Bamboo and Blood

by James Church

  Once my fingers thawed, I found a phone and called up to Jenö?s room. “I made it here, barely. Meet me in the coffee shop. I’ll be the one pouring hot water over his head.”

  I was the only customer, so I picked the warmest-looking table and sat down.

  Jenö showed up a few minutes later. He didn’t even say hello. “How did the first group react when it found out about the other one?” It sounded like the beginning of a bad joke. The two Israeli delegations were staying in the hotel, but apparently he was steering clear.

  “I haven’t talked to them.”

  “You must have seen a report.”

  “Let’s just say one of them spit bullets and the other two laughed until they cried.”

  Jenö leaned back and smiled, content. It seemed a good time to break the news to him.

  “All your requests for meetings have been denied,” I said matter-offactly. We weren’t on a beach. We were both wearing our overcoats. The coffee had gone cold almost immediately, not that it mattered. “All denied but one. You can go to the Trade Ministry tomorrow morning, assuming there’s someone around to meet you. It’s only a five-minute car ride from here. Other than that, you’re allowed to wander around within the four walls of this building. You can look closely at the hotel lobby. When you get tired of that, you have permission to stare at the television in your room. As a fallback, go up and down in the elevator a few times.”

  “I protest.”

  “Then look out the window if you’d rather. I think you can see the train yard, or at least the tracks. I doubt you’ll see a train.”

  “I mean about the appointments. I didn’t risk that plane ride just to sit around this depressing hotel.”

  “Oh, really. You don’t like the Koryo? It’s not bad, once you get used to it. Besides, no one twisted your arm to come back. Why did you? We had a hell of a time getting you out safely the first time. You must realize by now that there are people who would like to get their hands on you. I’m still wondering how you got another visa.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “My Ministry doesn’t issue visas. If we did, you wouldn’t have one.”

  “I have money, Inspector. Your government is in rather desperate need. Tab A, slot B, so to speak.”

  “Well, your tabs don’t seem equally compelling to everyone, as far I can tell. Your requests for meetings are denied. I’m supposed to make sure nothing happens to you, and the best way to do that is to keep you here.”

  “I see. Perhaps you are the one who has denied my requests?” The man looked off into space; his eyebrows twitched thoughtfully. “It really doesn’t matter where I have my meetings, you know. People can come here. It’s warm, relatively speaking. We can sit and talk, drink tea, have something to eat.” He put his hand on my shoulder and his eyes lit up. “Brilliant idea, Inspector, brilliant. I should have thought of it myself. If I can’t go to them, they’ll be happy to come to me, right?”

  “When do your friends leave?”

  “Those two delegations? They aren’t my friends. We have different goals, very different. I want to make money. They think I cooperate too much with people who should be stepped on.”

  “They think we should be stepped on?”

  “They did think that before, but now they seem to have changed their minds. That’s why they’re coming by the planeload to see your officials.”

  “And what changed their minds?”

  He shrugged and then smiled. It was one of those charming smiles that put my hackles on red alert. “That isn’t something I would know, now is it? I just want to make some money.”

  I relaxed a little, it was so ridiculous. “Are you kidding? Money? Here?”

  “Sure, why not? You have workers; they know how to obey orders. They’re educated and can be trained. I’ve heard from others who have set up shop here that there are ways of making things work. If you had roads and electricity, I could be the richest man on earth.” He paused. “But I can make do with a lot less. What sense is there in being the richest man on earth? A lot of unhappiness is all it brings. You ever hear of King Midas?”

  “I slept through the English history classes.”

  He smiled. “Only one thing I need.”

  “Sorry, I already told you, your requests for meetings have been denied.”

  “I heard.” He put a hundred-dollar bill on the table, stood up, and walked past the girl at the front counter without paying.

  8

  The next morning, we met in the lobby. It was so cold the staff all wore overcoats with the collars up and, if they had them, scarves. “Someone from the party will see you at ten o’clock,” I said after we shook hands.

  “What about the Trade Ministry?”

  “It was decided you don’t require anyone from the ministries. The party will do fine for your needs.”

  “And what are my needs?

  “That is what you’ll explain this morning when you meet someone from the party.”

  “I suppose this means you are no longer assigned to look after me. So, good-bye, Inspector, thank you for your help.”

  As we shook hands again, his eyes widened slightly when he felt the bill in my palm.

  “You accidentally left something on the table yesterday,” I said.

  His hand went into his pocket. “It’s not polite to refuse a present from a visitor. Every culture has that as a basic rule.”

  “Perhaps, but I heard somewhere to beware of Greeks bearing gifts. We don’t see many Greeks,” I said, “so I assumed that went for the Swiss as well.”

  He smiled, not the charming one.

  “Maybe even Pakistanis.” It didn’t mean anything, or maybe it did. Pakistan was on my mind. Not on my mind, exactly, but just below the surface. Ever since my old friend the acting personnel chief had let me know that someone from Pakistan had gone to Hwadae county, I’d heard a rustling in my subconscious, something stirring, a Siberian wind blowing dead leaves along the frozen ground. Hwadae county was off-limits; we were supposed to report anyone overheard saying anything about the place. It was supposed to be a big secret that things to do with missiles went on up there, but plenty of people had relatives, who had friends, who knew former army buddies who drank too much and said something they weren’t supposed to when their heads were lolling and their tongues were loose. If someone from Pakistan had gone to Hwadae, then it wasn’t so far-fetched that the special section might have an unusual interest in what happened to a certain Korean woman who died in Pakistan—and something kept telling me that my first wild hunch had been completely right, it had been Pakistan. In the great wide world somewhere else, that might be a stretch. Not here, not in my little corner of reality.

  Jenö didn’t say anything when I mentioned Pakistanis, but the half-smile normally on his lips vanished into the cold. In that instant, he told me just what I needed to know. I left before his eyebrows slow-danced back into place.

  9

  After I left Jenö, I sat in the duty vehicle for a few minutes with the engine running and the heater on. Now I was pretty sure she worked at the embassy in Pakistan, or at least found access to a phone there. It was still officially a hunch, but it had become one of those hunches that don’t want to get crowded out by other possibilities. Yes, if Pak wanted to argue I’d have to admit it might have been somewhere else; I couldn’t prove she’d been in Islamabad. Actually, I wasn’t even supposed to prove it; I wasn’t supposed to worry about it. It wasn’t the sort of fact the broom was supposed to sweep. If the Man with Three Fingers hadn’t turned up and sneered, I might have dropped the whole thing, but I didn’t want to leave another body lying around my conscience.

  The problem was, where to go next? Her husband had an assignment, but doing what? For whom? Her father said she’d complained he was going to get her into trouble. If she was just a wife, how could he get her into trouble with the locals? It wasn’t beyond possibility that she had an assignment, too. And if she’d had an assignment, maybe it
was connected with why she turned up dead. In that case, there was only one place to begin checking—the Foreign Ministry. It wasn’t somewhere I liked to go, but they usually had hot water for tea.

  Outside it was frigid but clear, so I decided to leave the car at the hotel and walk. The less I had to drive on slick streets, the better I liked it. There were a few other people out walking, and even a couple of old trucks on the road. I watched them go by, which may be why I didn’t notice that the sidewalk down the hill hadn’t been cleared. Just as my feet left the ground, an army jeep coming up the hill spun its wheels and slid sideways into a nearby snowdrift. The driver climbed out and looked around. He spotted me on the ground.

  “You! Give me a hand.” It was an officer, a colonel. Just like I remembered from the army, a colonel always shows up when you least need him. When I didn’t move, he bristled. “I said give me a hand. I haven’t got all day.”

  Inquiring why he didn’t have a driver didn’t seem like a good idea, certainly not while I was on my back. I stood up slowly, careful not to slip again. “I’m on duty, Colonel, and on assignment.” It was an assignment I’d given myself, but what the hell. “I’ll give you a push, and maybe you can drive me where I need to go. It isn’t far.”

  That bargain didn’t seem to go down. “You think you can refuse a direct order from an officer of the People’s Army these days? I can have you arrested. I can even have you shot. I can do it myself, if I’ve a mind.”

  “You want help on your jeep or don’t you?” My feet were getting cold, and my back was sore. If I didn’t get somewhere warmer soon, it would stiffen up and I would be hunched over until spring. I wasn’t about to stand and argue for a whole afternoon, even a short one in January, with a colonel who didn’t rate a driver. He might have me shot, but he didn’t look the type to do it himself, certainly not here. There was more and more talk that the army had made a grab for extra status, but that still didn’t dictate executing police in broad daylight with no one else in sight. Make sense, you strutting bastard, I thought to myself. Why shoot a monkey to scare the chickens if there are no chickens around to see you do it? Or was it the other way around?

  The drive to the Foreign Ministry took less than two minutes. We roared up to the front steps so quickly it startled the sentry, who unfastened the holster at his hip and reached for his pistol. I was barely out of the jeep when the colonel backed into the street at high speed and slid into the square before he regained control, hurrying off in a spray of ice and snow.

  The guard had seen me before. He didn’t want to move again because if he did, it would disturb the warmth of the posture he had settled into. He flicked his eyes to the door. I went in and up the stairs to the liaison office. I didn’t knock.

  “Inspector!” The liaison officer had a small electric heater on. That was illegal, but warm. He nodded for me to come over and share the heat. “Is this a pleasant surprise, or have you arrested someone who is going to cause us trouble of a diplomatic sort?”

  “I’m on heater patrol.”

  “Well, you came to the right place.” The lights flickered once, then went out. So did the heater. “Funny,” he said, “the other day on the radio they announced that the electricity workers had overfulfilled this month’s quota.”

  “Perhaps they were rewarded with today off.”

  We stood around in the dark, wondering how long it would last this time. Sometimes it was only a few seconds; sometimes it was longer. A few people kept candles in their desks. Apparently, he wasn’t one of those. “Don’t move, Inspector,” he said very softly. “If you move, you’ll dissipate the warm air. Just stand still and let it waft slowly up to the ceiling. If we’re lucky, Mr. Shin downstairs will do the same, and his heat will be arriving through the floor just as ours goes up to Miss Ban. Imagine the heat going up her legs, will you?”

  “I’ll do no such thing.” I thought about it for a moment, and as I did, the lights went back on. “There, back from vacation. They probably just went out to read the paper. I need a favor—only you owe me, so it really isn’t a favor. It’s more like payment.”

  He rubbed his face with both hands, as if he were washing something away, maybe the memory of the last time I had twisted his arm behind his back to give me information. “Very well, though I don’t recall your doing anything for me lately.”

  “Are you going to make me pull your cousin’s file again? Selling copper from downed electric lines is still a capital crime.”

  “What is it I can do for you, Inspector?”

  “I need a few facts, that’s all.”

  He was impassive. Finally, he stirred. “If I can.”

  Just then the lights flickered again, but this time the heater stayed on. “It’s the wiring,” he said. “The heater draws too much power. You know what they say about this ministry—more heat than light. I’ll have to jiggle something.”

  Maybe people said that about every ministry. “Forget the wires and the cute slogans. I need a woman.”

  The liaison man looked up, presumably to where Miss Ban sat. “You’ll have to get in line, Inspector.”

  “No, I need information on a woman, a particular woman. She worked in the embassy in Pakistan until recently. Or possibly her husband did. One of them did, anyway. Before that she was in New York.” Admittedly, I still didn’t know for sure she had even been in Pakistan, but I felt as sure as I could be based on nothing more than a hunch. What I needed was a piece of paper that had it down in black and white. It did no harm to offer up what I thought I knew. If I was wrong, this man would be happy to say so. If I was wrong, I wanted him to smirk and jump in to correct me before he had a chance to realize that maybe it wasn’t something he was supposed to do. It was different with the old general. They were like two trees that reacted differently to the same breeze.

  “She has a name, I assume.”

  I wrote it down and pushed it over the desk. He looked, then blew out a puff of air. “A person of interest, apparently. Someone already came and took away her file.”

  “You saw it before it disappeared?”

  “I didn’t read it.”

  “You looked at it; it happened to open as you were retrieving it, and you happened to see something?”

  “Some files have clasps on them. This one didn’t.”

  I nodded. “What about the husband?”

  “That will take me a while. It’s hard to search files when the lights go on and off.”

  “Give me a call when you find something. If you don’t call, I’ll be back when you don’t expect me, and I might have some wire cutters with me next time.” He recoiled slightly. “Find a flashlight somewhere in this building. There’s enough light to see the files with that. Maybe Miss Ban can help.”

  He looked up at the ceiling, but I couldn’t see his expression because the lights flickered again and then gave way to the dark. I saw myself out.

  10

  “Are you actually so at ease with yourself, Inspector? I wonder if you are; or is it that you are as completely empty as always, void of all feeling?” My old friend the acting chief of personnel sat in my office. She didn’t have the air of someone who had the hots for me. Her question might have been the start of a late-night argument, just like old times, but it was only noon. It should have been a warning when she called and said she needed to come over. So why did I ignore the warning, the ominous tingle in my spine? Maybe I was distracted by the glare of the sun off the snow on the street outside my window. If I had been wearing my sunglasses, the glare wouldn’t have bothered me. If I’d had on my sunglasses when she walked in and sat down, I could have looked directly in her face and she couldn’t have seen into my soul, where I was surprised to discover she still lurked. I would have had time to stop myself, to keep my mouth shut. “Me? Ill at ease?” I turned and did the only thing I could. I laughed.

  She smiled, and I suddenly remembered she had several. One of them was real, pure starlight and moonbeams. This wasn’t it. “Happ
y to see me again so soon?” She could keep her tone eerily even, the same calm surface that killer sharks love to cruise beneath. She did it before she ripped you apart, tore huge chunks out of your existence before you had time to shout for help. Even now, when her tone was so deadly flat, her face was round and her cheeks dimpled. The smile might be unreal, but the dimples weren’t. The dimples killed me. They were mantraps.