Blindfold Game

by Dana Stabenow

  “Perhaps,” Jones replied, but neither of them believed it. By the first anniversary of their father’s death his two sons would be dead or imprisoned in a land far away from this cemetery, and they both knew it. He turned. “Come. Uncle has a bed for us.”

  THERE WASN’T A BED but there was a roof. It was chilly because there was no heat, and dark because the local electric utility had run out of fuel and had no money to buy more, but cold water still ran from the one tap and their uncle had managed to beg, borrow, or steal a few ounces of real beef, which he offered boiled in grass soup. Afterward he served them a traditional Korean tea, pouring boiling water from a tin saucepan dented almost but not quite past the point of function into a heated clay teapot. He poured more boiling water over the outside of the teapot as the tea brewed. He poured out the first two brews in ceremonial fashion, and everyone pretended not to notice that there were no tea leaves in either.

  To the third brew he added the leaves, although so few the resulting liquid was still mostly water. It was hot, though, and warmed them as it went down. They drank it slowly, conversing in quiet tones, also from tradition but also because they didn’t want their uncle’s neighbors to learn that he had company and turn him in for harboring fugitives in exchange for a handful of rice.

  Uncle had shrunk in the two years since they had seen him last, a boy’s body with an old man’s face. His skin and hair was colorless from malnutrition, and the sore on his left nostril where the border guards had pierced a hole to string him to the other captured escapees had never completely healed. He wore tattered trousers beneath a patched and faded jacket. The rags wrapped neatly around his feet in lieu of shoes he had somehow managed to keep mostly clean.

  He spoke a few words, all his energy having gone into the welcome he had prepared for his nephews. He didn’t know how their father had died, but he praised the Morning Star for bringing him home and allowing him to be buried next to his wife, who had starved to death, his third son, a soldier who had been shot by his commanding officer when he refused to rob a peasant’s home to feed his troop, and his two daughters, who had died of exposure following their mother’s death.

  When the tea was done, the three of them curled into threadbare blankets on a thin cot placed as close to the tiny stove as possible without setting the cot on fire. The brothers lay on either side of their uncle, and it was probably his warmest night since his wife had been sent away to a camp for daring to cross into China and ask for rice, a capital offense against the North Korean ideology of Juche, or self-reliance.

  In a nation so self-absorbed that its modern history began in 1912, the year Kim II Sung was born, Juche was only one more example of political solipsism that, however much it defied reality, guided the lives of its citizens from cradle to increasingly early grave. It was why the uncle of Ja Yong-bae, alias Smith, and Ja Bae-ho, alias Jones, believed that Kim Jong II, known to his people by many names, including “the Morning Star,” had personally interceded to bring his brother’s body home.

  His sons had escaped this philosophical inculcation when their mother had shoved them across the Chinese border ahead of her, and had turned to offer the guards pursuing them the rings from her fingers and the bodies of her daughters in exchange for her sons’ freedom.

  THE BROTHERS SET OUT the next morning to walk from their uncle’s house to the nearest town, some twenty miles distant. From there they hitched a ride to Pyongyang. They contacted a local smuggler with whom they had had dealings in the past. He put them on a fishing boat that managed to slip past the defenses of two nations to put them ashore on a deserted stretch of coastline south of the DMZ. Under cover of night and a fortuitous fog they walked to Inchon and took a train to Seoul.

  They arrived at the Great East Gate Market by midnight. The streets were mobbed with Koreans selling everything from New England Patriots jerseys to knockoffs of Halston dresses and Levi’s jeans. Down an alley they found a merchant selling Brooks Brothers suits, or what looked very much like them. Smith exchanged a few words with the merchant, who barely paused to acknowledge them before jerking a thumb toward the back of his stall. There they found two stools and a camp stove, and there they sat for three days, waiting. The merchant sold his Brooks Brothers merchandise steadily but not spectacularly.

  At a little past 1:00 A.M. on the fourth day two tall young Russian women appeared, to greet the merchant with exuberant familiarity, to offer gifts of vodka and caviar, and to examine every single article of clothing he had in stock. Their Korean was competent if uninspired. A long, fierce negotiation followed that ended in the purchase of six men’s topcoats, a dozen women’s blazers, a dozen men’s sport jackets, and various amounts of skirts, shirts, sweaters, and vests for both sexes. After extracting a twenty percent discount for paying in cash, one of the women counted out a large wad of money into the merchant’s hand while the other muscled the clothing into an ungainly pile. Without looking up from the wad of currency the merchant snapped his fingers. Smith and Jones appeared with packs, to which the purchases were secured with rope. The women avoided looking at their faces and left soon after.

  The brothers hauled the packs back to the coast, where they met the same smuggler, whose boat took them back across the border. From the coast they wended a tedious route north, on foot and sticking to heavily traveled roads, losing themselves in as much of a crowd as North Korea was at present capable of mustering. They crossed into Russia at Khasan, where the two Russian women welcomed them at the border, and rode in the back of a very cold step van with the cargo all the way to Khabarovsk. From Khabarovsk they took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Komsomolsk, again riding in the freight car with the Russians’ payload. From Komsomolsk they were upgraded into a seat on the aging Tupolev into Moscow, where they took leave of the women, who paid them well and then tipped them, too, which made them both think they should have checked the pockets and the linings of the clothing to see what else they had been bringing into Mother Russia.

  In Moscow they took an even older Tupolev to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Their forged passports, visas, and work permits went unchallenged. They found menial jobs as sweepers and loaders on the docks and a one-room apartment with light but no heat.

  They settled in to wait, sinking with barely a trace into the general population, which unlike the citizenry of many Russian cities was fully occupied building ships for the Russian Pacific fleet, assembling Mig fighters for export, manning a steel mill to furnish material for the construction of both, and lading freight on and off the many ships coming into the port.

  Within days, the others began to trickle into town in ones and twos.

  Smith and Jones wielded shovels and picks and the occasional broom, and waited.

  JANUARY

  HONG KONG

  HUGH LEFT BALTIMORE ONE evening at 8:30 p.m. and arrived in Hong Kong the next day at 1:05 p.m. He didn’t sleep well on jets, spending most of his time holding them in the air by the armrests, and he was feeling distinctly travel worn when he came through customs.

  He was also weighed down by the possibility that he was going to be fired for any number of reasons, among them disobeying a direct order and misuse of public funds, but he shoved that into the back of his mind and pushed through the crowd to the curb. A taxi pulled up and Arlene’s voice said, “Get in.”

  He did and they pulled away with a lurch and a corresponding roar from a muffler that sounded as if it were hanging by a thread.

  “How was your flight?”

  “Give me a Super Cub anytime,” he said. “What have you got?”

  “No hello after I’ve spent two and a half months in the wilderness for you?”

  “Hong Kong isn’t exactly the wilderness, Arlene. Come on, give.”

  Arlene’s smile was small and satisfied. “I found him.”

  “You told me that six weeks ago. What else?”

  She pretended to pout. “I don’t get to brag?”

  “Later. Talk.”

  “I
had a couple of local contacts, and one of them knows someone in Chinese customs. Turns out they’ve been interested in Fang and Noort-man for some time. They’ve compiled quite the little dossier.”

  “You didn’t manage to score a look at it?”

  She smiled again.

  “God, I’m so smart,” Hugh said.

  “For what?”

  “For hiring you.”

  She laughed. “Naturally I agree.”

  “What was in the dossier?”

  “Our boy’s been busy.” She recounted half a dozen of Noortman and Fang’s jobs, including the most recent one. “They took a tramp freighter”-she closed her eyes for a moment-“the Orion’s Belt, carrying a load of Chilean lumber from Valparaiso to Mumbai. Near as our friends can figure, Noortman, uh, rerouted the cargo to Sumatra and sold it on the black market. The Indonesians are desperate for construction materials after the tsunami, and they don’t ask a lot of questions when a load of two-by-fours shows up at the dock.”

  “What did they do with the ship?”

  “Sold it to shipbreakers in Alang.” At his look she elaborated. “A beach on the west coast of India.” She shrugged. “An efficient means of disposing of the evidence. I was writing a story on Mumbai a couple of years ago and I took a trip out there. Hell of an operation. The beach is six miles long and on any given day there can be as many as two hundred ships being scrapped at once. The ship would have been gone in as little as six months. Maybe a year. Like I said, efficient.”

  Sara would have hated the very idea of an operation like Alang’s, Hugh thought. “Can our friends in Hong Kong prove any of this?”

  Arlene snorted. “It was a French-owned, Liberian-flagged freighter carrying a Chilean cargo bound for India, with Indian officers and a Filipino crew, taken by pirates of multiple Asian nations in international waters. No one country even has jurisdiction over the crime scene, never mind any evidence that would stand up in court.”

  “Yeah,” Hugh said. “So?”

  “So, I’ve been watching Mr. Noortman.”

  “Have you? Any company?”

  “Are our friends watching him, too, do you mean? They say not. I’d say yes, just not twenty-four seven. Noortman has done nothing to offend the local laws, which would be the smart thing to do if he wanted to stay here. Thou shalt not shit in thine own nest.”

  Hugh couldn’t argue with that. “Where are we going?”

  “To a restaurant with a conveniently placed front window. I’ve already reserved a table with a view of our boy’s office building.”

  “Marry me,” Hugh said.

  She grinned. “You’re too old for me.”

  “Noortman actually has a storefront?”

  “Oh yeah, Hong Kong Fast Freight, Ltd., is very much on the up-and-up, licensed, bonded, registered, incorporated, files quarterly tax returns, contributes to enough local charities in small enough amounts to stay low on the local social radar screen. All perfectly aboveboard and squeaky clean.” As an afterthought she said, “Of course, this is Hong Kong. Squeaky clean in Hong Kong isn’t squeaky clean in, say, Seattle. Or for that matter Beirut.”

  “I thought everything tightened up after the Chinese took over.”

  Arlene gave him a look. “It’s still Hong Kong.”

  Hugh, who wasn’t about to admit that he’d learned most of what he knew about Hong Kong from the www.discoverhongkong.com Web site while he was sitting in the Baltimore airport waiting for his flight to board and the rest from James Clavell during the flight, gave a noncommittal grunt.

  “You’ve been here before, right? So I don’t have to give you the tour?”

  Half a dozen times to change planes, and once to meet in the British Airways lounge with a snotty little shit of a case officer who had started their conversation with a recitation of his family tree, which appeared to reach all the way back to the Mayflower, and reached forward to several members of Congress, a cabinet-level post in the current administration, and a Supreme Court justice. It had ended with the snotty little shit of a case officer white-faced and trembling, mumbling out his report of the nascent Islamic terrorist cell in Egypt he had stumbled across in his posting to the American embassy in Cairo. The report had been unexpectedly useful, but Hugh, who saved the rough side of his tongue especially for arrogant little pricks just starting out in the agency, didn’t make the mistake of saying so. Said prick was now warming the most junior of junior charge d’affaires seats in the American embassy in Zaire (or the Democratic Republic of the Congo or whatever the hell they were calling themselves nowadays), which gave Hugh the warm fuzzies all over whenever he thought of it, which wasn’t often.

  “I’ve been here before,” Hugh said without elaboration. He was a desk man, not a field agent. He shook off his fatigue and watched the approaching skyline with interest. From a distance Hong Kong looked like a multitowered castle built on a tall green promontory, surrounded by the world’s largest moat. The water was crowded with craft of every kind and size, from homemade junks to boxy ferries to sleek cruise ships.

  As they entered the city proper, Hugh saw a lot of concrete, a lot of neon, and a shitload of people, many in cars. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper stop and go, and none of the drivers would have made it a hundred feet on an American street without being pulled over for felony tailgating. Everyone, pedestrian and driver alike, ignored the stoplights, and Hugh saw a black Mercedes roll through an intersection against a red and literally hit a woman in the crosswalk. The car was moving slowly enough that all it did was hoist her up on the hood. She slid down and yelled at the driver. The driver stuck his head out the window and yelled an uncomplimentary reply, and for a minute Hugh felt like he was in New York.

  “Here we are,” Arlene said, and leaned forward to tap the driver on the shoulder. They screeched to a halt, Arlene handed over an alarmingly thick wad of banknotes and they got out, elbowing for room on a street of storefronts thronged with people. “This way,” Arlene said, and led Hugh through a glass door into a tiny anteroom with a podium barricading the rest of the establishment from just anyone who might wander in off the street. Arlene smiled at the hostess, who didn’t smile back until the two hundred and fifty Hong Kong dollars Arlene tipped her disappeared down the front of her dress. She turned to lead them into the restaurant proper.

  Arlene noticed Hugh’s expression and said in a low voice, “Relax. It was only about thirty American, and that’s cheap for a sit-down restaurant in Hong Kong.”

  “It’s not that,” Hugh said, looking over her shoulder.

  “What is it, then?” Arlene followed his gaze, and her eyes widened. “Holy shit.”

  Noortman was sitting at the table in the window right next to the one the hostess was standing beside, menus in hand, watching them with an impatient look on her face.

  For a moment Hugh was transfixed, and then he recovered his wits. “Smile and talk to me,” he whispered to Arlene, and gave her a gentle shove forward.

  “What if he recognizes me from Pattaya Beach?” Arlene hissed.

  “He won’t, he was too focused on his next big score,” Hugh said, and prayed he was right.

  It was a safe bet, as today Arlene was dressed in a deep blue suit, cream-colored silk shirt, heels, and pearls, and her hair had been moussed and blow-dried into a smooth knot at the nape of her neck. She looked nothing like the zaftig tourist in the Bermuda shorts the previous October.

  Noortman, on the other hand, looked exactly as he had in the photographs Arlene took of him. His nose was aquiline but his eyes were Asian, and his teeth were square and white, with the exception of the gold-encased incisor that flashed when he smiled. His skin was sallow, his stylishly cut hair dark but not black. Like Arlene, he was dressed to suit his environment, in a charcoal striped suit with a dark red tie that matched the silk handkerchief peeping from his breast pocket. The watch on his wrist had the glint of Rolex gold. His shoes probably cost even more.

  He was drinking tea as he scrolled d
own the screen of a laptop. The server brought a tray just then and made a distressed sound. Noortman looked up and smiled. Hugh was in the middle of being seated but it looked like a perfectly ordinary smile, no fangs showing, although it was a smile that seemed familiar, crooking up at one side in what could almost have been called a sneer. Otherwise, Noortman looked like any other young and ambitious Hong Kong businessman.

  He became aware that Arlene was giving him a minatory look, and he realized their server had materialized. On impulse he told the server, “Tiger Beer.” He smiled across at Arlene, and said in a voice just above a whisper, “You didn’t think that because this restaurant was so close to his office that he never came in here? Even pirates have to eat.”

  Arlene hooked a thumb toward her sternum and mouthed words that Hugh couldn’t understand. He shook his head. Arlene leaned forward. He met her halfway. “What?” he said.

  “He’s gay, right?” Arlene whispered.

  “What? I don’t- That’s what it says in his files. So what?”

  “After I leave, pick him up.”

  “What?” Noortman looked up at Hugh’s unguarded exclamation and then went back to his braised abalone in oyster sauce.

  “Pick him up,” Arlene repeated. “You’re a hunk, he’s probably drooling into his plate over you right now.” She reached into her bag.

  He said the only thing he could. “I am not a hunk!”

  She rolled her eyes. “Right. Robert Redford has nothing to worry about.” She pulled her hand out of her bag.

  “Arlene, I-”

  “His apartment is close by his office. That’s probably where he’ll take you. I’ll follow.”

  “Arlene, we don’t even know if Noortman makes a habit out of picking up guys off the street, I can’t just-”