Bamboo and Blood

by James Church

  “Perhaps you could be more cryptic for me.”

  “Later. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Me? My work here is done.”

  “Before I went to your hotel, I paid a call on the ambassador. He was surprised to see me.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Actually, I thought he was going to have a stroke. No such luck. When he could finally talk, he picked up the phone and told his aide that they were leaving immediately for Zurich. A meeting, he said. I saluted him from the front steps as his car went out the gate, but I don’t think he was mollified. So I went back to his office to write him a note.”

  “You went into his office?”

  “I sat at his desk, actually. He shouldn’t leave some of those documents lying around like that. The wrong people might read them. Apparently, the situation is fluid.”

  “Are we back to cryptic? Because if we are, I’m going to my hotel.”

  “Before that, you’ll have to do some shopping. There are new instructions from the Center for everyone working overseas. They can be summarized as follows: Collect vegetable seeds and food, food, food. Fertilizer if it is to be had, but the first priority is food. So is the second priority. And so is the third. On ships, on trucks, on bicycles—it doesn’t make any difference. For the moment, we grovel, we pander, we lick the boots of anyone who will deliver. You won’t believe the catchphrase that excuses this madness.” Sohn took a pen out of his pocket. “You need a pen?”

  “That’s the ambassador’s. I saw him use it. You took the ambassador’s pen.”

  “Don’t worry, I left him his pencils, most of them, anyway. What you need to worry about is the new instructions.”

  “What happened to ‘crazy’?” I asked. “The last time you and I spoke, that was to be my message. It was delivered, incidentally.” I didn’t mention to whom.

  “Scratch ‘crazy.’ According to the new, improved thinking, it will only scare people off. ‘Quietly desperate’—that’s where things are now. If you already told people we’re crazy, you’ll have to go back and undo it.” He unscrewed the pen and looked at the parts. ‘They’ll eat us up,” he said absently. “This is exactly what the wild dogs at our door have been waiting for. It’s suicide, admitting we’re weak.”

  “I’m going to ask you a question.”

  “Let me ask you one first. Your brother—do you know what a menace he is, Inspector? People like him think their time has come. The Center is distracted. Every day there is more to worry about. I think we may actually be coming out of the worst of it, but there is still plenty that can go wrong. Your brother and his friends were busy last year when the sky was darkest. They used the time well, and I’m a year behind. It might as well be a lifetime.”

  “Do you want me to nod knowingly, Sohn? Or will you tell me what you are talking about first?”

  “Imagine this. They’ve been digging, and planning, and putting together the pieces. A piece here. A piece there.” He moved the parts of the pen around on the table. “In a month or two, if they are left alone, they’ll be ready to walk into the Center and present what they’ve done. Then it will be too late. They’ll lay out plans, sketch out scenarios. And at that point, when I am asked what I think, it’s too late. Should I say: ‘No! Don’t do everything possible to protect the Fatherland.’ Or how about: ‘No! It is dangerous to go down that path, it risks everything we’ve accomplished, it might explode in our face.’”

  I frowned. Sohn was careful with his imagery; he didn’t make mistakes.

  “At that point, the only answer I can offer is, ‘Good for them. Hooray for them. All honor to them.’ Your brother will be rewarded. He’ll swagger, he’ll go to the parties, he’ll put his filthy fat hands—” Sohn stopped. “Forgive me.”

  “No, go ahead, say whatever you want. He isn’t my brother anymore.”

  I thought Sohn would bark, but he didn’t. He hadn’t barked once the whole time.

  “You have friends here who are anxious to meet,” I said.

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll drink while you talk.”

  “There isn’t much else to say. I assume that with your arrival, I’ve become extraneous. You’ll take over, and I can go home.”

  “Nothing of the sort. There is still a lot to be done.” Sohn put his glass down and leaned toward me. Surely now, a bark. “There are things you can do that I can’t.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as keeping a lid on the negotiations; such as watching over our diplomats and making sure none of them decide to stay out too late or forget to come home.” He picked up the glass again and drained it. He wasn’t going to bark, I finally realized. Overseas, he didn’t do that. Overseas, he didn’t walk like a bear, or clear his throat. Overseas, he was a different man.

  “You don’t want to meet your friends?”

  “I’m too busy. It’s too dangerous.” He put the pen back together, the way a soldier assembles a rifle during a drill.

  “But it’s alright with you if I put my head in that lion’s mouth.”

  He smiled. “Have you discovered yet what happened to the woman in Pakistan?”

  “I figured you had some connection to all of that.” A thought crept up on me. “Was she yours?”

  “Good guess. But mine? I don’t own people, Inspector. I don’t like to see them murdered, either. And I don’t believe for a moment that she was killed by locals. Do you?”

  “Don’t tell me, her murder has something to do with why I’m here.” I stopped. “Next you’re going to tell me my brother is tied into this as well.”

  He handed me the pen. “I trained her.”

  “You what? She was an embassy wife. What did you train her to do? Cook? Apparently, she wasn’t very good at it.”

  “How much do you already know about her, Inspector?”

  “Nothing. I think I prefer it that way. When I went to look at her personnel file, it had disappeared. All I was supposed to do was to gather a few odd facts about her and sail them on their way. I should have done that. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

  “You were destined to be here.” Sohn smiled. His ears looked bigger, though maybe it was just the light. “If it’s odd facts you’re after, this is as odd a place as any to gather them. I thought you’d like it in Geneva.”

  “Here? Why would I like it here? The trees are butchered. I’m sick to death of looking at watches in store windows. And I resent like hell being tossed in front of my brother.”

  That rolled off Sohn’s back.

  “Odd, my brother’s taking a sudden interest in fresh-baked bread.”

  Sohn perked up. “He told you that?”

  “No, I heard him talking about it on the phone.”

  “I don’t suppose you know who he was talking to?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Your brother hates bread.”

  “I know.”

  Sohn looked thoughtful, and I knew I wasn’t part of the conversation going on inside his head.

  “I’d guess your friends are going to contact you fairly soon,” I said. “They seem impatient. It wouldn’t surprise me if they have reserved a room for you, probably at the usual place. Maybe I’ll see you around.” I got up and left quickly, before he could say anything more. Halfway out the door, I realized I hadn’t thanked him for the pen.

  3

  When I got back to the hotel, there was a bench across the street. A green felt hat sat on it, in case I had any doubt who to thank. The hotel lobby, as usual, was deserted. I walked past the desk clerk and was partway up the stairs when she called to me. “You have a message.” She held up an envelope. “You want it?”

  “Of course I want it if it’s for me.”

  “It might be bad news.”

  I walked back down and held out my hand. “Do you mind?”

  The note was from Sohn, though it wasn’t signed. All it said, in Korean, was “Same place, tonight at nine.” Today was the fourth, an even-nu
mbered day. That meant I was supposed to subtract two hours from the time in the message. Or was it three? Which would mean we were supposed to meet at 6:00 P.M., assuming I remembered the code right. Sohn thought codes were indispensable. To me, they were confusing and easy to forget. Maybe a code with bread in it had advantages.

  I arrived at the Sunflower at six, right on time. The bartender looked at his watch, then pointed to the same table Sohn and I had occupied a few hours earlier. I waited. People came into the bar, and left. The tables near me filled up with groups of three or four. I hadn’t paid much attention to the neighborhood, but it didn’t seem to be a very bourgeois crowd. A couple of women with lots of makeup and long lashes came in and surveyed the scene. One of them caught my eye. If she was Portuguese, I couldn’t tell and didn’t want to find out. I shook my head.

  Three hours later, it dawned on me that Sohn wasn’t going to show up.

  4

  “Tell me the truth, Inspector, do you prefer New York to Geneva? You have been to New York, haven’t you?” M. Beret and I were standing in a tiny park. I didn’t like being there. It was a small piece of land sandwiched between the lake and the street, the sort of thing city architects like because it meets their quota for green space. There were lots of trees—a circle of maples around a fountain, lindens along the path, a couple of big beeches off by themselves. The beeches looked like they felt crowded and wished they were somewhere else.

  “Can’t we find another spot?” The more I looked around the little park, the more I didn’t like what I saw.

  “How about the airport? I can have your bags shipped later.” M. Beret sat down on a bench facing the water. I especially didn’t like that. It put our backs to the street.

  “What makes you think I’ve been to New York?”

  “A friend of a friend of a friend. A very long chain of friends. They met someone who talked to someone who saw you walking down a hill to Third Avenue. You looked lost, they said.”

  “Small world. I had no idea you had orthodox friends.”

  “Given your thought patterns, I’ll take that for a yes. But how am I to interpret such information? A mere police inspector, going here and there, there and here, all in the space of two or three months? It’s very odd, is it not?”

  “I thought so.” I hadn’t been walking down the hill, I’d been walking up. The other man had been walking down, the friendly man who had stopped. A friendly old man with distant connections to M. Beret?

  “Again I ask, what am I to make of your frequent travels? More to the point, why is your passport so light on visas if you travel so much? Do you just slip across borders like the March wind?”

  “My passport? Can we walk a bit? It’s getting cold on this bench.” The wind was whipping the lake into frantic wavelets that smacked against each other. In the sunlight they might have sparkled, but not under the leaden gray of the early morning clouds. When I passed by Ahmet’s place on the way to meet M. Beret, it had been closed; no sign in the window, but the shades were down and the door was locked. Maybe Ahmet was out getting his knife sharpened. That meant Dilara was alone, in her bedroom upstairs. Or was she not alone? It was an interesting question, but not as interesting as the one occupying my mind at the moment. When could I get something to eat? I waited for M. Beret to produce a roll from his pocket. This was how dogs were trained, and I could see why it was so effective.

  “Obviously, you’ve checked,” I said. “Funny, I examine other people’s passports with some care, but I never look at my own very closely, and it’s not something I keep at home in a drawer. Surely you know that much about my country. I am handed a passport, it has my name and picture in it, a birth date. That’s good enough for me. Is it the same one as last time? Who cares? Maybe they lost the last one after I handed it in. Maybe they revised the covers and had to reissue new documents to everyone. How should I know? Believe it or not, I have other things to worry about. If you want the truth, I didn’t really want to come here, to this polished place under these friendless mountains. It was an order.”

  It took only a few minutes to walk around the edge of the park. His roll-hand stayed in his pocket the whole time. When we got back to where we started, M. Beret rested his arms on the railing that ran alongside the path. “What do you think, Inspector?” He pointed across the river.

  “I’ve been wondering. Are those political slogans on the tops of those buildings?”

  “Political slogans? No, we don’t do that. They’re advertisements. That one on the end is for watches.”

  “Then they’re slogans for the rich. Ours exhort the people. Yours exhort the rich. We say, ‘Victory!’ You say, ‘Buy!’ Not a world of difference, is there?”

  “Which one do you prefer?”

  I was disappointed, somehow. He hadn’t struck me as the type to ask that sort of question. We’d finally established good working relations, I thought. I didn’t expect him to spoil things by dragging in politics. “Have you seen the trees on the street that runs alongside the lake? The street with the woman with the rump.”

  “Quai Gustave-Ador?”

  “Is that her name?”

  “The street.”

  “Well, those are plane trees along that street. When plane trees are free to grow, they grow tall, and the shade they produce is sweet all summer long. Those trees of yours, an entire line of them, have been butchered.”

  “You mean cut down?”

  “They might wish they were dead. No, they have been mangled. Their tops have been hacked off. They are maimed.”

  “Pity the trees.”

  It was too snide to pass over. I went over to the bench and sat down. I wanted to be sitting when I put this knife between his ribs. “I happened to be out walking the other night. No doubt you noticed.”

  “I’m behind on my reports, but I’ll take your word for it. Good, exercise is what you need. It helps with any lingering jet lag. Clarifies the senses.” He sat down beside me. “I might wish for better weather, though. It’s a bit windy. You must forgive me.” There it was again—snide. That wasn’t his normal style. Maybe he’d caught his fingers in a door.

  “Yes, it is a bit windy, and a little chilly in the evenings. That’s what I wanted to ask you about. I noticed that you seem to have an organization very similar to the Young Pioneers in my country. It seems to function after sundown.”

  “Is that so?” M. Beret looked at me warily. “What do you mean?”

  “I happened upon several young girls. They all had on the same uniform, more or less. White boots. Long white boots.”

  I see.

  “Coats with fur collars.”

  “Yes.”

  “I would have thought the skirts were too short for this weather. Maybe there is a shortage of cloth in Switzerland? Or problems with distribution?”

  “And did you approach one of them?”

  I ignored him. “The blue light. That’s what got me curious. Does it signify the headquarters of this organization for young girls?”

  “You would like to investigate?”

  “Some of them seemed very young.”

  “They do.”

  “I also saw a man, very short, walking behind an African woman of proportions I never even imagined.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous, that sort of thing? Do you have ambulances standing by?”

  He laughed. “He visits her once a month, sometimes more.”

  “I saw a Korean girl, too.”

  “Korean? No, she is Thai.”

  “Thai? M. Beret, give me the benefit of the doubt, please. She may sit in a Thai café wearing those long white boots, but that does not make her Thai.”

  He pondered this. I could see him mentally rearranging his tidy filing system. “We shall see,” he said. “Thank you. It’s always good to have an informed point of view.” He adjusted the belt on his coat. It was a gesture of unease, grooming behavior that police of all backgrounds lapse into when they are unsure o
f their footing. “We don’t claim perfection. Or won’t that do for an excuse?”

  He might have been apologizing for mislabeling the girl. It was something I was not prepared to leave ambiguous. “I am simply observing your wide world, M. Beret. I hope you didn’t think I was casting the first stone.”

  He smiled grimly, the way a man who has gotten the point might do. “You never really answered my original question. Out of curiosity, if you don’t mind, what were you doing in New York?”

  “I can’t believe you of all people are asking me that.” He still hadn’t produced the roll, and I was beginning to think I would have to buy one for myself once I got out of this cramped park. “Is it a requirement in the West that a person must account for his movements to every police department and intelligence agency in every country he visits?”