Bamboo and Blood

by James Church

  Sohn had sent me out to talk to the Americans in Geneva; instead I was somewhere in France—or Italy, if they were to be trusted—sharing a fruit bowl with Mossad. Sohn didn’t make mistakes. I was here because he wanted me to end up here. When he played soccer, I had a feeling, the ball only bounced where he wanted it to. “If the talks succeed,” I said, “it will stop our missile sales to your neighbors. I take it that isn’t what you really want, even though you say that it is.”

  “To the contrary, it is very much what we want. And as you know, we are prepared to invest quite a bit in your country if we can be sure we are getting what we need. We want those missile transfers to stop, not slow down, not be rerouted. We want them to stop. But if the talks succeed, that will not happen. Why? Because you don’t trust the Americans, your side will probe for the seams in an agreement.”

  Ahmet hissed through his false teeth.

  “The deal will fall through sooner or later; and we will end up losing a lot of precious time on the problem. If the talks succeed, by which is commonly understood you sign something and drink a glass of champagne, we will be put on the sidelines and told not to interfere. Meanwhile, and this is our estimate, so please contradict me if you think we are wrong, your own situation will not improve. You will gain nothing from the negotiated deal, and the money you earn from sales elsewhere, even from your old customers, will become a pittance because no one will trust you anymore as a supplier. How can anyone sign a contract with someone who takes their money and then negotiates away the deal, tears it up for diplomatic gain? They barely trust you as it is. You see my point.” He didn’t wait for me to respond. “So it comes down to this: Would your side rather deal with someone who can deliver, or someone who can’t? That’s the choice. That’s the message that we want you to pass to Sohn.” He threw the plum pit into the fireplace and walked out of the room without saying good night.

  7

  “Don’t turn around, but that is probably one of your M. Beret’s boys who just swung in behind us.”

  “Why do you keep calling him ‘my’ M. Beret? He isn’t mine. If anything he’s yours. You’re the one who dined with him last night. I didn’t even eat.” I could see headlights in the rearview mirror.

  Jenö accelerated slightly and turned into the narrow street. “I’ll drop you just past that warehouse, up there, on the right. You’ll have to jump out while the car is moving. Are you trained for that?” It wasn’t a skill we used in Pyongyang, but that was no business of Mossad.

  “See you around,” I said and reached for the door handle.

  “You might want to release your seat belt first, Inspector.”

  “European sequencing,” I said. Fortunately, we had slowed enough so that when I jumped out, I only stumbled against a lightpost and fell into a pile of boxes. Jenö?s car disappeared; the one that had been following us squealed around the corner and roared past.

  When I limped in the front door of my hotel, M. Beret was sitting with a book in his lap, dozing. He looked up when the door clicked shut.

  “Ah, Inspector. Alarm bells have been ringing. Your mission is in an uproar wondering where you are. The talks were recessed and angry words have been exchanged. Your side says you have been kidnapped. Quite exciting. And you? Been skiing on the Italian side?”

  “I don’t ski.”

  “Then you must have bruised your shoulder jumping from a car. It takes practice.”

  “How would you know if I bruised my shoulder?”

  “You’re limping like a bird with a sprained wing.”

  “I’m tired, if you don’t mind. I’d like to get some sleep. Will you do me a favor and tell my mission that I was knocked unconscious in a disco and nearly suffocated in the crush of young, sex-starved bodies, but that I’m alright now?”

  “Of course, Inspector, that is probably as believable as anything.” He closed his book and watched me climb the stairs. “How was the lamb, by the way?”

  “Good night, monsieur.”

  I heard him move softly to the door.

  Chapter Five

  “The talks are locked up. We have no instructions; none will show up until we have sent back a good explanation for where you have been.” The security man at the mission was pasty-faced and nervous. He had already smoked two cigarettes and was fumbling to light a third. The ambassador sat quietly to the side. His aide was taking copious notes, though since nobody was saying much, it was hard to see what there was to record so far. Long silences can speak volumes, but it can be tricky getting them down on paper. When I first joined Pak’s section, I would polish my interrogation reports for hours, noting everything. Remarks, silences, facial tics—everything. Eventually, Pak told me that the Ministry had requested we submit something shorter. No more than one page for each report. “Boil it down,” they told him. I told Pak we’d lose the nuance. He laughed. “Keep a special folder for nuance, O. Once a year we’ll dump it out on your desk and sort through the pile.”

  “We’re waiting, Inspector. You were gone for twenty-four hours. Thursday night to Friday night. Where were you?” I recognized the man talking as the driver who met me at the airport when I arrived. In this room, he didn’t look like a driver anymore, or sound like one. The security man observed him sourly.

  Interesting, I thought. “Turkish food,” I said. “Since I was told not to attend Thursday night’s dinner with the delegation, I went out for Turkish food. I think I drank too much of that ugly liquor of theirs; when I came to, I was in a pile of boxes on a street near a nightclub. It was quite bizarre, actually. Hard to believe, but there you are. Keep away from that liquor, that’s my advice. If you don’t mind my asking, what do my drunken wanderings have to do with holding the negotiations? It’s not as if I add a lot to the discussions. I heard you accused them of kidnapping me. Why would they want to do that?”

  The door opened, and a woman handed a sealed envelope to the ambassador. She waited while he signed a log. “I think this might save us some time,” he said. “Give me a moment to read it.” He carefully opened the envelope and looked at the single sheet of paper inside. “That’s clear enough,” he said when he had read it through twice. He looked at the man standing next to me. “No more questions.”

  “What?” The security man ground out his cigarette. “Says who?”

  The ambassador’s aide grimaced but didn’t stop writing. The ambassador folded the paper and put it back in the envelope. “Inspector, I am going to request that you be sent home immediately. That’s a formality. I don’t really require approval. I have good and sufficient reason to order you out on my own authority, even before I receive guidance from Pyongyang. Your brother and I had a conversation the other day, and now I see why he warned me against letting you stay. You are disrupting my operations here. Because I do not know what you are doing or why, I consider you a menace. The Swiss are also unhappy, and if they are unhappy, so am I. The last thing we can afford is to have the Swiss snapping at us. They don’t want a defection here; neither do I. It doesn’t matter what airplane leaves in the next three hours, or where it goes. I want you on it.”

  Defection? Had my brother spread the word that I was thinking of defecting? There was a knock on the door, and the same woman came in with another envelope. The ambassador signed the log again, and this time ripped the envelope open. “Sons of bitches,” he muttered. The aide put down his pen.

  “I take it the inspector should not pack his bags just yet.” The man who wasn’t really a driver didn’t sound surprised.

  “Handwritten instructions from the Top.” The aide and the security man glanced nervously heavenward. “He stays.” The ambassador gave me a malign look. I didn’t know him at all; our paths had never crossed before, and if he had passed through my sector in Pyongyang, I hadn’t noticed. But he definitely didn’t like me. “There are wheels spinning, Inspector. I strongly advise you stay clear of things that don’t concern you.” He paused. “Mountain lakes are deep, just remember that. Perhaps i
t would be good for you to start wearing your badge. It might help with identification.” The aide closed his notebook and slipped out of the room. The ambassador turned to a young woman who had been lounging near the window. “The talks should resume the day after tomorrow. Have the delegation pass a message to the other side tomorrow morning telling them we have new instructions. Let them fuss with that idea for twenty-four hours. Don’t say anything about the reappearance of the wanderer.” Another malign look was flung in my direction.

  In the hallway, I passed Mr. Roh. It was time for our talk. “I’m going out for some fresh air,” I said. “I hear the fountain in the park, the one near the rose garden, is nice in the afternoon light.” He nodded and kept walking.

  2

  A smart young man—that was what I concluded when I saw Roh sitting on one of the white benches beside the fountain about an hour later. Smart, a little reckless, maybe a potential security risk. That’s how it would go down in his file if anyone spotted him here talking to me. A security risk because he was out meeting with a security person from another office without checking first with his own. And I knew he hadn’t checked with his own, because they never would have let him come here alone to sit with me. So he was a risk, and it wasn’t my worry. It meant he’d answer some questions, as long as I gave him a comfortable lead-in. His head was down and he might have been reading the book in his lap. But he wasn’t; he was waiting. As soon as he heard my steps on the gravel path, he looked up.

  “Nice weather,” I said. “A good day to sit underneath pine trees.”

  “This could get me into a lot of trouble,” he said. “The word going around the halls is, the ambassador doesn’t like you.”

  “But you decided it was worth the risk. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

  “I was curious. People have been wondering about you ever since you showed up.”

  “Have they? And why should that be? I’m just a servant of the people, doing the people’s business.” He was smart and he was curious, but he knew enough not to trust me yet. That was alright. I didn’t like people who trusted me too quickly. They could go the other way just as fast.

  Roh closed the book. “The people’s business. The people. The people.”

  “Our people. You know, the ones tightening their belts, again. The ones who would rather have guns than candy. I’d rather have guns than candy, wouldn’t you?” I looked down at my belt. “I have at least two notches to go.”

  “Every day, I push aside the plate of candy in front of me. More guns, that’s what I want, I tell the cook. That’s why we’re in Geneva, isn’t it? To make sure when my mother goes for her food ration, she can be told, ‘Here, have some more guns.’” He swallowed hard. “You’re going to report me for that, aren’t you?” He reminded me of my source on the campus back home, the girl who liked Rachmaninoff. I hadn’t expected him still to have that much of an edge. I assumed being in the Foreign Ministry would have smoothed it off.

  “All diplomats talk funny as far as I’m concerned. Especially inexperienced ones like you. I’ve stopped paying attention. But maybe you can tell me something. Why don’t we go for a stroll? It’s easier to talk when you’re moving. I learned that somewhere. Even in a job like mine, sooner or later, you learn things. You don’t realize until it’s too late that you learned something; and then you don’t remember where, or how, or why. There’s no voice that automatically pipes up: Inspector O! Attention! Learning experience! All you can do is check for scars, or dings in the windshield. That’s where lessons usually come, at 80 kph on a bad road at night with no moon.”

  “You sound like my father.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” We walked past the small grove of oak trees that still clung to some of last year’s leaves. There is nothing to recommend old leaves; they give nothing to a tree except the mournful appearance of days past. Once, when I mentioned to my grandfather that it was odd how oak trees clung to their leaves, he snorted. “Why blame the trees? Oaks are just too kind, that’s all. Not like maples.” He’d pointed his cane at a maple tree. “Greediest damned tree you’ll find.”

  “You keep looking behind us,” I said to Mr. Roh. “Don’t worry. No one is following.” Which was almost certainly not true. I couldn’t go out without someone trying to stay a respectable distance back, pretending to be birdwatching, or window-shopping, or consulting a bus schedule and wandering off curbs. But the Swiss didn’t need to follow me into this park; I’d already figured that out. They had the area under constant watch. Little cameras disguised as acorns, maybe, and too bad for the squirrel who ate one. If anyone was lurking, it was the Man with Three Fingers. I didn’t think he would bother with Mr. Roh, though, unless he thought he could use the youngster to club me senseless. Roh might have been followed by someone from the mission, but I’d be able to spot them soon enough.

  “Where are you from?” It was an uncomplicated question, I thought, nothing he would shy away from answering.

  “I was born in Pyongyang.” That meant he had seen the city in better days, in the 1970s, when the streetcars ran and the lights worked.

  “You get into the countryside much?” Not as simple; there were jagged edges on a question like that.

  “My mother’s family is from Chongjin.” He paused. “I was there just before coming here. My uncle was sick.” Sick. That meant he was dying of hunger, but no one would say that, certainly not this kid who was starting to wonder what I was doing, regretting he’d come out to meet me, still weighing what he said to make sure he didn’t say too much.

  “How were things in Chongjin?”

  Mr. Roh looked at me carefully. This was the danger point, and he knew it. The question wasn’t complicated; it could be deadly. If he told me what he’d really seen and if he’d misjudged me, he was finished.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m still not planning to write anything down.”

  “I won’t soon forget what I saw.”

  “Don’t, don’t forget. You understand me? Don’t ever forget.”

  We fell into silence again, standing under trees with dead leaves in a dying afternoon.

  “You want me to tell you something about the delegation, is that is it?” He shoved his hands in his pockets and thrust out his chin. “That’s the game? Always games and countergames. I get tired of them.”

  “But you came out here anyway. You do have a conspiratorial frame of mind after all. I was beginning to worry.” I wondered when he would get around to mentioning the delegation. I didn’t want to raise it. I wanted him to open that door.

  “Conspiratorial? No, just realistic. People criticize the Foreign Ministry for being unrealistic, but they don’t understand. We know what’s what.”

  “Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.”

  “We know plenty, trust me.”

  “Like for instance.”

  “Like you can be sure the delegation leader understands perfectly well what the game is.”

  “Game? Whose game?”

  “These talks we’re in. They’re part of the game at home. Some people want us to sell off the missiles to the Americans for money and food. Other people don’t want us to do anything at all, just stall. And then there is a group that wants us to pretend we’re making progress so another bidder will get involved.”

  “Really? Another bidder? Who would that be?”

  He shrugged. Maybe he didn’t know about the contacts with the Israelis, but it was more likely he did.

  “Sure,” I said. “You can’t tell someone from the Ministry of Public Security, because it’s a matter of security. Because you wouldn’t want to get yourself into trouble, would you? Not you, or your family.” It was a lousy thing to say. I wasn’t going to threaten his family, even if that’s what he thought.

  I saw him damp down a powerful surge of anger. He waited to speak until it had subsided, and he could trust what he was going to say. “The delegation leader goes out at night sometimes. No one knows where.”

&nb
sp; “The security man at your mission doesn’t keep track?”

  “The security man is busy. The delegation leader found out he likes Portuguese.”

  “The security man likes Portuguese girls?”

  “No, he likes Portuguese boys.”

  We walked up the hill and then back toward the rose garden. I saw someone duck behind a tree. “Time for you to get back,” I said. “I’ve got things to do.”

  3

  That night, I went out for a walk. I figured I’d go down to the lake and stroll back, but I must have taken a wrong turn. One wrong turn usually leads to another. It should be simple enough to back up to the right way again, but it’s not. You don’t know you’re lost until it’s too late. By the time I realized I was lost, that I didn’t know whether the lake was to my right or to my left, I was on a street that was dark and completely empty. The buildings were run-down, but that’s what buildings tend to be when you’re lost. The street didn’t go anywhere, except to another street that was even darker and more deserted.