The Orphan Master's Son (28 page)

In the morning, there were no big good-byes. Pilar filled a basket with muffins and fruit for their plane trip, and everyone gathered out front where the Senator and Tommy had pulled up the Thunderbird and the Mustang. Dr. Song translated the Minister's farewell wishes, which were really invitations for them all to visit him soon in Pyongyang, especially Pilar, who would be hard-pressed to return from a worker's paradise if she did.

To all, Dr. Song offered only a bow.

Jun Do approached Wanda. She wore a jogging top, so he could see the power of her chest and shoulders. Her hair, for the first time, was down, framing her face.

“Happy trails to you,” he said to her. “That's a Texas good-bye, no?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “Do you know the response? It's ‘Until we meet again.' ”

The Senator's wife held a puppy, her fingertips moving through the soft folds of its skin.

She considered Jun Do for a long moment.

He said, “Thank you for tending to my wound.”

“I've taken an oath,” she said. “To assist all in medical need.”

“I know you don't believe my story,” he said.

“I believe you come from a land of suffering,” she said. Her voice was measured and resonant, the way she'd spoken when she'd talked about the Bible. “I also believe your wife is a good woman, one that only needs a friend. Everyone tells me I'm not allowed to be that friend to her.” She kissed the puppy, then held it out to Jun Do. “So this is the best I can do.”

“A heartfelt gesture,” Dr. Song said, smiling. “Unfortunately, canines are not legal in Pyongyang.”

She pressed the dog into Jun Do's hands. “Don't listen to him, or his rules,” she said. “Think of your wife. Find a way.”

Jun Do accepted the dog.

“The Catahoula is bred to herd,” she said. “So when that puppy's mad
at you, he'll bite at your heels. And when he wants to show his love, he'll bite at your heels.”

“We have a plane to catch,” Dr. Song said.

“We call him Brando,” the Senator's wife said. “But you can name him whatever you like.”

“Brando?”

“Yes,” she said. “See this mark on his haunch? That's where a brand would go.”

“A brand?”

“A brand's a permanent mark that says something's yours.”

“Like a tattoo?”

She nodded. “Like your tattoo.”

“Then Brando it is.”

The Minister began walking toward the Thunderbird, but the Senator stopped him.

“No,” the Senator said. He pointed at Jun Do. “Him.”

Jun Do looked to Wanda, who gave a nodding shrug. Tommy had his arms crossed and wore a satisfied smile.

Jun Do took a seat in the coupe. The Senator joined him, their shoulders almost touching, and slowly they began moving down the gravel road.

“We thought the talkative one was manipulating the dumb one,” the Senator said. He shook his head. “Turns out you were the one all along. Is there any end to you people? And controlling him with yeses and nos at the end of sentences. How dumb do you think we are? I know you've got the backward-nation card to play and the I'll-get-thrown-in-a-gulag excuse. But coming all this way to pretend to be a nobody? Why tell that cockamamie shark story? And what the hell does a minister of prison mines do, exactly?”

The Senator's accent was getting stronger as he spoke, and though Jun Do couldn't catch all the words, he knew exactly what the Senator was saying.

“I can explain,” Jun Do said.

“Oh, I'm listening,” the Senator told him.

“It's true,” Jun Do said. “The Minister is not really a minister.”

“So who is he?”

“Dr. Song's driver.”

The Senator laughed in disbelief. “Christ a'mighty,” he said. “Did you even consider playing level with us? You don't want us to board your fishing boats, that's something to talk about. We sit down in the same room. We suggest that you maybe don't use fishing boats to smuggle Taepodong missile parts, counterfeit currency, heroin, and so on. Then we reach an agreement. Instead I'm wasting my time talking to the chumps, while you were what, getting a gander?”

“Suppose you had dealt with me,” Jun Do said, even though he had no idea what he was talking about. “What is it you would have wanted?”

“What would I want?” the Senator asked. “I never heard what you had to offer, exactly. We'd want something solid, something you can mount above the mantel. And it would have to be precious. Everyone would have to know it cost your leader dearly.”

“For something like that, you'd give us what we wanted?”

“The boats? Sure we could lay off them, but why? Every damn one of them is freighted with mayhem and compassed toward trouble. But the Dear Leader's toy?” A whistle came from the Senator's teeth. “That's a different prospect. To hand that thing back, we might as well take a piss on the Prime Minister of Japan's peach tree.”

“But you admit,” Jun Do said, “that it belongs to the Dear Leader, that you're holding his property?”

“The talks are over,” the Senator said. “They happened yesterday, and they went nowhere.”

The Senator then took his foot off the gas pedal.

“There is, however, one more issue, Commander,” the Senator said as they drifted to the side of the road. “And it has nothing to do with the negotiations or whatever games y'all are playing.”

The Mustang pulled beside them. From its passenger seat, her hand hanging out the window, Wanda spoke to the Senator. “You boys all right?” she asked.

“Just getting a few things straight,” the Senator said. “Don't wait for us—we'll be right along.”

Wanda slapped her hand on the side of the Mustang, and Tommy drove on. Jun Do caught a glimpse of Dr. Song in the backseat, but he couldn't tell if the old man's eyes were crinkled in fear or narrowed by betrayal.

“Here's the thing,” the Senator said, and his eyes were locked into Jun
Do's. “Wanda says you've done some deeds, that there's blood on your file. I invited you into my house. You slept in my bed, walked amongst my people, a killer. They tell me life isn't worth much where you're from, but all these people you met here, they mean an awful lot to me. I've dealt with killers before. In fact, I'll only deal with you next time. But such dealings don't take place unawares, such people don't sit down to dinner with your wife, unbeknownst. So, Commander Ga, you can give a message direct to the Dear Leader, and this is on my letterhead. You tell him this kind of business is not appreciated. You tell him no boat is safe now. You tell him he'll never see his precious toy again—he can kiss it good-bye.”

The Ilyushin was littered with fast-food wrappers and empty Tecate beer cans. Two black motorcycles blocked the aisle in first class, and most of the seats were taken up by the nine thousand DVDs Comrade Buc's team had purchased in Los Angeles. Comrade Buc himself looked as though he hadn't slept. He was camped out in the back of the plane where his boys were watching movies on fold-up computers.

Dr. Song meditated alone on the plane for some time, and he didn't stir until they were far from Texas. He came to Jun Do. “You have a wife?” Dr. Song asked.

“A wife?”

“The Senator's wife, she said the dog was for your wife. Is this true, have you a wife?”

“No,” Jun Do said. “I lied to explain the tattoo on my chest.”

Dr. Song nodded. “And the Senator, he figured out our ruse with the Minister, and he felt he could only put his faith in you. This is why you rode with him?”

“Yes,” Jun Do said. “Though the Senator said it was Wanda who figured it out.”

“Of course,” he said. “And concerning the Senator, what was the nature of your conversation?”

“He said that he disapproved of our tactics, that the boarding of fishing boats would continue, and that we would never see our precious toy again. That's the message he wanted me to deliver.”

“To whom?”

“To the Dear Leader.”

“To the Dear Leader, you?” Dr. Song asked. “Why should he think you had his ear?”

“How should I know?” Jun Do asked. “He must have thought I was someone I'm not.”

“Yes, yes, that's a useful tactic,” Dr. Song said. “We cultivated that.”

“I didn't do anything wrong,” Jun Do said. “I don't even know what toy he was talking about.”

“Fair enough,” Dr. Song said. He took Jun Do's shoulder and squeezed it in a good-natured way. “I suppose it doesn't matter now. You know what radiation is?”

Jun Do nodded.

“The Japanese invented an instrument called a background radiation detector. They pointed it at the sky, to study something about space. When the Dear Leader heard of this device, he asked his scientists if such a thing could be attached to an airplane. He wanted to fly over our mountains and use it to find uranium deep underground. His scientists were unanimous. So the Dear Leader sent a team to the Kitami Observatory in Hokkaido.”

“They stole it?”

Dr. Song got a wild look on his face. “The thing's the size of a Mercedes,” he said. “We sent a fishing boat to pick it up, but along came the Yankees.” Here, Dr. Song laughed. “Perhaps it was the same crew who fed you to the sharks.”

Dr. Song woke the Minister, and together, the three concocted a story to mitigate their failure. Dr. Song believed that they should depict their talks as a complete success until, as they were about to agree on the deal, a higher power interceded via a phone call. “It will be assumed this is the American President, and Pyongyang's anger will be redirected from us to a meddlesome, vexing figure.”

Together, they practiced timelines, rehearsed key moments, and repeated significant American phrases. The phone was brown. It sat on a tall stool. It rang three times. The Senator only spoke four words into it, “Yes … certainly … of course.”

The trip back seemed to take twice as long. Jun Do fed the puppy a half-eaten breakfast burrito. Then it disappeared under all those seats and proved impossible to find. When darkness came, he could see the red and green lights of other, distant jetliners. Once everyone was asleep, and there
was no life on the plane but the pilots smoking in the glow of their instruments, Comrade Buc sought him out.

“Here's your DVD,” he said. “The best movie ever made.”

Jun Do turned the case in the faint light. “Thanks,” he said, but then he asked, “Is this a story of triumph or of failure?”

Comrade Buc shrugged. “They say it's about love,” he said. “But I don't watch black-and-white films.” Then he looked more closely at Jun Do. “Hey, look, your trip wasn't a failure, if that's what you're thinking.”

He pointed into the dark cabin, where Dr. Song was asleep, puppy in his lap.

“Don't you worry about Dr. Song,” Comrade Buc said. “That guy's a survivor. During the war, he got an American tank crew to adopt him. He helped the GIs read the road signs and negotiate with civilians. They gave him tins of food, and he spent the whole war in the safety of a turret. That's what he could do when he was only seven.”

“Are you telling me this to reassure me, or yourself?” Jun Do asked.

Comrade Buc seemed not to hear this. He shook his head and smiled. “How the hell am I going to get these fucking motorcycles off the plane?”

In darkness, they set down on the uninhabited island of Kraznatov to refuel. There were no landing lights, so the pilots dead-reckoned the approach and then lined up by the purple glow of the moonlit strip. Two thousand kilometers from the nearest land, the station had been built to service Soviet sub-hunting planes. In the shed that held the pump batteries was a coffee can. Here, Comrade Buc placed a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, then helped the pilots with the heavy Jet A-1 hoses.

While Dr. Song slept on the plane, Jun Do and Comrade Buc smoked in the crackling wind. The island was nothing more than three fuel tanks and a strip surrounded by rocks glazed white with bird guano and littered with chips of multicolored plastic and beached drift nets. Comrade Buc's scar glowed in the moonlight.

“Nobody's ever safe,” Comrade Buc said, and gone was his jovial sidekick tone. Behind them, the old Ilyushin's wings drooped and groaned as they took on their payload of fuel. “But if I thought someone on this plane was headed to the camps,” he added, turning to Jun Do to make sure he was being heard, “I'd smash his head on these rocks myself.”

The pilots pulled the blocks and spun the plane, nose into the wind. They cycled the engines, but before lifting over the dark, choppy water,
they opened the bilge, slopping out all the plane's sewage in a midnight streak down the runway.

They crossed China in darkness, and with dawn, they flew above the train tracks leading south from Shenyang, following them all the way to Pyongyang. The airport was north of the city, so Jun Do could get no good look at the fabled capital, with its May Day Stadium, Mansudae Mausoleum, and flaming-red Tower of Juche. Ties were straightened, the trash picked up, and, finally, Comrade Buc brought Jun Do the puppy, which his men had crawled the length of the cabin to capture.