Star of the North

by D. B. John

  The policeman took off his gloves and pulled back Cho’s blanket. Cho’s hands were beneath him, as if he were supporting his back, holding his spine away from the pressure of the floor. The policeman attempted to turn Cho over, but stopped when he let out a sharp cry of pain.

  The policemen looked at each other.

  The lapel radio gave a burst of static. “Come in, Wang. What is your progress? Over.”

  The one on his knees said to the other, “Fetch the stretcher from the van.”

  The landscape was becoming more barren, turning into an endless stony plain, undulating, rock strewn, reaching as far as the eye could see. Here and there it was patched white with snowdrifts. Jenna could see no signs of habitation.

  After a while the road began running parallel with a railroad track. The sun had almost set. Some meteorological trick of the light created a display of peach and tangerine clouds. The car slowed and pulled over. They were in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing out here but the road and the railroad. She was alone, handcuffed, in hostile territory. Her fears began to morph into black terror.

  A secret murder. They’d chosen the right place.

  Unable to keep the tremble from her voice she said, “Sir, whatever it is you want, I will obtain it for you with one phone call …”

  Leather Jacket chuckled. “Shut up.”

  She tried to think, think of a strategy, but her hands were out of action, she had no space to kick, and these four were armed. She suddenly felt an immense sadness for herself. For her unfulfilled self. For the future she would never see. She was staring ahead as Leather Jacket lit a cigarette and lowered the window to smoke. The driver turned on the radio … Peng Liyuan singing a patriotic ballad, backed by a male-voice chorus. He was drumming his fingers on the wheel. Leather Jacket was watching out of the window.

  Yet it was very strange, this murder, with none of the shiftiness and dark energy of a foul act about to be committed. But who was she to reason why? It would happen. Why else drive here? Perhaps they were waiting for her executioner.

  The policeman to her right muttered something in Mandarin to the others and held up his cell phone: no signal out here.

  Leather Jacket started slightly, and flicked his cigarette out of the window.

  About a mile away on the horizon to the north, moving slowly toward them like a dark-green hedgerow, was a train.

  Leather Jacket took something from the glove compartment, exited the passanger door, and clambered up the shale escarpment of the railroad bank. Standing on the tracks, he held up an orange flag in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He was signaling to a train heading toward North Korea from … where? Beijing?

  Jenna watched the scene intently. The train’s headlights flashed once, acknowledging the signal. It had already cut its speed.

  Minutes later it was in front of them, rolling to a stop in a long hiss, couplings banging together, a screech of brakes. A reek of carbonized steel reached Jenna through the car’s open door.

  It was immense, much higher than a normal train. The front of the engine car was adorned with a large white star between two red flags. The carriages were painted dark green. Some were windowless; others had black tinted glass. Two were mounted with antiaircraft guns: one near the front, the other at the rear of the train. Gleaming brass Korean letters on the side of the engine car bore the name STAR OF THE NORTH.

  Doors opened and dozens of helmeted troops jumped out onto the chippings.

  Leather Jacket opened the car’s rear door. Jenna was herded out and held by her arms between the Chinese policemen so that she stood on the gravel facing the train.

  She began to shiver.

  The soldiers had taken up positions at intervals along the length of the entire train, holding their Kalashnikovs at forty-five degrees. For a few moments nothing happened. Sparse snowflakes continued to fall. An icy breeze flapped their long coats. Finally, an officer appeared in a train door and beckoned to Leather Jacket with a flick of his finger.

  The man removed the handcuffs from Jenna’s hands and, almost courteously, led her forward by the arm, up the shale embankment toward the train. The officer reached down and helped her up the three ladder steps into the carriage. The heavy door closed with a thunk behind her.

  Cho watched the policeman’s face, pale in the reflected glow of his cell phone as he checked his messages with one hand, and picked his nose with the other. Outside dusk was falling. They heard the elevator. His colleague had returned.

  “No stretcher in the van,” he said.

  The other looked at Cho. “Right. We’ll lift you ourselves.”

  Again Cho spoke calmly and evenly. “If I’m returned to North Korea paralyzed from the neck down, how will that look for you two? How will your captain explain it?” He smiled at them. “You’d better find a stretcher.”

  One of them swore, and said to the other, “Radio the boys in Onsong Station. See if they have a stretcher.”

  In the soundproofed interior, Jenna heard her breath sound shallow.

  Piped Korean folk music played softly. The officer pointed the way forward, pushing her gently in the small of her back through a series of compartments—a conference room with a long polished table, a lounge furnished with ornate, comfortable sofas and a mirrored bar, a communications room with banks of flat screens and seated army officers speaking on radiophones. One of them stopped her and scanned her from head to foot with a handheld metal detector. He took her keys and phone from her.

  In the next vestibule the officer told her to wait. She stood to one side as about a dozen women in long silk hanbok dresses flowed out of the compartment ahead of her. White-powdered faces turned briefly toward her as they rustled past in a cloud of sweet fragrance. They were holding musical instruments—zithers and flutes. The officer reappeared. Again Jenna was propelled forward by a hand on her back, and she found herself in what appeared to be a long dining compartment, empty except for two soldiers standing guard at the far door, and a small aged man in beige seated at a dining table, eating alone. The door behind her closed. The women’s fragrance still hung in the air.

  “Dr. Williams?” the old man said, raising a napkin to his mouth. “Thank you for coming.” He stood with some difficulty and smiled at her. “Please join me.”

  As if in a dream, Jenna could only stare. The man was Kim Jong-il.

  53

  Forty Kilometers South of Yanji

  Jilin Province,

  China

  Somehow she motioned her body forward. Her limbs were on a kind of autopilot, while her mind had closed down in shock. She could not take her eyes off him. He sat back down. His attention had already drifted back to the food.

  A dozen saucer-sized gold dishes were spread out before him. From one of them he picked a tiny morsel with silver chopsticks and chewed slowly.

  A place had been laid for her with a crystal goblet.

  “Please,” he said, gesturing with his chopsticks for her to sit.

  The window blind next to him was drawn against the glowing landscape outside and the lamps in the compartment were shaded by orange glass, but the low lighting couldn’t hide his frailty.

  Jenna sat.

  Facing her, stooped in his seat, was the Lodestar of the Twenty-First Century, the Dear Leader, a man whose image had been carved in marble, cast in bronze, painted in oils, mass-produced in screen-prints, patterned in vast mosaics of glass, displayed by a hundred thousand schoolchildren holding up colored cards, and projected onto clouds in the sky. His name was graven in letters six meters high on the rock face of Mount Paektu, it was intoned in voices quavering from loudspeakers, it was sung by army choruses, invoked by toddlers in thanks for food on the table, praised by orators before massed rallies. It was a name that had authored hundreds of volumes on everything from nitrate fertilizers to the art of the cinema, a name given to countless schools, universities, factories, tanks, and rocket launchers. It was a name shouted by cadres in a desperate act of
loyalty as they faced the firing squad, a name that haunted the dreams of defectors, no matter how far they fled from his realm.

  Yet absolute power hadn’t halted the decay of his body. The famous bouffant hair was dry and sparse; she could see patches of his scalp. Deep lines bracketed his mouth and caused his cheeks to sag as he ate; his skin was creamy gray and liver spotted. With the outsized glasses resting on a small, feminine nose, he resembled not so much a man as a homunculus, kept alive by raw power.

  “I use to have such an appetite on these journeys,” he said vaguely. “Now food has lost its taste.” He pointed to a dish with his chopsticks. “Chilled flowering fern cleanses the palette. Quail’s egg jelly goes well with the grilled pheasant, shot on my own range. This one’s fried octopus with ginkgo nut, prepared by my sushi chef. But can you guess which is the best food on this table?” He looked at her with amusement. “The bread! Flown to me this morning from Khabarovsk.”

  His voice was thin and parched, and impeded by a slight stammer. The left arm had a tremor to it, and one side of his body seemed subsided, as if from a stroke.

  This man has fewer than five years left to live, she thought.

  “I’m … not hungry.”

  An immaculate young man in a white jacket appeared at Jenna’s side, bowed to her with his hand pressed to his heart, and poured a spirit into her glass from a golden bottle, which he left on the table.

  “Baedansul,” Kim Jong-il said, turning the label toward her. “Distilled for me by the Foundational Sciences Institute. At eighty proof, my doctors won’t let me touch it now. Doctors …” He gave a wry snort. “When they attend to me their hands tremble. But if they didn’t tremble … that’s when I should worry.”

  He was drinking what looked like watered-down red wine. He raised his glass to her in a toast, but she did not move.

  “Why have I been brought here?”

  He stopped eating and his expression changed minutely, becoming less benign.

  He signaled to the young attendant to remove the dishes, then raised his hand and with a flick of his wrist ordered the soldiers behind him to leave.

  They hesitated. “Great General, we—”

  “Leave us.” He closed his eyes. Raising his voice had enervated him. The soldiers left through the rear door.

  His mouth settled into neutral expression but the tiny eyes were as bright as pins.

  “America’s symbol is the eagle, is it not? A bird that soars. And Korea’s pride is the mountain landscape that scrapes the sky. There is no obstacle we cannot overcome if we decide together.”

  Jenna could think of no response to this gnomic remark.

  “If people treat me diplomatically,” he went on, “I become a diplomat, and I wish to be treated diplomatically, Dr. Williams.” He swirled his glass and took a sip. “For years my father was a guerrilla fighting the Japanese occupiers in Korea. He’d spend whole winters holed up in caves in the mountains of Ryanggang Province with my mother and a devoted band of rebels. By day they’d be outfoxing the imperialists, by night singing songs around fires in the snow. It was a simple, heroic life. Then came the Revolution in ’48, and my father was no longer the leader of a small band of rebels, but of a country of eighteen million people. So our new nation became an extension of the life he had known. We are a guerrilla nation at war with the world. That’s the state I inherited. It is who we are. There is nothing I can do to change it, without it falling apart.”

  He gave the sigh of a man who had drunk deep from the cup of life’s experiences, and was tired. He put his glass down.

  “We’re not dissimilar, you and I,” he said, giving her a thin smile. “Your life, like mine, was shaped long ago by unhappiness and events beyond your control. Neither of us had a choice in the person we became.”

  She felt her ears burning as she sensed, in some vague and unformulated way, that she was about to be blackmailed.

  “You don’t know me,” she said. A faint feeling of nausea was beginning to ferment in her stomach.

  Kim Jong-il raised the window blind a few inches and peered out. The black Volkswagen sedan that had brought her here was still waiting down on the rough road parallel with the track. Leather Jacket was standing next to it, braving the cold to smoke. The helmeted soldier below the window stood as immobile as a statue. Snowflakes were sticking to the barrel of his Kalashnikov. The last light of the day had retreated to the horizon in a palette of ominous reds and purples. A few stars pierced the sky between the clouds.

  He said, “A year ago you wrote a secret report for CIA director Panetta urging a radical change in America’s attitude toward me. Your idea was to sweep away all sanctions and embargos on my country, all restrictions on travel, banking, and trade. You argued for nothing less than a sea change in American policy. It was a bold, audacious proposal. The secretary of state was opposed to it, but under pressure from the White House, it seems, she discreetly shared your ideas with the Chinese and the South Koreans, and later with the Russians. She was most surprised, judging from her e-mails, that their response was not negative. Last week, in an e-mail to your president, she wrote that she had become convinced of your recommendations. She is ready to go public with them and lobby the UN …”

  Jenna stared coldly at him. So here it is.

  “… and once she does so, the president will give her his full backing.”

  Kim Jong-il turned back to her. The dying light was reflecting in his glasses so that she could not read his expression, but his voice turned cold.

  “You will tell the secretary of state that you have reconsidered your report. After much soul-searching, you have developed grave doubts about it. It is your expert opinion that all sanctions and embargos against my country must remain in force in perpetuity.”

  A long pause passed before Jenna said coolly, “Your country is poor and isolated because of sanctions.”

  “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?” A current of anger had entered his voice, but then he seemed to force his expression into something more conciliatory, and she sensed the momentousness of what he was saying. “My people are innocent children. Exposing them to the storms of the global economy, and with it all the pernicious influences of the modern world would … put them under stresses they could not endure.”

  Jenna muttered, almost to herself. “But while they’re hungry and poor and kept in the dark they can’t rise up against you.” She felt a spike of pure loathing for this man. “What makes you think I’d do any such thing?”

  “I should have thought that’s perfectly obvious.” He pressed a button in the side of the table.

  The doors behind him at the far end of the compartment opened, and a woman in a pale-blue silk hanbok dress appeared.

  Jenna jumped to her feet.

  Her sister’s black hair was tied back, and a white powder had been applied over her caramel skin. Her face was expressionless, a grotesque doll, her eyes blank and glassy.

  Without looking at her, Kim Jong-il raised a finger and beckoned her forward.

  Jenna watched appalled as Soo-min glided toward her like a vampire. She felt herself begin to tremble and realized she was crying.

  *

  A stretcher had been found. Both policemen were by now in a thoroughly bad mood. The one who’d had to fetch it was shining with sweat and swearing but Cho was oblivious, staring at the ceiling from his mat, not moving a muscle. They lay the stretcher on the floor next to him.

  “Careful,” he said. “I suggest you each go either side of me and lift me very slowly, with one of you supporting the weight of my head.”

  They crouched either side of his mat, putting their hands beneath him to lift.

  “That’s it,” Cho said, grimacing. “Slowly, slowly.”

  “Soo-min … it’s me.” Jenna’s face was streaking with tears. She held out her arms. “It’s Jee-min.”

  Soo-min stopped at the dictator’s side. She kept her eyes lowered, avoiding Jenna’s gaze, but Jenna sen
sed her sister’s emotions roiling behind the facade, like flames behind glass. Kim Jong-il reached feebly for Soo-min’s hand, taking it and pressing it to his shoulder, an intimacy that made Jenna feel sick to her stomach.

  “I’m delighted to be the agent of your reunion,” he said.

  Jenna lurched forward and threw her arms around Soo-min, but her sister remained stiff and unresponsive, as if Jenna were a stranger.

  “Please, embrace,” Kim Jong-il said with a wave of his hand. “We are all family here.”

  Slowly Soo-min reached her arms up like a manikin and placed them around Jenna’s shoulders and Jenna felt her sister’s heart beating violently. Their cheeks pressed together. Soo-min’s skin was flushed hot.

  “My dear sister,” Soo-min said in a strange voice that sounded disconnected from her body, like a tape recording. Her face froze into a smile. “I bid you socialist greetings, and wish you well in your endeavors for my people.”

  Kim Jong-il’s face had lost its weariness and had become animated with cunning.

  Soo-min released Jenna. She bowed deeply to him, whispering, “Great General,” then inched backward toward the door, her body bent over.

  Jenna began to follow, until Soo-min glanced up and flashed a bright, clear warning with her eyes. As quickly as she’d appeared, Soo-min was gone.

  Jenna’s mouth had gone dry. She reached for the clear liquid in the crystal glass and took a gulp before remembering that it was an eighty-proof spirit. She coughed and felt her face catch fire. Her leg was trembling. She sat down again before she collapsed.

  Kim Jong-il chuckled softly. “I wish I could join you in a glass of that … Ah, but …” he patted his heart. His small fingers were as white as grubs. “I hope you and I now have an understanding? I personally will guarantee your sister’s safety.” His eyes hardened. “I regret that the same can’t be said for the traitor Cho Sang-ho, however. He will be returned to our care tonight.”

  Jenna felt the alcohol go to her head. An unbearable agitation filled her body. Not sure what to do with her hands, she put them into the pockets of her padded sleeveless vest and touched the corner of a cigarette packet.