by James Church
I could tell this registered. It was true, I did recognize him, and I did get some aspirin for his aunt. She had repaid me with a promise to be a matchmaker. She knew some girls in the countryside who would be good for me, she said. Hard workers. Simple needs. Knew how to boil water.
The door shut in my face, but there was no click of the lock. I decided to wait. A minute later it opened a crack; a hand stuck out, with a stocking dangling on the end of it. “You didn’t get this from me.”
“Only one?”
“That’s right.” The stocking was torn and had a considerable amount of blood on it. Still visible along the top and up one side were small designs. At first they were hard to read, but when I examined them more closely, I saw they were monograms, Western letters, CB.
“You’d look pretty silly with this over your face, wouldn’t you?” I held up the stocking.
He opened the door wider and peered around the corner. “No, because I wouldn’t put that thing over my face.”
“What do you think the CB means? I’ve never seen stockings like that.”
“You’re the inspector, not me.”
“There’s a place in my sector, Club Blue.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“No, I’ll bet you wouldn’t. You always have spare stockings lying around? Or only when they come in with corpses that were never here?”
He began to look like he was thinking of closing the door.
“You must have autopsy equipment in there, right?”
“Of course.”
“Little scalpels, tiny picks.”
“Something like that.”
“You can do fine work, delicate work?”
He shook his head. “Forget it, Inspector, I can’t dissect a cell phone.”
I patted my pocket. “Don’t jump to conclusions, it’s bad for your ankles. Just one thing more.”
He waited.
“You wouldn’t have any other suspicious deaths that you’ve been keeping to yourselves, would you?”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I’ll be seeing you around.”
7
Two flights down, the door opened into a dark room. It wasn’t locked, or at least not very. This lock was cheaper than the one on the morgue, so it gave way after a little twist and a nudge. I stepped inside; the entryway was dark, and so was the hall, but at the end there was a faint light and the sound of music. I walked toward the music, feeling my way along the walls. A flashlight would have been good; mine was in the back of my desk drawer, with only one battery. There were none in the Ministry storeroom, and the supply clerk said none would show up until next year. He always said this with some satisfaction, as if informing us what we couldn’t have was part of his job description.
The room at the end of the hall turned out to be a drinking club, with high stools along the bar, and on the back wall a long mirror and rows of classy bottles of champagne and whiskey and expensive-looking glasses. Against the other walls were tables, some of them surrounded by velvet curtains, the rest just empty. I sat on a stool and looked down the bar. The music got a little louder, by degrees. Not like anything they played in the karaoke bars for the foreigners; it sounded deeper, maybe African. This was a bad idea, following up. It broke all of my rules about staying out of swamps. But the stocking with the monograms made me curious. I pretty much kept away from these clubs. Some inspectors liked to keep close track of the ones in their sectors. They said it was important to follow the activity; it was also a good way to get free drinks. I was more inclined to noodle restaurants, but the girls in the noodle restaurants didn’t wear monogrammed stockings, I had to admit.
“We’re not open, but what’s that to you?” From somewhere behind the bar, a voice emerged.
“The door wasn’t exactly locked. I figured it meant you were serving.”
“This is a night place, friend. We don’t serve drinks until the sun goes down. You got business here, breaking in?”
I finally located the bartender in the dark, a short man with no neck wearing a black shirt. He had a broom, but he wasn’t sweeping.
“What’s that music?” I always start with an easy question.
“It’s from the Caribbean somewhere. Any creep would recognize it. You didn’t come to listen to records, that’s for sure, and you have no cause to break into an honest establishment.” He had a funny, high voice.
“We’ll see about honest. Where’s your license? It’s supposed to be on the wall where I can see it.” I looked around for the pictures that should have been there, two of them, father and son looking down. “You also are missing some fine portraits.”
“Careful, Inspector, don’t get carried away.” Another voice from behind me, a polished voice, probably coming from a tailored cotton suit, or a herringbone sports coat and trousers with a sharp crease. I turned around slowly. None of the tables had been occupied when I came in. Now the one closest to the end had a man sitting with his back to me. He was facing a mirror that was attached to a door, maybe an office behind it. From the reflection, I knew he was smiling—his teeth were shining—but I couldn’t see his coat.
“The license must have been lost in the mail, Inspector. I arranged for it myself, went over to Changkwang the other day to make sure. They said the piece of paper was on the way. But you know, they always say that.”
The central party offices are on Changkwang Street. Heavyweight; not everyone can get past the guards. This man could do it, if anyone could. He had something unusual, a golden aura of self-confidence that surrounded him. It went beyond his trying to impress me, talking as if he went to Changkwang Street just to blow his nose. That part was just an act, I felt sure. Humble he wasn’t, but there was something judicious about him, as if he knew how far to play out his leash, a little at a time. “The mail doesn’t concern me,” I said. “My concern is making sure people follow the law, keep our city a nice place to live and a good place for foreigners to visit, so they make friends with the locals and spend money.”
“Well, what do you know, that’s exactly my concern, too, Inspector. You are an inspector, aren’t you? I hope they wouldn’t send someone of lesser rank to shake me down.” He gave a low chuckle, the way people who find themselves amusing sometimes do, though I had the feeling even that was part of his act. “Foreigners come in here to get away from politics, you understand?” He looked around the walls as if to indicate all was in order. “What’s important is not what we show but what’s in our hearts, am I right? It makes the foreigners feel more comfortable if there aren’t too many symbols around, staring them in the face. Foreigners don’t like politics. They like the music, they like the drinks and the atmosphere, they like the company. They love the company. They really love the company. And so they spend money. I make a profit, I pay my fees, I look after my friends, and they look after me. No fuss, no muss. You understand, Inspector, no fuss, no muss. We really are closed; I must ask you to leave.”
“I’d like to, but I can’t.”
The bartender started sliding toward the far end of the bar. I reached over, grabbed his wrist, and gave it a twist, hard, so he yelped in pain and dropped the broom. “Stand still, friend. I don’t like people slipping away while I’m talking.”
The man at the table got up and turned around. For a couple of seconds the crazy thought went through my mind that he might have a gun, but he only pulled a wallet from his jacket. The jacket fit him like a glove, made his shoulders look big and his chest full. The jacket was a brown herringbone; his trousers were a darker brown, the crease was so sharp he probably used it to open his mail. “Here, Inspector.” He was holding several big bills, euros. “This is for you. Just a token of my appreciation for your coming down here to see if everything was alright. You’re right, we do need a new lock. I’ll see to it. Come back tonight. The drinks will be on me, and the company will be, too.” He looked at my shirt and grinned. “Like I said, it’s what’s in our hearts that counts.”
&nb
sp; “Kind of you”—I nodded at the bills in his hand—“but not today. You could do me a favor, though.” I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the silk stocking. “Would this belong to your club? It has monograms on it, CB, even one along the top edge, very sexy; not where anyone would normally look.”
“Not normally, Inspector. But it happens. People sometimes look in funny places.” He took the stocking and held it gently in the air.
“Yours?” I asked.
“I’m partial to socks, but who knows what the girls wear, or where they leave their clothing once they walk out of here in the dark of the morning. This is torn pretty bad.” He looked at the blood and then at me, a careful look, very measured, as if he were considering how much of his leash he had left. “CB, that could be us, Club Blue.” He smiled at me and handed back the stocking. “I don’t want to have to make a phone call, Inspector. Please leave.”
I looked around the room. “Nice place. Wouldn’t be so nice if it were covered with broken glass. There are some Chinese boys on Yanggak Island who love to break glass, for fun.”
As the bartender turned to look at the champagne bottles and the expensive glasses, I saw he had a long scar down the left side of his face, a scar from a knife or maybe a broken bottle. Most of the bartenders in these drinking clubs are pretty boys, white jackets on pinched waists, high cheeks and soft hands. This one was ugly. Ugly isn’t always mean, but in this case, I had a feeling it was.
“I’ll be back after I’m off duty, to collect on that drink. No doubt that license will have arrived and be on the wall by then.”
The man in the herringbone jacket nodded slightly to the bartender before he smiled at me, though it wasn’t the sort of smile that leads to long friendships. “We’ll look forward to that, Inspector.”
8
As long as I was out and about, enjoying the spring air, there was no harm going to the bank. For one thing, it would give me ammunition to use when Min complained I wasn’t doing anything. “Been to the bank,” I could say, giving him a level gaze. “This is category three, Min. Why don’t we cut it loose? Let SSD kill themselves over it.” Then I’d nod, gravely if the moment seemed right.
The bank was in a three-story building with a gold star on a signboard. There was nothing else to show it was a bank; the guard post at the base of the uneven steps leading up to the entrance was empty. The front windows on the first floor had been bricked up, except for slits along the top to let in some light. The original door had been replaced with something a little sturdier, metal with designs to make it look like a brass gate in a palace. There was even a fake iron grate in front of it. A bright metal plate surrounded the double locks, and the handle felt solid. Inside, the place was dark and musty. The light slits on the front wall were stingy, and the overhead fixtures were short on bulbs. The floor was carpeted, something flowered under the dirt; off to the side a series of desks sat behind a low wooden railing. Along the back wall was a counter with three teller windows. One of them was broken and had a piece of plywood filling the gap; the other two were shut. The plywood caught my attention, and I started over to look at it more closely.
“Can we help you? Would you like to open an account?” At a desk off by itself, in the corner, a middle-aged woman in a pale yellow dress looked at me. She brushed a wisp of hair from her face and stood up. I took my ID from my pocket. “I’m from the Ministry of Public Security. We have some questions for you, or maybe your manager.”
The woman leaned back against the desk. “I thought you had changed your name to People’s Security. Or are you still Public?”
I looked quickly at my ID. “People’s, Public, it doesn’t concern you.”
“Questions from police of all descriptions belong behind there, in the offices. We don’t want to scare the customers, especially the foreigners.”
There was no one else in the room, so I assumed she was speaking metaphorically. “Were you here the other day, during the robbery?”
She walked over to me, on high heels that accentuated her height. She was tall and slender, maybe younger than I first thought. “I told you, we don’t want to scare the customers, or don’t you get it?”
There was nothing wispy or slender about her manner. She was rude like a hammer before it comes down on a nail. “The office is in the back. If you want to talk, that’s where it’s done. Out here, we do business. Okay with you?”
“Fine,” I said. I pointed to the windows along the back. “That plywood in the teller window is a nice touch, gives an impersonal place like this a more natural feel. Where’d you get it? Plywood isn’t easy to find.”
She looked at me in disbelief, then shook her head. “How the hell should I know? It isn’t part of the decorating scheme. The window broke, and the janitor put it up.”
“So, you do answer questions out here. There aren’t any customers. There isn’t even a guard out front. Isn’t he posted all the time?”
“We didn’t have enough operating capital to pay him. Everyone told us it was safe in this city, anyway, so we let him go.”
“He was a private guard?” I never heard of such a thing.
“No, he was from one of your security departments, I don’t remember which one. But the agreement was we were to pay his salary. They insisted that they weren’t going to spend their budget for a guard to look after our money. Can you believe it?”
“When did he leave?”
“About ten days ago.” She watched me steadily. “Yes, that is just before the robbery. We don’t think there is any connection.”
“Good, always good when the victim analyzes the situation. That saves us a lot of time. How about you lock the front door and sit over there with me while we review what went on. By the way”—I looked down at her legs—“you don’t wear silk stockings, do you?”
“I can’t lock the front door during business hours, it’s against bank regulations. And if you start harassing me I’ll file a complaint that will dump you in a pig farm so far away you’ll have to check a map each time you take a crap.” She paused and brushed the hair out of her eyes again. “I need to see your ID up close. You can’t just come in here and flash a piece of cardboard across the room.” A lock clicked on the back door, the one she said led to the offices. Suddenly, the whole city was nothing but locks.
“What a shame.” I shook my head. “Don’t tell me, everyone just went out to lunch and I should come back later.” At some point, I’d want to get into that room, if for no other reason than they didn’t want me to see it. Though she had said if I wanted to talk about the robbery, I should go back there. And then they had locked it. If there had ever been anything of interest in there, it must be gone, but maybe not everything. There was no reason to push my way in just now; I’d only end up looking around at blank walls and a swept floor. I couldn’t do a thorough search by myself. Better to wait; maybe someone would put something back, get careless, if they thought the coast was clear.
“Wrong, not later, never. The bank has an internal investigation under way. We don’t need you, and we don’t need your ministry nosing around.” I may not have been listening closely. She had a face that was unusually pretty. Her skin was the color of copper, her cheekbones were high, and I realized she spoke with a slight accent. “There are ways of making that point stick, if you choose not to pay attention to me. Do I make myself clear, Inspector”—she looked again at my ID—“O, is it?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You get high marks for clarity. If I could go out that door and not come back, it would be fine with me. But that’s not possible. I have my orders, and until I get new ones, you are on my list.” I took a scrap of paper from my shirt pocket and held it up. “You’ll find I’m persistent. Polite, mostly, but persistent. I don’t know your name, by the way.”
“You don’t need to know it, but if you must, it’s Chon. Good day, Inspector.” She stood in a solid enough way, more solid than you’d think someone with her waist could stand. In the howli
ng wind of a winter storm she might sway, but not here. I hadn’t eaten since early morning, and it was a good time to find a bowl of noodles. I nodded, looked at the plywood again, and went back outside into the sunshine.
Chapter Two
So far, anyone looking casually at the whole thing would say there was nothing interesting about the case itself, other than that it was the first bank robbery we had ever had in Pyongyang, perhaps in the whole country. Maybe there’d been one over on the east coast, or maybe up in the special zone with the casinos, and they hadn’t told us. But I doubted it. I also wasn’t looking casually. Admittedly, there were interesting angles to it. The stockings were interesting. The lady with the waist was interesting. The real problem was that even at this early stage, I knew, knew absolutely, beyond any doubt, that somebody didn’t want the case solved. There wasn’t anything big or obvious I could point to, just little warning flags. Over time I’d learned that the size of the flags was not important, the real question was the number. Already there had been plenty, and they had STAY AWAY written all over.
I knew it. I had a feeling Min knew it. But there was a certain dance we had to perform first. Until Min actually ordered me off, formally, I had to keep following footprints leading nowhere. At least I had to hope they led nowhere. If by accident I stumbled on a real clue, it would be nothing but trouble. Looking into the stockings seemed safe enough for the moment.
Min was staring out his window when I climbed the stairs and knocked on his door after lunch. He didn’t turn around, but from the way his back was tensed, you had the sense he didn’t feel he was on solid ground and he didn’t know when he’d find some again soon. There were only two reasons Min stared out his window like this, looking at trees he did not like. Either he was deeply worried, or he was miffed.
“You took the office car.” His voice sounded miffed, but his back told me he was worried. “You know perfectly well you are supposed to use the duty car. It may not be quite so pretty, but that’s what you’re assigned, it’s on our books for daily use, and more to the point, it has the plates you need to get around. No one has driven it in weeks. What if the battery goes dead? I know, I know, following the rules is sometimes difficult, irksome.” I could see his reflection in the window; his lips moved slightly as he groped for another word. “Burdensome. I hope we’re not putting too much stress on you, Inspector. If we are, please note it in the daily log—the same log that doesn’t even have an entry in it for your using the car, either car. Maybe we can find a more tranquil place, out in the countryside. Working in a rice field, they say, is quiet.”
