by James Church
I thought about it. Nothing had gone on here except that a dumpling machine showed up. Solving the murders was the responsibility of the police. If I filed a report on them, Beijing would ask why I was interfering in local affairs. The mayor was still a crook, and I still needed to get transferred. Meanwhile, I had to figure out how to get rid of Mike and my new deputy.
“Then that’s that,” I said. “What happens next?”
“I have an idea for a bookcase, nephew. It’s for very tall people who don’t like to bend down. I’ll need a few special gears for the shelves.” He peered into the crate. “I’ll bet there are one or two in this thing.”
2
At dinner, Uncle O was preoccupied. He stared at the bowl, picked at his food, selected a grain of rice with his chopsticks and examined it before putting it in his mouth.
“Something the matter?”
He looked at me as if in a dream. After a moment, he shook his head slowly. “I think I’ll sit in my workshop for a while. You go ahead with dinner.”
An hour later, he still hadn’t emerged. I listened outside the door for a couple of minutes, but there were no sounds.
“Uncle, everything all right?” I knocked at the door. When there was no answer, I rushed inside. He was sitting on his high stool, writing.
“You had me worried,” I said.
“Oh? Sorry, some lines of poetry were running through my head. All of a sudden, they came to me. Do you know, nephew, I think it’s time to go home.”
“We are home.”
“No, I mean across the river. I’ve been here long enough.”
I hesitated. He’d fed me a line not so long ago about needing to go to Portugal. I wasn’t falling for it again.
“No,” he said, “don’t worry. This is not some great revelation. Even geese feel the pull. I need to go home.”
“But you can’t go back.” I couldn’t believe I’d said that. “Your enemies are waiting.”
“My enemies are all like me, they’re old and toothless. No one cares anymore who we were or what we did. If I have any time left, I might as well spend it where I belong. I know the trees there. They are all strangers to me here. Besides, I can take that crate.”
I realized what he meant. “You’re going into the dumpling business?”
“Nothing big, just a small stand. I know the perfect place, near a little train station on the way to Pyongsong. By the time passengers get there in the afternoon, they’re hungry. They’ll devour dumplings by the dozen.”
“You’ll never get permission,” I said. “Why not do it here?”
“Here? This is a big, grand country, nephew, but I can’t breathe here. It’s as foreign to me as the moon. Don’t worry, I can get back on my own. You don’t have to do anything, and when your ministry asks, you can say you didn’t suspect I was leaving.”
“They’re watching. A lot of people are watching.”
“You think I don’t know? Every time I go out I practically stumble over them. They are sloppy. I could go anywhere I wanted, and they’d be left with their tongues hanging out.”
“Yes, if you want to go back, I guess I understand. There are new buildings in Pyongyang, lots of more modern things than when you left.”
“I don’t give a damn about buildings. I want to go back to the mountains. I want to see the trees. I want to breathe clean air again.”
“You really do have the soul of a poet, you know.”
“No, I do not. I am just past the point where it is any use looking ahead. So I’ll go home and settle into the compass headings that I knew best a long time ago. Before I die, though, I’d like to go to Kyongju. My grandfather used to tell me about it.”
“How are you going to do that? Kyongju is in the South.”
“I know that.”
“Maybe I could help you get there. I can go easily enough. If you’re with me…”
“I’m Korean, nephew, I don’t need anyone to help me get around my own country.”
He was being stubborn. Nothing would ever change that.
I tried a new tack. “My reports say they’re cracking down again on defectors. It’s ugly, and it’s more dangerous than it has been for a long time.”
“It’s always more dangerous today than it was yesterday. It’s one of the problems with being born, nephew. But I’m not a defector. I was on an extended vacation as far as they are concerned. I never spoke against the government, never benefited a foreign service, shared no secrets, collected no compensation from anyone. I know these people. New buildings or not, they haven’t changed. They don’t want to waste bullets on an old dog. It would serve no purpose.”
“Revenge.”
He thought about it for a moment. “Revenge I know something about. If it is meant to be, it will be. Why should it worry me?”
“They’ll know you lived with a Chinese security official while you were here. They’ll think you helped out with our operations against them. They’ll want to find out what else you know. They won’t ask politely.”
My uncle shrugged. “I go back tomorrow. I’d like to take the machine in that crate. I don’t think I can row it across the river.”
There was no stopping him, no argument, no logic, no plea. He was my uncle, and he was determined to go. No one had to tell me what I had to do.
“I’ll find a truck going from Tumen across the bridge,” I said. “You’ll need some money.”
“I have enough.”
3
The next morning, very early, a drab truck with no markings pulled up outside the house. The crate was wrestled into the back. My uncle climbed into the cab. He rolled down the window and leaned out. “Good-bye, nephew.” He said it in Korean.
“I’m probably not going anywhere for a while, uncle, so I’ll be here. Come back to visit. I’ll keep your bookcases.”
The old man smiled. “Sell what you can. I can always make more. I left you a poem on the workbench.”
“Send me a postcard from Kyongju.”
“I will.”
He waved. I saw him watching from the window as the truck pulled away and disappeared in the dark.
4
I went back in the house and called the office. The duty officer answered on the second ring.
“Get me the mayor,” I said.
“It’s four in the morning, sir. He’s asleep.”
“I know what time it is. I have a watch. You have a watch. The mayor has a lot of watches. Get him on the phone. And don’t let someone else answer and tell you he’s sleeping.”
“You’re the boss.”
“I am. Now get him on the phone. I’ll just sit here picking my teeth. No, wait. Forget that. New plan.”
“You’re the boss.”
“First thing, call the new deputy into the office. Tell him it’s an emergency and he needs to get in fast. As soon as he gets there, strap him to a chair. Knock him out if you have to, I don’t care.”
“Your deputy, the tall guy?”
“You know another one?”
“OK, then what?”
“Then you get the mayor on the phone. This needs to be done in exactly the order I gave you, clear?”
“Clear.”
“No mistakes. And get it done fast. Send my car for the bastard. Have them drive like crazy so he’ll think it’s really important. I’ll keep this line open. If there’s trouble, let me know. But I figure you can handle it.”
About fifteen minutes later, the sound of the mosquito came over the line. “What the hell, Bing! You don’t call me at four in the morning!”
“I do, and I did. Get dressed, Qin. We’re bringing you in.”
“You’re what? Have you been drinking?”
“No, I’m very sober. You interested in the charges, or would you rather wait to hear them?”
“You’ve gone mad. I’ll have your job. I’ll have your head, that and the head of your crazy uncle.”
“You threatened before to have my job, but here I am, sti
ll waiting. You are a disappointment, Qin. You are also sloppy. You had a meeting a while ago, upstairs in the jeweler’s building. You remember?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Good. You’re on tape, by the way. Deny whatever you want; they love it when people deny things. It lets them go to the maximum on the sentence. And the maximum for these charges is ugly. You want to buy the bullet now? I’ll bet you can get it at a discount from one of your friends.”
There was a slight pause. “So I went to the jeweler’s, so what? I needed some jewelry.”
“Sure you did. That’s why you were upstairs with a bunch of people. They were helping you pick it out.”
“Yeah, I like a second opinion.”
“How much did you pay that Russian piece of shit to bomb my offices?”
Silence.
“OK, next question. How much did you pay Mike to arrange those murders?”
Silence.
“No good, Qin. I have everything I need.”
“I didn’t pay Mike.”
“You’re working as a source for the Tianjin MSS office, but not a good one, and definitely not a smart one. It was an especially bad idea to put that bomb in the Yanji office of State Security, my office. A very bad idea. That makes you not only a traitor and a terrorist but also an embarrassment. They especially don’t like being embarrassed. It looks bad. So you know what they do? They get rid of embarrassments without a trace. Here today, gone tomorrow.”
“Just a minute, Major.”
“Don’t try to bribe me, Qin. I’ll cram it down your throat just before they shoot you.”
“I’m not bribing you. I’m only thinking out loud. We can think out loud, can’t we?”
“Go ahead. But I want to bring you in before dawn, so don’t drag this out.”
“OK, here is what I’m thinking. It was a mistake, but you’ve got to admit, it was only a little bomb. No one got hurt. I made sure Dmitri made it small, more noise than anything else.”
“A bomb is a bomb.”
“Sure, I know that.”
“Who let Dmitri into the building?” I already knew the answer, but I wanted to see if Qin would give it away.
“Who do you think? Look, Major, let’s be blunt. It doesn’t matter whether you like me. This city is starting to grow. Things are getting better for everyone.”
“No, not everyone. Not for Mei-lin.”
Another pause. “I told you, that wasn’t me. What’s the matter? Lonely? We can find someone pretty, just take a few days is all.”
“Qin, you disgust me. Time’s up. Don’t bother packing a bag.”
“Wait a minute, will you? Things will get better for everyone, just watch. Sure, the wheels get greased. Come on, Major, you know that. How else are things going to get done? When has it been any different?”
I sensed a change in his tone. He had caught on.
“Look out your window, Qin. The sky is getting light in the east. What’s your point?”
“The point is, if you get rid of me, you’ll have to deal with a new mayor, and none of the new breed understands the world, much less anything about running a city. They will do whatever Beijing tells them to do, and we all know what that means these days. It’s as bad as it was under Mao.”
“You don’t want that on tape.”
“Come on, Bing, there’s no tape. You want a deal; otherwise you wouldn’t have called me first. You would just have busted in the door and grabbed me. OK, I like it here. You want me to dial back? I can do that. As long as I’m here, I can hold off the political types from the capital. We should coexist. Am I right?”
“You are only right about one thing, Qin. I’ll be watching. And I’ll squash you like a bug if that’s what I think needs to be done. Keep away from Mike.”
“I don’t like him. Nobody likes him. And I didn’t have those diners murdered. That would have been stupid.” He laughed. “Bad for business.”
“And don’t bother phoning your old contact from Tianjin. He’s on his way out of here as soon as I sign the papers.” I hung up. It wasn’t much, but Qin knew I had a rope around his neck. Sleazy and revolting as he was, it was better for everyone if he stayed put. If one of the new breed of hatchets for Beijing showed up as his replacement, it would be worse.
* * *
I sat thinking for a few minutes, then walked back into Uncle O’s workshop. For a change, it was neatly organized, everything in its place. On his workbench, under an antique wood plane he brought from Korea, something he’d once told me his grandfather had given him, was a piece of paper. It was a poem in neat Chinese characters.
The perfumed words return each night.
Too soon they disappear,
Like small waves weary of
A long familiar shore.
Lisbon
2015
Also by James Church
A Corpse in the Koryo
Hidden Moon
Bamboo and Blood
The Man with the Baltic Stare
A Drop of Chinese Blood
About the Author
JAMES CHURCH (a pseudonym) is a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia. He has wandered through Korea for years. No matter what hat he wore, Church says, he ran across Inspector O many times. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Preface
Epigraph
PART I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
PART II
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
PART III
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
PART IV
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Also by James Church
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
THE GENTLEMAN FROM JAPAN. Copyright © 2016 by James Church. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover photograph: landscape and bridge © Katya Evdokimova Arcangel
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Church, James, 1947– author.
Title: The gentleman from Japan: an Inspector O novel / James Church.
Description: First edition. | New York: Minotaur Books, 2016. | Series: Inspector O novels; 5 | “A Thomas Dunne book.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2016024876 | ISBN 9780312614317 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250023018 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Korea (North)—Officials and employees—Fiction. | Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction. | Conspiracies—Fiction. | Political fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Thrillers. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Hard-Boiled. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3603.H88 G46 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.
loc.gov/2016024876
e-ISBN 9781250023018
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
First Edition: December 2016
