by James Church
The heftiest man, with the neck of a bullock, hauled himself up to his full height, which wasn’t all that much. There’s going to be trouble, I thought and reached behind the door for a steel bar I keep handy.
The cook shook his head. “No need for anything physical. If my colleagues can wait inside, everything will be fine.” Colleagues? This was a gaggle of noodle chefs?
I made a command decision. “They can wait in the office,” which sounded more official than “the library.”
The cook’s eyebrows went up slightly. “And where is the royal audience to take place?”
“You’ll see.” I put the steel bar back against the wall and opened the door the rest of the way. The group followed me down the hall to the office/library. “You two amuse yourselves here. Those things on the shelves are books. None of them are cookbooks; otherwise you could find new ways to prepare bird’s nest soup.” The bullock scowled and occupied the red velvet chair. I closed the door and locked it from the outside.
“Won’t do any good,” said the cook evenly. “They’re both pretty good with locks. You’ll have noticed that Mr. Liang has a big right shoulder. Locked doors don’t stand a chance.”
We walked quickly down the hall and across the courtyard to the entrance of the workshop. At the doorway, the cook stopped suddenly. “Wait a minute. Is he here? Because if he’s not here, you’re going to be sorry.”
I put my hands in my pockets. “Calm down. This is his workshop.” I jerked my head in the right direction. “Lucky for you, he’s in a good mood. Don’t be nervous. He’ll just ask a lot of questions about noodles. Keep your answers short.”
As we entered, my uncle was pondering a sheet of paper. He put a finger to his lips. “A moment, please, I’m on the edge of finding the right word.” He concentrated again on the paper. “What I need is something that sounds like grass when the wind sweeps across a field.”
He looked up and frowned when he saw the cook. “You wouldn’t know anything like that, I suppose. Any language will do.”
“Very sweet. You’ve taken up poetry in your old age, O?” The cook glanced around the room. He was speaking Korean. “Still stuck on wood, I see. Any of these finished?” He pointed at the bookshelves against the wall.
“It depends on what you mean. I consider them finished. They served their purpose. To you they may appear incomplete, but that’s because you always had a bad habit of starting from the wrong place.”
“It’s never my starting point that has been the problem, it’s where I’ve ended up. I’m not going to play around with you, O. No one is anymore.”
I moved toward the door. If the man wanted a job, he was going about it the wrong way. The mood music didn’t seem scored for sharing fond memories. “Time for me to check on your sous chefs,” I said.
“They’re fine.” The cook took his eyes off my uncle and pinned them on me. “I want you here during the questioning. In fact, maybe you ought to make yourself useful and take notes.”
“Notes?” I echoed. “For what?”
My uncle nodded. “Good idea. We need a record of this encounter.” He sat back and smiled. “A complete record, nothing omitted. Nothing added afterward, either. I know how you make yourself look good in the reporting.”
“All right, O,” said the cook. “Let’s get this over with.” He took out a small notebook and flipped through several pages. “I’m going to ask a series of questions. They are perfectly clear, but I’m willing to repeat them once if you want to play your old games. Then you’re going to answer each one of them, and for a change, you’re not going to give me long, involved answers. I don’t want to hear any tortured logic or elliptical phrasing. You’re going to get to the point and stay on it. Don’t build me a watch. Am I getting through?”
“Like a brick over the transom.”
The cook smiled, only I didn’t think he was happy. “We’ll start with the obvious, and work from there.”
“Let me ask you a question first, if that’s allowed.” My uncle was also speaking in Korean, but it was very clipped so I had a hard time following. “Since when do you work for the Chinese? Or should I ask, how long have you been on their payroll? You can’t cook, by the way. You should be arrested for trying. You’re not with the MSS, I take it.”
“You can take it any way you want, O. My career path isn’t under the microscope here. Yours is.”
My uncle turned to me. “I want a verbatim record. Verbatim as in word for word. Even the pauses. Nothing left to the imagination. If you miss something, anything, just tell us to wait until you catch up. There’s a pad of paper on the top shelf of that red lacquered bookshelf.”
The cook moved quicker than I did. He lifted the pad from the shelf and fanned through the empty pages. “Nothing here you don’t want me to see, is there? Maybe I should have the boys take apart this workshop. They’d enjoy that.”
“Go ahead, try it.” My uncle retrieved a long-handled chisel I’d missed from under the workbench. “You’ll lose more than a hand if you do.”
“Are you threatening me, old man? Because you don’t want to do that.”
“You said you had some questions. Why don’t you ask them and leave aside the tough stuff?”
“Where is she?”
My uncle laughed. “That’s the first question on your carefully composed list? No warm-up? No setting the stage? No priming the pump? What happened to foreplay?”
The cook grabbed a board from the floor and smashed it against the workbench. “There’s your foreplay.” My uncle didn’t flinch. “Next time, it will be your head, Inspector, and if you don’t think so, just try me.”
“I’m no longer an inspector, and if you break another board you’ll have to pay for it. That’s red sparrow wood, very rare and expensive.” He looked at me. “Make a note of it. We’ll check the prices later.”
“Yeah, and make a note of this, while you’re at it. Inspector O refuses to cooperate.”
“What the hell is this about?” I wasn’t following very well.
My uncle tossed the paper and pen aside. The two of them glared at me. My uncle climbed down first. “All right. Let’s start over.” He picked up his pencil. “I still need a word that sounds like the wind sighing through the grass. That’s where we were when you walked in.”
The cook picked up one of the splintered pieces of wood. “You are either a prime suspect or an accomplice, O. That’s the thinking in Beijing. This time you can’t charm your way out of trouble. They’re serious about bringing you in. And once they’re done, they’ll toss what’s left of you out across the river. You don’t want that, do you?”
“Meaning what? You’re here to save me the trouble? You’re finally going to do me a favor? One of several you still owe me.”
“Me owe you?” The moment of calm had passed. “I owe you spit, and this is why. Drugs over the border. Money laundering. Illegal goods. Bribes. An occasional body floating down the river. Teams of agents crossing at night for completely forbidden operations, then racing back. Kidnapping. Prostitution. Gun running.”
“That’s it?” My uncle yawned.
“No, one more thing. Suborning an MSS officer.” He whacked the broken piece of wood on the workbench.
My uncle glanced at me from the corner of his eye and then looked back at the cook. “He came over completely on his own. No photos. No tapes. We never even bought him a drink.”
“The hell you didn’t.” Whack!
“What, you think there is money enough to buy someone to cross the river backward? Or enough embarrassment in a single heart? Be realistic for a change, will you? He jumped. We didn’t push; we didn’t pull. We didn’t even know he was coming. One fine day I turned around and there he was. I told him to go back where he came from, spent most of an hour arguing with him. Might has well have been talking to a ginkgo tree. He insisted he was staying. Completely adamant, almost pleading.”
“O, in your old age you can’t carry it off anymore. Once
you might have skated by with a story like that. Not anymore. It doesn’t convince me, and it won’t convince them in Beijing. They want to know what he told your people, what he brought with him. They need to know, and they’re going to make sure you tell them.”
“What if I wasn’t in the debriefings?”
“You admit he was debriefed?”
“Admit?” My uncle snorted. “What’s to admit? The director of the MSS office in Yanji skips out and turns up on the wrong side of the river. Show me someone dumb enough to think that he wouldn’t be asked a lot of questions.”
“Where is he now?” Whack.
“Now? Don’t know. Really, I don’t know. He disappeared. It wasn’t my job to keep track of him. I wasn’t appointed his babysitter. Not in my position description, and I checked. Maybe he settled down with some beauty in a big, drafty apartment and died of overfulfillment. I didn’t enquire.”
“We want him back. He says he wants to come home, and we want him back.”
“We? Ha! Since when are you one of them? I wish you all the best. Every bit of all the best. Is this conversation done? I’m in the middle of a poem.”
The cook threw the piece of wood on the floor. “I’m not authorized to pull you by the ears out of this house, O. Someone will be here later today for that. You might want to pack a bag.” He turned to go and then turned back. “You are the most stubborn, infuriating person I’ve ever met. But I think you knew that already.”
I would have bet my uncle would not take that as criticism, but I didn’t expect him to smile so broadly. “Allow me one more question, will you?”
The cook frowned. “It’s not your show—but go ahead; what the fuck do I care about anything these days?”
“Are you in communication with Fang?”
“Me?” For the first time, the cook laughed. It had a mean undertone to it, but it qualified as a laugh. “Are you kidding? Why would she have anything to do with me? I’m not her type.”
“You’re not, but you know what I mean. Is she sending reports out through you?”
“I don’t have access to operational reporting. That’s not what I do.”
“No, you just make bad noodles. OK, never mind. It was worth asking, though.”
After I had seen the cook and his friends out the door and locked it, I went back to my uncle’s workshop. “Who the hell is he? What’s going on?” I had a pretty good idea, but I wanted to hear it from my uncle.
“He’s not one of yours? I thought he might be.” My uncle looked at the dent in his workbench and the splintered wood on the floor. “In that case, he must belong to someone else in your system, which complicates things. How I’m not sure, and you don’t want to make inquiries.”
“Don’t tell me when not to inquire! I heard what you said. I’d have to be in a coma not to realize that at some point in the past he worked with you, or for you, or some damned thing on your side. What the hell was he doing cooking noodles in Yanji?”
“That’s what I’d like to figure out, once I clean this place up.”
“Screw noodles, I don’t care about noodles. I want to know who that guy is. He was here with a pair of thick friends. I would like it if they didn’t come back to my house. Now, this minute, I need to know exactly who he is. I can’t call to get protection unless I know whose orders are supposed to be countermanded, and even then I might not be able to do it.” I picked up one of the pieces of broken wood. “See this? This is going to feel like goose down when they’re through with us.”
“You have that envelope with the money that Miss Du gave us?”
“Yes, it’s in my desk.”
“Where you parked his two plague rats? Why didn’t you just hand them the cash wrapped in a red ribbon?”
He reached under a pile of wood and came up with another envelope. “Never mind. Here’s the rest of it. She sent it over the next morning while you were at your office. That’s 120,000 yuan. Even if we lost the down payment, there’s plenty here for two plane tickets out of the country.”
“Out of the country? Not a chance. How are we going to breeze past immigration, even if we get out our front door? And no, under no circumstances am I going across that damned river, like—” Then it hit me. I had to sit down. “This just got a lot worse than I thought.”
He gave me a blank look. “A weather front. It will pass.”
“Not this time. I think this time the consequences are deadly.”
“Consequences? What would you know about consequences in this hothouse of a country? I’m not asking for your help, and I don’t plan to stay here forever. I’ll go back when the time is right. There is going to be a break in the clouds at some point. There always is.”
“You’re going to go back. Whenever you’re ready. I’m not pushing you out, but I can’t help either of us if I don’t have a better idea what is going on. You think keeping things from me is going to make the road easier? Most of that conversation you had with the cook, or whoever he is, didn’t make a lot of sense.”
“It wasn’t supposed to make sense. I wanted to see how much he knew.”
“So what did you find out?”
“It’s lunchtime, isn’t it? Let’s not have noodles.”
Chapter Six
“It little profits that an idle king.”
After dinner we were following our usual practice of sitting in the library. I looked up from the pile of bills on my desk. “If anyone would know about an idle king, you would.”
“No need to be literal. It’s poetry. Rings nicely, wouldn’t you say?” He had a small book open in front of him.
“That wasn’t your line, I take it.”
My uncle had a dreamy quality in his eyes as he surveyed the room. I didn’t like that look. I’d seen it before. Nothing good came from it.
“All art is shared,” he said and waved his hand airily. “Like all ideas are shared. That goes for existence, too.”
He didn’t believe such a thing, not for an instant. I’d listened to him long enough to know that he believed life was solitary, each of us in our own cage. “Shared? I tell you what we need to have shared. Money. Maybe we can get someone with a lot of money to share a little with us, wouldn’t that be something?”
“Why are you so obsessed with money? The grand crypto-capitalism that has infected this society seems to have only one thing on its mind—money. Getting, saving, keeping, spending, owing, or paying money. More money. Not enough money. Money just around the next corner. I see in the newspaper that prices of apartments in Shanghai have doubled in six months.”
“Too bad we don’t have an apartment in Shanghai.”
“Yes, let’s get an apartment and then spend every waking hour calculating how much will be lost if prices go down next week. Pah! Ridiculous. You don’t even like that city.”
“You’re right. Forget money. We’ll sit here and wait for food to appear magically at our door. A food fairy on a motor scooter will deliver it.”
My uncle closed the book. “Fine, you have my full attention. I’m listening. What do you propose we do?”
I gathered my wits. Rarely was I asked for an opinion. It was a moment that called for supreme caution. The old man was always a step ahead of me, and he never left much room in the passing lane. The surest way to get in front was to hang back, not give him a chance to say no before I’d even prepared the battlefield. One false move, I knew, and we’d end up doing exactly what he wanted, no matter how much he painted it to look like my suggestion. I thought fast, but not fast enough.
“Very well.” He jumped in ahead of me. “You contemplate the options, I’ll review where things stand. Stop me any time you think I have something wrong.”
I pushed the pile of bills into the drawer. “Go ahead.”
“First, there is an odd current swirling around us, set off by the sudden appearance of Madame Fang. You never should have opened the door to that woman, but you did.” He held up his hand before I could say anything. “Past is past
. We can’t fix that first fatal step, so we won’t anguish about it.”
“Second?”
“Second, two disappearances, Madame Fang and Lieutenant Fu.”
I never discussed what went on at the office with him. I was sure I didn’t talk about it in my sleep. How did he know about Lieutenant Fu? “Who told you anything about Fu?”
“It’s not important. You have your sources. I have mine. Fu disappeared. I never liked him.”
“You knew him?”
“Nephew, this is and is not a closed system we inhabit. The illusion is one of stark degrees of separation. Believe me, it is only that, an illusion. Yes, there may be a billion Chinese, but there are a very limited number that deal with your border up here, and from that an even more limited number moving back and forth across the river with doctored passports and an odd mincing walk. Fu Bin had a strange walk, you have to admit. Many Third Bureau people do.”
“Oh, really?” What did my uncle know about how Third Bureau people walked? They weren’t supposed to have anything to do with foreigners; even their existence was supposed to be kept secret from outsiders. The Third Bureau didn’t even show up on the Ministry’s internal organization charts. “Anything else I should understand about what you think you know about my ministry? How far do these hands of friendship across the border go?”
“You’re the bureau director, I’m not telling you your business.”
“Thank you.” Third Bureau officers on the other side of the river? That was exactly my business. No Chinese official with operational knowledge was supposed to go into North Korea without approval from the local MSS bureau director. Lots of rules get bent, but not this one. This one was supposed to be ironclad. No exceptions. I hadn’t given approval, not to Fu Bin or anyone else. All meetings with sources were supposed to take place in China; that way we could control the environment and avoid unpleasant surprises. Handout was a source, he could skip into North Korea anytime his heart desired, but not his handler. So what was this about? Was Fu Bin making extra cash to support his love life, or was the Third Bureau now running private operations? Either way it was bad. Another thread to pull.
