by James Church
“This armrest is driving me crazy. These chairs were made in China; I can tell. They think they can run this country? Don’t make me laugh.”
“Relax, Inspector; don’t get excited. You might disappear again otherwise.”
“You disappeared, Kang, and not for a couple of minutes. Why did you come back? Why do you care what goes on here? Don’t tell me you’re suddenly a patriot. You’re not a believer. And you’re not here on your own; that’s what I think. Who is paying you?”
“I didn’t leave because I wanted to, you may recall. It wasn’t my choice to stay away so long.”
“It never struck me that you were someone who was too particular about borders, or about your paymaster. Major Kim told me—”
Kang looked away. “Nothing Kim says matters.” He said this softly, like he had turned out the lights in a room he never wanted to see again.
“You know him pretty well, I take it.”
I waited, but nothing came back. The question simply dissolved in the space between us. “Let me guess. You had a joint operation, but it didn’t go well. And now you’re working against him.”
“I’ll say this only once. Never believe anything he tells you. Nothing. Ever.”
“My grandfather was suspicious of oak trees. He said that they were too complex to be trusted.” I thought about it. “And me? You believe anything I say? I’m not all that complex, really. You’ve been watching me; you should know that much.”
“For the moment, I believe whatever it is that keeps me alive. That should be your credo, too.”
“I don’t need it. I’ll find something else. Maybe something halfway in between.”
“A piece of advice, Inspector—stay out of the middle. In times like this, it is the middle that gets crushed. When this is finally over, the countryside will be littered with the corpses of people who chose too late.”
“You’re about to give me a choice, is that it? Don’t bother. I don’t join and I don’t jump. I don’t know if that’s my fate or my upbringing. If you have doubts about me, don’t. I’m not with Kim, and I’m not scared of him.”
“Here.” Kang handed me a napkin to put against the cut. “Take this in case you finally decide it’s worth getting out of the middle.” He stood up to go. “No sense bleeding to death right now.”
5
“Let’s suppose the Chinese moved in. Would that be so bad? It wouldn’t be the end of the world. You don’t want the Chinese here in large numbers, of course, or with their ponderous influence.”
“I don’t want them in any numbers, and neither do you.” Kang had helped me back to my hotel room. He was leaning against pressed wood.
“You also don’t want the South to take over.”
“Why should we? We’ll be treated like dirt for a generation. Look how long it took them to stop sneering at Cholla people.”
“Then what’s left?”
“We’ve been on our own for a long time. We can do better. We’re not completely stupid after all these years.” Kang had started down one road of thought, but I could see he changed his mind at the last minute. “You realize, Inspector, that this can’t have a happy ending. There is no clean solution. It’s over the edge of the cliff already.”
“Pity.” He must know about Li.
“I mean, especially for you. It can only end badly.”
“Compared to what?” I said. “If you’re trying to scare me into jumping in line behind you, forget it. I told you: I don’t jump; I don’t join. That’s probably why I survived on the mountain. The more I think about it, the more I realize I was lucky to be there.”
“The problem is, you might not be lucky forever. Life is a series of remembered tasks. What if you forget to inhale one day?”
“Don’t worry; I plan it out every morning when I wake up. So many breaths. So many heartbeats. So many trips to the bathroom. It’s too hard to dole out laughter daily, so I put it on a monthly ration. By the end of the month, people find me dour.”
Kang had a pistol in his belt. He put it on the desk. “What about surprise? What’s the quota for fear this month? Pain?”
“Overfulfilled. I’ve already borrowed against next month. I told you, if you’re trying to scare me, forget it.”
Kang moved to the window and looked outside. “This hotel. You like it?”
“It’s all right. You said so yourself.”
“I’d say you might want to consider moving to a new room. Even better, move out altogether; find a quieter place, something with a better character, maybe. It’s up to you, but that’s what I say.” He looked at the pistol, then at me. “You have something to protect yourself with in these troubled times?”
“My aura of invincibility.”
“Useful, but carry this when you go out from now on.” He took an extra clip out of his pocket. “If you use these up and need more, it means you’re out of luck, so don’t bother looking around for the exit door. Keep one for yourself. I’ll be in touch.” He stepped into the hall and, from the sound of another door slamming shut, took the stairs.
I didn’t have a suitcase, but I also didn’t have much in the way of clothes, so I put everything in the laundry bag. There was no sense checking out, since Kim, or at least his accounting department, was paying the bill. Downstairs, the bird clerk looked up as I walked by.
“It’s no problem for us to do the laundry,” she said. “Just dial six.”
“I thought six was room service.”
She held up one finger.
“Never mind. I prefer to do the laundry myself. Go down to the river and beat it on the rocks, that’s how we washed our things in the old days.”
“There are no rocks.”
“No? That’s progress. Every damn river in the country is filled with rocks except this one.” I smiled at her. She wasn’t bad looking when you saw her in the afternoon light. “Say, don’t I know you from up in Rajin? Didn’t you used to sing at the casino?”
“Me? I’ve never been up there.” She seemed pleased.
I hoisted the bag over my shoulder. “I’ve always done my own laundry.”
“You kidding me?”
“Sure, it’s how we did things. My grandfather, who you probably never heard of, said he hadn’t spent all that time in the forest fighting Japs just to make sure someone else would wash his shorts.”
“He said that? What about your mother?”
“She died in the war.”
“Oh.” The clerk looked serious. “You shouldn’t call them Japs.”
“Pardon me?”
“Japs. You shouldn’t say that. We get Japanese tourists these days, older ones, not many, but more and more. They like to come and look around at places they used to live, where they went to school, that sort of thing. We’re not supposed to offend them.”
A car, two cars roared into the parking lot. A lot of doors slammed all at once.
“You’d better get back here.” The clerk opened a door behind the counter. I moved quickly to see what she meant. There was a small space and what looked like a passageway, though it was too dark to see where it led. “Do it!” she hissed. “Now!”
I disappeared inside, and the door shut behind me.
“You can’t go up there,” I heard the clerk say.
“The hell we can’t.” A clatter of footsteps up the stairs. A few minutes later, footsteps coming down, not nearly as fast. “Where is he?” It was Major Kim’s voice. He was out of breath.
“I don’t know. He left a few minutes ago.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Out.”
“What out? Where did he go?”
“How should I know? You don’t pay us to put tracking devices in their undershirts.”
There was a slap and a yelp. “You were supposed to keep him here.”
“Yeah.” This time it was the thin man. “You were supposed to keep him here.”
“He didn’t take well to stalling tactics, all right? He left. He said he wa
s going to do his laundry down by the riverside. That’s what I know. You hit me again and I’ll report you.”
Another slap, another yelp. From the sound of his voice, Kim had moved around the counter and was standing right outside the little door. “You people had better get it straight who’s in charge from now on. What happened to these TV monitors? You’re supposed to be taping everyone who comes in here.”
“They’re not on.”
“I can see that. When did they go off?”
“Yesterday, day before, who knows? I’m not a technician. We put in a request for maintenance, but they’re sealed, so someone special has to open them. He hasn’t shown up. Hey! Let go of me.”
“You screw with me once more, you’ll end up in a camp, you understand? And they aren’t nice, those guards. Get these monitors fixed. Everything else better be working, too. I’ll be back to check. And you,” I was guessing he had pointed a finger at the thin man, “you go down to the river and pick him up. If he gets out of your sight again, you’re going to be trading recipes with the crabs at the bottom of the West Sea.”
The car engines started up, and tires screamed out of the parking lot. A minute later, the clerk opened the little door and looked in. “You heard that?”
I came out and straightened up. “I heard.”
“One of these days, I’m going to put a bullet in his skull.”
“Good for you. Since when are we friends?”
“Beats me. I only do what I’m told.”
“By whom?”
“Someone better than him.” She rubbed her cheek.
“If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the handy little closet under there?”
“It leads into the main monitoring panels for the audio and video surveillance in all the room—phones, lamps, phony sprinkler heads.”
“TVs in the bathroom,” I said.
She shrugged. “Most of the time, whole floors in a hotel are devoted to monitors and transcribers and so forth, but these owners didn’t want to sacrifice profits. They must have had a lot of clout, because Security ended up with everything crammed into a room at the end of that tunnel.”
“Thanks.”
“You need another place to stay. Don’t leave me a forwarding address; I don’t want to know. If I were you, I wouldn’t leave by the front door.”
“Where?”
“There’s a back exit.” She fiddled with a dial on one of the monitors and a picture appeared. “Nobody around. They’d be in plain sight if they were back there.”
“I thought the monitors weren’t working.”
She twirled the dial again and the picture disappeared. “They’re not.”
6
The back door of the hotel opened onto a narrow street that snaked past a school and a collection of buildings that were under major repair. I wanted to get to the SSD offices, not the headquarters but a nondescript compound behind a sagging brick wall where the technical offices were located. Security was not as tight there as it was at the main building. I knew that because when I was still working at the Ministry I occasionally had gone to the compound on business. Assuming the compound was still there. Assuming the procedures hadn’t changed in five years. One thing, I knew, was working in my favor—bureaucratic time. Mountains might crumble, but regulations were for the ages. Five years was nothing for a bureaucracy. It wasn’t even worth opening a file.
As I emerged onto a main street, I heard a car slam on its brakes and watched in amazement as a blue Nissan with right-hand drive shot across six lanes up onto the sidewalk in front of me.
“Get in.” It was the thin man, and he was breathing heavily. “We thought you were at the river doing laundry.”
“I was, but I had to go back for some bleach. You don’t mind giving me a lift? Where’d you get this car?”
“We had a deal. You broke it. I’m going to bust your legs so you can’t do that again.”
“No, you’re not. You’re going to take me to SSD Compound Three. They just phoned about some photographs. Step on it.”
7
The guard at the front gate held up his hand and frowned.
“I told you we’d never get in. My plates are the wrong ones for this compound. Now I’ll have to argue with this moron.” The thin man started to open his door.
“Wait; don’t get out. Stay in the car. He’s not used to looking in a right-hand window at a driver. If you get out, you give the guard the advantage.”
“I do?”
“Make him come over here. Growl at him.” I gave it some thought. “Give him one of your stares.”
The guard frowned again and looked more closely at the license plate.
“Don’t worry,” I muttered between clenched teeth. “He’s getting nervous. He’ll come over to your side any minute and ask for ID. Tell him to get lost.”
“What? He’ll call in his commander, and they’ll take me away in chains.”
“They don’t have chains. All they have is those nose rings. Just say we need to see H4. See if that does any good.”
The thin man put his hand to his nose as the guard walked over.
“ID.” Every guard since time began sounded angry when he said that. It wasn’t anything personal.
I wasn’t too worried, but the thin man looked rattled. “I’m here with a headquarters visitor. He has official business with H4.”
The guard took a step back and saluted. “Next time, get a fucking blue pass for the windshield.”
I smiled as we drove in. “See, that wasn’t so difficult. Park over on the side. That’s where I used to put my car. Someone will come out of the building to complain, but if you lock the doors, there isn’t anything they can do. Move as if you’ve been here a hundred times before.”
“Say, you know your way around. I’m impressed.”
“Do whatever I tell you. Once we get into the photography section, you sit in the waiting room. They have collections of real good pictures, if you know what I mean.”
The offices of H4—“Silver Mountain Tractor Parts” as it was known to outsiders—were on the second floor. That was where SSD doctored photographs for use in operations. It was also where photographs were checked to make sure someone else hadn’t monkeyed with them. The people in H4 were very good at what they did. If they said they needed a new, state-of-the-art machine to keep up with the opposition, they got a new machine.
The door to the second floor from the stairway was locked. “This one is compliments of me,” the thin man said. He took out a leather pouch with several small tools in it, selected one, and opened the door. “We’re even.”
“Even,” I said. “There’s the waiting room. Go in there and look important. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
The third door down the hall was open. The desks hadn’t changed; nothing had changed, not even the rounded shoulders of the man sitting with his back to the door, peering through a microscope.
I knocked softly. “Can anyone come in?”
The man swiveled around in his chair. “Long time, Inspector.” He stood up. “Who let you through the front gate?”
“Nice way to greet an old friend. Have a minute?”
“Sure. That’s probably how long we’ll have before the guards come up and drag you away.”
“Not to worry. I’m here with someone from SSD headquarters.”
“That so? I suppose they’re in the toilet powdering their nose.”
“Actually, they’re in the waiting room.”
“You don’t mind if I look? The last time you and I did business, they lifted my file for investigation and my rations were suspended for two months because you weren’t properly escorted.” He walked down the hall. In a minute, he was back. “OK, your escort is swooning over the photographs. We can talk. What can I do for you?”
“A little background.”
“As in information? That I can’t do. Pictures we can discuss. Information is something else. You know that.”
“All r
ight, pictures. If I wanted to modify pictures from a hotel security camera, what would I have to do?”
“Depends on the camera. If it’s an old one that takes photos every few seconds, it doesn’t much matter. The photos are crap and the time between the frames makes it nearly impossible to get a believable continuity. We don’t touch them anymore. There are only a few hotels in the city that haven’t changed over to the new technology yet.”
“What about hotels overseas?”
“We don’t have access.”
“Nowhere?”
He scratched his head. “Mostly nowhere.”
“How about Macau?”
“MSS doesn’t like us fooling with their stuff.”
“But you do.”
“I don’t pay attention to what’s on the film or where it’s from. The job description comes in on the orders, I push a few buttons on the machine, zip, zap, a new reality is born.”
“If I was in a new five-star hotel in Macau and I wanted to evade the hallway security cameras, could I do it?”
“Sure. All you’d have to do is call the control room and tell them to turn off such and such a station.”
“But that would leave a gap, a blank spot. Everyone would know.”
“An empty inside corridor is an empty inside corridor. It looks the same all the time. No problem with changes in shadows. Once in a while a maid walks by. If you don’t really care, you just put in a stock scene. No one can tell with the new digital stuff. They say they can, but they can’t. If you are going up against someone who is more careful, double-checks the schedule of the help and that sort of thing, then you have to be more careful, too. That takes some coordination with the locals. But it can be done.”
“Zip. Zap. Coordination?”
“You know, a local service. Friends in the right places.”
“Gangsters?”
“You’re asking for information, O. No information about gangsters asking for film to be altered from Macau. I can’t share that sort of thing with someone like you, no matter how many times you ask. Nothing about suitcases, either. Now, get out of here, and take your friend with you. You’d better wipe his chin; I think he’s drooling all over his shirt.”