Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare (9 page)

“Pain, Inspector. The question left hanging from this afternoon concerned pain.”

“Is that the essence of your world?” I don’t like it so dark when I’m talking to someone I don’t know and have reason to think doesn’t have my best interests at heart.

“I’m not sure you are concentrating. Are you? What are you looking around for?”

“A light switch.”

“This isn’t a game. I have a lot to accomplish, and only so much time to get it all done. An hour ago, I learned that the time is even shorter than I’d thought. You can imagine that I’m getting impatient, and when I get impatient I feel the urge to peel off some of the veneer of civilization.”

In other words, he was under a lot of pressure and wasn’t getting much help in solving his problem. “So the problem isn’t really pain, after all. We’re back to the question of time, that and these mysterious tasks of yours. Go ahead and get them done, why don’t you? By all means, do what you have to do. Work
eighteen hours a day. Skip dinners with your girlfriend in the red dress. Just leave me out of it. Whoever put my name in front of you must have pulled the wrong file. It happens.”

The major signaled the bartender. “Two large drinks.”

The bartender nodded and went somewhere into the darkness.

“Large.” It seemed to me that he could at least have asked what I wanted to drink. “That is now an acceptable order, I take it. No need to worry with content, only size. Sign of the times?”

Kim patted my knee. “Get real, Inspector. We’re about to have a conversation, a true exchange of ideas. No more fencing, no more banter. We’re going to talk of pain and suffering on a large scale. Let me say at the outset, I honestly believe it would be good to avoid that if possible. If not, if it proves impossible, well, it won’t be the first time.”

When the drinks arrived, we moved to a table, deeper into the gloom. Other people’s eyes adjust to the dark; mine don’t. There was a young inspector in our office years ago with eyes like a cat. The darker it was, the better he could see. He would sit in the dark reading files all night long. If we were on surveillance, he could spot a suspect moving in the blackest night. It made the rest of us look bad. No one was sorry to see him assigned to another office.

“Obviously,” I said, “neither the pain nor the suffering is to be yours.”

A woman appeared, a shadow emerging from the emptiness of space, and handed the major a piece of paper. He moved back to the bar where there was at least a little light to read by, wrote something quickly across the top, and held it up for the woman to take away. She didn’t move until he looked at her and nodded.

“I have enough suffering of my own, Inspector. You might not think so.” He stared in the direction of the vanished woman. “Pain and suffering,” he laughed. The room echoed with the sounds of a five-hundred-year-old gingko tree losing a limb in a storm. “Sign of the times.”

“Overall, though, we aren’t focused on your suffering.”

“No, we aren’t. Disappointed?”

“Then it must be mine.”

The major sat down again and raised his glass. “Not yours exactly. Not in so many words. Let’s put it in broader terms. Let’s be grand in our vision, lofty in our ideals. Nation, race, family, individual—when one is in pain, all suffer, isn’t that the theory?”

“Theories are junk.” I picked up my glass. “To better times.”

The major shrugged, but in the dark I couldn’t be sure of the face. “To whatever comes next.”

We drank in silence and sat awhile in contemplation. With barely enough light to see your own glass in a bar, there isn’t much else to do. I was not inclined to say anything more. The man was baiting me. He was trying to ratchet up my interest. I took another sip of the large drink. It was gin, but I drank it anyway. The flame in the far globe flared enough so at last I could see the major’s face. He was staring at me, not in a friendly way, but at least it wasn’t a mean, practiced stare. I made a note to myself to start a file on stares. Laughter wasn’t of much use. All it did was point to more pain. A typology of stares might be more instructive. Something to do with the eyes, I guessed. Maybe we were seeing the impact of all the light flooding the city, light that, for some reason, couldn’t find its way into this bar.

“Things will change,” Kim said at last.

“They do, sometimes.”

“From what I’ve seen, that hasn’t been the case here in the North for quite a while.”

“Let’s leave that discussion for another time. Purely for the sake of argument, we’ll posit that things will change. And next you’re going to tell me, that means for the better.”

“You’re doubtful?”

“Oh, not at all.”

“Then what?”

“Loss, my dear major. Loss.”

The light from the globe was giving out, but I could see that his face was appropriately puzzled.

“Now, truly, I am disappointed,” I said. “In another minute you will tell me that we have nothing to lose but our chains. Yet freed we will become what?”

He waved a hand in front of his face. “And you, you’re about to rattle on about the joys of the collective. Spare me, please, Inspector.”

“Freed we will be what?” I asked again. This was something I’d thought about on the mountaintop, watching shadows climb out of the little valley and then fall back. “Smarter? Richer? And, in the end, why do you care what is best for us? Is it your business? Do you really care at all?”

At this the major shook his head. “Apparently, not only is it my business; it is my unhappy fate. To make you happy, all right, I’ll admit it. No, I don’t care what happens to you, because of everything you and your friends have done—or allowed to be done—to this place for the past fifty years. You can all hang as far as I am concerned. I’d spring the trapdoor myself, but I have no choice in the matter. I am here to deliver you into freedom, and that is exactly what I am going to do.”

“I know you were bound for Paris. A pity you didn’t go.”

“The game is over, Inspector. It comes down to that. All of the planning and plotting and maneuvering—all done. For some reason, your side has decided the best offense is to give up.” We were back in the major’s office. The night before in the bar, after I had finished my large drink, a man had appeared with a message in a locked black dispatch case. The major had read the message and left in a clatter. “We’ll continue this tomorrow morning, Inspector, in my office,” he said before disappearing.

The driver was waiting in front of my hotel at 5:00
A.M
. We were back to the ferret. He told me to get in the rear seat. “We aren’t pals,” he said. “I’m a driver; you’re the passenger. Keep it that way, OK?”

When I walked into Kim’s office, breakfast was already on his desk. He handed me a bowl of soup. It was pumpkin, but I put it to one side.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. I’d mulled it over through the night and decided this would be my opening line. It wasn’t strictly true. I did believe him. What he’d said about surrender at the top was the only explanation possible. All that I lacked was evidence. Not counting Kim himself seated behind the big desk, the neon sign on my hotel, and the low-cut red dress, where was the evidence of such surrender, exactly? The woman with the baseball cap in the market was actually evidence to the contrary. She didn’t sound like someone who was giving up. Besides, from everything I’d seen, there was a lot that hadn’t changed. Buses continued not to run on time, in some cases not to run at all. People walked across the bridges as they always had. A few new buildings stood here and there, and yes, there were all of those extra streetlights, but did that really suggest anything as sweeping as Kim was laying out—wholesale surrender?

“Fortunately for all of us,” Kim picked up his bowl to drain it, “the state of your belief is unimportant.”

This, I could be sure, was untrue. I was of no utility to Kim and his people unless I bought into what he was telling me. He needed me for some reason; that much was clear. That, I knew in my bones, was my leverage. It was not the heavyweight crowbar I would have liked, but it was something. It was more than something; it was all I had.

Kim looked at my bowl. “Are you sure you won’t have any? It’s pumpkin, and it’s pretty good. The cook is one of yours. I’m glad to see your people haven’t forgotten how to cook.”

“I’m always pleased when you’re glad, Major. Nothing for me, though.”

“Well, as I think I mentioned before, it wasn’t my idea to bring you into this. I didn’t even want you in the city. I said you’d be trouble, and it turns out I was right.”

This did not seem to be adding to my leverage.

“But you’re here, and things are moving. You can be useful, as long as you don’t get in the way.”

“I’ve heard the same thing said about doorstops.”

“We have decided that talking of ‘surrender’ is a bad idea. The problem is not simply in use of the term but in the concept as well. Bad idea, bad concept, bad approach—that’s why you won’t hear me talking about it. Surrenders lead to vacuums; things become unstuck; people wander aimlessly and go bump. Some of them get crazy ideas about history and destiny. It makes for a lot of noise.”

“And blood.”

“Yes, that, too. Messy, ugly, painful.”

“Costly.”

He was silent, but I could see I had hit upon the word that swirled up from his cable traffic every morning. Cost. Expense. He needed calm and quiet, he needed to avoid bloodshed, because chaos ran up the budget.

“There we are,” I said. “You do need me. For some reason you need me to save your skin.”

“Never overestimate your place in the universe, any universe. Yes, your skills,” he looked as if the word caused him some pain, “might prove useful. And whether you believe it or not, for a change you will actually be doing something good, in the long run.”

“An interesting place to live—the long run. What do you suppose they’re serving for lunch, in the long run?”

“You mean to tell me that you don’t care about the future?”

“In case you’ve forgotten, Major, at one time you and I were the future. Now, here we sit.”

“Yes, here we sit. And there’s a way yet to go.”

“Not for me.”

“Ah, I keep forgetting. You’re no longer part of the human race. You are some sort of new mountain-dwelling species. I saw something to that effect in your file.”

“I don’t think you’ve seen my file, not the whole file.”

“You’d be surprised, Inspector, what I’ve seen. You’ll be pleased to know that your file and all its annexes have been pulled from the inactive archive and put back into active status.”

“In other words, I’m to be paid.”

“In other words, you take orders.”

“From whom?”

This earned a broad smile, a number one on the chart. “Lucky you.”

“For one thing,” the smile fell from the face as if held on with old cello tape, “it’s time to stop playing the angles, stop acting like a rat in the shadows.”

“Rabbit.”

“Another thing, stop contradicting me. I said ‘rat.’ I meant ‘rat.’ ”

“So, I should be more like . . . what?”

“When you’re sitting here, you’re working for me. Don’t try to figure out how to get around me, or play me off against someone else. There
is
no one else. For all intents and purposes, I am it. I am the party center.” He paused and glared. I could tell he was gauging my reaction. I only glared back, so he went on. “You don’t have to check with anyone else; you don’t have to worry
about orders being countermanded, or signals being switched, or my waking up one day with a new agenda.”

“You say jump, I jump. Fairly simple.”

“You jump, and you don’t come down . . .”

“. . . until you finish your soup. You still expect me to believe you’ve read my file? I’m not by nature a jumper. Everyone says so. There are whole chapters in my file filled with complaints about how I failed to jump.”

“No, but you will. You will. And you know why?”

“I can’t guess.”

“Because I could snap your backbone right here, Inspector. I could throw your guts out the window and let them hang there until . . .” He had to think about it, just for a second, but that was all it took. It told me he wasn’t as tough as he wanted to be. I didn’t need to get around him. When the time came, I could walk right over him, but only when the time came. If it came. Meanwhile, there wasn’t much I could do.

He fixed me with a baleful stare, his entire being concentrated in his eyes, sending probing rays into my skull. “I know what you’re doing. You’re calculating, Inspector. Don’t.” He stood up, switching off the ray machine. “Follow me. There’s something you need to see.”

We went into a hallway lined with old photographs: a woman walking down a dirt road, the village in the distance behind her, the sky overhead heavy with summer’s heat; two men sitting in the shade on a wooden bench in front of a house; a line of trees at midday; a bridge in the late afternoon with a woman and a young boy standing together, looking over the edge. I stopped at each photo. It was impossible not to fall deep into each one. They were from the 1930s, judging from the clothes the people wore and the way the trees leaned against the sky. When I looked up, Major Kim was watching me.