by James Church
2
An hour later, the train squealed to a stop.
“We’re at a junction.” My uncle crawled to the back end of the crate and peered outside. “I had to memorize the rail lines in this part of the country one time when we were chasing a smuggling ring. The tracks split here. One branch leads over to Khasan on the Russian side; the other route goes south and ends up in Rason. The stationmaster here might decide to take off a few freight cars to send to Russia. He’s not supposed to, but the Russians pay him extra for Chinese railcars. Let’s hope he reads the freight manifest right and keeps us hooked up on the Rason route. While they’re decoupling and rearranging, the train guards will use the chance to stretch their legs and do a quick inspection. They’ll probably bang on a couple of crates and make some noise for the hell of it. Make sure Mr. Noodle over there stays quiet.”
We heard someone clamber up onto the flatcar our crate occupied. My uncle looked at his watch and started ticking off the seconds with his fingers. When he was at fifteen, we heard a female voice say, “Not tonight, sweetheart.”
My uncle smiled to himself. “That’s MPS talk for ‘nothing here,’” he whispered. “The number code on the back of the crate is for special Chinese cargo bound for Rason. They have orders to expedite anything with that code. Normally, they think ‘expedite’ means whenever they feel like it, but there’s no fooling around with this code. If anything marked with it is held up for more than two hours at any station, heads roll. This is the last rail junction before Rason. Once we leave here, the rest of the way should be easy.”
“Good,” I said. “Now maybe you’ll tell me, what’s in Rason that we need to see?”
“I thought you knew. Batbayaar said he played you a tape, and you told him it was from around Rason. What would a Chinese MSS officer know about a North Korean port, he thought to himself. Same question occurred to me. What would you know about Rason? It’s not in your sector, is it?”
“Funny, I had a question, too, when I listened to the tape. What did the Mongolian Special Service care about a recording of a seal barking? I just took a guess that it was from around Rason, but if it was, why did the Mongolians care?”
“Did you have an answer?”
“I didn’t right away, but then you said something that nudged the piece into place. You told me the Chinese wanted access to coal and rare earth mines, and they also wanted control of the railway in Mongolia to transport all of that stuff out of the country. What you didn’t mention was where it would all be going—to the ice-free port of destiny, the Sea of Japan’s shining star.”
My uncle shook his head. “They don’t teach geography in China? East Sea, East Sea, not Sea of Japan. They don’t own it; they don’t name it.”
“We hear that Pyongyang is pushing for Mongolian participation in Rason to dilute the Chinese presence there. The Mongolians aren’t sure of their footing—they get dainty when it comes to standing up to the Chinese—so they’ve been trying to develop agents around the port to get a better idea of what’s going on and where it’s safe to step. You know, the usual—dock workers, taxi drivers, prostitutes. Maybe the tape was a recording of a report phoned in from one of their new agents, and they were trying to figure out from the background noise exactly where it originated, whether their source was really in place or was calling in from the corner drugstore in Ulan Bator.”
The train started to move.
My uncle looked skeptical. “How, sitting in Yanji, would you know anything about these things?”
“It’s my job, that’s how, and that’s all I’m going to say.” I looked over at the noodle king, who had his eyes closed but was listening intently. I should have blindfolded him and put his head in a bag. “What happens to him?” I asked.
“He goes on a coal freighter to Shanghai. If he survives the trip, he’ll be a lifelong advocate of clean energy. He’ll also be so seasick he won’t be able to stand for weeks. Since he’s wanted for the murder of the deputy chief of the Yanji MSS special office, it won’t even cross his mind to complain about how you broke both of his legs before pushing him down the coal chute.”
“I’ll break more than his legs.”
“He’s from Fujian, isn’t he?” My uncle slid over to where the noodle king was turning various shades of pale. “Listen, you, I’m going to take the tape off your mouth, and then we’re going to have a conversation. Does that meet with your approval, or do we start taking you apart?”
The noodle king opened his eyes and indicated he wanted to talk. My uncle ripped the tape off.
“Hey!”
“Yeah, it hurts. Lay off kissing for a few months. You were in Yanji gathering up noodle shops not long ago, am I right?”
“So?”
“Did Mike ever come to town to check how you were doing?”
“Maybe.”
“Where did you meet?”
“I can’t remember.”
My uncle knocked him on the side of the head, pretty hard.
“Did that jar anything loose?”
“It’s no good, uncle,” I said. “He doesn’t care about his head. He cares about his hands. Go ahead and give him a little of what I did to that guy in Mongolia.”
The noodle king shot me a look you wouldn’t have thought a man in his circumstances would have had in him. “Come on, what is this rough stuff? What did I do to you?”
Word had spread fast from the cowshed. “You killed Li,” I said. “That’s for starters.”
“It was Wong, didn’t I already say that?”
“Wong worked for you.”
“Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Wong was a subcontractor. Mike didn’t want permanent staff. He wanted to be able to take people in and get rid of them whenever he felt like it. No strings, no blood oaths, no pinkies cut off. Simple business. He said it was cost-effective.”
“I’m asking you one more time. Where did you and Mike have your meetings?”
The wheels clicked and clacked. A rock landed against the crate. The train heaved to a stop, and we heard the train guards climb down several cars away to shout threats at someone. Then we started moving again.
“What a shame. Time’s up. Show me your left hand. I’ll tell you your fortune.”
“Gao’s. We met at Old Gao’s. Always the third room.”
“That’s the one in the back, the smallest one,” I said.
“You and Mike did some gambling?” My uncle ignored the observation. “I don’t think Mike likes to gamble.”
“Not unless it’s a sure thing.”
“Then it’s not gambling, is it?”
“I guess not.”
“So, Gao let a couple of thugs take over one of his rooms, eating into his profit-making space. Is that right?”
“No,” I cut in again. “No, that’s not right. Gao worked for Mike.”
“You knew that?” my uncle asked, a coating of ice in his tone of voice. “You knew that all along?”
“We knew Gao wasn’t an independent. No way someone taking in that much money could stay independent. We weren’t sure who he worked with. I wanted to put a twenty-four-hour watch on the place, but the idea panicked a lot of people in Beijing. What if we ended up with a long list of officials frequenting Gao’s? Arresting a mayor or a city party secretary is all right, but a provincial governor? A vice premier? Not something you want to try.”
“I thought you spent a lot of time there.”
“Nah, not as much as you think. I knew most of the regulars who showed up, but Gao would have kept me out of the way when someone really big was there. I figured putting the place under surveillance might be useful; it would have given me a good excuse for being there once in a while.”
“Maybe you could even have put your losses on an expense account.”
The thought had crossed my mind more than once.
“I forgot, you are the only pure soul in the kingdom. You’d think about something like that, but you wouldn’t do it. We would starve first.” My
uncle shook his head. “Why didn’t you do the surveillance on your own and keep a list in your desk of whoever showed up? Lists of names come in handy sometimes.”
“I know, that’s what I tried.”
“Don’t tell me, you assigned Lieutenant Li to the job, and he came back with nothing.”
“Almost nothing.”
“You let him get away with that?”
“He told me his sources were warning us off.”
“How do you know his sources didn’t work for Mike?”
“Twenty-four hours ago I would have laughed that off. Now? I’d say it’s possible. Maybe even likely.”
“If you had a dirty mind, you might even suppose that’s why the Third Bureau had taken up residence in your office. Checking to see how far Mike’s influence went, assuming the Third Bureau is nothing but virgins who never took Mike’s money.”
I considered this. It made good sense. In fact, it jarred all my suppositions loose and rearranged what was possible. “Remember you recommended a different bag for each hypothesis? It’s time for another one.”
Our shipping crate swayed slightly as the train slowed and then stopped.
“Rason,” my uncle said. “We’re on the edge of Pier Three. The Chinese run it like they own the place. Maybe some of your creepy friends are involved.” He gestured at the noodle king. “In less than an hour, one of the stevedores will check the shipping numbers on this crate, hoist it into the hold of a freighter, and off you go.”
“So you were only kidding about the coal chute.” The noodle king looked relieved. “I knew you were only kidding.”
“Not coal,” my uncle said. “Scrap, garbage, string, old toothpicks—that sort of thing, but they sneak those ships around like they’re hauling contraband. The U.S. Navy may mistake it for a shipment of plutonium and blast it out of the water. We’ll try to find something buoyant to leave with you. Try to remember not to breathe as long as you’re underwater,” my uncle added helpfully. He turned to me. “This way.” He counted over three boards from the corner and pushed the fourth open. “When I say go, you go—jump down and run like hell to the nearest cover. I’ll find you.”
“What about him? Won’t he yell?”
“He might, at which point the guards will fill this crate with lead. You know any Korean?” my uncle inquired of the noodle king.
The noodle king shook his head.
“Nothing at all? How do you talk to your contacts over here?”
“We use Chinese. They come over to our side. Shit, don’t leave me here; I’ll get you a lot of money if you take me with you.”
My uncle looked at his watch. “It’s five o’clock. The local guards are napping, the train guards have gone off duty, and the stevedores are on dinner break. Everything starts to move again at five thirty. You have five minutes to tell me what you know. I’m not giving you the whole half hour because I don’t like you.”
“Ask, ask, don’t sit there, ask!”
“What does Mike have to do with the counterfeit state seal?”
The noodle king dropped below pale to pure white, white enough for the Peking opera. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I don’t know about any seal.”
“Good.” My uncle sounded pleased. “That’s what I hoped you’d say. Now I don’t feel guilty about leaving you for the dogs.”
“What dogs? I don’t like dogs.”
“What, you think Koreans only eat dogs? This ship sails with high-value cargo buried under the garbage. That means there are special State Security Department guards, Black Guards we call them. They walk around with dogs that haven’t been fed in days. When the guards see something they don’t like, they let the dogs go after it.”
This was all news to me. In all my years of reading agent reports from this side of the river, I never saw a mention of Black Guards or killer dogs.
“OK, OK, but if Mike finds out, he’ll murder me.”
My uncle laughed.
“He’ll slice me up. I saw him do that once to someone, and then throw the pieces into a pot of noodles.”
I thought of the dried ends. Apparently, my uncle did as well. He shifted uneasily. “Never mind that,” he said. “The seal, what did Mike have to do with it? Was he going to use it, or was he just a conduit?”
“That isn’t my department,” said the noodle king, “but I’m the type of person who keeps his ears open. I overheard Mike on the phone a couple of times. He was talking to someone in Fujian about a character named Hu, or maybe Du.”
“So what?” My uncle narrowed his eyes. “Are you screwing with me? Because I’m not in the mood”—he looked at his watch—“and we’re almost out of time. What do I care about some character named Hu?”
“I don’t know.”
My uncle stood up. “Here, doggie, doggie.”
“Wait! I don’t know exactly. I seem to remember. It was Du, and I heard Mike say that if Du didn’t finish the job before the sun set, he’d lose a finger for each hour of overtime. I didn’t think anything of it. We used to cut off our fingers all the time as a sign of loyalty. Not me, I didn’t, but a lot of the guys did.” He looked over at Wong.
My uncle turned to me. “Unbelievable. This guy’s about to lose his liver to a German shepherd and he’s still playing games with me.”
I figured this was meant as my opening. If my uncle was playing bad cop, that left me the job of pretending to be kind to this loathsome son of a bitch.
“Maybe he’s not fooling around,” I said. “Maybe that’s all he knows. Mike ran things real tight. That’s why we infiltrated Li into his group.” At that moment I wished we had infiltrated Li into the group. Then we could have given him a medal at his funeral.
From the outside, we heard boots crunching on gravel. The noodle king stifled a sob. My uncle hissed at him, “Shut up.”
Someone clambered up onto the freight car and walked around to the back where my uncle had said the numbers were. A moment later, we heard a man’s voice shouting in Korean, then a stream of liquid against the side of the crate. Laughter. More shouting. The boots jumped down and crunched away.
My uncle closed his eyes. The air turned acrid.
For the benefit of the noodle king, I gave a rough translation. “The guard read the number on the crate, proclaimed that he was going to water the flower of Chinese-Korean friendship, and did so.”
“Typical,” said the noodle king. “We send aid, they give us back shit.”
At that my uncle reached under his jacket and came out with a 9 mm pistol, no mother-of-pearl handle. “If I had on boots, I’d make you lick them.” He stood up. “I ought to put a bullet between your eyes, but what good would that do?” He tucked the pistol back in his belt. “Instead, I’m going to tape your mouth, put a flour sack over your head, and wish you good luck. The MSS representative here will observe and attest that everything is done according to international human rights standards.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” The noodle king had slid back as far as he could against the wall. “I told you, there’s a lot of money if you let me out of here.”
My uncle turned to me. “You interested?”
I shook my head.
For an old man, my uncle moved like lightning.
3
Once we were clear of the train and onto the dock, my uncle slowed to a leisurely pace. “If anyone stops us, let me do the talking,” he said.
“What about the Black Guards and the dogs?”
This drew a short laugh. “No such thing.”
“What happens when they find the noodle king?”
“Depends on who gets to him first. If the stevedores find him, they’ll haul him into a room with the Chinese gang leader, an ill-tempered sort named Tun Fan-xi who controls the docks. Our friend there will come out not long afterward neatly packed in several suitcases, one of which will be sent to Mike. If my old MPS colleagues find him first, they’ll argue about what to do and then turn him over to Mr. Tun. Diff
erent road, same destination.”
“More body parts. This is incredible.”
My uncle shrugged. “It’s the trend.”
“You know, he heard us talking.”
“Good for him. He won’t live to tell anyone. Incidentally, if I ever mention the urge for noodles, shoot me.”
“Speaking of guns, what are you doing packing so much firepower? All of a sudden you’re Hopalong Cassidy? What happened to that cute pistol you used to shoot Wong with? And where did you get that 9 mm?”
“The little one is on the floor of the warehouse. Don’t worry, they’ll figure a jilted girlfriend finished off Wong. It doesn’t have any prints on it. As for the other one, I know a few people in Harbin who deal in this and that.”
We came upon a guard post at the entry to the pier. The guard barked an order. My uncle barked back and flashed a pass. “Keep walking,” he said to me in Chinese. “Look important. Wait a second or two, then sneer, just a little, like everything within sight is beneath you, distasteful, pitiable.”
I sneered.
“Enough,” said my uncle. “More than enough. Chinese around here sneer when they think they’re almost out of sight of the locals.” We walked for a few more minutes, turned down a street, up a small hill, and ended up on a weathered bench facing the port. “You said you had another hypothesis. Let’s hear it.”
I was about to explain when two cars—one black, one brown—barreled past going in the direction of the wharf. We could hear a commotion, then the black car tore by going in the other direction. The brown car followed a few minutes later, two uniformed police in the front seat looking out their windows, searching the area. The car slowed to a crawl as it pulled abreast of us. The driver’s eyes drilled into me. I stared back, unsure whether or not to sneer. The car drove on. My uncle was sitting back the whole time, relaxed.
“Idiots,” he said. “They were waiting for us to break and run. That would have made their life easy. You should have given him a good sneer.”
“Do we want to stay here talking?”
“Sure. If we move now, they’ll want to know where we’ve gone. When they drive by again and we haven’t moved, they’ll figure one of us is paying off the other. The noodle king didn’t give them a description; otherwise we wouldn’t still be here. What’s your new hypothesis?”