The Gentleman from Japan

by James Church

  6

  “Dmitri Alexandrovich,” I said, “the next time I knock on your door, you should answer it nicely.”

  “The next time, Bing, you should knock politely.” The Russian was clearly annoyed. “Who is going to pay for this?”

  I’d kicked the door in, and it was hanging by one hinge. “Maybe you can dip into your rainy-day funds. See? It’s raining again.”

  “What do you want? I’m busy right now. I was planning to invite you to tea sometime, maybe next week.”

  “I’ll bet you were. You’re always busy, that’s why I admire you. I hear you had a meeting.”

  “I have a lot of meetings, Bing. People who sell insurance do that.”

  “Is that what you’re doing these days? Selling insurance?”

  “If you’d looked at the door before kicking it in, you’d have seen the sign. You want insurance? You’ll have to make an appointment.”

  “Does the mayor need insurance? Is that why you were meeting with him?”

  The Russian gave me a look like a wolf that had other things on its mind.

  “The mayor,” I said, “not to mention your old friend Mike, and someone else. A lot of insurance, is that it? Group insurance? Better rates?”

  “Yeah? So? There was a meeting. It’s not illegal to have meetings.”

  I laughed. “Dmitri Alexandrovich, you are such a funny guy sometimes. Of course it’s not illegal to have meetings. It’s also not illegal for me to take you up into the hills and handcuff you to a tree. I’ll bet the bears would be interested.”

  “There are no bears around here, Bing.”

  “Dmitri, Dmitri, don’t tell me where there are bears and where there aren’t. Just answer the question. What is Mike doing back here? You don’t like him, I don’t like him, and he doesn’t like either of us. But you were sitting together with him in a meeting with our mayor. I don’t find that normal.”

  “Normal, not normal.” The Russian shrugged. “Mike had a business proposition.”

  “Ah, good. I’m interested. You see my ears bending toward you?”

  “That’s it. He had a proposition.”

  “No, no, no. Dmitri Alexandrovich, haven’t you and I been through this sort of thing before? Short answers are only good when I ask for something along the yes-no axis. In this case, I want details. You aren’t even supposed to be in Yanji. The last time you were here, I told you to get out and stay out.”

  “You don’t own this city, Bing.”

  “That’s true. But I run security here, me and no one else. If you think the mayor can protect you once I decide to toss you off a roof, you might want to think again.”

  “Like I said, you don’t own this city.” The wolf eyes narrowed. “I came here to help out. Mike said he had some business. Sure, him and me don’t see eye to eye all the time, but business is business.”

  “Which was it, noodles or dumplings?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re all in the same room, Mike is switching from noodles to dumplings, he’s opened a fish restaurant and moved in some tough lady from Harbin to run it and do whatever else he wants, and suddenly we have seven diners die all at once. Three of them in a noodle restaurant. Two more behind a dim sum place. You know anything about that?”

  “Huh? I mean, you know me, Bing. I’m not crazy. Seven people? Why would I do something like that?”

  “When you get credentials, you can ask me questions. For now, you answer. Here’s where you are on the answer scale. Zero. You aren’t scoring too good.” I picked up a teacup and threw it against the wall.

  “Hey, that was my grandmother’s!”

  “I believe you. Now, tell me, what was that meeting about? You, Mike, and the mayor.”

  “And the tall guy.” The wolf grinned, just like Liao had, only with more teeth. “Don’t forget him.”

  Chapter Two

  Dmitri and I parted on bad terms. That was normal. What wasn’t normal was that for once, he’d told me something that he hadn’t meant to. The murders of seven people in one night had shaken him. He didn’t know who was responsible, but he wanted to make sure I understood he had nothing to do with it. He was a crook, he would rough people up if he had to, he said, but he drew the line at murder, at least at more than once in a while.

  “Very good,” I said. “You have a moral center. So who did this? Would Mike?”

  He thought about it. “No, Mike couldn’t. It would take several people to do this. Murder isn’t easy. Not here, anyway. It’s not like we use car bombs.”

  “Bombs,” I said. “You do know something about bombs, as I recall. Last time you were in town, we worked over your apartment. You had boxes of strange things in the closest. Timers. Wires. Cell phones. Ever made something small?”

  “Never made anything, Bing. I was in sales then, I told you. It was merchandise, inventory. Strictly business.”

  “You are not a convincing personality, Dmitri. I’m beginning to think you have something to do with those murders.”

  “Bing! Listen! I was trained to work one on one. To do seven in one night, in different locations? Almost at the same time? It would need quite an organization, a lot of resources to do that. I don’t have those resources. And Mike is a little guy. He talks big, but he is a tiny fish, a sardine. Maybe less than a sardine. He couldn’t pull it off. You sure those murders are all connected?”

  “I have no idea. You know I’m not a cop, Dmitri. You know what I want to find out. Let’s forget about the murders. Let’s talk about Mike.”

  2

  On the way back to the office, I was thinking about what Dmitri had told me when I spotted the police chief standing on the corner near Fuzhou Alley.

  “You still here? Why did you wave me off?”

  “Sorry, I thought I saw the mayor’s driver coming out of the furniture store.”

  “Maybe the mayor needs a chest for all of his money.”

  “Maybe. But I checked. It wasn’t him. He and the mayor are up in the hills getting ready for another party. Anyway, we finally got the results from the coroner on two of the stiffs.”

  “It took this long?”

  “The coroner left town the night we found the bodies. Vacation, he said.”

  “Paid for by the mayor, I’ll bet. What’s the verdict? If you can believe the coroner’s reports.”

  “I don’t judge either way. You want to hear?”

  “Not really, but go ahead.”

  “The upscale diner died of unknown causes.”

  “Very useful. Not the sauce.”

  “And the blonde died of an overdose of something, and it wasn’t happiness.”

  “What about the other five?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “And the bits and pieces from the explosion?”

  “Not human. The coroner thinks it was a couple of cows. Someone who lives in the neighborhood says the farmers up there had a running boundary dispute, and one of them finally got fed up and threw a stick of dynamite over the fence.”

  “You believe that?”

  “We’re checking.”

  “Well, don’t bother about the noodle shop corpses. I’m less sure about the ones behind the dim sum shop.”

  “You want to go sit somewhere and explain?”

  “No, I have to drive to the airport. My uncle is flying in. He’s been away.”

  “We figured he was either sick or out of town because he hasn’t been wandering around. Did he go on one of his trips to Harbin for lumber?”

  “He called from Beijing to say he went to Portugal but didn’t like it so he took a train to Berlin to visit old friends.”

  The police chief didn’t say anything.

  “Well, I was surprised, too. But he used to get around a lot. Could be.”

  “Could be.” The chief nodded.

  “Anyway, the three in the noodle shop made the mistake of being there when Mike was making the transition to noodles.”

  “Mike is back?”

>   “You didn’t know? Great bunch of cops you have.”

  “You can’t expect miracles from the street cops up here. They don’t get paid enough, not—”

  “—not after all the deductions. I know. Never mind. Yes, Mike is back, and he’s switched his focus to dumplings. In fact, he’s hooked up with some big Japanese dumpling king, a sort of globalization. Mike must have figured the best way to move our local consumers from noodles to dumplings was to poison a few of them.”

  “Then why kill off two hookers who were sharing dumplings?”

  “Maybe connected, maybe not. If you want a theory, it was in order to put the other dumpling shops out of business. That way there would be no competition. What a world, huh?”

  “Yeah, what a world. I’m still stuck with seven deaths on my statistics for the month.”

  As soon as he said that, something clicked. “No, you’re not,” I said. “These happened on the same night, but they’re not all linked. At least two of them are routine—the blue-eyed tourist died of a drug overdose. Not much you could have done about that, especially if she got the drugs from the mayor’s Uighur friends. And the diner at the hotel restaurant, well, that’s an expensive place. No one will want to pursue it too far. Maybe he swallowed the salad the wrong way. That leaves five that fall in the ‘suspicious’ column. The mayor wanted to pin them on me, the result of terrorism that he said I hadn’t stopped. But now he can’t do that, because I know he was meeting with Mike. Believe me, Beijing would love to pin something like this on Mike, doesn’t matter whether they can prove it or not. It will help them close the file. And if my Ministry can use them to close the file, they don’t go on your statistics.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Who knows, maybe this is even the hammer I’ve been waiting for to use on the mayor.”

  The police chief looked down at his shoes and smiled. “Yeah, well.” He looked up again. “I guess I’m off noodles and dumplings for a while. But what about fish? You think fish is still all right?”

  “You never know until you try,” I said.

  “I guess so.” The chief thought it over. “And our fish lady? She’s clean?”

  “You said it yourself, she’s too tough to be controlled. But her place is dark and out of the way, a good spot for meetings that you should be watching.”

  “Well, as a theory, it’s not bad, Bing. It all fits.”

  “Yeah, it all fits. That’s what makes me nervous.”

  I waited until the chief had disappeared around the corner, and then walked slowly a few steps down Fuzhou Alley. It was time to try some fish soup.

  Chapter Three

  “Open the crate.” I handed my uncle a crowbar.

  “I can already tell you what’s in there.”

  “Open it.”

  Inside was a large machine. An instruction book in five languages was fastened to one of the knobs. It promised that careful adherence to the instructions would result in perfect dumplings, “every time.”

  “Satisfied?” My uncle picked up some of the wood from the crate and examined it. “They ought to outlaw this cheap plywood.”

  I looked at the instruction manual and then turned a couple of the knobs. “What is this?”

  “If you were a seabird, you might fly to a small port on the north shore of Hokkaido. You might circle and watch as a Russian fishing boat pulls in and unloads three crates.”

  “Dmitri,” I said softly.

  Uncle O pretended to look at the instruction booklet.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The real one was being sent to Japan the whole time.”

  “It was.”

  “And you knew it?”

  “Not at first. Luis, poor Luis, didn’t know anything about it, and neither did that bastard Mike.”

  “Tuya?”

  My uncle looked away. “What do you think?”

  “I’ll give you a theory. It’s a new theory. I just threw away my old one, so I have to make this up as I go. You don’t have to say anything. Just listen for a change, all right?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “From the very start, the machine was to be shipped to Japan.”

  “That’s all you’ve got?” My uncle snorted.

  “No, I’d say they figured it couldn’t go directly, or at least not without an enveloping cloud of misdirection. There had to be absolutely no risk that it would be revealed. To avoid that, the whole thing had to leak into the world in overlapping and almost impossibly contradictory layers. The layers were sticky. If you picked one up, it stuck to you and gathered stray facts along the way. Stray facts that had been spread around on purpose.”

  “For example?” That was exactly what my uncle would ask whenever he already knew the answer.

  “For example, someone had the idea to make it look like your friends across the river were shipping in something highly sensitive under a false label. Then they layered on another cover story that was accurate as far as it went. The machine wasn’t going across the river, but was actually meant to go to Japan, a special model ordered by the dumpling king. Only, of course, it wasn’t ordered by the dumpling king. Anyone who got that far in pulling the threads would find a third layer.”

  “Which was?” Again, he was just leading me along the path.

  “Which was that the machine—labeled as a dumpling machine—was really going across the river for your friends. The Japanese mafia was employed, a route to northern China traced out, that rat Mike was brought in to arrange transport across the Tumen River from Yanji to North Korea, and finally, there was a series of murders in Yanji to add to the story that something highly sensitive was going on. Mike didn’t know for sure it had nothing to do with dumplings. And the Uighur with the limp helped out by inviting his relative up here for something big but mysterious.”

  “A lot of seams.”

  “No, once it was under way, it was easy to make the whole story work because it fit what everyone already thought they knew was true. Once an intelligence organization decides it knows what is going on, all the facts fit. Those that don’t fit end up in the wastebasket. So all they had to do was feed in the pieces of the story in the right place, at the right time. The fish lady had been sent months earlier to begin to lay the groundwork. She was putting out stories to the girls on Dooran Street about unusual visitors to her restaurant. I put the question to her. She was the one who said she’d seen Mike before he crossed the river, and you helped spread it. You know the lady?”

  “In a manner of speaking. But I didn’t spread it. I told you, no one else.”

  “You could have told me who the source was.”

  “That would have violated our agreement. Your sources are yours; mine are mine. We agreed.”

  I thought about asking whether he knew Dmitri, but that would have drawn a blank stare, so I let it go. Instead I pushed a little on a different door. “They played you like a fish on a line, didn’t they?”

  If I had worried this might annoy my uncle, I needn’t have. He was very calm, almost amused. “They thought so, yes.”

  His calmness touched a nerve. “Oh, no you don’t, not this time, uncle. For once I can see through you. They needed to have it look as if that machine was going to the North, and what better way to do it than to get a North Korean involved?”

  “Even me?” He smiled. It was his satisfied smile.

  “Especially you.”

  “Good, you have a theory. You have leads. And now you have some proof. What are you going to do with it?”

  “That’s my problem. I’ll do what I need to do. But right now I want to know, how did you figure it out?”

  “Phony shipping company. They said it was going through a shipping company in Harbin—Bingwei Marine and Rail. There is no such company. And it never had business cards.”

  “How would you know?”

  “We used to put that name on phony bills of lading sometimes. It’s made up. If you want to know, my brother—your father—made it up. No on
e realized it at the time, but now that I think about it, it was a reference to your mother.”

  “My father? Why did he handle clandestine shipments?”

  “Never mind what he did or why. That’s past, and he’s dead.” Uncle O suddenly looked younger. He had looked old and tired at the airport, but now that had dropped away. It was as if recalling the past wasn’t a weight but lifted him up. “You never saw a reference to that company in your files at work? No, maybe not. We stopped using it almost twenty-five years ago for shipments over the border. The point is someone in Japan who was connected with the dumpling machine operation found a reference to it somewhere, and decided it was just what they needed to throw anyone getting too interested off the scent.”

  “But it didn’t work.”

  “Maybe if I hadn’t seen the business card it would have worked, along with everything else they were doing. But if you ask me, anyone who puts Bingwei Marine and Rail down as their shipping company is not going through Harbin. They’re certainly not planning to go across the river through any crossing point you or I know.”

  “How could you be so sure your friends didn’t revive it and use it as a cover to ship in the nuclear dumpling machine for their program?”

  “That would have been stupid. We’re not idiots, you know.”

  “I know that, uncle.” I figured he’d told me all he was going to about shipment, so I asked the next logical question. “What do the Japanese want with the machine?”

  “You tell me.”

  “No,” I said. “You tell me.”

  “OK, let’s keep it simple. Let’s not draw big, sweeping pictures in the air. I’d say they want to produce centrifuges, but they don’t want anyone to know what they’re doing. That’s as far as I need to go. I’m retired. I have no reporting chain. No one listens to me anyway. The big brains will figure the rest out, or they won’t. If anyone finds evidence at that factory—and the people who send Luis his paycheck will pull it apart from the ground up—that the machine was shipped to Asia, everyone will assume it went to bad people. Everyone knows the Japanese are good people. You can do what you want with the information.”