Bamboo and Blood

by James Church

  “Only a partial wreck.”

  “Does anything still function here?”

  “That’s not my concern. If it’s inside the fence line, I guard it.”

  “I suppose the vegetables are worth something.” I walked over to a small plot that showed signs of having been cultivated a few months ago. The rows were uneven and the soil was rocky. “I don’t think they got much of a harvest, though.”

  “Did you need to see anything else? Or have we exhausted your curiosity?” The general stopped to retrieve something from under one of the steel bars. He held it up for me to see. “Cigarette butt.”

  “I recognize the species.”

  “My men don’t smoke these.”

  “Cigarettes?”

  “Not these.” He sniffed it. “French. Agitates.”

  “If you say so. I never smoked a French cigarette, so I’ll take your word for it.” I’d also never run across a cigarette butt that still smelled after sitting most of the winter in the snow, but there was no use pointing that out to a general. Besides, what a French cigarette was doing in his compound was his business.

  He put the cigarette butt in his pocket and then reached for his pistol. “I’m going to escort you back to the hut, Inspector. It will look better if we don’t seem to have become fast friends.”

  “Have we?”

  “Put it this way: When you finally walk out of here, my men should not see you again.”

  Back in the hut, the general pulled off his gloves and threw them on the table. The last portion of food was gone.

  “This is my headquarters. That is my headquarters staff.” He pointed at the two guards who had moved from the gate to stand by the door. “After the incident with that corps on the east coast—” He stopped suddenly. “You know what I’m referring to?”

  “I try not to pay attention to military matters, especially those outside the capital. It overloads my circuits.”

  “Someone in the Fifth Corps went crazy, or maybe they came to their senses. Anyway, it looked like the beginning of a rolling coup.” He watched my eyes. “Don’t pretend you hadn’t heard. It was crushed, and the rest of us had to readjust to fill in the blank spots. My division has twice the area to cover and half the staff. I am to guard these facilities and a few others close by. They moan to each other at night across the emptiness. That’s all they do.”

  “I’m still puzzled about the glass.” That, and why I was out here in the first place.

  “The glass? It’s a mystery, isn’t it? You’re a policeman, why don’t you find it for me?”

  “Can’t you replace it? At least board up the empty panes.”

  The general looked over as his adjutant shuffled out of the back room. He shut the door before I could see what sort of dog was in there. Not too many guard dogs are put up in staff headquarters, even if they’re only huts. “The inspector thinks we should board up the windows, Major.”

  The major coughed weakly and sat down on a chair against the wall. “Are you the one who brought the food?” He coughed again. “Did you bring any cigarettes?”

  The general turned back to me. “Fixing the windows will protect the overturned and rusted machinery, the rotted floors, and the corroded pipes from … from what?”

  “Forget I mentioned it.” The major needed cigarettes like Pyongyang needed one-way streets.

  “No, please,” the general said in a suddenly solicitous tone, “it is instructive to hear from Pyongyang. Always good ideas.”

  “To tell you the truth, General, I’m not here to comment on your facility.”

  “A relief to learn that, isn’t it, Major?”

  I didn’t remember sarcasm as a strong point of military service. Maybe the times had brought it out. “My apologies. No one is in a good mood these days, and I should have been more careful.”

  The general nodded at a chair. “Sit down if you want.”

  “You said this was a component assembly point.”

  The major stirred slightly, and the general frowned. “It was what it was; it is now something entirely different. Let’s call it a symbol and leave it at that.”

  “Whatever you call it, I’m authorized to bring a visitor here.”

  “This should prove interesting because I have no authorization to receive anyone.”

  “You received me.”

  “No, at the moment you’re still under guard.” He patted his pistol.

  I took out the document Pak had given me and unfolded it carefully. “This is a special situation.”

  The general stared at the paper. “More notes. Are you mocking me, Inspector?”

  The major coughed and put his head against the wall.

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’m serious.”

  “If I had a telephone that worked, I’d call the chief of staff,” the general said. The major lifted his head. “Or perhaps not,” the general continued. “Why not the first vice marshal?” He looked at the two soldiers. “Get me the first vice marshal on the double.” Neither of the guards budged, though the major groaned softly. “No, wait. We ate the last dispatch pigeon a week ago, didn’t we?” The soldiers smiled slyly.

  The general took the paper, read it quickly, and tore it into small pieces. “Wonderful to see you, Inspector. Nice to break the monotony. Now get out of here.” He put his pistol on the table. “Drive back to wherever you came from. Tell them that all is calm in the countryside, and that they can safely let us continue to sink into the earth.”

  The game wasn’t over, and we both knew it. “There are several sacks of rice in the trunk of my car, General. I put them there for traction in case the road was icy, but it’s clear, so I won’t need the extra weight on the drive back. The lock on the trunk is broken.”

  No one moved a muscle.

  “I need to be back in Pyongyang by sunset, so I’ll have to drive fast.”

  The general nodded; the two soldiers disappeared. After a minute or two, I heard the trunk of my car slam shut.

  “I hope to see you again, General.”

  “Have a safe trip,” he said, but he didn’t walk me to my car.

  Going back, the roads were no better than they had been coming. There was no reason they should be, since most of them were one lane.

  When I drove into Pyongyang, it was past dinnertime. I went straight to the Koryo. Jenö was pacing around the lobby. As soon as they saw me, the hotel security men disappeared behind the pillars and went for something to eat.

  “Where have you been?” Jenö pounced. “I thought you’d be here hours ago. Do you have any idea how many times the electricity went off while I was waiting?”

  I was hungry and tired from the drive. “Next time bring a flashlight if it bothers you.”

  “Did you get permission?”

  “Can I at least have time to sit down before you start on me?” I went over to the doorman’s chair and sat. “Hard to tell what we got. The military says no instinctively. In this case, it may have been less than categorical. The fellow on the scene is interesting, that much I can say with confidence.”

  “Now what? Do we go or don’t we? Without seeing the place I’m not prepared to proceed.”

  “Proceed? With what?” He started to reply, but I stopped him. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. That’s your business, and you can have it. Give me a day to think over what comes next. It will take me some time to fill up again, anyway.”

  “With gasoline?”

  “No, rice. This will cost you.”

  2

  The next morning, Pak was writing furiously. He always wrote furiously. Before they stopped making requisition forms, he put in a request every month for a chalkboard. “I want to beat the hell out of something when I write answers to these idiots,” he would say. “Chalk is good. A chalkboard is perfect. You can pound on it for hours, and then when you’re done, you erase the whole damned thing.”

  He stopped and crumpled the piece of paper that had borne the brunt of his pen. Then he
cursed, smoothed it out, and started writing furiously again. He didn’t look up when I knocked on his open door. “Get packed,” he said simply. He read over what he had written. “Damned craziness.” He put the crumpled paper in a file folder with a black band around it. “Well.” He finally raised his head. “Are you packed?”

  “For what?” I hadn’t gone back to the office that night after seeing Jenö It was late, I was cold and tired, and the tale of my conversation with the general could wait until morning. Nothing, I figured, would happen in the meantime.

  Pak pointed at the folder. “For this.” Apparently, I had been wrong. Apparently, a gear somewhere had become unstuck overnight.

  I looked at the folder. There obviously wasn’t much in it. It must have been only a small gear. “I don’t know what it says.”

  “Of course you don’t. It’s a secret, very closely held in the Ministry. I am even instructed to keep it from you. Can you believe that?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You are ordered to New York effective immediately.”

  “What?” My mouth doesn’t generally drop open, but for this it did.

  “You have an aisle seat on Saturday’s plane to Beijing. There you wait for a visa, which may or may not be forthcoming from the Americans, and then onward as soon as possible to New York. ‘Onward as soon as possible.’ I sound like a dispatch cable.”

  “I can’t do that.” I was thinking fast but not coming up with much. The last thing I wanted to do was to fly over the Pacific Ocean to New York.

  “Give me one good reason you can’t.”

  “I have to take our foreigner to that site he mentioned. Don’t you want to hear a report of what happened when I was up there? I’m not sure whether the note you signed made a dent, but at least they didn’t shoot me.” I was going to have to come up with something better, much better. The only problem was, I couldn’t think of anything.

  “They can shoot you later, after you get back, if they want. Right now, we have no time to worry about the foreigner. You have seventy-two hours to tidy up your office, clear those piles of paper off your desk, and wheedle a decent pair of shoes from the supply clerk.”

  “I don’t need shoes,” I said. “I need an explanation. When I land in a city behind enemy lines, I like to have some idea of what I’m doing, don’t you?” This sounded better; it even gave me momentary hope that I had found some firm ground on which to take a stand. Maybe Pak could turn it into something effective.

  “No, you don’t get to know anything.” Pak had a better sense of footing than I did. If he didn’t even pause to make a show of considering the argument, it meant there wasn’t any firm ground on this one, only swamp for as far as the eye could see. “Obviously, they’ll have to tell you something sooner or later. But nothing officially now, not yet, anyway.”

  “Nothing?” Paduk stones are given more notice of being put on the board than I was getting.

  Pak shrugged. “You didn’t hear it from me, but it has to do with the dead woman, the one for whom you were supposed to sweep up a few facts and then dump the whole thing back in the Ministry’s file of ‘cases-for-another-day.’ We only needed some background information on her. Nothing elaborate, remember? Shoe size, preference in blouse color, eating habits. Anything to fill up a few pages. Maybe if you’d done that like I told you, we’d have been able to unlatch ourselves from this whole thing.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “Doesn’t matter what I believe anymore. But, no, I don’t believe that.”

  “So, why New York?” I already knew why, or part of it. Her father had told me.

  “She was in New York for a short time before her final assignment. That much you’ve already discovered on your own, I take it. They want to know what she did, who she saw, where she went while she was there. They think it’s important, why I don’t know. I told you about those strange winds from strange places. This is one of those. Think of yourself as a seabird being blown off course to an exotic clime.”

  “It’s January. New York isn’t exotic; it’s colder than it is here. I know, I read the reports from the security detail assigned to the diplomatic mission there. They say it’s miserable.”

  “As if anything they write can be believed. Why you in particular were selected to go on this junket might seem odd, but these are odd times. You’ve been overseas before, so I suppose you naturally came to mind.”

  “Is this another one of those favors?”

  Pak could be impassive when he needed to be.

  “You volunteered me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I protested being deprived of staff, especially now.”

  “You wrote a complaint?”

  “No. But I crumpled the order a couple of times.”

  I smiled at Pak. He threw the file over to me. “Consider yourself doubly lucky. There’s a big meeting here next week, one of those national sessions. Ten thousand extra people in Pyongyang with no heat, no electricity, and no food. We’ll all have double shifts trying to keep them out of trouble. All of us but you. You will be happily away from the action, seeing new sights, dodging muggers and blond women with legs that reach all the way to heaven.”

  “I’m not going. They can’t make me.”

  “And will you cite the muggers or the legs as the reason?”

  Chapter Four

  I would have rather flown anything else, even a Chinese airline, but the Ministry insisted that I take their advice. “We’ve booked you on the U.S. national flag carrier,” the travel clerk said. “We know airlines, don’t worry.” So on Tuesday afternoon, I climbed into a middle seat and took my last full breath for twelve hours. The man next to the window was as big as an ox; the woman on the aisle had hips. The ox and the hips both ate their dinners without looking up. I left mine on the tray. When the lights went out for the movie, I listened briefly to the engines, closed my eyes, and tried to think.

  New York. I was bound for New York, where I could expect orders that would officially tell me less than what Pak had already told me informally. The orders would be encoded, but try as the code clerk could, he would not be able to make them sensible because, at base, they would be meaningless, almost certainly designed to use what I already knew to lead me away from what I really needed to learn. Whatever I was supposed to discover in New York, I wasn’t supposed to understand how it fit into a larger picture. Pak had told me as much as he knew. Well, almost as much.

  This had not been a simple investigation to begin with, even if that is what Pak insisted we could make it. Simple investigations don’t send inspectors to strange places, in such proximity to strange hips. Someone in Pyongyang was abnormally worried about the dead woman’s fate, and was frantically searching for clues on at least three continents, maybe more. More and more, it looked like that “someone” was Pak’s acquaintance, the one for whom he was suddenly doing favors. The one for whom I was only a Padua stone, put on the board wherever he needed. Nothing simple about it. Either the woman was extremely important in her own right—and what little I’d seen so far didn’t suggest anything along those lines—or she was involved in something very sensitive. Or maybe none of the above. There was still that final possibility, the one that kept popping into line and wouldn’t disappear. Maybe she wasn’t really the focus of whatever it was that was going on.

  Besides the woman, there was Jenö. No connection between the two of them that I could see, except that they dropped into my life more or less at the same time. Jenö had an inordinate interest in missiles. The woman might have been killed in Pakistan. I didn’t know if there were tabs and slots in all that, but it was worth bearing in mind.

  As long as there was nothing else to do, it would have been good to make a few notes, but there wasn’t enough room to move my arm.

  Chapter Five

  “There was about the place the curious and companionable silence of men at breakfast away from home.”

  Pak seemed to be listening
to me; I saw his head move to the side as it does when he is puzzled. But I was tired from the flight home, and he was slightly out of focus. Maybe his head hadn’t moved to one side. Maybe mine had.

  “It was a plain room, like the rest of the hotel. We all ate in solitary fashion. The waitresses kept their voices low. I suppose it might seem like a funeral, but it wasn’t. It was oddly pleasant. Even though we didn’t know each other, there was a sense of unity. We frowned together when one of the tables started a conversation. Bankers, I think. They were the only ones wearing yellow sweaters and big glasses.”

  This image of the breakfast room was still fresh in my brain. It was the only thing fresh in my brain. Otherwise, a brick occupied my skull, and had since I arrived back in Pyongyang around midday. The brick and I went straight to the office. “Don’t worry,” the customs official at the airport had said as he went through my bag absentmindedly, “it’s jet lag. They say it goes away sooner or later.” So far it wasn’t going away. My consciousness was still over the Pacific.