by James Church
The one in the yellow shirt glanced down at his. “This is fine,” he said. “I picked it out this morning special for you.” He looked up and smiled, a self-assured smile that had Beijing written all over it. “You want to see some ID?” He looked over at his partner. “Maybe we should show him some ID.”
The blue suit nodded slightly. “Sure, why not?” He put his notebook down and stood up. “Which ID do you want to see?”
“The one that will make me shiver with admiration.”
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to pretend we didn’t get off to such a bad start. We’re going to pretend that we knocked softly at your door, that you came over and let us in, shook hands real nice, offered us a seat, and called your tea lady to bring us some refreshments. How about we do that?”
“That’s OK by me.” I waved the blue suit back to his chair. “Do we need names, or do we just point pens at each other?”
“You’re Bing.”
“True.”
“I’m not.” The blue suit grinned.
“Neither am I.” The yellow shirt smoothed his tie.
“Good.” The blue suit beamed. “Now that we have that out of the way, we can get to business. You want to call your tea lady, or does she come in all by herself when you have company?”
“Mrs. Zhou?” I picked up the phone. “Mrs. Zhou, will you bring in some tea?”
A voice from outside battered the door. “Tea? Do I look like a tea lady to you?”
I put down the phone. “Nothing personal, she does that all the time, even to me. You had questions?”
“No, we don’t have any questions.”
“Ah.” I paused and pondered the situation. “You’re here to report a crime? You want to turn yourselves in?”
“We are going to relay orders.”
“These couldn’t come in the normal manner?”
“We understand you’ve lost some files. Paper seems to disappear from this office. So it was decided not to risk using paper. It was decided that we’d pay a visit and whisper in your ear.”
“You each going to whisper in a separate ear, or do we go in order of seniority? The left ear is my bad one.” I turned my head slightly. “The right one is better, but someone nibbled on it the other night so it might look a little red.”
The yellow shirt cracked his knuckles. “You’re cute.”
“So I’m told. Why don’t you finish your business and clear out? I have work to do.”
The blue suit looked hurt. “Why, listen to him. He wants us out of here. Whatever shall we do?” He picked up the notebook again. Again he turned the pages slowly, smoothing them as he went.
“You said it wasn’t on paper.” I grinned.
“This? This is my menu for lunch, the dessert part. You like dessert?” He grinned back. So they knew that my wife ran away with a Japanese pastry chef and they were trying to pluck my strings? So what?
“I don’t eat dessert. In fact, I don’t even eat lunch these days. Why don’t you both go back where you came from. Can I borrow your pen? I’ll draw you a simple map of the road out of town. The one in the reception area might be a little complicated for you.”
“Maybe you should just listen for a change. I’m going to speak real slow, the way you country people do up here, everything in simple sentences. Ready?”
I looked at the yellow shirt. “The tie isn’t bad, but I think you’d look better with something natural on it. Rutting deer, maybe.”
The blue suit motioned his partner to sit still. “Point one. You are to proceed immediately to Ulan Bator and make contact with”—he looked back at the notebook, searching for his place—“Mr. Ding.”
Mongolia. There weren’t too many reasons they’d send me there. My current job didn’t call for a certificate in sheep shearing. This must be what my uncle had been speculating about the other night, a test to see how watertight the information channels were. “There’s only one Mr. Ding in Mongolia? I assume you don’t want me to put his name on a slip of paper as a reminder. I could make it look like a grocery list. Buy half doz Dings. That sort of thing.”
“He’ll be at a camp about forty kilometers east of the city. You rent a four-wheeled vehicle to get there. We own one of the clerks at the rental place, so it won’t be a problem.”
“What color?”
“If the owner is there, he’ll insist on giving you a driver when you do the paperwork, but you tell him you don’t need one. If you get a driver, we don’t know who he’s working for, you understand what I’m saying?”
“Perfectly.”
“When you get to the camp, Ding will brief you on step two.” He put away the notebook first, then the pen.
“That’s it? It took a pair of you to deliver that?” If the North Koreans found out about any of this, either my uncle or I—or both of us—wouldn’t be coming back. Or maybe that had already been decided, that’s what my uncle would say.
“If for any reason Ding is not there, you go to the fallback.”
“What if he’s late? How long do I wait for him?”
“You want to know the fallback? Because if you don’t, it’s fine with me. Is it fine with you?” He turned to the yellow shirt.
“Yeah, sure, fine with me. Let him rot with all those sheep for all I care. Someone told me there are wolves.” The partner gave me a toothy smile. “Wolves eat sheep, I hear.”
“See? It’s unanimous, we don’t care if you know the fallback.”
“But I bet it’s on your little lunch menu,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me what it is and then get the hell out of here? You’re wasting my time. I don’t have all morning.”
“You bet you don’t. You have to pack, you and that uncle of yours.”
“What’s my uncle got to do with this?” That clinched it. My uncle was right; this was the loyalty test. “If you think he’s going, too, you have another think coming. He doesn’t travel well.”
“Let me ask you a question. Strictly between you, me”—he nodded at the yellow shirt—“and the lamp post. You saw Fang Mei-lin a few days ago?”
“Says who?”
“Is she really hot?”
“You forgot something.”
“No, we didn’t forget anything.” He turned to his partner. “Did we forget anything?”
The yellow shirt shook his head. “Nothing. We didn’t forget nothing.”
“See? Oh, wait, I know. You want to know the fallback.” He turned to his partner. “Go on, tell him the fallback.”
“There isn’t one.”
2
I put in the rest of the day at the office. Part of the time I pieced together what information I could find on Jang, the new Third Bureau rat. Around noon I went for a walk with Lieutenant Li to tell him about my two visitors. Halfway down Renmin Road, Li stopped to look in the window of a medical supply store.
“Looking for something special, Lieutenant?”
“A man and a woman. Twenty meters behind us.” He pointed at a pair of crutches in the window. Anyone watching would have thought he was shopping.
“Should we lose them, or take them for a nice stroll?” I wasn’t happy with the way things were trending. First I learn strange people are loitering around my house and other people are photographing them. Now this. People weren’t supposed to tail me in my sector, certainly not two blocks from my office. “Anyone we know? The man doesn’t have on a yellow shirt, does he?”
“The woman hangs around the Muslim Hotel. The man started working at a massage parlor on Fenghou Hutong a couple of weeks ago. He’s wearing a dirty white shirt with a missing button. The slob doesn’t even know how to tuck it in. I have a little file on him, but nothing on her other than that she’s from out of town. How about we let them tag along? I need to see how good they are at this game.”
Half an hour later, we were sitting in a dumpling shop near Taiping Street. “I say we invite them in for lunch,” I said. “Maybe they’ll treat.”
; “I did some research on that kid Jang.”
“And?”
“And very blank. Lots of forms, all filled out in detail, all made up. Too normal, like they had come from a computer program. One thing checked out, though. You’ll like it.”
“I can’t imagine anything about Jang that I’ll like.”
“He’s related to the chief in Shanghai.”
I called the waiter over. “Two bottles of beer, and make it snappy. We’re celebrating.”
Li picked up a dumpling and put it on my plate. “Not only that, but he was slipped into the Third Bureau through a side door. That’s icing on the cake, right?”
He saw me frown.
“Sorry, wrong image in a dumpling joint.” Li always covered his mistakes pretty well. When the beer arrived, he poured for me and then a glass for himself. “Got to look ahead,” he said. He raised his glass. “To ridding the world of annoying people.”
“You can say that again,” I said and took a long swallow. “What do we know about Ping Man-ho?”
Li put down his beer glass rather oddly. “Ping Man-ho? Not much. He acts rich, he dresses sharp, and he does all right with the ladies. He travels now and then, nothing eye-catching. A few gaps in his trail, but those are normal. I was thinking of recruiting him a couple of years ago, so I ran a check. Nothing much of interest. When I tried to pitch him, he ran the other way. I guess he figured it would interfere with his lifestyle.” Li poured some more beer for me. “Why do you ask?”
“Let’s just say his name came up somewhere. There’s nothing funny going around about him?”
“Other than Gao’s complaints about never getting paid back, I haven’t heard anything. I’ll keep my ears open.”
I shrugged. “Don’t waste a lot of time on it.”
“It’s not my business,” Li said, “but how are things between you and your uncle?”
“What brought that on?”
“Birds are singing and bees are buzzing all of a sudden. Some of it has to do with your uncle. So I just wondered if there was anything going on.”
“You think that’s why the man with the missing button is following me, something to do with my uncle?”
Li mixed a large amount of hot mustard with a drop of soy sauce. He dipped a pork dumpling into the mix, put it in his mouth, and instantly started to sweat. His eyes filled with tears. “Beer,” he said. “Quick.”
“Why do you do that, Li? I’ve told you a hundred times, that mustard is going to take off your stomach lining.” I handed him the bottle that was full.
Li gulped half of it down and then took a deep breath. “Better than a bullet in the head.” He grinned. “This is nothing. Back home we’d eat this mustard as candy.” He grinned again and finished the beer. “If you don’t want to talk about your uncle, it’s OK with me. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s out of bounds.”
“There’s nothing special going on. He’s as hardheaded as always and doesn’t know how to back off. Still, he is my father’s brother, and he needs a place to stay. There’s plenty of room in the house, and besides, he knows what’s what on the other side of the river. He pretends he doesn’t, but if I provoke him enough, he gives me some interesting nuggets once in a while.”
“He’s not talking to the other side, I hope.” Li mixed himself more mustard. This time he used a drop more soy sauce. “Maybe he’d be more comfortable someplace else.”
This was Li’s way of telling me he thought my uncle should move out of my house.
“You have reason to think he’s still in touch?”
“Forget I raised it, OK?”
“You want the last pork dumpling? Or should we wrap it up and give it to the woman from the Muslim Hotel?”
3
After lunch, Li and I walked back to the office unaccompanied. The couple that had been tailing us was gone.
“They were better than they looked,” Li said. “The man dresses like a slob, but he’s no dope.”
“Shut down that massage parlor,” I said. “Let’s see where he turns up next.”
“What about the lady?”
“I can’t close the Muslim Hotel, too much trouble. Send her picture around the region, see if anyone recognizes it.”
“Do I mention why you want to know?”
“Say she lost her puppy, and we’re trying to help out.”
Li nodded. “I’ll send it out right away.”
It was early evening by the time I got home. From the moment I stepped into the house, I could tell my uncle had been into the kimchi. I opened the windows and let the breeze fight it out with the garlic.
My uncle was in his workshop, but he’d been alone all day so I didn’t think he’d mind the company. “Good evening, uncle. Sorry to be back so late.”
“Don’t apologize.” He was straightening up his worktable, putting the tools in some sort of order that made sense to him. “You don’t have to worry about me so much. I can take care of myself.”
“Can we talk?”
He indicated a newly built stool for me to sit on. “I had the pieces lying around for a couple weeks; let’s see how they fit. Tell me if it feels solid.”
I sat down. It felt solid. “I had some visitors at the office this morning.”
“I’ll probably put on a different seat. That one is made out of poplar, and I have a feeling it might itch.”
When I finished the story of the visitors, my uncle looked at me without saying anything. Then he frowned. “You didn’t see any ID. You don’t know who they are. You don’t know who this Ding character is. Yet you expect me to pack to go with you?”
“I asked someone whose knowledge about these things is impeccable.” It had taken Li Bo-ting several phone calls to find the answer. “He told me exactly who they were, down to the yellow shirt and the tan jacket. They aren’t too smart, but they’re legitimate.”
“Who are they, or are you going to dodge?”
I dodged. “Part of a unit attached to a hurriedly formed detail. It’s complicated. This detail operates without links to anything else. The people who fund it don’t know it exists, and they put their hands over their ears whenever someone tries to tell them.”
“Well, I want to know. All of a sudden I’m a big fan of transparency. I’ve been through too many of these go-here-go-there-look-under-the-bed operations. Step one is that Mr. Ding will be at the camp, you’re told. Oh, really? And will step two consist of our being buried where no one will ever find us once Mr. Ding carries out his orders?”
I had had a feeling my uncle would say that. “We’ll take it slow and careful. Don’t worry, no one is going to kill us.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“They’re not going to pay for air tickets to Mongolia just to do away with us there. It’s cheaper to do here.”
“Maybe.” My uncle didn’t sound convinced. “I’m still not going. You can if you want.”
“It’s not a question of want or not want.”
He was back to rearranging his tools. “It would do you good to go. See something of the world. When was the last time you were out of China? If you’re so sure about Ding, jump on the first plane to Mongolia.”
“Sure, I’ll see the world, and you’ll be right beside me. For once, you don’t have a choice.” I was going to have to scale back on being deferential and pull rank. Normally around him I was willing to play the junior officer. It didn’t cost me anything, other than a little extra enamel from grinding my teeth. This was different, though. “It’s either go with me or get hog-tied and carried to a basement in an old building on the outskirts of Beijing. I’m warning you, you won’t like it. It’s not a broadening experience.”
From the way he let a rasp drop on the workbench, I knew my uncle had picked up the change in my tone. “Maybe I could go back across the river. Maybe the weather’s cleared up.”
“Shall I wave good-bye from the front door?”
“Don’t bother.” He half-smiled, which hid plenty. “
So, you are off on a merry chase, following clues to bring home your errant knight. As we both know perfectly well, this is the loyalty test I mentioned to you. It’s more than that. They’re dropping you into an operation without any preparation. We would never have done anything like this.”
He was right, but I wasn’t going to let him crow. “Don’t pretend you know something if you don’t, all right? It isn’t helpful. That’s how things get off on the wrong foot. Why should our fish be in Mongolia? How the hell did he even get there? Why would some state seal be rolling around with a bunch of sheep, anyway? Maybe you’re right, but maybe not. Maybe it’s something else entirely.”
“Like what?”
“Give me a moment, I’ll come up with something.”
“You know what you lack? A hypothesis. If you don’t have a hypothesis, how do you know which way you are going and where you’ll end up? I’m reminded of the Blue Sparrow murders.”
“The what?”
“The Blue Sparrow murders.”
“I don’t want to hear about blue sparrow murders. We don’t have time for that now. Blue sparrows, red sparrows, birds of any type, color, wingspan, or mating habit, all immaterial.”
“The case was quite a challenge. Every now and then I go over it in my mind.” He folded his arms and looked innocently at me. “Not completely the same as what we have here, but instructive nonetheless.”
It was obvious that he wasn’t going to relent. We’d been through this sort of thing before, his raising “challenging cases” from the old days. I had learned the hard way that the more I objected, the more he would be determined to tell the tale. The best move was to feign interest. It saved time in the long run. “Why blue sparrows?”
“Did I say sparrows? I didn’t say sparrows plural. I said sparrow singular—Blue Sparrow, as in one small, dully brown little bird. Only one. If there had been more than one, I might not be here.”
“That’s a thought.”
“Blue Sparrow wasn’t a bird, actually. It was a code name, or a recognition sign more likely. We never found out exactly. Fascinating.” He nodded to himself. “Thoroughly fascinating case.”
“I’m waiting.” I pointed at my watch. “You are determined to tell me about it, so go ahead. I’ll give you five minutes. Maybe just the summary and conclusion will be enough? Then we could get on with figuring out how to save our necks.”
