A Corpse in the Koryo (3 page)

"Now, if no one objects, I'm going to find some tea."

Pak moved to the blackboard and began erasing what he'd written.

"I want a report on my desk in one hour, Inspector. Turn in that camera to Operations, and tell them to check it. And turn in the radio to Supply." He blew the chalk dust off his fingers.

Kang tore a page out of a small notebook with a leather cover.

Nothing like what we were issued. "This is my number. Call me this afternoon. Two o'clock." If I told the supply officer to get me a leather-bound notebook, he would laugh in my face. "Inspector," he would simper, "you're a riot."

I took the paper and put it in my pocket without looking. Kim had put the camera down on the desk, but he was still holding the lens cap.

He bent it double between his fingers, gazed at it thoughtfully, then nodded slightly and handed it to me.

"Do you think Operations has a kettle?" I turned to Pak, who was sitting at his desk again, pretending to study the first page of a longout-of-date Ministry personnel manual.

"I want that report, Inspector." He didn't look up as I walked out of the room and down the hall to Supply. I pulled the radio off my belt. It was switched on. That meant the battery had died, because otherwise it would have been popping and spitting throughout the meeting. I wondered if the third row of hills had disappeared in the haze of the August day.

4

The report didn't take long to write. There wasn't much to say, and I knew Pak wouldn't want much detail. Details invite questions. Questions demand answers. Answers get twisted, or misinterpreted, or used as weapons. When I finished, I made sure Pak was alone. His door was wide open, but this time I knocked.

"Come." Pak was facing the blackboard, but it was blank. Two personnel dossiers lay open on his desk. One of them was mine, with an old picture of me stapled in the corner. I had a frown on my face. I drank too much in those days, and bright lights gave me a headache. I always frowned in front of cameras, waiting for the flash.

"So, Inspector O, what have you to say for yourself?"

"Sorry?"

"How about, 'Very sorry, Chief Inspector, for acting insubordinate to your visitors.'" I couldn't see Pak's face, but I knew his eyes were closed. He was wishing he was somewhere else. "You weren't drinking that damned Finnish vodka on that hillside, were you?"

I ignored the question. "Visitors? Visitors are meek. They murmur soft compliments. Those two weren't visitors. Those were aliens. Being in the same room with them, it made my skin crawl."

"Please, Inspector." Pak finally turned around. His face was drawn in a way I'd never seen before. "We're in so much trouble I can't count that high." He looked at his watch. "And it's not even noon."

I moved over to my favorite spot, where I could look out the window.

It wasn't much of a view. In the course of a year, the courtyard below alternated between dust and mud. At one corner sat a pile of bricks meant for a sidewalk between our offices and the Operations building across the way. Years had passed, but the walk was never built. No one raised the lack of progress with the Ministry; it would have done no good. We expected the bricks to disappear, a few here, a few there, two or three taken home, a dozen showing up for sale in the street market a few blocks away. Miraculously, no one touched them, and the brick pile was transformed into a permanent monument, useless but familiar.

One summer, a junior officer in Operations had used the bricks as a bench, sitting there at dusk and singing up to a young telephone operator who worked the third-floor switchboard with her window open. She leaned her elbows on the windowsill and looked dreamily out at him, leaving calls to pile up. Her uncle was a colonel general in the army; otherwise she wouldn't have lasted the several months it took for the Ministry to muster the courage to transfer her back to her hometown.

She was pretty, a cheery sort, and I was sorry to see her go. No one sat on the bricks after that.

I counted the bricks whenever a Ministry directive got under Pak's skin. He would read the offending paper a few times, call me into his office, and then start writing furiously on his blackboard. Usually he would mutter only a word or two that I could catch--"idiotic" was common--but on occasion he would launch into a full-blown lecture.

It took me a while to realize I wasn't meant to respond. I only needed to stand at the window and tally one brick with each click of the chalk.

Pak would finish his lecture and say, "What do you think?" I would reply, "Incredible, all there."

Pak liked the window, view or no view. He said it let in extra light on overcast days. In autumn, across from the brick pile, two tall gingko trees turned a brilliant gold for several weeks before the wind and cold November rains took away the leaves. Pak seemed happiest in early October. He would restlessly look out his window to spot the earliest touch of color on the trees. Finally, he'd call me to his office, and when I poked my head in, he would point to the window, a faraway look of quiet pleasure in his eyes. Now we were in the grip of summer, too soon for golden leaves.

"What's got you so upset?" I asked. "A dead battery kept me from taking a picture. Tell me, who the hell cares? Those two acted like it was a national crisis, like MacArthur had landed again."

"Maybe not so far-fetched." Pak lowered himself into his chair. "A simple operation, really. Sit on a hill surrounded by the nice flowers at dawn--your favorite time of day, you always say--snap a picture, two maybe, and come home."

"Not my job." Pak and I had been over this ground many times before.

It wasn't an argument. We each knew where it was going. "I don't get paid to take pictures out in the countryside. I'm supposed to keep the capital in good order, at least my sector of it. That's what I do. You heard complaints?"

"Inspector, when was the last time you were paid?"

"Okay, so they haven't paid us lately. So, we aren't paid to do anything."

"Good,

because that about describes what you do."

From someone else it would have sounded cruel, but I knew Pak didn't mean it. He and I got along fine, mostly. Ten years working together had worn away the rough edges. He was worried about something, I didn't know what, and when he worried he got testy. But this time, I was testy, too. I was the one sitting on wet grass before daybreak, and now I was on the hook to call a party official who wanted to harass me about my pin. "I don't take pictures in dim light of speeding cars without plates.

I especially don't do it with a bad camera." I turned away from the window.

"And why can't we have a thermos when we have to wait around doing nothing at the crack of dawn?"

"Did they see you?" This, too, was typical of Pak. For no reason I could see, he would get mad, then cool off quickly and focus back on the main problem.

"Nobody saw a thing." I was sure no one could have seen me from the road. I had been on a small rise, with another hill behind me. Anyone who looked up from the highway would have focused on the crest of the hill. People did that. You could send a marching band along the flank of a hill and no one would notice. They always eyed the line where earth and sky met. "Even when I was trying to take the picture, I was hunched down. Anyway, I had on a farmer's hat. If the driver took his eyes off that lousy road--which he would have been crazy to do at the speed he was traveling--he would have thought I was Kim Satgat."

Pak shook his head. "Don't tell me. I don't want to know."

Fine.

"Alright, who is Kim Satgat? Is he on file?"

"Probably, at one time. His real name was Kim Pyong Yon. Wandering poet from the old days."

"That's it?"

"Long story, but he accidentally criticized his grandfather. Badly unfilial thing to do. He went into hiding, wore a bamboo hat to cover his face."

"So, if they couldn't see Kim Satgat, why did they honk?" Pak bobbed his head back and forth a little when he already knew the answer to a question he was asking. He waited, until he sensed I knew it, too. "Yes, the radio."

"That car was monitoring frequencies? No one gets equipment like that without piles of paperwork." I thought it over. "Unless it came from the outside. Who are we talking about here?"

Pak shook his head. "I don't know. And don't ask."

"That stone head Kim isn't from any joint headquarters, is he?"

"Inspector, drop it."

"I thought so. His neck is too thick. Not pretty enough for a headquarters billet."

"Drop it." Pak held up his hand. "Stop, drop it, enough."

"I don't like this operation. Kim I don't like. Kang I really don't like. You notice? He never changes expression. It's like watching a trout on your dinner plate, staring up at you." We were both silent for a moment.

"Did you see Kim tap his foot?"

Pak's chair squeaked as he swiveled around to face the window. He slumped and put the tips of the fingers of both hands together, making small diamonds for the sunlight to shine through.

"They're not working together, are they, those two aliens?" Pak pretended to ignore me, which meant I was right. "I don't suppose anyone checked. Was there even a battery in that damned camera?"

Pak sat up and the chair squeaked again. "You go home." He turned to face me. "You put on a clean shirt, if you can find one. Maybe some new trousers, too. You get a cup of tea and something to eat. Then, as fast as your little legs can pedal, you get back here. No visiting friends.

No stopping at markets. No sitting under a tree, gazing at the summer sky." He looked at his watch. "It's 11:30. You got up early. Take a rest.

Be back here at 1:45, in time to call Kang."

"What does he have to do with this, anyway?"

"Out. Now!"

I got one foot out the door, and Pak called after me. "Inspector, don't forget."

"I know." I said. "The pin."

5

The day had turned into a summer steam bath, not good for pedaling a bicycle, especially with the back tire almost flat. Every morning, I put air in the tire. It leaked out a few hours later; no one could discover from where, or why it always stopped leaking by noon. Every couple of weeks, I brought the tire to an old man who fixed bicycles in the shade of a pair of chestnut trees not far from my office, until he finally told me in disgust not to come by anymore, it took up his time and ate into his profits. I asked him what happened to the spirit of cooperation among us working people, but he snorted and turned his attention to an old Chinese bike that had been hit by a car. "Now that," he said, "will pay for dinner."

"This is a controlled intersection." I turned toward a traffic lady standing a few feet away, her whistle held close to her mouth. "And I control it. No bikes. No pedestrians. Just cars." There wasn't a car in sight. Sweet-looking girl, tough as nails. She had pouty lips, like all the traffic ladies did. Soon after I was assigned to the office, Pak and I had a long discussion about whether they selected girls with those lips from the start or trained them to look that way, extra lipstick or something.

Pak told me it didn't matter; either way, he wanted me to keep away from them. "They're off-limits. Each one of them is special issue." He paused. "Let me rephrase that. Each one of them is to be respected. No leering, no clucking your tongue as you stroll by, no comments on their sweet blue uniforms, or their pertness, or anything. You get me? Everything about them has been checked out at the top. The top looks very kindly on them, and not very kindly on one of us if we ruffle their little feathers."

I didn't dismount. I'm not short, but sitting on a bike makes me look taller, and getting off the bicycle would make her think she had some authority over me. "Yeah, I know the rules, but I'm in a hurry.

Official business."

"There's an underground passage." She pointed to the corner. "Use it."

"In this weather, a fifty-six-year-old man has to carry a bicycle up and down those stairs?" I didn't figure she would back down, but I wanted to see her smile.

She didn't smile, not even close. "You don't look that old to me."

Someone guffawed in the crowd that was forming.

"Well, I'm in pretty good shape."

She looked me straight in the eye. "I wouldn't know." This provoked another guffaw. One old woman put her hand over her mouth.

"And I don't care."

My shirt was soaked with sweat when I emerged from the stairs on the other side. Still no cars. It did not improve my mood when I saw that the traffic lady had moved out of the sun into the shade. She was watching me casually, her uniform crisp and unwrinkled, her black boots gleaming as if there were no dust for a mile in any direction. I thought I saw a smile flit over her pouty lips, but I didn't feel like chatting anymore. A man on the corner looked up and waved as I passed by. "Bad tire. Get you a new one?" I coasted under the willow trees that lined the river, trying to catch a breeze, then gave up and pulled onto the old Japanese-built bridge that led to my street in the decaying eastern part of Pyongyang.

Inside my room it was no cooler, but with the shades down, the sun no longer glared in my eyes. The apartment house was already falling down when I moved in years ago. It was one of four buildings set around a square in which several small flowering bushes grew according to no particular plan. The apartments had been constructed from blueprints the East Germans brought with them in 1954 as part of their offer to help rebuild a Korean city after the war. They ended up restoring Hamhung, on the east coast, but the architecture was so appealing to someone in Pyongyang that the plans were "borrowed" and used for a number of offices and apartments in the capital. Later, to no one's surprise, it was decided that buildings in a "foreign style" were not a good idea. After the fact, special work teams went back and modified all of them, including my group of apartments, adding touches that would make them "our own."

The floors of the balconies had crumbled beyond repair, except for a mysterious few that survived and were crowded with plants. Much of the building's yellow facade on the first two floors had fallen away, leaving stained concrete that for some reason turned a deep green when it rained.