Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare

by James Church

  “Don’t paw at me, Major.” I shook off his hand. “It dilutes your authority. And it makes me stubborn.”

  Kim straightened the sleeve of my jacket and brushed it clean with elaborate care. “There, all better?” He took a step back. “There’s only one reason I got you down from your mountaintop, O. Don’t make me sorry I did it.” His car pulled up. “I’d offer you a lift, but I know you have your own transport and things to do.” Right before he closed the door, he leaned toward me. “Fix it,” he said.

  The man in the hat looked up and watched as the car drove away.

  Chapter Three

  As far as I was concerned, things had taken the turn on which all cases ultimately hinged. This was the “good things come to those who wait” approach to investigations. It was rarely favored by chief inspectors, but I had never wavered in my devotion to the creed. Wait long enough and something would turn up.

  Luís, apparently, had that “something.” He had something he wanted to tell me, and it must be important, because someone didn’t want me to hear it. Kim was at me again to fix the case, or he kept saying that’s what he wanted. He’d left it hanging long enough after my return to half-convince me that Kang had been telling the truth. Maybe Kim didn’t want it fixed.

  Meanwhile, SSD was still fooling around outside of Kim’s authority. At this point, though, no more dead SSD operatives had turned up. Explaining the mistake that permanently turned off the lights of their operative in the lecture hall must have required a lot of fast thinking. Three police had been murdered in Chagang, in a tiny village where no one ever did anything before but nod and look the other way when officials from Pyongyang appeared. There were whispered rumors of incidents in other locations in the mountains on the east coast, but the facts were being tightly held.

  I decided to drive around the city, over one of the bridges, and find the apartment house in my old neighborhood where I’d lived years ago. I turned down the street where I thought it should be, but most of one block of apartments had been leveled, and the road had been widened. There was new construction going up, nothing like what existed in the western part of the city. These were plain boxes with big painted numbers on their sides. One of them looked finished; the others still had cranes at the top. The street ended abruptly with a barrier. A traffic cop lounged against it. He held up his hand and frowned.

  “You don’t read so good? The sign back there said: ‘No Traffic.’ ” He stuck his head into my car and checked the front seat. “That means you. Or do you drive wherever you want?”

  A big black Mercedes nosed around the corner and blocked my way out. No one had been following me. I had no idea where this car came from. “What about him?” I said. The traffic cop pulled his head out and walked back. In the mirror, I saw a hand reach out from the front seat and give him an envelope. He put it in his big white hat and shuffled back to his resting place. A few seconds later, the car’s back door opened. Zhao climbed out. There wasn’t anywhere to go, so I turned off the engine, put my hands on the wheel and waited.

  “I see we are both interested in the future, Inspector.” Zhao stood a few feet away and looked up at the construction cranes. “These are ugly buildings, wouldn’t you say? Pretty soon the whole city will look like this. Row after row of these boxes, just like in Beijing. It almost makes me pine for the Grand Lisboa.”

  “I warned you, Zhao, after what you did to my house.”

  “So you did. Why don’t we take care of that later? Just stay in your car, both hands on the steering wheel, and pay attention. Right now, we have something else to discuss.”

  “Like what?”

  “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” He indicated the traffic cop should move farther away. “I have a note for you from Luís.”

  “You?”

  “Luís and I have a long history, Inspector. I can’t get rid of him, he can’t get rid of me, and so we agreed to coexist. Nothing formal. It was only going to be temporary, but that was more than twenty years ago.” Zhao handed me a folded piece of paper. “It was hard for him to write, but he wanted to make sure you got this.”

  I took the paper and put it beside me on the seat.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  “What happened to him, Zhao? Same thing you did to Li?”

  “No, I told you. Luís and I have an understanding. In fact, we found we became extremely useful to one another after a while. He is the last person on earth I would want to harm.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t try to sound sensitive. It would make a cat laugh.”

  Zhao looked at me, then at the apartments again, and then at the ground. “Read the note, Inspector. Then get rid of it. If Luís wants to set up another meeting, he’ll let you know. Lulu will call in an emergency. Meanwhile, drive carefully.” The door slammed; the black car backed up at high speed. Barely slowing, it spun around and disappeared down the road. As I turned the key in the ignition, the traffic cop appeared again. He was counting a small wad of bills and listening to the earpiece of his radio.

  “The bastard never pays what he says he’ll pay, Inspector. Can’t we arrest someone like that?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Well, think about it while driving. I just got a report that another car is headed in this direction, fast. You can turn into a dirt alley past that finished apartment building, go out the back way, and get on a road that will take you toward the river. Get moving.”

  “You’re a funny guy.” I put the car in reverse.

  He shrugged. “I’ll sell you to the highest bidder if I have to.”

  The worst of it was, I believed him.

  2

  The note Zhao handed me consisted of only one word: “Fotos.” I read it several times when I got back to my hotel room. It might not really be from Luís, but something told me it was: intuition, I don’t know what to call it. After a while, you decide you can’t question everything all the time. I held the note up to the light, steamed it with steam from the shower, rubbed it with urine to make sure there wasn’t something else on it. Nothing. I turned out the lights in the bathroom, filled the sink with water and soaked the paper before tearing it into tiny pieces, rolled them into a ball, soaked it again, then tore it into more pieces before swallowing half of them and flushing the other half down the toilet. It was a lot of work for one word, but I didn’t have anything else to do, other than wonder what Luís meant.

  Even though I had decided the note was from Luís, I went over again in my mind whether it was worth trusting Zhao. Intuition is good, but checking the doors and windows one more time never hurts. Obviously, it was crazy to trust Zhao. You might as well trust a python with your pet rabbit. But I wondered anyway. So what if he knew Lulu? I answered my own question: If he knew Lulu, he knew Luís. I was back to intuition.

  So, where was Luís? The story line was simple. He wanted to see me with some information, but he didn’t make it to Pyongyang. Somehow, he got a message to Zhao, and Zhao got the message to me. No, that wasn’t the story line; this was: Luís had discovered that the open-and-shut case was more complicated. “Fotos.” Photographs could make things very complicated. People saw what they thought they saw, not what was there. Worse, photographs could be doctored. Videotapes could be altered. Anything digital could be made to appear the opposite of what it was. An entire section in SSD did that full-time. Maybe I should go see someone in SSD. Someone thin, maybe.

  3

  “What makes you think I work for SSD? If I worked for SSD, would I work for Kim? Answer me that. Anyway, you and me have a score to settle. You disappeared, and Kim kicked my ass all the way down the hall. Something happened to that transmitter on your car. I knew you’d screw with it. You screwed with it, didn’t you?”

  “Me? Do I look like a mechanic?”

  “Don’t disappear again; I’m warning you, O. Stay close. If I spit, I want it to land on your shirt.”

  “Yeah, make your life easy. You really are from S
SD, aren’t you?”

  The thin man grinned, the first time I’d seen him do that. “It’s all about survival in these troubled times,” he said. “And my money is on survival. Angles, everyone is playing the angles.”

  “No, not everyone. Some people are playing for keeps.”

  Early in the morning, before the mist lifted, we stood on the bank of the river, beneath a row of willow trees. One or two trailed their branches into the water, but the rest stood back. Willows look loose and sleepy; they aren’t. “Don’t let them fool you for a second.” My grandfather would point to the willows when we went to the river to fish. “They’re wide-awake and a step ahead,” he’d say. “Nothing much gets past them.”

  The thin man picked up a rock and threw it into the water. It disappeared without a sound. “What about you, Inspector? What angles are you playing?” When he had anything to do with stone, he tended not to stare. Rock beats fog, I thought, that sort of thing.

  “None. I’m done with playing angles.”

  “That’s what you say. I hear different. I hear you’re in the middle of it.”

  “Really? In the middle? Then I guess that’s where you are, too. Right in the bull’s-eye.”

  “What does that mean?” The thin man looked both ways, up and down the riverbank.

  “You heard about Major Kim’s deputy, I suppose.”

  “Maybe.” He gave me a Baltic stare that would bring the city of Riga to its knees.

  “His name was Sim. He was a captain. Friend of yours?”

  The stare deepened. Latvia fell; Lithuania was next. I avoided meeting his eyes. “The captain was standing about as far from me as you are right now.”

  That did it. The stare dissipated. The thin man slid a few steps away. “So what? He was playing both sides.”

  “So, you knew him. And you know what he was doing. It sounds like angles to me.”

  “You want something, right? I can always tell.”

  “Of course, that’s why I’m so sure you’re in SSD. It’s hard to fool your type. How long have you been working there?”

  “Long time, too long, I’m thinking. Listen, if you get the idea you’re leading me, forget it. I do interrogations, too, you know. I know how this works.”

  “Sure, you do. Probably good at it, am I right?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I had my entrée to SSD, and if I had to pay him one more compliment I was going to throw up. “It’s good for the circulation to get out in the fresh air like this, but I’ve got to hurry over to see Major Kim. I’ll pull out first, but I’ll drive so you can catch up. Spit whenever you feel like it.”

  “Thanks for nothing.” He stripped a few leaves off one of the branches and put them in his mouth. “Sort of medicinal, you know? Good for headaches, that’s what they say.” He spit out the leaves. “Tastes like crap. Don’t forget, keep close.”

  “Don’t forget.” I said it softly enough to make him slow down to catch my voice as he walked to his car. “Don’t forget who’s in the bull’s-eye.”

  4

  I kept my speed down. The thin man trailed by about thirty meters, which meant every time I went through an intersection I had to make sure he didn’t get stuck on the other side. I pulled over once or twice to let him catch up and then decided to hell with it. He knew where I was going.

  There was a line at the tunnel. The guard was looking closely at everyone’s ID. Normally, the numbers on the plates would be enough, but not today. When I pulled up, the guard walked around the car. “You ought to get this thing cleaned, don’t you think?” He wrote down the license number. “Or maybe you should junk it. Pull around the side, behind one of the tanks, will you? We don’t want to drag down the tone of today’s meeting.”

  “What meeting?”

  The guard stepped back onto his platform. “Well, well, guess who wasn’t invited. Move it; there’s a line of cars behind you.”

  When I started down the hallway to Kim’s office, a burly figure stepped in front of me. “Wait in the waiting room. That’s what it’s for.”

  “I need to talk to Major Kim.”

  “Good for you.” He gave me a little push. “In the waiting room. We’ll call you. Take a number or something.”

  Two men, well dressed but with worried faces, hurried past us and disappeared into Kim’s office. “What if I told you I was with them?”

  “Last time.” He drew himself up to his full height. “The waiting room. Shut the door behind you; it’ll be nice and cozy.”

  An hour later, the door opened and the burly man pointed a finger at me. “The major wants you in his office.”

  “The other meeting is over?”

  “Let’s not have a long conversation, all right? Major Kim says you’re to get into his office. Do it.”

  I stood up and stretched. “How come everyone is giving orders all of a sudden? It’s like all the imperatives are falling out of the bag at one time. You know, if you use them all up, there won’t be any more to go around.”

  The burly man scowled. “You want me to tell you where I’m about to put an imperative?”

  “Not necessary.” I walked into the hall. “Leave it to my imagination.”

  The furniture in Kim’s office had been shifted around so that there was room for ten or fifteen people to sit in a semicircle. They all looked at me when I walked in. I didn’t recognize any of them. From the look of their shoes, it was a good bet that they were Kim’s people.

  “Good morning, Inspector.” Kim was standing near the window at the back of the room. He pointed to the chair next to his desk, the brown one, and indicated I should sit down. “This is Inspector O, gentlemen. I’ve been telling you about him and about how busy he is. Fortunately, he can join us for a few minutes, is that right, Inspector?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m at your disposal.”

  “That’s good, because we have some questions, and then we’ll need your thoughts on a few ideas we’ve been discussing.”

  This struck me as a bad idea. I had nothing to say to this group. And they couldn’t possibly have anything in their heads that I wanted to hear.

  “These gentlemen are all aware of the case we’ve tried to resolve. You want to tell them your progress to date?”

  A little clarity edged into my brain. This wasn’t a group of Kim’s subordinates. These were senior people, and they were nervous. Kim hadn’t accomplished what he was supposed to accomplish, and they wanted to know why. Maybe this was connected with why Luís wanted to see me, to warn me.

  “Progress has been slow because of the need for coordination between police forces with somewhat different procedures.” A few heads nodded, but mostly I got blank stares, blank bordering on hostile. “Procedural delays are the price of doing business globally, as you know.” Apparently, they did not know and, judging from their expressions, they did not care. What they wanted was some signs of progress because—it didn’t take a genius to figure out—the case Major Kim told me to fix was very important to them. Very important. It was so important that this group had traveled all the way to Pyongyang to find out what was holding things up. If these were Kim’s superiors, they must be under a lot of pressure. Good, now we understood where we all stood.

  “Inspector?” A man in a blue suit stood up. He had a self-satisfied air about him, which instantly put my teeth on edge. “That is your title, isn’t it? What do you inspect?” The others smiled. “Because if you can’t do this job for us, we’ll get someone who can. We’re not going to carry you people on our backs, you know.”

  I looked at Kim, but he cut in before I could say anything. “This is a complicated situation, Inspector.” His eyes pleaded with me not to articulate what he knew I was about to articulate. “Perhaps you could mention something about your trip to Macau and your discussions there. That would give the group some context.”

  The man in the blue suit was still standing. “I’ll be succinct,” I said, “because I know you all must be very busy.” That seemed sufficient
abasement on my part, because the man sat down and the others shifted happily in their chairs. “The Macau trip went very well. The authorities were completely cooperative. All records and files were opened for my inspection. We believe that the work can be wrapped up in a week or so, at most. We did encounter some procedural delays, which I noted to you, but those are behind us. I’m only waiting for a final report and for the inter-governmental agreement to be signed in order to wrap things up.”

  There was the deadly silence that comes when self-important people are at a sudden loss for words. Finally, a man sitting on the edge of his chair spoke up. “Did you just say something about an inter-governmental agreement?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course, you knew that my government has no agreement covering the transfer between police authorities of information pertaining to political, economic, or capital crimes. Simply a formality, naturally.”

  A wave of relief made its way around the semicircle.

  “Once the papers are submitted for the agreement,” I waved airily, “it only takes around eight months, a year at most, for the legal documents to be drawn up, signed, and ratified.”

  A deep silence ensued, very deep, deep enough to swallow a lot of careers.

  “Well,” I said. “I hope that answers all your questions.” A couple of men looked up numbly, as if trying to remember how to swim.

  5

  “I should skin you alive for what you did this morning.” Kim slammed his door so hard a map fell off the wall. “What treaty? You never mentioned a treaty to me.”

  “That’s because I didn’t know about it before. We have treaties with everyone, all sorts of treaties. The Foreign Ministry has a bureau that does nothing but treaties. When Macau became part of China, we had to redo all of our liaison agreements. You’re going to have to deal with them, replace them, renegotiate them, or something. You can’t just trash them.”