Bamboo and Blood

by James Church

  “Your mission is on the other side of the lake, a long walk, especially in this weather. Perhaps you’d allow me to drive you? I could let you off a few blocks away, near the statue, the one of the woman whose lovely backside faces the road. No one would know.”

  “Why this change of heart? Last time we met, you wanted me out of the country.”

  “I did. For one thing, you people attract others. It’s as if you are flowers, and the bees of services from other countries cannot resist. They swarm in here and do silly things. That complicates my life, and I prefer life to be uncomplicated, or as uncomplicated as I can make it.”

  “Let me know how it turns out.”

  “To tell you the truth, I thought you were here to deal in missile parts. I’ve had enough of that for a while. In the last few weeks, I’ve gone through stacks of blurry copies of bills of sale and shipping manifests until I nearly went blind. If you were dealing in missile parts, I’d have booted you out without a second thought.”

  “Why would I be dealing in missiles?”

  He shrugged. “Why not? There’s money in it. Arms go through airports all the time. We usually don’t stop shipments unless they are labeled “Weapons;” it’s bad for commerce. In fact, yours is the only one we’ve stopped in a long time. We were asked to intercept it, so that’s what we did. The shipping form was unimaginatively filled out. ‘Bulldozer replacement parts,’ it said. I haven’t seen too many bulldozers with stabilizer fins, have you?”

  “I don’t know anything about missiles. Or bulldozers, for that matter.”

  “That was my conclusion, but it leaves a question. Why are you here?”

  “Ah, finally. Why didn’t you ask before? It’s not a secret. I’m here because my mother likes chocolate, and the store near our villa in Pyongyang ran out.”

  “Very good.” He laughed and looked around. “That will be a great shot, the chief of the Bundesamt für Polizei, sitting on a bench and laughing with a North Korean agent. Would you like a print? Or would you rather have a video of you with one of the Portuguese girls that hang out in our bars?”

  “I don’t know any Portuguese girls. The other day you were pushing Indonesians.” The chief of Swiss counterintelligence was following me around? You’d think the man would have more important things to do.

  He stood up. “My name, in case you are interested, is Beret. Please call me Monsieur Beret. I will call you Monsieur O. Or perhaps you’d rather I call you Inspector.” He watched for my reaction. I looked out at the lake and wondered briefly how much more he knew about me. And how he knew it.

  “It will start to snow within the hour. Stay warm, Inspector, however you can.”

  6

  It was Saturday, so there were no talks scheduled. That was fine, because I didn’t want to go over to the mission and make faces at the diplomats. I wandered by the chestnut trees and watched for a while as they danced in the wind. You couldn’t say they were graceful. A couple of big cars drove up to the hotel across the street and parked, but no one got in or out. It was getting too windy to stand around, so I headed across one of the bridges into a shopping district. I started down a covered passageway, and there was the Man with Three Fingers, examining watches in the window of a jewelry store. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised he turned up again. I had been pretty sure that just paying for his drink at the Sosan coffee shop wouldn’t be enough to keep him out of my hair forever. Maybe I should have bought him lunch.

  “A chance encounter, I suppose.” I walked up slowly and stopped a step behind him. He looked surprisingly at ease. At first I thought he hadn’t heard me, but he wouldn’t have missed my reflection on the glass. He moved, barely, to acknowledge my presence.

  “I leave nothing to chance anymore. Maybe you shouldn’t either.” He pointed at a watch. “Do you see that? It costs twenty thousand euros. Why would anyone spend that amount of money on a watch?”

  “Maybe they really, really want to be sure they know what time it is.”

  He pointed at another watch. “That one is ten thousand euros. Do we conclude it only tells time half as well? Perhaps it only tells time during the day, and you need another watch, one with diamonds, for night.”

  “Are you really supposed to be out all by yourself like this? I thought special police roamed in herds. Where are your pals?”

  “You’re my pal, O. Remember?” He finally turned to face me. “Or do you still just discard people when it suits you?”

  I let that alone. It wasn’t worth batting back. “The Swiss service is pretty good. They must have a bead on you already.”

  “I doubt it. They think I’m Mexican.”

  “Mexican? You know Spanish?”

  “Don’t worry yourself over what I know.”

  “I’m not. It’s just that the locals are keeping tabs on me, and by now I would assume they have taken twenty pictures of us standing here talking. Since I don’t know Spanish, they’ll assume you must know Korean. That will interest them, a Mexican with a mastery of Korean. They aren’t exactly kindred languages.”

  “Really? And what would you call a kindred language to Korean?”

  I figured he wasn’t really interested, so I kept quiet.

  “Still the same, aren’t you? Just like on the operation. When you weren’t worrying, you were fussing. I guess you must have fussed all the way out of the room, with me on the floor. Of course, I wouldn’t know. I was bleeding and unconscious. Practically dead. I guess that must have worried you, huh?”

  “Mexicans don’t speak Korean.”

  “We could be speaking English, or Chinese. Like I said, don’t start worrying yourself on my account.” He looked back at the watches. “No matter how much they cost, they all mark time the same way. The casing doesn’t make a bit of difference; it doesn’t go any smoother, or faster, or happier. It just goes, isn’t that right? And sooner or later”—he touched my shoulder with his ruined hand—“it always runs out.”

  A black car cruised by, the windows open.

  “Well,” I said in a loud voice, “adios, amigo.”

  7

  Sunday it rained, and when it didn’t rain, it snowed. That night I had trouble sleeping. It was ten o’clock in the morning in Pyongyang, no wonder I couldn’t sleep. So what if the Swiss clocks showed 2:00 A.M.? That wasn’t the time in my head, or on my watch. I never changed my watch to local time. Who the hell cared what time it was in Switzerland? The message Sohn had given me kept running through my head. When was I going to deliver it?

  I could see Sohn’s face, grim and deliberate, as he had gone over what he wanted me to convey. “They must be made to believe that we are about to collapse, that they will inherit more maggots than they can count, more bodies than they can bury, more disease than they can cure, more chaos than they can stomach. They are convinced that we are weak, on our last legs, about to collapse? Let them; let them worry every night when they go into their warm beds that we are about to hold our breaths until our wasted bodies fall across their doorstep. That’s good. We want them to think that, because it is the last thing they want. Do you imagine for one moment that they look forward to caring for us? Do you think they want the responsibility for twenty million beggars? Of course they don’t. It would interfere with their shopping, their specialty foods, their imported blouses and ties. The last thing our southern brothers want is for us to crawl into their fat lives, and so they will pay to prop us up. Believe me, Inspector, they will pay whatever it takes, and we will not let them get off on the cheap.”

  “So,” I said, “we show the Americans we are weak.”

  Sitting in that little room in the airport, I noticed that Sohn had rheumy eyes. That and his small ears did not make him look like a man on the way up. But appearance wasn’t everything. These days it wasn’t anything. Pak was right on this. The essential question wasn’t how pretty Sohn was, but how much power was behind him. I couldn’t be sure, but the more I thought about it, the more I had to guess it was plenty. Our minist
ry wasn’t easy to kick around; snatching personnel to send on funny assignments took clout.

  “No!” Sohn shouted. I had jumped. People with rheumy eyes usually didn’t shout like that. “Haven’t you been listening? Not weak. Crazy. We show the Americans we are crazy, crazy enough to pull the trigger. Still strong enough for that, and plenty crazy. If they think we’re weak and rational, we’re finished. They have to think we have weapons that can destroy them, because in fact, we do. For that, these foolish missile talks cannot succeed. If we end up making a deal with the Americans, they’ll never deliver. And the people who actually can deliver will be dealt out of the game. And then, then we will be weak. Then they will walk over us, at which point you and I, Inspector, will be dead. So we will survive by looking like we can’t survive. We will survive by looking like we can’t be defeated.” Then he had relaxed, the way a tiger relaxes when it’s near a tethered goat. “You have your passport? Cash? Well, now you have your instructions, too. I have only one more thing to say: Don’t screw up, it might be our last chance.”

  I remembered very clearly that final injunction. I turned it over in my mind. One of the roof timbers creaked in the cold, recalling something, and that’s when I knew it for sure. It wasn’t chance that Jenö had been assigned to our care. At two in the morning, there is a certain clarity that creeps around your brain. Tab A, slot B.

  8

  “I didn’t know you were allowed to travel these days.” My brother was never happy to see me, and certainly not by accident. I wasn’t happy to see him, either. When I woke up in the morning after a few hours of sleep, my stomach was bad. The talks had gone on all day, and my stomach hadn’t let up once. I wrote a cable for Sohn, but the code clerk wouldn’t take it for a couple of hours and I couldn’t leave it, so I sat around until almost 8:00 P.M., which was already 4:00 A.M. in Pyongyang. No one would read a message at 4:00 A.M., unless they couldn’t sleep. If I were in Pyongyang, I wouldn’t read a message at that time of the morning. If I had been in Pyongyang, I never would have run across my brother, who was standing in front of me in Geneva. I didn’t follow his travels, but I usually heard something whenever he left the country. This time I hadn’t heard a thing. Strange coincidence, us being here at the same time. I didn’t like it from any angle. I didn’t like being here with him, and I didn’t like the coincidence.

  My brother and I agreed on nothing other than that we wanted our few meetings to be carefully planned ahead of time. In some ways, he and the Man with Three Fingers were alike, nothing left to chance, though my brother was smarter and more devious.

  It had not always been this way between us. Our relations had never been good, but when we were younger, there had been less poison. When it was that things changed, I could not say and had stopped trying to understand. He traveled overseas frequently, ate at restaurants with crystal wineglasses, or so he liked to say. I didn’t know about the glasses that touched his lips, but I could see with my own eyes that he wore shoes with leather soles. He wouldn’t say what he did on those trips, and I never tried to find out. I could have flipped a file or made a call, but I didn’t want to know. My trips were simpler, easy liaison missions, cheap seats on trains, cheap meals, cheap liquor. No wonder my stomach was bad.

  “Once in a while, there’s something to do,” I said. He looked like a prosperous Asian businessman, well-cut suit, perfectly fitted, pale blue shirt. “I do whatever there is to do, then go home. How was I to know you’d be here? If I’d known, I would have told them to get someone else.” His eyes were not as dangerous as they had once been. When he was younger, he could flay a person with his eyes.

  “You never make things that simple. Who sent you here? Don’t bother being so secretive. All I have to do is make some phone calls.”

  There was never a moment to breathe; as soon as we stepped into each other’s line of fire, the guns started booming. “What do you care? My orders are valid.”

  “They can also be canceled.”

  There was no sense standing in the damp evening continuing a struggle that would only end when both of us were dead. “Then get them canceled, it doesn’t matter to me. It wasn’t my idea to come out here in the first place.”

  My brother stepped around a puddle. He looked carefully at his shoes. “I have a dinner. It will probably last until midnight. We can finish this conversation later. There’s a bar near a hotel on the main street that runs through Coppet, about ten kilometers up the lake.” He reached down and picked a wet leaf off the tip of one shoe. When he stood upright again, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his fingers. This was his way of annoying me. It always worked. “Can you find it on your own? You’ll have to take a taxi or hire a car. Meet me there at 1:00 A.M. Everything else in town will be closed but that bar; it will be hard to miss.” He folded the handkerchief carefully, so that all the edges were in line, then put it back into his pocket.

  “There may be a parade of people tagging along behind me. They think I’m selling missile parts.”

  My brother froze. It was only for a heartbeat, but I saw it. “Surely you’re not peddling missile parts these days,” I said. “Isn’t that beneath you?

  “And surely you’re not digging into other people’s business these days. Oh, wait, I forgot, that’s your job, isn’t it?”

  I turned and walked away, up the hill to the drab hotel where I was staying. The mission said it didn’t have space for me, and anyway, my instructions from Sohn were to keep clear of the mission as much as possible when we weren’t in talks. If I seemed to be operating outside the normal bubble, that would attract attention, he said, which is what he wanted me to do. Attract attention. From the two cars parked at either end of the street, it appeared I was succeeding. I decided not to go back to my room yet. I’d seen some beech trees that had been cut down a few streets away; maybe there would be a few chips I could pick up to bring home.

  It was hard to find beechwood in Pyongyang. One year my grandfather went to great lengths to have some shipped from Bulgaria. I had imagined a whole trainload would pull up to our door, but there were only a few boards. He treasured them. The day they arrived, we celebrated as if there had been an addition to our family. For months they sat in the house, carefully leaning against the wall in the room where my grandfather sat and wrote letters. I asked if I could help saw them. The old man shook his head. It was much too soon to talk about such things, he said. The boards needed to get accustomed to the place; they weren’t used to the climate, to the way we talked, to our dreams. The wood had to feel rested and comfortable, then it would be ready. Finally, on a spring afternoon nearly four months after our “guests” arrived, he said it was time. When I asked what he was going to make out of the boards, he looked surprised. “How would I know? The wood and I have to decide together, don’t we? Don’t think you can just impose your will on things. Don’t listen to this talk you’re hearing these days about man being at the center of creation. Wood doesn’t know about politics. And thank goodness for that.” It turned out that the beech wanted to be part of a chair. I only sat in it once, before my grandfather gave it away, a present to a friend in the army, a man with a long title and a nice office. When I went to visit him a few years after my grandfather died, he had disappeared, as had the chair.

  The two beech trees had been cleared away. From the pale light of the single streetlight, I could see a little sawdust on the road, but nothing else. I walked down the hill again to town, figuring I’d sit in a quiet bar until it was time to go meet my brother. If anyone was following me, they would just have to wander around a bit or find a place to relax until I set off for Coppet. I wasn’t sure where Coppet was, but I wasn’t going to let my brother know that. It would give him too much satisfaction, dictating directions to me. It was bad enough he just assumed that I would accept a summons to meet him someplace out of town at 1:00 A.M. The only thing worse was that he was right.

  I had been given a pocket map of Geneva before I left Pyongyang; I�
�d check it as soon as I found a place to sit down. It was an old map made in Hungary. Sohn had handed it to me with an odd look on his face. “What makes them think you’ll find this of any use,” he said, “I’ll never understand. It’s probably what Geneva looked like during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Let’s hope it’s better than nothing.”

  A woman in high heels, spikes that could go through your heart, passed me when I turned onto a main street in search of a café. She was blond, Russian, a face like a fox, though I don’t imagine a fox, even in a leather skirt, looks that way from the back. When she walked up to a man standing on the corner, it was clear they knew each other already. He put his arm around her waist. She drew away, just a tiny gesture, then settled against him. She doesn’t like him, I thought. Maybe she’ll murder him tonight, with those stiletto heels.

  Chapter Two

  Coppet was quiet and dark. A figure in a beret and a belted coat came out of a doorway and fell into step with me. “Lonely?”

  It was M. Beret. I couldn’t see his face, but the voice, even with just that one word, was unmistakable.