Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare (10 page)

“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.

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.”

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.”

“Let me offer a suggestion,” said the captain. “It would save a lot of time if you people would build a few bridges over these valleys. A nice, straight highway would probably cut an hour, maybe two, off the drive. You might build some tunnels, too, while you’re at it. We could send some of our engineers up to show you how to do it.”

“Captain, tunnels are one thing we know how to build.”

“Then why don’t they do something about these roads?”

“Nothing wrong with these roads,” I said. “They’re scenic. Why don’t you look at the scenery?”

He looked and I drove as fast as I dared as we descended from the mountains down to Chosan, toward the shores of a lake formed by a dam on the Amnok River. We arrived before dusk, but not a lot before. I suggested we wait until morning to look around, but the captain seemed in a hurry.

“Let’s go out there now, get it over with,” he said. “There’s plenty of light left, and I don’t want to hang around.”

“This is nothing like the descriptions in those reports in the file. I wonder if they were talking about another location.”

“If I were you,” the captain had a pair of small binoculars to his eyes and was scanning the horizon, “I wouldn’t mention that file anymore. Forget you saw it.”

“What file?”

“That’s more like it.”

“Still, it’s peaceful. I don’t know what it is about the countryside in the fall, but it has a lulling effect on everything. If there was anything to worry about earlier in the year, you’ve forgotten what it was by October. You know, this area was separatist a long time ago. It pulled away from one of the old kingdoms and wouldn’t come back. Maybe that’s why we’re up here, to see if that sort of thing has stayed in the gene pool. Stubbornness is a dominant gene, I think. You only need one.”

The captain put the binoculars in his pocket. “Stop musing, Inspector. It’s going to get one of us killed.”

“Not likely,” I said. I turned my attention to a line of lindens that defined the route of a narrow road as it followed the banks
of a stream flowing west, into the sunset. At dusk, the air in this part of Chagang took on a purity that made the light a river of memories. All the more reason I was surprised when the captain grunted and crumpled to the ground.

Nothing happened for what seemed a long time. Then a lanky man wearing a sharkskin suit and huge running shoes stood up from behind a row of bushes, brushed off his trousers, and walked slowly toward me. Even in the fading light, I could see he was very much a Chinese policeman. There was no mistaking the haircut or the way he moved. Somebody had once been shocked to find Chinese where he didn’t expect them to be in Korea, not far from here. I knew how that felt.

The captain was on his back, completely still, with a pretty big hole in his head. That seemed strange, because the man walking toward me wasn’t carrying a weapon, not where I could see one, anyway. Nobody else was in sight, but I presented a good target, so I picked out a place to fall down in a hurry if the bushes started moving.

“We know who you are, Inspector,” the man said when he was close enough to be heard without shouting.

“I take it that’s a good thing.” I nodded at the captain’s body. “If you’d waited for a moment, I would have introduced you to my colleague.”

“Him we know. He’s responsible for the deaths of two of my men. He was supposedly working for me, only I knew he wasn’t. I warned him a few times. It didn’t take. So, he’s gone.”

“Just like that.”

“Just like that. And you, Inspector, I understand you are about to do funny things in funny places. Funny things happen to people in such cases.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t know? I’m talking about your trip to Macau. You aren’t welcome there. I can’t guarantee your well-being if you go.”

“Who the hell are you to be telling me where I can go and where I can’t go?”

“Just someone trying to pass along a little friendly advice.”

“Friendly advice? Since when is a hole in the head friendly advice?”

“When it isn’t your head.”

I don’t react well when people standing next to me are shot. “Maybe on your own soil you can hand out advice. But this land, here, on this side of that river, isn’t yours, or perhaps you need to check a modern map. The weather may come from your side. The wind may blow from that direction most of the time. But that’s about all. The sun doesn’t rise there, the sky doesn’t start there, and I don’t have to put up with your threats while you’re standing in my country.” It was a long speech, maybe a little provocative under the circumstances. I looked down at the captain. The hole in his head wasn’t getting any smaller.

The Chinese policeman gave me a slow, ancient, imperial smile. “Keep it up, Inspector.” He started to walk back to the bushes where he’d first appeared, then stopped and looked over his shoulder. “The captain didn’t listen to me,” he shouted. “Think about it.” He disappeared from view, but I wasn’t inclined to find out where he went.

The next day, well before dawn, I put gas in the car and drove like a madman back to Pyongyang. When I got to the compound, I slowed down; I made it a point to move up the walkway in a manner that wouldn’t excite the tank gunners. Even though the door to Kim’s office was ajar, I knocked. The first time it had been a good move to go in unannounced. I didn’t think it was smart to make that sort of thing a habit, especially because as far as Kim knew, the captain and I were still on the border.