by James Church
“Why should I care about this body at the hotel?”
“If you want to know about Kang, that’s the only way to do it.”
“Kang must have decided he could trust you, if he told you anything about the Japan operation. Who did he first hear it from? Pak?”
“What makes you think Pak knew anything about Japan?”
The Irishman smiled. “I don’t know anything about your sad country. That’s why I’m investing in all of this tape.” He pointed at the recorder. “I’ve been to Japan, though.” He wiggled his eyebrows and laughed. “You thought I’d never been in the mysterious East, didn’t you, Inspector?”
“You ever get to Pyongyang, Richie, call me. I’ll take you to dinner, that’s a promise.”
3
From my conversation with the office before coming over to the Koryo, I knew that hotel security had done at least one thing right: They’d called the liaison office in the People’s Security Ministry as soon as the body was discovered. From there everything went wrong. There had been a moment of genuine panic at the Ministry when the first identification, based on a card in the blue polyester pants pocket, suggested the deceased was a Finnish citizen, and worse, an inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency. Panic led to a call directly to the Foreign Ministry duty officer, breaking all rules. The chain of command was supposed to run through hotel security to the police, then to the party’s security organization, from there to the party liaison in the Foreign Ministry, and only then to the Ministry’s unfortunate duty officer, usually someone junior. That night, not only was the duty officer junior, but because it was a Saturday, it was his very first shift alone. He didn’t bother to look in his instructions manual to see that he wasn’t supposed to take a call about the murder of a foreigner from anyone but his own party liaison man. Even so, he was smart enough to realize that the death of an IAEA inspector would be a disaster.
Too bad he did the worst thing possible. He called a friend of his, a Captain Choi in the Military Security Command. Choi, smart and on his way up, checked his manual and alerted his duty officer, who called the police to ask why the hell the Foreign Ministry was involved in a state security investigation.
This caused seventy-two hours of complaints and accusations by various liaison officers, during which time the body was moved to the central morgue, well before any sort of crime scene report was written, much less filed. Just as things were calming down, the Military Police of the Pyongyang Military Garrison raised hell. It was one of those rare occasions when they were supposed to be alerted, but no one had their number—and even if they had, no one would have remembered to call.
Just as I walked through the front door of the room, Chief Inspector Pak emerged from the bathroom, wiping his hands on his shirt. “About time you showed up, Inspector.”
“A pleasure, I’m sure. Do you want to hear about my trip and my conversations with Kang?”
“Screw your trip. Screw Kang. I have a dead foreigner in the morgue that no one can identify, cause of death unknown, time of death unknown, and a summons to see our friend Kim of Military Security this afternoon at three. Care to join me?”
“Pass. I’ve spent the past week dodging him, and I have reasons not to want to see him anytime soon. You were right. It’s a good idea for me to keep as far away from him as possible.”
“Luckily, someone is leaning on him over this case. I don’t know who, yet, but as long as he is feeling some pain, he’ll behave with us. I know his type. He’s nervous, and he needs help. If this goes bad, he could end up walking to work in a coal mine.”
I had developed a sour feeling about this case from the moment I heard how the notification had gone out of channels. The fact that there were no signs of an investigation had set off more warning bells. Now I knew I was right. This was not an incident we wanted to touch. There was no way to win. Somebody’s ox was going to be gored, and everyone else would try to make sure it was ours. Nothing was moving the right way. Simply getting things unsnarled to zero would take me a week, and by then there would be no trail left to follow.
“Why do we have to take this case? It’s a foreigner, and we only deal with foreigners if there is a crime.”
Pak raised an eyebrow. “Murder is usually defined as a crime. Criminal Code, Chapter 8, Section 1, Article 141, unless there are extenuating circumstances; also Article 142, fit of rage, or 143, self-defense.”
“But we don’t know where it happened, much less who’s responsible and under what circumstances.”
“That’s what the investigation is for, Inspector.”
“That assumes we can investigate. If another foreigner did it, and if it happened outside the capital, then we have no jurisdiction. We touch a case with dead outsiders, we’ll get nothing but interference from the Foreign Ministry. On top of that, we’ll get blamed for not solving it, and at this point, believe me, no one can solve it.”
“You just stuck your nose in the door and you know all that?” As soon as Pak frowned, I knew where we were heading. I tried to put my mind somewhere else, somewhere peaceful, before he started the lecture. “Let me make something clear, Inspector: This is the capital city. It may not be a fine and fancy place, like Geneva or Prague, but it is the capital of our country, and it is the responsibility of our unit to keep it safe. At this moment, it is not safe. This isn’t the border, Inspector, this is the capital, and I’m damned if I’ll have dead bodies turning up, not anywhere, not on highways, not in hotel rooms. So, like it or not, we are going to find out what happened here. And we will do so quickly. And when I say ‘we,’ Inspector, I mean ‘you’ very specifically. I need a report by 2:45, something I can stuff down Kim’s gullet.”
As he pressed the elevator button, Pak turned and waved toward the room in a gesture of frustration. “Find me something, anything. That will give us a couple of days.” The elevator door opened, and he said to no one in particular as he stepped in, “Too bad. Nice room, actually has a view.”
4
I couldn’t tell much about the view because the heavy curtains were shut, but as far as I could see, there was nothing special about the room. It had the normal dark entry hall, a small, slightly raised sitting parlor, and a bedroom. The carpet in the bedroom was worn in spots. There were two narrow beds, each covered by a shiny red silk quilt with a circle of flowers embroidered in the center. The short, square lamp on the table between the beds was new, as was the white phone that shared the space. A TV sat against the wall, facing a chair near the window. The bathroom had been renovated recently; it was one of those modular bathrooms with a low ceiling that makes you think you’re in a fiberglass space ship. I never liked fiberglass. It doesn’t grow anywhere.
When they were first installed, the bathrooms must have been considered modern and efficient, but they didn’t wear very well, especially since hotel guests aren’t all that careful. The shine rubbed off, and then the color went flat. They couldn’t be painted, so the only thing to do was to replace the whole module. Usually the fixtures got broken in the process, so that meant replacing them as well. This one had a new sink—nothing fancy, but gleaming, like new sinks do. It didn’t look like it had been used more than once or twice. The thin towels weren’t new and didn’t match, but they were clean, folded precisely, and hanging neatly from the towel bar. There was a phone over the toilet. Why anyone needed a phone in the bathroom, I never understood.
The sitting room had a couch that could hold two people if they were friendly, a couple of chairs, a standing lamp with an old silk shade, and a wooden table, badly stained pine, standing slightly askew. On the table was a glass vase with a bunch of wilted flowers. The shelves next to the closet in the entry hall were empty. So was the small brown refrigerator that sat in a nook between the armoire and a built-in chest of drawers. I opened every drawer. Each one squeaked as I pulled it out. Nothing a little soap on the runner couldn’t fix.
“The foreigner was on the floor, in the sitting room. It look
ed like he had tripped on the light cord, but no one could hit his head so hard on such a small table and leave that vase standing.”
I turned around to find the floor lady standing in the hall, a short, compact woman of about forty, in a plain brown dress with a white apron. I hadn’t heard her footsteps because she had on socks but no shoes. “I found him. I went in to see if there was a bottle of water in the refrigerator, and there he was. I never seen a skull bashed in like that.” She paused and then added, with a note of disapproval over what she seemed to think was a breakdown in procedure, “I didn’t know anyone had checked into this room.”
“My name is O.” I bowed slightly to her and smiled. Most inspectors like to begin conversations with a witness on a menacing note—standard procedure, the way they teach it at training class—but I needed this woman on my side. She acknowledged my gesture with the slightest softening around her eyes, not yet a smile but something to build on.
“You a police inspector?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued, “Chief Inspector Pak scolded me, but what does he expect? If I had called him, I’d lose my job.”
“Pak will be alright. Why don’t you come in and sit down?”
“I can’t sit in the rooms.” She leaned against the open door. “I’m not even sure you can if you don’t register.”
I sat down on the couch in the sitting room, pulled the heavy curtain to one side, and looked out the window to make the point that the hotel’s normal regulations didn’t concern me. “Comfortable, tidy, nothing out of place. Tell me, why would you put flowers in a room you thought was empty?”
“They aren’t our flowers. I don’t bunch them up, and I don’t have any vases like that one. We grow our own flowers out back, in the garden. Nothing purple, and if we did, I would never cut it so short. Anyway, that vase is all wrong. Too narrow a neck. Why put a bunch of flowers in something like that? Makes it look like they’re in prison. The whole idea of flowers in the rooms is to make it seem like outdoors.”
“Like a mountain meadow, or at least a cabin.”
“Yes,” she studied me to see if I was mocking her, which I wasn’t. “At least like the hills after the rain.”
“I’m not asking about the arrangement. I’m asking, if they aren’t your flowers, who put them in the vase?”
“How do I know?”
I didn’t like it when a witness answered my question with a question. It usually meant I had lost control. “Were they here when you found the body?”
“I couldn’t say. I mean, it’s awful dark in these rooms with the curtains closed.”
“So, they weren’t your flowers, you didn’t put them in the vase, and you’re not sure if they were here when you discovered the body or not. If they weren’t already here, who would have put wilted flowers into a vase in a room with a murdered man?”
“Not me.”
“Very good, not you. We’ve more or less established that. Then who?” She was edging into the room as we talked, and I could see she was looking for something, hoping I wouldn’t notice. “Anything missing?”
“There isn’t. No.” She shook her head slightly, but her eyes were darting around.
I took out my notebook. “I’ll need your name, for the record. And when I leave, I will have to instruct you to lock the door and let no one in here without my permission.” Her eyes stopped darting and searched mine. “I mean that literally, no one. I’ll get an MSS guard here as soon as I can, but for now, it’s your responsibility.”
“My name is Li, Li Yong Hui. I can’t make any promises. The locks on these doors barely keep out the breeze, Inspector. And as we can see from your sitting on that couch, not too many people take orders from me.”
I closed my notebook, then opened it again. It was meant to be a gesture of authority, tinged with annoyance. Pak could carry something like that off, but it usually only made me look indecisive. From the expression on the floor lady’s face, I needed to practice it more. “I’m going to look around the room, make some notes. You can stand there in the doorway and watch or go about your business, Mrs. Li. In any case, this room is now the scene of a crime against the people, officially. That means the normal rules don’t pertain. This room belongs to me until the crime is solved, and when you tell people they cannot enter, you are speaking for me, is that clear?” This was not even remotely true, but it might get me some extra cooperation from her, and it wouldn’t bring her any harm. “Any information you have about the events or the scene is important to the solution of the crime, the apprehension of the criminals, and the dignity of the fatherland. You will be contacted by my office for a formal interrogation in a day or two. I trust we can work together.”
She said nothing. Partly she was judging whether I was going to cause her extra grief, partly whether there was anything to gain from going along with my game. She nodded, not very convincingly I thought, and padded down the hall.
My second walk through the rooms took five minutes. There was still nothing to see. Everything had been bumped or jostled. The bedroom had been dusted and waxed in the three days since the body was moved out. I sat in the chair and turned on the TV with the remote. There was a children’s cartoon on. A weak old king, a lovely princess, a handsome commoner sitting under a tree looking at the mountains. Even in a cartoon, mountains. I turned it off before the fire-breathing dragon appeared. There had to be a dragon, and he was going to threaten to barbecue the princess. Actually, he wanted something else, but they couldn’t put that in a cartoon, not in this country, anyway.
The bathroom was spotless. The refrigerator was unplugged, and water from the melted ice had pooled on the bottom shelf. There was no water bottle, but there was a faint odor, as if something had been rotting. I looked in the sitting room again. No mess on the floor near the table. Skulls are not empty, and when they are crushed, they leak all manner of unpleasant things that don’t clean up easily. There was no way the carpet had already been replaced, not in this hotel, not in this city. So what happened to the mess?
As I walked out the door, thinking about lunch, something nagged at me. I hadn’t checked the closet. I went back and stuck my head inside. The entry hall light didn’t work, which made the entry hall dark and the inside of the closet even darker. I didn’t have a flashlight with me; even if I did, the battery wouldn’t work. My eyes refused to adjust; there was no light, nothing to adjust to. I felt along the shelves that took up one side of the closet, but they were empty. I swept over the long shelf along the top. There wasn’t anything, not even an extra blanket. Finally, I got down on my knees and traced my hand along the edges of the closet floor. In the far corner, my fingers found something small and round. I picked it up, walked into the hall, and turned it over in my hand. It was a button, blue like the sky, blue like a lake in a Finnish summer.
5
I was at my desk, typing an initial report, when Pak walked in. “You dispatched a guard to the Koryo?”
“I did. The room is a joke, but we might as well preserve what we can.”
“On whose authority did you send the guard?”
“Mine. I do it all the time. It was standard procedure, last time I checked. If I ask for permission, we lose a day or two getting approval, by which time a guard is useless.”
“I’ve pulled him.”
“You what?”
“Captain Kim said a guard would only attract attention, and he wanted no attention. Also the Foreign Ministry said it would scare the foreign guests.”
I yanked the form out of the typewriter. “Then there isn’t any sense in starting a file, because there can’t be any investigation.”
Pak leaned against the edge of my desk. “You seem unhappy these days, Inspector. Nervous, jumpy.”
“No, thanks, I’m against another vacation to the border.” I sat back in my chair and focused on the molding between the ceiling and the wall. Our offices were in an old building, one of the first to rise from the shattered city after the war as a symbol of defi
ance and a statement of victory for people who had lost everything. Most of the trim had been stripped off over the years, victory not being all it was made out to be. A little remained, though, miraculously in my office. The molding had been carved by someone who had taken pride in his work, but the features had disappeared under layers and layers of paint. I often promised myself, on quiet afternoons, that I would find a ladder tall enough, climb up and take the molding down, sand off the paint, and restore it to its original glory. Sometimes I thought it was flowers or vines, but it might also be birds in flight. I had to hope it wasn’t something foolish, like a line of workers waving tools.
Pak moved to the doorway. “I leave for Kim’s lair in fifteen minutes. You can go partway. We’ll stroll by the river. It’s too nice to drive.” That meant he hadn’t received the month’s gas ration yet, but he always hated to admit it to me.
6
Sitting at my desk the next morning, I sketched the layout of the hotel room on the back of an old memo. I don’t read memos—especially those that come from the Ministry once a week—but they make good scrap paper. The body had been moved to the hotel from somewhere else and dumped next to the lamp table. Dumped, I was sure of it. I put the sketch to one side and reached in my pocket for the persimmon wood. After I ran my fingers over the smooth surface, my thoughts settled into place. Whoever did it wasn’t trying to cover up the murder. They didn’t even break a sweat setting it up like it was an accident. Hell, they didn’t even go to the trouble of renting the room. All their energy was spent covering their tracks, and that they had done effectively. Not one of the hotel staff had seen anything, so they said, though that was hard to believe. The whole purpose of the staff, especially at a place like the Koryo, which is filled with foreigners, is to observe, to see. Making the beds is secondary. It is the ultimate negation of their purpose if a guest is murdered in the hotel or, even worse, a dead body is carried up—much less down—the elevator and none of them notice. Normally, if the staff has been instructed to say “didn’t see anything,” there is something indicating otherwise: a tightening of the shoulders, a glance held too long or not at all. I had sensed none of that in my first set of interviews with them. Some people can lie outright to me and get away with it. Not hotel staff.
