by James Church
Pak opened a drawer and took out a piece of paper. "You don't mind if I doodle, do you?"
"You want to know what stinks about this? If it is really connected to that funny weapons group you just mentioned, then the investigation belongs in other circles, not with us. There are plenty of units outside the Ministry to handle something like this. Why not those guerrillas from the special section? It has nothing to do with us, does it, if a woman is killed in Pakistan?"
Pak's pencil stopped on the paper. He looked up and frowned. "Why would you think that?"
"That it has nothing to do with us?"
"Don't be coy, Inspector."
"Pakistan?" I thought about it. "I don't know, no reason, I guess."
Pak didn't look like he was going to take that for an answer.
"Alright, just thinking out loud. Why? Am I getting close?"
Pak's expression didn't change.
"Three Fingers, actually." I really didn't know for sure why I'd mentioned Pakistan. Maybe it was on my mind. Seeing Mun had brought back a lot of memories.
"Is that where he left the other two? Is that where someone didn't prop the door open for you?" His eyes bored into mine. "That's all? Just free association?"
"You mentioned something about special weapons. I've heard a few things about that, not much. When foreign visitors come through my sector, I get reports. I don't file everything I hear, you know that, but lately we've had some curious comings and goings. Even if I look the other way, people like to tell me things. Pakistan keeps coming up in what they say. Special weapons come up sometimes. I figured it was cracked, garbled, I don't know. It's cold and people are hungry, a lot of stuff is going around on the streets. Some people talk more than they used to."
"Forget whatever you've heard; forget it." Pak began to draw jagged lines on the paper. "Inspector, let's not make this any more complicated than it has to be. Empty your pockets of all of this speculation." He glanced up. "Never mind, forget what's in your pockets. You just gather a few facts for us tomorrow. We'll put them on a form, seal it up in a nice new envelope, and drop it into the bureaucratic river that flows through the whole of mankind's existence. It unifies us as a species. I think bureaucracy preceded speech. It may have even preceded sex, normal sex, anyway." He gazed thoughtfully into the courtyard for a moment. "Do us both a favor, O, and for once take my advice: Just be a broom."
"I don't think a broom is what we need."
"You don't." Pak sighed. "Naturally, you don't."
"No, I think we are in the realm of the shovel."
"You planning to dig?"
"If necessary. I do that sometimes, you know."
2
As soon as I knocked on the door, I knew things weren't going right. From inside I could hear sounds, furniture scraping, someone clearing his throat, then footsteps.
"Who is it?" It was a man's voice, an old man. According to the file, this was her father, a widower, a former air force general. Leave it to a general not to open the door. "I said who the hell is it? You hard of hearing?"
"No, sir. I'm just waiting. Would you mind opening the door so we can talk? It's cold in the hall."
Laughter. "Not any warmer in here, sonny." The door opened. He was old, sharp eyes, grizzled is probably the right word for the rest of him. "Say what you want and say it quick. I'm sick." He coughed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. "Well, say it, what do you want?"
As soon as I'd left Pak's office, I got started on the investigation. I rummaged around in the Ministry's file room, traded an insult or two with the clerks, and then made a list of facts to sweep into a big folder to put on Pak's desk as soon as I could. No shovels, no digging-I heard a little voice repeating. The sooner I start, I told myself, the sooner it's done.
First on the list was the woman's father, the old general. "I've got to ask you a few questions, that's all."
"The hell you do. You tell me who you are first, then we'll decide what comes next."
"Inspector O, Ministry of Public Security. I'm sorry about your daughter, but I have to ask you some questions, General."
He frowned. "You alone?"
"I am."
"Come in. Keep your coat buttoned, it's cold as hell in here." He stood aside, and I walked past him into a dark room.
"Should I open the curtains?" I bumped into a low table. "It will give us some light."
"I don't want any damned light, what do you think about that? I want it dark. I want to sit in the dark and think. That meet with your approval, Inspector?"
"Fine. Mind if I sit?"
"Ask your questions, why don't you?"
I sat down and tried to figure out how to deal with the man. The air in the room was so laden with grief, it was hard to think. I wasn't going to get much out of him, no matter what tack I took, and he wasn't going to give me much time. Since he wouldn't tell me what I needed to know, even if he knew it, I might as well not even bother to ask him directly. Just take it easy, I told myself. Stay in control. "About your daughter. Did you have any communication with her in the last few months?"
"The last few months? No."
"Few means many, several, something more than two but less than six. Does that help?"
"We spoke once or twice."
"On the phone?"
"Stupid question. Yes, on the phone. How else would we speak? Once, she was in an embassy; she called my office. The other time"-he said this very softly-"was from New York. She was real excited. She didn't say much, but I could tell by her voice. She said she was happy. I told her to be careful, to listen to the security people."
An embassy. Well, it was a start. Curious, that hadn't been in any file on her I'd seen so far. No mention of being attached to the Foreign Ministry. "At the embassy, she was happy with the surroundings? Weather was okay, food alright, and so forth?" I didn't want him to realize I had no idea where the embassy was. Maybe it was Pakistan, maybe it wasn't. If he sensed I was guessing, he certainly wouldn't tell me. If he smelled a hunch, he'd smile grimly and sit back, as I imagined he used to do in a roomful of generals-each one suspicious of the next and all of them scared of him. He'd go silent all of a sudden. Nothing would make him open up then. I softened my tone a little. "Did she mention anything that caught your attention? Insects, trees, trouble sleeping? Anything?"
"Pretty fine-grained questions for a cop. You sure you're not one of those security snakes?" I shook my head and pulled out my ID. He didn't bother to look. That wasn't what generals did. Other people, guards at the gate, checked IDs.
"We didn't talk long." He was changing the subject. "She just wanted to know if I would send her something."
"What was that?"
"Got your attention now, don't I?" He went silent, so I waited. I could wait as long as he could. We stared at each other for a couple of long minutes. Finally, he walked into the next room and emerged with a book. "She wanted one of these. One of her books." He held it out for me to see. "Something about music. By the time I found someone to carry it out to her, she was dead." He felt bad about that, I could tell, but he wasn't going to say to me that this or anything else on earth bothered him. "Dead," he said again. "I don't remember where I put the damned book, if that's what you're going to ask me next."
"That's not the book?" I pointed to the one he was holding.
"I told you, I can't find that one now. I put it somewhere when I heard she was dead. I have this one, that's all. It was hers. I look at it sometimes."
Time to change the subject. If he sank any deeper into melancholy, I'd never get him back on dry land. I should have seen it coming as soon as he said he'd told her to be careful in New York. "You still go to the office? I thought you were retired."
"How long you been at this job, Inspector?"
"A while."
"A while. You were in the army?"
"I was."
"They boot you out?" The melancholy had been vaporized.
"No."
"Why'd you leave? Army
not interesting enough? Too tough?"
"Maybe I should go out and come back in, so we can start this all over."
"Maybe you should just go out and not come back."
I looked around the room. "No, I don't think so. I think I have some more questions to ask, and I think you're going to answer them."
"If I don't?"
"But you will. Sit down, General. I don't really want to be here, and you don't really want me here, so we're on equal footing. I said sit down."
The old man squinted at me. When he was younger, it was a steely look; now it was just a squint. "You have a hell of a nerve." He paused. "No, I'm not going to sit. But I'll answer three questions. Then you're done. And don't think I'm not serious, because I am. People in the army still stand at attention when I break wind." He grinned. "You want to test me?"
"No. Three questions are fine, for now." I let that sink in for a moment. "First, when you spoke to your daughter, you said she sounded excited. Do you mean agitated? Did she sound worried about anything, anything seem to be bothering her, any concerns she voiced to you about her personal safety? That's all one question, by the way."
"No, she said everything was fine." I thought he might just shrug off the question again, but he seemed to take it seriously. "Something funny that I recall: When she called from New York, she said she'd walked in his footsteps and now she could die happy. That's all she said before we were cut off. The second time, it was a few months later. It wasn't a good connection, but I'd say she sounded tired. Trouble sleeping. The chants or singing, whatever it was, woke her early. It made her edgy, she said, everything being so foreign. One more thing, she said that fool husband of hers was going to get her in trouble with the locals. I'll save you a question. No, she didn't say why and I didn't ask."
"You saved me two."
The old man grunted and walked over to the window. He moved one curtain to the side. The light didn't exactly spill into the room-it was already late afternoon and there wasn't much left-but the gray from outside crept along the walls until I could see that the place hadn't been cleaned in a long time. We fell back into silence. I figured I'd give him a chance to say something else, if that's what he wanted to do.
Finally, I stood and walked to the door. "I have a few other things to check, but I'll be back for the last two questions. If you remember something that you think you ought to tell me, something you forgot, let me know."
"Don't bother coming back. There's nothing else. You'll be wasting your time." He closed the curtain again. "I told her not to get into this stuff, but she wouldn't listen to me."
"What stuff?"
He moved over to the door. "I'm done talking to you, Inspector. Your people want something from me, tell them to put it in writing."
3
I spent the rest of December sweeping up a few inconsequential facts about the woman who had been murdered. Or not murdered. Anything was still possible, based on what little I knew. Maybe she'd just dropped dead. I didn't actually have a single fact about what happened to her, and the paper we had on her case told me exactly nothing. It asserted she'd been murdered. That didn't mean anything to me. But I was starting to lean. That happens sometimes. A few facts here and there, a feeling stirs an intuition, and the next thing that happens, I'm leaning in the direction of a hypothesis.
Her father told me she said she couldn't sleep because of the chanting in the morning. She wouldn't tell him it was the call to prayer, but that's what it could have been. This was circular, I knew. I assumed that what she was complaining about was morning calls to prayer for no good reason other than that Mun had suddenly shown up. Circular logic isn't wrong, it's round. If it was a call to prayers, it could have been any Islamic country, but again, not if I threw Mun into the equation. True, I didn't know where Mun had been for all of these years. I knew where he and I had been, though, and it wasn't a cosmic coincidence that he had suddenly appeared and wanted to talk over "old times" with me. Or that he had showed up just after someone had delivered an Israeli or a Swiss Jew, or whatever Jeno was, on our doorstep. If I had to choose, I'd choose circular logic over cosmic coincidence.
This is how I get when I start to lean, even when I know it would be better to assume things are unconnected. I looked, I swept, I dug into the woman's background, but there wasn't a lot of information about her where there should have been, and every time I found a gap, even a little one, I leaned a little more. She was dead. People had a habit of doing that, and afterward, there were always gaps. Some gaps are natural. That's how people live their lives-gaps, empty places, silences. But not like what this woman left behind.
I had no description of where she'd been when she died, or what time of day it was, or what color clothes she was wearing, or which way her legs crumpled when she hit the ground for the last time, assuming she'd been standing just then, at that moment. If I knew some of that, I might have some sense of where to start filling the gaps. So I dug into holes that already existed, and swept small voids into bigger ones. That's when it hit me, the pattern. Someone had given us this assignment, and then nothing. No pressure to finish the report. None. Mun had showed up out of nowhere, then disappeared again. No more contact. The special section had paid us two visits, and then they were off our backs. Not even a phone call. Gears were turning somewhere and then getting stuck. Not my business why, and as far as I could see, Pak didn't think it was his business, either.
To my surprise, it didn't turn out to be such a bad way to spend the end of the old year and the first weeks of the new one, poking around files, gathering odd facts, staring into the blank spots in the dead woman's life. There wasn't much else to do, and I wasn't in the mood to do nothing. The folder I was supposed to be assembling was still on the thin side, and I was wondering how to make it appear fatter one morning when Pak walked in and dropped some orders on my desk. Normally, he says something when he gives me a set of orders. This time, he walked out again without saying a word. Not happy, I thought as I tore open the envelope.
I read the paper three times before the thought formed clearly in my mind: crazy. I was to go to Beijing to meet Jeno at the airport and escort him back to Pyongyang. It was beyond comprehension, given the thinly veiled-nearly naked, actually-threats from the Man with Three Fingers about how we shouldn't have let Jeno out of the country to begin with. The man had barely got out, and now I was supposed to fetch him back? I walked over to Pak's office and stuck my head in.
"Just do it." He said without looking up. "Don't ask me what is going on. I don't have a clue."
4
At the Beijing airport, Jeno smiled and followed me onto the plane. Considering the run-in we'd had in Pak's office with the special section, the man seemed unnaturally calm, even for him. There wasn't a drop of tension evident in his bearing, no cloud of concern on his brow, no spark of apprehension in his eyes. Someone watching us-and for sure there was someone watching us-would have thought I was more nervous than he was. Neither of us spoke for a while after takeoff. Finally, he looked out the window as the plane banked and the view opened up in a break in the clouds. "More snow than before, a lot more. January must be a bad month here, and it's not even half over." He pointed and his finger tapped the oblong window. "See that?" I leaned over his shoulder. "That's the plane's shadow playing across the ground. The snow is an odd color, isn't it? Looks like butterscotch pudding spilled from the hills."
"I wouldn't know," I said and moved back in my seat. "To me, it looks like pumpkin porridge dripping from the rim of a pot." No one made pumpkin porridge like that anymore. My grandfather made it in the autumn, from pumpkins we gathered off the vines that grew on the fence behind his house. He said he learned to make porridge from his father, and that I should learn it from him. After I moved to Pyongyang, I couldn't get pumpkins. Or when I did, I couldn't find the time.
"Sounds delicious, pumpkin porridge. Can you make it?" Just then the pitch of the engines changed. Jeno glanced around nervously, straining to hear wh
at might come next. The engines dropped back to normal, and he relaxed. "I am very sensitive to sound, Inspector. Some people respond to visual cues. I am hypersensitive to sounds of all types."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"The people behind us, incidentally, are Israeli." This he said in Korean, accented, but perfectly understandable. In fact, too good; it was as if the sound were coming from a machine. It nearly knocked me off my seat.
"You speak Korean? Why didn't you let on before?" I had meant that to come out as complimentary, but the annoyance was quicker on its feet.
"Surprised? Your language isn't so difficult, no worse than Hungarian. Besides, they're related. Come to think of it, maybe we're related. Wouldn't that be something? Ancient brothers from tribes that wandered apart in the misty past."
"I don't think so. I don't like paprika."
The trolley with drinks stopped beside us. The stewardess looked down at me. Why don't these good-looking girls work in my office, even near my office? I thought. Why are they confined to this ancient Russian tube ten thousand meters above the earth? Jeno nudged my arm. "Don't pant. Just tell her what you want."
"Nothing." I nodded to the stewardess. "Nothing for me. Perhaps our guest would like something, though. Go ahead, ask him in Korean. Or Hungarian. No, wait, try Hebrew."
"You really shouldn't refuse me, Inspector," the girl tossed her head back, just a little, just enough to notice, then she smiled at the foreigner. "Drink?" she asked in English.
He took a cup of tea; the trolley moved on. I looked around the cabin and then settled back. I closed my eyes, pretending I was somewhere pleasant. An elbow nudged me.
"I'd rather not be poked," I said. "Please, don't poke me like that, I don't care whether we are tribesmen or not."
He paid no attention. "You might get up and stroll into the first class cabin. There are some interesting passengers beyond the curtain. You'll find three more, just like that group behind us. Say 'shalom' to them and watch their eyes pop out." I didn't move. "Go ahead, have some fun, what can it hurt?" He poked me. "Eh?"
