Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare (31 page)

He sat down at the table next to mine. “Sorry to have kept you, Inspector.”

“Not at all, Luís,” I said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

The bartender appeared. “Finnish vodka. The label came off the bottle, but I know it’s Finnish.” He put down the glasses. “Why don’t you sit together? That way I don’t have to wipe off two tables. I think there’s another bottle somewhere if you finish this one, so go ahead and drink yourselves silly.”

When we were alone again, Luís straightened his wig. “I love Brazilian girls, but they can be rough.”

“Already? You just got here. Besides, I thought you were Portuguese.”

“I am. But your consulate people were rejecting all Portuguese passports, wouldn’t even take any extra money for the visa.
I figured it must be serious. That’s why I didn’t get here when I promised.”

“I didn’t realize you’d make the next flight. I was worried someone had come up behind you in a dark alley.”

“Nothing so dramatic. I went back to the office, rummaged around in the bottom drawer of my desk, and came up with something from Brazil. I nearly forgot I had it.”

“And the wig?”

“It wasn’t what I would have chosen if I’d had more time. Work with what you have—that’s what they teach us. It fit better in China. Something about the air here makes it slip.”

“What have you got for me?”

“You want to talk now?”

“This is good, better than going for a walk. That only attracts flies. Don’t worry about the bartender.”

“All right. It’s simple. Remember those security tapes I told you about? The ones taken in the hallway? I heard they were altered. New times put on. Who knows when that Russian girl was there? That’s not all that was fixed, I bet.”

“I think I know how to get something more on the tapes. But that still leaves a problem. Either he brought out a bleeding suitcase or he didn’t. What difference does the time make?”

“Maybe it wasn’t him that came out.”

I thought about it. “Back up a second. Has anyone seen him in the meantime?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Would you know?”

“I know people who would know.”

“Has anyone heard from him?”

“Messages, I’m told. I haven’t seen them. I haven’t asked to see them. I prefer not to see them.”

“Phone messages?”

“No.”

“So they’re written, these days maybe e-mail or whatever else
they use. Birdsongs, I don’t know. Anyone could be sending them in his name. In other words, he could be missing.”

“Yes.”

“OK, so he could be dead.”

“Didn’t I imply that?”

“New problem: Who wanted him dead?”

“We call that ‘motive.’ ”

“The old rectification of names. Call it by its right name and it gets you most of the way you want to go. I call it someone-wanted-to-make-sure-he-was-out-of-the-way. I have my suspicions why they would want him on the sidelines. But dead?”

“Not just dead. Parked in a Louis Vuitton. I double-checked. They took out the hanger to make space.”

“Kim’s people, maybe. Pang’s people. That bastard Zhao. All of them could have done it. Personally, I think it was Zhao. Something this sick, it’s right up his alley.”

“Maybe. Each of them had reasons to get rid of him. Each of them had reasons to keep him around.”

“We call that motive.”

“Everyone was supposed to believe that no one had a reason to kill him, that anyone who thought about it needed him alive. But late at night, when everything was quiet and the branches were brushing against the windows in the wind, it occurred to someone that if he was around, there was always a chance he might turn out to be brilliant. What then? What if instead of chaos they ended up with stability? Maybe even recovery? What if he turned out to be charismatic? Even ‘capable’ could be a problem. They couldn’t risk the chance that a thirty-three-year-old might know what he was doing, might rally his forces and tell them to get out of his country.”

“So, she killed him, and they killed her.” Kang was sitting across from me in the restaurant on the second floor, except we had missed breakfast and so were picking at our lunch. “I needed him alive. Without him, we don’t have anyone to hold the flag.”

Kang had appeared that morning. There was a knock on my door at 10:00
A.M
. and there he was.

“May I come in, Inspector?”

“Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty.”

Kang gave me a puzzled look.

“I saw it in a movie a long time ago. I think it indicates surprise in the American West. Come in, absolutely. It says in the hotel rules I’m allowed to have visitors until ten
P.M
. Here, let me take your bag.”

Kang had a small nylon carry-on over his shoulder. “No, I’ll keep it with me.” He stepped inside and gave the room a careful once-over. “Nice place,” he said. “You think we can get some tea?”

I went to the desk and retrieved the room service menu. “It says here we can. All I have to do is dial six.” I dialed 6. “Yes, a pleasant good morning to you. . . . Yes, I slept well. . . . Yes, you can do something for me as a matter of fact. I would like two pots of tea.” I paused. “I see. . . . Yes, it is after nine thirty. All right, two pots of coffee. Maybe some toast with strawberry jam as well? . . . Aha. I see. All right, blueberry will do fine. Thank you.” I hung up. “Ten minutes, they said. Meanwhile, make yourself comfortable. Take a shower if you want. Don’t mind the TV; they promised me the picture only goes one way.”

The coffee showed up; the toast did not. I was a little concerned about talking in the room, but Kang said not to worry.

“Not to step where I’m not wanted,” I said, “but how did you get in the country? I would have thought some sort of lookout had been issued for you.”

“They don’t even know for sure if I am still alive, Inspector. They have a collection of faded photographs and out-of-date descriptions. I could be anybody’s grandfather. I’ll bet my documerits
are better than yours. It was time to come back. I’ll be out of your hair and set up in another part of town by the end of the day. Then we shall see what we shall see.”

After a little more Delphic volleyball like this, by 11:30 we were both hungry. “Let’s try the restaurant. I hear the soup is good.”

“Maybe he’s not dead; maybe we’re still speculating,” I said, though I only said it to make Kang feel better. It didn’t make me feel any better. The armrest on my chair was loose. Fancy restaurant, gold-trimmed mirrors, gold-trimmed tables, and the damned gold-trimmed chairs were falling apart. The table wobbled, too; it was the sort of wobble that would only get worse if they didn’t tighten the screws. I reached underneath to see if I could turn the ones on my side with the end of my spoon.

“No, I’m not speculating. I know Macau, Inspector. I used to do my banking there. It was hard not to bump into someone who would dispose of a body for the right fee. When the economy was bad, you could even get a rate for more than one body. He’s gone; I’m sure of it. But I need to know what happened. That’s the only way I can figure out where the solid ground is, and where the swamp. If we know who did it, and how, it may put us in a better position for the next move. Greta thinks you have a theory.”

“Greta. You know, if you mix up the Roman letters for her name you get ‘great.’ How is Greta, by the way?”

“Busy.” Another couple of words would have been polite, but he wasn’t handing them out. “Now, tell me your theory. Don’t worry with the political gloss. We’ll treat this like a police matter.”

“Nice try,” I said. “But you know as well as I do that these strands wrap around each other. I can’t separate the political from the criminal even in normal times—on this one, it is completely impossible.”

“What a relief, Inspector. For once, I thought, you might actually do exactly as I asked, and that would mean we had both become boring old men. All right, we’ll throw everything into the pot and see what we get.”

“He arrived in Macau on Sunday night, the ninth of October, at five o’clock, but you already knew that. There is a gap between that time and when he showed up at the Grand Lisboa Hotel. That you may not have known. He wasn’t preregistered, didn’t even have a reservation. That suggests a last-minute move, or an effort to keep his travel as far as possible under the radar. I don’t know where he was between the moment he put his feet on the soil of Macau and when he walked into the lobby. It might matter a lot, or it might not matter at all. If you ask me, it was the first time he had been out of the country in a while. Maybe he wanted to stretch his legs and gather his thoughts before the operation got underway.”

I kept myself from staring into Kang’s eyes. I knew they would tell me nothing. They would go from expressionless to dead, barren orbs in a frozen sky. It wouldn’t even help to watch his hands. I’d learned the lesson sitting across from him fifteen years ago, and I never forgot. Kang was in complete control of his every gesture; if he needed a nervous tic, he could time it to the millisecond. If I wanted a reaction, the only thing to do was wait. I’d laid down the challenge to him—that I was pretty sure what had happened in Macau wasn’t the result of an accident, that it was far worse than that, that it was a political assassination. I’d already told Greta that I suspected she had been in Macau to pass a message. Kang knew I was picking up the shards of a broken operation, but now I was challenging him directly to tell me the details, or at least a few of them.

“Maybe someone spotted him while he was walking around.” Kang’s voice was completely noncommittal. Then his cheek twitched. Astounding, I thought, right on schedule. “Maybe it was someone who wasn’t supposed to know he was there.”

“Could be.”

“That wouldn’t help if, as you say, he was involved in an operation.”

“Listen, either we play this on level ground or we finish our lunch and go our separate ways. You know exactly what the operation was. I have my suspicions. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but please don’t play dumb. It’s annoying. After all these years, it’s very annoying.”

Kang nodded. “Let’s put it to the side for now. Good enough?”

It wasn’t nearly good enough, but it was clear that I wasn’t going to get anything more on this from him, not yet, so there was no sense pouting. “I’ll throw some more in the pot. You tell me when to stop. He arrived at the hotel at half past six. He wanted a very specific room. He gave the front desk a list of requirements, but that was chaff. There was only one thing he really cared about: It had to have a good view of the Portuguese fort on the hill. I think I know why. I think you do, too.”

Kang made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “More for the side pile.”

“He had one suitcase with him, a Louis Vuitton Pegase 60. That’s a two-wheeler, good enough for a few days’ travel if you don’t care about wrinkling your suit. Not as good as the 70.”

“Get on with it, O.”

“He goes up to his room and locks himself in for three days. I think he was nervous. He wanted to be alone to think. Maybe he wasn’t sure he was ready for what was coming. And he was waiting for a message. That’s when he made the first mistake. He put on the
DO NOT DISTURB
light. He may not even have known he turned it on. The light switches in those rooms are a nightmare. They’re like the control panel in an agent submarine. But the housekeeping staff had no way of knowing whether he did it by mistake or not. All they knew was that the light was on and that meant they were supposed to stay away.”

“And they did?”

“Religiously. He waited for the message. By the second day he began to worry when it didn’t come. His stomach was in knots and he couldn’t eat. He wanted to talk to someone, anyone, but he knew he couldn’t do that because he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone at all where he was. It was too dangerous. He was alone, without friends, without protection, for the first time in his life. His only hope was the message. That would be his lifeline. But the message didn’t come.”

“Why not? It was delivered.” Kang bit off the last word. He knew he had gone too far. Or he wanted me to think he had.

“Yes, it was delivered. It showed up the first night, exactly according to plan. But the concierge held it. The
DO NOT DISTURB
light was on. The next morning, word came in that the message was to be ‘misplaced’ for another day or so. The concierge didn’t ask why. He just put it in the bottom drawer. Once that happened, the trap was set.”

The waiter came over to the table to see if we needed anything else. Kang waved him away.

I continued. “Almost as soon as our boy disappeared from Pyongyang, there was a frantic search. Alerts went out. He had to be found. And he was. I still don’t know how. You said it could have been that someone saw him walking around. Maybe. Or maybe you have a problem in your organization.”

“I can do without the free advice, Inspector. We’ll leave it where you put it—he was found, and we don’t yet know how. You said something about a trap.”

“Once he was found, a decision was made to make sure he never came back. It was a quick decision, almost instantaneous. It was one of those things that came out of nowhere. No one thought about it. The opportunity was too good to pass up, not merely because it was a chance to eliminate him physically, but because his reputation—and everything he stood for—could be destroyed as well.”