by James Church
“You think the robbery and the appearance of a tall, broad Scotsman is not a coincidence. Well, neither do I. I think he’s here for something else. If I had to guess, I’d guess he’s not here to cooperate. I’d say he’s up to no good. Worse than no good.”
“Thank you, Inspector, for that.” Min reached down and unplugged my phone from the wall. “A Ministry team was here last night to sweep the building. I’m led to believe that all is well, but I’m also reliably informed that they left these in place.” He twirled the phone line in the air and then let it drop to the floor.
I looked at the wire for a moment. “I’m going to recommend that the visit by the British VIP not take place. As soon as we’re done, I’m going over to the Ministry and personally putting in the recommendation.”
“Too late. Too late. Too ever fucking late, Inspector.”
“Why?”
“He’s already here. Special aircraft. Arrived yesterday evening.”
“That can’t be. Why would they allow him in early?”
“How should I know? Do I look like an airline reservation clerk? He’s here. Though exactly where he is right now I couldn’t say.” He held up his hand. “No, I’m not keeping it from you, Inspector. No one has told me. I’m in charge of security for this delegation, but I have no idea where the visitor is at the moment. And if something happens to him in the meantime, you know who gets blamed, don’t you?”
I jumped out of my chair. “Where’s Boswell?”
“He’s your responsibility, not mine. You’re supposed to be babysitting.”
“Where are the Germans?”
“Probably at their hotel.”
“They’re supposed to be on the east coast. It was arranged.”
“Countermanded. Little Li complained all morning long that he thought he was finally going to get a vacation, trailing after them.”
“This is a disaster. It’s a setup. Boswell and those Germans are in this together, but they’re not leading the parade. We’re being led to slaughter, Min. But by whom? Who is going to cut our throats?”
“Let me tell you what I think, Inspector. I think that I am being carried in the jaws of death. Lightly, gently, like a lioness carries her cub. But she will not drop me this time.”
“Lovely imagery.”
“Coming from you, Inspector, that could be funny. We both know what is going on. From the moment they assigned us that bank robbery, something wasn’t right.”
“That’s what I said weeks ago.”
“Then you disappeared.”
“Twice.”
“Twice.” Min spoke the word carefully, as if he were stepping over a hole in time. He pulled on his ear and looked at nothing. “Fate, I suppose. The whole road, leading to this.”
“Well, you may be ready to bow your head and accept what comes. I am not, not yet, anyway. We didn’t do anything wrong, and we’re not going to be anyone’s excuse. That’s for sure.”
“Better to go limp, Inspector. It might not hurt as much when the blow comes.”
“Don’t talk to me about blows, I know all about blows. Want to see my bruises?”
“Some other time.”
“Give me the keys to your car. I’m going up to that old man’s hut again. There’s something there. Why would they set so many dogs to watch my behind if someone wasn’t worried I’d find something?”
“You just figured that out?” Min tossed me the keys. “There’s enough gas in the tank of the duty car for you to go and get back. If the gauge is to be trusted. Are you going to take the Scots bear?”
“You want me to?”
Min smiled, so that I knew fate had slipped a tiny bit in his calculations.
“Okay, then.” I fished in my pockets for some wood and came up with a piece of walnut. I held it up with what must have been a look of surprise on my face.
“Something wrong, Inspector?”
“This is walnut.”
“If you say so.”
“I don’t know why I’m even carrying it around. There’s a certain smugness to walnut that you can feel.”
“I hadn’t realized.”
“My grandfather used to look at a piece of walnut and say, ‘Ugly.’ He claimed walnut needed discipline. Too many people say, ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ every time they see walnut burl, and they ended up spoiling the wood, that’s what he thought.” It was clear Min didn’t know what to say, so I put the wood in my pocket and stepped out the door. “If Boswell calls looking for me”—I turned back to Min—“you heard me say I was going toward Sinuiju to collect on a bet.”
“I did hear you say that.” The phone rang. Min let it ring twice, then waved for me to get going. As I went down the stairs, I heard him say in convincing tones, “Superintendent, I don’t put bells on my people. How should I know where he is at this moment?”
Chapter Three
The first thing that registered was how quiet it was. I walked around the back of the hut with a bad feeling coming over me. The old man was sitting in the dirt, with the dog in his lap. The dog was dead. It had been shot. The old man cocked his head at the sound of my footsteps. “You’ve come back, Inspector, but too late. Look, here, my dog is dead, has been murdered by the bastards. I wish they had killed me, too.”
“Are you alright?” I couldn’t tell if we were being watched. The dog had been shot with a rifle from point-blank range. The shell casing was a few feet away. “Maybe we should go inside.”
“No, I won’t leave the dog, not till she’s buried. There’s a shovel beside the door. If you bring it around, I’ll dig the grave myself.” He put the dog’s carcass gently on the ground and stood up. There was blood on his shirt, a lot of it. “This dog was all I had, Inspector. They knew that.”
“I’ll get the shovel.”
After the dog was buried, the old man stood over the grave, his mouth moving but no sound coming out. I didn’t say anything, just waited. After a while he stopped and turned to me. “There was an old monk that lived at the temple right after the war. No one bothered him. A couple of political types came up that first September and asked him a few questions. When they were leaving, they told me it was my job to watch him. It was funny and we all laughed. Setting a blind man to watch a monk. The monk died a few years later. He must have known it was coming. A few days before, he sat beside me and told me something I haven’t forgotten. He was a small man, tiny hands, a light voice, like the wind in high trees.”
I took the old man by the arm and led him to the steps of the temple. “I’m listening.”
“The monk, he said the world is finite, and everything in it is limited. They all say that, but then he went on. Everything is rationed, you might say. Even pain. Endlessly recycled. Like atoms, and parts of atoms. The same atoms are here as were here when the world began, isn’t that right? Might be some changes because of those atomic bombs, fusion or fission or something. But by and large, same atoms. Life comes and goes, but same atoms. This is not cycle-of-life fantasy, ‘oh, we are all part of a Great Wheel.’ Life isn’t everything. Life isn’t at the center of creation. No. No, it isn’t. What are the elements of the universe but the parts of life, color, and sound, and taste, and so forth. Emotions, goodness, evil, melancholy, sadness. Love. All of it, limited, rationed, finite. Only so much of everything. These elements come in, how can I say, packets. You don’t create red, red is outside of you, but then it strikes your eyes and goes inside, and you remember red. Same with blue, and so forth. Same with the smell of the mountains at dawn, and the wind against your skin in autumn, and the sound of the stars. Only so much of it out there, and it becomes you, over time, you absorb these and they are you and you are them. Emotions, too, you don’t pull them out of nowhere, from nothing. They are part of creation, maybe that first instance in creation, all created, all formed, once and for all. Love and melancholy and hate and happiness. So when people were new, when the earth was new, there was a lot of it around. The sky was vivid blue, the wind was fresh, t
he meadows would knock you over with the smell of the grass and the flowers. Pools of sadness hung in the air, and if you walked through one of them, you could be sad for a week, but no matter because it was a pure sadness, pure white, sadly white if you know what I mean. And hatred was pure, and maybe it floated and maybe it didn’t. I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this. The more people there are, the less of this there is for everyone. The world is duller and duller. Colors are dull. The seasons are dull. Pretty soon you can’t tell one from another, pretty soon sadness and evil and melancholy and love are all gray, pounding gray lumps that enter you and sit in confused silence inside your heart so you don’t know anymore what you are. But when you die, these things, they separate out again, they go back into the world in their pure form, little splinters and fragments of them, and someone else gets them, and if they bathe in goodness, why, we rejoice and smile at the luck, but goodness is light and usually floats on the wind so no one gets much of it, less that than love, which dances across the empty spaces and so you only run into it by mistake, or by surprise.”
2
After the old man finished, we sat side by side and didn’t feel the need to say anything. A breeze blew against me, and I wondered if it was goodness, or love, or just the wind. Finally I stood up. I had a job to do, and I might as well get it done. “This temple, it’s brand-new, isn’t it? All reconstructed. You have a good reason you didn’t tell me? I trusted you to tell me the truth.”
“I told you what I could.” The old man’s fingers lightly touched the blood on his shirt. “I didn’t want to say much with the foreigner hanging around. I told you it was rebuilt several times.”
“You also told me you stumbled on the body, but how could you do that if it was floating in one of those pools?”
“I needed you to come back. The only way to be sure you would was to make up something that you knew couldn’t be right. The truth waits, sometimes.”
“When was the temple rebuilt?”
“Three months ago. It was in the dead of winter. They moved me out of here, told me to shut up, that it was some special decision and that if I said anything they’d send me off to a camp in the mountains. They said they’d send the dog to Pyongyang for foreigners to eat.”
“When did they let you move back?”
“Two, three weeks ago. They said they’d put everything back and nobody would ever know the difference.”
“Who’s been here since then?”
The old man rubbed his chin. “They’ll kill me if I tell you.”
“If I can get to them, they won’t be back. It’s up to you.”
“Just a minute.” The old man stood up and went into his hut. When he came out, he was wearing a different shirt. “I’ll have to burn the other one. Otherwise that dog’s ghost will come back, looking for its blood. You ever heard a ghost howl in the dark, Inspector?”
“I can’t say that I have. The living cause me enough trouble.”
The old man laughed, bitterly. “Are you going to take notes? Or can you just remember?”
Chapter Four
The four-car caravan turned off the paved road onto a dirt track. The first car, a Mercedes with bad springs, carried the British visitor with his Foreign Ministry escort. In the next car, a fairly new Toyota with a right-hand drive, sat the two aides, an older woman who brayed when she laughed and a young man with a haunted expression and a long nose. The third car was mine. Boswell sat in angry silence beside me. He kept curling his right hand into a fist. Yang was in the backseat, staring out the window. The final car, a van, had the luggage and two extra MPS guards.
We came to a stop. Boswell brought his fist down on the dashboard. “This is the craziest security I’ve ever seen. The craziest. The target is in the lead car, unprotected. Are you trying to get him killed?”
“Your visitor was briefed about the plot this morning. He said he didn’t believe it. His aides yawned; the woman said it looked like an effort to discredit him. We can’t tell him to go home; the Foreign Ministry says it would cause an incident. So just in case, we’ve redoubled the guard at every site he’s to visit. Anyway, who says he is unprotected? For all you know, the lead car has bulletproof glass. Just relax.”
“Mary and Joseph in a stewpot, how can I relax?”
“We got past your buildings with the shadows, didn’t we?”
“Where next?”
“I don’t know.”
Boswell snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous. There are only so many places this dirt road can go. Don’t tell me you don’t know where that is.”
The caravan started again, the lead car speeding ahead. Yang leaned forward. “There’s a secure guesthouse up in the hills, about a fifteen-minute drive from here.”
Boswell turned around and stared, as if information coming from the rear seat was unwelcome. “You mean he’s not going to stay at the Koryo?”
“Would seem that way.” Yang sat back in his seat again and looked out the window, ending the conversation. From his tone of voice, you’d think he was bored, but looking in the rearview mirror, I didn’t think he was.
We hit a bump; Boswell bounced and hit his head against the roof. “Christ, every time we go anywhere that happens. Can’t you people build roads? I thought this led to a VIP guesthouse.”
“Who said it was for VIPs? All Yang said was it’s secure, well protected.”
“You can’t bring a visitor someplace in the middle of nowhere, out of the blue.” Boswell’s Korean was starting to deteriorate. “You can’t just dump a foreign official wherever you choose. No one does that. I haven’t checked out this place.”
The dirt road became paved again; we roared past one guard post, then another. Abruptly, the road became barely one lane. It climbed a steep hill in a series of switchbacks; there were no guardrails, not even any rocks painted white along the side, which dropped down a few hundred meters. “Slow down a bit.” Boswell spoke carefully, not to jar my concentration.
“Relax, would you? I’ve driven roads like this much faster, at night, in the fog.” I took my eyes off the road for a moment and looked at Boswell; he was gripping the dashboard. “You’ll like it. We never build guesthouses where there are shadows.”
Yang coughed. “Mind if I open my window?”
We went around another sharp bend, then the road became straight and broad. It passed through an open gate with sentries on either side. They weren’t slouching. At the end of a long drive was a one-story building, surrounded on three sides by a high concrete fence, with broken glass cemented along the top, and barbed wire on top of that.
The first two cars were already parked and the visitor was walking with the driver and the Foreign Ministry escort to the front door when gunfire broke out. The driver dropped the two suitcases he was carrying and hit the ground, fumbling for the holster under his coat. Three more shots; one kicked up dust near the lead car’s front tire, the other two shattered its windows on the driver’s side. I braked and steered off the road onto the dirt. The Foreign Ministry official dropped to the ground and covered his head with his arms. Boswell cursed and fumbled with his door handle. He half fell out and scrambled toward the house. “Get fucking down, you idiots,” he bellowed and looked wildly around to pinpoint the source of the shots.
The two aides started to get out of their car, but Boswell ran over and shoved them back inside. “Stay there, stay there, don’t move, don’t move a muscle.” He crouched behind the second car, took a deep breath, then ran toward the house.
I turned to tell Yang to follow him while I circled around the back. He had a pistol in his hand. “What the hell is that?” It was the first thing that came to my mind, though I already knew the answer. It was a Russian Makarov.
Yang stopped, clicked off the safety, then looked at me. “Stay out of the way, O. Please.” Another shot rang out, just as Boswell reached the visitor and pushed him onto the ground. I had no time to think. I threw myself at Yang, caught him on the shoulder, and we both fell
off balance. His gun hand swung around and hit me on the side of the head. If I hadn’t been so much off balance, maybe I could have kicked him in the chest. Instead, I fell down.
Two men stood over me. Jurgen and Dieter, or maybe the other way around. One of them said, “Oh, shit,” in German and loaded a shell into a hunting rifle he held easily, the way some people hold a familiar book. He had a pen in his breast pocket. Yang put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t bother,” he said. I didn’t know the man could speak German; first the waitresses at the guesthouse, then Yang. Maybe he taught himself during all those night shifts. He switched to Korean. “I’ll take care of him,” he said, pointing at me. “Get the others and finish the job here.”
The German with the rifle looked disappointed but nodded. “We’ll see you later,” he said curtly, in Korean that was better than Boswell’s.
As I stood up, two men with their shirttails flapping hurried across the road toward the back of the guesthouse. Two others emerged from the luggage van and strolled into the woods without looking in my direction.
I turned to Yang. “Go on, get it over with.”
“Nothing left to do, O. I’ve finished my part.”
“You can’t get very far, you realize that. They know all about it now.”
“So what?”
“I’m disappointed.”
“Don’t be, O.” There was an exchange of shots and then a shrill scream. Yang stiffened. “That’s it, then. Time to go.” He nodded to me and jogged off into the woods.
The two guards from the entry gate and another enlisted man came running up, waving their arms. “We heard shots and then saw people running.” The first one pointed his pistol at the trees. “What is going on? We’ve radioed in an alert, but they said they need more details.”
“Who told you to leave your post? One of you has to get back to the radio.” They stared at each other dumbly. “Never mind, come with me. Just don’t shoot at anything unless I tell you to.” We edged up toward the guesthouse. The front door was open. When I eased myself inside, the two aides were crouched, white-faced and panting with fear, in the corner. Boswell was standing over the visitor, who was bleeding slightly from the upper arm. “He’s been shot,” Boswell said and turned away.
