by James Church
“Time to go.” The captain took one last look around. “How long until we get there? I don’t want to be roaming around at dusk. It’s hard to see Chinese in that light. Step on it, will you?”
It took another five hours, going up mountains, down mountains, around mountains. The captain dozed; each time he woke with a start. “Where are we? Did we cross into China?”
“What makes you think that?”
“More trees, and then more trees. Where did they come from? I thought you didn’t have any left.”
“Got to get up early to fool your people,” I said. “I called ahead and told the farms to mobilize everyone to plant these big trees in a hurry. But you spotted it right away.”
“Let me offer a suggestion,” said the captain. “It would save a lot of time if you people would build a few bridges over these valleys. A nice, straight highway would probably cut an hour, maybe two, off the drive. You might build some tunnels, too, while you’re at it. We could send some of our engineers up to show you how to do it.”
“Captain, tunnels are one thing we know how to build.”
“Then why don’t they do something about these roads?”
“Nothing wrong with these roads,” I said. “They’re scenic. Why don’t you look at the scenery?”
He looked and I drove as fast as I dared as we descended from the mountains down to Chosan, toward the shores of a lake formed by a dam on the Amnok River. We arrived before dusk, but not a lot before. I suggested we wait until morning to look around, but the captain seemed in a hurry.
“Let’s go out there now, get it over with,” he said. “There’s plenty of light left, and I don’t want to hang around.”
2
“This is nothing like the descriptions in those reports in the file. I wonder if they were talking about another location.”
“If I were you,” the captain had a pair of small binoculars to his eyes and was scanning the horizon, “I wouldn’t mention that file anymore. Forget you saw it.”
“What file?”
“That’s more like it.”
“Still, it’s peaceful. I don’t know what it is about the countryside in the fall, but it has a lulling effect on everything. If there was anything to worry about earlier in the year, you’ve forgotten what it was by October. You know, this area was separatist a long time ago. It pulled away from one of the old kingdoms and wouldn’t come back. Maybe that’s why we’re up here, to see if that sort of thing has stayed in the gene pool. Stubbornness is a dominant gene, I think. You only need one.”
The captain put the binoculars in his pocket. “Stop musing, Inspector. It’s going to get one of us killed.”
“Not likely,” I said. I turned my attention to a line of lindens that defined the route of a narrow road as it followed the banks of a stream flowing west, into the sunset. At dusk, the air in this part of Chagang took on a purity that made the light a river of memories. All the more reason I was surprised when the captain grunted and crumpled to the ground.
Nothing happened for what seemed a long time. Then a lanky man wearing a sharkskin suit and huge running shoes stood up from behind a row of bushes, brushed off his trousers, and walked slowly toward me. Even in the fading light, I could see he was very much a Chinese policeman. There was no mistaking the haircut or the way he moved. Somebody had once been shocked to find Chinese where he didn’t expect them to be in Korea, not far from here. I knew how that felt.
The captain was on his back, completely still, with a pretty big hole in his head. That seemed strange, because the man walking toward me wasn’t carrying a weapon, not where I could see one, anyway. Nobody else was in sight, but I presented a good target, so I picked out a place to fall down in a hurry if the bushes started moving.
“We know who you are, Inspector,” the man said when he was close enough to be heard without shouting.
“I take it that’s a good thing.” I nodded at the captain’s body. “If you’d waited for a moment, I would have introduced you to my colleague.”
“Him we know. He’s responsible for the deaths of two of my men. He was supposedly working for me, only I knew he wasn’t. I warned him a few times. It didn’t take. So, he’s gone.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that. And you, Inspector, I understand you are about to do funny things in funny places. Funny things happen to people in such cases.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t know? I’m talking about your trip to Macau. You aren’t welcome there. I can’t guarantee your well-being if you go.”
“Who the hell are you to be telling me where I can go and where I can’t go?”
“Just someone trying to pass along a little friendly advice.”
“Friendly advice? Since when is a hole in the head friendly advice?”
“When it isn’t your head.”
I don’t react well when people standing next to me are shot. “Maybe on your own soil you can hand out advice. But this land, here, on this side of that river, isn’t yours, or perhaps you need to check a modern map. The weather may come from your side. The wind may blow from that direction most of the time. But that’s about all. The sun doesn’t rise there, the sky doesn’t start there, and I don’t have to put up with your threats while you’re standing in my country.” It was a long speech, maybe a little provocative under the circumstances. I looked down at the captain. The hole in his head wasn’t getting any smaller.
The Chinese policeman gave me a slow, ancient, imperial smile. “Keep it up, Inspector.” He started to walk back to the bushes where he’d first appeared, then stopped and looked over his shoulder. “The captain didn’t listen to me,” he shouted. “Think about it.” He disappeared from view, but I wasn’t inclined to find out where he went.
3
The next day, well before dawn, I put gas in the car and drove like a madman back to Pyongyang. When I got to the compound, I slowed down; I made it a point to move up the walkway in a manner that wouldn’t excite the tank gunners. Even though the door to Kim’s office was ajar, I knocked. The first time it had been a good move to go in unannounced. I didn’t think it was smart to make that sort of thing a habit, especially because as far as Kim knew, the captain and I were still on the border.
“Yes, Inspector, can I help you?” Kim had his back to the door, studying the old maps on the wall behind his desk. Apparently, he did know I wasn’t still in Chagang.
“What’s this about?”
“You mean your meeting with the Great Han up on the border? We’d all be better off if you didn’t talk to strangers.” He turned slowly to face me.
“I didn’t have much choice, actually. He was hard to ignore. You already knew he’d be there?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Who is he? He put a hole in your captain’s head, or did you already know that, too?”
There was a slight pause, maybe an intake of breath. “I repeat, dealing with strange Chinese isn’t wise.”
“All Chinese are strange.”
“Good, Inspector, at last we agree on something.”
“How am I supposed to stay away from Chinese if I go to Macau?”
The face went several shades of red. “Who said you’re going to Macau?”
“The Great Han. He didn’t seem in any doubt that you were sending me. He emphasized that I’d better not go.”
Kim picked up the phone. “I want a meeting in my office in fifteen minutes.”
“Back to the previous question, how am I supposed to stay away from Chinese if I go to Macau? Or hadn’t you thought of that?”
Kim was writing a note. “There you mingle; here you don’t.”
“How is it that the Great Han knows what you’re going to do before you do it? Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out, Inspector, as soon as you leave.”
“You going to cancel the trip? I don’t even have a suitcase.” I also didn�
�t plan to go. There was nothing I wanted to see in Macau. Driving to the border with the captain had been different. While I was in the windowless room reading that file, I’d felt a switch flip on somewhere inside me. It had been years since I’d looked at a file, traced connections, put together stray bits of information to see if they fit. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it. But the image of the hole in the captain’s head was enough to convince me that nostalgia for operations wasn’t healthy.
“Cancel? Why should I? It’s not as if we’ve lost the element of surprise. Pang—that’s the Great Han’s name—would know as soon as you passed through Macau immigration anyway. He’s a colonel, and therefore impressed with himself. If it pleases him to think he has inside information on my plans, so much the better. It will give him more time to trip over his own big feet. We’re not going to cancel anything. We just need to be careful, that’s all. You, especially, need to take precautions.”
“No, I don’t, because I’m not going.”
“In Macau, the Chinese will pitch you; almost certainly they’ll make you an offer to work for them, as if they don’t already have enough of your people on their payroll. They’ll use anything and everything—a woman, money, a long-lost family member, maybe even an appeal to your sense of culture and history. Tell them to get lost. Can you do that for me?”
“Macau,” I said. “It’s a den of vice. People disappear.”
“Are you worried? After all of these years in the police, putting your life on the line for the citizens of Pyongyang, do I detect concern about personal safety? Come on, Inspector; you’re too old to fear the future. What have you got to lose anymore? Besides, I’m your friend, remember? Why would I send you on a trip if it was going to end badly?”
“The Chinese say, ‘If we have one more friend, we have one more door.’ I don’t need any new doors at this point in my life, especially if I don’t know where they lead.”
“So, you want to back out. Fine, we can deal with that.” He reached for the phone. “If you’re concerned about your safety . . .” He dialed a number. “I’ll get someone else.”
This was not a matter of pride. Anyone could see he thought he could shame me into going. It would have to be shame, because there was nothing else pushing me, nothing but a speck of curiosity about what this was about. I wasn’t working for him; I wasn’t working for anyone. Besides, the trees would still be on the mountain when I got back. They weren’t going anywhere. “I didn’t say you should get someone else. I said people disappear in Macau. I take it that’s what I’m supposed to do, find someone who disappeared there.”
Major Kim put down the phone. The face tiptoed around appearing cagey. “Not exactly.”
“What, exactly?”
“On the one hand you might say that a woman disappeared.”
Faint alarm bells rang. This wasn’t a road I wanted to go down. “Been there, done that. I like women I can see. If they disappear, I can’t see them.”
“Only, she didn’t actually disappear. It’s more like she disintegrated. Or maybe you could say disarticulated. Since most people can’t do something like that to themselves, by themselves, we’re interested.”
“Someone hacked her up, and you want me to put the pieces back together again.”
“Not exactly.” I felt that flutter in my stomach, the one that means my head hasn’t caught up with what the rest of me already realizes is a reason to turn around and go the other way. “The Macau police think they can identify who did it.” Kim said this slowly.
“Then, you must want them to think otherwise.” I paused. “Is this the ‘little problem’ you mentioned the first night we talked?”
Kim raised his chin a millimeter.
“You’re not thinking of setting me up, are you? Having me met at planeside by a team of Macau detectives who will take me to a dark room and beat me for a week until I confess?”
“This woman showed up in pieces, Inspector, over two weeks ago. You have nothing to confess. The whole time you’ve been either on your mountaintop or under my control. How could you have strangled her, chopped her up in the bathtub of a suite in the Grand Lisboa Hotel, carried a matched set of luggage through the lobby at seven A.M. after eating a breakfast of tea and rice congee, and dumped the larger suitcase, the red four-wheeler, in the harbor where it floated for a full day before being picked up by the police who had been tipped off by a Japanese reporter waiting at the scene with a camera crew?”
“I never liked congee.”
“Unassailable proof of innocence. Find something equally airtight for the person whom the Macau police are unjustly accusing.”
“You want me to make it clear to the police that they are barking up the wrong tree, still assuming you are not setting me up. Still assuming that I’ll actually go.”
“Go to Macau, Inspector. Put the police on the proper scent. Get them off the wrong tree, as you put it. Above all, stop worrying. What enjoyment is there in life if every angle has to be covered? You might even have fun in Macau.”
No, I would not. There was nothing about this picture that pointed to fun. “Your friend Pang advised me not to go. He sounded serious. Not to dwell on the point, but he killed the captain with one shot in bad light.”
“Go; find what needs to be found. Clarify what needs clarification. Wipe clean whatever window seems befogged to you. My only advice: Stay away from willowy Chinese girls, from full-bodied Portuguese tarts, and from whatever else they throw in your path. Then, mission complete, we’ll drive you in style back to your mountain, where you can saw boards until the end of time. What could be simpler?”
“One thing.”
“What?”
“You haven’t told me who didn’t do it.” It was the sort of thing I never wanted to say but did anyway.
“That’s not your concern.”
“Maybe not, but I’d like to know. Call it professional curiosity.”
“Go downstairs to the second floor to pick up your tickets and passport. The ticket should be for the day after tomorrow. They’ll have some travel money for you, too. Don’t waste it; we’ll need an accounting. It will probably take you an hour to get everything done. When you’re finished down there, come back up here.”
The passport had a ten-year-old photograph of me, but the clerk said it was close enough. It was a South Korean passport, which got under my skin. The travel money was practically nothing; the clerk said I was lucky to get as much as I did and if I played my cards right in Macau maybe I could turn it into a neat little pile. When I went back upstairs, there was a small man with an expensive haircut in a black shirt and black tie sitting in the green chair across from Kim. They stopped talking when I walked in.
“That will be all,” Kim said to the man, who stood up and left without acknowledging me as he brushed by. He had on expensive cologne, a lot of it.
“Who is your thuggish friend who gets the good chair?” I waved away a perfumed nimbus.
“Just someone who thinks the northeast is his territory to dispense.” Kim was looking through a small notebook.
“Oh, really? Of course, you set him straight. He understands it’s not his and it’s not yours, either.”
“You got the passport?”
“I assume he isn’t part of your operation.”
“What are you talking about?”
“His shoes cost more than you make in six months. He’s been drinking. Even his cologne bath couldn’t cover the alcohol. Your discipline can’t be that bad. Besides, he is Chinese.”
Kim looked up, momentarily amused.
“I’m wondering, though, why you were so tense when he was here? He doesn’t look the type to have a hold on you. Still, your eyes have taken on that worried cast.”
“Worried?” Kim blinked, twice. “No, Inspector. I may have braced myself, that’s all. Zhao is not someone with whom you have a casual conversation.”
“So, why the sudden silence when I walked in? What’s he to me? You woul
dn’t have left the door open like that if you didn’t want to make sure that we brushed antennae.”
“Let’s put it this way: If Zhao is in a good mood, he can be your patron, even your protector, in faraway places. He’ll supply your needs and embellish your wants, beyond what you’ve got in that little envelope of travel money you’re holding. He can also put you in touch with the right people in Macau. His access to the influential is exceeded only by his bank accounts.”
“This, as you say, is if he is in a good mood. If not?”
“If not, he has a pet rat who can remove your lungs and use them to stuff the pillows of the orphans he’s had a hand in creating. Zhao believes grief is a bad thing, a burden on society, so if he murders a husband, he makes sure to murder the wife.”
“I have no wife.”
“No one to grieve for you? Then the man’s work is simplified.”
“I’d rather this Zhao stick to enlarging my wants.”
“ ‘Embellish,’ Inspector. I said ‘embellish.’ ”
“Another friend, another door?”
“You’ll have to ask him yourself. It’s not my job to read his mind. We coexist, that’s all.”
“You can’t arrest him?”
Kim smiled. I began recording a series of variables in my head—corners of the mouth, forehead, eye crinkling. This was the first entry, so there was no basis for comparison, but on the face of it, I thought it could go down as “wan.”
“No, Inspector, I can’t arrest him, not if I want to keep breathing. Unlike you, I do have a wife—a wife and two children.”
“What about the Great Han? Can’t he do something? Surely he doesn’t approve of someone like Zhao.”
“I guess you could say the Great Han prefers to keep breathing, too.”
4
I went back to the hotel to think things over. It still wasn’t too late to tell Kim to find someone else to go to Macau. I had made it a point never to get involved with gangsters while I was in the Ministry, because I knew it would be nothing but a headache. There was a tiny section in a dark office in the headquarters building that dealt with all gangs—Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and whatever else the wind blew across the borders. Gangsters were tough people, very smooth for the most part, and for the most part deadly. That was only half the problem. The rest of the problem—and the most difficult part—came from the fact that other entities, various central committee departments, military groups, special services, and we never knew for sure what else, loved to run operations using foreign gangs. We were never informed ahead of time. If we got in the way of an operation, we were in trouble. It took a lot of careful footwork to stay clear of something you didn’t know existed. One hot summer, a Japanese gang tried to set up shop in my sector. It wasn’t a big operation, but I was against letting them hang around, so I complained through channels. Channels told me to mind my business. It turned out a couple of the gang members were working for a foreign intelligence service and weren’t very discreet about it, so after a few months the whole operation was shut down and moved to the east coast.