by James Church
The major smiled obliquely; I checked off one of his thousand expressions. “I’m still your pal; don’t misunderstand. But I’ll crack your skull open and cook your brains for breakfast if you give me trouble. Is that clear?”
“Finally, we’re getting somewhere. Let me put two and two together. You’re from the South, as you told me last night. You seem to be under the impression that you are my superior. Streetlights are on everywhere. And the room maid addresses me as ‘sir.’ Shall I take a guess at what has happened? Or what might happen?”
“No. You won’t be doing any guessing, Inspector. There’s no margin here for that. I move according to stone-cold facts. And that’s what you will do from now on, too.” He shrugged. “Confused? I suggested to you last night that facts are inconvenient, but so is reality. Facts may be a problem, but reality is a killer. There’s no way around reality, in my experience. Admittedly, you seem to have spent a lifetime avoiding it.”
3
“Let me get this straight.” I reached in my pocket for a piece of pine.
The major frowned. “What’s that? One of those wood chips you carry around?”
“This?” I held it up for him to see. “It’s pine, that’s all, a very uncomplicated wood. It helps me think uncomplicated thoughts. Nothing threatening about it, don’t worry. It won’t explode or anything.”
“Uncomplicated thoughts? By all means, Inspector, let’s keep things simple. Maybe I should pass out some of that wood to my staff. Do you have more?”
I considered that. “No, I don’t think it would do any good. What works for me might not work for them.”
“And what work is that? More adducing of the evidence assembled so far? Is this a reflection of your training or your temperament, Inspector?”
“The three dogs at the long table last night knew who you are. Paul the pliant waiter has a reasonably good idea. Everyone around here knows, I take it. Everyone but me.”
“Not everyone. Let’s say everyone that matters.”
“So, do I matter?” I got up and walked over to the window. The view told me nothing. It was an inner courtyard with two wooden benches, a few flowerpots with bright yellow mums, and a stone fountain made to look like a mountain waterfall, but it wasn’t turned on. The sky above the courtyard was still dark, but there was soft lighting around the fountain to illuminate the scene. “Must be pleasant, hearing the sound of water. It soothes the nerves; do you think that’s why they put it there? Very stressful, I imagine, working here. This office, for example, it must have been for someone with real power. Whose was it?” I looked at the windows across the way. The curtains were closed. It reminded me of the Operations Building across the courtyard from my old office. Our courtyard had no flowerpots and no fountain. We made do with three old gingko trees and a pile of bricks. “Before you moved in, who had this building?”
“You don’t know?”
“Never been here. Never even been near here, I don’t think. I never had much to do with buildings surrounded by tanks.”
“Let’s just say that whoever was in these offices has moved. They were happy to pack up when they were offered something better.”
“You’re not going to tell me.”
“At the moment, you wouldn’t be interested even if I did, because you wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”
“I might.”
“No, Inspector, I’m quite serious. This building was for a group formed after you left. Or is ‘retired’ the term we’re supposed to use?” I didn’t rise to that crummy piece of bait. “The group was put together for a very specific purpose. That purpose has been overtaken by events. A lot has happened since you left.”
“People keep telling me that.”
“Perhaps you should pay attention.”
I went back to the brown chair. There was no way to relax in it, no way to strike a pose of nonchalance in front of Kim. “I’m listening. I’m not going to interrupt. Sit and absorb—will that suffice?”
“We want you to take charge of a camp.” The idea came out of nowhere. It might have been better phrased, probably more effective, if he’d led up to it. But maybe he figured that the direct approach would catch me off balance. It did.
Sitting down again had been a big mistake, I realized. I should have remained standing. That way I could have walked out the door as soon as I heard him—out the door, down the walkway, over the hills, anywhere but here. But now I was sitting, and getting out of the chair would take those few extra few drops of will that his words had bled out of me in the hurry. Kim didn’t add anything. He watched the reflection on the desktop, waiting for my reaction.
“You mean you haven’t disbanded the camps?” The question was so obvious it was beside the point.
“No, not yet.” Kim looked up at me in a curious way. “It’s way too soon for that, don’t you agree?”
It must have been a stray note in his voice that rang the bell. That’s what he wanted; he wanted me to say yes to something—anything. Get a “yes” into the conversation, a tiny crack in the door. One single spark of assent, that’s all it took to light the fire. I’d nearly forgotten. I’d grown stale, up on a mountaintop forgetting everything I had ever learned, while he had been in this office, sharpening his technique every day. He was better than I thought, and that meant he was dangerous.
Kim appeared relaxed, but I could sense he was wondering if he’d moved a half step too fast. That’s why he followed up when he should have stayed quiet, let the idea simmer. “The camps, as you can understand, are a very delicate problem. We did try to disband a couple, but things turned disruptive. There were too many people walking around with too many bad stories. We don’t want an increase in negative feeling toward the current regime, do we?” He smiled to himself, a sarcastic smile, a smile that said he could afford to be ironic on this question because he was sitting behind the polished desk and I was not. “Negative feeling—that wouldn’t be very helpful. Besides, we had experience running our own camps not so many years ago, you know. And we’ve also learned from what other people have done, as well, to get ourselves ready for this situation. Running prison camps isn’t easy; neither is getting rid of them. So much complaining! No one approves of them. No one wants to touch them. But, everybody gets their feet wet sooner or later. It’s unavoidable. The result is, there’s a large body of experience to draw from.”
“Which means?”
“Which means we’re improving the conditions a little at a time, retraining your guards, instituting new rules. But the camps themselves stay, for a while anyway. We figure what they need is leadership.” This time he gave himself an extra beat for pacing. “That’s you. You have the credentials, grandson of a Hero of the Republic and all that.”
“What about the Prison Bureau? Are you going to leave those psychopaths in place?”
“How comforting to know you never agreed with what was going on in those offices, Inspector! A little rearranging is in the works; I can tell you that much. A replacement here and there.”
“This is the little problem you wanted me to fix?”
He said nothing. I looked at my bowl of soup. My grandfather had made soup every morning, relentlessly, without fail. Every 6:00 A.M., there it was, even in the heat of summer—soup. I pushed the bowl away. That’s why I was here, nothing to do with prisons. They needed my grandfather; they needed his blessing from the grave. Good luck, I thought. They weren’t going to get it, not through me.
“I can give you the names of plenty of people who would take the job,” I said. “You need someone with the right temperament for that sort of thing. You don’t want me.”
“Aren’t you going to ask which camp?”
“I’m not interested.”
“Of course, just like you were uninterested for the past fifty years in what went on inside those fences?”
This sounded very much like a knife cutting through flesh. A little soon, I thought, for him to make the move to the negative. He shoul
d have waited another round; he still had a few problems with pacing. Maybe they didn’t spend much time on that sort of thing in the South. “Apparently, this is the moment for me to chop wood for you,” I said. “Or maybe it is the day to polish one of the tanks?”
Kim looked at my bowl. “You finished with the soup? I’ll have the dishes cleared.”
“Yes, let’s bring in the trained monkey again.” We were done with the feint about the camp job, and he’d let the subject of my grandfather drop. So why did they send the ferret to fetch me from the mountain? What was so important that they needed me here?
The dishes were whisked away, and the first rays of sunlight came through the window behind me, glinting off a group of framed maps on the opposite wall. Somehow, they missed Kim’s eyes. Maybe he repelled sunlight, I thought. We sat in silence. Kim pushed a button and the shades on the window went down halfway. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “But I find the morning sun this time of year a little hard to take.”
Simple, I thought. Have Michael and Paul move the fucking desk.
Kim opened a file and began to leaf through it. He stopped with the last page, which he held flat on the desktop so I could see that it was a list of names.
“Tell me, Inspector,” he said finally. “Do I have your cooperation, or don’t I?” He had his pencil poised over the paper.
“No.” I stood up. That wasn’t the real question, and I didn’t plan to wait another hour or two for him to get to the main point. He had something he wanted me to do, and I had no intention of doing it. If he thought he had some power over me, let him try. “If there will be nothing else, I have to get to the hotel to pack my things.”
He made a mark on the list, a small x next to a name. “Returning to the mountain, Zarathustra?” He crossed out one name near the top, then another. “I can have a car waiting for you. It can’t be done today. How about tomorrow? About noon?”
4
Downstairs, I realized I didn’t know how to get back to my hotel from here, because I didn’t know where “here” was. The duty driver was nowhere around, and no one offered me a ride. When I stepped outside and started down the walkway, I felt a tank gun barrel following me. Small-caliber weapons aimed at my back might not register, but a tank barrel—always. At the end of the walkway, a jeep sat idling, with a man in an unfamiliar uniform and a red armband at the wheel. He indicated I should get in, drove at high speed through the tunnel, and pulled over as soon as we emerged.
“End of the line,” he said.
“How far are we from my hotel?”
“Beats me,” he said. “This is your city, not mine. And as far as I’m concerned you can have it.” He put the jeep in gear and roared back through the tunnel.
I tried to orient myself, but there were no landmarks on the horizon to help. Off to the right, several new, tall buildings were going up. In front of me, an entire block had been leveled. A brief walk around convinced me that I was in the far western part of the city, some distance from the Taedong River and a long way from any subway stop that could get me back to the central district, close to my hotel.
When west, walk east. Maybe I’d run across a traffic cop whom I could ask for directions. They didn’t know much, but they could usually figure out which direction the river was. As far as I could tell, no one was following me. It didn’t really matter; in fact, it might be better if there was. If I got too lost, my tail might get tired and give me a ride back to the hotel.
I wasn’t in a hurry, I didn’t need to be anyplace particular, and the weather was good for a stroll. If I had to be in Pyongyang, a bright October morning was as good a time as any. The trees along the streets were turning color, and in an hour or so smoke from roasting chestnuts and sweet potatoes would be drifting from the kiosks. Already the air was painted with faraway hope. It was an autumn sky remembered from years past, always sparkling in anticipation—in anticipation of what I never understood. My grandfather said autumn was a party, that most trees acted foolishly drunk in the fall and then wept at their loss all winter long. He didn’t like evergreens, but he said at least they were sober.
I walked about a kilometer, taking in the sunshine and becoming more and more uneasy. The problem was that no matter which way I turned, Li’s warnings from the other night trailed beside me. No, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but I was beginning to get a few ideas. Major Kim had extraordinary authority, he was from the South, and Pyongyang had the indefinable feel of a tiny planet beginning to wobble on its axis. There were more babies, more children being pushed in strollers, more couples walking together. The traffic ladies weren’t where they ought to be. There were fewer of them, and they were doing their ballet in the smaller intersections. They looked the same as ever—same blue uniforms, same pouty lips—but none of them blew their whistles when I crossed in the middle of the street instead of taking the underpass. Even the cranes at the construction sites had changed, the old, stubby dinosaurs replaced by long, graceful booms. It wasn’t only how things looked. It was how they felt, how they fit together. A city can change in five years, I thought, but not like this. It wasn’t until I went up a long flight of stairs and crossed high over a train yard that the growing panic in my chest subsided. I stopped and looked down. Here, at least, the grime was familiar.
From the train yard, I knew, it wasn’t far to the subway entrance. A tall man leaned against the railing, watching the traffic.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’re waiting for a bus.”
Li kept his eyes on the traffic. “My car is on the next street. Let’s go for a ride.”
“Let’s not. I’m getting out of here, compliments of Major Kim.”
“I’ll take a wild guess. He said he’d send a car for you tomorrow at your hotel.”
“He did.”
“And you believed him?”
“The man gave me soup for breakfast. How can I not believe him?”
“Never take soup from strangers, O—always sage advice. Let’s not stand around. It makes me nervous.”
I followed him to his car. “What makes you think Kim won’t have someone right behind you?”
“He will. He already does.” We pulled onto a busy street. “But he won’t for long. These people are very sure of themselves, very sure we are idiots.”
We turned left into a small alley, raced through the courtyard of an apartment complex, flew across a bridge, and ended up behind three small trucks in the parking lot of a blue-roofed market overflowing with people.
“Out, Inspector. You’re going to do a little shopping. Don’t look around; go right inside.”
“Am I missing something? I thought you worked for Kim.”
“See you later.”
Inside, the market was a crush of bodies. For a moment, in the fruit section, I was stranded next to the bananas. Bananas! I gawked at them. Since when did normal people even in the capital have bananas to eat? Then a man pulled on my arm and I broke through the masses into a small office. The door shut behind me.
“You can wait here.” The man let go of my arm. A middle-aged woman with a baseball cap sat at a desk working a calculator. She frowned at the numbers. “Too many fucking zeros,” she muttered.
“Busy place,” I said. It was a cinch I was trapped, that Major Kim would come through the door at any moment, with one of his tanks close behind.
“Major Kim, if that’s what is worrying you, has meetings today.” The woman didn’t look up as she spoke. “He has a nine o’clock. Also, today is Thursday. He gets a haircut on Thursdays.”
“What about his minions?”
The woman turned and appraised me carefully, from head to toe. “His minions aren’t looking for trouble. They live a cushy life up here, and they don’t want to spoil things. If they make us mad, we’ll see that things get difficult for them. So they ease up when they sense we’re serious. Self-preservation ranks high on their list of priorities.”
“So, are we serious?”
The woman turned off the calculator and put it in a small cloth case before she stood up and looked directly into my eyes. “We are, Inspector. We are deadly serious. Are you?”
The man whispered in the woman’s ear. She gave him a little nudge and locked the door after him. “A question, Inspector.” She moved closer to me, so close that the brim of her cap touched my forehead. “There’s a question pending. Do you want to answer it? Or shall I answer it for you?” She was round, very confident about who she was.
“You asked the question,” I said. “Maybe you should answer it. Seems only fair.”
“You don’t act serious. You don’t sound serious. I don’t think you are. But I think you will become serious, Inspector, sooner than you imagine. And I’ll tell you why—because there is no other way for you to survive.”
“Business is good?” I didn’t think I wanted to stay too long with this confident woman. I certainly didn’t want to slip into an extended conversation with her about survival, definitely not about my survival. “Maybe you should put up extra lights. Everyplace else in the city has more than enough. That way you can see how much the ladies behind the counter are stealing.”
“The real crooks are always somewhere else, Inspector. Do you know what is going on in your Ministry these days?”
“It isn’t my Ministry. I’m retired.”
“So you say. You gave me some advice. Now I’ll give you some: Open your eyes; look around.” She finally stepped back. “Someone will be in touch.” She unlocked the door and indicated I should leave.
I figured Major Kim would be waiting outside, but there was only a crowd of people around a table loaded with shoes. None of them looked my size, so I headed toward the exit. When I finally made it into the fresh air of the parking lot, an elbow jammed into my ribs.
“Got a match?” It was the bellboy from the hotel, grinning. “Didn’t think you’d be here with the rest of us poor stiffs. Want to buy something? I can show you around.”