by Barry Lancet
Which didn’t take long.
Ian Dillman strolled up and said hello. I nodded. He looked me over. I no longer had any bandages on my face but there was still evidence of my Asian passage.
“Good to see you back in the city,” he said.
“Good to be back.”
“Looks like the trip had a few bumps.”
“There were some rough patches.”
He gestured at the opposite bench. “Mind if I sit?”
“I was counting on it.”
He slid in across from me and signaled his bartender, who brought over a full bottle of Jameson Rarest Vintage Reserve, two shot glasses, two tumblers, water, and ice.
“Save the beer for later,” Ian said.
I glanced at the Jameson. “I think I might.”
“We’ll start with a shot for Mikey, then move on. This stuff is too good to drink fast.”
I nodded and he poured a stiff one for both of us. We raised our glasses. Ian made a toast to Mikey and we drank.
A second shot disappeared for good measure, then Ian laid out the tumblers and set down fresh pours. We touched glasses and sipped in silence for several long moments, giving Mikey his due. The Jameson was impossibly smooth, a complex mixture of fruit, nut, spice, and more. Mikey and Ian and I had sat in these booths on more occasions than I could count and it nearly felt like one of those times now.
Ian eventually got around to saying what I knew was coming. “You didn’t give me a whack at the guy.”
“I didn’t forget. Just didn’t work out that way.”
“But you got him?”
“Big-time.”
“So tell me how you did right by my brother.”
And as we worked our way through the whisky, I did just that.
EPILOGUE
JENNY, of course, jumped all over me as soon as I returned home. She wanted her gifts, attention, and the special message from Rie.
Sitting in our small apartment with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, we caught each other up on everything the other had missed, then I passed on Rie’s message. After an exuberant congratulatory comment about Jenny’s win and new belt, it went like this:
“Remember, you were strong at the tournament, but know you can be strong anytime. Tournaments are brief. The rest of life is ongoing. There’s always—and I mean always—a way to win a fight. Never, never, never give up or give in.”
Jenny thought about the message, asked me to repeat it, thought about it some more, then said, “She’s not talking only about punching and kicking and throwing, is she, Daddy?”
“No, she’s not.”
“She’s talking about what you and I always talk about. About the world spinning, sometimes in a good way and sometimes in a bad way, but always spinning and us always learning and always enjoying the good, which is gooder than the bad is badder.”
“She is.”
“Plus the never giving up part.”
“You’ve got it, Jen.”
She beamed up at me. “Tell her thank you. Can I go play with Lisa now? I need to take her her Totoro pajamas.”
* * *
The call came a month after my initial exchange with Jenny.
We’d just finished reviewing some of my daughter’s latest judo moves, and she was getting into her sleepwear following a shower. The caller ID was blocked. I picked up anyway and said hello.
“I see you made it home safely.”
No return salutation. No names over an open line. But I had no trouble recognizing the voice. I never would.
“Yes. Where you calling from?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Jenny walked into the room in her pajamas, drying her hair with a hand towel. I pointed behind my ear and at my toes and she nodded. She’d washed both places.
Zhou said, “I heard there were complications in Tokyo.”
Complications. “There was a minor inconvenience or two, now that you mention it.”
“Good thing you made it out. I would have hated to see all my effort go to waste.”
I took the roundabout sentiment for what it was worth. Which was a lot.
“Got a question for you,” I said. “Who is the real Chen?”
Jenny flopped down on her pink-and-yellow-striped eyesore of a beanbag, smiled at me, and continued to dry her hair. I’d lobbied to throw out the anachronism a dozen times, but my daughter was having none of it. As a result, I’d been forced to patch up the beanbag more times than doctors had patched me.
“A former big wheel in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs now behind bars for helping you escape.”
“And how did that come about?”
“Two days after your unfortunate breakout, he was found asleep in a hotel room with two lovely ladies from a local . . . pleasure institution. The celebration had been ongoing.”
“Sounds like a honey trap.”
“A variation. There was evidence to tie him to your jailbreak and a convincing amount of hard cash in the room safe with his fingerprints all over it. He and his confederates are now in custody. They will be interrogated and shot as traitors.”
“Which is what they had in mind for you?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.” Yes.
Clearly, crossing the master spy was suicidal.
“Are you in any more danger?”
“No. I am a hero. I captured you. The man who let you go is an enemy of the State.”
“Remind me never to play chess with you.”
Jenny stood, yawned, and, as was her habit of late, crawled onto my lap.
“You did quite well. Your one mistake was to show up in my territory and allow yourself to be outnumbered.”
“Live and learn.”
“You did at least one of those admirably without assistance.”
A sobering thought.
Zhou said, “There are people in China who want to be able to do what you do every day, Brodie. Who want the freedom to sit down at a good meal in Tokyo or San Francisco without the Party looking over their shoulder. Who want the freedom to stroll across the Golden Gate without a burden of any kind. That’s what you Americans have and we Chinese do not. That’s what many Chinese think but can only say in private, among friends and family.”
“Do many of them think that?”
“Millions.”
“Not to mention you.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you are talking about.” Yes, of course.
“I didn’t think so,” I said. “By the way, I passed on some of what I ‘learned.’ ”
The president’s chief of staff had contacted me about flying to Washington for half a dozen private briefings, and suggested I be prepared for more.
On the other end of the line Zhou seemed to settle into himself. “See, I was right about you. You are the enemy.”
“I have no idea what you’re on about,” I said.
* * *
By the time we hung up, Jenny had fallen asleep in my arms.
I settled into my seat and just held her. Her breathing was faint and feathery, her features calm. She looked at peace with the world.
I had yet to mention my forced separation from Rie because it would break her heart. But that was only the first of two reasons. Recalling the conversation in the hospital room, I had an inkling the feisty policewoman had passed me yet another coded message.
If I was not mistaken, Rie had, if not a trick up her sleeve, plenty of fight left.
ABOUT AUTHENTICITY
BRODIE’S story ranges over five countries this time around. Here’s what’s true, country by country.
JAPAN
I start with the elements in the novel from my adopted home of more than twenty years, the always intriguing and often enigmatic Japan.
Kabuki theater traces its roots back hundreds of years. The historical facts about the Japanese performing art presented in the story are all true. That said, the opening Kabuki sequence at the Kennedy Center is a composite
of many performances I have seen over the years and not drawn from one particular play. The fireworks are a nod to a variation known as Super Kabuki.
The pair of Kabuki costumes Brodie finds for his client actually exist, and the descriptions and histories in the book are faithful to the originals. The first robe belongs to a private collection in western Japan. The second, which, in the story, found a home in the museum of Brodie’s curator-client actually resides in just such a depository, the Tokyo National Museum. It was donated to the museum by Kyo Takagi in 1901. Takagi was the daughter of a one-time maid to the daughter of the eleventh shogun Ienari Tokugawa, who ruled from 1787 to 1837.
Although Kabuki evolved into an all-male activity, Japan is also home to the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female musical theatrical troupe with a history dating back more than a hundred years.
Eating in Japan falls into the category of a national pastime, and is part of the adventure, whether it’s one of the many specialties of the native cuisine or a Japanese variation of, say, Italian fare or the classic Western oyster bar. The Ostrea Oyster Bar and Restaurant is tucked away on a brick-lined lane in the Akasaka district of Tokyo. The menu lists forty-five types of Japanese oysters, although the offerings appear seasonally. The two specimens Brodie and Zhou sample are winners, and the oyster risotto a brilliant finish.
Yakuza gangs can be found throughout Japan. While they understandably keep a low profile most of the time, they have their hands in a number of enterprises, and are known to provide third-party muscle. The Chongryon is a functioning group in Japan that has supported the North Korean regime for decades.
While I have been to the American ambassador’s residence in Tokyo and to the Yokota Air Base on a number of occasions, for security and plot reasons the details about both locations have been altered.
As for the rest of the Japanese sites and activities, the funerary practices described are true to form. The PSIA counterterrorist agency is located in Tokyo’s Kasumigaseki district. Shinjuku Ni-chome is in fact Tokyo’s largest gay quarter, home to some three hundred bars, though the Dragon Skin is fictional. The Japanese bath, so unlike its Western counterpart, is indeed restorative.
And last, the poisonous snake known as the habu, from which one character takes his nickname, inhabits the islands of Okinawa. Like its namesake in the story, it is best avoided.
SOUTH KOREA * NORTH KOREA
For this novel, I visited Seoul for the fourth time, and the DMZ for the first time. I also dipped into dozens of sources of all types to confirm the information presented in these pages, including Seoul Train, the documentary mentioned by one of the characters.
Three books with distinctive voices that left an impression because of their unflinching determination to look at the real situation in North Korea and China today, as well as their desire to debunk the old stereotypes and clichés about the countries, are North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson; The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia by Andrei Lankov; and The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee.
But nothing in the books could compare to my unsettling visit to the DMZ. Guards from the North and South face off on a daily basis, sometimes only a handful of yards from one another. I worked hard to make my descriptions of the highly secure area as accurate as possible. While there, my passport was scrutinized no less than five times, and on each occasion I was instructed to hold it alongside my face for comparison. A South Korean solider was required to ride along for portions of the visit, and when I arrived in the Joint Security Area, I was required to sign a waiver absolving the joint government commission of all responsibility in case of a sudden outbreak of hostilities.
The village of Daeseong-dong exists and is located within the DMZ. The special privileges and protections accorded its residents as mentioned in the story are all true, as are the restrictions.
The South Korean soldier “Robert” Kim, who assists Brodie’s team at the JSA, took his nickname from US Navy commander Robert M. Ballinger. Commander Ballinger and ROK Marine Corps major Kim Hah-Cheol were killed in an explosion in 1975 while investigating the first infiltration tunnel.
The account about the attempted attack on South Korea’s presidential residence, known as the Blue House, by North Korean special commandos is true, as are the casualty numbers.
The Statue of Brothers at the War Memorial of Korea in central Seoul may be visited, as may the Hyundai I-Park Tower and Bear Hall. Both have sculpture attached to the buildings as depicted.
The North Koreans did employ a malware called DarkSeoul against the South. Cyberattacks by North Korea continue apace, another making international headlines the same week I compiled these notes.
Two photographers appear in this book. Ben Simmons, the lensman Brodie meets in Seoul, is a portrait of an actual expat American photographer of the same name out of Columbus, Georgia. Based near Tokyo, Simmons has made a career of shooting Japan and Asia. He also took the author photo for this book. Karen Stokely, who appears in the San Francisco sequence with Zhou, is fictional but not unlike a number of talented expat female photographers I’ve met over the years.
The plight of defectors fleeing North Korea for a better life is dangerous, with police and human traffickers in China ready to pounce on the unsuspecting refugee every step of the way.
The history of North Korea’s kidnapping program is true. Many Japanese fell victim to it in the 1970s and ’80s, as did citizens of more than a dozen other nations. While only seventeen Japanese have been officially recognized as kidnapped, by some accounts the number runs into the hundreds. There is talk of new kidnappings even now, making Anna’s plight all the more frightening.
In the 1990s, a famine spread across North Korea and hundreds of thousands perished, with some estimates rising as high as three million. The lack of food was so dramatic, pervasive, and enduring, it is said to have stunted the growth of an entire generation of North Koreans.
This was a tragic period, and it changed the mindset of the North Korean people as they realized they could no longer rely on the government to provide them with all of the basic necessities to live. This has led to a thriving underground black market as described in these pages, and to an even newer generation of entrepreneurs, many of them in the upper echelons of North Korean society.
CHINA
Before I was a full-time author, I was an editor. Among the many books I acquired were a few on China. Several of the books involve the classic strategies of deception and battle, and another was on contemporary business practices. Not surprisingly, I drew on these works for the novel. I also turned to Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower. The views of the Chinese character Zhou in the present piece of fiction are an amalgamation of much of what I gleaned in discussions, other sources, and Pillsbury’s work.
As for the locales in the novel, Dandong and Jilin are actual Chinese cities, while Changbai is technically a county with an urban center also called Changbai. Dandong and the urban area of Changbai sit on the Yalu River, which also defines a portion of the border China shares with North Korea. North Korea is clearly visible on the other side of the river. I took some liberties with the layout of the streets and shops in Changbai.
The selling of North Korean women defectors “captured” by Chinese human traffickers is an ongoing problem in China, and is only inflamed by the huge “surplus” of males to the tune of thirty million, courtesy of the one-child policy, which has been brought to a close.
China’s practice of repatriating North Korean escapees while knowing that returnees will face execution, or in the best-case scenario life imprisonment, is, from any angle, unconscionable. On the other hand, the country hardly treats its own citizens who fall into disfavor much better.
China justifies its actions with a verbal sleight of hand, labelin
g all escapees “economic refugees” rather than “defectors,” thus technically circumventing international law even though people from all levels of society leave for a variety of reasons. Further, while some North Koreans wouldn’t mind settling in China, and historically a number of them have, the vast majority would prefer going to South Korea or somewhere else if offered the choice.
Torture in China remains widespread. The torture sequence involving Brodie was hard to write but harder to research. Chinese officials deny all such incidents, citing statutes on the law books that prohibit acts of torture. But the flood of testimony from Chinese defectors, activists, and others tells another story. The Death Bed is one of many means of torture practiced in China. However, the bone-crushing technique Zhou proposes to use on Brodie’s friend in San Francisco is fictional.
On a lighter note, the Geely GC5 is an actual car manufactured in China and does, happily, come in tangerine orange.
UNITED STATES
Brodie frequented two places in the United States this time around, San Francisco and Washington, DC, I grew up in California and spent a great deal of time in San Francisco and the Bay Area, and return there for visits and book tours every chance I get. As for DC, I’ve made many research trips to the nation’s capital, and have been aided by insiders on the finer points of the city. I am fond of both places and tried to do them justice.
On the San Francisco food front, the pair of restaurants featured in these pages are real and have a loyal patronage. Gary Danko is a stalwart on most “best restaurant” lists and a San Francisco institution. And Mr. Pollo is a true hidden gem and perennial favorite among locals in the know, and now one of mine. It actually does seat only twelve at any one time, give or take the occasional chair squeezed in for a larger party. Fortunately, it has three seatings on most nights. And since I know many readers like to visit places in the books, let me just add that a reservation for either restaurant is recommended.
