The Man with the Baltic Stare

by James Church

  We drank in silence and sat awhile in contemplation. With barely enough light to see your own glass in a bar, there isn’t much else to do. I was not inclined to say anything more. The man was baiting me. He was trying to ratchet up my interest. I took another sip of the large drink. It was gin, but I drank it anyway. The flame in the far globe flared enough so at last I could see the major’s face. He was staring at me, not in a friendly way, but at least it wasn’t a mean, practiced stare. I made a note to myself to start a file on stares. Laughter wasn’t of much use. All it did was point to more pain. A typology of stares might be more instructive. Something to do with the eyes, I guessed. Maybe we were seeing the impact of all the light flooding the city, light that, for some reason, couldn’t find its way into this bar.

  “Things will change,” Kim said at last.

  “They do, sometimes.”

  “From what I’ve seen, that hasn’t been the case here in the North for quite a while.”

  “Let’s leave that discussion for another time. Purely for the sake of argument, we’ll posit that things will change. And next you’re going to tell me, that means for the better.”

  “You’re doubtful?”

  “Oh, not at all.”

  “Then what?”

  “Loss, my dear major. Loss.”

  The light from the globe was giving out, but I could see that his face was appropriately puzzled.

  “Now, truly, I am disappointed,” I said. “In another minute you will tell me that we have nothing to lose but our chains. Yet freed we will become what?”

  He waved a hand in front of his face. “And you, you’re about to rattle on about the joys of the collective. Spare me, please, Inspector.”

  “Freed we will be what?” I asked again. This was something I’d thought about on the mountaintop, watching shadows climb out of the little valley and then fall back. “Smarter? Richer? And, in the end, why do you care what is best for us? Is it your business? Do you really care at all?”

  At this the major shook his head. “Apparently, not only is it my business; it is my unhappy fate. To make you happy, all right, I’ll admit it. No, I don’t care what happens to you, because of everything you and your friends have done-or allowed to be done-to this place for the past fifty years. You can all hang as far as I am concerned. I’d spring the trapdoor myself, but I have no choice in the matter. I am here to deliver you into freedom, and that is exactly what I am going to do.”

  “I know you were bound for Paris. A pity you didn’t go.”

  3

  “The game is over, Inspector. It comes down to that. All of the planning and plotting and maneuvering-all done. For some reason, your side has decided the best offense is to give up.” We were back in the major’s office. The night before in the bar, after I had finished my large drink, a man had appeared with a message in a locked black dispatch case. The major had read the message and left in a clatter. “We’ll continue this tomorrow morning, Inspector, in my office,” he said before disappearing.

  The driver was waiting in front of my hotel at 5:00 A.M. We were back to the ferret. He told me to get in the rear seat. “We aren’t pals,” he said. “I’m a driver; you’re the passenger. Keep it that way, OK?”

  When I walked into Kim’s office, breakfast was already on his desk. He handed me a bowl of soup. It was pumpkin, but I put it to one side.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. I’d mulled it over through the night and decided this would be my opening line. It wasn’t strictly true. I did believe him. What he’d said about surrender at the top was the only explanation possible. All that I lacked was evidence. Not counting Kim himself seated behind the big desk, the neon sign on my hotel, and the low-cut red dress, where was the evidence of such surrender, exactly? The woman with the baseball cap in the market was actually evidence to the contrary. She didn’t sound like someone who was giving up. Besides, from everything I’d seen, there was a lot that hadn’t changed. Buses continued not to run on time, in some cases not to run at all. People walked across the bridges as they always had. A few new buildings stood here and there, and yes, there were all of those extra streetlights, but did that really suggest anything as sweeping as Kim was laying out-wholesale surrender?

  “Fortunately for all of us,” Kim picked up his bowl to drain it, “the state of your belief is unimportant.”

  This, I could be sure, was untrue. I was of no utility to Kim and his people unless I bought into what he was telling me. He needed me for some reason; that much was clear. That, I knew in my bones, was my leverage. It was not the heavyweight crowbar I would have liked, but it was something. It was more than something; it was all I had.

  Kim looked at my bowl. “Are you sure you won’t have any? It’s pumpkin, and it’s pretty good. The cook is one of yours. I’m glad to see your people haven’t forgotten how to cook.”

  “I’m always pleased when you’re glad, Major. Nothing for me, though.”

  “Well, as I think I mentioned before, it wasn’t my idea to bring you into this. I didn’t even want you in the city. I said you’d be trouble, and it turns out I was right.”

  This did not seem to be adding to my leverage.

  “But you’re here, and things are moving. You can be useful, as long as you don’t get in the way.”

  “I’ve heard the same thing said about doorstops.”

  “We have decided that talking of ‘surrender’ is a bad idea. The problem is not simply in use of the term but in the concept as well. Bad idea, bad concept, bad approach-that’s why you won’t hear me talking about it. Surrenders lead to vacuums; things become unstuck; people wander aimlessly and go bump. Some of them get crazy ideas about history and destiny. It makes for a lot of noise.”

  “And blood.”

  “Yes, that, too. Messy, ugly, painful.”

  “Costly.”

  He was silent, but I could see I had hit upon the word that swirled up from his cable traffic every morning. Cost. Expense. He needed calm and quiet, he needed to avoid bloodshed, because chaos ran up the budget.

  “There we are,” I said. “You do need me. For some reason you need me to save your skin.”

  “Never overestimate your place in the universe, any universe. Yes, your skills,” he looked as if the word caused him some pain, “might prove useful. And whether you believe it or not, for a change you will actually be doing something good, in the long run.”

  “An interesting place to live-the long run. What do you suppose they’re serving for lunch, in the long run?”

  “You mean to tell me that you don’t care about the future?”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, Major, at one time you and I were the future. Now, here we sit.”

  “Yes, here we sit. And there’s a way yet to go.”

  “Not for me.”

  “Ah, I keep forgetting. You’re no longer part of the human race. You are some sort of new mountain-dwelling species. I saw something to that effect in your file.”

  “I don’t think you’ve seen my file, not the whole file.”

  “You’d be surprised, Inspector, what I’ve seen. You’ll be pleased to know that your file and all its annexes have been pulled from the inactive archive and put back into active status.”

  “In other words, I’m to be paid.”

  “In other words, you take orders.”

  “From whom?”

  This earned a broad smile, a number one on the chart. “Lucky you.”

  4

  “For one thing,” the smile fell from the face as if held on with old cello tape, “it’s time to stop playing the angles, stop acting like a rat in the shadows.”

  “Rabbit.”

  “Another thing, stop contradicting me. I said ‘rat.’ I meant ‘rat.’ ”

  “So, I should be more like… what?”

  “When you’re sitting here, you’re working for me. Don’t try to figure out how to get around me, or play me off against someone else. There is no one else. For all inte
nts and purposes, I am it. I am the party center.” He paused and glared. I could tell he was gauging my reaction. I only glared back, so he went on. “You don’t have to check with anyone else; you don’t have to worry about orders being countermanded, or signals being switched, or my waking up one day with a new agenda.”

  “You say jump, I jump. Fairly simple.”

  “You jump, and you don’t come down…”

  “… until you finish your soup. You still expect me to believe you’ve read my file? I’m not by nature a jumper. Everyone says so. There are whole chapters in my file filled with complaints about how I failed to jump.”

  “No, but you will. You will. And you know why?”

  “I can’t guess.”

  “Because I could snap your backbone right here, Inspector. I could throw your guts out the window and let them hang there until…” He had to think about it, just for a second, but that was all it took. It told me he wasn’t as tough as he wanted to be. I didn’t need to get around him. When the time came, I could walk right over him, but only when the time came. If it came. Meanwhile, there wasn’t much I could do.

  He fixed me with a baleful stare, his entire being concentrated in his eyes, sending probing rays into my skull. “I know what you’re doing. You’re calculating, Inspector. Don’t.” He stood up, switching off the ray machine. “Follow me. There’s something you need to see.”

  We went into a hallway lined with old photographs: a woman walking down a dirt road, the village in the distance behind her, the sky overhead heavy with summer’s heat; two men sitting in the shade on a wooden bench in front of a house; a line of trees at midday; a bridge in the late afternoon with a woman and a young boy standing together, looking over the edge. I stopped at each photo. It was impossible not to fall deep into each one. They were from the 1930s, judging from the clothes the people wore and the way the trees leaned against the sky. When I looked up, Major Kim was watching me.

  “They’re very good, don’t you think?” He put his hand on my shoulder. “I brought them with me. Another age.”

  “The light is pure, almost liquid. It breaks your heart.”

  Kim turned and led the way down the hall. He took out a key and opened a door to a small room. Inside was an old wooden armchair, a small table with a file on it, and, next to that, a green teapot. The colors were jarring after the black and the white of the world in the photographs. Against the far wall sat a young man with alert eyes. He didn’t stand up when we walked in. The major didn’t seem to notice.

  “This is the file room. That is the file. Here you will read the file all the way through. No notes. Commit it to memory; make riddles or songs of the key points to help you remember if you like. Whatever you want, as long as it stays here.” He tapped his forehead.

  I looked at the man who hadn’t stood up. He was pretending not to care, but he was studying me closely. His eyes moved bit by bit across my face. “Sometimes,” I said, “my lips move.” I nodded toward the man. “Should I read with my mouth open?”

  “This is not someone you need worry about.” The major looked at his watch. “The file on the table is dense. It may take you a while to get through it. I don’t want you to become lonely.”

  “You mean, you don’t want me alone. Already we are without trust?”

  The man in the chair suddenly relaxed. “You got that right, pal,” he said.

  “Inspector O is a colleague.” Major Kim’s voice was flat. “Remember that, Captain. He gets every courtesy-and ‘pal’ is not his name or his title.”

  The captain gave me a mock salute. “I am at your disposal.” He turned to the major. “Better?”

  “It may take you the rest of the day to absorb the file.” Major Kim moved to the door. I had thought he would hand the captain his head. It was odd to see him retreat. “We’ll talk later,” he said, frowning again. The door shut. It clicked, locked.

  5

  The file took all afternoon to finish. I had hoped it would be possible to skim most of it, but the major was right. The information was dense. Many names. Many connections. I didn’t bother to try to memorize anything. Whatever stuck, stuck. The captain didn’t say a word the whole time. He looked at his watch now and then but did nothing else that suggested impatience.

  “All done,” I said finally, and stood up to stretch. The room was cold, windowless, no pictures or mirrors on the walls. No decoration of any kind. It was a room. It had a door that locked from the outside. Either it was soundproof or the rest of the world had gone away. This was an interesting thought: The captain and I were the last people on earth, in a cold room with no windows.

  “No one could hear your screams,” he said.

  “They couldn’t hear yours, either.”

  “Well then, let’s not scream, shall we?”

  “Like I said,” I closed the file, “I’m done. You want me to sign anything?”

  “Sign? Sign what? No one gets to see that file. Ever. You didn’t see it. I didn’t see it.”

  “The major didn’t see it.”

  “Especially the major.”

  “If no one has seen it, it must not exist.”

  “You might be right.”

  Chapter Seven

  Two days later, the captain and I stood about a meter apart, not far from the border with China. After I finished reading the file, Major Kim had made clear that he wanted me to drive to the border to see exactly where the problem was centered. The file mainly focused on Chinese plans to move into the North to stop a collapse. There were wild rumors that Chinese were already flooding into the country, though no one could ever seem to spot them.

  “I don’t know what’s sparking these stories or who is helping to spread them, but they have to be stopped,” Kim said. His people in the South were alarmed, and they were making his life a nightmare. He was doing his best to keep them calm, he told me. For the time being, that was possible by playing down the more alarmist of the reports, but it wouldn’t work forever. He needed someone to go up there and look around. He didn’t trust his own people on such a mission, because he didn’t know which ones were really loyal to him and which were reporting to his many detractors in Seoul. He wasn’t overjoyed to have to use me, he said, but I’d been highly recommended and he didn’t have time to search for alternatives. “Your pedigree is considered impeccable, you were never in a responsible position, and you’ve been thrown out of Pyongyang. All that looks good on a bio sheet. Remember, one thing you don’t want to do is double-cross me,” he said. “But I think you already know that.”

  The captain came along because Kim didn’t trust me, and I was there because Kim didn’t trust the captain. It was simple. The captain said he wasn’t supposed to let me drive, but would I mind because he had a bad headache from drinking too much the night before. So I drove, and he tried to sleep. We went through the mountains near Hyangsan, where the maples looked like a forest fire burning on the hillsides. I went off the main road to avoid a couple of ugly towns, then sped through Huichon to Kopun, where my grandfather and I sometimes went shortly after the war for wood from a special stand of oaks.

  Past Kopun, the valleys had a few farms with goats on the hills and fruit trees along the road but nowhere really to stop, so I drove until I found a pavilion on a mountain thick with pine trees, overlooking a river. Not far from the pavilion was a glade of Erman’s birch, beautiful trees, almost twenty meters tall and at peace in the afternoon sun. I sat underneath them and closed my eyes until a couple of old women showed up, pushing bicycles loaded with apples.

  “What are you going to do with those, Grandma?” The captain seemed better; he was picking his teeth with a silver toothpick.

  “What do you think I’m going to do with them?” The first woman put her bike against a tree. “What does anyone do with fruit? Where are you from, anyway?”

  “Never mind him,” I said. “How about giving us a couple of those apples. It will lighten your load.”

  “I don’t want
the load lightened. As soon as we get to the top of this hill, I’ll need the extra weight to keep me from going too fast down the other side, won’t I? Unless you want to buy more than two. I’m not against sharing, you understand, but a person’s got to make a living. And that’s not easy these days.”

  “More complaints,” the captain said. “Nothing but complaints from you people.” There it was again. Even the captain was afflicted with Kim’s compulsion to mark the territory, to draw a thick line between the “you” and the “us.”

  “Do you want the apples or don’t you?” The old lady shifted the load on the seat of the bike. “I haven’t got all day. The Chinese only buy in the afternoon, and I’m already late for the market.”

  The captain sat up. “What Chinese?”

  “What Chinese? They’re strutting all over the place.”

  “You’ve seen them?” The captain had a notepad out and was searching for a pen.

  The old lady shook her head. “If you don’t want the apples, why don’t you just say so?” As she pushed the bike onto the road, she turned to her companion, sitting on her heels a few meters away, watching closely. “I was right,” she said. “Wasn’t I right? As soon as we spotted them I said they were a couple of deadbeats from Pyongyang.”

  “Time to go.” The captain took one last look around. “How long until we get there? I don’t want to be roaming around at dusk. It’s hard to see Chinese in that light. Step on it, will you?”

  It took another five hours, going up mountains, down mountains, around mountains. The captain dozed; each time he woke with a start. “Where are we? Did we cross into China?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “More trees, and then more trees. Where did they come from? I thought you didn’t have any left.”

  “Got to get up early to fool your people,” I said. “I called ahead and told the farms to mobilize everyone to plant these big trees in a hurry. But you spotted it right away.”