A Corpse in the Koryo

by James Church

  “Excuse me, but I’m not convinced. You’re out of your country, rolling around Eastern Europe like a billiard ball, and no one knows where you are? Sorry. I’m not in the market for a story like that. And you know what? If I don’t believe you, we don’t have a meeting. You go your way, I go mine. Good-bye, see you in a ditch.”

  “You want the truth? They don’t care who I meet.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” He closed the briefcase that was beside him on the floor. “I’m only going to give you one more chance. Then I’m gone.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “See, I’m a trusting fellow, but I’m not stupid. Let’s say I hand in my notes. First question I’m going to get is, ‘What was the SOB doing in Prague if his orders called for him to be in Budapest?’ And I’m going to say, ‘Wow, good question. It didn’t occur to me to ask. I was thinking of hills and girls on their sides.’” He clicked the lock on the briefcase. “Like I said, see you in a ditch.”

  “Go to hell. I’m only a police inspector. Sometimes they need someone unmarked. They hand me my passport, tell me to go somewhere, see someone, do something. Nothing complicated. I’m like background noise. No one looks twice at me.” I glanced at the red eyebrows. “Anyway, as far as they’re concerned, I don’t know anything that will do anyone like you any good. Even if you chop off my fingers one at a time, I’ve got nothing to tell.”

  “We’re not into fingers.” He settled back on the couch. “Not this week.”

  “You asked about Kang. Still interested?”

  He gestured toward the table. “Sit down, if you want. You got something to say, I’m listening. I doubt if it’s worth a lamb’s tit. We’ll have to see. If it makes any sense, I’ll take out my notebook. Otherwise”—the red eyebrows jumped on his forehead, then settled back into place—I have a date.”

  “The man’s dead. Why would I make anything up?”

  He clicked his pen twice. A nervous habit. He wasn’t trained very well, I thought, and his Russian was getting worse the more we talked. I walked over to the table and sat down. “You ready?”

  “Yeah.” He turned on a tiny silver tape recorder and put it on the low table in front of him. The table was dark wood, maybe black walnut, covered by a white cloth with blue and red birds embroidered around the edge. They all had sharp, bright yellow beaks. The cloth was new; you could still see where it had been folded. “Just a nice narrative, a bedtime story. Clean and simple. I don’t need anything too Oriental.” All of a sudden, his Russian was perfect.

  3

  I didn’t knock. Just opened the door, tossed the camera on Pak’s desk, and pulled up the only empty chair left in the room. My trousers hadn’t dried from the wet grass; the camera hadn’t worked; nothing had been accomplished. I was plenty irritated, and I wanted Pak to know it. I could tell he was annoyed as well. He ignored me. He kept writing on his blackboard, making a clicking sound with the chalk as he lifted it and then attacked the blackboard again. He battered the blackboard pretty good, pretending to be deep in concentration before saying, “Please come in, Inspector.” There were two other men in the room. Neither one spoke. Finally, Pak turned to me. “Inspector O, you know everyone here.” His face took on the slightest hint of warning. “Or maybe you don’t. This is Captain Kim, from joint headquarters.”

  I had never run across Kim, but I didn’t have to look twice to know we weren’t meant to be friends. He had short hair, unevenly cropped, a thick neck, and a dark face with an expression that might have been sullen except that his eyes were quick and sharp, like little paring knives. His summer uniform was good quality, better than his haircut, and someone had spent a long time shining his boots. He gave me a dismissive glance, then turned to frown at the camera on Pak’s desk. No one had to tell me, it was pretty clear he was connected with the surveillance.

  “No pictures,” I said. “Battery’s dead. Anyway, there were no plates on the car.” I flashed Kim a grin meant to suggest we were about to share something that would amuse him, but his little eyes stayed metallic, and I could sense he only laughed when he was the one making the joke. Off to the side, I could see Pak bracing himself. “You may not believe this, but the bastard honked the horn as he drove by.”

  The man next to Kim sat back and folded his arms. “What?”

  Before I could reply, Pak took my elbow and walked me to the door. “You’ll be wanting some tea, Inspector.”

  “No, he needs to answer my question.” I recognized the tone of voice. It was like the tip of a whip being dragged slowly back along the floor, just before it cracked through the air. A certain type of party official used that tone. Not mean, but quick and always decisive.

  “Actually,” I said, “I would like some tea.” Pak shut his eyes. He did that when he was embarrassed. Whether he was willing himself into an incorporeal state or hoping I might disappear if he could no longer see me was never clear. The man in the chair shifted his weight and stretched his legs, seemingly unhurried and at ease, but watching me the whole time. He put his fingers together, tapered fingers with well-manicured nails. Not someone who had recently been out helping the farmers. I knew what was coming.

  “I see, Inspector, that you are not wearing your portrait of either of our great Leaders.” The man paused for a fraction of a second. Captain Kim’s polished right boot tapped the floor lightly, just once, like the flick of a cat’s tail. Everyone pretended not to notice. “Can I assume there is some reason you choose not to wear one, unlike your fellow citizens in the capital?”

  “We don’t wear pins in the field,” I kept my tone matter-of-fact. Pak’s breathing had become dangerously slow. One of his standard warnings to me, repeated endlessly, was, “Never call the small picture of the Leader a pin.” But every time I put the little round badge on, it pricked my finger. Same place, every time. As far as I was concerned it was a nuisance, a sharp point in my life I didn’t need, a pin. I shrugged. “I haven’t been home in three days. It’s in my top drawer, on the left. Actually, the top drawer is my only drawer.” I could not resist what came next. “But you probably already know that.”

  “Inspector, this is Deputy Director Kang from the Investigations Department.” Pak was back with us. His eyelids flew open, and he put a smile on his face, though his lips didn’t take part. “We rarely get a Central Committee visitor to our small office. This is an honor.”

  Kang smiled in return, not to be friendly but to show me his teeth. He had on civilian clothes. His trousers were a little too long and wrinkled; the white shirt, open necked, looked like it was worn for a week at a time. His belt and his shoes were from overseas. Carefully chosen, not too stylish. The shoes were nicely scuffed, almost in deliberate counterpoint to Kim’s boots. “I asked a question,” he said evenly. “I’m still waiting for an answer.”

  “What I said was, the bastard honked.”

  Captain Kim broke in. “Who did? You mean the driver?”

  This caught my attention. I had assumed the two of them were cooperating, until Kim interrupted. Even in a session as informal as this, interrupting threw off the rhythm. Questions weren’t the key to an interrogation; it was the rhythm. Lose that, you lose everything. Then you have to start all over again. Good teams wouldn’t do that. Even bad teams observed basic rules.

  “How do I know who honked?” I relaxed. These two, whatever they were doing in Pak’s office, were pulling against each other. “The windows were smoked, and the car was moving so fast it was a blur.”

  “So how could you be sure it had no plates?” Kim picked up the camera. Unlike Kang’s, his hands were calloused and hard. Not from helping farmers but from breaking bricks and boards. Maybe bones,though I wasn’t going to ask. Kim’s voice emerged from inside a dark cave, where even simple questions were mauled and came out nasty. “How do we know you didn’t fail to take the picture on purpose? How do we even know you really tried?”

  “Look.” My voice got an edge to it sometimes when it shouldn’t,
and this was one of those times. I put both hands on Pak’s desk and leaned toward the two strangers, moving slowly, deliberately. It was either insubordinate or rude, I didn’t care which. Kim’s face darkened even more. He wanted a sign of deference, maybe a touch of fear, something to show I acknowledged his status, but I wasn’t in the mood to be deferential. Kang was almost the opposite: He didn’t seem to care. He didn’t change expression; his eyes followed me like a bear watching a rabbit. Not interested, not uninterested, just watching.

  “I don’t know about you, but I got up early to go sit on a hill in the dark, and for what? The battery in that camera is dead, like most batteries they issue us.” I paused. “The car, a big black Mercedes, was waxed and shining, no mud on the sides, new tires, no identification plates. None, not front, not back. It was coming from the south, incidentally, though no one has bothered to ask.” I paused again. Every time I paused, Kim got angrier. The metal in his eyes took on a dull sheen like the sky before a bad storm. “And the driver honked. A real nasty blast, more like a sneer. Why, in the middle of nowhere, on an empty road at dawn, would he do that? Lots of coincidences for just one morning, don’t you think?” I glanced at Kang. His face was still blank. “Now, if no one objects, I’m going to find some tea.”

  Pak moved to the blackboard and began erasing what he’d written. “I want a report on my desk in one hour, Inspector. Turn in that camera to Operations, and tell them to check it. And turn in the radio to Supply.” He blew the chalk dust off his fingers.

  Kang tore a page out of a small notebook with a leather cover. Nothing like what we were issued. “This is my number. Call me this afternoon. Two o’clock.” If I told the supply officer to get me a leather-bound notebook, he would laugh in my face. “Inspector,” he would simper, “you’re a riot.”

  I took the paper and put it in my pocket without looking. Kim had put the camera down on the desk, but he was still holding the lens cap. He bent it double between his fingers, gazed at it thoughtfully, then nodded slightly and handed it to me.

  “Do you think Operations has a kettle?” I turned to Pak, who was sitting at his desk again, pretending to study the first page of a long-out-of-date Ministry personnel manual.

  “I want that report, Inspector.” He didn’t look up as I walked out of the room and down the hall to Supply. I pulled the radio off my belt. It was switched on. That meant the battery had died, because otherwise it would have been popping and spitting throughout the meeting. I wondered if the third row of hills had disappeared in the haze of the August day.

  4

  The report didn’t take long to write. There wasn’t much to say, and I knew Pak wouldn’t want much detail. Details invite questions. Questions demand answers. Answers get twisted, or misinterpreted, or used as weapons. When I finished, I made sure Pak was alone. His door was wide open, but this time I knocked.

  “Come.” Pak was facing the blackboard, but it was blank. Two personnel dossiers lay open on his desk. One of them was mine, with an old picture of me stapled in the corner. I had a frown on my face. I drank too much in those days, and bright lights gave me a headache. I always frowned in front of cameras, waiting for the flash.

  “So, Inspector O, what have you to say for yourself?”

  “Sorry?”

  “How about, ‘Very sorry, Chief Inspector, for acting insubordinate to your visitors.’ ” I couldn’t see Pak’s face, but I knew his eyes were closed. He was wishing he was somewhere else. “You weren’t drinking that damned Finnish vodka on that hillside, were you?”

  I ignored the question. “Visitors? Visitors are meek. They murmur soft compliments. Those two weren’t visitors. Those were aliens. Being in the same room with them, it made my skin crawl.”

  “Please, Inspector.” Pak finally turned around. His face was drawn in a way I’d never seen before. “We’re in so much trouble I can’t count that high.” He looked at his watch. “And it’s not even noon.”

  I moved over to my favorite spot, where I could look out the window. It wasn’t much of a view. In the course of a year, the courtyard below alternated between dust and mud. At one corner sat a pile of bricks meant for a sidewalk between our offices and the Operations building across the way. Years had passed, but the walk was never built. No one raised the lack of progress with the Ministry; it would have done no good. We expected the bricks to disappear, a few here, a few there, two or three taken home, a dozen showing up for sale in the street market a few blocks away. Miraculously, no one touched them, and the brick pile was transformed into a permanent monument, useless but familiar.

  One summer, a junior officer in Operations had used the bricks as a bench, sitting there at dusk and singing up to a young telephone operator who worked the third-floor switchboard with her window open. She leaned her elbows on the windowsill and looked dreamily out at him, leaving calls to pile up. Her uncle was a colonel general in the army; otherwise she wouldn’t have lasted the several months it took for the Ministry to muster the courage to transfer her back to her hometown. She was pretty, a cheery sort, and I was sorry to see her go. No one sat on the bricks after that.

  I counted the bricks whenever a Ministry directive got under Pak’s skin. He would read the offending paper a few times, call me into his office, and then start writing furiously on his blackboard. Usually he would mutter only a word or two that I could catch—“idiotic” was common—but on occasion he would launch into a full-blown lecture. It took me a while to realize I wasn’t meant to respond. I only needed to stand at the window and tally one brick with each click of the chalk. Pak would finish his lecture and say, “What do you think?” I would reply, “Incredible, all there.”

  Pak liked the window, view or no view. He said it let in extra light on overcast days. In autumn, across from the brick pile, two tall gingko trees turned a brilliant gold for several weeks before the wind and cold November rains took away the leaves. Pak seemed happiest in early October. He would restlessly look out his window to spot the earliest touch of color on the trees. Finally, he’d call me to his office, and when I poked my head in, he would point to the window, a faraway look of quiet pleasure in his eyes. Now we were in the grip of summer, too soon for golden leaves.

  “What’s got you so upset?” I asked. “A dead battery kept me from taking a picture. Tell me, who the hell cares? Those two acted like it was a national crisis, like MacArthur had landed again.”

  “Maybe not so far-fetched.” Pak lowered himself into his chair. “A simple operation, really. Sit on a hill surrounded by the nice flowers at dawn—your favorite time of day, you always say—snap a picture, two maybe, and come home.”

  “Not my job.” Pak and I had been over this ground many times before. It wasn’t an argument. We each knew where it was going. “I don’t get paid to take pictures out in the countryside. I’m supposed to keep the capital in good order, at least my sector of it. That’s what I do. You heard complaints?”

  “Inspector, when was the last time you were paid?”

  “Okay, so they haven’t paid us lately. So, we aren’t paid to do anything.”

  “Good, because that about describes what you do.”

  From someone else it would have sounded cruel, but I knew Pak didn’t mean it. He and I got along fine, mostly. Ten years working together had worn away the rough edges. He was worried about something, I didn’t know what, and when he worried he got testy. But this time, I was testy, too. I was the one sitting on wet grass before daybreak, and now I was on the hook to call a party official who wanted to harass me about my pin. “I don’t take pictures in dim light of speeding cars without plates. I especially don’t do it with a bad camera.” I turned away from the window. “And why can’t we have a thermos when we have to wait around doing nothing at the crack of dawn?”

  “Did they see you?” This, too, was typical of Pak. For no reason I could see, he would get mad, then cool off quickly and focus back on the main problem.

  “Nobody saw a thing.” I was
sure no one could have seen me from the road. I had been on a small rise, with another hill behind me. Anyone who looked up from the highway would have focused on the crest of the hill. People did that. You could send a marching band along the flank of a hill and no one would notice. They always eyed the line where earth and sky met. “Even when I was trying to take the picture, I was hunched down. Anyway, I had on a farmer’s hat. If the driver took his eyes off that lousy road—which he would have been crazy to do at the speed he was traveling—he would have thought I was Kim Satgat.”

  Pak shook his head. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  “Fine.”

  “Alright, who is Kim Satgat? Is he on file?”

  “Probably, at one time. His real name was Kim Pyong Yon. Wandering poet from the old days.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Long story, but he accidentally criticized his grandfather. Badly unfilial thing to do. He went into hiding, wore a bamboo hat to cover his face.”

  “So, if they couldn’t see Kim Satgat, why did they honk?” Pak bobbed his head back and forth a little when he already knew the answer to a question he was asking. He waited, until he sensed I knew it, too. “Yes, the radio.”

  “That car was monitoring frequencies? No one gets equipment like that without piles of paperwork.” I thought it over. “Unless it came from the outside. Who are we talking about here?”

  Pak shook his head. “I don’t know. And don’t ask.”

  “That stone head Kim isn’t from any joint headquarters, is he?”

  “Inspector, drop it.”

  “I thought so. His neck is too thick. Not pretty enough for a headquarters billet.”

  “Drop it.” Pak held up his hand. “Stop, drop it, enough.”

  “I don’t like this operation. Kim I don’t like. Kang I really don’t like. You notice? He never changes expression. It’s like watching a trout on your dinner plate, staring up at you.” We were both silent for a moment. “Did you see Kim tap his foot?”