The Man with the Baltic Stare

by James Church

  Around six o’clock, Kim called and asked if I wanted to go out for dinner. “Sure,” I said. Either he was working overtime to cultivate me or he was seriously isolated in his own machinery. The girl in the red dress met us at the door, only this time she was wearing blue. “Blue is definitely your color,” I told her.

  She tossed her head. “This way,” she said to Major Kim, and led us back to the triangular table.

  Michael had the night off. We were waited on by Bruce, who had the same austere smile. I figured they handed them out in the kitchen, along with the white jackets.

  Even before the drinks arrived, I got to the point. “Forget about it.” That was as direct as I knew how to be. “I’m not going to Macau or anywhere else, except back to the mountain.”

  Kim was looking at the menu. “The quail looks good,” he said.

  “I’m not about to get back into all of this running around. Consider me a candle with nothing left to burn. No flame, all consumed. Look around, Major. Look. Look for heaven’s sake!” I tried to keep my voice down. I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to look at.

  “Oh, Christ.” He put down the menu. “You’re wallowing like a pig in self-pity, Inspector. You sound like you’re about to start singing an anthem to regret. A life wasted, wrong turns taken. Don’t, please. Keep it to yourself.”

  “Look to the future, is that it? Let the past fall away. And where will it fall? In what peaceful graveyard do we bury the past?”

  “Graveyard? More probably, a garbage dump in your case. You’d better hope all the years you spent in service of this mob can be recycled. Is there a great universal machine that takes old time and makes it new? How should I know? And why should I care? We’re not here to compare philosophy notes. I’m supposed to throw a rope across this pathetic chasm of a country. I don’t look down. I don’t notice if there are rotting corpses or rivers of gold. Makes no difference. They want a rope so they can build a bridge from here to there. It starts with a rope. That’s you, Inspector. That’s you.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t bet on it.”

  5

  The next afternoon, I went downstairs to complain about my phone. It was blinking, and it wouldn’t stop.

  “That means you have messages,” said the clerk. With his wrist extended just so, he indicated the button on the phone that meant messages. “You push this and your mailbox will tell you what messages you have. We’ll make it easy. I’ll push the button; you listen,” he said. The message said I was to stand under the canopy at the front door at 1:00 P.M. It was almost one, so I started out the door. The man with the long stare had been at the far end of the counter, watching me, the whole time.

  “Do we know each other?” I walked over to him. “Because if we don’t, you’re getting on my nerves.”

  He shrugged, a gesture with no impact on a stare.

  I went outside, and a minute later a black car appeared.

  A little man jumped out from the passenger side and opened the rear door. “In,” he said. “Now.”

  I got in. The same man who had been in Kim’s office was sitting in the shadows. He had switched cologne. The new stuff seemed to destroy oxygen and possibly affected the light as well. I’d never seen the backseat of a car so dark. It was like taking a drive in a black hole. That was not a comforting thought, and I started to sweat. The door slammed shut. Now all of the light from the outside was gone. I could see Zhao, dimly, but I couldn’t see my own body. When I held up my hands, they weren’t there.

  “A nice illusion, Inspector. It gives people a sense of disquiet-who is here and who is not? Well, life is transitory, like pleasure.”

  “We have business?” Maybe it was only an illusion, but for some reason I had no trouble seeing Zhao’s eyes. He was looking at me with unrelenting dislike. A stare may be unnerving, but it is basically passive. This look was launching a thousand poison-tipped arrows. “Or are we going to discuss Aristotle?”

  The driver accelerated around a curve, and the car jumped ahead. We might have been preparing to take off, for all I knew.

  “Some of the roads around here aren’t all that good.” I felt around for a seat belt. “Your driver might want to take it easy.”

  “Don’t worry about the roads, Inspector, or belting yourself in. These are the least of your concerns.”

  “In that case, let me go to the obvious question: What are the most of my concerns?”

  Zhao laughed. He might have been a panther sitting on a branch above the forest floor, licking his paws and laughing. His eyes were embers; his teeth shone; his hair was sleek. For the first time I could make out what he was wearing. Black, all black-black sweater, black trousers, black shoes. They should have been invisible in the darkness.

  “The most immediate of your concerns is simply how to stay alive.” The focus dissolved from his eyes. “I don’t mean right now. You’re in no danger at the moment. But next month, next year.” He sighed. “Who can tell, the times are so unstable. In such times, we need to be under-”

  The car swerved violently to the left. I was thrown against the door, but Zhao didn’t move.

  “You see, Inspector? This is exactly what I was saying. In unstable times, you need something secure, something you can hold on to.”

  “And why do you think the times are unstable?” They must have removed the seat belt on my side, because I couldn’t find it. “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the times.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Exactly right. As usual, you’re on the mark. That’s what people have told me: ‘Inspector O is a man who can see through the fog.’ Can you actually do that?”

  “Fog is not a problem.”

  “No? And what is?”

  “Bullshit is the problem. You’re wasting my time, Zhao. Get to the point.” I didn’t think I wanted him as a lifelong friend, so there wasn’t much to lose by being blunt. He wanted to scare me, rough me up mentally. So far, it wasn’t working.

  Zhao’s lids dropped, and for a moment I thought he was dying. Sleek and dangerous one moment, dying the next. Not all that unusual, especially for a gangster. He opened his eyes again slowly. “You plan to go to Macau. I don’t think that is wise.”

  “Not wise.”

  “What happens in Macau isn’t your business.”

  “Everyone seems to have a great deal of interest in this trip. Major Kim thinks it quite important that I go. So does Colonel Pang, as a matter of fact.” That was not strictly true, but it seemed to me that Zhao wasn’t a stickler for honesty. He and Pang apparently didn’t get along; I needed to know exactly how bad their relations were. It took less than a heartbeat to find out.

  “If I were you, I would stay as far away from that bastard Pang as I possibly could. People like him are a deadly disease, and you don’t want to catch it.”

  “Anything else? I like my advice in a big bag so I can keep it all in one place. When advice comes in dribs and drabs, it can get mislaid, you know what I mean?”

  “Here’s something for your bag, then.” The window on my side opened. “Take a good look, Inspector. This is my territory now.”

  “What is it about you people? This is not your country. It’s not yours, never has been, never will be-not now, not ever.”

  Zhao cocked his head, the first sign I had that he was really paying attention. “Down, boy, I said ‘territory,’ not ‘country.’ I don’t need your ragtag nation. But I’m serious about my territory. What’s mine is mine. Do I make myself clear? And no one takes it away from me. Not Pang, not your brothers in the South. And especially not you.”

  Something clicked. “You and Kim share a dangerous misconception. You both think my ragtag nation has already collapsed. You seem to think you can move in at this point to bite chunks off the carcass.”

  “I don’t think.” Zhao lit a cigarette. His eyes reflected the glow. They became yellow and luminous, bright spotlights in the black. “Thinking is all about assumptions, and perceptions, and convictions. To think is to ass
ume rationality, and that can be very fatal. I act on instinct.” Again, the panther, outwardly in repose, his head resting against the back of the seat, but every muscle alert, every nerve primed. “Yes, your country is a corpse. And you only have a few weeks, maybe a month, to decide whether to die with it or to get away. I can give you a comfortable new existence, a new life. I have money, friends, a place where you can enjoy life for the years you have left.”

  “And what should I do to earn this reward of rebirth?”

  “Do nothing, nothing at all. It’s an ancient principle, Taoist, not exactly in its pure form, of course. I have adapted it slightly. But the core remains intact.”

  “The essence of the concept is effortlessness, Zhao, not ‘do nothing.’ Give oneself up to the flow of the universe, become in perfect harmony with Righteousness. That is not ‘nothing,’ but everything.”

  “No!” He sat up suddenly. I saw the driver wince and turn his head, which told me that the conversation was being piped into the front. It also told me that the driver was missing part of his left ear. “No! I’m not going to get into a philosophical duel with you. I’ve given you a choice. Get out of my way or get run over. That’s it. That’s your choice. At the moment you’re in my way. Very much in my way.”

  “I’ll take my chances.” The panther didn’t want me to go to Macau. That made it simple. I was going.

  The car pulled over. The door opened and the little man leaned inside. “Out,” he said. “Now.”

  “You should learn to speak in complete sentences,” I said to him before he climbed into the front seat and slammed the door. I waved, but as far as I could tell, no one waved back.

  6

  That evening, Colonel Pang met me near the Taedong River. He left a message at the front desk that he would be across from the monument at dusk and that perhaps we should try getting acquainted under better circumstances than we had the first time. Kim obviously didn’t like him, and neither did Zhao. If the enemy of my enemy was my friend, that seemed to go double for Pang. I decided it was worth finding out what was on his mind.

  “I’m sorry you got mixed up with Zhao,” he said. “I should have warned you.”

  “Do you have a free pass across the border? How did you get here?”

  “The border isn’t much of problem these days, Inspector. You could go out and come back all without a passport if you wanted to.”

  “I’d rather not get my shoes wet.” I could see that he had two bodyguards with him. One was about ten meters ahead; the other was the same distance behind. “Are we going to hold the entire meeting here, or should we walk a little, to give the SSD teams some exercise?”

  “Either way. I like rivers. They are unambiguous dividing points. There is nothing uncertain about where you stand in relation to a river. You’re either on this side or that. Borders shift around; rivers are usually more permanent. Don’t look now, but up ahead on that bench is one of Zhao’s men. It’s his number three, a real viper. From what the coroner in Shenyang tells me, he spits poison in the eyes of his victims.”

  “Why, I don’t know, but a lot of people seem to want to be helpful these days, giving me warnings. Let me return the favor. You ought to know-if someone hasn’t made this clear already-that Zhao is not going to throw you a birthday party this year.”

  Pang moved his head and put his finger on a scar that went vertically down the left side of his throat. “This was not from a love bite, Inspector. The key point to understand at the moment is that Zhao doesn’t want us cooperating.”

  “We’re not.”

  “Zhao doesn’t know that. No one who sees us walking together at sunset along the river would know that.” Pang smiled at me. A person might think it was a pleasant smile. A person might even forget about the hole in the captain’s head.

  “How do you suppose that Zhao knows that I am going to Macau?”

  “Zhao knows a great deal. That shouldn’t surprise you, Inspector.”

  “Who told him?”

  “He goes into a lot of offices during the course of a day, as you know.”

  “True, it could have been Major Kim, but it could as easily have been you. You knew about it even before I did.”

  “Why would I want to tell Zhao anything?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering.”

  “Good, keep wondering.” As we passed the viper, Pang smiled again-well this side of pleasant-and said something in a Chinese dialect that threw hatchets. The security man in front of us had stopped and watched closely, his right hand in his jacket pocket. “I mentioned that I’d heard about his mother and turtles. I don’t think he liked it.” Pang looked at his watch. “I have an hour or two to kill, Inspector; would you care to join me for a drink? Don’t worry. I don’t shoot people at close range. There’s no challenge to it.”

  “In that case,” I said, “I accept.”

  Pang ran up a flight of stone steps that led away from the river. At the top of the steps a car waited, its engine running. “There’s a place north of the city, not very far away. We’ll be back at the hotel before anyone misses you. Please, get in.”

  7

  As Pang promised, we ended up north of the city. For a moment, I thought we were heading to the airport-which suggested I might be going to Beijing in a box-but we turned off onto a dirt road and drove for about twenty minutes before stopping outside a compound lit with strings of electric lanterns. Through the gate, I could see a pond with four Chinese maple trees around it. Chinese maples are showy and overly delicate. The leaves take a lot of time deciding whether to end up as scarlet or yellow. A few had cut short the agony and dropped into the pond. Off to one side of the compound was a one-story building with no windows and a large radio antenna on the roof. A guard stood in front of the door. He was Chinese, carried a Chinese rifle, and didn’t seem to like me looking at him.

  “You might say this is an embassy annex, Inspector. We can have drinks over there.” Pang pointed across a miniature brook with a tiny bridge. “We’ll sit on the pavilion and be serene. Maybe a poem will come to you.”

  We sat on mats, which my knees hated instantly. “All very lovely,” I said. “I never knew there was an embassy annex here. I don’t think my Ministry knew it, either.” From the looks of it, this was newly built, and screamingly illegal.

  “Of course, this is all fairly recent.” Pang gestured to someone I couldn’t see. “We’ve had the land for a long time.” He gave me a bland look. “The current situation has called for a few adjustments in normal protocol. The paperwork always trails behind. I’m sure you’ve had the same experience.” A woman came out of a low white building some distance from the pavilion. She put down two porcelain teacups and a pot in the shape of a bird. “We’ll have tea,” Pang said. “Would you like ginseng tea?”

  “No, I can’t stand it.”

  “A Korean who does not like ginseng tea? Can this be? Well, in that case, let me suggest something else. I can offer you very good tea from Zhejiang. I’m sure you’ll appreciate it. General Su Dingfang drank the same tea from these very cups.”

  The woman had moved away to stand beside one of the maples. Beneath the lanterns, a smile danced across her lips as she saw Pang pour the tea into my cup.

  “Let the tea set for a moment, Inspector. The fragrance builds beautifully if you wait.”

  I waited, but not for the tea. Su Dingfang was a T’ang Dynasty general who invaded Korea. He had the help of other Koreans, true enough. If these were his teacups, they were in remarkably good shape. Pang’s had a tiny chip on the rim. The glaze on mine was cracked, but I would be, too, if I were thirteen hundred years old. Assuming these were actually General Su’s teacups, what was Pang doing with them?

  “If you like, Major Su over there could refresh your understanding of history.” The woman nodded. “She is a descendent of the general. The teacups have been in her family all these years. They wouldn’t be sitting here in front of us otherwise. It’s quite an honor, don’t you thi
nk?”

  If I didn’t get up in another minute, I would never stand again. I put my hand on the floor behind me and leaned back to relieve the pressure on my knees. “Don’t tell me, the family thought it would be a filial gesture, returning the teacups to the general’s old battlegrounds.”

  Pang rested his hand on the teapot. “They thought the cups would bring the major good luck in her mission. And I am delighted to have her ancestor here with me.”

  “A long, long time ago, Colonel. Didn’t you tell me that borders change? The border right now is down the middle of your beloved rivers. That’s where it is going to stay.”

  “Don’t misunderstand, Inspector; I’m not here to seize territory. But if some of your countrymen want assistance in resisting pressure from another kingdom, there is a long history of our making ourselves available. Didn’t Baekche ask us for help? In fact, in recent years we’ve been happy to provide shelter for a number of generals from your army who thought it best to live on our side of the river for a while. Now? Well, now they have decided they might want to go home. And we quite agree. In any case, Chinese have been here before, and now they are here again.” He picked up his teacup. “We are quite tolerant, you’ll see.”

  “The Japanese have also been here before,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean we want them back.”

  “Surely, Inspector, you aren’t comparing us to them.”

  “I know General Su was a great military leader.” I bid farewell to my knees. It was hopeless. I would have to be wheeled around from now on. “I also seem to recall-and you or the major will correct me if I am mistaken-that he went home in defeat, having failed to take Pyongyang.” I picked up my cup. It was very delicate. If I crushed it between my fingers, I would not be doing history any favors.