Bamboo and Blood (9 page)

I lived alone, but loneliness was no burden, not like people sometimes imagined. It was a matter of indifference to me if a new day
came. Dawn brought nothing, but I didn’t care. If the new light of day had ever meant anything, I had forgotten what it was.

“How is your mother?” I asked Pak. Once, that was a simple question, a question from normal times, when the answer was normal, in a normal conversation. It wasn’t simple now, but if I didn’t ask it, it would mean there was nothing left for us to hold from before. It used to be a simple question because the answer was simple. No more.

Now, Pak might tell me to mind my business. If he was as weary as he looked at this moment, he might simply walk out the door, down the stairs, and never come back. I waited, and the waiting spoke to how far from normal we had drifted. He sat and didn’t answer, not with words, not with a gesture, not with his posture. That void told me what he didn’t have the will to say. No, he wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t leave, though there were people we both knew who had done that, leaving family, leaving everything, walking into the cold and disappearing. A query would come down from the Ministry once a month—“Where is so-and-so? Anyone with information about so-and-so should report immediately to the chief of personnel,” which was almost funny because the chief of personnel had disappeared. Someone had been assigned his job but not given the title lest that person disappear, too, and the job have to be filled again.

“She rarely eats.” If he was going to stay, he had to speak. He knew it. He had to talk to other people and read his files and draw one breath after another. “She says her food should go for the boy. We’ve argued until I can’t say the words anymore.”

“I have more than I can use.”

“No, Inspector, you don’t. I need you healthy.”

“Just let me know.” He nodded. That meant the subject was closed, and it was time to move things back to business. If you had to breathe, you might as well get back to business. “That background report may be delayed a little more,” I said. “Some of the people I have to interview in order to finish it aren’t around.”

There it was again. I didn’t say where they had gone. I didn’t have to. Pak knew what I meant. I could see in his eyes what he was thinking. He was imagining what he would never do, being one of the gone. Leaving everything, avoiding tomorrow.

After a session like that with Pak, I wasn’t going to my office and stare at the walls. A long walk would do me good. If it got cold enough as the sun went down, it would drive everything from my mind. I could get back to the office after dark, finish a little paperwork, and then go home.

“Don’t take my car,” Pak said. “I need it later to get to some meetings. Take the duty vehicle. It’s back from repair, guaranteed to start. Just in case, don’t go too far.”

The Potong River wasn’t too far, and I liked walking there. By then, there wasn’t much left of the afternoon. It turned to dusk, but dusk didn’t hang around; nothing wanted to linger at this time of year. That was why I didn’t see her coming.

“Hello, Inspector.”

“Hello, yourself.” There wasn’t much else to say. She was the last person I expected to run across. Then it occurred to me, maybe it was fate. Why not? I was due for some fate. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Is that so?”

“I’ve been wondering, what if I want a transfer?”

“Something wrong between you and Pak? You finally exhausted his patience? The man has a reservoir of patience deeper than the ocean, but you have drained it.”

“No, Pak is fine, still putting up with me. I’m just thinking ahead. A whole career in Pyongyang, it might not look so good when it comes time for my promotion.”

“If either of us lives that long. Face it, you’re not ever going to be promoted, O. Besides, when did you start craving advancement? ‘Don’t make the offer,’ you said the last time the subject came up. ‘I won’t take it. I’m fine where I am.’”

She was a woman I’d met in the army; “an old friend” is how I described her to people when they asked. A few years ago, she had been made a deputy in the Ministry’s personnel section. It was her chief who had disappeared. The whole section had been put on report for not
predicting that the boss was going to defect. No one knew for sure if he had defected, but he was gone, and it was pretty clear he wasn’t on vacation in Cuba.

With the day finished, the temperature was looking for a place to spend the night. It would be good if we could go to her office to talk. As head of the section, she’d likely have some heat. If anyone had heat, she would. No one wanted the acting chief of personnel in a bad mood, whether she was on report or not. Little presents came her way, small bags of rice, pieces of fruit. She also had a lot of people slithering under her door in hopes of getting a good assignment. I wasn’t one of them. Once, we had been very close, but things had changed. I had forgotten why.

“Well, then,” I said, “let’s just pretend. If I
was
going to get promoted, wouldn’t I need to serve outside of Pyongyang?”

“What is this about? I don’t have time for games, O, not these days. They’re crawling up our backsides, trying to figure out where he went.”

“I assume that’s the one place he isn’t.” I smiled in the dark; she looked at me with ice in her eyes. Even in the blackness, I could see that. That look, it started to jar loose in my memory what had gone wrong. “Let’s just say I wanted the toughest, most undesirable post you could find. Let’s say I got headquarters really mad at me, and they decided it was time to exile Inspector O to teach him a lesson. Where would they send me?”

“You don’t want to go to North Hamgyong, and I’m not sending you. It’s suicide these days. You never struck me as suicidal. Obtuse and heartless maybe, but not suicidal. This isn’t about postings. What is it?”

“I need your help.”

“You need my help, you bastard?” She laughed, the way an axe laughs at a piece of kindling. “After all this time, you knock on my door and say you need my help? How, specifically?”

“Hwadae county.” Might as well get straight to the point. Romancing her up to the question clearly wasn’t going to work.

“Are you crazy?” She considered. “No, you’re not crazy, you scheming bastard. I’ll tell you what I should do. I should put you in the coldest, deadliest, sickest, hungriest place I can find. I should make you a mine guard, a camp guard.” She took a deep breath. “I might still do that, don’t push your luck. But I won’t send you to Hwadae.”

“I don’t want to be assigned there. I need to know what’s going on.”

“Of course you do. Every crummy sector cop in the capital needs to know what is happening in an isolated, out-of-bounds county on the east coast.” She snorted, which was never her best noise. “Don’t ask me. It’s military, and they keep us out. That’s all I know, and if I knew anything else, you’re the last person in the world I would tell.” She was lying, very openly, which was the only way she could tell me what I wanted to know. Amazing! As angry as she seemed to be after all of these years, she was willing to help. Maybe she still liked me. Not bad, having a chief in the personnel section, even an acting chief, with the hots for you. It was more than I had a right to ask; but it was exactly what I needed.

“There’s a visitor who wants to go there,” I said and put my step in cadence with hers. “Body rhyming,” we used to call it when we went for walks. That popped into my memory from somewhere. I shut the door in a hurry. “Should I take him?”

“You couldn’t get him past the first barrier. He’d need special orders. So would you, incidentally. A Ministry ID doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

“He’s an Israeli.”

I could tell that stunned her. She took a half step out of rhythm and then stopped abruptly. “Well, well, well. He’ll have some interesting company if he gets in there.” No reason she should know about a visitor under our protection, but still, it surprised me that she didn’t. I would have thought the news had gone up and down the corridors by now.

“Interesting company?” I thought my voice had just the right lilt of disinterest. “Like who?”

“Maybe Pakistanis. Maybe Iranians. Maybe Bolivians.”

“Bolivians?” It was hard to sound uninterested.

“Why not? If I were from Bolivia, I’d want missiles to protect me against Venezuela.”

“Venezuela isn’t near Bolivia.”

“My mistake.” She walked away, down the path to a waiting car. Her engine probably got maintained pretty regularly.

I didn’t go back to the office as I’d planned. I needed to walk a little more in the dark, maybe head to the Koryo and let my thoughts fall into some sort of order. I made a mental list. The Man with Three Fingers, the general’s dead daughter, a Swiss-Hungarian-Jew with a wad of dollars, and now, to top it all off, two Israeli delegations falling over each other. None of them had anything to do with Bolivia, but I’d bet they were all linked. Timing had everything to do with it. Pak hated it when I fell back on timing to explain a hunch. I never much liked it, either. The only thing I liked less than timing as an explanation was coincidence, cosmic or not. Even if I could accept coincidence now and then, there was no way that could cover two Israeli delegations. I thought about this for a while—whether timing meant something or whether it meant nothing—and then I realized I was completely alone. No one else was on the path; there was barely anyone around. It wasn’t that late; there should be at least a few people still outside, hurrying home. The city had become eerie, much too quiet. There was no pulse left, no spark. The stores were empty, the streets were deserted. The whole way over to the Koryo, I kept wondering where the hole was that had swallowed the population. By the time I got to the hotel, I was practically frozen.

Once my fingers thawed, I found a phone and called up to Jenö?s room. “I made it here, barely. Meet me in the coffee shop. I’ll be the one pouring hot water over his head.”

I was the only customer, so I picked the warmest-looking table and sat down.

Jenö showed up a few minutes later. He didn’t even say hello. “How did the first group react when it found out about the other one?” It sounded like the beginning of a bad joke. The two Israeli delegations were staying in the hotel, but apparently he was steering clear.

“I haven’t talked to them.”

“You must have seen a report.”

“Let’s just say one of them spit bullets and the other two laughed until they cried.”

Jenö leaned back and smiled, content. It seemed a good time to break the news to him.

“All your requests for meetings have been denied,” I said matter-offactly. We weren’t on a beach. We were both wearing our overcoats. The coffee had gone cold almost immediately, not that it mattered. “All denied but one. You can go to the Trade Ministry tomorrow morning, assuming there’s someone around to meet you. It’s only a five-minute car ride from here. Other than that, you’re allowed to wander around within the four walls of this building. You can look closely at the hotel lobby. When you get tired of that, you have permission to stare at the television in your room. As a fallback, go up and down in the elevator a few times.”

“I protest.”

“Then look out the window if you’d rather. I think you can see the train yard, or at least the tracks. I doubt you’ll see a train.”

“I mean about the appointments. I didn’t risk that plane ride just to sit around this depressing hotel.”

“Oh, really. You don’t like the Koryo? It’s not bad, once you get used to it. Besides, no one twisted your arm to come back. Why did you? We had a hell of a time getting you out safely the first time. You must realize by now that there are people who would like to get their hands on you. I’m still wondering how you got another visa.”

“You don’t know?”

“My Ministry doesn’t issue visas. If we did, you wouldn’t have one.”

“I have money, Inspector. Your government is in rather desperate need. Tab A, slot B, so to speak.”

“Well, your tabs don’t seem equally compelling to everyone, as far I can tell. Your requests for meetings are denied. I’m supposed to make sure nothing happens to you, and the best way to do that is to keep you here.”

“I see. Perhaps you are the one who has denied my requests?” The man looked off into space; his eyebrows twitched thoughtfully. “It really doesn’t matter where I have my meetings, you know. People can come here. It’s warm, relatively speaking. We can sit and talk, drink tea, have something to eat.” He put his hand on my shoulder and his eyes lit up. “Brilliant idea, Inspector, brilliant. I should have thought of it myself. If I can’t go to them, they’ll be happy to come to me, right?”

“When do your friends leave?”

“Those two delegations? They aren’t my friends. We have different goals, very different. I want to make money. They think I cooperate too much with people who should be stepped on.”

“They think we should be stepped on?”

“They did think that before, but now they seem to have changed their minds. That’s why they’re coming by the planeload to see your officials.”

“And what changed their minds?”

He shrugged and then smiled. It was one of those charming smiles that put my hackles on red alert. “That isn’t something I would know, now is it? I just want to make some money.”

I relaxed a little, it was so ridiculous. “Are you kidding? Money? Here?”

“Sure, why not? You have workers; they know how to obey orders. They’re educated and can be trained. I’ve heard from others who have set up shop here that there are ways of making things work. If you had roads and electricity, I could be the richest man on earth.” He paused. “But I can make do with a lot less. What sense is there in being the richest man on earth? A lot of unhappiness is all it brings. You ever hear of King Midas?”

“I slept through the English history classes.”