A Corpse in the Koryo

by James Church

  “How about another room?”

  “All full. People want to party, not my business. Not yours, either, for that matter.”

  “My idea is to get some sleep. That’s why I’m paying for your crummy room. Either tell the party to pipe down or move me.”

  “I’ve got a third choice for you.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. There’s the door.” He pointed.

  “It’s two in the morning.”

  “Dawn comes early in these parts.”

  “You wouldn’t want me to complain to the local People’s Committee, would you?”

  He leaned across the desk, so close I could see the stains on his shirt from dinner. “Be my guest. They’re in 305.”

  “That’s next door to me.”

  “Correct.”

  “How about some tea?”

  “Maybe the Finnish girl can get you some when she’s done for the night.” I didn’t like the way he leered. “Look,” I said, “accept my congratulations, you’re as nasty as they come.”

  “Couple of baskets of fish, you might be able to get a quieter room.” I must have looked surprised. “The way I hear it, you push fish across the border. A basket more or less …” He waited for me to say something, then frowned. “Up to you. I guess it’s true. Wonsan people are pretty tight. Must be from having such a fat life, living by the beach and all.”

  “A while ago you said I was from Pyongyang.”

  “Yeah, well, I gave it some thought. Something about you isn’t right, not smart enough to be from Pyongyang.”

  I decided this was meant as a compliment. “The truck doesn’t get here until tomorrow. I need the room tonight.”

  “No problem. I’ll know when it gets here. And it won’t get across the border until a basket shows up at my back door. If this works out, maybe we can do regular business. Lots of fish in the sea, they say.” He reached into a drawer and came up with a key. “Five-oh-one. We just painted it for an important visitor. Gets some use but never for more than an hour at a time. Your Finnish friend thinks it’s a dump, but she uses it just the same.” His leer was cut short by a shrieking coming from the video. “You think that party next to you is loud, you got no idea!” He turned, went into the back room, and closed the door behind him.

  An amazing idea, fish as currency. Then again, why not? Maybe a little difficult to carry around. I pulled a few Chinese notes out of my pocket. At least you could eat fish. Even several more baskets of imaginary fish were not going to solve my basic problem. Last week I was minding my own business. Today I had the feeling I was slowly getting sucked into a deadly game between Kang and Colonel Kim. It had to be something more than a personal feud. Kim thought a picture of a car coming from the direction of South Korea could be used against Kang, but why? Military Security was a sledgehammer; it wouldn’t be deployed for something minor. True, intelligence and security organs were always rubbing each other the wrong way. I once had a knife fight in my sector between two drunken agents. Neither would tell me where he worked, and both had identification papers that were laughable. When we reported this up the line, we got a phone call back with clear instructions to let them go. No explanation.

  Kang’s problems might be linked to an interagency grudge, but I doubted it could be the whole story. Pak wouldn’t put me in the middle of something like that. Pak’s words about “all hell breaking loose” went beyond bureaucratic tussles, and Pak had a good sense of the tides in the capital. More than that, he had good sources, including the Minister, who would feed him tidbits of information about things that were stirring in the Center, to get his reaction. Pak was discreet; he never said anything to me directly about these conversations. If there was something I needed to do my job, he had a way of telling me what I had to know—not a shred more. Kang said I was here to help. Do what? I didn’t work for Kang, and I didn’t have any orders from my office instructing me to help him; we had no arrangements even for liaison without strict approval. So why the hell was I limping around an outlaw town on the Chinese border, peddling baskets of nonexistent fish?

  9

  The Irishman took a notebook from his pocket. He flipped through a few pages, stopped, flipped through several more. He found the page he wanted and bent its corner. “Finally, we’re getting somewhere. Elena was in Manpo. At the Manpo Inn.”

  “I thought you wanted to know about Kang.”

  “Do you mind if I steer this car?” He looked at his watch and made a note.

  “You going somewhere?”

  “Some coincidence, you meeting Elena.”

  “She a friend of yours?”

  “Never met the lady. Not partial to her type.”

  “Meaning what?”

  He looked closely at me. “Steady on, Inspector. I didn’t ask before, but you don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”

  “You want another word out of me, try to keep to the subject—Kang.”

  He whistled softly. “Jumpy Jim, you need pills or something to calm you down. Alright, alright, leave Elena be for the moment. Let’s talk about Kang. You said he has a daughter. She speaks French. Unusual?”

  “Why should it be unusual? Lots of people speak French. Most of France does, so I’m told.”

  He turned off the recorder. “Jesus. Why don’t you just point out for me the one or two subjects that you’re not touchy about, and we’ll stick to those. You have contradicted everything I’ve said tonight. Everything. Your people always like that?”

  “My people? No, we mostly laugh from morning to night, joking around, you know, like life is a Caribbean island and we’re waiting for the big white ship to come into port. Life’s a lot of fun, that’s what we always say to each other. That’s what the old lady must have been telling that girl in the field.”

  The Irishman stared at the wall behind me. Finally, he broke the silence. “Kang’s daughter. Why was she on the border? Trouble with her behavior, so they booted her out of Pyongyang? Family difficulties?”

  I shook my head. “I was just beginning to think you knew something about Kang. Maybe I was too quick.”

  “Finally, a sign of self-doubt. This is good.”

  “I thought he was sailing alongside you, not working for your organization, exactly, but moving on a parallel course, just out of reach. Now I discover, when you suddenly lost track of him, you got worried. I’m wondering why.”

  “Kang is an interesting character.”

  “I thought so. Very complicated man. The sun bounced off him in a thousand directions. Like a diamond. Built up quite a list of enemies, as far as I could tell.”

  “Nice image, Kang as a diamond. How many karats, would you say?”

  “A diamond in a garbage pile, who cares what it might have fetched on the world market.”

  The Irishman clicked his pen.

  10

  I’ve seen the sun rise over the hills a thousand times, in different seasons, in different weather, sometimes eager for the day, sometimes not. Each time, I waited for that absolute moment of peace that comes the instant the hills and the sky, the light and the quiet fuse into one. During one of my first trips abroad, when I was still in the Ministry’s liaison office and traveling to Berlin to help set up a visit by the Minister, I’d been ordered to Geneva to pick up instructions that I knew would make no sense and could only complicate my assignment. The instructions never arrived, but it gave me an excuse to sit by the lake on a Sunday morning and watch day break over the Alps.

  It surprised me that there was nothing peaceful about dawn creeping across those mountains. I’d seen pictures on calendars, but the pictures all lied; they were too pretty, too smooth, too much sparkle. The peaks I saw clawed the sky, so that the dawn was wounded and the sunlight bled into the day. The Alps weren’t a source of serenity. They didn’t calm your heart or even make you sad with memories. They hulked over Geneva, defiant, threatening to tumble into the lake at its upper end near a little town called Montreux, scattering the swa
ns and swamping the outdoor restaurants with their yellow umbrellas along the shore. When I thought about it later on the train, I figured that must be why the Swiss were so distant, always looking over their shoulders to make sure those mountains were not about to crush them once and for all.

  The hills around Manpo were not soothing, either. They were too close to China maybe, with the same pretensions of grandeur. But there was nothing defiant about them, and there was no danger they would molest the city. The hills were too tired; the city had no virtue to lose. So there was a separation: Manpo paid no attention to the hills anymore, and the hills disdained the squalid collection of buildings at their feet. Much as the Alps might glower at Geneva, at least it was Geneva they woke with. I couldn’t imagine what they would have done if they had to watch over Manpo day in and day out until, pebble by pebble, they were ground down to foothills.

  Kang wanted me to get a sense of Manpo, and I could only get that by walking around, not going anywhere special. The more I wandered aimlessly, the less interested any tails would be. Actually, if they were very good, they should become more curious the more I didn’t seem to have a destination, but this far out of the capital, it was unlikely there would be anyone who was much good or curious about anything beyond breaking for dinner. All the good people wanted to serve in Pyongyang. Border cities ended up mostly as security service junkyards—unless a flying squad was sent on a special assignment.

  I set out from the Manpo Inn before daybreak and wandered over to the teahouse Kang’s daughter ran, on the off chance it would be open. It wasn’t, not even a sign of life. No breakfast, but at least I felt rested. Room 501, which I’d bought with the promise of a bushel of phony Wonsan fish, hadn’t been painted recently, unless “recent” had another meaning on the border, but at least it had been quiet. There was a soft knock on the door around four in the morning, but I hadn’t ordered room service and wasn’t curious who was tiptoeing around at that hour. When I left the inn, the clerk was standing behind the front desk. He asked if I’d slept well, but I could see his heart wasn’t in the leer he tried to push across his face. It occurred to me that I hadn’t filled out any registration forms here, either. In this town, it didn’t matter who you were. Besides, all the documentation would be false, and everyone knew it.

  Halfway out of town, the dark called it quits and it was day. That suited me fine. I had a feeling I was being followed, and daylight makes it hard to tail someone on a deserted dirt road leading up to the mountains. Once the climb got steep, I stopped worrying about the tail. If boredom was a problem for these guys, physical exertion was going to be one, too. None of them would want to stick with me all the way up a mountain, and they wouldn’t have had time to set up another team, partway up the trail. More than the tail, I was worried about my feet. I knew that if I didn’t watch each step, I’d stumble and wrench my back—again.

  The road leveled off, and as it did, a view opened up of a dead-end valley. At its mouth, there were two buildings, a guard post, and a black Mercedes, real clean, starting to reflect the few rays of sun that perched on the top of the hills before tumbling onto the scene below. Smoke was coming from a chimney in the building that was still in the shadows. A lamp was on in one of the upstairs windows; then someone clicked it off. The other building was half in the sun but looked deserted. The buildings were about three hundred meters away, though because of the angle and the clear air at that hour, they looked closer. I could see the guard pretty well. He was leaning against a tree, sipping tea, a dog curled up at his feet—a violation of every rule I’d ever learned about sentry duty. Up the valley the sun glinted off something metallic, first only at one spot, then at another, and another. Probably machine-gun posts, judging from how regularly they were spaced. There was a double fence line. None of this impressed the dog, which was fast asleep.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see who it was. We’d been trained never to make that mistake; I made it anyway. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground looking up at the tree tops, my cheek aching. Luckily, because the whole thing happened so fast, I hadn’t tensed: My back was fine. I relaxed on the pine needles and, for a moment, enjoyed the trees and blue sky.

  Then the sky was blotted out by a face leaning over me. It was one of the Military Security thugs I’d seen the night before, loitering outside the goat lady’s tent. I couldn’t believe someone that big and ugly could have moved so quietly. In the darkness, I hadn’t gotten a good look at him, but now he had my full attention. There was no doubt he was Korean, but neither could anyone miss that in his veins flowed blood from ancestors who never belonged here. The hawklike features, the sharp nose on a long, lean face, flashing eyes set deep in his head. Allowing for generations of marriage with the locals, this was the face of a long-ago Arab horseman, come far from home and trapped here by fateful orders he could not disobey.

  I’d seen a face like this once before. On the road near our house, a traveling barber had set up shop. Same nose, same deep-set eyes. I’d stared, not just because he looked different, but because he had a different air; he moved like someone who wasn’t comfortable surrounded by the fields and the hills. “Don’t gawk at strangers,” my grandfather said. Then he lowered his voice. “That one”—he nodded his head toward the barber—“beware of his kind.” Centuries ago, he told me, when their empire stretched halfway around the earth, the Mongols had sent Arab princesses and their retainers to the Korean court. They stayed, or most of them, and mixed with the population.

  Yes, but at that time the court was in the southern part of the country, I said; how could there be any descendants around where we lived, far to the north? My grandfather laughed and snapped his belt. “Do you think they didn’t spend the night up here on the way south to Chungchong?” Abruptly, he turned serious again. Foreign blood, he warned, was a stain; it would never go away. “Anyone named Chong might be one of them. Watch for people named Chong.” He spoke so gravely it gave me chills. “Watch their eyes real close.”

  In this case, I had no choice. His nose was almost touching mine, and I could smell the breakfast on his breath. “Surprised to see me?” He didn’t expect an answer.

  I started to get up, but he put a huge hand on my shoulder and pushed me back onto the ground. “No, if you stand, that might catch the attention of the guard down there. If he got off a lucky shot, it could kill you. Bad way to start the day.”

  I rubbed my cheek. “And this was a good way?”

  He considered that for a moment. “Where you from?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  He growled. “Don’t tempt me. If you disappeared in these hills, no one would care.”

  “You’re not going to kill me. You’d have done it by now if those were your orders.”

  He grunted and stood up, apparently not worried about the guard down below. “I’m going to ask you some questions. If I like the answers, you can limp back to the inn, gather your things, and go back to where you came from. If I don’t—” He opened his coat, and I saw he had a knife that had an odd blade. “It’s used to gut goats.” He let his coat fall back.

  My cheek was going numb, and my eye was starting to swell. I was getting tired of this sort of thing. Pak had sent me out of Pyongyang, he said, to keep me safe. Getting hit on the head and punched in the face all in the same lousy town wasn’t my idea of safe. What the hell was Pak thinking, telling me to steer clear of Kang and then pushing me into his path? If he knew something big was going on, why didn’t he just tell me? Maybe I should have resigned, like he wanted. I looked up into the ugly face. No, I didn’t want to resign, I wanted to get this guy’s foot off my chest.

  “I’m only going to ask each question once. Before I do, and to save us some time, I’ll tell you I’ve checked in Wonsan.”

  If my cheek hadn’t hurt so bad I might have laughed in his face. What was he going to check in Wonsan? I hadn’t filled out any registration papers at the inn; there were no documents to trace. If he’d c
alled the Wonsan State Security Department, they’d have had a good giggle and then gone back to sleep. They were incredibly lazy. I knew this for a fact because we needed their help once and when we called to explain our problem, there was nothing but a long silence on the other end of the phone.

  “You checked. Good for you. If you know the answers, why are you asking me?”

  “Name.”

  “Ho Tam.”

  Ho Tam had been a ranking party member years ago, a smart man with the normal number of enemies; he died in a hospital overseas. Ho Tam’s father and my grandfather had known each other. We made a piece of furniture for Ho’s family, and they liked it very much. At the time, Ho had been a college student. He was home when we delivered the piece: a blanket chest made of chestnut that I’d smoothed and polished for days before my grandfather nodded in satisfaction.

  When Ho heard I’d helped build the chest, he took me outside into the courtyard. It was May, and the blossoms on the apple tree were new, brilliantly white. Ho was fairly short, so it didn’t feel like an adult was talking to me, more like a brother. “Your grandfather is a great man. Still we need him, and we will need you, too, before all of this is over.” I thanked him, though I found it odd he should speak to me in that way.

  Later, when I told my grandfather, he became angrier than I had ever seen him. “Have you learned nothing from me, in all of these years?” he shouted. “When someone takes you aside and says even three honest words to you, haven’t you learned not to tell anyone else, not even me?” His face was white with rage. “You’ll get yourself killed, you’ll get anyone stupid enough to trust you sent to the camps, and why? Because you don’t pay attention, you don’t see. Can my grandson be such a fool?”

  “I’m not a fool.”

  “Then don’t act like one. I lost my son to this. Don’t let me lose the rest of the family as well.”