Bamboo and Blood

by James Church

  “Can we walk around the block?”

  “You realize how miserable it is outside?”

  “I know the temperature, Inspector. You can chain me to your wrist if you want. I’m not going to run away.”

  I laughed. “Very dramatic. We don’t use chains. Okay, let’s walk. You have on long underwear? Or are you still relying on those genes of yours for warmth?”

  It was much colder outside than it looked, the dead cold that comes on clear, sunny days. There was no wind, but it was hard to move, the cold like an invisible weight, maybe gravity doubled. After we walked past the stamp store, I could see that he was having second thoughts about being outside.

  “You had something to say?”

  He was breathing hard, gasping from the way the air entered his lungs and filled them with ice, and I wasn’t sure he could hear me. He turned his head slowly. “Why would you think that, Inspector?”

  “No one is outside today unless they have to be. We don’t have to be, so the logical conclusion, and the one of every person who saw us go through the front door, can only be that you want to talk and—more to the point—not be overheard.”

  “You’ll record what I say?”

  “No, I don’t care what you say. I told you, I’m only supposed to keep you safe, and that means my main concern is that you don’t slip on the sidewalk and break your arm. Watch where you’re walking.”

  “Is there a place we can stop to get something warm?”

  “As long as we keep moving, you won’t freeze solid. I’ll have you back in the hotel in twenty minutes, unless you plan to make a long speech.”

  “In other circumstances, Inspector, I might have taken my time edging into what I need to say to you. I would have stroked your ego, appealed to your manhood, perhaps. Then I might have looked for some vulnerability, found a way to snap your psychic spine.”

  “But you’ve decided not to.”

  “No, the temperature has given me no choice. I have to get straight to the point.”

  “Suddenly, I’m doubly not interested. Forget it. Whatever you are going to suggest, forget it.”

  He shook his head. “Listen closely. I need your assistance, and in return, you can have whatever you want.”

  “You’re not serious. Only yesterday I told some fool that when it gets cold, people talk crazy. I thought I was making that up, but maybe it’s true.”

  “I’m not trying to recruit you, Inspector. I’m not asking you to betray your country.”

  “Then why couldn’t we stay in the hotel for this?”

  “I don’t want your brother agencies to know, that’s all. There are people trying to prevent me from getting my work done. Some people want me to succeed. Some people don’t.”

  “The latter group seems to be on top; tough for you. It’s nothing that concerns me.”

  “Quite the contrary. You don’t live in a bubble. Lots of things concern you, even if you know nothing about them.”

  I stopped. “Look at that line of trees over there, look at the tops, what do you see?”

  “Let’s keep moving. We’re not talking about trees.”

  “You may not think so. What do you see?”

  “The tops are even.”

  “Good. Now, look at the trunks, what do you see?”

  “Inspector, I’m freezing out here. Can we get to the point?”

  “The trunks, what do you see?”

  He sighed heavily. “Some of them are on small mounds, some are on the ground, but the tops are all still even. Are we done with this?”

  “Even, you say. None too short, none too tall. Now, let’s move closer. What do you see?”

  “The tops aren’t even any more. Can we please go inside? I value my extremities. I’d like to keep all of my fingers.” He looked at me oddly, but I pretended not to notice.

  “Nice illusion, isn’t it? The tops aren’t actually even. You can see that with your eyes, but your brain insists on creating a sense of order where none exists. It’s an illusion. What you see, and what is there—not the same.”

  “Have you ever seen pictures of those frozen mammoths in Siberia, Inspector? This is what they must have gone through in their final, excruciating moments. Listening to police-mammoths lecture until they turned to ice blocks.”

  “Ever since I was small, I noticed the illusion that trees gave, or rather that my eyes did. Things look uniform, only they aren’t. We have a need to see uniformity, so we do. Eventually, I began to wonder if reality was someplace other than where I was. Ever have that feeling?”

  “I have no feeling left. I think my lungs have begun to ice up.”

  “No, that doesn’t happen for at least another ten minutes, don’t worry. If you breathe through your nostrils, it might delay things a few minutes beyond that. In your case”—I looked at his nose—“maybe a little longer.”

  He groaned audibly. “I think I’m dying.”

  “The first time I can remember sitting on a train, staring out the window, I watched a farmer walk beside an oxcart along the edge of a field. The ox was plodding, the two of them barely moving. It confused me. The farmer was in sight for a few seconds, and then he was gone. Whose was the reality? His? Mine? Did he disappear? Or did I? Was he still there? Was I? I have that same feeling right now with you. If I look away, maybe you will disappear and not be there when I turn back.”

  “This is truly stunning, Inspector. How did I get mixed up with the only North Korean alive who imagines he is Spinoza? Stop worrying with metaphysical oxen. Pay more attention to the temperature.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder about reality?”

  “Yes! No! Who gives a damn about reality? We have to get out of this cold.” I didn’t move. “Do you know what absolute zero is, Inspector? It’s the temperature at which I lose my temper. Forget the big questions right now. There are savage birds circling. We don’t have time to worry about theories of existence.”

  I looked up, but there was nothing there. No birds. “Just suppose,” I said. “Suppose this isn’t reality. Suppose I’m actually somewhere else.”

  He stared at me oddly again. Then he shrugged. “The cold must be getting to you. Listen to me.”

  Chapter Two

  Jenö talked, and I listened. He referred to his list of travel requests, said he could do without meeting anyone from the party, emphasized again and again how there were people who wanted him to succeed while he was here and thus it depended on me to help him do that. He mentioned that virtue was its own reward, but added that additional recompense was not beyond question. He threw in a few comments about bikinis and suntan lotion, but then his teeth started chattering so badly I decided we’d better get back to the hotel. At the front entrance, he repeated that there were dangers all around us, birds of prey circling and so forth.

  I dismissed this as an exaggeration brought on by exposure to extreme cold. I’d seen it happen in the army when we were on guard duty for extended periods in winter. Frostbite of the brain, someone called it. I stuck around the hotel and kept my eyes open for the next twenty-four hours, nevertheless. I wandered through the lobby; I sat drinking tea; I shuffled into the hotel store and chatted with the salesgirls. I went up to the front door and looked outside. Nothing untoward occurred; nothing even looked about to occur. Day moved to night and back again without a hint of the unusual. There were no signs of bodily harm in preparation. People weren’t hanging around the vicinity of the hotel where they shouldn’t be. That was easy enough to see because the streets were empty. No one could be inconspicuous in this weather. Just in case, as I left to return to the office, I told the chief security man at the hotel to keep tabs on Jenö, something beyond their normal routine. I didn’t completely trust the hotel staff or the BSD men hanging around, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. We didn’t have enough people left in the office to assign against phantoms, not new phantoms, anyway. The old phantoms were taking up all available personnel.

  When I got back to t
he office and told Pak what Jenö had said, I thought he would laugh. He didn’t. “That’s all of it?” he asked.

  “Every word.” Some of what Jenö told me had been intended only for my ears, or at least that’s what he implied. But I don’t keep secrets from Pak, not when it comes to work. We don’t always put it in the files, but I make sure Pak knows everything I know—almost everything.

  “Go back there and sit around,” Pak said. “I don’t trust those security men, none of them. There’s a reason they work at the hotel, and it isn’t a good one. All I want is for our guest to leave in one piece. That’s not too much to ask, is it, Inspector?”

  I’d just spent a full day and night moping around the Koryo, watching the security men watch me. Why would I want to go back?

  “The hotel has hot water,” Pak said. This was true; they had more than the Foreign Ministry.

  “The duty car is acting funny. You don’t mind if I take yours?”

  “Why should I mind? You take my car all the time.” He tossed me the keys. “If you spin out on a patch of ice, don’t call me, I don’t want to know.”

  Back at my desk, I opened the top drawer and did a careful inventory. If I was going to sit doing nothing in the hotel, I might as well have a piece of wood that would help me sort through the case. Something pragmatic. Elm was good in that way. Most trees succumb to nonsense at some point in their lives. They get top-heavy. They forget their roots. Not elms. From beginning to end, they remain stately and pragmatic. I had a piece of elm somewhere.

  “Get moving, O!” Pak yelled down the hall. “I don’t want to explain to the Minister that something happened to our guest while my inspector was pawing through scraps of wood.” I grabbed the first piece I could find. Acacia. Suboptimal for the work at hand, but it would have to do.

  When I got to the hotel, I spotted Jenö sitting on a bench on the second floor. He waved but didn’t make a move to join me. Well, I thought, if the molehill won’t come to Mohammed.

  “I’m tired of being in my room,” he said as I stepped off the escalator. “There isn’t a lot on TV at this hour, and I’m out of things to read.” There was a book next to him on the bench.

  Just then, three girls walked by in single file. The first one, pretending to be busy thinking, stared straight ahead. The second smiled and nodded, almost gaily. The last one looked away, a deliberate gesture. It was probably as close to haughty as she dared. They were all the same age, not more than twenty or twenty-one. The second one had her hair tied in the back with a blue bow. Otherwise, they were dressed nearly identically in bright-colored traditional Korean skirts and jackets.

  “Did you see that, Inspector?” Jenö watched as the trio disappeared around a corner. “I love those dresses.”

  “I wasn’t looking.” Of course I’d seen it. Who wouldn’t look at three girls floating by like ribbons in an April breeze?

  “Nice to see something colorful for a change.”

  “Next week is Lunar New Year; that means the flowers can’t be far away. It’s built into people’s genes, this sort of rhythm. You find it quaint, I suppose.”

  “Not at all. Beside the dresses, you know what I noticed? Three girls, three separate reactions when they passed by.”

  “Three. Were you expecting more, or less?”

  “Why do you think the girl in the middle smiled? Why wasn’t she afraid like the other two?”

  “None of them was afraid. What do they have to be afraid of?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Three girls went by. They weren’t triplets. Is there any reason they should react the same? Are they trained dogs?”

  “It was a simple question.”

  “Good.”

  “Only a harmless observation.”

  “Fine.”

  Jenö pulled out his wallet. “Let me show you something.” He handed me a photograph of a group of schoolboys. Each confronted the camera in a different way. “This is my son”—he pointed at one of the boys—“and his friends. Look at them.”

  “I’m looking.”

  “Not trained dogs?”

  “No.”

  “So what makes them react so differently, so individually to the very same instant in time, just when the shutter clicks?”

  “You have a theory?”

  “No, it just interests me. I wonder about it. I’d say you do, too. All the time, you wonder about reality. Why does one person stand here and not there? Who moves to the front in a group? Who hangs back? Who smiles? Who smirks? Who stares into the lens? And most important, the question that nags constantly—why?”

  “And the answer is?”

  “You’re not following me, Inspector.”

  “I think I am. You’re trying to figure out whether I’m the bird that flies off the tree first, or if I wait for the others. You’re trying to figure out whether I’m the schoolboy who smiles at the stranger, or if I’m the one who looks away. Do I wave when your car goes by, or do I stare impassively?”

  “Cossacks, you’re seeing Cossacks again, Inspector. But thank you. I think you just answered my question. Now I have another one for you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Remember what I told you the other day? I need to make contact with someone. Can you help me?”

  “No. I hate to be impolite to a guest, but absolutely not. I cannot help you do anything but stay out of trouble. Why don’t we sit and wait for more groups of girls to walk by. They do that every so often. It passes the time, and as long as you only look, it’s harmless. Besides, it’s comparatively warm in here right now. Making contact with anyone means going outside.”

  Jenö passed me the book, his finger on the edge of an envelope between the pages. “They were sold out of volume twenty-two, but the lady assured me this one was equally as good.” His eyebrows did that bouncy, energetic dance the visiting Russian troupes always performed near the end of one of their programs. They call it a country quadrille. I just wasn’t sure what country.

  2

  In the midst of nowhere, in the middle of what should have been a small, narrow valley of rice fields backed up against a frozen river and lines of tall, ragged hills, a triple barrier cut across the land. On the outer perimeter, an electrified wire fence held up with thick concrete posts; inside that, electrified wires running close to the ground; finally, inside that, coils of barbed wire. The two electrified barriers probably weren’t live. There wasn’t any electricity out here, unless they had their own generator. If they did, it wasn’t running. Generators hum, but everything was quiet. No birds, no people, no nothing.

  A bridge stretched over the river, but I decided to park and go ahead on foot; the pilings didn’t look strong enough to take the weight of my car. On the far side of the bridge was a wide gate. In front of it stood an army guard, sunken cheeks, sunken eyes. The eyes glanced at my ID.

  “Wait,” was all he said before he disappeared into a hut just inside the gate. I waited. It’s best not to seem impatient when standing outside a military gate in the middle of nowhere. To pass the time, I flexed my shoulder. It was stiffening up, probably because on my way here, I’d had to back downhill nearly half a kilometer when one narrow road over a mountain just stopped. If anyone had reported the country was minus one road, it hadn’t made its way to the Ministry’s transportation office.

  A second guard walked up and looked me over. He seemed more alert than his companion; maybe he wasn’t used to visitors flexing at the gate. His expression was distinctly veiled. Not just one of those slack looks country people give you; this one was more careful than that. It was calculated, carefully designed to have no sure meaning. I remembered my conversation with Jenö. Which schoolboy would this have been? The one that hung back? The one that turned his head away?

  Off to the side, about ten paces away, was an elevated guard post, big enough for one man and high enough for him to be a couple of meters above anyone at the gate. It was meant for a third guard to watch the other two and to
make sure that if anything went wrong, there was backup with a clear line of fire. But it was unoccupied.

  The first guard emerged with my ID. He handed it back without any reaction. No eye contact; no gesture that I should pass; no refusal. In my days in the army, ambiguity hadn’t been one of our options. We told people yes or no; pass or go away. Those were the choices. Things apparently had changed. I decided the absence of a clear negative was positive enough, so I started through the gate.