by James Church
“It’s a ficus,” I say. “An old one, maybe four hundred years. Some Portuguese missionary must have planted it.” Anyone could have planted it. It could have planted itself for all I know. It is very hot, and the Grand Lisboa appears to be dancing.
“There’s a plaque on the tree.”
“Yes, but it’s in Portuguese.”
“Oh, you aren’t from Macau? I could have sworn I’d seen you somewhere. At the Venetian, perhaps, taking in a show?”
I let my eyes roam around the fort. The only person not on one leg is leaning against number thirteen.
The man beside me is humming. He puts the book on the bench between us. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” he sings in a soft, high voice.
I take a sip of warm water from the bottle. What the deuce is that supposed to mean? “Yeah, me, neither,” I say.
He smiles and hums a few more bars. “Gaaz-ing at the sky.” He looks up through the leaves. “Going to be a pretty day. Puffy white clouds.”
That rings a bell. I nod. “Blue sky.” Wherever this is going, we are just about there.
“Too bad about your uncle.”
All at once, this isn’t the conversation I expected. I don’t have an uncle.
“Well,” he says finally. He walks away, holding the book. The newspaper is on the bench. I sit for a couple of minutes, wondering whether this is a trap. I don’t trust Luís, but he doesn’t seem to be the type to put me in a trap, I am pretty sure, almost sure. Still, that leaves a number of candidates. Pang didn’t really want me to be here, despite what he said. Zhao hadn’t tried to be devious; he had been absolutely explicit. The old man on thirteen has moved down to number eleven. He watches. It isn’t a trap, I decide, so I pick up the newspaper and skim the front page. Then I fold the paper under my arm and walk slowly down the stairs to the hill, and slowly down the hill to a bakery for a cup of coffee. This wasn’t the best handoff I’d ever seen, I think to myself, but apparently it was good enough for Macau.
5
When I got back to the Nam Lo, the clerk was hurrying down the stairs. He pressed himself against the wall. “Nobody touched your room; don’t worry,” he said. “I was cleaning up the one down the hall, the one your girlfriend uses.”
“Out of my way,” I said. “I lost a suitcase full of money at the casino and I don’t want to talk.”
This seemed to cheer him up, because he said something using only six tones.
The room looked untouched. I closed the door, put the ratty chair against it, and opened the newspaper on the bed. Taped on page 3 was an airline ticket for tomorrow to Prague, though not nonstop. That meant changing planes, risking delays. Why Prague? I got a funny feeling. I’d been there once before, long ago. There was a return ticket, but it was for Shanghai. That did me no good; there were no flights from Shanghai to Pyongyang. That meant I was going to have to change the routing at the airport in Prague, with a lot of unnecessary questions from the ticket agent about why I didn’t book it that way to begin with. There would also be careful study of my identification, which meant the visa stamps would get attention. The ticket wasn’t in my name. It wasn’t in the name that was on my South Korean passport, either, but that was all right because on page 5 of the newspaper was an envelope with a Dominican passport inside. It had a better picture of me than the one Kim’s people had used. My name was Ricardo, and I was fifty-four years old, which was fine. That knocked almost fifteen years off the wear and tear on my body. The age on a fake passport might not be an elixir of youth, but it helps.
I went downstairs and gave the room clerk a sad look. “My uncle died. I have to leave a day early.”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s a curse. Whenever people have to leave early, they kill off an uncle. Never an aunt.”
“I’ll be back.”
“You get charged for the full stay. It’s policy.” He pointed at a sign behind him on the wall.
“That’s an explanation of the fire exits, in Chinese.”
“Say, you’re one smart Korean, aren’t you?” He let loose a few long sentences in Hakka.
“OK, I get it,” I said. “I pay for the day I’m not here, and you pocket the money.”
“Any complaints, fill out the form in the desk in your room.”
“There isn’t a desk in my room.”
“Really? Well, you can use one of the forms over there.” He pointed at a few dirty pieces of paper on the counter.
“Where do I put it when I’m done?”
He grinned.
“I’ll tell you what I need. I need a train ticket for tomorrow.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Macau is practically an island. No trains.”
“Yeah, I figured that out. But you must have travel agents that can make arrangements. I’ve seen one or two luggage stores, and that means people travel; if people travel, they have tickets, and they must get them somewhere.”
“Depends. Where you going?” He gave me the canny look of a man calculating how much he could get for selling the same information to three buyers.
“Shanghai, to pay my respects to my uncle, who ran a noodle shop there. Then to Beijing to see my aged mother, who lives with her sister in one of those new villas near the Kempinski. You know it? Then on to Yanji. Yanji is lousy with Koreans, in case you didn’t know.”
“Right.”
“Can you get me the tickets?”
“No, but I can tell you where to go.”
“A ticket office.”
“If you knew, why did you ask?” He was already reaching for the phone.
6
That night I went back to the restaurant where the Chinese girls ate before they went to work in the hallway. The Russian girl was sitting in the same corner.
“Hi,” I said. “Can I sit?”
“Sit.” She smiled up at me. “Yes, sit.”
“You’re here again.” I scanned the menu. “You want something beside noodles and orange juice?”
She shook her head. “It’s good. You want some?”
“Nah, I never eat the night before I travel.”
“You leaving? Changing hotels? That’s good. You don’t want to be at the Nam Lo.”
“I’m going to Shanghai. My uncle died.” Might as well put the story out in more than one place, though I felt bad using her.
“Sorry.” She shrugged. “You’re a nice man. I will miss you.”
“And you’re a nice girl with beautiful eyes. I wish you’d go home.”
“I can’t. I have a contract.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“I already told you, a thousand dollars.”
“How many other girls does your boss control?”
“You want someone else?” She looked hurt. “All right. There are eight girls altogether. For a few days we were nine, but now it’s back to eight again.”
“Someone went home?”
“Who knows? We never got a good look at her. She was older than the rest of us, showed up suddenly. My boss put her in the Nam Lo for one night. I don’t even think she was there the whole time. She didn’t work, that’s for sure, and then she was gone. I saw her from the back, just briefly. She was blond. When she left, my boss told me to clean out the room she had been in. There was a small suitcase full of clothes and a razor. Otherwise, it was as if she hadn’t been there.”
“But she had been there.”
“Yes, but the room didn’t feel right. It didn’t smell right.”
I stood up to go. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”
She stood and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Make sure it’s before April. My contract is up then, and I’m never coming back.”
7
I had time on my hands, money in my pocket, and things on my list. The first thing I did was stop one of the girls walking up and down the hall.
“Where are the best pork buns in town?” The girl was carrying a black patent-leather bag with matching shoes. I figured if anyone knew about pork b
uns, she would.
“Fifteen hundred,” she said.
“Maybe later,” I said. “Right now, I need pork buns, the best. When you go out for pork buns, where do you and your friends go?”
She called over one of her co-workers, frilly white blouse and her hair done up in a tight bun. Very fetching, but not what I needed. The two spoke between themselves for a moment.
“You want both? Twenty-five.” The black bag swung provocatively.
“Listen,” I said. “When I need to kill myself, I’ll call you first. Meantime . . .”
“I know,” she said, “pork buns. Rua da Barra, not far. It’s a place called Mama Nhi’s. Pretty good.”
An older girl walked up. “Keep it moving,” she said, and looked at me. “Either buy or don’t buy.”
8
Mama Nhi didn’t have a box, but she did have a big shopping bag.
“Fill it up?” She put her hands on her hips. “That’s one hell of a lot of grease. You planning to sell the stuff? Tell me; I can get you more.”
9
I opened the door of the van. “These are for you,” I said. “Maybe we can talk.”
10
The next morning, I was at the luggage store in the Lisboa when it opened. None of the suitcases looked big enough for a body, not even for one of the skinny models waving from the photographs in the window.
“I need something large.” I smiled. “Let’s say I wanted to go on a trip. Let’s say for laughs I wanted to go in my own suitcase. You got anything?”
The clerk’s eyes opened for a flicker. “This is the biggest we have.” She went behind the counter and pulled out a Louis Vuitton, a two-wheeler.
“Nice,” I said. “But cramped. How about a Lancel? How about red?”
She shook her head. “Too bad. I sold the last one a few weeks ago.”
“Is that so? You remember whom you sold it to?”
“Sure. Some Russian woman, thin, very careful with the makeup. How come all the interest in red Lancels all of a sudden?”
All of a sudden, she said. I took a chance. “Luís was in last night?”
She shrugged. “You browse. Take your time.” She went back behind the counter. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I pretended to look around. So, Luís hadn’t followed the suitcase angle before. We all had blind spots. His were baggage and balconies. Senhor Penza hadn’t come with a red Lancel. A Russian woman had bought one and ended up floating in it a few days later. Luís hadn’t realized that before. He did now. It didn’t fit in my puzzle. Maybe it fit in his.
“This red suitcase you sold to the nice tourist lady, it had four wheels?”
“What if it did?”
“Lancel doesn’t make four-wheelers, not elegant enough. I checked. Yours must have been a fake.”
“So sue me.”
I picked up a carry-on. “How much is this?”
“Eight thousand Hong Kong. Too small for you. You’d have to cut off your legs.”
Chapter Three
The immigration official in the Prague airport looked at my passport and then at me. Then he looked back at the passport—the fatal second glance. “You have taken an odd routing.”
The tickets had taken me from Hong Kong to Shanghai, then to Madrid, and then back to Prague. “Miles,” I said. “I have a lot of them. A few more and I get a free trip to Copenhagen.”
The immigration official looked closely at one page. He held it up in the booth for me to see through the glass. “You’ve already been to Copenhagen.”
“Sure I have. And I want to go back.” I winked. “If you know what I mean.”
“Don’t disturb the peace here in Prague.” He stamped the passport and handed it back to me. “We aren’t like the Danes.”
From the airport I took a taxi to the hotel where I’d stayed the only other time I’d been in Prague. It was a little more frayed than it had been back then, but so was I. The day was cool but clear, so I decided to take a tram to the river, walk across the bridge, and wander around. Kang—or somebody—went to a lot of trouble to get me here; they could go to a little more trouble if they wanted to find me.
An old man with a hat got on at the next stop. He sat in the seat behind me.
“Long time, Inspector.”
It was Kang. The voice was older, but it was still tough.
“Don’t turn around. We’re getting off soon.” He spoke in Russian. None of the other passengers looked up. The tram swayed around a corner and then stopped. “This is it,” he said. “Walk with me.”
2
We climbed the stairs to an apartment house that looked like the one next to it, and the one next to that. They all looked the same. The door opened before Kang could put his key in the lock.
“Christ on a cloud, Inspector! You haven’t changed.”
“Neither have you, Richie.” The stick figure in the doorway was nothing like the man I’d met in this city fifteen years ago. That man had been burly, self-assured, filling the safe house with his presence. This man was wasting away. He was dying. I searched for something to say. “You still have that little silver tape recorder you used last time we saw each other? It didn’t work very well. I’ll bet half of what I told you was lost.”
“Maybe, but we don’t use that stuff anymore. We read brain waves.” He shook my hand. His grip was fragile like one of Colonel Pang’s ancient cups. “Come in and have some tea. I can’t remember—with milk or without?”
Another man stepped into the room. I try not to be judgmental, but he was Russian in the worst way. Put together from ugly discards, and none the happier for it. He stood next to Richie.
“Kulov here is my batman. Kulov, meet the Inspector.”
Kulov extended a meaty hand. “A pleasure, I’m sure,” he said in a low, cultured voice.
A tremor of pain passed over Richie’s face. Kulov watched silently until it passed. “Next time,” he said, “you’ll take the pill when I give it to you. Sit on the sofa. I’ll bring the tea.”
Richie sat down. “Kulov is not full of sympathy. That’s all right; sympathy is the last thing I need. Maybe a week at the baths would do some good. What do you think, Kang?”
Kang was on a stool that looked like it had been shoved into the corner as an afterthought. “How about trying some food now and then? That might help, too.”
“Food I need even less than sympathy.” Richie put his head back and closed his eyes. “So, Comrade O. Glad you made it. We weren’t sure you’d come. Welcome back to Prague.” He meant to smile, but there was nothing left, just the prospect of the void.
They must have pulled Richie from his deathbed for this. Did they think it would make me more comfortable, being welcomed by a near corpse? For some reason, they decided that they needed him to take the lead, even though there was no doubt that this was Kang’s meeting. “How did you know I was in the Nam Lo?”
“It’s a cinch you weren’t at the Lisboa. How did you like it in Macau? I was there once, about thirty years ago.”
“It’s all right. They could use a few chestnut trees.”
“Did you happen to get to the maritime museum?”
“It wasn’t on my itinerary.”
“There used to be a good restaurant in the neighborhood. Past a street called Rua da Barra. I never drove, so I never knew how to get there exactly. Just wondering if it’s still in business. Maybe I’ll go back one of these days.” That didn’t ring hollow; it didn’t ring at all.
“You called me halfway around the world to ask about restaurants?”
Richie started to laugh, but then he coughed. “It’s over, Inspector. All done, finally done. Time to choose. That’s why we called you halfway around the world.” He coughed again, a long, painful, desperate effort for air. “Kang said we should give you a choice.” Kang and I waited while Richie caught his breath. Kulov brought a glass of water from the kitchen. Richie waved him away. “Get me some whiskey, you bastard.” The Russian put the glass down
on a table and disappeared into the kitchen.
I turned to Kang. “And you? Where have you been all these years?” The odds were he would never tell me, but it never hurt to ask. Sometimes even a short answer led somewhere. Not this time.
“Here.” Silverware rattled in the kitchen. “And there.” A tiny bit of irony arced over Kang’s lips. Richie closed his eyes and smiled.
“Here and there,” I said. Those were the boundaries. Near and far. Up and down. It was a mystery to me why I had even bothered to ask. “I always figured you got clear that night in Manpo when the shooting stopped. Your name came up a few times afterward; then people stopped asking.” The door had closed and been permanently sealed. There was never a warning to drop the subject; there didn’t have to be. The word was out that Kang had been shot, eliminated. Anyone who thought otherwise knew not to raise their doubts. “Richie here was particularly concerned about you. I had to tell him you were dead. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Mind? Why would I mind? I only did what anyone can do, Inspector.” Kang gave me that look, the same one he’d used in the old days—the bear watching the rabbit.
“And what is it that anyone can do?”
“Accept fate.”
This made me laugh. “Fate. I would never have guessed that was your style. What do we call it that I’m here with you and Richie? Fate?”
Kang went over to a low cabinet with a decanter on it. He poured a glass of whiskey and handed it to Richie. “Have a glass, Inspector? Calm your nerves.”