by James Church
At the first checkpoint on the outskirts of the city, a young traffic policeman with a long face stepped onto the road and waved me over.
"Going somewhere? You're almost out of your jurisdiction." He was very tall and moved like a stork in a rice paddy, slowly, with an odd, deliberate majesty. His white uniform was spotless; the white hat fit perfectly on his head. I had no idea where they had found such a specimen, or why he was assigned to a low-level traffic checkpoint. The tall ones usually get better assignments.
"The local security officer in Pyongsong called with an emergency.
He said he had some information on a case." It was the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment.
"He must have been lucky to get through. The phones are down.
There's a lookout for you, Inspector." He leaned down so his face was even with mine. "You don't know me, but I know you. You're O
Chang-yun's grandson. Military Security doesn't want you to leave city limits."
"So what now?" He was polite, but I had the feeling he was going to be a problem.
"If I told you to turn around, that's what you'd have to do."
I started to turn the wheel, but he put his white-gloved hand on it.
"That's what you'd have to do if I told you. But like I said, the phones are down, and my radio doesn't always work. Mostly it's a miracle when it does." He pulled his head back and stood up. "Road is clear from here to the Sinuiju turnoff. You ever been to Sinuiju? Nice place. From there you can go into China real easy."
"No. I don't like border cities. You're not from one, are you?"
"Drive carefully, Inspector." I started to thank him, but he was already walking back down the road. In the mirror I could see him bend over and retrieve something from behind a tree. It was an old thermos with a black plastic cup. As I pulled away, he was pouring himself some tea.
The Sinuiju turnoff usually had a couple of sentries standing around.
Sometimes they stopped a few cars to break the boredom, but they didn't exert themselves as long as there wasn't an inspection team in the area. They didn't even raise their heads as I went past. I wasn't surprised.
If Kim was tracking my progress--and I didn't know if I could trust a traffic policeman who had a thermos--a black Mercedes would suddenly appear out of nowhere. Sometimes it seemed those cars just sprouted from the earth, spit up from hell.
Past Kaechon, there were convoys of big brown trucks with field workers standing in the rear. Whatever the alert in Pyongyang, it hadn't reached into the countryside yet, or no one wanted to get in the way of bringing in the crop. Gangs of women sat beside the road, resting from the harvest. A few had taken off their floppy hats and put them on the ground, where they fluttered with each passing truck.
The fields gave way to hilly wasteland, and coming around a curve I passed a young girl walking alone on a deserted stretch of road. She held a dainty white sun-parasol over her head and had a white bag purse slung over her shoulder. What really caught my eye was her blouse.
Crisp and new, but most of all red. Bright, bold red. She looked straight ahead, her free arm swinging at her side. I watched her in the rearview mirror for as long as I could. Where was she going all by herself, wearing a red blouse in the middle of nowhere? I almost stopped to offer a ride, but on second thought I decided she was one of those cranes on the celadon vase. Lifting in flight, going nowhere.
When I pulled across the tracks onto the final short stretch of road that led along the river to the hotel, the moon was rising, pale and brimming with the sorrow of early evening. The sight of the hotel did nothing to cheer me up. The last time I was here, I had seen it only during the day. In the sunlight, even if you weren't crazy about buildings that looked like wedding cakes, you could see that some effort had been made to fit the hotel into the landscape. At dusk, it looked like a spaceship that had wandered off course, or a big white bug feeding at the foot of the hills.
The lobby was almost dark and seemed deserted. As I stepped inside, I spotted two people sitting on a sofa against the far wall. When she saw me, Lena lit a cigarette and looked away. Song, the singing security man, started, muttered something, and then disappeared through a doorway marked no entrance. The front desk looked unmanned, so I wandered over to the sofa. "Shocked to see me?"
"Not half as shocked as you are to see me." She blew some smoke off to the side. "There aren't any no-smoking rooms here, but the twelfth floor has a good view." She'd been drinking, enough so that she slurred a word here and there.
"So does the fifteenth floor, I hear." I sat down next to her. "Out of your neighborhood, aren't you?"
"My papers are in order, if that's what is worrying you."
"I'll bet they are."
"I'm glad to see you." She patted my hand. "Really I am." For some reason she switched to Chinese; maybe it was because knitting reminded her of her mother. "I hope the sweater fit."
I realized I had never even tried it on, but I knew enough not to say so. "Did you have dinner yet?"
"Still good at changing the subject, I see. Yes, I ate. They serve early.
The dining room has closed." She looked at her watch. "And I must get to the bar upstairs in a minute, before it opens." She put out her cigarette slowly and then turned to me. "Tomorrow is promised as good weather."
Maybe I was tired, or maybe it was her perfume, but it took me half a second too long to realize what she meant. By then, she was at the elevator.
There was a laugh from a chair hidden in the shadows behind a potted plant. The desk clerk emerged and moved behind the counter.
When Lena stepped into the elevator and the doors closed after her, he laughed again. "You better fix that timing, friend, or you're going to be one lonely inspector. The rules are you must, I emphasize must, have a reservation to get a room, but what I just saw was so pathetic, I'm willing to bend them. Lucky for you we have a room or two left. Breakfast starts at seven. Tell me now or you don't eat." He handed me a key: 1504.
I dangled it in front of his face. "How about another floor?"
"Can't. We're full and you don't, I emphasize don't, have a reservation.
When we're full, we use the fifteenth. Great views." He gave me a sly look. "Don't worry, the window won't swing open in this room. The bastards soldered them shut."
The floor mat in the elevator said it was Wednesday. Either they were two days late changing it, or they wanted to get a good jump on next week. The hallway on the fifteenth floor was pitch-black. The only way to find my room was by counting doorknobs. When I rattled the knob on what I assumed was 1502, I heard the safety clicked off a pistol.
I didn't bother to apologize. At the fourth knob I opened the door, half expecting Kim to be sitting on the bed. Or Kang. The room was empty. Maybe they didn't know where I was. One of them would by tomorrow. Someone roaming through the parking lot would see my plates and phone them in. I thought about walking up to the temple in the moonlight but remembered the climb and fell asleep instead.
The knock on the door at four in the morning woke me. Something about that hour attracts hall walkers. I knew it wouldn't be Kim. He wouldn't knock, not after what happened during our last meeting. It was the local guy, Song. He looked uneasy as he opened the door, stepped in, and turned on the light. "Master key." He held it up for me to see.
"Good morning."
"I put new plates on your car, from Hamhung. Now it's part of the Hamhung group that's here to see the Friendship Exhibit, though there aren't many of those Volvos left. Sort of stands out. I don't really know if there are any in Hamhung, but no one's going to check right away. Too much trouble." He massaged his shoulder. "Don't thank me. It's my job."
"Did you have something else?"
"Kang was here, but he left all of a sudden. He said you'd know what to do."
"That's it?"
"Yeah. If I were you, I wouldn't stick around here, Inspector. The Military Security team down the hall is restless. They're packing the
ir equipment. Somebody's coming up from Pyongyang tomorrow night to pick them up."
"Kim?"
"I don't know. I'll be glad when they're gone. And you with them."
"Any more cars with girls come up here?"
"I wouldn't know what you are talking about. Your old plates are in the trunk. Along with that gas can."
"How much gas did you take?" As I got out of the bed, he backed toward the door.
"Don't worry, you've got enough left."
"Anything else?"
"Yeah, I'd do something about that rear tire. That's what I'd do."
2
In the morning I went down to the front desk and asked the clerk to give Lena a message.
"She's in 614. Deliver it yourself if you want."
"I don't. I want you to give it to her." I handed him a sheet of stationery that had been in the room. There were no envelopes, so I folded it in thirds and then tucked in the edges. I didn't write anything. I figured the blue button I'd found on the floor in the closet in the Koryo would be enough.
3
The pine needles made a soft bed on the slope of the hill facing the temple. No one could see anything from below; the spot was screened by wild azaleas and a grove of scrub pine trees. Lena had circled around and approached me from behind. I heard her footsteps, but not until the perfume reached me did I turn to look at her.
She had on the same long skirt and the white blouse she'd been wearing the night I first saw her. The blue buttons were even brighter in the sun, but mostly it was her eyes that took the light.
"We missed our picnic last time," I said. "I thought we could try it here."
"If I'd known, I would have brought something." She was speaking Chinese, and I was never able to read much emotion drifting in the tones of that language.
"I have the black bread and blueberry jam." She didn't look amused, and I began to worry that the whole thing was a mistake.
"A small joke," I said. "Sorry. I did bring some rice cakes from the hotel and a couple of apples. They're tart this time of year."
"I see you have a bottle of beer, too. Do you have any glasses, by any chance?"
"No. We'll have to drink out of the bottle. Not so elegant, I guess.
Next time I'll bring some cups that I made a few years ago, out of persimmon wood. Liquor takes on the flavor. So does tea. Do you like persimmon?"
I reached in my pocket, then remembered all I had was a piece of oak. "Persimmon is pretty wood. Has a nice glow. But it hides itself. Some wood tells you almost as soon as you touch it what it means to become.
Not persimmon. It's beautiful on the surface, almost unfathomable underneath.
That's why furniture made out of persimmon often looks odd.
Someone tries to shape it into something it was never meant to be."
"Is that the greatest tragedy you can think of, Inspector, being shaped into something you were never meant to be?"
"It is a sad thing, don't you think?"
"You're not married, are you, Inspector? I've heard you live alone.
Didn't you ever want to be with someone?" It wasn't the question I was expecting.
"I'm fine. I'm with other people enough. I'm with you right now."
"That's not what I meant." She stopped and I waited. The silence grew, but there was nothing awkward about it.
"In the house where I grew up," I said after a while, "there were only two of us, my grandfather and me. Both my parents died in the war. My older brother went away to a school for the children of war heroes, but I was too young. Grandfather said that I had to be more filial than any kid whose parents were still living, I had to respect the memory of my father and mother with all my heart. If I'd been a tree, he used to say, I would have had to be the straightest one in the forest."
"Trees in the forest aren't alone. My father used to tell us that when you see a tree standing by itself, it's a sign that something sad will happen."
"Maybe my father would have said that, too. I don't know what he would have told me. It isn't something I wonder about." The silence fell between us again. I looked at her face and was surprised to find she was crying softly. I handed her a handkerchief. "I've heard that when a man and a woman part, he gives her a handkerchief." I paused. "I hope you won't keep that."
She laughed, the mixed-up laugh that sometimes comes from a woman who has been crying. "This is very nice of you, Inspector. It's the sort of thing I imagined you'd do. Maybe that's why I've thought about you so much since we met." She dried her eyes. "What do you want?"
"Wasn't this your idea?"
We sat down on the pine needles. She was close beside me but with enough distance to leave open what she had in mind. "That must have been long ago," she said. "A week, a decade. Time moves in funny ways in this country. Did I suggest a picnic? I must have been intoxicated with the idea of a quiet afternoon. Maybe I thought it would be like at home, by the lake. Maybe I thought you and I would have something to talk about. Do we? Pardon me for asking again, but what you do want?
It's not an unreasonable question, under the circumstances. You didn't drive up to Hyangsan to see me. You didn't even know I'd be here."
"You're right. I was surprised. I'm just wondering, how is it that you happen to be so far away from where you normally stay?"
"This is a resort, as you may have noticed. There are tourists here, with dollars." She let the thought hang in the air. "Not very pretty, I realize.
Do you still want to have a picnic?"
"Tell me about Finland."
"You mean, why would a Finn come here, to this country?"
"You know a guy named Pikkusaari?"
She turned her head away quickly. I hadn't even thought about that question. It just came out, like Lake Keitele.
"I don't know him well. He used to work for the Finnish National Police. He and my father often did business, though he was very young at the time."
Now it was my turn to blink. Maybe she was making this up. She probably made a lot of things up, but I didn't follow that thought too far.
"Your father did business with the police?"
"No, Inspector, my father was a spy. I never knew exactly who he worked for. As a businessman, he traveled all over. He was gone every winter and spring, but every year on June 21, without fail, he always came home. We waited at the train station for him, my sisters and I. Pikkusaari came to see him a couple of times a month, in the summer. The two of them went for long walks beside the lake, moving slowly, their hands behind their backs. Sometimes they would be gone for hours. When they came back down the path, they looked exactly the same, moving slowly, hands behind their backs, as if they'd never said a word to each other the whole time. For all I know, they didn't.
"When they returned, Pikkusaari would always say, 'You're a lucky man, Ollie. You've a good wife and fine children. All you lack is a son.
I wish I could say the same.' Then they would drink a bottle of vodka, sitting on the wicker chairs we put under the birch trees in the back of the house, and listen to old records. My father had a good collection of classical music, but he insisted it be kept for winter, when everything was dreary. Summer was for jazz, he'd say. With the record player perched on the ledge of the open window, the sound turned up, he liked to sit facing the lake, tapping his feet. Pikkusaari liked jazz, too, but he said he couldn't listen to it at home. His mother couldn't stand what she called 'that noise.'
"That's how they'd sit, my father and Pikkusaari, drinking and listening to jazz. Neither spoke, except to say something in English, 'Oh yeah,' or 'That's the stuff.' After a few glasses of vodka, Pikkusaari would stand up and start to dance by himself, perspiring, his face tilted toward the sky, eyes closed, his hands swaying over his head as he turned in small, tight circles. Where we lived was quiet, no other houses nearby, and the scratchy sound of jazz, a trumpet and then a piano wildly taking flight, would make its way down to the water, where my sisters and I lay on our backs on the pier, watching the
clouds. Around nine or ten o'clock at night, with the summer sky still bright and small waves from the lake splashing against the wooden pilings, Pikkusaari would stagger toward his car. My father would call after him, 'You're drunk, you fool, drive slowly.' "
"Did your father ever come here?"
Lena shook her head. "To this godforsa . . . isolated country? He said it wasn't worth his time."
"Any Asians ever come out to see you at the lake?"
"My mother was Chinese, Inspector. It was rare enough among all those blondes. We always had visitors." She was dodging the question; I didn't know why. Or maybe I did, but I wasn't going to spoil the picnic.
"If you must know, Pikkusaari came out the most. My mother said it wasn't to see my father really, but to see me."
"Fine. Enough questions. Let's just enjoy the view." As I moved closer to her, my hand touched hers. I could see the pulse in her throat, and the way the breeze floated strands of her long hair over her shoulders.
Then it was gone. She stood up and brushed the pine needles off her skirt. "I think we're out of luck again, Inspector. I have to be back in the hotel before dinner, to change and put on my makeup.
Anyway"--she looked up at the sky--"it's going to rain." She pointed across the valley, where a huge cloud bank was piling up, dwarfing the hills and rapidly replacing the high blue of autumn with a heavy blackness that squeezed the light out of what might have been a glorious afternoon.
"People think I'm absentminded, that I forget things. Maybe. To me, it's more complicated. I know something, but I choose not to remember it. I can do both at the same time."
The Irishman looked tired, but I knew he was wide-awake. He turned off the tape recorder and put his hand over his eyes. "That's not good for a detective, is it? Detectives are supposed to see everything, remember everything.
"
"So you think. But knowing too much can only lead to trouble. You know what you need to know. I'm not talking about instincts. No, my instincts are fine. Sometimes they move sideways, like an ox stumbling across a muddy field, I let them move however they wish. People think instincts should be sharp, they should fly like arrows. I don't believe that. I think instincts should wander and meander, like streams coming down the mountain.
