by James Church
The man who had made the others laugh was thin. He looked even thinner because of the way his suit was cut. The jacket was over his shoulders, like a gray cape; a pair of glasses hung on a chain around his neck, where they bumped against his chest as he strolled toward the front desk, then toward the restaurant in the back, shaking his head slightly, calling to the others. You might have thought he was in a zoo, the way he pointed. I could see the girl behind the money-changing counter look down and pretend to concentrate on something else when he approached. It did no good; the man stopped and pulled out his wallet. He put several euro bills on the counter and summoned her, in bad Chinese. She looked at him blankly, though she knew perfectly well what he’d said. I checked my watch. These people were gawking as if they hadn’t seen the lobby before. They must be staying at one of the other hotels, maybe the Potang-gang, and were just crawling around the Koryo for laughs. If Boswell didn’t show up in the next thirty seconds, I was going to get up and leave. He could have dinner by himself, or with the cape-man and his friends.
After the run-in with the traffic cop, I had taken Boswell to Club Blue. I told him it was so we could have a drink together, but really I needed to see the tough bartender again. I wasn’t happy about having Boswell along, but there was no way to get rid of him. The tough bartender wasn’t there anymore. And the old owner had already been replaced, which was a surprise. I thought he might be roughed up a little but then crawl back, not that he’d vanish. The new bartender wasn’t talkative. The new owner wouldn’t stop. He pretended to be glad to see us and shook Boswell’s hand four or five times, until Boswell put it in his coat pocket and kept it there until we got back to the car. I didn’t think Miss Chon would be attracted to the new owner. His shoulders weren’t much to look at.
As we were climbing the stairs, Boswell asked me if there was much trouble at these sorts of clubs. I said no, nothing besides a stabbing not long ago. He pretended not to be interested. “Happens all the time, Inspector,” he said. “Drunken patrons in a scuffle, am I right?” Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a warning flag.
The wait at the hotel was getting long. Just as I decided to leave, Boswell came out of the elevator on the second floor, waved curtly to me from the balcony, and rode down the escalator to the lobby.
“Evening, Inspector. Shall we dine?” He looked at the cape-man with distaste. “That fellow should either put on his damned jacket or take it off.”
This startled me. “I thought you would be glad to see your countrymen.”
“They’re not my countrymen, they’re Italians. What do you suppose they want here?”
I ignored the question; how could I know what they wanted? It was like asking me about crops. “Where would you like to go to dinner, Superintendent?”
We were speaking in English, and the cape-man turned to observe us. He adjusted his coat and perched his glasses on his long nose. He glared at Boswell, as if our having a normal conversation broke some sort of unwritten rule. Their guide probably went to her room and drank every night.
Boswell took my arm and started leading me away. “What’s wrong with this place for dinner? They have a dining room here.”
“Here?” I knew the hotel had a dining room, I had eaten in it. But the Ministry didn’t like us to use it for entertaining guests, foreign or domestic.
“A problem? What’s the matter, doesn’t it fit with your Ministry’s guidelines?”
“I just thought you’d like to go out somewhere, that’s all. There are a few new places that visitors seem to enjoy.” I wouldn’t have minded ending up at the all-night foreigners’ restaurant, just to see the look on the lady in the silk dress as she walked us to our table. This time, I wouldn’t sit with my back to the door.
“I’m tired.” Boswell was slouching, as if to emphasize the point. It wasn’t a posture that fit him very well; it made him look like an oak tree in love with a dandelion. “I don’t want anything with singing or dancing. Let’s just eat here, Inspector. At breakfast, I peeked at the dinner menu. They have pot roast, can you believe it?” If the menu said so, I believed it, though I didn’t know how good it would be. Beef was tough; unless it was in a soup or grilled in little chunks, I couldn’t see why foreigners thought so much of it. “Anyway”-Boswell had dropped my arm and was walking ahead of me, his posture much restored by the chance to be sarcastic-“I can’t resist restaurants with mirrored ceilings.”
At dinner, our waitress was the same girl I’d spotted on the balcony. She pretended not to remember me. And from the way she moved, I could see she was nervous, just out of training and worried because she knew every step she took was being observed by her supervisor, an older woman who stood off to the side. Her hand shook when she filled the small glasses in front of us with liquor. A tiny bit overflowed, spilling onto the tablecloth. It was nothing, no one could have noticed, but it was not what she meant to do, not what she wanted. Her eyes were so pained that for a moment I thought she might faint. Boswell paid no attention. He downed the glass in a gulp, then sat and chewed in silence. I asked him how the food was; he only nodded. Once or twice he appeared to gather his thoughts, and I thought he was about to say something but nothing came of it.
“Maybe we should have gone somewhere else,” I said at last. He said nothing. “Something the matter?” I asked. It was fine with me not to carry on a conversation about nothing, but this was getting awkward. “If something is wrong with the food, we can tell the waitress.” It passed through my mind that the girl might be transfixed, actually physically incapacitated, if we complained to her about the food. “I don’t know pot roast, but my soup is not bad. Maybe you should try some. Here.” I pushed the bowl toward him.
Boswell put his fork down, then his knife. He looked at them intently for a moment, then at his plate, and finally, as if it cost him to do so, at me. “Have you never sat in silence, Inspector? It is not a mean thing to do. How can I think if someone is talking all the time?”
When the meal was over, he folded his napkin and left the table without a word. I sat for a while by myself, half expecting the man in the brown suit to show up, but no one else came into the dining room, so I finished my soup and went home. Something was eating Boswell, and it wasn’t the pot roast.
2
The next morning after I checked in at the office, I went for a walk. Min wouldn’t be in until late. This was his regular day for meetings at the Ministry. Boswell could sit alone in his room for a few hours in silence and think; for all I cared, he could sit there the whole day. The whole damned day. I had some thinking to do, too. I looked through my desk drawer for a piece of wood to keep me company. I found a piece of acacia and put it in my pocket. Acacia knew how to mind its own business and let a person think.
Boswell’s moodiness at dinner still irked me. I hadn’t ever dined with a Scotsman, but as far as I knew, there was a level of politeness that civilized peoples maintain while eating together. Boswell was concerned about something, pressured. More pressure, first Min, then me, now Boswell. Everyone was feeling it. Something about Club Blue had set him off, especially the stabbing.
Club Blue seemed to set a lot of people off, even Miss Chon. I had formed a strong impression of her the first time I went into the bank-apart from her waist, she struck me as haughty, someone used to ordering people around, and yet there was this odd gap. Yes, she was a very competent woman, about as self-assured as I’d ever seen. In that case, why wouldn’t she admit she was close to the owner of Club Blue? You’d have thought she’d want to wave it in front of my nose, how she had bagged those big shoulders. I doubted if banking practice forbade sleeping with the customers. She must know by now he was missing and be worried, unless she knew where he was. Then it came to me, the one thing that stood out now that I thought about it-and it was as if a big bell was booming next to my ear. Why I hadn’t heard it before, I couldn’t say. She didn’t seem off balance. She hadn’t once complained to me about how things were done here. The jan
itor moved the desk, he didn’t move the desk, the desk suddenly disappeared, all fine by her. The fussing that night at the restaurant about the desk, it was an act. She wasn’t worried, because she wasn’t surprised. I stopped. She even knew that the name of my ministry had been changed from Public Security to People’s Security. That was more than ten years ago. How the hell would she have known that?
I walked a little farther, trying to tickle my subconscious into action, but it seemed otherwise occupied and silent. It must have been preoccupied with the group of Italians, because when I looked up, I found myself heading toward the Potang-gang Hotel. A woman was waiting at the entrance to the park that sits beside the Potang River. The trees in the park were in leaf, fresh green, delicate in the sunlight. The shadows were still dainty, not like the ponderous shade that trees manufacture late in the summer. I thought I’d sit in the park for a while and let my thoughts roam, but something about the woman caught my attention. She was standing perfectly still. You might have thought she was a statue except that her ponytail stirred slightly in the breeze. So did the belt on her coat, where it hung down in front. Unlike the waitress at the Koryo Hotel, this woman was waiting for someone. You could tell she wasn’t looking forward to the meeting. If the way she had set her feet meant anything, she was becoming more impatient by the minute. Finally, she glanced at her watch, looked back up along the street, and then walked down the path to the river. Something about the way she moved made me follow. It took a moment to realize this was the bank clerk I’d lost in the underpass. In the dark, I never had a good look at her face, and now, with a ponytail, her chin wasn’t so sharp. Faces sometimes fool me. But I never mistake the way someone looks from behind, the way someone walks. If you follow enough people, pretty soon you stop looking at faces anyway. Hips and heels, those are the signatures.
The bank clerk walked along the river. Without her high heels, she took longer, more confident steps. This time I wasn’t going to let her out of my sight. A few blocks later, she turned into a building with empty stores at ground level. I relaxed, waiting across the street until she came out. There were no entrances in the back. This was my section of town, I knew it inside out, and I had made a study of buildings that had rear entrances that couldn’t be seen from the street. This wasn’t one of them.
An elderly man appeared in the same doorway where the clerk had entered. Just for a moment he stepped outside and seemed to enjoy the air. Then he glanced in my direction and disappeared back inside, but not before I noticed that his feet turned out. I took another look at the building. There was nothing unusual, except maybe that the curtains on the second floor drew back slightly for a moment and then closed again. That and the fact it was one of the buildings in the block Boswell had insisted we stop and look at more closely. He had said he didn’t like the shadows. Maybe he didn’t, or maybe he had just wanted to make sure he saw the building.
My phone rang; that ridiculous tune I couldn’t get rid of blasted from my back pocket down the entire block. Perfect, absolutely perfect, I thought. “Yeah?”
“Fine greeting, Inspector. Good communication skills. Let’s work on that, can we?”
“Come on, Min, I’m in the middle of surveillance, or at least I was until this phone alerted everyone in the neighborhood to my presence. I’m not in a chatty mood.”
“Good, good, no need to chat. Remember your friend the nightclub owner? The one with the silk stockings? His body is floating in a river up in the hills. Communications with the patrol on the scene aren’t good, but through the static it sounded like maybe his head was bashed in. Apparently, there was plenty of identification in his pocket, so whoever did it must have wanted to make sure he was identified. According to the leader of the patrol, it looks like he’s been in the water for two days, maybe longer.”
“Maybe he just slipped and fell. Accidents do happen, Min.” The man had been missing for two weeks, and he wasn’t on vacation, hiking around the countryside. Ending up in a river was no accident, but there was no sense in saying so to Min. He’d only complain that I hadn’t told him sooner.
“No, Inspector, these country patrols may not be very smart, but they can usually tell an accident from a homicide. They said it was murder.”
“Well, if it’s murder, it’s murder, but it’s not in my territory.”
“It’s your case, and he was one of your suspects, wasn’t he?”
“He wasn’t a suspect.” I thought of Miss Chon. When was the last time she saw him? “His bar might have been mixed up in it somehow, but he didn’t seem the type to rob a bank. His connections were too good for anything rough like that.”
“No time to argue, Inspector. Come on back here, pick up the initial scene report that was phoned in, get the superintendent from the hotel, then go take a look. Whatever you do, keep the Scotsman out of town for a few hours. SSD called just after we got the news; they must have heard almost the same time we did. They told me they wanted the Scotsman out of the way. They were clear on that.”
“Who did you talk to?”
“Han.”
“Did his phone click?”
There was a prolonged silence.
“Never mind,” I said, “forget I asked. Why don’t we just ignore him?”
“Not this time.” The strain was back in Min’s voice. “When I was at the Ministry this morning, I got severe looks, a lot of them. Something is up, and I’m not going to be under it when it comes back down. I also checked with some people I know. Han is a comer; he’s under someone’s wing, they said, though that’s all they would say. I got the feeling that if we get on his bad side today, he’ll eat our livers tomorrow.”
“He’ll choke on a feather long before that, Min. You worry too much.”
“You want to stand there and argue, or will you do as I ask?” Min wasn’t giving me an order, he was pleading. “One more thing. Little Li dropped off a report he’d been working on all night.”
“Yeah, so?”
“It’s about the bus.”
Min wasn’t sure how to tell me this; it was obvious from how he was dancing around what he wanted to say. “What about the bus?”
“Little Li found the driver. They had a long conversation, once the guy felt good enough to talk.”
“Something happened to him?”
“He fell down or something. Li says once he regained consciousness, he was fine. His story is that his brother was the regular driver but got sick all of a sudden. This guy volunteered to help out, though he’d never driven a bus before. He got lost, went up the wrong street, and then panicked when he saw someone in a strange costume in the road in front of him. He hit the gas instead of the brake.”
“Pretty convenient.”
“Maybe, but it checks out. The regular driver really was sick, and this guy really couldn’t steer a bus.”
“Good, we can eliminate the bus.” I put my hand over my eyes. “All right, now what do you want me to do?”
“Han said it was important to make sure the Scotsman is with someone. Don’t drop him off somewhere, like you did at the bank. They weren’t happy with that, not a bit. Han said to stop for lunch along the way if you need to stretch it out.”
“Is he going to pay out of his big budget? I don’t know of any restaurant en route, do you?”
“Must be something around there; people have to eat, don’t they?”
“Maybe we’ll steal a goat and roast it over an open fire.”
“What! Did you say steal a goat?”
“You’re fading, Min. I’ll see you later.” I clicked off the phone. Maybe banning these things wasn’t such a bad idea. Who invented them? And why was it so complicated to change the ringer?
3
Boswell was still moody and said he wanted to stay in his room, but I told him about the body in the river and he perked up a little. We drove for about two hours off the main highway, along dirt roads past fields that had been newly ploughed, between rows of acacia trees that didn’t yet ha
ve the leaves of the trees in the city but showed new branches that were limber in the breeze. We crossed a bridge without side rails that went over a riverbed with only a trickle of water. Amidst a pile of rocks in the center was an old steam shovel, its bucket resting on the cab of a dump truck that had no tires. “What was that?” asked the Scotsman. “Wait, I want to take a picture of it.”
“No need,” I said. “It’s just some construction equipment.”
“No, really, it’s perfect. I want to get a picture. Stop the car, back up.”
“Impossible, can’t go backwards on a bridge without side rails. It’s against traffic regulations. Anyway, you can’t take pictures of construction equipment.”
“Inspector, there isn’t anyone around here worrying about traffic rules, and who is going to know I took the picture except you?”
I accelerated and hit the bump at the end of the bridge hard enough to cause the Scotsman to bounce against the car’s roof.
“Hey, watch out.”
“Nearly there, just past those trees.”
When we got to the end of the road, there was a black car parked, one uniformed Ministry of People’s Security officer standing in the road, hands behind his back, looking up into the nearby hills. The driver and a second man were squatting in the middle of the road, in the shade of the car, smoking, not talking, not looking at anything in particular. When Boswell and I pulled over and walked up to them, none of them said anything. Boswell looked at me, sort of questioning, and cleared his throat. I shook my head and pointed up the path. I didn’t recognize the MPS officer, and he didn’t indicate he knew who I was, or cared.
