A Corpse in the Koryo

by James Church

  I gave one last swirl to the persimmon; it was as smooth as it would get. I opened the drawer to my desk, tossed the piece in, and rummaged around for a chip that I hadn’t worked on yet. There was some pine, but that was boring. Too easy, no character, nothing to help the concentration. Next to it was a piece of camphor wood. Not bad for winter when I had a cold, but otherwise it would make my fingers stink and my eyes water. Near the back of the drawer was an old piece of walnut. Tough and hard. Just what I needed for this case. Under the walnut was something I didn’t expect, a torn, worn piece of sandpaper.

  Sandpaper was hard to get, especially good sandpaper. Whenever I went overseas, or knew someone going on a trip, I tried to get another piece. Other people wanted tins of biscuits or televisions. I asked for sandpaper.

  Once, when I was coming back from supporting a delegation to Eastern Europe, a border guard at the train station opened my suitcase and found four sheets of medium sandpaper, the sort you use when you can’t find the grade you really want. The guard was young, and I could see he was trying to do his job. “What is this?” He was scowling. There was nothing in the regulations about sandpaper, but he was suspicious. No one had ever brought it in before, and exactly for that reason there must be something dangerous about it.

  “It’s sandpaper. I’m building wooden statues of the Leader, and to do it right, they have to be smooth, you know what I mean?” I winked. “Smooth as a baby’s bottom.” That flustered him. Referring to the Leader and a baby’s bottom in the same breath was vaguely troubling. “You take away this sandpaper, the statues will be pretty ugly, and people will want to know why. They may question me. They may torture me. I’d have to tell them who confiscated the sandpaper.” By now the guard was squirming, his face was flushed, and he was looking around for his squad leader, but his squad leader was probably off smoking behind a shed somewhere.

  Anytime I wanted to build something, sandpaper was the bottleneck. Sawing and drilling a few holes didn’t take much time, but then things sat around because I couldn’t get any fine sandpaper. My grandfather used to argue that fine sandpaper was an invention of the devil. He believed, and said this with great conviction, that it was a question of concentration and patience. Any piece of wood could be made smooth and lustrous, he said. This only meant discovering what had been there all along; it had nothing to do with sanding. People who sanded wood without thinking were more apt to ruin than improve it. And people who used fine sandpaper were the worst, he insisted, because they wore down the wood instead of bringing it to life.

  One day I found a book about inventions. It said that an American had invented sandpaper in the 1830s. “Who needed it!” my grandfather waved the idea away with an angry gesture. “My father’s father prepared wood for furniture by smoothing it to a silken shine. He used a smoothing tool like a magic cloth, people used to say. There were no Americans around then, I can tell you that.”

  I wasn’t going to argue, but I was interested in why he was so adamant. “Because we are always being portrayed as behind, beholden to others, backward and beggars.” His face flushed when he spoke like this. “Not Americans, not Chinese, not Japanese—we’ve been making furniture for hundreds and hundreds of years. Beautiful furniture, when America was still covered with trees and peopled by savages who wore animal skin for clothing. What would they know about wood, about how to coax it, talk to it, romance it, sing to its spirit? Do they have any real carpenters there?” I didn’t say anything, because when he was mad like this he treated me as if I were one of the enemy, someone who had gone abroad and come back tainted. “Well, do they, Mr. Korea-Not-Good-Enough-for-You-Anymore?” He was glad I was being assigned on travel out of the country—it meant I was trusted—but he worried I would decide not to be Korean anymore. “Sand!” He snorted. “Why would you use sand, anyway, on a piece of wood? Sand is fine for metal, maybe, but wood, wood, wood is like a beating heart.”

  “So now you’re telling me that Koreans did not invent sandpaper because it is a bad idea.”

  “All I’m saying is that no one taught us how to smooth wood. We’ve known how to do it for a long time, longer than America has existed, and no American ever invented anything that I would want to use.”

  To please him, I said I would try the old way of smoothing wood.“You wait,” he said as he went into the back room and came out with the same simple scraping tool that I had dropped years ago. Heavy and unbalanced in my hand, it claimed its revenge by nicking the wood whenever my concentration drifted. When my grandfather took it from me, the damn thing assumed an intolerable grace, moving gently over rough spots with a soft “shhhusss.” It sang so smoothly, he said, that the wood found its true shape and never wanted to be anything else.

  Long after my grandfather died, I sanded wood in the evenings, alone in the back of the apartment house, as the stars came out. Constantly my fingers felt the wood; even in the dark I could tell if I was getting close to the heart. Concentrating on bringing the wood to life, listening for that song, my mind wandered until I was far away. My working alone like this annoyed our local security man, a tough veteran of the war. He limped from pieces of shrapnel still in his leg, dragging his left foot slightly behind him. Before he came around the corner of the apartment house, I knew it was him. He would stand silently watching me. Sometimes we would exchange a few words, but usually there was only the slight “shhhh-shhhh” of the sandpaper moving across the wood, not quite a song but tolerably close. Even on days when I was supposed to be in a study session, I was sanding, sometimes humming to myself. “Not healthy activity,” said the paper they slipped under the door of my apartment. “Too solitary.” Just to annoy them, when I finally did go to a study session, I told them that sandpaper had been invented by an American.

  One night after work, I came back to the apartment and my stock of sandpaper was gone. Pak said it was my own fault for waving it under their noses. Then he told me he would help me build up a new stock. “Keep it in your office, but put it out of sight and don’t invite other people to admire it. They won’t care, believe me, and someone is liable to mention it to someone else.”

  The piece of sandpaper in my desk was worn but still had some life in it. I folded it carefully and put it in the third drawer of my filing cabinet, with the rest of my meager stock. Then I went back to my desk and stared at the sketch of the hotel room. I added the closet and drew a little button on the floor.

  I was beginning to think that whoever had dumped the body had avoided the staff completely. No one was even trying to feed something tiny into the investigation, a crumb of a “clue” in an offhand answer that might have kept me chasing my tail for weeks. The whole staff saw “nothing,” end and sum total of answer—except for Mrs. Li, the floor lady, who had been nervous but surprisingly forthcoming, even indignant at what had happened in a room that was her responsibility.

  The flowers were a dead end. All that effort to get around the staff, and then leave a vase that didn’t belong, on a cheap pine table that would have broken in two if someone had fallen against it hard enough to crush his skull. Anyway, pine tables don’t crush skulls. The wood is too soft.

  Pak yelled at me to come to his office. He was pacing, like a tiger. “Inspector, I don’t care how our corpse got in the room, or how he met his end. Or even who led him to it. Right now, I need to know who he is. Was.” Pak had been at a meeting the whole morning. I could tell he’d been sleeping through some of it. His eyes were puffy. I only hoped he hadn’t been dozing during the part where he was supposed to be alert and keep us in the good graces of the vice minister in charge.

  “Rough session?” Without meaning to, I was looking at the piece of walnut while working it in my right hand.

  Pak stopped pacing and pointed at me. “You haven’t broken that dirty habit yet? They’re starting to bitch about it. Last month something almost got into your file. Someone called it ‘antisocial.’ I blocked it.” He started pacing again. “Why the hell can’t you just s
moke, like everyone else?”

  The vice minister in charge was named Yun. No one liked him, which he didn’t mind. He was one of those people who felt safer surrounded by enemies. Maybe he thought it enhanced his standing with the Minister, though nothing would ever do that. The Minister was elderly, not quite one of the revolutionary veterans but old enough to have known them personally. He’d known my grandfather. They came from the same mountain village. When the war broke out, the Minister, who was then only a young army recruit and a country boy, was assigned to a headquarters element. They were under constant air attack, moving practically every night, trying to keep some semblance of order and discipline. The Minister became a noncommissioned officer when all the others were killed. By war’s end, because the casualty rate was so high, he was a colonel. He often said he didn’t know the first thing about commanding troops when he started and knew less when he finished, but he’d learned to yell convincingly into a field telephone so that whoever was at the other end stood at attention. When the war was over, he figured he’d go back to the village and farm. He got home and there was nothing. The village had been pulverized. No one could figure out why. The bombs came out of nowhere; no one heard the planes arrive in the night sky, the survivors said.

  A few people wanted to rebuild the village, but the forests were gone, the farmland had never been good for much, and the military decided to use the valley below for a special factory, so everyone in the surrounding hills was moved out. The Minister ended up in the capital. He never got in anyone’s way, and he was reliable. He carried out his orders. He was invariably cheerful, even when he was drunk. He trusted his subordinates, treated them with kindness, and established a loyalty that served him well in the bad years. Everyone in the ministry, including Pak and me, worried that he would retire and that Vice Minister Yun would get his job.

  “The vice minister thinks he’s going to use this case to knock the old man out, I can sense it.” Pak walked over to the window and stared absently into the courtyard. I moved so I could look out, too. One of the gate sentries had left his post and was leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, trying to draw the last of the morning’s coolness from the concrete blocks. Pak stood for a moment with his back to me, then turned and made a wry face.

  “The vice minister is sure we’ll screw up this murder investigation. He asked if we needed help getting a camera that works. You know, in that bored tone of voice he uses before he sinks his fangs into someone.”

  “How much does he know? Who told him about the camera?”

  “Not Kang. They hate each other. One of them isn’t going to survive this.” Pak gave me a funny look, then turned to stare out the window again. “So that leaves your favorite captain.”

  “You mean Colonel Kim? Does he know I was in Manpo?”

  “He may have some sketchy report, but I doubt if he knows anything for sure. Just don’t go to any fish restaurants with him.”

  “Humorous.”

  “What do we know about the corpse?” Pak rubbed at a spot on the window. “Can we get this washed, you think?”

  “Nothing much. Dead. Caucasian. Male. Heavy blow to the temple crushed the right side of the skull. Never checked into the hotel. No papers. No identification. The name card in his pocket wasn’t his, and the IAEA inspectors say they never met him.”

  “How hard can this be, Inspector?” Pak gave up on the window and moved over to his desk. “He didn’t float down from the moon.”

  “Might have, for all we know at this point. It will take another day to run down the whereabouts of all foreigners in the country. Everyone in the city is accounted for.”

  “Autopsy report?”

  “They won’t do an autopsy.”

  “What are you talking about? By tomorrow morning, tonight even, the Ministry will be screaming at me, and then others will take it up, like a convention of jackals.”

  “At the hospital, they say their orders are not to start the autopsy until there is an identification.”

  “Sure, they want to know what set of knives to use.”

  I started to work the walnut again, then stopped myself and put it in my pocket. “Can’t you get Kang to make a phone call?”

  “This is our business, not Kang’s. He won’t touch it. Besides, the vice minister would like nothing better than to find Kang’s fingerprints on what is supposed to be a criminal investigation, not an intelligence romp.”

  “What about the procurator’s office? They are going to have to bring charges against someone, sooner or later.”

  “This is a foreigner. They don’t want to know anything about it. They say it is foreign policy.”

  “I knew it. We’re stuck working with the Foreign Ministry.”

  “The liaison guy, the short one with the ruddy face and the bad shoes, is coming here this afternoon after lunch. You want to sit in?”

  “Maybe. No, on second thought I’d better get back to the hotel and shake the tree again.”

  “Just a minute. Let’s play a game, Inspector. It’s called Continents. I name a continent, you tell me if the corpse is from there.”

  “You already said he was a Finn. Anyway, all I’ve seen is the pictures, and they aren’t very clear. The crime scene camera needs a new battery.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a Finn. That was just a hunch, fed by the card in his pocket. Apparently it was planted. But let’s proceed. Africa?”

  “No. Well, maybe yes. Could be South African. Could be an expat, I suppose.”

  “South America.”

  “Could be, but the clothes are wrong, from what little I could see.”

  “North America.”

  “Not likely. Wrong haircut.”

  “Europe.”

  “Probably.”

  “Russian?”

  “Nyet.”

  “Australia.”

  “Look, boss—”

  “Humor me, Inspector. Australia.”

  “Yeah, sure, could be. But, I mean, he’s white, too white, maybe. Not ruddy enough.”

  “Asia.”

  I thought for a second. “No.”

  “Lots of territory, a couple of billion people if you count India. Care to change your vote?”

  I shook my head. “Not Asia. That doesn’t narrow it much.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  I stood for a moment, waiting to see if Pak was going to draw any conclusions from all of this. He sat calmly and quiet as a stone.

  “Is the game over?” I moved toward the door. “If you need me, I’ll be at the Koryo for a couple of hours.”

  Pak nodded. He looked pleased with himself, and I walked down the hall wondering what he knew that I didn’t.

  7

  The floor lady at the Koryo was not happy to find me back in the room. She tugged at the sleeve of her dress. She refused to look me in the eye. It wasn’t hard to see that by now she had been talked to by someone who had warned her that it was a bad idea to answer my questions. There was no sense in pressing her at this point. I told her that I’d call her later. She was relieved. “I’m busy this morning,” she said. “A bus load of Romanian basketball players is arriving. Some friendship tournament. They are the worst. Tall, skinny, they all think because they have such long legs they are comedians. You should see what they do to the rooms. With luck, they’ll go to twelve and above.” She backed into the hall and slipped away like a shadow. Real quiet, well trained.

  I went through the room again inch by inch. Pak had said his first priority was finding out the victim’s identity, but that would only be a process of elimination. There were a limited number of foreigners in the country; each provincial unit would make an accounting based on the entry cards and then be told to do it again. Eventually, someone would come up one short, and that would be our man. Or rather, our corpse. My real problem was to figure out who did it, and we were drifting backward on that. So far, all we knew was that the body had been found in this room in the Koryo. Though we hadn
’t nailed it down as a fact, I was almost sure he was a Finn. At the very least, he was a European, but I pretty much ruled out southern Europe. He wasn’t a Slav, either. According to the initial inventory report, all the clothes were from stores in Vienna. If that checked out, then it probably meant he worked for an international organization. Lots of nationalities did. So what made me think he was a Finn? A blue button. But I didn’t even know it was his. None of his clothing had buttons like that. Maybe it belonged to his killer. Maybe the murderer was a Finn. But I didn’t think so. I’d been through the hotel records. The room had seen scores of Koreans from Japan, a few Americans, and plenty of Chinese. Also newlyweds from Turkistan. There were no signs in the room of any of them, unless that button was part of a Turkistan wedding night custom. I doubted it.

  The floor lady knocked softly on the door sill. “There’s a call for you downstairs.”

  “You clean these rooms yourself?”

  I could see her deciding whether this was the sort of question she could answer. It was. “Yes, each of us is responsible for an entire floor. Two actually. We used to work in pairs, but last year they cut the staff. We have to make a profit, they said. So I do all the cleaning myself here and on nine.”

  “The Turkistani couple, the honeymoon couple.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I don’t talk about guests.” I was into questions she’d been warned not to answer.

  “When you clean, you clean the whole room?”

  “Why not?”

  “I ask, you answer. Try to remember that.” I gave her what was meant to be a friendly look. “You’re pretty busy. Two floors to clean. Easy to miss a spot.”