by James Church
“Until you’re so bored you think you’re about to die. Then pinch your bottom and sit some more.”
“I don’t like this,” said the other man, the one who hadn’t opened his mouth until now. “We get called in here the day of an operation and then find out no one knows anything about what we’re doing.”
Kim moved around the table and pushed the man so hard he almost fell over. “No one asked you for your opinion, did they? When someone asks, maybe then you can whine. Until then, you do as you’re told.” He turned to the other two. “Same goes for you. I thought that’s what you people did best, followed orders. If you can’t do that, there’s not much left, is there? All right, get out of here. There’s a room down the hall where you can sit around and complain. I’ve got a few things to go over with Inspector O.”
After the three of them left, Kim picked up the phone. “Get Li in here.”
4
Li stood at the door. “You wanted me?”
“Yeah, come on in. Tell the Inspector what we found out last night.”
“We were going through your file again. There was a piece of paper tucked away that said someone heard you had a stroke.”
“Not so.”
“It says your health is not very good.”
“I’m fine. Better than fine.”
“What was it, then? Something scared you off the mountain into a doctor’s office last year. That’s not like you.”
“It was nothing. Well, maybe it was something. A sign, an omen.”
“That’s what the doctor said?”
“In his own way. He said everybody dies eventually.”
“A doctor said that?” Kim threw up his hands. “I could have told you the same thing. Li could have told you. Some doctor you have. Who needs to hear that from a doctor?”
“How much longer you have?” Li looked a little unsure of how that sounded. “I mean, do you need a glass of water or something?”
“I’m perfectly fine, in the pink of health. Better than either of you, I’ll bet. And you want to know why? When I realized what had happened, I had this sense of ecstasy. I was in my cabin on the mountain, looking out the window at the trees, when all of a sudden my brain shook. And then I got weak; not just weak, it was beyond that, the other side of weak. It was like going through the secret door in the floor of our house when I was young.”
“It sounds like you were stunned, kind of in shock or something. The driver said the ceiling in your place looked kind of low. Maybe you hit your head.” Li was trying to be helpful. This was the Li I remembered from a long time ago, when we first worked together.
“Shock? No, I’d say it was the opposite of shock. Maybe revelation. In that instant, I realized that I wasn’t doomed to wind down like an old clock. I could go all at once, in a moment that I controlled. Not controlled consciously, of course, but something deeper, older, a self within, one that knew more, had seen more, like starlight passing through the earth, a speck of dust on the way to the other side of nowhere, everywhere, boundless.”
“Careful, you’re getting out of breath, O. Sit down. I think you might be hyperventilating.” Kim moved the green chair closer.
“I don’t need a chair.” My eyes must have had a strange gleam in them. Kim looked frightened, as if he wasn’t sure who I was. “Don’t you get it? It means I’m not on a leash. No one owns me.”
“Good. Forget the leash and sit. I’ll get you a glass of water.” He turned to Li. “Do we have a physician around here?”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “It’s only a power surge in the system. I get a little boost of energy once in a while, nothing to worry about.” I felt my blood pressure dropping back to normal. “It’s like stepping on the gas when the transmission is in neutral, that’s all. Probably helps clean the carburetor.”
“Don’t pay attention to him,” Li said. “Mechanical things are not his specialty.”
“Cancel your operation, Kim. The guy with the smirk is from SSD; I’m sure of it.”
“We now classify people according to their smirks?” Kim’s face ran through a dozen expressions. “What about these?”
“You think I’m kidding? If we’re lucky, they’ll leave us twiddling our thumbs and move things to another time. If they really want to make a point, they’ll do something ugly.”
5
The lecture hall was deserted when we walked in. It wasn’t a big room—maybe twenty chairs—and it was going to be harder to blend in if we ended up with only a lecturer, my team, and three or four SSD operatives. Kim refused to cancel the operation. He said I was afflicted with a fear of shadows, that it was a result of my living too long in a warped environment. That left us at the mercy of SSD. In the best case, SSD might send only one person, but I had a feeling there would be what we always called belts of security—the key agents, then a team watching them, then a team watching them. The Ministry never worked that way, but SSD was in the business of shooting ghosts, or at least tracking them. They needed a lot of people to do that.
I had assumed the room would also have a few students, several academics, a couple of bureaucrats desperately trying to learn new vocabulary that would help them keep their jobs, and the inevitable party types taking notes on what was said and who was there. It was beginning to look like my assumptions were wrong. At 1:10 there was no lecturer and still no one else in the hall. The short man leaned over to me.
“Maybe we’re in the wrong room.”
“You have inside information?” I said. “Maybe you know something the rest of us don’t?”
He sat back and let a faint frown settle around his mouth. The man from SSD had closed his eyes and was resting comfortably. The third man, the one who didn’t say much, was looking at his hands.
The room was still empty at 1:20 when the door opened. “The lecture has been canceled for unavoidable reasons.” A young woman walked to the front of the room. “We have another group coming in at one thirty, so you’ll have to leave.”
“When was it canceled?” I looked at the man from SSD.
The short man was on his feet. “And why didn’t someone bother to come in and tell us before? We’ve been sitting here waiting. Do you think that’s all we have to do?”
“I don’t know what all you have to do. I do know you’ll have to get out of this room.”
“Is it OK if he stays through the next meeting?” I pointed at the man from SSD.
“And why would it be OK if he stayed?” she asked.
“Because he’s dead.”
6
“Who knew?” I was sitting in a chair—not the green one, which had been moved to the other side of the room—in front of Kim’s desk while he chewed on pencils. “You could certainly argue that it was a day bad for somebody’s health.”
“I don’t think he just keeled over.”
“He didn’t keel over. He didn’t even slump. He was sitting up.”
“How did they do it?”
“How did who do what? I don’t have any idea what happened to him. All I know is that he sat down at one o’clock and by one twenty he wasn’t going anywhere.”
“They must have killed him.” Kim looked worried. “Why would they do that? He must have known something that he wasn’t supposed to know. Either that or he had plans to jump ship and they needed to stop him.”
“I doubt either one of those. I also doubt that SSD killed him. They don’t do that to their own people. It’s very bad for morale.”
“Maybe you were wrong. Maybe he wasn’t one of theirs.”
“Then whose was he?”
“I don’t know. It was in his file, but the file is gone.”
“Gone. Mislaid, I suppose.”
“Files do disappear sometimes, Inspector. This is a secure facility. I don’t think anyone here made off with it.” Kim was looking more worried by the second. The more he said out loud all of the reasons everything was all right, the more he realized that things were starting to go bad. “We’ll hav
e to do an autopsy. That will tell us the cause of death. The police can take it from there.”
“The police? You really don’t understand this place yet, do you? The police won’t have anything to do with a dead SSD agent.”
“They won’t? Then who will investigate?”
“That’s a good question, Major. If he died of a heart attack, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief, because a big red check can go in the box on the file that says: ‘No Further Investigation Necessary.’ If his heart stopped for unexplained reasons, no one will answer the phone when you call.”
“What do we do? Forget it happened?”
“No, you keep it in mind at all times.”
“Was it a threat?”
“Against you? Not likely. They’re not going to threaten you. They aren’t sure who is going to come out on top. What if you emerge as top dog? They don’t want to be on your bad side.”
“They want to be on my good side. Then why murder that agent?”
“Fair enough: Why murder that agent? It could be they need you to keep some distance. Remember I told you to call off the operation? Actually, I don’t think they meant to kill their man to make that point. I think they meant to kill someone else.”
“You?”
“Could be. The question is, why?”
“Don’t they realize that killing you wouldn’t have mattered to me?”
“That helps.”
“They must think you’re working for me.”
“Or something.” It could be that. More likely, they got wind of my meeting with Kang in Prague.
7
Finally, I decided to ask the major. The man in the lobby, the one who stared at nothing but always seemed to watch as I walked in and out of the hotel, was there every day. The clerk said he’d been away for a weekend while I was traveling, but he was back on his chair the day before I returned. Who was he?
“Him?” Kim was glancing over a report. He made a notation in the margin, put a big star next to one passage, and turned the page over. “We don’t know who he is. Your people say they’ve never heard of him and have no records. Should I believe them?”
“My people? You mean the Ministry? They might not have any records, but someone sure as hell knows who he is. Anonymity is not a hallmark of what we have built here all of these years, believe me. Why not bring him in?”
“You worried? You want a personal bodyguard? The man is just staring, Inspector.”
“I was only letting you know, that’s all. If he’s one of yours, call him off, would you? It’s unnerving.”
“I told you, he’s not one of mine. Maybe he belongs to Zhao. His people don’t have much going on in their heads, so they tend to stare. That’s not your biggest problem right now.”
“I take it that means you can’t bring him in. I thought you were in charge.”
“In charge? What an idea! I’m hanging on for dear life, Inspector. An admission of weakness that I probably shouldn’t make to you, but you might as well know where things stand. There is no cooperation, only a sullen quiet when I walk into the room. What do you think is going on? You seemed to understand the situation with SSD. What else can you tell me?”
“How would I know?”
“How would you know, that’s exactly my question. Incidentally, I was told this morning that we lost track of you in Macau for several days. Why?”
“If you thought I was going to let that madman Zhao follow me around, you’re crazy. If you could keep tabs on me, so could he. I took some precautions. Nothing elaborate.”
Kim was suddenly alert. “What makes you think Zhao was in Macau?”
“Nothing. I just wasn’t taking any chances. I told you, I took some precautions, that’s all.”
“Like taking an airplane out of Macau?”
“I certainly wasn’t going to buy a train ticket to Beijing.”
“The idea is starting to bounce around, Inspector, that you aren’t on our side, that you are on the wrong side, in fact. That’s not good.” Kim walked over to a large cabinet and turned a switch on the side. “You’re not bothered by white noise, I trust. Now no one will hear our conversation. I hope you don’t have a transmitter in your shoe or anything.”
“I did, but it gave me bunions, so I threw it away.”
“Here’s your dilemma. You don’t mind if I speak frankly?”
“I wish you would.”
“This place,” he looked around the room, but it was clear he meant the gesture to be interpreted more broadly, “is gone. Frankly, all that holds it up is the fear in my capital that a collapse will be disastrous for us. Believe me, people are shaking in their Guccis.”
“I think you’re wrong. A bigger real dilemma is that if you move too soon, or the wrong way, the Chinese won’t sit still.”
“Thank you for your advice, Inspector, but I read the same file you did. We’re handling the Chinese, and we don’t have any new openings for policy advisors. I’ll tell you if we do.”
“Money, that’s your problem. It makes your world go round. You’re afraid of making history for fear of losing money. Here, we rely on power. So why would people with power in this city agree to fall into your lap? Purely for money? I find that hard to believe. This group has no desire to spend the rest of its days on the Riviera.”
“Not money, Inspector, loss of nerve. It happens—not often, but it happens. That’s all it takes. Someone wakes up one morning, looks in the mirror, and can’t see anything familiar. It’s contagious. The result is extreme loss of self-confidence on a grand scale. I think it might be connected with the same gene that causes animals to stampede.”
“No, that gene doesn’t exist here. Maybe somewhere else. India, for example. Not here.”
“You don’t think so? You don’t think the whole structure could crack, from basement to penthouse? The whole rotten lie? It was a lie, O; you know that. You always knew that.”
“You’re going to find this hard to understand, Kim, but it wasn’t a lie. That word can’t cover how tens of millions of people lived their lives for nearly seventy years. We had something to believe in, a way to order existence. Maybe people didn’t have much, most of them had very little, but for practically all of those years they felt they belonged to something. Not so long ago, we used to be friendly to each other; young people stood up and gave their seats to the elderly. There was a simplicity in who we thought we were. We even had hope for the future.”
“That’s what innocence is, Inspector, hope.”
“You southerners lost it along the way, and now we have, too.”
Kim looked about to say something but changed his mind. He gestured for me to continue.
“You think your skirts are clean, rid of the camps you used to have. But I notice you’re not rushing to close the ones up here. Too complicated, you think. You’d rather draw up a list of particulars, crimes against humanity after the fact. Maybe you already have. Maybe that’s one of the lists on your desk.”
“And you, Inspector? How did you fit into this idyllic society?”
“I lived according to the prevailing myth, that’s all. Everyone lives by myths. Prettied up, they’re called truths—basic truths, natural truths, self-evident truths.” None of this sociopolitical pabulum was worth a damn. All that mattered was that I was not going to give Kim the pleasure of seeing me admit that my entire existence had been wrong. Never in a thousand years, I thought to myself—not now, not ever—will you see me grovel. “What I knew or thought a year ago is beside the point. The problem is today. Even if the past was a lie, what am I supposed to replace it with? Another lie? All that’s necessary is to pull the old one out and put a new one in, like a circuit board? Your lies have more diodes. I suppose they work faster, more color and noise.”
“What you replace your empty past with, Inspector, is your business. I’m giving you something different. I’m giving you a choice. Think about it. You choose, and that becomes your fate. Whatever years you have left, it’s
all in your hands. Can you handle that? Can you make a decision on your own, without someone telling you which way to go?”
Kang had wanted me to choose. Now Kim wanted the same thing, only he couldn’t help being nasty about it. People who know the truth are that way. “And what if I don’t want to make a choice?”
“Dead. Very simply, dead. We’ll shoot you. In fact, I’ll do it myself. We’ll make it something dramatic, something that will send a message to the others. ‘What a waste,’ they’ll say as they cluck their tongues. ‘O had a choice to live, and he chose to die. Too bad.’ ”
“Maybe that will turn out to be your worst nightmare. What if I end up being a martyr?”
Kim’s smile told me the thought had already occurred to him. “You aren’t martyr material, Inspector. You have no cause; no one will rally around anything you have ever said, or been, or imagined. It will be as if you stepped off a cliff for no reason.”
“I could choose to go back to my mountain, fade away, not cause you any trouble. What’s wrong with that?”
“Not possible. We can’t have you on the fence. It would be a bad precedent, and we’re dealing with a period right now when setting precedent takes priority over normal considerations of right and wrong. I may not accomplish much in the next couple of months, but one thing I will get done and that is to establish precedents.”
“So you’d rather eliminate me. Nothing personal, simply setting precedent.”
“Look, O, here’s a list.” He pulled a paper from the folder. “See the names with the check marks next to them? They’re with us.”
“The familiar name list. I’m not on it, I hope. It seems an unstable place to be. You keep fiddling with the order. These are the ones you’re propping up, I assume.” I glanced at the list. Nobody I’d want to have drinks with. “You don’t pick your friends all that carefully as far as I can see.”
“I’m not picking them; they’re picking me. They come knocking on the door in the dead of night, promising to deliver whole sections of the country, army units, security files, whatever I want.”
“They have probably done the same with the Chinese.” Most of the names were of people used to landing on their feet.