by James Church
Mrs. Zhou had been in charge of various MSS file rooms for thirty years. She was in place before I arrived, and would probably be there after I left—after we all left. She was a permanent fixture in the bureaucratic universe. On gloomy days, I concluded that when the world ceased and heaven blew to the other side of nowhere, Mrs. Zhou would make a file marked THE END, which she would put on the lowest shelf so she could reach it later.
Whenever Mrs. Zhou said, “I don’t know,” it was not a comment on the state of her knowledge. It was a declaration of complete certainty about uncertainty. When she said, “I don’t know,” it was like absolute zero; zero chance of ever finding out. Questioning her on missing files was like questioning why light disappeared into a black hole. Yes, there were unquestionably black holes, and six years of Handout’s reports were somewhere in one of them. I was willing to accept that as a reasonable explanation if it meant not having to listen to Mrs. Zhou go on at length.
“I asked for tea, or has that disappeared, too?”
Mrs. Zhou pushed the basket of files against my desk. “They’re in reverse chronological order, the newest ones on top. Don’t get them out of order.”
“My tea?”
“I’m in charge of files. Do I look like a tea lady? Besides which, I don’t like that new officer, Jang, watching me in the kitchen. He has an evil eye.”
Well, at least Jang couldn’t recruit her. That cheered me up. “You do not, Mrs. Zhou, look like a tea lady. I simply asked, that’s all. There’s no harm in asking.”
“Here’s the checkout sheet.” She held up a narrow piece of paper for me to see. “You have to sign for the files if you’re going to read them in here.”
“I realize that. It’s procedure. We wouldn’t want another six years of files to disappear, would we?”
“Are you suggesting I’m to blame? Because if you are, don’t bother, it’s not my fault. People treat these files like gum wrappers. I do my job, but I can’t do it if I’m not here, can I? In 2003, I was detailed to the provincial office in Jilin. It was September. Very hot in those old offices; we didn’t have any fans. This place is a palace compared to that one. I mean, the chief had a fan, but he kept his door shut. Bastard!” She spat the latter word out in Fujian dialect; it rattled the windows and crashed out the door into the waiting area. “You think I’m kidding? Take a gander at my personnel file.”
“Not necessary. I’ll take your word for it.” If I’d ever known that Mrs. Zhou had been seconded for several years, I’d forgotten. Maybe the deal could be resurrected.
“Don’t you want to know who was in charge of the files when all eight years of Handout documents disappeared?”
“Eight years? You mean we’re missing more? A moment ago it was only six.”
“Don’t let it worry you. Files come and go. The sun doesn’t rise or set differently depending on what we have or what we’re missing. Think of it that way.”
“Nicely philosophical, Mrs. Zhou.” For a crazed fishmonger, I added silently.
“Are we done?” Mrs. Zhou looked at the clock on the wall behind my desk. It was always slow, probably because it doubled as the junction box for the special wiring. She made a mark on the accompanying checkout sheet. “Allowable checkout time for these sorts of files is three hours. Some of the files are four hours. These are three.”
“Then what?”
“Then you have to turn them in and check them out again.”
“No exceptions?”
“None.” She shook her head firmly.
Going through Handout’s files turned out to be a waste of the afternoon. I didn’t learn much, or at least not what I needed to learn. Recruitment had been unusual. Handout had appeared one day at the old airport as the office director, my predecessor, was waiting for his driver. My predecessor—himself an open file, a running bureaucratic sore. Now, it turned out, he was also the fool who had recruited Handout.
“I have something you want.” This was the sole and single quote from Handout in the entire file, reportedly what he said that day at the airport. Usually there are pages and pages of transcripts of conversations, but there were none here, unless they had been part of the six years, or was it eight, gone missing. No transcripts, no quotes, no way to figure out how Handout’s mind worked. A whole basketful of files filled with indirect quotations, surmises, chits, phony receipts, and babble.
There were also no concrete indications that Handout had been vetted in the usual fashion, no background investigation, no full employment history or family register examination beyond the sparse facts on the cover sheet. Not even a complete date of birth, only the day and the month. It occurred to me that some, maybe all, of our older sources in the files were similarly thin on bona fides. Ascertaining that would mean asking Mrs. Zhou to find at least a dozen more files. Maybe another time.
(Summary sheet from Handout’s personnel file)
READ ONLY
1 of 3 - Cover Sheet
CASE FILE: “HANDOUT”
ESTABLISHED: AUGUST 26, 2001
TRUE NAME: XXXX XXXXXX
DOB: APRIL 30 XXXX
POB: HANOI, DRV
FAMILY BACKGROUND (DETAILS IN HQ FILE 5255-B): FATHER SENT TO XXX COMMUNE, SICHUAN. DECEASED JUNE 1968. MOTHER AND CHILDREN LIVED WITH HER PARENTS IN SHENYANG. ONE BROTHER, DIED IN AUTO ACCIDENT MARCH 1997. MOTHER DECEASED 1998.
MARITAL STATUS: SINGLE
EDUCATION: SHENYANG INSTITUTE OF AERONAUTICAL ENGINEERING,
- GRADUATED 1991
TRAVEL: NO FOREIGN TRAVEL UNTIL 2001
- MAY 2001—SOUTH KOREA, TECHNICAL CONFERENCE ON MATHEMATICAL MODELS FOR CHEMICAL REAGENTS USED IN THE PETROLEUM INDUSTRY
READ ONLY
2 of 3 - Cover Sheet
EMPLOYMENT: L
DATE OF RECRUITMENT: MAY 24, 2001
PLACE OF RECRUITMENT: YANJI AIRPORT
METHOD: SELF-INITIATED
RELIABILITY: EXCELLENT FIRST YEAR
PAYMENTS: REGULAR - LINE 5
MOTIVATION: PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATION INCONCLUSIVE
HQ COMMENTS: XIANG FENG BAO, BG special vetting *
OFFICERS IN CHARGE: (See p 3.)
3 of 3 – Cover Sheet
BLANK
READ ONLY
I put the file back in the basket, on the top of the pile. From out on the street, I heard the roar of a big motorcycle. I braced myself for what would come next. The phone rang a minute later. It was the duty officer, young Mr. Jang.
“Special courier for you, sir. Shall I let him in?”
“No, Jang, keep him standing outside until he calls the army to bring around a tank to blast open the door. Yes, let him in, and tell him to come straight to my office.”
Another minute, heavy boots on the floor, a knock. “Courier!”
“Enter and be made whole.”
“What?” The door opened and a tall, fully decked-out courier stepped into my office, thick gloves tucked in a regulation belt, boots shined beyond the spectrum of visible light, helmet under one arm, and a large envelope with two stripes of special tape under the other.
“Sign.” The courier stood at attention. They didn’t like to hang around chatting.
I signed. “Want something to drink? Fine northeast tea?”
“Very kind.” He handed over the envelope. “Not today.” He stepped backward to the door. “Closed?”
“Yes, please.”
As soon as he was gone, I retrieved a small knife from my desk and cut the tape in the approved manner. There was a single page inside. I read it twice, then lit a match and burned it in a vase I keep on the floor for that purpose.
3
Late that afternoon, as we sat in our library/office after I’d returned from work, I realized it was necessary to see if my uncle had any ideas about a particularly uncomfortable part of the puzzle—the disappearance and current circumstances of my predecessor. There was no easy way to wade into the subject, especially given the sensitivity that had been emphasized at
least three times in the flash message I’d received earlier in the day. The best way, I decided, was a direct frontal approach against the ramparts. That gave me the benefit of surprise and thus a chance of shocking my uncle out of asking too many probing questions. He was unlikely to have any direct knowledge, I figured, but he might have heard this or that about the episode when he was still in North Korea. Word gets around, even when it sticks to the shadows and only crosses the street at night.
“I’ve got a question, if you don’t mind,” I said.
My uncle was fussing over a sketch he’d just completed. “I don’t mind.”
“I was wondering. My predecessor left work suddenly; perhaps you heard. He disappeared.”
“Dead?” My uncle didn’t lift his concentration from the sketch. Maybe he didn’t know anything after all.
“Might as well be. He slipped away, and no one knows to where. At the time, it gave several people in Beijing whiplash. No one likes it when a bureau director vanishes.” That was true, and hardly a blinding revelation. It didn’t give anything away, but at least it might buy me a few seconds of my uncle’s undivided attention.
“Impossible.” My uncle looked up suddenly. “I don’t care what anyone says. No one simply vanishes. There are always traces.”
“Usually, yes, there are. Apparently not this time, though. The investigation was thorough, from what I hear. It was also kept very quiet, but rumors floated around. I was in another job at the time, on the other side of the country, and even I heard a little of this and that.” I knew somewhat more than this or that, having received a cryptic briefing in Beijing in a special locked room shortly before being approved for my current assignment. Before I could get out of the room, paperwork had to be signed in two places swearing I wouldn’t tell anyone what I’d been told—nobody, never. A few more tidbits, very few, had been thrown into this afternoon’s message. It didn’t add up to much, except that Headquarters knew what had happened to its bureau director, seemed to know he was still alive, and was not happy.
“Maybe someone snatched him.” My uncle snorted. “The Americans? The Israelis? Did anyone ask?”
“You don’t really think that’s much of an explanation, do you? I never heard anyone suggest he was kidnapped. That would almost make it worse.” The thought hadn’t occurred to me. It was unnerving.
“Don’t worry about it. I have a feeling that MSS bureau chiefs are on the do-not-snatch list of almost every foreign intelligence service of any competence. How do you know he’s not dead?”
I hesitated for a fraction of a second. “I know.”
At this my uncle paused. A flicker of surprise lit on his forehead before vanishing. “Do you also know where he is?” he asked carefully.
From this point on, I knew I had to tread with utmost caution. I could almost hear the range finder in his brain switch into operation as he sensed a target of interest. I’d been right the first time; he had heard something.
“After all these years, that may be the question—where is he now? If Beijing has dusted off the file, they must have something new to go on.” If my uncle knew anything at all about this, the only way to get it out of him would be to dangle a little something. “They haven’t exactly said anything yet, not to me, anyway, but I know they looked at the file again.”
My uncle thought about that for a second, the range finder clicking softly. He was far too experienced to show even passing interest in how I knew Beijing had looked at the file.
“Very well,” he said, “assume for the moment someone gets a bead on him, establishes contact. Then what?”
I shrugged. “We welcome him back.”
This was ridiculous, and my uncle had no trouble figuring that out. It was so ridiculous he didn’t pursue the point. Instead, he asked the next logical question. “What if he doesn’t want to come back?”
“But what if he does? What if he does, but he’s not sure how to go about it? After all this time away, we can imagine he’s a little cautious about his reception.”
“Gun-shy.”
“You might say.”
My uncle looked out the window at the setting sun. “It must be getting toward summer. I think the weather is changing. My joints ache.”
“I’m just speculating here, but I’ll guess that if we don’t get him back from wherever he is, there will be an incident, something ugly.” I made sure my next comment came out casually. “Some people seem to think he’s living across the river.” No response. “Already, there’s talk of throwing out all of your friends again, like they did when he first disappeared. Even then they must have thought he went over to your side. Funny business.”
My uncle looked at the ceiling. “Up to now, you haven’t asked a real question. I assume this is it—do I remember anything?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“Yes, it was a funny period. I remember people from our State Security Department racing around with worried looks on their faces when your side began rolling up their operations in retaliation. But what made anyone think your man came across the river to our side? All the traffic was going the other way at that time; it still is. And I wish you wouldn’t refer to them as my friends. They’re not my friends, not a single one of them. Except for a couple of times when I had no choice, I stayed away from their operations, especially anything on the border.”
“Really? I heard that you tangled with an MSS colonel at some point. He was something special, outside channels. I never got the full story. He shot someone, on your side of the river is what I heard.”
“You want the full story? He didn’t belong on my side of the river, and I told him as much. The person he shot was standing right next to me. I don’t like standing beside people who get shot, and I also made that clear.”
“Interesting, but what matters is now, and now you’re on a list that you don’t want to be on.”
My uncle finally looked up from the sketches on his desk. “A list? What list? I don’t work for anyone. It wouldn’t mean anything if they threw me out. No one would care. It would be like throwing a pebble at the Milky Way.”
“Headquarters doesn’t consider you a pebble. A sharp stone in their shoe, maybe. Be thankful they haven’t hauled you in already.”
“For what, may ask? I realize the what doesn’t actually matter, but these things usually follow a certain dramatic line. They like to concoct a cause, if only to fill in that part of the form.”
“You already know the what. You saw her before she went over there. They probably think you lured her.”
He laughed until he started coughing. “Lured her?” he asked when he could speak again. “You saw Madame Fang. Do you think anyone could lure that woman?”
4
A few days later, Uncle O took the train to a lumberyard on the outskirts of Harbin, a twelve-hour trip on a hard seat. With the exception of winter, he’d taken that journey once each season since he moved in with me. The first December he’d made it known that he wanted to go but couldn’t because if he slipped on an icy sidewalk in Harbin, he would lie there until he froze to death. “Harbin people are callous,” he’d said, “and don’t tell me they’re not.”
“How do you know people would just walk over your body? I bet someone would stop and give you a hand.”
He snorted. “Have you ever met anyone from Harbin? Don’t make bets you might lose. Don’t make bets, period.”
“I know lots of people from Harbin.”
“Name one.”
“None leap to mind.”
“When they do, you can call and tell me I’m wrong. Meanwhile, I’m not going until spring. It gets muddy up there, but mud is less lethal than ice.”
It was already late May, far into the safe zone by his calculation. “I’ll see you in five or six days,” he said. “If I’m not back in a week, send out a scouting party.”
“We don’t have scouting parties anymore. I’ll call the MSS office in Harbin and tell them to keep an eye on you. The c
hief there will be delighted to have something to do.”
My uncle picked up his small carry-bag. “Do you think I want a tail on me the whole time? Leave your boys in Harbin alone. I’ll call when I get there to let you know I arrived.”
“Take your cell phone.”
“I will not use that thing. Throw it in the garbage.”
There was no phone call, and four days later, my uncle returned, empty-handed.
“Nothing worth my time,” he said when I opened the door. The train from Harbin is overnight, and he was yawning as he walked past me. “They had something they called ‘fortune wood.’ What is it about you Chinese with naming things? It was jumped-up pine, that’s all it was. You think I couldn’t tell? Fortune wood! That whole lumberyard is full of crooks. They would cover their mothers with creosote and sell them as fence posts if they could. What a country!”
“Promise me you’ll never open a business where you have to deal with the public. Speaking of which, you must have scared away Miss Du. She never called us back.”
“She’ll call, don’t worry. She’s probably arguing with her brother right now about our fee and how to keep the body parts separate from his restaurant supplies.”
“What makes you think she’ll pay your price?”
“I’m tired. There’s no way to sleep on that train. It’s overheated and the windows won’t open. A gang of kids ran up and down the aisles all night. Don’t people control their children in this country?” He looked ready to fall asleep on his feet. “Have we got any noodles around here? I haven’t eaten since I don’t know when.”
“How did I know you would get back this soon? I wasn’t even sure you arrived there. For all I knew, you’d slipped in the mud and sunk in up to your ears. Anyway, I’ve been busy at work. No time for shopping. As a matter of fact, I was planning to get some dumplings at a place on Wenxue Hutong. It’s dependable. I’ve never had a bad dumpling there.”
