by James Church
“The janitor wouldn’t help?”
“He said it was covering a switch plate in the floor and I should leave it be.”
“The janitor said that? I assume he was already at the bank, too, like the furniture. You didn’t hire him?”
“No, I hired a few staff, a couple of girls as tellers and an accountant part-time, but the janitor and the cleaners were assigned by some other office.”
“They probably work for SSD. The Ministry used to have control of locals working for foreign businessmen, but we don’t have the budget for that anymore. The only office with that sort of money is SSD. They are especially keen on watching the banks and hotels. Their off-book funds probably make up ten percent of your assets.”
“You think they have the desk.”
I shrugged. “Don’t know. It may have had equipment in it, maybe recorders. They’d want to know who was coming in for loans, how much you offered, whether you were cutting any deals that weren’t reported. If you were, they could use it for—”
“I’m not worried, Inspector, nothing of the sort went on.”
“That’s good, because someone robbed the bank. Maybe SSD figures the robbers came in earlier and looked around, sat with you for a bit, asked a few questions. Maybe they figure you are part of the robbery; you knew how much foreign currency was in the safe. Tell me, just for the hell of it, why did you sound so upset when you called tonight? I still don’t know. It wasn’t anything to do with the desk.”
“What do you think?”
“Have you ever been to the Club Blue?”
“No, that’s the sort of place the German hogs wallow in.”
“So, you know where it is?”
“Of course I do. The owner had an account at the bank.”
“Did he borrow some money?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss bank business.”
“I think you are, but we’ll let it pass for now. Do all your customers have access to that back room after hours?”
She leaned close to me. “You seem like a nice man, Inspector. A little lonely, maybe. You don’t have anything in your apartment you want to show me?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Etchings, maybe.”
I stared at her. I was about to fall into her eyes. “Etchings? I don’t know what you mean.”
She sat back. “Will there be anything else?”
“I think I haven’t eaten in a while.”
“Then maybe you should order.” She stood up and said something to the two Germans. This time they both winced. Then, without giving me a second glance, she walked out of the room. Several tables of foreign businessmen raised their glasses and smirked; whether it was for Jurgen or for me, I wasn’t sure.
3
Han phoned early the next morning. “I found a few files on the lady.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “Sourced to the janitor?” The monitoring machines at SSD always click in a funny way when the call starts, so everyone knows it’s them even before they say anything. There had been no click before Han had spoken. He wasn’t on a mobile phone; the connection was too good.
“The what?”
“The janitor. I assume he’s one of yours. I assume the desk was, too.”
“The file says she’s from Kazakhstan.” He waited, but I didn’t respond. “Well, that’s pretty interesting, Inspector. Especially because she has a Scottish passport.”
I perked up. “Scotland doesn’t issue passports, Han. Scotland isn’t a country.”
“Says who?”
“She was married to a Scot with big shoulders, but he died. It happens.”
“How do you know so much all of a sudden? You told me people like her don’t have files.”
“How many pieces of paper are in this file you are holding?”
“I haven’t counted.”
“One, right? You can count that high.”
Silence.
“All you’ve got is the cover sheet, last name, nationality, age, and residence. That’s not a file. They’re holding back on you, Han, there’s more. The janitor was reporting something to someone in your organization, and you don’t have it. Go look. Call me back. While you’re at it, look to see what you’ve got on the manager of the Club Blue. And don’t forget, you promised to tell me how to fix my cell phone.”
“It’s easy.”
“Yeah, good. Then it won’t take long.” I hung up. A minute later the phone rang again.
“I’m sorry I left you so abruptly last night, Inspector, but a woman had just come in.” I never expected to hear an apology from Miss Chon. It had a nice ring, but it didn’t come close to her laughter. “She’s been following me for weeks. She was at the bank party the other day, pretending to be one of the hostesses. Do you know her?”
“No.” There was no response, so I dug myself in deeper. “I don’t know her, but she thought she knew me. It turned out she didn’t.”
This time there was a slight pause, just enough to tell me the denial was a mistake, which I knew it would be. When she spoke, though, her voice didn’t have any suspicion in it, as if she weren’t surprised at what I’d said. “Have you thought about what I told you last night, Inspector?”
“People tell me things all the time. What did you say to Jurgen when you walked out to make his eyes tear up?”
“It was Dieter, and it wasn’t polite.”
“I think he likes you. He smacked his lips after you left.”
“How much do you know about him?”
“Nothing. He’s never done anything to get my attention. Han’s people may have something on him, but I doubt if we do.”
“You might want to check. Oh, and the desk is back, Inspector. The drawers are empty, but it is still heavy. The janitor said he wanted to put wheels on the legs so I could move it around.”
“Very thoughtful. I’ll be over after lunch. Someone has the office car. As soon as it’s back, I’ll knock on your door.”
“Don’t be long, Inspector. I don’t like to wait for men.” She hung up before I could reply.
Miss Chon, I thought to myself, you are going to get one of us in trouble. Then I wondered how much a couple of etchings would cost. Maybe Logonov would know, if he hadn’t already left.
Min walked in with a couple of thin files. “How we got these, you are not to ask. We got them, that’s enough.” He put them on my desk and stood back. “All for you. Don’t say I never did anything for you.”
I opened the first one. It was an Interpol file, background on international bank robbery rings.
“Since when do we have access to Interpol?”
“Never mind. Read through it and tell me if you want more.”
The original was in French, but there were flimsy sheets of Korean attached to each one. The translation seemed rough, but good enough to give me the flavor. It was mostly junk, all about people boring into vaults from adjoining sewer systems. “Fascinating, but not what we need.” There weren’t any sewers strong enough or big enough in Pyongyang for that sort of operation, not in my sector, anyway. The city’s plumbing had been put in hurriedly after the war; anyone trying to stand up in one of the sewers would put his foot through the bottom. And he couldn’t stand up unless he was very short, someone like the ugly bartender.
As my eyes danced down the page, I noticed a section on Kazakh gangs. I tore out the paper and put it in my pocket. “Don’t worry,” I said to Min, “I’ll never say you didn’t do anything for me.”
“Hey! You can’t tear anything out of that file. It isn’t ours. It has to go back where I got it.”
“Oops.”
Min scowled, not an expression he had mastered. “If we can’t show some progress by tomorrow morning, I’ll have to go to a lot of meetings and answer a lot of questions. You never go to those meetings. You don’t realize how aggravating they are.”
“Who knows about the Germans in town?”
“Am I supposed to be impressed with t
hat question, Inspector?”
“No. I was just wondering. We don’t have anything in our records. SSD might, but I don’t want to check with them; they’ll tromp around the bushes and scare the birds away.”
Min took a deep breath. “Names.” He held out his hand.
I wrote the names of the two Germans on a piece of paper and gave it to him. He scowled again, better this time. “These are only first names. I can’t search on first names.”
“Sure you can. There’s an entire section marked ‘last name unknown.’ Besides, there aren’t that many Germans in town.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Not sure, exactly. Just put the files under my pillow and let me sleep on them.”
Min shook his head. “No wonder I’m so cranky.”
A few minutes after he went back to his office, my phone rang. “Make yourself busy, Inspector. It will be tomorrow before there’s anything on these Germans.”
There was nothing else I wanted to do at my desk, so I went for a stroll. I found myself back at the restaurant where the well-connected go to eat. If the man with all the relatives and the knife in his back had been there more than once, Miss Pyon, the lady with the noodles, might know something about him, maybe overheard a little table conversation. Anyway, it was going on dinnertime.
The restaurant was nearly empty. Miss Pyon walked over to my table. She didn’t look happy to see me.
“You want something to eat?”
“Is this how you treat a regular customer?”
“You ain’t regular. You’ve only been here a few times, and the last time you didn’t keep things quiet. You also didn’t pay, if you recall. After you left, there was nothing but trouble for days. I kept thinking you’d come back and help straighten things out, but no.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“You know, the regular kind. Questions, warnings, threats, more questions, a table overturned to make the point.”
“It wasn’t my people.”
“Who cares, your people, their people, what the hell difference does it make? Why? Am I supposed to be grateful you had nothing to do with it?”
“Never mind. Look, if you have a problem, I can go somewhere else to eat.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. If you leave, then I guess you and me don’t have anything to talk about.”
I decided to stay. “Just bring out something that wasn’t here since yesterday.”
“You want a drink with that?”
“If you have a beer, that’s fine.”
“Of course we have beer. What kind of place you think this is? Don’t go away, Inspector, I’ll be right back.”
When she’d brought a bowl of noodles and the beer, she sat down at the table.
I looked at her closely. Her teeth were crooked; her eyes were puffy from fatigue. And if you were being honest, you’d have to admit she had a face like a horse. Real long. But there was something in the way she carried herself. It appealed to me. I relaxed. “Pretty friendly, Miss Pyon. Won’t you get in trouble, sitting with a customer?”
“This is mine, or did you forget? I sit with whoever I want, whenever I want.”
I smiled. She owned the place.
“And I decided to sit with you. That okay, Inspector?”
“Fine. It’s fine. I’m happy for company. You mind if I eat in front of you?”
“It’s a restaurant, people eat in front of me all night long.”
“Sometimes they fall off their chairs.”
She smiled a crooked smile. “Only happened once. I’m sorry I started screaming like that. But I was all tensed up. Whenever he and his friend came in, there was trouble. It was like they picked it as a meeting place; of all the noodle places in the city, they had to choose this one.” She shook her head. “Once they walked out without paying. I tried to report them, but I got my hands slapped, hard. They didn’t belong here, acted like they were too good for the place. They did more drinking than eating. And the crowd they brought in was too rough, foreign types, I don’t know.”
“If I had some questions, I’d ask them now.”
“You want another beer?”
“No. What do you mean by foreign types? Were they foreigners?”
“They were and they weren’t. They were Koreans, but funny, if you know what I mean. Might have been Koreans from China, but they didn’t have that know-it-all attitude. A couple of them spoke Russian, but they weren’t Russians.”
“Kazakhs.”
She shuffled the little dishes of vegetables around the table. “A good guess.”
“When were they here?”
“The foreigners came in twice. The first time was maybe a month ago, still dusty outside. All that grit in the noodles, even my regulars complained. Damned Chinese dust.”
I patted her hand, mostly to get her attention again. She sighed. “Those foreigners,” she said, “they drank too much. I told them not to come back. The last time was a week, maybe ten days before their friend fell dead off his chair. They sneered at me. One of them got too familiar, right here, in front of the customers. I told him if he did it again, I’d make sure he walked with a limp for the rest of his life.”
“What’d he say?”
“He laughed and said when I was mad it got him excited.”
I finished my noodles, picked up the bowl, and drank the soup. “Well, I guess that’s what happens when you live around so many sheep.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“Don’t worry, I don’t think they’ll bother you anymore.”
“Thanks for nothing.”
“They’ve left town. A couple of them have even left the planet.”
“Dead?”
“Maybe. What do you know about the man with the red shirt?” I didn’t want to get Miss Pyon hysterical again; she didn’t need to know the red shirt had a knife tear in the back.
She stood up and took the dirty dishes to the kitchen. As she disappeared in the back, two customers walked in, a man and a woman. They sat down at a table near the window on the front wall, looked at the menu, then got up and left just as Miss Pyon emerged from the kitchen. She watched them with a disapproving frown. “Why’d they come all the way up the stairs? The menu is posted on the front door. You say anything to scare them away?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe they recognized you.”
“In that case, they would have stayed. I don’t have any enemies.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “Everyone has enemies, Inspector.”
I smiled. “Sure, everyone has enemies. The man with the red shirt, did he have enemies?”
She sat down and looked at her hands. Her fingers were short, the nails broken. The thumb on her left hand sat at an odd angle. She saw me looking at it. “Bent back until it broke. The sound was sickening. It never healed. The doctor said they must have twisted it to make sure it wouldn’t set. It hurts sometimes, but only sometimes. One of these days, I’ll kill the bastard who did it.”
“Have you got any fruit?”
“You’re loaded with sympathy, aren’t you? Yeah, I have some apples, though they’re scrawny.”
“Never mind, I’ll get one some other time. You don’t want to talk about the man in the red shirt. Too bad. He seems to be a Mr. Big. Did he ever mention some drinking place called Club Blue?”
“I don’t monitor conversations, it’s not polite. I run a restaurant, Inspector; it gets busy sometimes.”
“Yeah. Sometimes. Don’t worry about the red shirt, he won’t be here anymore.” The imparted information hung between us for a moment, then floated away. She didn’t try to stop it. “Well, back to the office for me. What time do you get off work?”
“My, my, Inspector, I didn’t think you were interested.”
“I’m not. I just wanted to know how late I could get noodles.” Nobody mentioned the bill.
4
Yang was on the phone when I stuck my head in his office. It
was unusual; he didn’t talk much on the phone. I backed up and listened from out in the hall, but there was not much to hear. He said “yes” once or twice, “no” once, then banged down the receiver.
“Sorry, Yang, didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Nothing to interrupt, O.” He looked sick.
“Anything the matter?”
“No.” He paused, then said it again. “No.”
“I was wondering if you would do me a favor.”
“If I can.”
“What did you find out from that fellow you questioned the other night?”
“The red shirt? Very nasty, very assertive, very unhappy.”
“Who was he?”
“That I didn’t determine. He refused to give me his registration card, wouldn’t fill out any forms, threatened me with terrible punishment.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him his trousers were unzipped.”
“True?”
“No, but it sort of broke through his resistance. It’s hard to be adamant when you’re checking your fly. After that he calmed down a little. Still wouldn’t answer questions, though. I let him use the phone. Twenty minutes later, a big black car pulled up outside. Two toughs in long coats ran up the stairs into my office and told me they had jurisdiction.”
“And they were?”
Yang shrugged. “Didn’t matter. One of them had a pistol on his hip. I couldn’t keep the guy, anyway. He hadn’t done anything, remember?”
“We don’t know he had nothing to do with his dinner companion’s murder.”
“Murder, is it? I thought the doc said it was his heart.”
“Maybe.” I hadn’t shared the autopsy results with Yang, and I doubt if Min had. Yang wasn’t someone who rang up the morgue on a whim. I suppose the morgue might have called us late at night with some more information and he took the message, but I never got a message. Curious; maybe Yang did more than sit around in the quiet before dawn. Maybe he was coming out of his shell a little. “That’s all?”
“No, but there’s not much more. When they got downstairs, the two toughs shook hands with our nasty friend, then they all got in the car and drove away. The toughs in the front, him in the back. I got the license plate from the guard at the gate.”
