The Orphan Master's Son (59 page)

I studied the map a long time. I had it spread across the Pubyok Ping-Pong table and was contemplating every word and line, when Sarge came in. He was soaking wet.

“Been doing some waterboarding?” I asked him.

“Actually, it's raining,” he said. “A big storm's coming in from the Yellow Sea.”

Sarge rubbed his palms together. Though he smiled, I could tell his hands were hurting.

I pointed at the big board. “I see there was a mass confession while I was out.”

Sarge shrugged. “We got a whole team of Pubyok with time on their hands. And here you were with ten open cases, just you and two interns. We were only showing some solidarity.”

“Solidarity?” I asked. “What happened to Leonardo?”

“Who?”

“My team leader, the baby-faced one. He left work one night and never came back. Like the rest of the guys who used to be on my team.”

“You're asking me to solve one of life's mysteries,” he said. “Who's to say what becomes of people? Why does rain fall down and not up? Why was the snake created cowardly while the dog was born vicious?”

I couldn't tell if he was mocking me or not. Sarge wasn't exactly a philosopher. And since Leonardo's disappearance, Sarge had acted strangely civil toward me.

I returned to the crudely penciled sketch of the Texas village.

He stood there, massaging his hands.

“My joints,” he said. “They're murder when it rains.”

I ignored him.

Sarge looked over my shoulder. “What do you have there, some kind of map?”

“Some kind.”

He looked closer. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The old military base west of town.”

“What makes you say that?”

He pointed. “There's the road to Nampo, and look, here's the fork in the Taedong.” He turned to me. “This have to do with Commander Ga?”

Finally, the kind of lead we'd been looking for, the chance to crack this case wide open. I folded the map. “I've got work to do,” I said.

Sarge stopped me from leaving. “You know,” he said, “you don't have to write an entire book about every citizen that comes through the door.”

But I did have to. Was anyone else going to tell a citizen's story, was there going to be any other proof that someone ever existed? If I took the time to learn everything about them, if I made a record, then I was okay with the kinds of things that happened to them afterward. The autopilot,
the prison mines, the soccer stadium at dawn. If I wasn't a biographer, then who was I, what did I really do for a living?

“Am I getting through to you?” Sarge asked. “Nobody even reads those books. They gather dust in a dark room. So quit killing yourself. Try it our way for once. Knock out a few quick confessions, and then come have a beer with the guys. We'll let you load the karaoke machine.”

“What about Commander Ga?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“His biography is the most important one.”

Sarge stared at me with cosmic frustration.

“First of all,” he said, “that's not Commander Ga. Did you forget that? Second, he wouldn't talk. He's had pain training—the halo didn't even touch him. Most important, there is no mystery to solve.”

“Of course there is,” I said. “Who is he? What happened to the actress? Where's her body, her kids?”

“You think the guys at the top,” Sarge said, pointing down to the bunker below, “you think they don't know the real story? They know where the Americans were hosted—they were
there
. You think the Dear Leader doesn't know what happened? I bet Sun Moon was probably standing to his right, while Commander Ga was to his left.”

Then what was our purpose
, I wondered.
What was it we were interrogating
,
and why?

“If they have all the answers,” I said, “what are they waiting for? How long can the people wonder why our national actress has gone missing? And what about our national hero, the holder of the Golden Belt? How long can the Dear Leader not acknowledge they've mysteriously vanished?”

“Don't you think the Dear Leader has his reasons?” Sarge asked me. “And just so you know: you don't get to tell people's stories, the state does. If a citizen does something worthy of a story, good or bad, then it's up to the Dear Leader's people. They're the only ones who get to tell a story.”

“I don't tell people's stories. My job is to listen and write down what I hear. And if you're talking about the boys from Propaganda, everything they say is a lie.”

Sarge stared at me in wonderment, as if only now did he realize the size of the gulf between us. “Your job …” he started to say. Then he started to
say something else. He kept shaking his hands, trying to expel the pain. Finally, he turned to leave, pausing only a moment in the doorway.

“I did my training at that base,” he said. “You don't want to be anywhere near Nampo during a storm.”

When he was gone, I called the Central Motor Pool and told them we'd need a vehicle to take us toward Nampo. Then I gathered Q-Kee and Jujack. “Round up some rain slickers and shovels,” I told them. “We're going to fetch an actress.”

It turned out the only vehicle that could get us down the road to Nampo in the rain was an old Soviet Tsir. When it pulled up, the driver was none too happy, since someone had stolen his windshield wipers. Jujack shook his head at the sight and backed away.

“No way,” he said. “My father told me never to get in a crow.”

Q-Kee had a shovel in her hand. “Shut up and get in the truck,” she told him.

Soon, the three of us were headed west, into the storm. The dark canopy was made of oiled canvas, which kept the rain out, though sprays of muddy water rose through the slats in the bed. The bench seats we sat on had been carved with people's names. It was probably the work of folks being transported to faraway prison mines like 22 or 14-18, voyages that would give a person lots of time to think. Such was the human urge to be remembered.

Q-Kee ran her fingers over the carvings, tracing one name in particular.

“I knew a Yong Yap-Nam,” she said. “He was in my Evils of Capitalism class.”

“It's probably a different Yong Yap-Nam,” I reassured her.

She shrugged. “If a citizen goes bad, he goes bad. What else should he expect?”

Jujack wouldn't look at any of the names. “Why don't we wait till after the storm?” he kept saying. “What's the point of going out there now? We probably won't find anything. There's probably nothing to find.”

The wind started to rattle the black canopy, its metal ribs groaning. A cascade of water poured from the road, sluicing over the sewage ditches.
Q-Kee leaned her head on her shovel handle, staring out the back of the truck at the two channels our tires cut through the water.

Q-Kee asked me, “You don't think Sun Moon could have gone bad, do you?”

I shook my head. “No way.”

“I want to find Sun Moon as much as anybody,” she said. “But then she'll be dead. It's like, until our shovels unearth her, she still seems alive.”

It's true that when I'd been imagining finding Sun Moon, I'd been picturing the radiant woman on all the movie posters. It was only now that I visualized my shovel raising up pieces of decomposed children, of the shovel's blade sinking into the abdomen of a corpse.

“When I was a girl, my father took me to see
Glory of Glories
. I'd been acting out a lot, and my father wanted me to see what happened to women who challenged authority.”

Jujack said, “That the movie where Sun Moon gets her head cut off?”

“It's about more than that,” Q-Kee said.

“Good special effects, though,” Jujack added. “The way Sun Moon's head rolls away and everywhere the blood spills, the flowers of martyrdom spring from the ground and blossom. That had me, man, I was there.”

Of course everyone knew the movie. Sun Moon plays a poor girl who confronts the Japanese officer who controls her farming village. The peasants must relinquish their harvest to the Japanese, but some rice goes missing and the officer decrees that all will starve until the culprit is caught. Sun Moon stands up to the officer and tells him it is his own corrupt soldiers who have stolen the rice. For this affront, the officer has her beheaded in the town square.

“Never mind what the movie was really about, or what my father thought it was about,” Q-Kee said. “All around Sun Moon were powerful men, yet she was without fear. I registered that. I saw the strength with which she accepted her fate. I saw how she changed the terms of men into her own. That I am here right now, in Division 42, I owe to her.”

“Oh, when she kneels down to take the sword,” Jujack said, as if he could see the moment before him. “Her back arches, her heavy chest swings forward. Then her perfect lips part and her eyelids slowly, slowly close.”

The movie is filled with famous scenes, as when the old women in the village stay up all night sewing the beautiful
choson-ot
that Sun Moon will
wear to her death. Or how, before dawn, when Sun Moon is gripped by fear and falters in her resolve, a sparrow flies to her—the bird holds kimilsungia blossoms in its beak to remind her that she does not sacrifice alone. The moment I remember, the point of the story at which no citizen could hold back tears, is when, in the morning, her parents bid her a final farewell. They say to her what has always gone unspoken, how she is the thing that gives meaning to their lives, that without her they will be lessened, that their love is of no use if not for her.

I looked to Q-Kee, deep in contemplation, and I wished for a moment that we weren't about to discover the decomposed remains of her hero.

The crow left the road and drove into a basin, a field of shallow water as far as one could see. When I questioned the driver, he pointed to the map I'd given him. “This is it,” he said.

We looked out the back of the crow. The sky flashed white.

Jujack said, “We'll get diphtheria in all this runoff. Look, I bet there's nothing out there, this is a probably a wild goose chase.”

“We won't know until the shovel hits the mud,” I told him.

“But we're probably just wasting our time,” Jujack said. “I mean, what if they moved it at the last minute?”

“What are you talking about, moved it?” Q-Kee asked him. “Do you know something you're not telling us?”

Jujack looked warily at the darkening sky.

Q-Kee pressed him. “You do know something, don't you?”

“Enough,” I told them. “We only have a couple of hours of light.”

Then the three of us jumped from the crow into ankle-deep water that was sheened with oil and sewage foam. Everywhere around us was muddy water, as far as you could see. The map, long since soaked, pointed us toward a stand of trees. Using our shovels as probes, we made our way. Passing between us were the humps of river eels wrestling through the shallow water. The beasts were like biceps with teeth, some two meters long.

The trees, it turned out, were filled with snakes. Their heads hung down to watch us splash from tree trunk to tree trunk. It was straight out of my awful dreams, as though the snakes from my sleep were visiting me here. Or did it work the other way—would these snakes visit me again tonight? How I hoped not. Endure what one must during the day. But please, can I not have some peace when darkness falls?

“Those are rock mamushi,” Q-Kee said.

“Can't be,” Jujack said. “Those only live in the mountains.”

Q-Kee turned to him. “I know my deadly snakes,” she said.

When distant lightning flashed, you could see them all, silhouetted in the branches, hissing, poised to drop on unsuspecting citizens as they went about their civic duties.

“A snake is a fucking snake,” I said. “Just don't provoke them.”

We looked around, but there was no sign of a fire pit or a corral. There was no chuck wagon, no guns or fishing poles, no stack of scythes.

“We're in the wrong place,” Jujack said. “We should get out of here before we get electrocuted.”

“No,” Q-Kee said. “We dig.”

“Where?” Jujack asked.

“Everywhere,” Q-Kee said.

Jujack stomped the blade of his shovel into the mud. With great effort, he pulled a single scoop of mud, sucking from a hole that filled with water. When he turned the shovel upside-down, the mud stuck.

Rain battered my face. I kept spinning the map, trying to see if I'd made a mistake. This should've been the place—the trees, the river, the road. What we needed was one of the dogs from the Central Zoo. It's said their savage instincts can detect bones, even ones long under the earth.

“This is impossible,” Jujack said. “It's all just water. Where's the crime scene? Where's any scene?”

“That might work to our advantage,” I told them. “If a body were in the mud, the water might help float it free. All we need to do is go around loosening the soil.”