something to shoot at, even a wobbly hypothesis. I turned around to watch my uncle’s reaction. “There are two possibilities as I see it—a counterfeit seal can be used to stamp real decrees, or it can stamp phony decrees. Either way, the result isn’t legal. If we can figure out how it’s going to be used, we might have a compass heading pointing us toward who has it.”
“A shot in the dark, hardly worth the effort.” My uncle wasn’t looking at me. He was sitting in the only chair in the room, flipping through a booklet on shopping and nightlife in Ulan Bator.
Coming from him, that response was positively encouraging, so I ventured on. “Might be underworld, might be designed to undermine a government, might be—”
“Where did we leave off on the Blue Sparrow?”
“A severed right ear. It was an unsolvable case, you said. It also has nothing to do with our present problem, and I still don’t know why you brought it up to begin with.” I gave this some thought. Something clicked, which is what things do sometimes. No reason, they just click. “Wait a minute. Until the other day, I never had a single case that involved body parts, not human body parts, anyway. Some of them concerned bear gall bladders, but that’s routine. Suddenly, you come at me with a story about a lonely ear, and then Miss Du shows up with a bag full of her dad.”
“I never said Blue Sparrow was unsolvable. I said we didn’t solve it, and we don’t know if it’s Miss Du’s father yet.”
“Can I remind you that we have to send her some sort of a report in the next few days or my house may be gone when we get back.”
“No, she won’t do that. She likes you.”
“What are you talking about? She threatened to neuter me if I touched her.”
“Pah. I think you are just skittish after your last”—he paused delicately—“experience. No need for that. Dust yourself off and get into the game again.”
“The game, as you put it, can wait. I’m talking reality, cold cash. We haven’t made any progress on Miss Du’s case, and she gave us a lot of money, remember?”
“You’re always complaining about money. Would you feel better if I gave it back to her?”
“My conscience doesn’t need that much soothing. Let’s just write down a few lines about what we’ve discovered and get them to her.”
“We haven’t discovered anything. Personally, I find it hard to believe that old Du would be rash enough to get himself dismembered.”
“He’s a forger.”
“The best, and in my experience, forgers are not rash. They are meticulous to a fault. They can worry the hell out of the tail on a numeral. Every little thing is a problem a continent wide to them. It’s annoying if you don’t share their passion.” He turned back the top of a page on bars and put the booklet on the low table that occupied whatever space in the small room the two beds and single chair didn’t.
“I suppose you can be dismembered for being annoying same as you can for being rash.”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s better not to be annoying.” I would have liked to look him in the eye to drill that point home, but his eyes had closed. “Uncle!”
His eyes remained as they were. “I’m thinking.”
“Think about this. The seal, I’m telling you, is phony. I’ve got this feeling.”
“So you say, and now you’ve said it twice. Repetition is not an antidote to uncertainty. You might as well get that through your head. As it happens, you could be right, but I have no way of knowing one way or the other. I take it neither do you.”
“I know a good coincidence when I see one. A phony seal … and a forger? What if there’s a link? What if Du is connected to this seal? What if he was hired to produce the counterfeit? It’s a start.”
“You mean, what if he faked his own death and then counterfeited his own fingers. The ‘what if’ approach to problem solving, is that where you’re going with this? Yes, well, what if camels sprout wings? What if?” At this point his eyes opened and regarded me uncomfortably. “Phew, what a thought.”
“All right, if you think I’m chasing my tail, come up with something better.”
“You of all people don’t need a tail. It would only make you easier to read than you already are, like a puppy that has chewed on the furniture. Don’t flinch, that’s not meant as criticism. I tell you such things for your own good.”
“Maybe my own good is my business, uncle.”
“Then have it your way. Your business is your business. Be my guest if you want to grow a tail. I’d simply suggest that we need an alternate hypothesis to the one you just floated. Keep yours if you want, but let’s find another. With two you don’t end up stuffing all the evidence into one bag, whether or not it fits. It’s much too easy to fall into that trap. Bad investigations do that all the time. In the Blue Sparrow case—”
“Find me another bag. Let’s forget the damned birds!”
My uncle rolled on effortlessly. “In the Blue Sparrow case we tried and tried to come up with another hypothesis bag. We knew we had to. Everything fit together in the investigation too neatly almost from the beginning. As you’ll recall, it was a woman’s ear that the vice minister of railways had found on his doorstep.”
“Don’t worry, I recall.”
“The vice minister was a foul-talking man, a one-star general who thought the best way to get people to follow orders was to insult them in the loudest possible voice.”
I sat down on my bed. “Will this take long?”
“It was a little like doing a jigsaw puzzle of a picture of yourself looking in a mirror. Obviously, we said to ourselves, this is a grudge crime. Someone took badly to being yelled at all the time.”
“Sure, they cut off their own ear and put it on his doorstep. Very symbolic. Shouldn’t have been difficult to find a woman with only one ear.”
“That’s exactly what we thought, until a week later. We made a list of everyone who might have a beef with the vice minister. The man had a career going back forty years. It was quite a list. I pointed out that most of the names were of men, most of whom didn’t have shell ears or wear earrings. In fact, a good number of them were already dead of other causes. No matter, we had to check them all out. The byword of the Ministry in those days was ‘thorough.’”
“Do you have another bag for us, or don’t you?”
My uncle put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “Another bag? Consider this possibility—the seal isn’t Chinese.”
“I’m listening.”
“It’s Korean. Probably South Korean.”
“No, that’s crazy. It doesn’t go anywhere. Why would Beijing worry about a phony Korean seal? The two of them, Seoul and Pyongyang, bark at each other all the time. Our standing orders from Headquarters are not to get between them on anything.”
“We’re creating hypotheses, not spinning answers. I’m not saying I’m sure. I’m saying it’s possible.”
“In that case, why not spin this—your people in Pyongyang forged it to use against the South.”
“At least you’re thinking. That could be right, it could be wrong, but it’s a thought.”
“Much as it pains me, I’ll give you this, uncle, you know plenty, but you don’t know Chinese like I do. I can’t see any way Beijing would break a sweat if this is about South Korea.”
“Pah! What you really mean is that you don’t see why you were hustled off to this place. Maybe your presence is beside the point. Maybe it doesn’t actually concern you.”
That opened up a hell of a big bag all of a sudden, so big I walked into it without having to duck my head. “Meaning, perhaps, it concerns you?”
“Two thoughts in a row, very good. Leave that aside for now. Let’s open a third bag and call it ‘loose threads.’ You are partial to threads, as I remember. What do you suppose all that talk you heard about corruption across the border actually meant? Do you imagine your headquarters really cares about corruption? Since when do Chinese care about corruption?”
He had something there. “I’d say they care about corruption when they’re ordered to worry about it, or when they realize their last payoff had a long string attached.”
“Let’s pull on that. How worried were they when they gave you that order? To put it another way, what do you suppose worried the people who ordered you to worry about it? Let’s add one final point to consider—we can be sure that whoever is behind the phony seal isn’t after a big splash. No, this is not supposed to be high profile. More likely, it’s supposed to be just enough to discredit whoever uses the stamp, which in this hypothesis would be the South Korean government.” He picked up “What to Do in Ulan Bator.” “Why would someone want to discredit the South Koreans?”
“They’re annoying?”
“For the moment, let’s assume you’re right. They certainly are all over this town, but we are still left with the central question: Who has the seal?”
“I don’t know and you don’t know, but it looks to me like someone certainly has a hunch, and they’re playing it for all it’s worth. Let’s back up. If Beijing put this all in motion to get you here, who do you think they think has the seal?”
“People they consider my old friends, that’s who.”
“Again, that border! You’re telling me Beijing thinks this is a North Korean operation? I thought you said it was South Korean.”
“No, I said it was a South Korean seal. Whose operation it is remains to be seen.”
Maybe all of this was pure speculation, but it didn’t ring that way. This involved at least three capitals, maybe more. If this was such an important case, why hadn’t they put a special team on it? I knew the answer before I even asked myself the question. They needed someone small, too small to attract attention. They also needed someone who thought like a North Korean, not just someone with a little Korean blood in his veins. They needed my uncle, and they couldn’t get him here without me. My résumé, golden or otherwise, had nothing to do with it.
“This stinks,” I said. “If I can book us a flight, we’re going home tomorrow. Beijing can send someone else to handle things. If it were on the border in my jurisdiction, that would be a different story. This isn’t my neighborhood. Not even close. Wrong latitude, wrong longitude.”
“Not even if Madame Fang is part of it?”
“Be serious. She’s too old for me. Besides, you said it yourself, she’d eat me alive.”
My uncle had a gleam in his eye I didn’t like.
“Don’t tell me you think she’s involved.”
From behind me, I heard, “Do you want to close the door, or shall we let all the flies come in?”
Chapter Three
“Mei-lin, this is unexpected.” My uncle walked over and took her hand. “Been in town long? Fascinating country, rather flat in parts. No doubt you’re here for the wrestling matches—glistening, sweaty young bodies, muscles ripp
ling, that sort of thing. Or maybe you’ve taken up throat singing. You were always good at playing two parts at once.”
Madame Fang rewarded him with a disdainful smile. “Inspector, if I’d known you and your handsome nephew were here, surely I’d have come sooner. I’ve been here a week or so staying all alone in a lovely ger hotel at the edge of town. You should move your things and room with me.” Madame Fang gave my uncle a look that would have sunk a thousand ships. She was dangerously annoyed and made no pretense of it. It didn’t seem to throw my uncle off stride.
“No, we’re comfortable here, aren’t we, nephew?”
I nodded. “Perfectly comfortable.”
“In that case,” Madame Fang said, shifting moods abruptly, “why don’t we all go out to dinner? There’s an Italian restaurant downtown not far from here that’s very good. It’s Italian in its own way, of course, but the ambience is tremendous. They play music from the 1930s. It reminds me of restaurants in Shanghai when I was younger.” She was suddenly sunny, cheery to a fault.
I like it when emotions arrive with plenty of warning. Madame Fang preferred the neck-snapping variety. It didn’t seem to faze my uncle, but it was getting to be too much for me. “Why don’t you two go for dinner?” I suggested. “I have a few things to nail down. I’ll probably be late; stay out as long as you want.”
“It will be like old times, Inspector.” Madame Fang laughed.
She was well over her annoyance and as dazzling as the Hope Diamond. I could see from his expression that my uncle would have meowed like a kitten for her if she’d suggested it.
“Do you still drink?” She patted my uncle’s hand. “Or have you given that up, too?”
2
I headed for the square in front of the Parliament Building, not far from our hotel. At this time of the evening, the place was bustling, and the sidewalks all around were full of people. That was good. I moved into the flow of the crowd, blending in every way I could. I made myself walk like a man who would rather be on a horse than on a concrete sidewalk. I held my head like someone accustomed to being outdoors scanning the horizon; someone who ate large quantities of mutton; someone who knew how to survive long winters of minus thirty degrees. I swung my arms like a man who hated wolves because they killed my sheep. My sheep! I thought bad thoughts about Lenin and the Soviet secret police. Most of all, I convinced myself that I was not from China but from this place, had always been from here, back to the beginning of time. My ancestors, I felt deep in my heart, had ridden down fleeing soldiers of broken armies and laughed at the sport of doing it. There was also something about other men’s wives, but I let that alone.