Bamboo and blood io-3

by James Church

  But this winter things were different. The work gangs were smaller, and nobody spoke when I walked by. Sometimes, one or two would follow me with dull eyes, too weak or dispirited to move their heads. I had the feeling I was moving past ghosts.

  On rare occasions, I drove over to the university. I didn't like being there. Schools belonged to another security unit, not even to the Ministry, and in those days it made me nervous to be on someone else's territory. But Pak had worked out an understanding to let us peek in from time to time. When Pak needed an understanding, he could usually get it. We should have access to the campus, he'd say, just to keep an eye on things. Just in case the situation started drifting toward some unknown event, a potential trigger. No one would talk about it openly, and the Ministry wouldn't put anything on paper, but we all knew what was happening, and we all knew that the students might get in front.

  "I don't think I should be over there," I said to Pak.

  "Don't worry so much. It's all arranged, just keep a low profile. If anyone asks, you're thinking of going back to school, technical training, something." Especially now, when classes were held only sporadically, with so many teachers too weak or tired to lecture, and the students too hungry to concentrate, Pak was keen on our keeping up good contacts on campus. I dodged as best I could, but I always ended up going.

  "Get to school and check in with the ears, Inspector."

  "Busy day, Pak, not sure when I can make it. Send someone else, why don't you?"

  "All you're doing is staring at the molding on the ceiling. You're not going to paint it, so leave it be. I need you over at the campus. You're good at it; you give off the right vibrations. Students don't clam up when they see you coming."

  "Yes they do. If looks could kill, I'd be scattered to the winds by now. They hate our guts, and you know it. Things haven't calmed down from when they chased that SSD fool off of the campus."

  "Served him right, trying to break into a student meeting like that. Don't worry. As long as you stay in the shadows, they won't bother you and we can keep away from Tiananmen. Just check in with that kid you have on a string."

  "She's not on a string. Why don't I do it off campus somewhere?"

  "The whole idea, Inspector, is to show the flag."

  "In the shadows?"

  "You don't have to wave the flag, Inspector, just unfurl it a little. Stroll around, sit on a bench, rattle a doorknob, let them know you're there."

  3

  The room was frigid. It hadn't been heated since the last time the sun shone directly in the windows, and that had probably been in September. The girl was young; she might be pretty one day, but it was far too soon for that. She kept her hands in the pockets of a thin blue coat that couldn't have done much against the cold. She shivered once or twice.

  "I thought you weren't going to come here anymore, that's what you promised." She kept her voice toneless, though it was with some effort. She was holding back. "The last time you showed up, someone almost saw us. If anyone catches me talking to you, I'll be ordered to leave. You say it's all been worked out, but that's not true. Local security will report me, and then I'll be sent home. You know I'm only supposed to talk to the assigned security people. Why can't you stay away from campus, like you promised?"

  I considered this for a moment. It was gutsy of her, telling me off. Maybe that's why I picked her to begin with. Her file said she was always outside the group. She'd only been accepted at the university from a nowhere village near Hamhung because she was good with languages, and because she was considered an exceptional pianist. Where she found a piano to play out there in the countryside, I couldn't imagine. "You like Rachmaninoff?" I looked around the room. The walls were bare. The instructor's desk had been moved to one side, and there was a three-legged easel with a piece of gray cardboard on it standing at the front. The cardboard had several names printed on it. The last one was Rachmaninoff. I figured she'd like whatever was listed last.

  "I do. I want to play his music someday."

  "Which piece?"

  "What's it to you?"

  "You think I don't like music?"

  "Do you?"

  Four questions in a row. With her, I could keep it up all afternoon, all questions. It would be interesting one day to see how long she could play the game, until she slipped and actually said something. This afternoon, though, I didn't need anything from her. I just needed to be here. It bothered me a little that someone might see the two of us together. Sent back to the east coast, she might not survive, or she'd leave for China and end up selling herself. I moved away from the window. "This may surprise you, but I have been known to listen to music. More than that, I've heard some Rachmaninoff."

  She took one hand out of her pocket, her left one, and looked at her nails. They were broken and dirty. She flexed her fingers. She was aching to get out of the room, but her hands were important. If she took them out for me to see, it was a gesture. She might not know it, but that's what it was. It wasn't trust, exactly, but it was coming close.

  "Which piece? You have a tape? I like him a lot better than Shostakovich. That's mostly what we listen to. I think he's overrated." She said it as a challenge, but I didn't pick it up. She sighed. "We had a German conductor here a couple of months ago. All of a sudden he appeared, like he dropped from the sky. He brought some music for us to play, tapes for us to hear. One of the pieces was Rachmaninoff. I cried when I listened to it. How could anyone imagine anything so beautiful? How could he have heard something like that in his head?" Her voice wasn't toneless anymore. "I want that, I want to know something that beautiful." She stopped suddenly and looked at me intently. "He left Russia, you know, after the revolution. Do you know where he went?"

  That's my girl, I thought. Smoldering like a pile of juniper branches. If I didn't say something to cool her down, she might burst into flames right here in front of me. Maybe she would survive after all. "Musicians are strange," I said. She frowned, and I hurried to cover my mistake. "What I mean is, they aren't moored to one place. Art is universal, isn't that what they say?"

  She hummed something.

  "Rachmaninoff?"

  I was rewarded with a quick smile. "You guessed that, didn't you? It must be your security training." The smile disappeared. "Well, you left your spoor. That's what you wanted to do, wasn't it? You see, Inspector, I've figured you out." She pulled her hands out of her pockets and walked to the door. "I have, you know."

  "I know." I waited until she had left the room and I could hear her footsteps in the cold hallway. "I'm betting on it."

  Both hands out of her pockets-maybe not trust, actually; maybe defiance. It came down to the same thing.

  4

  It wasn't a long drive back to the office, but I needed some time to think. I could think in my office, except for Pak coming down and asking if everything was fine. I couldn't think when he did that; I couldn't think once he left because I knew he would be back. If I drove around my sector, I could keep the car heater on. There wouldn't be much to see, the streets were almost deserted, but at least it would be warm.

  No one had mentioned the subject of the Swiss visitor again, a silence that had nothing good to recommend it. No one at the Ministry raised it when I went by to look for a file on an old case. The special section team stayed away from our office, though every day we expected them to pay another call. Pak was sure so they'd be back, he gave me explicit orders not to clean the cups. Most disquieting of all, during our brief meeting at the Sosan Hotel, Mun hadn't raised the subject even once. Out on the street, he had hinted he knew quite a bit about the visitor, but at the Sosan, he clammed up. He'd repeated the warnings about how much trouble I might be in, but didn't let on any more about what he knew. From the way he had asked me if I still had contact with anyone from our operational days, I didn't think that's what he really wanted to know. It seemed more like he was trying to figure out what I remembered from the past, and what I was willing to talk about. I told him I didn't remembe
r anything, and hadn't seen anyone, which was mostly true. I didn't like his sneer, but paid for his drink anyway. I figured if he went away and never came back, it was worth the investment. Not that I thought he'd go away. It wasn't, as I'd told Pak, a good bet that we wouldn't see him again.

  That still left one burning question mark hanging over us-why the Swiss visitor had become a nonsubject. Pak seemed to think that the subject was something being discussed somewhere else and that it would eventually crash down on our heads again. This wasn't like Pak, to be so jumpy and off-key. Pak was the polestar, the fixed point. If he started to wobble, there was no telling what would happen to the rest of us. I didn't blame him. The situation was bad. Pyongyang was awash in rumors, most of them true, about how conditions in the countryside had fallen apart. We were ripe for something, I just didn't know what.

  Chapter Three

  "Life, existence, whatever you want to call it these days-it's all made up of layers, am I right? People speak in generalities. They constantly sum up existence, apply a necessary shorthand. They say 'one' but they actually mean 'many.' If you say 'morning,' Inspector, what do you mean?"

  I was standing in Pak's office, wondering what had brought this on. "I mean morning, like now. This is morning, which is when I generally come in to report what happened the day before. So here I am. I came in to give you a report on the meeting I had yesterday with the student. Yesterday afternoon. This"-I pointed out the window at the darkness-"is morning."

  Pak waved away the idea of the report. "No, you don't mean morning. Morning is shorthand. What you really mean is that the sun is at a certain spot at or below the horizon, the sky a certain shade, the early breeze bringing the smell of earth, someone groaning after not enough sleep. It's the same with happiness, or sorrow, or boredom, isn't it? All layers, everything layers. Layers and intersections."

  I could never fathom what set Pak off like this, climbing to these philosophical heights. Whenever it happened, the only thing to do was to follow along and try not to fall too far behind. "Intersections," I said and nodded, but he wasn't waiting for my reaction. He was already on the ledge above me.

  "If you start to strip things down too much, get at their 'essence,' what do you suppose happens?"

  This time I didn't bother to nod. It wasn't a real question. Pak pointed a finger at me. "I'll tell you what happens. If we aren't careful, things that matter disappear because we reduce them to bits and pieces, smaller and smaller, to the point where they become nothingness. Abstractions take over. Pretty soon, we start thinking that the only difference between day and night is the amount of light. 'Essence is everything,' people start thinking. So they keep searching for essence, some sort of first principle, but essence isn't anything. Sometimes, it's nothing."

  This was fast getting to be unprecedented. A change, not yet defined, was coming over Pak. First he had been unusually confrontational with the special section, and now he was soaring into philosophy, far beyond the boundaries where he usually stopped. In another minute, we might need oxygen bottles, we'd be so high in existential clouds.

  If Pak was suffering from the altitude, he didn't show it. "We can say exactly the same about sight," he said, and he smiled expansively. I looked around the office. Was there nothing I could use to slow his ascent? Some sort of cord to keep him from drifting completely beyond the boundaries of space?

  "You think you see something, O. No, what you really perceive is movement and change; what you perceive is the changing light, light off one object in relation to something else. If there's no change, if things are totally static, there's nothing to see. That is a fact. Provable fact." That must have been the apogee, because he stopped and leaned back in his chair.

  I took a breath. "Then I'm surprised anyone can see around here. Nothing ever changes."

  Pak pretended he hadn't heard. He stared out the window into the darkness and the empty courtyard. "It's exactly the same with sound, you know. Constant complaining-almost impossible to hear after a certain point." He swiveled back to his desk and took a piece of paper out of a folder. He studied it a moment. "A woman was murdered last month. We're supposed to find out why." He glanced up to see my reaction. I started to speak, but he cut me off. Pak rarely cuts anyone off; he always defers to another speaker, even when someone interrupts him. "Not 'why,' actually. Not 'why' in the traditional sense. We're just supposed to gather information about her, background, family, friends, political reliability, education. Gather them up, all the things that might have a bearing on the 'why.'"

  "Sex life?" Right away I was on guard. Cutting me off was another example of aberrant behavior. He was worried about something. If he wasn't going to share with me what it was, then I'd better worry, too.

  Pak observed me with a kind of smoke in his eyes, a hazy, far-off look meant to avoid giving anything away. "If it's relevant, yes."

  "You don't think it's relevant?" I never liked it when he gave me that hazy look.

  "It might be. But there is a complication."

  "A complication. Let me guess. She had odd appetites."

  "No, she was murdered overseas."

  I gave it some thought. "That's a few hundred kilometers out of my district, isn't it?"

  "We have less than a week. They want a nice thick dossier prepared. We hand it over, then it's not our business anymore. It goes to the Ministry, but I have a feeling"-he paused for the downbeat-"I have a feeling it doesn't stop there. You'd better get moving."

  "How do we know she was really murdered?" Getting moving, as Pak put it, was not high on my list until he let me know a little more about what I was supposed to do. A person could fall into a deep hole unless he asked a question or two before he got moving. "Maybe she just died. People do that."

  "We don't know anything other than what it says on this." Pak held up the piece of paper. "I'll assume it's right, and so will you. It doesn't matter anyway. The facts will be the same on this end, no matter what happened to her or if she liked…" Pak paused. "It doesn't matter what she liked. All we need is a collection of the facts on this end. That's it. Nothing fancy, no hypothesizing, no grand framework. No essence. Just facts. Fact one, fact two, fact thirty-four. Sweep them up with a broom. Just think of yourself as a broom, Inspector. Now, go sweep. Most of it should be in files somewhere, so you can sit and keep your shoes dry." It was raining again, needle drops with icy tips that clattered against the window. "Don't bet some of the files haven't already been fiddled with, though. And where there are gaps, you'll have to go out and fill them."

  "Isn't this a little odd? I can't remember being put on something like this before, worrying with events so far outside our jurisdiction."

  "An unquestioning broom, a dumb, unthinking, uncomprehending broom. Shut up and sweep, can't you?"

  "You don't think this smells right, I can tell. What do you know that you're not sharing?"

  Pak got up and closed the door. When he sat down again, he crossed his arms. It made him look weighty-weighty and obdurate. He wasted another minute or so, hoping I would turn into a broom. I didn't, and finally he shrugged. When I first started to work in Pak's section, I thought that shrug was dismissive, a gesture meant to show that he was top dog and I wasn't. If I wanted to shrug, I thought, I'd have to find someone lower down the chain. Over time, though, I realized it wasn't deliberate and it wasn't aimed at me. It was part of a conversation Pak carried on within himself, an internal argument he had before deciding he didn't want to debate a point anymore. Some people grimace after they've made a decision they don't like. Pak shrugged. "The word is, this isn't just a simple murder. There are overtones. Or undertones. The sort of thing I don't like, and I tried to make the same argument you're making-that it's outside our jurisdiction. No luck."

  "Not simple." I moved over to the window. "Murder may be a lot of things, but it's never simple." The icy rain had changed to snow, and would soon be piling up against the three ginkgo trees that stood in the courtyard. Pine trees took winter with a
touch of grace. Not the gink-goes. They endured in a stolid, flinty sort of way, pursed lips, rigid and annoyed. One of the three was sick. It probably wouldn't last much past spring. It would never be replaced. We'd be down to two, and that would change the entire tone of the courtyard, change the light coming into the office, change everything. "You can't nurse a tree," my grandfather would say. "All you can do is say good-bye."

  "I don't know how, but the whole thing seems mixed up with that funny group that works out of the party, you know, whatever they call themselves these days," Pak said. "The ones who deal in special weapons, and I don't mean infantry rifles or pistol ammunition. They're hooked up with this somehow, that's what I'm reading between the lines." He held up the paper again. This time I got a better look. There weren't many lines on it.

  "Where did this assumed murder take place?"

  "How should I know?" Which sometimes meant he knew exactly.

  "So, we can assume they don't want us to guess where, and they certainly don't want us to find out. Agreed?"

  Pak fiddled with his pencil.

  "In this case," I said, "I'm going to take silence as assent. But you must realize, I'll certainly find out sooner or later some of the things we aren't supposed to know. It's inevitable. Maybe even by tomorrow. I mean, it won't be very hard to figure out where she was sent, and if we're unlucky I'll stumble over a lot more."

  "You might, unless they've already pulled all of the files, not just fooled with them but pulled them and warned people to clam up."

  "No, not 'might.' I will. Even if I try not to, I'll find out. And when I do, we'll know too much, won't we?" It suddenly occurred to me that whoever ordered this assignment either didn't understand much about investigations, or knew more than we realized. First the visitor had showed up, then Mun, and now this.