by James Church
“No. Three questions are fine, for now.” I let that sink in for a moment. “First, when you spoke to your daughter, you said she sounded excited. Do you mean agitated? Did she sound worried about anything, anything seem to be bothering her, any concerns she voiced to you about her personal safety? That’s all one question, by the way.”
“No, she said everything was fine.” I thought he might just shrug off the question again, but he seemed to take it seriously. “Something funny that I recall: When she called from New York, she said she’d walked in his footsteps and now she could die happy. That’s all she said before we were cut off. The second time, it was a few months later. It wasn’t a good connection, but I’d say she sounded tired. Trouble sleeping. The chants or singing, whatever it was, woke her early. It made her edgy, she said, everything being so foreign. One more thing, she said that fool husband of hers was going to get her in trouble with the locals. I’ll save you a question. No, she didn’t say why and I didn’t ask.”
“You saved me two.”
The old man grunted and walked over to the window. He moved one curtain to the side. The light didn’t exactly spill into the room—it was already late afternoon and there wasn’t much left—but the gray from outside crept along the walls until I could see that the place hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. We fell back into silence. I figured I’d give him a chance to say something else, if that’s what he wanted to do.
Finally, I stood and walked to the door. “I have a few other things to check, but I’ll be back for the last two questions. If you remember something that you think you ought to tell me, something you forgot, let me know.”
“Don’t bother coming back. There’s nothing else. You’ll be wasting your time.” He closed the curtain again. “I told her not to get into this stuff, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”
“What stuff?”
He moved over to the door. “I’m done talking to you, Inspector. Your people want something from me, tell them to put it in writing.”
3
I spent the rest of December sweeping up a few inconsequential facts about the woman who had been murdered. Or not murdered. Anything was still possible, based on what little I knew. Maybe she’d just dropped dead. I didn’t actually have a single fact about what happened to her, and the paper we had on her case told me exactly nothing. It asserted she’d been murdered. That didn’t mean anything to me. But I was starting to lean. That happens sometimes. A few facts here and there, a feeling stirs an intuition, and the next thing that happens, I’m leaning in the direction of a hypothesis.
Her father told me she said she couldn’t sleep because of the chanting in the morning. She wouldn’t tell him it was the call to prayer, but that’s what it could have been. This was circular, I knew. I assumed that what she was complaining about was morning calls to prayer for no good reason other than that Mun had suddenly shown up. Circular logic isn’t wrong, it’s round. If it was a call to prayers, it could have been any Islamic country, but again, not if I threw Mun into the equation. True, I didn’t know where Mun had been for all of these years. I knew where he and I had been, though, and it wasn’t a cosmic coincidence that he had suddenly appeared and wanted to talk over “old times” with me. Or that he had showed up just after someone had delivered an Israeli or a Swiss Jew, or whatever Jenö was, on our doorstep. If I had to choose, I’d choose circular logic over cosmic coincidence.
This is how I get when I start to lean, even when I know it would be better to assume things are unconnected. I looked, I swept, I dug into the woman’s background, but there wasn’t a lot of information about her where there should have been, and every time I found a gap, even a little one, I leaned a little more. She was dead. People had a habit of doing that, and afterward, there were always gaps. Some gaps are natural. That’s how people live their lives—gaps, empty places, silences. But not like what this woman left behind.
I had no description of where she’d been when she died, or what time of day it was, or what color clothes she was wearing, or which way her legs crumpled when she hit the ground for the last time, assuming she’d been standing just then, at that moment. If I knew some of that, I might have some sense of where to start filling the gaps. So I dug into holes that already existed, and swept small voids into bigger ones. That’s when it hit me, the pattern. Someone had given us this assignment, and then nothing. No pressure to finish the report. None. Mun had showed up out of nowhere, then disappeared again. No more contact. The special section had paid us two visits, and then they were off our backs. Not even a phone call. Gears were turning somewhere and then getting stuck. Not my business why, and as far as I could see, Pak didn’t think it was his business, either.
To my surprise, it didn’t turn out to be such a bad way to spend the end of the old year and the first weeks of the new one, poking around files, gathering odd facts, staring into the blank spots in the dead woman’s life. There wasn’t much else to do, and I wasn’t in the mood to do nothing. The folder I was supposed to be assembling was still on the thin side, and I was wondering how to make it appear fatter one morning when Pak walked in and dropped some orders on my desk. Normally, he says something when he gives me a set of orders. This time, he walked out again without saying a word. Not happy, I thought as I tore open the envelope.
I read the paper three times before the thought formed clearly in my mind: crazy. I was to go to Beijing to meet Jenö at the airport and escort him back to Pyongyang. It was beyond comprehension, given the thinly veiled—nearly naked, actually—threats from the Man with Three Fingers about how we shouldn’t have let Jenö out of the country to begin with. The man had barely got out, and now I was supposed to fetch him back? I walked over to Pak’s office and stuck my head in.
“Just do it.” He said without looking up. “Don’t ask me what is going on. I don’t have a clue.”
4
At the Beijing airport, Jenö smiled and followed me onto the plane. Considering the run-in we’d had in Pak’s office with the special section, the man seemed unnaturally calm, even for him. There wasn’t a drop of tension evident in his bearing, no cloud of concern on his brow, no spark of apprehension in his eyes. Someone watching us—and for sure there was someone watching us—would have thought I was more nervous than he was. Neither of us spoke for a while after takeoff. Finally, he looked out the window as the plane banked and the view opened up in a break in the clouds. “More snow than before, a lot more. January must be a bad month here, and it’s not even half over.” He pointed and his finger tapped the oblong window. “See that?” I leaned over his shoulder. “That’s the plane’s shadow playing across the ground. The snow is an odd color, isn’t it? Looks like butterscotch pudding spilled from the hills.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said and moved back in my seat. “To me, it looks like pumpkin porridge dripping from the rim of a pot.” No one made pumpkin porridge like that anymore. My grandfather made it in the autumn, from pumpkins we gathered off the vines that grew on the fence behind his house. He said he learned to make porridge from his father, and that I should learn it from him. After I moved to Pyongyang, I couldn’t get pumpkins. Or when I did, I couldn’t find the time.
“Sounds delicious, pumpkin porridge. Can you make it?” Just then the pitch of the engines changed. Jenö glanced around nervously, straining to hear what might come next. The engines dropped back to normal, and he relaxed. “I am very sensitive to sound, Inspector. Some people respond to visual cues. I am hypersensitive to sounds of all types.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“The people behind us, incidentally, are Israeli.” This he said in Korean, accented, but perfectly understandable. In fact, too good; it was as if the sound were coming from a machine. It nearly knocked me off my seat.
“You speak Korean? Why didn’t you let on before?” I had meant that to come out as complimentary, but the annoyance was quicker on its feet.
“Surprised? Your language isn’t so diff
icult, no worse than Hungarian. Besides, they’re related. Come to think of it, maybe we’re related. Wouldn’t that be something? Ancient brothers from tribes that wandered apart in the misty past.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t like paprika.”
The trolley with drinks stopped beside us. The stewardess looked down at me. Why don’t these good-looking girls work in my office, even near my office? I thought. Why are they confined to this ancient Russian tube ten thousand meters above the earth? Jenö nudged my arm. “Don’t pant. Just tell her what you want.”
“Nothing.” I nodded to the stewardess. “Nothing for me. Perhaps our guest would like something, though. Go ahead, ask him in Korean. Or Hungarian. No, wait, try Hebrew.”
“You really shouldn’t refuse me, Inspector,” the girl tossed her head back, just a little, just enough to notice, then she smiled at the foreigner. “Drink?” she asked in English.
He took a cup of tea; the trolley moved on. I looked around the cabin and then settled back. I closed my eyes, pretending I was somewhere pleasant. An elbow nudged me.
“I’d rather not be poked,” I said. “Please, don’t poke me like that, I don’t care whether we are tribesmen or not.”
He paid no attention. “You might get up and stroll into the first class cabin. There are some interesting passengers beyond the curtain. You’ll find three more, just like that group behind us. Say ‘shalom’ to them and watch their eyes pop out.” I didn’t move. “Go ahead, have some fun, what can it hurt?” He poked me. “Eh?”
I sat up. All of a sudden, existence was awash in Israelis. A few weeks ago, I’d never met one in my life. Now they had me surrounded on, of all places, an airplane. I wondered if they were planning to hijack the plane. These were the people who had carried off Entebbe. They were larger than life, tougher than nails. I didn’t like traveling by air in the first place; I hadn’t wanted to go on this assignment to Beijing; and now I was being poked relentlessly, surrounded by a commando flying squad. “I’m not going up to first class,” I said. “I never walk on an airplane when it’s aloft. It’s not right. Movement could disturb the balance, or the trim—whatever it is.”
“You don’t go to the toilet?”
“I make it a point to take short flights.”
“How about standing? Can you at least stand?”
“Standing is possible, as long as it is done gently,” I said. I stood up carefully and looked back at the trio seated three rows behind us. Business suits, European, but slightly off. They were reading papers in an alphabet I’d never seen.
Jenö reached over and tugged at my jacket. “The papers are in Hebrew. They think no one can understand. Classified documents, I’ll bet.”
I sat down again. “You know these people, I take it. And the ones up front, too?”
“Not personally, I don’t know them.” His eyebrows went into the first few steps of a gavotte and then stopped, as if the orchestra had abruptly gone out for a smoke. “I heard them talking while we were in line at the check-in counter. They’re from the Foreign Ministry, apparently. Chatting away, making snide comments, convinced no one could possibly understand Hebrew. Can you believe it? What are they coming for, do you think?”
“How should I know? And if I were you, that would be the least of my concerns. You’re in enough trouble. The real question is not why they are on the airplane.” Actually, that was a real question, it just didn’t bear on my immediate problem. “The real question is, why are you coming back? And why the hell didn’t you let on before that you knew Korean? It would have saved me having to translate through frozen lips when we were in that hut in the mountains.” I shut my eyes again. There were two questions that loomed, and I had no doubt that if I ever found the answers, they would be intertwined. First, exactly what I asked him—why was he coming back? And second, which was my problem more than his—who approved the visa after the trouble we had keeping him safe from the special section last time? A normal person wouldn’t want to come back. A normal visa request after what had happened would have been turned down instantly. It would have provoked gales of laughter before being stamped: DENIED. This return trip wasn’t normal in any respect. It even went beyond abnormal. So where did that leave me, other than accompanying a foreigner on the wrong side of unfathomable?
Jenö unleashed the familiar smile. “No games, Inspector. I appreciate your coming to get me, but it was unnecessary. I don’t need an escort; no one is going to touch a hair on my head.” The pitch of the engines changed abruptly again, too abruptly for him, because he paled and gripped the armrest. Apparently, he hadn’t been at Entebbe.
“Don’t let it worry you,” I said. What happened to his hair would get sorted out after we landed. “Probably just some dirt in the fuel line. It usually clears.” I watched him pale a little more before poking his shoulder. “Look, would I be here if I thought there was any danger? Don’t worry. This plane is indestructible. If it hasn’t crashed by now, it never will—that’s what you have to keep telling yourself. Don’t pay so much attention to sounds. You have to train yourself not to hear things sometimes. Like the thudding of Cossack hoofs.”
“Very stoic.” His voice was a little strained; maybe he was low on those silk pills he took every morning, or whatever it was that kept his voice so damned smooth. He craned his neck to look out the window.
“Do you want to switch seats?” I said. “You’ll feel better if you don’t have to look at the earth. It confuses the horizon, makes you dizzy when we bank or go bump.”
“Not at all. I just hate landings. Do you mind if I shut my eyes and sweat for the next twenty minutes until we’re on the ground?”
“Suit yourself.” The landing gear made a loud thump, and the pilot pushed the plane into attack mode. I checked to make sure the wings were attached, and spent the rest of the way down wondering how big a crowd from the special section was already assembled on the tarmac.
5
The next morning, Pak sat at his desk and pulled his ear. “This is complicated. No, I’m wrong, it’s not complicated. That’s too simple. It’s unbelievable, completely unbelievable.” He shook his head. “I still don’t believe it. Tell me you are joking, Inspector.”
“I stick to facts, and the facts are these. The first group, in the front of the plane, didn’t know the second group was in the back, and vice versa. They come from separate parts of the Israeli government. They don’t communicate, very secretive; one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, if you can believe that sort of thing happens.”
“So what are we supposed to do? Keep them apart? Bring them together? Put out name cards in the hotel dining room so they don’t get mixed up and share a table with each other?” Pak motioned for me to sit down, but I didn’t want to. If I sat, we’d start talking about things we shouldn’t be discussing. Inevitably, the subject of how bad things were in the countryside would come up, people moving without permits to find food, bodies on the side of the road, trains with old women riding on the roofs of the railway cars and falling off. We’d talk, one thing would lead to another, and we’d both be depressed for the rest of the day.
“I’m not going to worry about their seating arrangements,” I said. “Let whoever signed for them at the airport clean up the mess. We have one visitor to look after, and that’s enough for me.”
“Even one is too many. I don’t have the manpower for visitors of any stripe. I don’t have any manpower at all. You’re supposed to be putting together a file on that woman. It should have been ready a week ago. I haven’t even seen a draft, not a word.”
“I’m not the one who okayed the orders for me to fly to Beijing in the middle of everything.”
That was unfair; Pak hadn’t wanted me to go. “People do write on airplanes, you know, Inspector. They have those little trays that come down. I’ve seen them.”
“I thought you didn’t like to fly.” I started edging toward the door.
“I don’t. I had to board a plane at
Sunan once to search for something.” He turned the memory over in his mind. “Never found it.”
“Maybe some people can write on airplanes; not me. I can’t even think on a plane. Something about the noise and that sense of being disconnected from the earth. I’m not one of those people who likes to hurtle through the air.”
“You sleep?”
“Sleep? Don’t be crazy. I concentrate.” Pak looked dubious. “The engines need a lot of attention. Sometimes I concentrate on the wings, but mostly the engines. At that height, you don’t take anything for granted. There’s no way I could work on finishing up the file. Besides, the stewardesses are always interrupting, going up and down the aisle.”
“Brushing against you, I suppose. You got an aisle seat, naturally.”
“They’re assigned.” Pak’s face indicated he was dubious. “I could keep better control of him from the aisle seat.” Pak remained silent. “Okay, yes, the stewardesses are friendly girls.”
