by James Church
“Someone said they were coming to get me in a black car.”
“Yeah.”
“You know who it was?”
There was a conversation offline. Bo-ting came back on. “It’s busy here right now, like a train station. See you in a few minutes, huh?” He was pleading.
“If you say so.” I hung up with a bad feeling in my stomach. Li didn’t scare easily.
Chapter Five
“You may sit if you wish. This won’t take long.”
“That’s good.” I made myself comfortable behind my desk. It was obviously going to be a long night. The visitors had the air of people who were planning to stay for a while. A woman seated at a small table that had been moved into the office and placed near the door was taking notes. She’d laid out three extra pens neatly on the table. I figured she knew the drill.
The man doing the talking wore the brush haircut of someone from the old school of interrogation. I could tell he’d been around. The others, younger, lounged at each of the four compass points, ensuring I would never be without a reminder of who was running this meeting. They looked a little bored, but I knew they were on full alert. One of them fiddled with a cigarette, put it to his lips, and then took it away. His eyes darted around the room. I noticed they rested for a fraction on the woman. She ignored him.
“Don’t tell me that we’re all friends,” I said, “because I don’t think we are. My friends usually leave me alone at this hour.”
“OK, we’re not friends.” The old man leaned against my desk. He seemed tired, not just from lack of sleep. Too many questions, too many furtive answers. I might have felt sorry for him if he wasn’t in my office at one o’clock in the morning. “But we’re acting friendly, we’re talking friendly. I’m thinking friendly thoughts. How about you, Penguin?”
The one with the cigarette and the white vest nodded. He had a hotshot air about him, maybe because he appeared to be the youngest. “Yeah, I’m awash in friendship.” He looked at the woman. “Never felt friendlier.”
The old man glanced at the clock on the wall. “Is that time right? You’re slow, but that’s normal for this part of the country, right? Lucky for you, we have a convergence of interests. You want to get home, and I don’t want this to drag on. I have a pain in my shoulder these days; questioning people who don’t cooperate makes it worse. They get tense; I get tense. You know what I mean? We flew up here because those were our orders. Let’s keep it simple, and maybe we can clear out of here in time to catch the morning flight. That will leave you the rest of the day free to annoy your staff, and I can get one of those Shanxi farm girls to walk on my back when I get home. Worth a shot?”
Well, at least we had established that they were thinking of no more than six hours for this session. Six hours I could handle.
“Good idea,” I said. “Tell me what this is about. That’s a friendly way to start, don’t you think?”
“Sure. I’m going to jump the monkey, if it’s all right with you. I probably know a few tricks you don’t, but why bother?” He moved the pile of flash messages to the side and sat on the edge of my desk. “What do you know about a source named Handout?”
“Hand down?”
“Smart guy. You heard me right the first time.”
“Sorry. I can’t discuss some things with strangers unless I know they have authorization. You have authorization? A black car doesn’t count.”
“You’re only going to stretch things out past tomorrow if you keep on like this. How about we don’t pick at each other? It isn’t a bad question, nothing tricky, no hidden agenda. Just a simple inquiry.” He turned around and took a couple of papers off the table where the woman sat. “This is a flimsy of the Handout file. It’s from Headquarters. You want to look at it? It’s the same one you have.” He put it on my desk in front of me. “Go ahead, take a look. I’ve got the time.”
I didn’t bother to look. I wasn’t about to start taking advice from him. “OK, so you have a flimsy. Good for you. What do you want to know?”
“See, that’s better. We’re getting along already. I knew we could do it. I just wanted to know what you think of Handout. Good source?”
“All I know is what I read. I haven’t picked him up yet. His old case officer left in a hurry; maybe you know something about that. I’m going to arrange a meeting as soon as I have time, when people aren’t calling me into the office in the middle of the fucking night.”
The man on the south wall let out a low whistle. “Angry sort.”
The gray-haired man ignored him. “So, you were about to set up a meeting. Funny, I heard you were trying to get rid of him. Why would you want to do that, if you haven’t met him yet? We spend a lot of money vetting sources and so forth. Why would we want to waste it, that’s the question people are going to ask, don’t you think?”
“You want Handout on your payroll? Go ahead, he’s yours. Did you vet him? You might want to spend an extra ten yuan and do it again.”
There was a low chuckle from the north end of the room, but not from the man in front of my desk. He studied me for a moment, then nodded in the direction of the woman at the table. She turned to a fresh page.
“OK,” he said, “have it your way, leave that for now. We’ll get back to it at some point. Let’s go to something easy. Let’s go over your career. You know the facts. I’m just reading from your file. Presumably, they are the same. If you hear something out of kilter, you’ll let me know. Miss Bao over there will mark it for further study, and we can check the box. Meet with your approval?”
I shrugged.
“Sometimes that indicates yes, sometimes no. I’ll take it as a yes.” He put on his reading glasses. “Subject is chief of the Chinese State Security Ministry’s (MSS) special bureau for the northeast tier, covering the border with North Korea along a particularly sensitive stretch, from Tumen to Quanhe. Subject assumed the post in late 2009, as part of Political Bureau decision to beef up security in tandem with a sharp acceleration and expansion of economic relations with the Korean Democratic People’s Republic. Special note—” The man looked up. “Are you with me?”
I shrugged again.
“Special note: This bureau had gone without a chief officer for over a year previously because the last occupant of the office had defected to North Korea in early 2007. During this interim period, the deputy, Lieutenant Li Bo-ting, was in charge with circumscribed authority.” He looked up. “How are we doing? Anything you think Ms. Bao should mark for correction?”
“No.”
“What a relief. If you had shrugged three times in a row, we would have faced a serious problem.” The man turned the page in the file. “Ah, here is something I want to run by you. It says here that you and your mother lived alone.”
“It’s all in the file. I don’t think we need to go over it.”
“You have friends?”
“Sure, the whole world is my friend. Isn’t that where we started, being friends?”
“What about Ping Man-ho, he your friend?”
I rolled this around real fast in my brain. I hadn’t talked to Ping Man-ho more than three or four times since being assigned to Yanji, all of them at Gao’s. “Ping shows up once in a while. He’s a sharp dresser, borrows money and doesn’t pay it back, but that’s not actually a crime. Bad upbringing, maybe, but not a crime.”
“You know about his upbringing?”
“Nope. Just being chatty. You want us to open a file on him? I’ll tell Mrs. Zhao to make room on the top shelf. I don’t think we’ll have to get to it very often.”
“Maybe you should do a little digging, turn your hunting dog Lieutenant Li loose on the case and see what he comes up with.”
“If you have something, why don’t you just save me the time and hand it over? We’re busy enough up here; I can’t spare resources on vague hints. Better yet, you have a big team. Do it yourself, why don’t you?”
“Why don’t I? Because it’s your bureau, that’s why. It’
s your territory. You’ve built up a nice reputation; important people at Headquarters purr when your name comes up. I don’t want to take anything away from you. I’m not in the business of subtracting from other people’s fitness reports. I’m just giving you a tip, that’s all. You decide what to do with it, OK?”
“Anything else?”
The man turned a couple of pages in the file. “I see you have an uncle.”
“You’re not interested in biology.”
“No, what interests me is that he is a North Korea police detective.”
“Retired.” Now we were getting somewhere, though not anywhere I wanted to be.
“Retired from North Korea, or retired from the police?” The old man closed the file and looked at Miss Bao. She picked up a new pen. The man smiled at me. “About your uncle, what is he up to?”
“Up to?” That wasn’t normal interrogation-speak. It was vague, left too much to the discretion of the person being grilled. “Up to? You mean right now?”
“Don’t repeat my questions. It wastes time. Just answer them.”
“Sure. Want to try being more specific?”
“Your uncle is still in touch with people across the river. How does he contact them?”
“Well, if I knew that the first part of your question was correct, I might have a clue how to answer the second part. As far as I know, he’s not in contact.”
“We’ve noticed funny people hanging around near your house.”
“You have any photographs? That might help.”
The old man nodded to Mr. Penguin, holding down the east flank of the office. “Show him the pictures.”
2
By the time the questioning and answering was done, the morning flight had left. So had the one at two o’clock. It was already late afternoon. The session had not been friendly; it certainly had not been short. By the end, I was tired, hungry, and plenty mad. I don’t like being badgered, especially for prolonged periods. If they weren’t going to drag me away, then they could go to hell as far as I was concerned, sore shoulders and all. I told them that. They finally stopped and looked at the woman with the pens. She shook her head; they straightened their ties and told me to go home, so I did.
The house was quiet when I stepped inside, which meant my uncle was in his workshop, either dozing or contemplating plans for another bookcase. It turned out to be the latter. He had a pencil in his hand and a slight frown on his face.
“I can come back,” I said. After being the object of a nightlong interrogation, I wasn’t about to deal with his moods.
“You could. Or you could come in.” He put down the pencil. “You have some sort of news or you wouldn’t be home this time of day. You left in the middle of the night; now here you are. You’ve been cashiered?”
“I need to sit. May I?”
“Sit, by all means. Of course, sit.” He pointed to a stool in the corner of the room. “Let’s see if the new glue I tried this morning dries as fast as they say.”
I sat gingerly. “First, if you see strange people hanging around the house with or without cameras, let me know, all right? Second, unknown quarters in MSS Headquarters filed an oversight complaint. That has worked its way up through channels, where it lodged in the brain of someone in charge of sending out special teams. One of those teams was in my office. That’s where I’ve been.”
My uncle picked up his pencil again and made a few marks on the bookcase plans. From what I could see, this one was to be built into a house with a fifteen-meter high ceiling. It actually looked like it might go well in Mrs. Zhou’s file room.
“The complaint is against you,” I said. “It is serious.”
My uncle grunted. “The problem with lumber around here nowadays is that it dries out too quickly. Even if I go to Harbin, it’s the same problem. You’d think good lumber would be easy to find at least somewhere in this country. You Chinese are buying up everyone’s resources, but you can’t import good lumber? If I’m going to build something fifteen meters high, the lumber has to be straight. Straight means straight, not curvy like that wall of yours in the front hall.”
“Apparently, Headquarters held the complaint for a week while it was discussed at higher levels. The highest levels, actually. A decision was dropped back down with a great deal of sizzle attached two days ago, and the team was dispatched almost immediately.”
“Your headquarters is nothing but trouble. It always was as far as we were concerned. When I was in the Ministry, we never liked going through Beijing on liaison trips. Too many of your people breathing down our necks. Moscow wasn’t so great either, believe me, but it was tolerable. They treated us like germs.”
“Germs?”
“They didn’t want to catch us. Too much paperwork.”
“There’s never too much paperwork here. I think it has something to do with inbreeding at the court. Like those little dogs.”
“Let’s be realistic. Why would anyone complain about me?”
I stifled my first response.
“Don’t stifle yourself, boy. What possible reason could they have? It wasn’t for making a scene in a noodle restaurant.”
“We’ve been through this already. You were among the last people to see Madame Fang before she disappeared, maybe the last. She must be close to someone in Shanghai who misses her pearls.”
“She’s been close to a lot of people, not all of whom miss her. She’d be the first to tell you. I can probably get a hundred testimonials to that effect, if you want.”
“I don’t want. I was told they have a bulging file of reports from people who say they saw her come here to meet you, and the next thing anyone knew, she was on the wrong side of the river.”
“And this has what to do with me? We’ve already established I didn’t lure her. Do they think I smuggled her across in a sack of rice?”
“They think you have connections.” I didn’t mention the pictures I’d been shown.
“Good for them. If I had connections, job one would be to get lumber that doesn’t warp, not fool around with Madame Fang.”
“Well, she came up here to see you, and that has a lot of people wondering why. The complaint recommends that you be brought in for questioning. ‘Recommends’ is a word you don’t want to see in communications from Beijing. It’s a nasty, explosive term.”
“I must add it to my vocabulary cards someday. They want to ask questions? Fine, go ahead, ask. You can do it right here. You’re authorized to ask questions, aren’t you? Then you can sit down, write a report, send it by one of your jazzy special couriers back to the imperial censor.”
“They don’t want a piece of paper. They want flesh and blood, not necessarily in equal measure. No, you’re to be brought to Beijing, unless…”
My uncle tapped the pencil on the worktable. “Go on.”
“Unless you agree to work for MSS.”
“Meaning they’re desperate. Pah!”
“That’s not all.”
“Of course that’s not all. They’re threatening to drag you in if I don’t cooperate, right? They think that’s leverage? Complete fools, all of them.”
“I suppose you did things differently in your day?”
“My day?” The voice became treacherously calm. “Let’s leave my day out of this. That’s the past, beyond anything you can understand. You don’t know what my day was like. Or your father’s, for that matter.” It was the closest I’d ever heard him come to saying something kind about his brother.
“Forget I brought it up.” The old interrogator had handed me a summary of the complaint just before things broke up. It had found its way into one of my pockets, though which one I couldn’t recall. My uncle watched as I searched.
“You looking for something special, or is this a spring cleaning ritual? Try the back pocket.”
It was in the back pocket. “This is what we have to deal with, here and now.” I held it up for him to see. “To be clear, I’m not asking you to go to Beijing. I’m not orderi
ng you to do it either.”
“Good, because I’m not going. I travel to Harbin a few times a year. That’s enough of a concession to the wider world at my age.” He paused and drew a couple of lines on the plans. “I’ll do this much, I’ll meet them here.” He erased a line and drew another.
“Here? In this house? You expect them to crawl to see you?”
“In this workshop, about where you are now, though they won’t be sitting. And I won’t meet with a pack of them. It has to be only one.” He crumpled the plans and threw them in the corner along with the pile of his other ideas and dreams too bizarre or breathtaking to follow through to completion. “One or nothing at all,” he said.
“Impossible. They don’t do that sort of thing. Trust me.”
3
The knock on the door at 10:00 A.M. wasn’t crisp or authoritative. It was barely halfhearted. We were expecting a visit by an MSS Headquarters team at 10:30, so I needed to get rid of whoever was there. The last time I checked, about an hour earlier, my uncle was on his bench in the workshop, writing poetry. I had made sure there wasn’t anything overly sharp within reach and then left him alone.
Outside the front door, for a change, wasn’t a beautiful woman. There were three men. Two of them I didn’t recognize, though I knew the type. The third was the cook from the noodle restaurant. From the way the others were standing, they had no doubt that he was in charge. He wasn’t carrying a knife, not that I could see, anyway.
My uncle had offered him a job. Why he had asked two friends to come along on an interview struck me as a little odd. Maybe they were references; maybe he was insecure, though people who cut off other people’s hands tend not to be. In any case, if he was here, it meant I wouldn’t have to send Li Bo-ting out to find out who he was. I could take him back to my uncle for fifteen or twenty minutes, slip in some of my own questions, and then show him the door.
“Welcome,” I said, not wanting to show surprise at seeing the cook again. I held the door half open. There was no chance I could keep all of them out if they charged in; there was no sense pretending I was going to slam the door. “Maybe your friends would like to wait outside. It’s a nice day, they can watch the birds.”
