Bamboo and Blood

by James Church

  The delegation leader laughed. “Do you really think you’d be here if you were just a policeman? That’s like saying your grandfather was just a guerrilla fighter.”

  “My grandfather has nothing to do with this.”

  “To the contrary, Inspector, I’d say he has everything to do with where we are, and where we might decide to go. You can be sure Sohn didn’t pluck you out of some Public Security rabbit hole by accident.”

  “Plucked is the right word. I’m not here by choice.” No, Sohn hadn’t picked me because of my grandfather but because of my brother. “The ambassador wants me out of here. He’s made that clear. I’m leaving as soon as I can. I’ve got no reason to stick around.”

  “Even before the job is done?” Jenö tapped the ash from his cigar. “Even when we’re so close to the goal?”

  “Goal. You want us to stop selling missiles to your neighbors. That’s your goal. It’s not mine. I don’t have any goals that relate to missiles. Believe it or not, I don’t even think about missiles. As long as no one carries one in my sector, missiles aren’t on my list of worries.” I was getting wound up. Nice weather, nice setting, but I wasn’t in the mood to enjoy it. Maybe I was still tired from the night before, still smarting from Di-lara’s crack about her little policeman. Well, if Jenö wanted to talk about goals, that was fine with me. I could talk about goals. “Everyone in the world is allowed to sell military hardware but us, right? Big powers do it because they’re big, and that means they can do whatever they want. Middle powers do it because that’s how they make a lot of money. Little powers like you”—I pointed my unlit cigar at Jenö—“do it because the big powers find it useful. They let you operate on the margins where they don’t want to be, or they don’t want to make the effort to stop you, or they don’t give a damn. But none of those conditions pertain to us.” I made clear I was including the delegation leader. “We’re a special case, right? You all sell missiles until you don’t want to do it anymore, then you say no one else can. Too bad for you. We need the money.” I didn’t know if we needed the money or not, but if my brother was involved, I had to assume money was part of the mix. “If we had rich uncles to give us aid to build steel mills, or ships, or computers, we’d be happy little piglets. But we don’t, we don’t have anyone to shovel money at us, so we sell what we sell and you can fuck a duck if you don’t like it.” Little policeman! What the hell did she mean by that?

  “No one said anything about stopping you from selling anything. If you think it’s your God-given right to lug weapons around the world, be my guest.” Jenö smoothed the air several times. The afternoon became calm again. The light settled on the lake. It seemed wrong for me to be here. I was taking up space I had no right to occupy. I was tired of people looking at me like I was a freak. I had roiled enough waters. I wanted to go home.

  Jenö nodded at me, and his smile, the one that played on his lips most of the time, turned enigmatic. “You can sell whatever you want, it really makes no difference to us. Not one bit. Just don’t sell to our enemies. That’s all we ask.” He was in full soothe-the-barbarian mode. You could almost hear the violins playing in the background. “And we’re not just asking. We’re prepared to make it worth your while, Inspector. In the long run, you’ll get a lot more from good relations with us than you’ll ever get from the people you’re dealing with now. Do you really think they spend any time thinking about your interests, your concerns, your history? Don’t be ridiculous. They only care about one thing, getting rid of us—and they’ll play you for everything they can if they think it will advance that goal. That’s their goal. What’s yours?”

  It was a little vague, his formulation, and I didn’t think it was an accident. Did he mean me, in particular? Were Jenö and his colleagues prepared to make it worth my while? I yawned. Somewhere I’d read that was what a defeated animal did—yawned. I wasn’t tired, but I was beaten. This place by the lake had defeated me. Maybe that’s why they took me here. I was sure it was the two of them, together, who had carefully chosen the place. “And we’re supposed to be shocked, that people thousands of kilometers away don’t care about our history? Do you think we care about theirs?” I wanted to get the emphasis away from the singular and back on the collective. “Anyway, none of this is my business. How many times do I have to tell you? No one listens to me. And that includes Sohn.” Which was certainly true now. I found myself yawning again.

  “Someone assigned me to you when I was in Pyongyang a few months ago. That wasn’t an accident.” Jenö wasn’t interested in signs of submission. He was poking me with a stick; he wanted to get a rise out of me.

  “They just wanted someone to blame if things went wrong,” I said. “That’s how they work.”

  “Well, things are about to go wrong. I’m getting negative messages from my people: Get this done, or we pull all of it, the whole thing, off the table.” Jenö looked at the delegation leader. For the first time, I sensed that they were still on separate sides of the divide. “You’re going to lose it all. I have it right here.” He patted his jacket pocket. “The whole deal. And you’re about to see me throw it in the trash.”

  The delegation leader shook his head. “You trash it, then nothing will change, you still won’t like your neighborhood, we’ll struggle back to our feet, and life will go on. Unless Mr. Sohn has given the inspector a plan he hasn’t yet revealed.”

  They both turned to me.

  “I’ll say it again, I’ll say it all afternoon long if you want. I’m not the person you need to deal with.”

  The delegation leader put his cigar carefully into the ashtray, an oversized ceramic triangle with an abstract drawing of a fish in the center. It was spotlessly clean except for the mound of ash in the center. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Sohn sent you out here, to pass a message, I assume. You haven’t done that as far as I know.” Wrong, but never mind. “You probably think I’ve been in your way, which means Sohn didn’t tell you anything about me.” Wrong again. Sohn told me I’d be up to my ears in shit if you defected. “We both know how bad things are at home. Sometimes I sense the youngsters on my delegation can barely sit still. They’re worried about their families, they feel guilty about being here, they can’t figure out what we are doing. They’re waiting, Inspector. All day long in those talks, we sit across from people who can really help us, and what do we do? We stall, because they won’t give anything if we don’t ask, and we won’t ask because we can’t afford to look weak. What are we going to do? Make more cardboard and plywood missiles? We don’t even have enough plywood anymore. We probably don’t even have enough screws.” I heard my grandfather laugh, somewhere in the distance. “We can’t sell our way out of this. We can’t growl loud enough, or puff ourselves up big enough, but that is what we’re going to do anyway. You want to see my instructions sometime? My job is to bluff and to stall. And when that doesn’t work, I have backup instructions to stall and to bluff.”

  “From what I’ve seen, you’re very good at it,” I said. “If that’s what you’re here to do, you’re doing it beyond what anyone might expect. If you ever need one, I’ll write a recommendation letter.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? One week I’m supposed to make sure nothing happens. The next week I receive instructions to make progress. I keep two files—one for angry messages asking me what the hell do I think I’m doing, the other for angry messages asking me why the hell I’m not doing more.”

  The ash from his cigar fell onto his trousers. As he leaned to brush it off, a shot rang out. The cushion on the back of his chair exploded. In an instant, practically before the sound died away, Jenö reached across the table, pushed the delegation leader down, shouted at me to take cover, and screamed some commands into a small radio that he pulled from his pocket—all a split second before he yanked a pistol from a holster under his jacket. Then it was over, almost as if nothing had happened, except that Jenö was breathing hard. I wasn’t breathing. I wasn’t scared or rattled, jus
t amazed. I had yet to see cows with cowbells walking up a dainty Swiss hillside. The only travel calendars I could bring back home with good conscience had men with broken necks and people under a table by the lake. I started to get up. Jenö grabbed my arm and pushed me down. “Nobody moves,” he said, “until I say it’s okay.”

  “Sure, I like it under tables with black bags.” I shook off his hand. “But if my pal here gets shot while I’m under a table, any table, I’ll never live it down in the Ministry.” I climbed to my feet and looked around. What was left of the cushion lay on the ground. It must have been hit by a tank round, judging by the hole in it. “I guess cigar smoking isn’t bad for your health, after all,” I said to the delegation leader.

  “You’re not helping things, standing there like that, Inspector,” he said, looking up at me.

  “You want me to go find the cannon that did that?” I pointed to the cushion.

  Jenö put the earphone in his ear and listened for a moment. “Don’t bother. We already have it.” He put the pistol back in its holster; his eyebrows did a skeptical promenade. “That’s why there wasn’t a second shot.”

  “What took you so long to get him?”

  Jenö smiled at me. He seemed genuinely amused. “I guess it’s hard to be a sniper like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, with only three fingers.”

  That made me sit down. “Where is he?”

  “The shooter? Under a tree. Must have fallen. He broke his neck.”

  The delegation leader picked up his cigar. “Anyone have a light?”

  8

  “Here are your tickets. Out of politeness, I should wish you a pleasant flight, Inspector, but really I cannot help hoping you hit rough air all of the way home, so bad the stewardesses cannot get up to serve drinks. So bad that your teeth rattle and your stomach rolls. You get the picture. I’ve never been in anything like the mess we have right now. This is Switzerland, for heaven’s sake! Keeping it quiet is going to be a full-time job. I should have followed my first instinct and booted you out immediately. Maybe it was that green hat. It was a distraction, really.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “we’ll meet again under better circumstances.”

  “Not in this lifetime, God willing.”

  “You’re not the one who has to explain two dead countrymen to thick-necked men with dour expressions as soon as the plane lands. They probably won’t even let me claim my suitcase before they start throwing questions at me. I hope that’s all they throw. Oh, and did I mention, the head of my delegation—a senior diplomat, I might add—was nearly assassinated on the shores of your peaceful lake?”

  “At least I’m not the only one whose career will suffer. Did you know that even the fact that your negotiations with the Americans fell apart is being pinned on me.”

  “Career?” I laughed. “If that’s your only worry, count yourself lucky. I’m going to have to write a long and very convincing report about what happened to Sohn, which will be doubly difficult because I have no idea what the truth is. And that means I can’t even concoct a decent story. Sohn had enemies at home, but he had friends as well. And his friends will start from the assumption that it’s all my fault.”

  “Well, at least you can report the man with the strange hand died doing his job.”

  “True, but I never took him for an assassin.”

  “Assassin? What do you mean?”

  “He tried to kill the delegation leader. That shot would have blown his head off if he hadn’t dropped cigar ash on his pants at just that moment.”

  M. Beret looked puzzled. “Is that what you think?”

  “Of course it’s what I think. I was there, wasn’t I? I saw it. We were both under the table.”

  “You were at the lake. How could you see what was going on five hundred meters away?”

  “Who do you think the target was?” My blood froze.

  “Yes.” M. Beret spoke slowly. “It was you.”

  “He was trying to shoot me?”

  “No, he didn’t fire the shot. He disrupted it. The bullet was aimed at you. I thought you were just showing sangfroid.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Unflappable. Cold blood, literally, but that may not be the best translation under the circumstances. You knew, of course, that his job was to protect you.” He watched my face. “You knew that, yes? Someone in your capital was trying to disrupt the talks, completely blow them up. The best way to accomplish that, they figured, was the death of a delegation member. They couldn’t kill an American; that would get them in a lot of trouble. But murdering someone on your side … well, it wouldn’t be the first time, eh? Apparently, the most expendable one was you. I expect that’s why Sohn came out here. He had discovered elements of the plot. He needed to warn you.”

  Warn me? He took his sweet time about it, if that was his intent. So much time he never got around to it, someone made sure of that. “M. Beret, there’s no way you could possibly know any of what you just told me. I appreciate your sense of drama, but it is pure fantasy, and if you paid for such reporting, you really should demand your money back from the source. Out of curiosity, what is the rest of the fable? Who was in the tree, trying to kill me?”

  “I believe they are about to close your gate, Inspector. Au revoir.”

  “Just tell me this, what happened to him, the Man with Three Fingers? Jenö said he was dead.”

  M. Beret paused for a fraction longer than he should have. “We have an unidentified Mexican in the morgue, if that’s what you mean. Now hurry, please. If you miss your plane I will be inconsolable.”

  “I will miss you, too.” I kissed him on both cheeks, which I figured was a photo he might like for the files.

  PART V

  Chapter One

  “He’s dead.” I was in Pak’s office, squinting against the sun that bounced off the windows of the Operations Building across the way. The gingkoes in the courtyard were useless, weeks away from getting leaves that could soften the light. Worst of all, three months into the New Year, their branches had all the charm of dinosaur limbs. March is bad enough, my grandfather would say, without having to look at gingko trees.

  “Really?” Shock registered in Pak’s eyes. “What happened?” He wasn’t feigning ignorance. I could see that he really didn’t know, which meant the news hadn’t gotten back here yet. Pak might be only a chief inspector, but no one had more lines out than he did. If Sohn’s death had been reported, no matter in what channel, Pak would have known. Even if the news were closely held deep in the Center, Pak would find it.

  “The Swiss are classifying it as an accident.”

  “By which I take it, you don’t think so.”

  “I think he was murdered. That’s what they suspect, too, only it would cause them too much trouble to say so.”

  “And why would you think this was murder?”

  “For one thing, his neck was broken. That doesn’t just happen. You can fall through a gallows’ trapdoor, or off a horse, or out of a car, or down the stairs, but generally it isn’t easy to break your neck all by yourself. If he fell, there would have been bruises. He didn’t have any. None.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw the body in the morgue.”

  “Why, the question will be asked, did Inspector O go to the Geneva morgue?”

  “The mission doesn’t want anything to do with bodies of any description. They said no one was missing from their roster, and they weren’t going to the morgue to stare at an unidentified foreigner. In fact, they complained it was an insult, suggesting something had happened to one of the staff. The Swiss threw up their hands and asked me. I thought I owed it to Sohn. Someone did, anyway.”

  “So, just for the sake of argument, we’ll assume you are right.” I expected Pak to ask a lot of things, but not what came next. “Does that bother you, his being murdered?”

  “Strange, the Swiss put the same question to me.”

  “And what d
id you reply?”

  “I said I’d have to think about it. I’m still thinking, but I’m not sure I like having so many people interested in my personal reaction. What if I asked you the same thing?”

  “I’d say I am bothered by it. I’d say Sohn was a good man. He grunted and barked at times, his ears were too small and the back of his head too pointed, but he was good to his people and he knew what needed to be done.”

  Nicely vague, that phrase—needed to be done.

  “So, you knew him from before you joined the Ministry. I figured you did. There was something about the way you spoke to each other.”

  “It’s been a while, but I don’t think he had changed much.”

  “From what I could tell, he had a lot of enemies.”