by James Church
The Potong River wasn't too far, and I liked walking there. By then, there wasn't much left of the afternoon. It turned to dusk, but dusk didn't hang around; nothing wanted to linger at this time of year. That was why I didn't see her coming.
"Hello, Inspector."
"Hello, yourself." There wasn't much else to say. She was the last person I expected to run across. Then it occurred to me, maybe it was fate. Why not? I was due for some fate. "I was just thinking about you."
"Is that so?"
"I've been wondering, what if I want a transfer?"
"Something wrong between you and Pak? You finally exhausted his patience? The man has a reservoir of patience deeper than the ocean, but you have drained it."
"No, Pak is fine, still putting up with me. I'm just thinking ahead. A whole career in Pyongyang, it might not look so good when it comes time for my promotion."
"If either of us lives that long. Face it, you're not ever going to be promoted, O. Besides, when did you start craving advancement? 'Don't make the offer,' you said the last time the subject came up. 'I won't take it. I'm fine where I am.'"
She was a woman I'd met in the army; "an old friend" is how I described her to people when they asked. A few years ago, she had been made a deputy in the Ministry's personnel section. It was her chief who had disappeared. The whole section had been put on report for not predicting that the boss was going to defect. No one knew for sure if he had defected, but he was gone, and it was pretty clear he wasn't on vacation in Cuba.
With the day finished, the temperature was looking for a place to spend the night. It would be good if we could go to her office to talk. As head of the section, she'd likely have some heat. If anyone had heat, she would. No one wanted the acting chief of personnel in a bad mood, whether she was on report or not. Little presents came her way, small bags of rice, pieces of fruit. She also had a lot of people slithering under her door in hopes of getting a good assignment. I wasn't one of them. Once, we had been very close, but things had changed. I had forgotten why.
"Well, then," I said, "let's just pretend. If I was going to get promoted, wouldn't I need to serve outside of Pyongyang?"
"What is this about? I don't have time for games, O, not these days. They're crawling up our backsides, trying to figure out where he went."
"I assume that's the one place he isn't." I smiled in the dark; she looked at me with ice in her eyes. Even in the blackness, I could see that. That look, it started to jar loose in my memory what had gone wrong. "Let's just say I wanted the toughest, most undesirable post you could find. Let's say I got headquarters really mad at me, and they decided it was time to exile Inspector O to teach him a lesson. Where would they send me?"
"You don't want to go to North Hamgyong, and I'm not sending you. It's suicide these days. You never struck me as suicidal. Obtuse and heartless maybe, but not suicidal. This isn't about postings. What is it?"
"I need your help."
"You need my help, you bastard?" She laughed, the way an axe laughs at a piece of kindling. "After all this time, you knock on my door and say you need my help? How, specifically?"
"Hwadae county." Might as well get straight to the point. Romancing her up to the question clearly wasn't going to work.
"Are you crazy?" She considered. "No, you're not crazy, you scheming bastard. I'll tell you what I should do. I should put you in the coldest, deadliest, sickest, hungriest place I can find. I should make you a mine guard, a camp guard." She took a deep breath. "I might still do that, don't push your luck. But I won't send you to Hwadae."
"I don't want to be assigned there. I need to know what's going on."
"Of course you do. Every crummy sector cop in the capital needs to know what is happening in an isolated, out-of-bounds county on the east coast." She snorted, which was never her best noise. "Don't ask me. It's military, and they keep us out. That's all I know, and if I knew anything else, you're the last person in the world I would tell." She was lying, very openly, which was the only way she could tell me what I wanted to know. Amazing! As angry as she seemed to be after all of these years, she was willing to help. Maybe she still liked me. Not bad, having a chief in the personnel section, even an acting chief, with the hots for you. It was more than I had a right to ask; but it was exactly what I needed.
"There's a visitor who wants to go there," I said and put my step in cadence with hers. "Body rhyming," we used to call it when we went for walks. That popped into my memory from somewhere. I shut the door in a hurry. "Should I take him?"
"You couldn't get him past the first barrier. He'd need special orders. So would you, incidentally. A Ministry ID doesn't go as far as it used to."
"He's an Israeli."
I could tell that stunned her. She took a half step out of rhythm and then stopped abruptly. "Well, well, well. He'll have some interesting company if he gets in there." No reason she should know about a visitor under our protection, but still, it surprised me that she didn't. I would have thought the news had gone up and down the corridors by now.
"Interesting company?" I thought my voice had just the right lilt of disinterest. "Like who?"
"Maybe Pakistanis. Maybe Iranians. Maybe Bolivians."
"Bolivians?" It was hard to sound uninterested.
"Why not? If I were from Bolivia, I'd want missiles to protect me against Venezuela."
"Venezuela isn't near Bolivia."
"My mistake." She walked away, down the path to a waiting car. Her engine probably got maintained pretty regularly.
7
I didn't go back to the office as I'd planned. I needed to walk a little more in the dark, maybe head to the Koryo and let my thoughts fall into some sort of order. I made a mental list. The Man with Three Fingers, the general's dead daughter, a Swiss-Hungarian-Jew with a wad of dollars, and now, to top it all off, two Israeli delegations falling over each other. None of them had anything to do with Bolivia, but I'd bet they were all linked. Timing had everything to do with it. Pak hated it when I fell back on timing to explain a hunch. I never much liked it, either. The only thing I liked less than timing as an explanation was coincidence, cosmic or not. Even if I could accept coincidence now and then, there was no way that could cover two Israeli delegations. I thought about this for a while-whether timing meant something or whether it meant nothing-and then I realized I was completely alone. No one else was on the path; there was barely anyone around. It wasn't that late; there should be at least a few people still outside, hurrying home. The city had become eerie, much too quiet. There was no pulse left, no spark. The stores were empty, the streets were deserted. The whole way over to the Koryo, I kept wondering where the hole was that had swallowed the population. By the time I got to the hotel, I was practically frozen.
Once my fingers thawed, I found a phone and called up to Jeno?s room. "I made it here, barely. Meet me in the coffee shop. I'll be the one pouring hot water over his head."
I was the only customer, so I picked the warmest-looking table and sat down.
Jeno showed up a few minutes later. He didn't even say hello. "How did the first group react when it found out about the other one?" It sounded like the beginning of a bad joke. The two Israeli delegations were staying in the hotel, but apparently he was steering clear.
"I haven't talked to them."
"You must have seen a report."
"Let's just say one of them spit bullets and the other two laughed until they cried."
Jeno leaned back and smiled, content. It seemed a good time to break the news to him.
"All your requests for meetings have been denied," I said matter-offactly. We weren't on a beach. We were both wearing our overcoats. The coffee had gone cold almost immediately, not that it mattered. "All denied but one. You can go to the Trade Ministry tomorrow morning, assuming there's someone around to meet you. It's only a five-minute car ride from here. Other than that, you're allowed to wander around within the four walls of this building. You can look closely at the hotel lo
bby. When you get tired of that, you have permission to stare at the television in your room. As a fallback, go up and down in the elevator a few times."
"I protest."
"Then look out the window if you'd rather. I think you can see the train yard, or at least the tracks. I doubt you'll see a train."
"I mean about the appointments. I didn't risk that plane ride just to sit around this depressing hotel."
"Oh, really. You don't like the Koryo? It's not bad, once you get used to it. Besides, no one twisted your arm to come back. Why did you? We had a hell of a time getting you out safely the first time. You must realize by now that there are people who would like to get their hands on you. I'm still wondering how you got another visa."
"You don't know?"
"My Ministry doesn't issue visas. If we did, you wouldn't have one."
"I have money, Inspector. Your government is in rather desperate need. Tab A, slot B, so to speak."
"Well, your tabs don't seem equally compelling to everyone, as far I can tell. Your requests for meetings are denied. I'm supposed to make sure nothing happens to you, and the best way to do that is to keep you here."
"I see. Perhaps you are the one who has denied my requests?" The man looked off into space; his eyebrows twitched thoughtfully. "It really doesn't matter where I have my meetings, you know. People can come here. It's warm, relatively speaking. We can sit and talk, drink tea, have something to eat." He put his hand on my shoulder and his eyes lit up. "Brilliant idea, Inspector, brilliant. I should have thought of it myself. If I can't go to them, they'll be happy to come to me, right?"
"When do your friends leave?"
"Those two delegations? They aren't my friends. We have different goals, very different. I want to make money. They think I cooperate too much with people who should be stepped on."
"They think we should be stepped on?"
"They did think that before, but now they seem to have changed their minds. That's why they're coming by the planeload to see your officials."
"And what changed their minds?"
He shrugged and then smiled. It was one of those charming smiles that put my hackles on red alert. "That isn't something I would know, now is it? I just want to make some money."
I relaxed a little, it was so ridiculous. "Are you kidding? Money? Here?"
"Sure, why not? You have workers; they know how to obey orders. They're educated and can be trained. I've heard from others who have set up shop here that there are ways of making things work. If you had roads and electricity, I could be the richest man on earth." He paused. "But I can make do with a lot less. What sense is there in being the richest man on earth? A lot of unhappiness is all it brings. You ever hear of King Midas?"
"I slept through the English history classes."
He smiled. "Only one thing I need."
"Sorry, I already told you, your requests for meetings have been denied."
"I heard." He put a hundred-dollar bill on the table, stood up, and walked past the girl at the front counter without paying.
8
The next morning, we met in the lobby. It was so cold the staff all wore overcoats with the collars up and, if they had them, scarves. "Someone from the party will see you at ten o'clock," I said after we shook hands.
"What about the Trade Ministry?"
"It was decided you don't require anyone from the ministries. The party will do fine for your needs."
"And what are my needs?
"That is what you'll explain this morning when you meet someone from the party."
"I suppose this means you are no longer assigned to look after me. So, good-bye, Inspector, thank you for your help."
As we shook hands again, his eyes widened slightly when he felt the bill in my palm.
"You accidentally left something on the table yesterday," I said.
His hand went into his pocket. "It's not polite to refuse a present from a visitor. Every culture has that as a basic rule."
"Perhaps, but I heard somewhere to beware of Greeks bearing gifts. We don't see many Greeks," I said, "so I assumed that went for the Swiss as well."
He smiled, not the charming one.
"Maybe even Pakistanis." It didn't mean anything, or maybe it did. Pakistan was on my mind. Not on my mind, exactly, but just below the surface. Ever since my old friend the acting personnel chief had let me know that someone from Pakistan had gone to Hwadae county, I'd heard a rustling in my subconscious, something stirring, a Siberian wind blowing dead leaves along the frozen ground. Hwadae county was off-limits; we were supposed to report anyone overheard saying anything about the place. It was supposed to be a big secret that things to do with missiles went on up there, but plenty of people had relatives, who had friends, who knew former army buddies who drank too much and said something they weren't supposed to when their heads were lolling and their tongues were loose. If someone from Pakistan had gone to Hwadae, then it wasn't so far-fetched that the special section might have an unusual interest in what happened to a certain Korean woman who died in Pakistan-and something kept telling me that my first wild hunch had been completely right, it had been Pakistan. In the great wide world somewhere else, that might be a stretch. Not here, not in my little corner of reality.
Jeno didn't say anything when I mentioned Pakistanis, but the half-smile normally on his lips vanished into the cold. In that instant, he told me just what I needed to know. I left before his eyebrows slow-danced back into place.
9
After I left Jeno, I sat in the duty vehicle for a few minutes with the engine running and the heater on. Now I was pretty sure she worked at the embassy in Pakistan, or at least found access to a phone there. It was still officially a hunch, but it had become one of those hunches that don't want to get crowded out by other possibilities. Yes, if Pak wanted to argue I'd have to admit it might have been somewhere else; I couldn't prove she'd been in Islamabad. Actually, I wasn't even supposed to prove it; I wasn't supposed to worry about it. It wasn't the sort of fact the broom was supposed to sweep. If the Man with Three Fingers hadn't turned up and sneered, I might have dropped the whole thing, but I didn't want to leave another body lying around my conscience.
The problem was, where to go next? Her husband had an assignment, but doing what? For whom? Her father said she'd complained he was going to get her into trouble. If she was just a wife, how could he get her into trouble with the locals? It wasn't beyond possibility that she had an assignment, too. And if she'd had an assignment, maybe it was connected with why she turned up dead. In that case, there was only one place to begin checking-the Foreign Ministry. It wasn't somewhere I liked to go, but they usually had hot water for tea.
Outside it was frigid but clear, so I decided to leave the car at the hotel and walk. The less I had to drive on slick streets, the better I liked it. There were a few other people out walking, and even a couple of old trucks on the road. I watched them go by, which may be why I didn't notice that the sidewalk down the hill hadn't been cleared. Just as my feet left the ground, an army jeep coming up the hill spun its wheels and slid sideways into a nearby snowdrift. The driver climbed out and looked around. He spotted me on the ground.
"You! Give me a hand." It was an officer, a colonel. Just like I remembered from the army, a colonel always shows up when you least need him. When I didn't move, he bristled. "I said give me a hand. I haven't got all day."
Inquiring why he didn't have a driver didn't seem like a good idea, certainly not while I was on my back. I stood up slowly, careful not to slip again. "I'm on duty, Colonel, and on assignment." It was an assignment I'd given myself, but what the hell. "I'll give you a push, and maybe you can drive me where I need to go. It isn't far."
That bargain didn't seem to go down. "You think you can refuse a direct order from an officer of the People's Army these days? I can have you arrested. I can even have you shot. I can do it myself, if I've a mind."
"You want help on your jeep or don't you?" My feet were g
etting cold, and my back was sore. If I didn't get somewhere warmer soon, it would stiffen up and I would be hunched over until spring. I wasn't about to stand and argue for a whole afternoon, even a short one in January, with a colonel who didn't rate a driver. He might have me shot, but he didn't look the type to do it himself, certainly not here. There was more and more talk that the army had made a grab for extra status, but that still didn't dictate executing police in broad daylight with no one else in sight. Make sense, you strutting bastard, I thought to myself. Why shoot a monkey to scare the chickens if there are no chickens around to see you do it? Or was it the other way around?
The drive to the Foreign Ministry took less than two minutes. We roared up to the front steps so quickly it startled the sentry, who unfastened the holster at his hip and reached for his pistol. I was barely out of the jeep when the colonel backed into the street at high speed and slid into the square before he regained control, hurrying off in a spray of ice and snow.
The guard had seen me before. He didn't want to move again because if he did, it would disturb the warmth of the posture he had settled into. He flicked his eyes to the door. I went in and up the stairs to the liaison office. I didn't knock.
"Inspector!" The liaison officer had a small electric heater on. That was illegal, but warm. He nodded for me to come over and share the heat. "Is this a pleasant surprise, or have you arrested someone who is going to cause us trouble of a diplomatic sort?"
"I'm on heater patrol."
"Well, you came to the right place." The lights flickered once, then went out. So did the heater. "Funny," he said, "the other day on the radio they announced that the electricity workers had overfulfilled this month's quota."
"Perhaps they were rewarded with today off."
We stood around in the dark, wondering how long it would last this time. Sometimes it was only a few seconds; sometimes it was longer. A few people kept candles in their desks. Apparently, he wasn't one of those. "Don't move, Inspector," he said very softly. "If you move, you'll dissipate the warm air. Just stand still and let it waft slowly up to the ceiling. If we're lucky, Mr. Shin downstairs will do the same, and his heat will be arriving through the floor just as ours goes up to Miss Ban. Imagine the heat going up her legs, will you?"
