by James Church
Margrit took my hand and offered what I took to be a tiny apology before turning off the hall light and disappearing again into the side room. Jenö motioned to the stairs. “Follow me, we’ll eat up there. Watch your step, the stairway bulb is out. The place is closed today, so we won’t be interrupted. Your M. Beret will have to wait outside. It will not make him happy, but”—Jenö shrugged—“he’ll live with it. The Swiss take disappointment well. Must be in the genes.”
3
We went up seventeen stairs—the five I saw, a sharp turn left, then twelve more. I pay attention to stairs; you never know when you’ll have to use them in a hurry. These treads were so narrow I thought to myself that the Swiss carpenters must have tried to save all the wood they could. Maybe Swiss had tiny feet. There were two rooms at the top of the stairs. The door to one of them was shut, which is something I don’t like when I’m in a strange place. The other room was brightly lit, but without much furniture. A small table with two chairs sat by a heavily curtained window.
Jenö indicated the chair where he wanted me to sit. “How about something with cheese? Fondue?” There was a black shoulder bag on the floor under the table. I kicked it to one side as I sat down.
“If you recommend it. I don’t know what fondue is.”
“A pot of melted cheese. You dip different things in it.”
“And they come out covered with cheese, I suppose.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Do you have another suggestion? Something simple.”
“Snails.”
“Simpler.”
“Frog’s legs.”
“What ever happened to chicken? Or beef?”
“Calf. Brains.”
“Pass.”
“Liver.”
“Pass.”
“You eat dog but you won’t eat calf? You eat ox knees but you won’t touch liver?”
“Who says I eat dog? Perhaps some soup, a salad, bread. Fish—anything but perch.”
“Let me order.” He stood up and called down the stairwell. When he was seated again, he put his fingers together, one at a time. I remembered not to interrupt his thoughts. “Will you have some wine?” he asked at last.
“You didn’t have me come here to eat brains and drink wine.”
“Not entirely, no.”
“Your black bag is clicking. Maybe you should check the mechanism. Odd placement, under the table. I wouldn’t think it would pick up sound very well from there.”
He reached under and pulled up the bag. “Did you kick this? You really shouldn’t mess with other people’s instrumentation that way. Besides, I thought things that were digital didn’t click.” He took out a small device and held it up for me to see. “This doesn’t actually record anything. The recorders are somewhere else.” He waved his hand to indicate somewhere and nowhere around the room. “Devices are not my specialty, so I don’t ask where they put those things.”
“Then what is that?” I pointed to the device, which was still clicking.
“I was told it was a transmitter of some sort. How it works from inside a bag I couldn’t tell you. I’d turn it off, if I knew how.”
Margrit came up the stairs with several plates, a basket of bread, and a bottle of wine. Jenö lifted his napkin from the table and waved it open. It looked like the pictures I’d seen of a matador waving his cape in front of the bull, which, I was once told by a Spanish tourist, is later dragged out—dead—by its tail. The matador, I seemed to recall, gets an ear.
“First we eat,” said Jenö, “then we talk.” He turned to Margrit, and they discussed something for several minutes. She shook her head vigorously; he shook his finger at her. Finally, she picked up the bag and heaved it out the door and down the stairs. She turned to him.
“Okay?” she asked.
“Okay,” he said and picked through the breadbasket for a roll that suited him.
4
After I was back in my hotel room, I mulled over what Jenö had told me during dinner. “This shouldn’t be so difficult, Inspector.” He’d had several glasses of wine and was about to pour himself another. “It’s straightforward, but your people keep dodging and wriggling. I argued that we should deal with you differently than we do with the Arabs, but maybe I was wrong.”
“You want to give me a clue, even a little one? Because otherwise, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I could have pretended to go along, nodded when he said that people were wriggling. But I preferred to know who was wriggling, and why. At home I could live with ambiguity. Not here, not in this tidy country where every hedge was clipped and not a single sunbeam bounced in the wrong direction. There wasn’t room for ambiguity here.
“Now that your heart rate is normal, tell me. What do you think of Dilara?” he asked. “More wine?”
“Beautiful girl,” I said. “No more for me.” Jenö?s expression changed. His eyebrows looked about to leap onto the table and do something with castanets. “Something wrong?” I asked. “Was that the wrong answer? You don’t think she’s beautiful?”
“These salted bread sticks are delicious, Inspector. Why don’t you take some back to your room? They’re from a wonderful bakery. Do you like baked goods?”
Chapter Four
“On your return, you will be hailed with a great ceremony at the airport. It will be thronged with press and cheering crowds, all to greet a man who had thought of abandoning the motherland but returned in its time of challenge and travail. Speakers will note that you are the grandson of a great hero; the blood lineage of the revolutionaries is always a good theme. There will be much waving of banners as you step from the aircraft stairs and plant your feet on the soil of your homeland. When they ask what made you return, you will say that Grandfather’s words echoed in your heart, that you saw him in front of you constantly, that you searched your conscience and finally realized you could not betray the people. You will weep at the mistake you almost made, weep at returning to the bosom of the country, the land where your parents shed their blood.”
My brother had left a message at my hotel for me to meet him again, this time in the park near the mission during the noontime break. As soon as I walked in through the gate and saw him sitting in the sun near the big pine tree, I knew I had made a mistake. Now that I heard what he had to say, I knew it was worse than a mistake.
“No. That I will not do.” I clenched my jaw so hard it hurt. “I will not play that sort of fool. I will not misuse Grandfather or our parents for such a ridiculous show. I will not betray them. You know I won’t do that. Why would you even suggest it? Are they so desperate at home to counter the defection in Beijing? Are they so rattled that they will grasp at anything, even this?”
My brother looked alien to me, and I thought I might despise him forever if I didn’t make one last effort. “Don’t you feel him near sometimes? I don’t mean like a ghost, but in your blood? When you see an old man on the street who looks a little like he did at the end, walks like he did, very proud and straight, don’t you think he is still around, a part of you?”
“Don’t be a fool.”
One more desperate attempt, one more and then I would quit. “Do you remember how Mother would sing at night, how her voice sounded in the darkness when she went down to the river to be alone? Can’t you hear it on the wind, still?”
“How could you remember anything like that? You were barely more than a baby. You’re romanticizing. There’s no time for sentimentality.”
“No, I remember. It is clear to me, her voice. I hear it sometimes.”
“Do you want to know what I hear? I hear grandfather telling us that they were dead, that we had no family left but him and that we had to leave in the morning because the battle was moving our way.”
“I remember her songs.”
“You don’t. You don’t remember a thing. You didn’t even cry when he told us. I don’t think you knew what was happening.”
“I remember Grandfather looking for someplace
warm for us to sleep. I won’t let you use him. It’s betrayal.”
“Use him? He’s dead! We all have jobs to do, now and maybe after we die as well. Besides, he wasn’t perfect, you know. Or maybe you don’t.”
“Perfect? What would you know about perfection? That’s just like you, isn’t it? Tearing down whatever makes you look small by comparison. Have you ever said anything decent about him? Have you ever mentioned what he did? No, you pretend as if he didn’t sacrifice everything for us.”
“This isn’t about me. What I’m asking does no harm to the old man. Let him be useful again, really useful, not a musty symbol of a bygone era. For all you know, he might have approved. He approved of almost everything that you did, didn’t he?”
That was meant to get to me. It did. “Damn you.” I thought of stopping there, but then the words boiled over. When other people mentioned my grandfather, I could ignore them, or just walk away like I almost did in Pak’s office with Sohn. That was impossible with my brother. With him it was different, exactly because he planned every word he spoke. Every word, every thought was for him part of an unending war fought against his own existence. But he did not fight on the front lines. He was a sapper who studied the structure, planned where to place the charge, and exploded it to cause maximum destruction. He thought of me as a bridge that had to be brought down to prevent the past from pursuing him.
“We aren’t related anymore.” I had never once thought of saying that, but there was no going back once I heard the words spoken in my own voice. “We aren’t part of the same family. We don’t share the same blood. From now on, we are strangers.”
He was silent, but not with shock or hurt or even with contemplation. I knew what he was doing; he was searching even then for a way to destroy me. There was only one thing left to say, and I might as well say it. “We are nothing to each other,” I said. “You and me, we have nothing in common, and we never did. Do you understand? Can I make it any clearer to you? We are not brothers. We are complete strangers who owe each other nothing. We will not meet. We will not talk. We will not acknowledge each other’s existence. As far as I am concerned, you died and I did not mourn.” He was looking out at the lake, pretending not to hear. I stopped for a moment to consider, but the words were already there, honed and dipped in poison that must have been fermenting for centuries. “Let me tell you this, if I ever find that you haven’t died, if you ever work your way into my sights, if I am ever, for any reason, told to hunt down a man and kill him and it turns out to be you, I will pull the trigger. You hear me? I will pull the trigger.”
That caught his attention. “No doubt you will, little brother.” He got to his feet. “The only question is whether you’ll live long enough to see that day.”
2
I watched him walk down the hill, past the stand of oaks and the line of maples all the way out of the park. I willed myself to be calm, but I had no will left, not for that. I made it a point to draw few lines in my life. Drawing them rarely made sense. People who drew lines became trapped on the wrong side. Things changed, reality shifted, shapes became shadows and shadows faded into night. You can’t see your principles in the dark. But where I did draw a line, I had no intention of erasing it.
At my grandfather’s funeral, a day of bright sunshine, people I had never met before bowed their heads and murmured as they passed by that I should be true to his name. On the day he died, the radio called him the Beating Heart of the Revolution, and all at once, when I heard that, I knew what he had been trying to tell me for all the years I had been in his house. I never saw him bend.
When we were young, not long after the war, my brother came home a few times a year. Whenever he did, my grandfather would become silent. It was a great honor, my brother would say. He was attending the revolutionary school for the children of heroes killed in the war. The students were all orphans, but they had not lost their family, he told us. The fatherland was our family, the party was our future, the Great Leader was the center of our hope. No one could rest on what he had done in the past; it was to the future we owed our lives. To me, it was stirring stuff. My grandfather sat with his hands on his knees and was silent.
Once, after my brother had returned to school, the old man went out to his workroom and didn’t come back, even though night had fallen. I found him sitting by the light of a single candle, holding a beautiful piece of wood he had been working on for weeks. As I stepped inside the room, he broke the wood across his knee. “Which piece should we burn first?” he asked me. I had no idea what to reply.
After my brother had disappeared outside the wall that surrounded the park, I set off for the lake. I walked, not noticing where I was or what I saw. I must have gone across one of the bridges, because the next thing I knew, I was all the way around on the western side of the lake, sitting on a bench that shared a patch of grass with a small linden tree. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a man jogging down the path. Barely a meter away, he stopped to tie his shoe. I knew what was going to happen next. He sat down beside me. “Nice day,” he said. “You jog? Good way to get exercise and see the sights.”
These people had no shame. I started to get up.
“Whoa, I didn’t mean any offense,” he said. “Just trying to make conversation. You look a little lonely, sitting here.”
I sat back down. “Let’s save ourselves a lot of time. I’ll give you my answer first. No. I’ll throw in an extra one for emphasis. No. And I have plenty in reserve. I brought a suitcase full of them and put several in my pocket this morning. No. Now, go ahead and ask your question.”
“What question? I told you, I was jogging. I’m here on a vacation.”
“Good for you. Myself, I’m here to dedicate a memorial to the Heroes of the Revolution.”
“Funny man. Look, you may not know it, but there are a lot of people about to crawl up your ass. Here’s my phone number.” He put a piece of paper on the bench next to me. “If you get nervous or decide you want a change of scenery, just call and ask for Mr. Walbenhurst.”
“Some name. I don’t think I can remember it. Is it real?”
“Everything is real, Inspector. And everything is possible.” He leaned over and checked his laces again. “Well, write if you get work,” he smiled. “That’s what my mama used to tell me.”
The woman sitting three benches away waited until he jogged past before she stood up. Nothing left to chance, I said to myself. Which is why nothing was possible.
3
The talks were on and then off and then on again for the next week. Their side read talking points, we read ours, then we all stood up and stretched. Then we sat down again to read the same talking points, and to hear theirs all over again. Finally, on a rainy afternoon, the opportunity arose to pass the message that Sohn had given me. The man I had selected as the target walked up to me.
“Nice tie,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“My tie?” It wasn’t what I had considered as the opening for slipping in the assassin’s blade.
“You seem to have a good collection. That one looks Italian.” He pointed to his own tie. “Mine are shabby by comparison, I’m afraid. I used to have one I bought in the Paris airport, but I can’t find it anymore. Does that happen to you? Ties disappearing. I have the same problem with socks.”
What problem? Were socks a problem? Were we exporting socks to rogue states?
“It looks like we’re going to be here for another week or so. Why don’t we all get together on the weekend, maybe go for a drive in the mountains? We could get a small bus. Let me know.” He smiled. “Nice talking to you.”
4
The idea of meeting the daughter of a Turk who worked for Israeli intelligence was not mine. I resisted up to a point, but I do not believe in taking hopeless stands. Dilara wanted to do it; she insinuated herself against me in ways that rapidly made my opposition untenable. I’d been to her father’s café almost every day, and every time she served me tea and little swe
ets and long ravishing looks that made my heart pound on my rib cage with a fierce insistence. Thursday afternoon, during the lunch break at the talks, I hurried over to the café. Her father was away. She came outside and walked with me to my hotel.
“I’m not going up to your room,” she said. “If my father caught me in your room, he’d slice you to ribbons. He doesn’t trust you.”
“Me? What have I done to deserve such suspicion?”
“Nothing. You’re Korean, that’s all, and he has bad memories of your country. You remind him of the war. He’s been very strange since you showed up.”
“The war was a long time ago.”
“My father says time is merde.” She smiled faintly. “Whatever that means. I try not to listen to everything he says. He doesn’t like me speaking to men, by the way.”
