by James Church
“They’ve been around before, and the last time they did a lot of damage.”
“It’s probably nothing.”
“It’s not nothing! It’s something. This isn’t the normal drunken shuffle.” Anxiety was in the rearview mirror, and we were heading toward hysteria.
“I’ll be there.”
5
The two men at the next table were loud, laughing at jokes that were not funny. Even they didn’t think they were funny, but they were drinking and getting into the mood where every third word gets a laugh, no matter what it is. One of them belched, they both laughed. It didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary to me. I got up to leave, but Miss Pyon came up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder. “Stay, Inspector. Things are already calmer, believe me.”
“Actually, I don’t think you have much to worry about.” I nodded at the two men. “Who are they?”
“I don’t know. They don’t come here regular, and I’m not looking for them to start. That bad, I don’t need the money. The short one is a pig, and if he grabs for me one more time, I’ll cut off his—”
“Never mind that. I’ll just sit awhile. How about noodles and some tea, if it’s not too late.”
“Late? We stay open past midnight. And if we need more noodles, we send the boy down.”
“Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know where the noodles come from. It will spoil the mystery. All these years I imagined they sprang from somewhere magical.”
The men at the next table started laughing again, until the taller one had a coughing fit and knocked his glass off the table. “Hey, girlie, get us another, and one for your friend, too.” The short one pointed at me in a way that told me he was not drunk, not even close.
I pushed back my chair and moved to their table. “Wonderful, this restaurant. Stays open late, you know that?”
The one who had been coughing looked up at me with angry eyes. “Go away. No one likes you. Your type is a cloud covering the sun, there’s always one of you around.”
He struggled to his feet, but his friend grabbed his arm. “No clouds but it rains, eh, Kim? Let it go. Sit down, let’s have another drink.” Kim took a sip, sat back with an expression of surprise on his face, then fell off his chair. I knew he was dead before he hit the ground.
The other customers looked startled at the sound. A few put down their chopsticks right away and drifted out; the rest waited a moment longer before deciding not to stay. None of them said a word. They moved quietly across the room, not even glancing at the body on the floor. When they had all left, I searched my pockets, looking for my mobile. It was in the backseat of the car. I turned to Miss Pyon. “You must have a phone in this place, you called me.”
“Not up here.” She was staring at the body. “It’s on the ground level. We only use it sometimes.”
“Time to use it.” I spoke carefully, because she looked like she was getting hysterical, and when women like her get that way, they freeze up, or they start screaming. “Why don’t you walk down the stairs one at a time, no need to run, find the phone, and dial this number.” I handed her a card that had my office number on it. “Tell whoever answers that Inspector O needs a couple of friends to visit him. They know where I am. Can you do that for me?” I smiled a slow, comfortable smile, but it was too late. She was already screaming.
6
The two duty officers that night were Sad Man and Little Li. They were on duty most nights. No one else wanted the night shift, and they both hated working days. The Sad Man’s real name was Yang Tu Man. He had lost his family in a fire nearly ten years ago, two sons, his father, and his wife. The flames didn’t do much damage, but the smoke was toxic. For a long time afterward, he didn’t speak to anyone; he didn’t even show up at work for several months. Eventually, he started coming in nights so he wouldn’t have to deal with other people. Mostly, he worked on the files. After a while, they told him he’d have to answer the phone, too, but not to worry because no one who called at that hour was looking for conversation. When the phone rang, Yang would listen, then say, “Yeah, yeah. Okay.” And hang up. The central personnel section recommended transferring him out into the countryside, somewhere he could be alone. But when his case came up for review, the recommendation was reversed, no one could figure out why. So he stayed in the capital, in the same apartment where his family died. Some of his neighbors washed down the walls, but the place smelled of smoke for a long time.
Little Li—his name was Li Po Jin—was tall, maybe the tallest man in the Ministry, with a long face and a big chin. The Ministry’s construction sections tried every way they could short of kidnapping to get him into one of their battalions. He laughed at them. “My mother didn’t raise me to build dams,” he’d say whenever they called, and then he’d wander out to Personnel to make sure that no request for his transfer ever made it to the right desk.
Li and Yang got along better than any two people I knew. Whenever someone told the Sad Man to cheer up, Li would say, “Aw, let him alone, would you?” He’d put his big hand on the Sad Man’s shoulder. “How about a beer or something? Now’s the time.” And he’d bend down slightly to look into the Sad Man’s face.
The Sad Man had a good sense of a place as soon as he walked into a room. He picked up little clues that most people overlooked, things that were there and things that should have been but weren’t. Once when I asked him how he did it, he shrugged his shoulders and stared at me with melancholy eyes. “Being sad means you see the world as it is.”
Other than routing paper, Little Li wasn’t gifted in any way. Despite his height, he added nothing to the Ministry’s basketball team, which rarely won a game in the interagency tournaments. He was a mediocre inspector; his best point was his bulk. He wasn’t actually strong, but he looked like he could pick up a truck, and that was enough to keep most people from getting ideas about running away when I needed them to stay put. The two of them—Yang and Li—weren’t much good during normal working hours. Li had headaches in the sunshine, and Yang slipped into unbearable melancholy whenever he was in a room with more than three people. He couldn’t question suspects, even at night. They complained it was too depressing to be with him, and they clammed up.
Yang stood at the entrance looking into the dining room. His eyes swept over the tables, then he walked over to the body on the floor. “What’s with him?” He gave me a gloomy look.
“Dead,” I replied. “You here to help or to ask moronic questions?”
“Aw, leave him alone.” Little Li stepped beside me, frowning. “This one giving you trouble?” He pointed toward the short man still at the table, who was picking his teeth in a mean way. He had on a dirty red shirt with no collar, like a Russian waiter in a cheap restaurant. Li looked down at him. “Name.”
The short man examined the toothpick, then put it back in his mouth. “You plan to stand around jib-jabbing all night? I got places to be, people to meet.” He pointed at the body. “I think he had a heart attack or something. Damned shame, but what can you do?” He pushed back his chair and started to get up.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I said. “Be friends with the chair, and the chair will be friends with you. Make a mental note to sit still while we get some answers. In other words, relax.”
Little Li smiled. I could see him mouthing the phrase to himself, “Be friends with the chair.” Yang knelt by the body and started going through the pockets. He pulled a wallet from the jacket, a thick brown wallet filled with euro notes. “Hey, O.” He looked up at me. The man really did have awfully sad eyes. They made me think of cold, dark afternoons in November. Rainy afternoons, with the wind just starting to come down the street and nowhere to be but alone. “This guy was rich. Only I don’t think he’d been rich very long.”
“I’m listening.” I pulled the toothpick from the mouth of the man in red. “Show a little respect, pal. Your friend there just keeled over, picking your teeth is not polite.” I broke the toothpick in two and handed the
pieces back to him. Little Li laughed.
“The bills are in perfect order, all facing the right direction, smaller ones in front, larger denominations in back.” Yang held up a wad of bills. “No one keeps money in a wallet in that sort of order. Maybe in a money clip, not a wallet.”
The man in red craned his neck to look at the bills in Yang’s hand. His face flushed before he turned to Little Li. “How about you and me go out for some fresh air, Inspector? It’s unhealthy in here, bodies on the floor and all. Anyway, the bathroom is on the first floor, and I got the urge.”
Li looked at me, then at Yang. “You okay?” he asked. Yang nodded.
“Go on, and put in a call for a wagon to take this body out of here while you’re downstairs.” I turned to Yang. “Here, give me the wallet.”
Yang looked at it intently; the sadness left his eyes for a moment but then returned. “All yours, O.”
The man at the table nudged Li. “You’ll never see that money again. He’ll take it all for hisself.”
Li put his big hand on the back of the man’s neck and lifted him out of his chair. “That was your money, was it, in your friend’s pocket?” The man gasped for breath until Li put him down and loosened his grip. “I still don’t know your name. Say, you’re breathing funny, you have asthma or something that interferes with your airways?” Li clapped his hand on the man’s shoulder, so he sagged slightly. “You want to walk by yourself, or you want me to carry you downstairs like a rabbit?”
“Don’t strangle him here,” I said to Li. “Wait till you get him back to the office.”
Yang scrambled to his feet. “You still need me?”
“Stay until the body gets moved, will you? Maybe we can talk a little.” I nodded to Li, and he took the man by the arm. I could hear him going down the stairs, saying, “Careful, stairs are bad for people with asthma.”
Yang pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and picked up the glass the man on the floor had held before he tumbled off his chair. He sniffed it. “We should take this in. Doesn’t smell like anything but soju, but you never know.” He turned to Miss Pyon, who was leaning against the wall, still pale, and then looked at me.
“She didn’t do anything,” I said.
“If you say so. I wasn’t here.” Yang looked down at the body.
“But something happened to him,” I said, “and it wasn’t his heart.”
Chapter Three
It was his heart.” The pathologist took off her gloves and her mask. I kept my mask on until we walked into the better air of her office and closed the door to the autopsy room. “It was diseased. Could have occurred at any moment. Could have gone when he was crossing the street, when he was making love, when he was sitting in a chair watching TV. He happened to be in a restaurant drinking, that’s all.”
I couldn’t believe that someone sitting next to the character with the red shirt just fell over dead. “You’re sure nothing pushed it over the edge?”
“Like what, Inspector?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. Don’t speculate, it’s a sign of insecurity. We can wait for the reports on what was in his blood and his stomach, but I don’t think they’ll tell us anything. Anyway, it might be a month before we see them. The testing laboratory is very low on chemicals, and their equipment has been sent out for repair. According to his identification, he was thirty-five. I’d say he lived five years beyond his appointed day, that’s all. Just a matter of time.”
“What about the body that was brought in here the other day, the one hit by the bus, was that also a matter of time?”
“Tell me, Inspector, did you see any other bodies in there? The one you just brought with you is all I have. I’ve got vacancies, if you’re interested.”
“I asked you a question.”
“You got an answer.” The pathologist dropped the gloves on her desk. “I use these a week at a time. They’re only meant to be used once, then thrown away. If I wear them again, they contaminate the evidence. If I throw them away, I won’t have enough to last the month.”
I looked at the mask in my hand. The pathologist laughed. “I opened a new one for you, but the next person here gets a dose of whatever you are carrying around.”
“When you receive the reports on the blood and stomach, even if they’re delayed, let me know. You have my number. Maybe it’s simple, like you said, his heart just gave out, but if there is anything in his system out of the ordinary, call me.”
“I will.”
“Unless you get another set of orders with red numbers.” I looked around the office. “I need to see your file with those orders.”
She stiffened. “I don’t give the orders, Inspector, I follow them. And you don’t have authorization to see that file. You know you don’t, so why did you even ask?”
I smiled. “It never hurts to try.”
She opened the desk drawer and held something out for me. “I can’t give you those orders, but this business card was inside his jacket, in the lining, actually. You can have it. Strange, wouldn’t you say? It’s from somewhere called Club Blue. Mean anything?”
“It might. You always check the lining?” I put the card in my pocket and then stuffed the mask in as well.
“No, but there was a hole in his pocket and it slipped through. There was also a piece of gum.”
“I’ll just keep the mask with me in case I have to come back.”
“Welcome anytime, Inspector, anytime at all.” She sat down at her desk. “You know the way out.”
2
“Where’s that wallet full of money?” Min dropped the normal “where have you been” when I walked in the next morning. I could tell he was angry. There was nothing on his face, and barely anything different in his voice, but he rarely went straight to the point.
“It’s safe and sound, don’t worry.” Trouble this early in the day wasn’t good. We should have gotten rid of the bank robbery case by now, but it was still hanging around my neck.
“I want it on my desk, immediately.”
“Can’t, I don’t have it on me. It’s at home.”
“In your apartment house, the one with no locks on the doors?”
“What’s the problem? No one goes into anyone else’s apartment. We have a code of honor.”
“A code of honor, in an apartment house filled with people who don’t have a pot to pee in? Why do you insist on living in that place? We could get you into somewhere nice, nicer than that, anyway.”
“It’s home, I like it.” Where I lived was my business. Min knew better than to tangle with me on that.
“Fine, that’s your affair, though it keeps triggering questions in the quarterly reviews. Somebody in the Ministry has started voicing suspicions that it isn’t normal for you to refuse multiple offers for a better place with more room. They think it must be a ruse.”
“Pardon me, but bullshit. What am I going to do with more room? Anyway, they’re good people in those apartments, no pretensions.”
“I know you are fond of the idea of the perfectibility of mankind, Inspector, but not at the expense of the Ministry’s procedures, please. How do you even hold on to such a notion? Every day we have examples right in front of our eyes telling us it isn’t true.”
“I don’t believe such a thing. I never said I did.”
“You don’t believe in the perfectibility of man?”
“Careful.”
“We’re not talking about me, Inspector, we’re talking about you. What I believe, I keep to myself.”
“So do I.”
“Ah, how I wish that were so. Do you know how much trouble I have every month, juggling the figures so it doesn’t come out that we are the office with the lowest arrest rate in the city?”
“We happen to work in a refined part of town, is all.”
“So, now you are suggesting that crime has a socioeconomic dimension, and that poorer people are more prone to crime than those who are better off?”
&nb
sp; I laughed. “Rich people just commit different sorts of crimes. I see it every day at the markets.”
Min shook his head. “That’s not what we are discussing at the moment. We are dealing with something more philosophical than the price of shoes. We are discussing your view of mankind. Tell me, do you believe that man is already perfect? That there is no need for, shall we say, the gentle guidance of our leaders, who know, shall we say, the truth?”
Min’s mastery of the ironic was suddenly a little thin. “This conversation is going to get one of us in trouble,” I said.
“No, it won’t. I’m certainly not going to remember it five minutes from now. But you have my interest piqued. As long as we are on the subject, why are our arrest figures so low?”
“People make mistakes; they are not always crimes.”
“That isn’t for us to judge.”
“Not in a formal sense, no. But you’ll admit there is a difference.”
“I admit nothing, Inspector. You haven’t answered me. Do you believe man is already perfect?”
“What difference does it make what I think about mankind?”
“You are squirming like a fish on a hook. You have a guilty look in your eye. I’ve caught you, haven’t I? You basically think people are good, that they might commit bad acts, mistakes as you put it, but if we were to tote everything up, take the sum total of their lives, on balance mankind is more good than bad. How could I have landed the only policeman on the continent, maybe even on the planet, who believes such a fantasy?”
Neither of us said anything. I looked out at the gingko trees. Min examined his nails.
Finally, he cleared his throat. “You realize, Inspector, by extension, if you believe humans are perfect, you are saying the same about yourself. That’s what the lady with the grating voice will conclude, before she pronounces sentence on us, and trust me, it will be both of us. I’m your supervisor; if your thoughts have gone astray, they’ll say it was because I didn’t give you proper oversight.”
“I haven’t said anything, Min. You’ve been doing all the talking, and all the inferring, and all the surmising.”
