by James Church
“Where’s the driver? I’ll tell him to get help.” I looked around.
“Don’t bother, he’s dead.”
The visitor raised his head and said tonelessly, “My arm.”
Boswell motioned to me to walk outside with him. “Flesh wound. He’ll be fine.”
One of the aides, the woman, stood up. “We’ve got to get out of here. They may come back.”
“You stick to arranging tea parties, I’ll do security. No one is coming back. Sit down and don’t say anything.” Boswell didn’t even try to hide his contempt.
I shouted at the guards to watch over the visitor, then followed Boswell out the door.
Boswell took in the scene in front of the guesthouse, then asked neutrally, “Where’s your friend Yang?”
“With the others, I suppose.”
“You suppose. Inspector, the man is rotten to the core.”
“Maybe.” I was thinking how he had stopped one of the Germans from blowing my head off.
“Can you call in and get help, or do you have to drive all the way back down to find a phone?”
“My phone is in the car. Who knows if it will work up here in the hills. The gate guards already issued an alert, but I doubt their communications unit will pass the word to someone who can do us any good. Maybe the lead car has a radio in it.” The radio, under the seat, was so new that I knew the car wasn’t one of the Ministry’s. Probably SSD. That explained why I didn’t recognize the dead driver. I didn’t know any of the call signs or even who I was going to be talking to on the other end when a voice came up. “Identify yourself.” There was a series of clicks.
“This is Inspector O, Ministry of People’s Security.”
“What the hell are you doing on this communications net?”
“Forget that. I need you to pass a message direct to MPS headquarters.”
“Passing MPS messages is not my job. You have your own communications.”
“Listen to me, you idiot. I’m on the security team for a British VIP who arrived yesterday. We’re at Koko Two. Do you know where that is? There’s been a shooting. One dead. One wounded.”
“A shooting? Who is this?”
“I told you who it was. We need emergency medical help. We also need a big squad of reinforcements. Is this a State Security radio?”
“None of your business. I still don’t know for sure who you are. Put on Lieutenant An.”
I looked at the dead driver. “Does An have a mole on his lip?”
“Yeah. Put him on.”
“He can’t talk right now.”
“Don’t screw with me. Let me talk to An.”
“Not easy to do. He’s dead.”
There was a crackle as the voice on the other end breathed into the microphone. “You killed An?”
“I’m telling you one more time. We need medical assistance and heavy reinforcements fast. Cordon off the Martyrs’ Cemetery, that’s where they’re headed. You better move fast. I think the Capital Command may already have been notified. If they have, they’ll lock down the city and you’ll never get anyone up here.”
A new voice came on. “O, is that you?”
“Han?”
“Where are you?”
“Koko Two. There’s been an assassination attempt here, the British VIP is wounded, and your Lieutenant An is dead.”
“How about your boy, Yang? Seen him around?”
I ignored him. “There are at least six of them. The two Germans are part of it.”
“Hang on a second.” He shouted at someone, then came back on. “Alright. There are sketchy reports of gunfire at the cemetery just coming in, I don’t know from where. We already have people on the way to that temple up in the hills. Reports say there might be weapons there.”
“There were. They’re gone.”
“Well.” He paused. “What about the old man?”
“There’s a group of assassins loose and you’re worried about an old blind man? He’s blind, Han. He’s pathetic.”
“Politics and blindness, Inspector.” Han’s voice was fading in and out. “I’m not qualified to judge. Wait, hang on again.” There was more shouting, then Han came back on the radio. “Listen, the army has sent out patrols in your direction. I’ll bet the soldiers are nervous as hell. Don’t look at them cross-eyed, that’s my advice. They’re not supposed to go into the cemetery, though, just cordon it off. So get over there as quick as you can.”
“What about the situation here at the VIP quarters?”
“What about it? Have someone close it off. Where are the other guards?”
“I think the term is ‘melted away.’ The gate sentries seem loyal.”
“They better be. Leave them there. A truck with one of our squads should get there in about twenty minutes, if they can make it up that hill. You better get moving. You’re closest to the cemetery. Get there.”
“Front gate or back?”
“Show some initiative, Inspector. It’s your call.”
“What about Boswell?” The radio clicked and went silent.
2
By the time we got to the cemetery, there were already three SSD cars scattered on the grass and another car, with plates I didn’t recognize, parked neatly behind a fence. A conference was going on under a tall, straight plane tree down the slope, next to the path that led toward busts of revolutionary martyrs. When Boswell and I ran over, the man in the brown suit was just folding a piece of paper into his coat pocket.
“We don’t need either of you here, Inspector. You’ve caused enough trouble already.”
Boswell broke in. “This was an assassination attempt against an official of Her Majesty’s Government. A guest of yours, I might add. I’m not leaving until those involved are in custody and we can question them. That’s firm, and that’s final.”
The man in the brown suit turned to Boswell and smiled patiently. There was nothing friendly in his face, however. Simply patience, the sort of patience that a skilled interrogator has in abundance, a bottomless pit of patience. “Her Majesty’s Government has no authority, no writ, no nothing for as far as the eye can see, Mr. Boswell. Certainly not this side of Suez. You have even less standing, I would add.” In a dark room, he would have paused to let the point sink in. “Go back to your hotel and stay there; do not stick your nose outside of your room. A car will come by to pick you up the morning of the flight. You don’t want to miss that airplane, Mr. Boswell, believe me.”
“I’ll do no such thing.”
The man in the brown suit shrugged. As he turned to one of the SSD officers, a shot rang out. All of us flattened ourselves on the grass, except for the man in the brown suit. He looked around calmly. “It came from over there”—he pointed to a slight hill to our left—“but it wasn’t aimed our way.” The sound of a machine pistol interrupted; two of the busts of martyrs fell to the ground fifteen meters away and rolled across the path into an azalea bush. “Whereas,” said the man in the brown suit, “that was more or less in our neighborhood.” He sat down heavily and stretched out his bad leg. “Splendid, they want to make a stand here.” He took out a cigarette, put it to his lips, and let it dangle there. “Dumb bastards.”
Boswell pulled his ample chin off the ground. “I need a weapon. Give me a revolver, anything.”
“You need to get back to your hotel, Superintendent.” The man in the brown suit was brushing the twigs off his jacket. “This isn’t your fight. This isn’t even your country. Stay the hell out of it.” The SSD officers had drawn their service pistols and were hunched behind a stone marker. “You,” the man in brown called to them, “don’t sit around like goats. Spread out and get us some idea where those shots came from.” He looked over at me. “Inspector, circle around back and see if you can figure out how many there are.”
“There are six.”
“Oh, really? And what are they wearing?”
“Blue trousers and tan shirts. Two of them have their shirttails flapping; those are the Kazakhs
, I’d say. Two others were posing as MSS guards, looked like Koreans but I don’t know. Their shirts are creased on the back, like they’re brand-new. Good shoes, very smart dressers for assassins.”
“The last two?”
Boswell broke in. “Those are the Germans. They’re as slippery as you’ll ever find. They’ll get away if you don’t close every exit, and I mean every possible exit.” He reached over and lit the dangling cigarette.
Another machine pistol burst, and three more martyrs’ busts rolled down the hill. The man in the brown suit sighed. “Arrogant bastard.” It was not clear whether he meant Boswell or the shooter. “Not very far away, maybe two hundred meters,” he said. “Okay, Superintendent, I’m giving you a weapon, and if you move one whisker off course, I’ll have you shot, is that clear? The inspector will put three bullets in your back.” He took a puff on the cigarette and exhaled carefully, not like a man in a national cemetery where a gun-fight would get him nothing but a bad report in his file, no matter how it ended. “Stay close behind him, Inspector.”
A single shot and the lead SSD officer fell to the ground. He didn’t move. The other two sniffed at him like dogs who had found the moldy carcass of a cat. They looked back at us, fear on their faces. The man in the brown suit pointed at the body. “Leave him there. Get on with it before they pick us all off one by one.” He scanned the terrain. “That was not a handgun, not a machine pistol. One of them has a rifle and knows how to shoot. A hunter, maybe. Well, we’ll see about that.” Another single shot, a sharp crack, then a burst from the machine pistol that shredded the leaves on the tree and brought down a shower of twigs.
Boswell and I crawled off toward a little cover. “You go first, Superintendent, I’ll watch.”
He looked at me without expression. “You won’t shoot me in the back?”
“Let’s have this conversation another time.” I gestured toward a statue that sat at the base of a small rise about twenty-five meters away. “Get to that and plop down. I’ll be close behind.” Without another word, he rolled over twice to the left, got onto his knees and looked around quickly, then sprinted to the statue. A shot rang out, and he fell forward just as he made it. I cursed, fired twice, then ran like hell.
Boswell was moaning when I flung myself behind the statue. “I’m not hit, but I think I broke my leg when I fell. I hate this fucking country, do you know that, Inspector?”
“You mentioned it once before.”
“No, really, I hate it, this fucking country.”
“Anything else?”
“My leg, I can’t walk. What should we do?”
“It’s your leg.”
“I need a doctor.”
“That could take days.”
“Days? Why, in God’s name?”
“Getting a visa, flying from England, that sort of thing.”
“England? England? You have doctors here, surely.”
“In this fucking country, you mean? We couldn’t have you submit to our backwardness. It wouldn’t do.”
“Don’t be getting droll on me, Inspector, not at a time like this. Call someone. You do have a phone on you?”
“I don’t.” That was true. The phone was still in the car. “Tell me, Boswell, what would the British Empire have done? In the old days, I mean. Gloriously wounded on the field of battle, the superintendent looks around for his subaltern, that is the word, isn’t it? Out in the field, surrounded by wogs, that’s what you called them. All those wogs, and one of your sturdy Scots legs, broken.”
By now I could see Boswell was in pain. “I can’t go back to the car just yet,” I said. “There are still too many people roaming around with guns. You seem to be a target, why I can’t imagine. Must be your size.” Boswell looked like he might snarl but then uncurled his lip and turned his face away. I wasn’t in a charitable mood at the moment. “Personally, I think there are more people out here than we imagine, and none of them are sure who they can trust. What about you, Superintendent, who do you trust?”
When Boswell turned back to me, he was sweating with pain. He moaned softly, took a breath, and turned pale. “I think I might be bleeding internally. Maybe the bone punctured an artery.” He moaned again. “Did I tell you I hate this fucking country?”
“Yes.”
“I do.”
“I get your point.” I crawled closer beside him and took his pulse. “It’s racing, but it’s plenty strong.”
“All of a sudden, you’re a doctor?”
“As long as we have nothing else to do, why don’t you tell me what you know about all of this? Your visiting official, what’s his name? I have a feeling you don’t care that he was shot. In fact, I think you actually wanted him killed.”
Boswell grimaced. It might have been a smile in other circumstances, though not a nice one. “Why would you say that?”
“You didn’t want to cancel the visit.”
“He’s a bad man, Inspector, a very evil man. Immoral to the core of his soul.” Boswell’s face was getting gray; his skin looked clammy. “It actually wasn’t in the planning, but at least if he was killed here, his death would accomplish something good.”
“And that would be, what?”
“You already know what his death will trigger. You told me yourself.”
“No, it won’t happen here. Not on my watch. Not in my territory.”
“It almost did, and that might have been enough. This isn’t about you, Inspector, it’s about something bigger. The future of your country. Your people’s future.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about, do you? You’re just reciting some crap they handed you at a briefing. My country’s future? Forgive me, Superintendent, I don’t know anything that flourishes when it’s watered with blood. Let’s not float away on visions of the future. Your man, whoever he is and whatever he’s done, is not my problem. Am I clear? If you have a bone to pick with him, take care of it yourself, on your own turf. What happens here is not yours to worry about. It’s for us, it’s our business, our future, our fate.”
“Surely you don’t believe that.”
“Don’t tell me what I believe. I live here, you don’t.”
“Thank God.”
“Let me guess, Superintendent, this whole thing involves a sort of Western calculus, moral weights and measures. The sacrifice of one evil man is worthwhile if it is for the greater good, is that it?”
“You don’t know this man, Inspector. He is disgusting. Everything he touches takes on a stench.”
“Oh, bravo! I congratulate you on being so sensitive. You have the ability to separate the moral wheat from the immoral chaff. Who in your system makes this decision? Who decides how to add it all up? One evil man, led to his death, set up to be murdered in order to trigger the deaths of others—how many we cannot guess—in the expectation that it will lead to something good. Someday. Maybe.”
“No one decided to have him killed, Inspector. If it were up to me, I’d say it was immaterial whether he died or not, what we call collateral damage. If he happened to step in front of a bullet—some of us thought that would be a bonus, but it wasn’t crucial. All he got was a flesh wound anyway. It might be enough.” Boswell stared at his leg. “That bastard only gets a flesh wound, and I break my fucking leg in the middle of a fucking cemetery.” He closed his eyes. “I may be out of options, Inspector, but so are you. This operation is already under way. You don’t dare try to stop it. You don’t have any idea who your friends are.”
“Friends?” I laughed at the thought. “Under the circumstances, I think I still have one or two, and that’s a hell of a lot more than you can be sure of. In fact, I’m the only friend you have in this place, at this moment, and I have orders to shoot you if the need arises. Look around. Believe me, you are completely naked, not to mention lame. Do you think you’re going to hang around here for a few weeks while your leg heals? Let’s say by mistake I tell one of your so-called friends about recent events, thinking by mistake he is
actually a friend of mine. How will he react? Will he do anything to me? Not likely. Instead, he’ll figure it is necessary to eliminate you, because you’re the risk. Are you sure the plans ever really called for you to get out of here in one piece?”
“A bluff, Inspector, but unconvincing. I know enough to get me out of here safely, whereas you still don’t even know the extent of what is going on.”
“And you do? In my country? You think you know the difference between shadow and substance? Between bears and tigers and snakes?” I laughed again. Laugher was better at relieving tension than hitting someone, though I wanted to hit Boswell. “Tell me one thing, then I’ll go for the phone.”
Boswell propped himself up, with his back to the base of the statue. I could tell the effort cost him plenty. “What?”
“Scotch egg.”
“Say that again?”
“Scotch egg, what is it?”
“Where did you hear that term?”
“If my face were as gray as yours right now, I wouldn’t ask questions. I’d answer them. Don’t you know?”
“Of course I know. You don’t think I’m from Scotland, is that it?”
“One thing’s for sure, you’re not a member of the Scottish police, not the regular police, anyway.”
“A Scotch egg is an egg covered with pork sausage.”
“Disgusting.”
Boswell smiled briefly. “There, Inspector, we agree.” He winced suddenly, then moaned, and his head fell forward. When he looked up, his eyes weren’t focusing. “Now find a phone, will you? This leg is bad. It isn’t a simple fracture or I’d hobble out of here all the way back home.”
“How did you plan it?”
“You said you’d get the phone if I answered your question. Do I have to beg for medical help? Is that how things work around here?” He closed his eyes. “I don’t know anything about the plan, not in detail. I came in late. They gave me the hurry-up treatment, sort of like training someone for only one parachute jump—just enough to get out of the plane and onto the ground in one piece. One of my jobs was to keep you occupied. We heard from somewhere that you were involved, and Molloy said you’d be trouble, that you had to be neutralized. Nearly succeeded, didn’t I?” His breathing was becoming labored.
