by James Church
I had no idea what he said, but I took the whiskey with my right hand and downed it in a gulp. It burned my throat; my ears went numb, then my cheeks, then, thankfully, my neck and shoulders and my arms above my elbows. If I could have curled up on the bed and slept, I would have, but even in my benumbed state, I realized that sleeping on the bed of a foreign police official would get me another session with the man in the brown suit. I stood up, with effort. “Let’s go,” I croaked, “downstairs.” I pointed in the direction of the door and walked out of the room. The floor-watcher had the good sense to keep out of sight, though I knew she was there, at the end of the hall around the corner, watching.
6
A Japanese businessman was on the stage, singing karaoke along with one of the bar girls, who was doing her best to look happy and attentive. The man was sweating; his voice wouldn’t have been quite so grating if he had been a little more sober. He couldn’t hit the high notes, but it was apparent that, in his state, he didn’t care.
Boswell watched the stage for a moment. “Make sure no one asks me to go up there and sing, Inspector. I only know songs that aren’t on your machine.”
“You never know. Ever heard of Willie Nelson? A Pakistani scientist did Willie Nelson one night. Everyone clapped.”
“Well, I don’t seek applause. But will you have a drink? We may as well get better acquainted, seeing that you’re stuck with me for the next few days.”
There was a tall, thin girl tending the bar. She said hello quietly and asked if we wanted anything. I shook my head, and she went back to writing in a notebook she had open on the counter, next to the bottles of liquor. She knew enough not to stare at Boswell.
“No, not stuck,” I said. “You’re a guest. What’s more, you’re here on a mission, apparently important to your government, and to mine. If I don’t make your visit comfortable or help it succeed, I will not have done either of us any good.” Just saying that made my shoulder start to throb.
“I’ll make you a deal.” Boswell leaned against the bar and looked around the room. The Japanese businessman had finished singing and stumbled to a table in the corner, where he sat alone, swaying gently from side to side. Otherwise, the place was deserted. “The deal is this. I won’t cause you trouble, and you help me get through this assignment without incident.”
“That’s it?”
“Too simple? You want me to add some complicating factors?”
“No, I like it just the way you said it. Alright, it’s a deal, let’s have a drink.”
I called the bar girl over. “How about some brandy?” I asked Boswell.
“Brandy is for French touts. We’ll have Scotch. And none of that Japanese stuff.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a flask. “This is real Scotch whiskey, tastes like Scotland on a wet spring evening. You’ll like it.” He switched to his odd Korean. “Give us two glasses, young woman, maybe three if you’d like a sip yourself.” He turned to me and was back to English. “No harm in that, is there, Inspector? She seems a fine fresh lass, as the other James Boswell would say.”
“Just a drop for her,” I said. “Her name is Miss Kwon, and she doesn’t drink much. To you, she may look like a kind and gentle maid, but she rules this bar with an iron hand. I wouldn’t underestimate her.” Miss Kwon smiled sweetly at me and brought the glasses.
“We had a man from Scotland here last year,” she said. “He sang in a sad voice, pretty but sad. The songs were all mournful. I tried to get him to sing something happy, but he wouldn’t, insisted he didn’t know any. We talked about it afterward, when he’d gone. The other girls said they never heard anything so depressing. On his last night here, he said he would come back soon, but we never saw him again.” She looked at Boswell for a moment. “Will you do the same, disappear forever?”
Boswell poured the liquor into her glass, then into mine, and finally into his own. “I don’t sing, and I can’t promise to return to your happy land.” He raised his glass and gave Miss Kwon his full attention; she held his gaze, and though he probably didn’t see it, I noticed a touch of defiance in her face. “But I’ll drink to your happiness,” he said, “and that of your loved ones, as well.”
Miss Kwon flushed, the defiance melted away, and she hesitated before she spoke. “Come back tomorrow night,” she said at last. “I’ll sing you a good song. Maybe you’ll want to join in.” She raised her glass. “To Scottish friends.”
They both turned to me. “To hell with sentiment,” I said. “The two of you are putting a damper on the evening, and we haven’t even started.” I picked up my glass the same way the man in the brown suit had done, made a flourish with it. “I’ll drink to our deal, and to songs with happy endings.”
“Let’s get comfortable, Inspector.” Boswell pointed to a dark corner, where there was a table by itself, as far away from the stage as possible. He turned to Miss Kwon. “Maybe we can encourage that Japanese chap not to sing anymore. Why doesn’t someone sit on his lap?”
Miss Kwon laughed. “Unless you want to be the one, we don’t do that sort of thing here, do we, Inspector?”
“Probably against the law, in both cases, whether it’s you or me,” I said, “though I’d have to check for sure which one is considered worse.”
We sat without talking very much for twenty minutes, or rather, I didn’t talk. Boswell went on at length about the history of Scotland. I was still sipping my first drink; Boswell was on his second. “Oh, yes.” His knees barely fit under the table, and whenever he shifted position, the table tipped. “We Scots have been everywhere, and if I may say so, everywhere we’ve been we’ve improved things.”
“A shame you didn’t make it here sooner.”
He pinned me with a glare, then softened his expression and bowed slightly. “From what I have seen so far, it would have done no good.”
“True, perhaps, but one never knows. We might have been apt pupils, once.”
“Oh, no, you misunderstand, Inspector. I don’t doubt that even this place could have used a good dose of Scottish influence.”
“You make it sound like the clap,” I said.
“What I mean is, the Chinese were here first, and if you got the clap, I should think you got it from the T’ung, or the Ling, or whatever they are.”
“T’ang. But not the T’ang. More likely it was delivered by the Khitan or Jurcen or some nameless barbarian tribe that favored rape and pillage. Of course Westerners don’t know it, but we had our own kingdoms, our own greatness before the Chinese. Now all we do is catch their dust. Hard to fathom what went wrong.” I looked around the dark room. “I’d say, when Scots still painted themselves blue, we already had a very civilized court life.”
“For the love of Mike, Scots never painted themselves blue. Picts, maybe, but not Scots.” He sighed and put down his glass. He peered into the flask, then shook it sorrowfully. “That’s the last of it. What will I do for the next two days?”
“You don’t have any more in your room?”
“I do not, and your little friends who are even now going through my bags won’t find any.”
“No one is going through your bags, Superintendent. And even if they did, if you had any extra Scotch, it would be quite safe.”
“I suppose all you have down here is that Japanese whiskey. I don’t favor it. It’s not real.”
“It’s expensive enough to be real.”
“You’ll never taste the peat in Japanese whiskey, Inspector. You know why?”
“I don’t.”
“Artificial. Imitation. Copied.”
“If we had anything in our glasses, we could drink to that.”
“Aye, but we can’t.”
“I have a question for you, Superintendent, if you don’t mind. What is a ‘cowering beastie’?”
He cocked his head and blinked slowly. “A what?”
“A ‘cowering beastie.’ I read it somewhere, a poem, seems to me it was Scottish. I can’t remember anything else, but those words stu
ck with me.”
Boswell sat in contemplation. “You are full of surprises, Inspector. It is from a poem by Robert Burns. How did you ever get hold of it? I wouldn’t think he made it into your required reading.”
“You’d be surprised what we read in our spare time, Boswell.” I waited to see how he would react to my using his name.
He showed no emotion. Then he waved to Miss Kwon. “Bring some of your best local whiskey over here, my fair, iron-fisted lass. The Inspector and I have some serious conversation ahead of us.” He sat back in his chair and, in a sonorous voice, recited:
“Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!”
I nodded. “So, what is it, this cowering, timorous beastie?”
“The title of the poem, Inspector.” He gave me an odd look. “ ‘To a Mouse.’”
“Ah, now I remember. Yes, a mouse. That’s why I paid so much attention to the poem in the first place. Why is it, Boswell, that people think mice are afraid, that they cower?”
“James. If we’re to discuss Robert Burns, call me James. Did you prepare for my visit? Tell me, Inspector, just as one cop to another. Did they give you books, background files to read up?”
“I didn’t know you were going to visit. You were a bolt from the blue. But we were speaking of mice. Why are they always portrayed as afraid?”
Boswell shrugged, wary. “Dunno. In my house, if you turn on the kitchen light and catch one at midnight, it scoots across the floor, nose twitching in terror. Perhaps you have a different species.”
“Mice are small, Superintendent.”
“How about if we use our names instead of titles? More friendly, like.”
“Small. Size is equated with cowardice; see something small, assume it is afraid.” The mountainous Scotsman looked at me thoughtfully, waiting for me to complete the thought. I did. “But they don’t correlate. We never make that mistake. I suggest you don’t, either.”
Boswell rose from his chair slowly, and when he was at his full height, he looked down on me. For a moment, I could tell he was weighing whether to pound me into the floor like a stake, to prove that size meant something after all. Then he exhaled mightily. “We’ll try this again tomorrow night, Inspector. You might do some more reading, if you’ve a mind.” He went over to the bar and whispered something to Miss Kwon, who was pouring our drinks, downed his in a gulp, then grimaced and walked out the door, singing a melancholy tune.
7
“I need to see a list of all UK passport holders in the country, and any Irishmen to boot.”
“I’m not sure I can do that.” Irishmen, he said. In the distance, I heard a warning flag snapping in the stiff spring wind.
“Inspector, you must have records you can access, shouldn’t take but half a second. In this of all countries, you must know where people are.”
“Of course.” I snapped my fingers, then looked around the office. “Funny, last time I did that, things appeared instantly.” The superintendent was sitting in my office, his long legs stretched to the edge of my desk. “Perhaps you don’t understand, James, my friend.” I kicked myself, hard. A sarcastic reference to Boswell as “my friend” would go down on a transcript as just that—“my friend.” I never knew a transcriber with an ear for humor. “ ‘Access’ is not a word that has any particular meaning to me. The records at the border are kept by the immigration section. They consist of scraps of paper that tend to tear or otherwise fall apart. The Foreign Ministry has records of visa applications, but these are kept separate, and are available only to the immigration people, who ask for them at the last minute, when they realize their own forms have gone missing or been trashed. The police, in whose offices you sit, have ‘access,’ as you put it, to exactly nothing. I couldn’t even squeeze out the license number of a bus the other day without a fight.”
“And did you get it?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“So you can’t get me a list of UK citizens in your country. Your government has no way of contacting them in an emergency.”
“Ah, that’s different. Pose a different issue, open different windows. If needed, we could ask the provincial police to help. People have to register with the local authorities. But that would take longer than you have, perhaps. Surely your embassy has its own records. It urges your citizens to keep in touch when they are here, am I right?”
“I don’t want the embassy to know I am doing this check. I don’t want anyone, other than you, Inspector, to know.”
“Wonderful, now I am conspiring with a British policeman against his own government. It might work.” I paused to consider, then shook my head. “No, too many angles. Anyhow, even if I did have a list, how would I justify giving you the names of Irish citizens, though I doubt there are any in my country. Ireland is a sovereign state, or am I wrong in my geography?” It was dancing with death to raise the subject of Ireland, I knew it. I opened my desk drawer and began feeling around for the Burmese rosewood, anything to tranquilize me.
“Inspector, we agreed that you would help me and I would help you.”
“So we did. But nowhere in our agreement was there anything about lists, or access to records. Let’s go at this another way. You don’t really care about all UK citizens. You have a particular few individuals in mind, though you would rather I not know who they are.”
The long legs shifted and the Scottish mouth set itself in a slight frown.
“Actually, I don’t care who you meet, James. Meet whoever you please, if you can find them and think you are invisible so that no one will see you doing it. Invite them all to your room for a drink and throw the phones in the toilet to be safe, if that is what you want to do. But I’m not going into any records. I have enough trouble getting access to them for my own cases; I can’t be doing it on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government.”
“How about Germans?”
Somehow, it wasn’t a surprise; he wanted the Germans, so of course he started out asking me about something else. “Who do you want to see, Dieter or Jurgen?”
The Scotsman leaned back and smiled. “I’ll be damned.”
“Never mind, you don’t have to tell me which. Both of them are staying in the Sosung Hotel, near the golf driving range. They sit on the balcony and drink the day away while they watch young women chase golf balls.” Ever since I put them on twenty-four-hour surveillance, they had done nothing, gone nowhere. Neither of them had a shirt with blood on it, either.
“You’ve met them?”
“In a manner of speaking.” There was someone else he wanted to see; I could tell from the way he sat, trying to frame the question so it would seem innocent. “Perhaps you need to go the bank?”
His eyes never flickered. “You are a son of a bitch, you know that?”
On the drive to the Gold Star Bank, Boswell seemed preoccupied. When I pulled over and parked under the big trees, he sat still for a moment before turning toward me. “I have a favor to ask, Inspector. Let me out here. You go back to your office. I know the way to the hotel, and I need some time to think. I’ll call you when I get back, in about an hour or two, you have my word. Then we can drive the route again; the shadows should be right by that time.”
“Shadows.” I shrugged and looked out my window. “Wrong shadows. Right shadows. I think you are obsessed with these shadows.” I turned to him. “I could wait out here, if money dealings embarrass you.”
“Thanks, but not necessary.” He spoke carefully and nodded toward the bank. “Let’s let it lie, shall we?”
“Be sure and count your change, that’s all I’ve got to say. And don’t get lost on the way back to the hotel, or I’ll have to explain how you happened to be on your own.” I watched him cross the street, just to make sure no buses suddenly appeared.
8
It wasn’t until the shadows were too long to do us any good that the phone rang.
It was a deep voice speaking in accented but unmistakably an
gry Korean. “I’m back. More precisely, I’m at your front gate. The guards won’t let me in.”
“Good.” I looked out the window and saw Boswell on the gate phone. I waved.
He made a rude gesture. “We have work to do, Inspector,” he said.
“Maybe we did an hour ago. Now we have nothing. And I’m plenty busy with my own business, you might consider that.”
“I bring greetings from Kazakhstan.”
“I’ll bet you do.” I was smoothing the scrap of chestnut with my fingers. It was dark, like my thoughts. I laughed at myself. “Alright, put the guard on, I’ll tell him not to shoot you.”
When Boswell got upstairs, I was standing by the window. “What do you know about chaos theory?” I asked as I heard him step into the room and sit down on the chair against the wall.
“Why?”
“Interested, that’s all.”
“Not much. Something along the lines that events happen according to no particular plan and in no particular order, that a minor event in one place can set off ripples that cause major developments somewhere else. The usual example is a butterfly flapping its wings.”
“Yes, and what happens after that?”
“I don’t know, a vast storm halfway around the world. Air currents, I guess. I don’t much care for chaos. Certainly not in our line of work.”
“Still, chaos is interesting, don’t you think?”
“No, I’ve seen it happen on soccer fields too many times. It’s messy.”
I smiled and turned around to face him. “You know what I would like to do someday? I’d like to bathe in chaos, stand under it like you would under a waterfall and have it cascade over my body. Maybe drown myself in it and be swept into a vast nothingness.”
“Whew. Heavy thinking, Inspector. Had a wee nip of the barley after lunch?”
I turned back to the window and waved my arms.
“What was that, if I may ask?” Bosworth was peering at the files on my desk; I could see his reflection in the window.
