by James Church
There were only four men in the room. Three sat in a row along the table, facing the door. The fourth stood in one of the dark corners, smoking. I didn’t recognize any of them. The man sitting in the center, apparently in charge, indicated I should occupy the chair across from him. Then nothing happened. The smoker gave no indication he’d seen me come in. No one spoke. Finally, he put out the cigarette in an ashtray balanced on the windowsill. He took a seat at the end of the table, apart from the rest of us.
“Good,” I said. “Everyone comfortable? I suggest we introduce ourselves. As you may know, I’ve been in the countryside for a few years and haven’t kept up with personnel news.”
The man across from me fingered the edges of a folder. He was military, he sat like a military man, but he was wearing a civilian suit and you could tell he didn’t like it. “We know who you are,” he said. “And we know who we are. That should be sufficient.”
“Sufficient for you, maybe, not for me.” Something else would have been smarter to say, but that’s what came out. Living alone on a mountaintop, you lose a little social grace. “This meeting, it isn’t what was agreed. I agreed to stay away; you agreed never to call me back.”
“We know what was agreed, Inspector. What was agreed is right here.” The man slid the folder across the table. “Go ahead; look at it. Make sure that’s your signature and everything is in order, exactly what you signed. Nothing has been altered. This isn’t a copy; it’s the original, same bloodstains on page three.” The man to his right nodded slightly. The man sitting to his left, his hands folded over each other as if they were a pair of gloves, stared at me. It was one of those mean, I-could-make-your-life-miserable stares that colonels practice in the mirror.
Stares don’t bother me, but bloodstains? Blood I usually remember, especially if it’s mine. I seemed to recall that I had bled but only metaphorically in the struggle over the agreement’s final wording. They could have dictated the whole thing if they had wanted. That would have made it easier, but the battle was as important to them as the words. So we wrangled for a couple of weeks over details until I finally said, “Put down whatever the hell you want,” and they took that as surrender enough, even though they knew I didn’t mean it.
The signed document—the one in the folder on the table—allowed me to leave the Ministry of People’s Security in 2011, a year before my official retirement, get out of Pyongyang, and withdraw from everything that was about to happen if I promised never to speak of what I’d seen or heard during my years of service—or, equally important to them, anything my grandfather had told me. My grandfather had fought with the anti-Japanese guerrillas. He knew the founding members of the new government; he knew what went on in headquarters during the war; he watched the postwar years unfold. They named him a Hero of the Revolution and buried him with high honors, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t always worried every time he opened his mouth.
I had thought they would pack me off to Yanggang, drop me as far away as they could, so the only ones who might listen to the old stories about people and events that were never supposed to be told would be a few pheasants and the ghosts of the tigers that had gone away long ago. But instead of Yanggang, someone picked an empty mountaintop near Changsong with a view of a little river valley. I don’t think it occurred to them that, as far as I was concerned, the view was a plus.
An old truck carrying a load of scrap lumber took me up the road to the top of the mountain one foggy morning in April. The driver and I had to get out a few times to move big rocks that had tumbled down the hillside and blocked the way. Near the top of the mountain was a small clearing, surrounded by a few tall trees. In the center was a hut that wouldn’t last another winter, so from the moment the truck drove away until the first morning of autumn—sharp with cold and crystal clear—I was mostly alone, building a one-room house using my grandfather’s carpenter’s tools. One afternoon in July, after three days of rain that made it impossible for me to work, a team of soldiers appeared. They had strung a phone line up the side of the mountain, and when I said I didn’t want it they told me they couldn’t care less. Two men in a Ministry car drove up with the phone three months later, just before the first snow. I told them I didn’t need a phone, but they said it was implied in the agreement and it had to be hooked up. In any case, the army had already installed the line and it would be a waste of the people’s resources if it stayed unconnected, they said.
After that, the phone rang a couple of times a year—it was usually an operator ostensibly running a line check and not interested in speaking more than a few words. I knew what this really was, a routine check to make sure I hadn’t disappeared. As further insurance, in case I fooled with the phone or learned to throw my voice really well, they put the guard shack on the road at the foot of the mountain. It was a waste of everybody’s time—the phone and the guards—but time was what they thought they had plenty of, and someone in the Ministry had decided they had nothing better to spend it on than me. When the road was open, food came once a month in the old truck. Twice a year, on the big holidays, a Ministry driver brought two bottles of liquor.
“Happy day, Inspector,” he’d say, stretching his legs and looking in all four directions at the view.
“I’m not an inspector anymore.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not a delivery boy, but I drove all the way up here to give you those bottles, so sometimes we have to be what we aren’t, I guess.”
4
“First of all.” I pushed the folder to one side. “Let’s get something straight. I’m not an inspector. I resigned, handed in all documentation, badges, identification, keys, and privileges attached thereto.” I checked to see if the mean stare across the table was still running; it was. “Second, maybe you can read in a dark room like this, but I can’t, not anymore. It’s the eyes.”
“Perhaps you’d rather be somewhere the lights are on twenty-four hours a day.” The staring man spoke up. He was younger than the other two, seemed comfortable in a dark room at a long table. I changed my mind. Probably not military, but I couldn’t figure out where he fit. He looked too intelligent to be SSD. When they stared, their jaws went slack. “It’s very tiring, I hear, having lights all the time,” he said. His voice had a lulling cadence. “Then again, with constant lighting, you could read whenever you wanted.”
The man at the end of the table stirred. The others glanced at him quickly, but he only looked idly into space, as if they weren’t there.
The military man in the center frowned to himself. If I had been interrogating him, I would have said he was trying not to show how angry he was. The frown was covering something, but he wouldn’t let it out. Finally, he pointed at me. “Go through that folder tonight. Study it carefully again in the morning when you wake up. Read through it as many times as you want during the rest of the day, in the sunlight. We’ll meet here again tomorrow, after dinner.” This was an order; it made him feel better to be giving orders, you could tell.
“I can’t, regrettably,” I said.
The younger man leaned forward. “You have another appointment?” There was a sneer hanging on the edge of the voice. I revised my estimate—he was definitely SSD. Sneering was something they all picked up after a while, like diphtheria.
“No, I’m returning home. I don’t, as it happens, have a change of clothes.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw the man at the end of the table smile, almost in spite of himself. “Maybe later, Inspector,” he said so quietly that the others had to strain to hear. “But for now, you’re needed here.”
I could sense the discomfort across the table as soon as he spoke. There was nothing overt, no clearing of throats or tightening of lips, but the temperature in the room went down suddenly, and they sat like ice figures. It didn’t seem to bother the man on the end. He lit another cigarette and leaned back in his chair, very much at ease. All right, I thought to myself, time to leave. I whisked the folder off the desk and stood up.
/> “An honor,” I said, and nodded. The nod was a good touch, I thought. It came almost automatically. Social grace was trickling back into my system. “I’ll study this closely.”
As I backed out of the room, the general in the center closed his eyes and slowly exhaled. The other two, sitting motionless beside him, didn’t seem to be breathing at all.
5
The little man outside the room was holding my jacket. Li was waiting in the elevator. The girl with the white gloves looked at the carpet.
“As usual, you didn’t take my advice, I can tell,” Li said.
“As usual, it wasn’t very good advice.”
As we retraced our steps, I remembered it had been a long time since I’d eaten. “You hungry?”
“No, but I’ll watch.”
“Don’t worry; I’ll buy.”
Li shook his head. “At these prices, you’ll change your mind, believe me.”
We drove back up the ramp out of the garage into the night. “So find a cheap restaurant. I probably owe you. Where am I staying, by the way?”
Li took a piece of paper from his pocket. “You’re an honored guest, O. Anything you want. Wine, women, color TV.”
We drove a few blocks and then turned parallel to the river.
“That bad, huh?”
“I told you.”
“So you did. Who was that character at the end of the table?”
The car pulled up to a building that was spilling oceans of electricity into a neon sign. “Here’s your hotel,” Li said. He’d heard my question; he wasn’t going to answer. “Pleasant dreams. You can call room service if you’re hungry. Put it on the room tab.”
“I walk in, they smile and hand me a key?”
“We don’t use keys anymore. Electronic locks. The room is stocked with liquor. Drink it up. Watch TV as much as you want; lots of stations from lots of places. It may amuse you.” He looked at me, funnylike.
“What?”
“You ever heard of Rip van Winkle?”
“Dutchman, by the sound of it.”
“Went to sleep, woke up in a different world.”
“Sounds like a good idea. I’ll set the alarm for five years from now.”
“Don’t bother; it’s already here.”
6
The desk clerks were expecting me, three of them, very bright eyed. The lobby was bright. The colors of the chairs were bright. The whole thing gave me a headache.
“I’m told I have a room waiting,” I said, and looked at the carpet, red with orange fish dancing across a shimmering sea.
“Welcome.” Three clerks, three heads bobbing in unison.
The first of them put a piece of paper on the counter and waved a pen. “Check the information and then sign, if you please. You’re staying with us for six nights?”
“Who said I’m staying here six nights?” I signed the form without glancing at it. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
The oldest of the trio nodded vigorously and gave me a little folder with a plastic card in it. “This is your room key. Room Twelve Nineteen, that’s on the twelfth floor. Breakfast starts at six thirty on the second floor.” He delicately indicated the second floor, his arm extended just so. “And the bar is downstairs, to the left.” Also delicately indicated.
“Your luggage is arriving later?” The third of the trio was pretty, like a little bird. She might at any moment, I thought, break out in chirps and whistles.
“No luggage. I was told? . . . never mind.” Since when did I explain myself to hotel front desks?
The bird rang a small bell; a young man in a tight-fitting yellow uniform appeared next to me. He put out his hand, which I shook. “How do you do?” I said.
He looked at the trio and then at me. “Hand over the key card. I’ll take you to your room.”
“No need,” I said. “I know my way around these places.”
“Sure,” the young man said. “All the same, it would be my pleasure.”
I shuddered inwardly. Unctuousness and neon—a killer combination I had thought would never make it this far up the peninsula, not to Pyongyang. I looked around. The lobby had a few chairs in one corner and a potted plant in another. Along the front wall, near the revolving glass door, was a single chair. Slumped in it was a man wearing a cheap suit and a vacant expression. He had the look of someone doomed forever to stare into morning fog off an empty coast. His eyes took me in, but I wasn’t sure what had registered. It was all getting to be unnerving—the streetlights, the lobby, this man staring into nothing. Maybe Li was right. Maybe I really didn’t know as much as I thought I once did. Maybe I didn’t know anything anymore.
Chapter Two
The young man in yellow came up in the elevator with me, opened the door to a room, turned on the lights, and stood next to the bed. “The TV is there,” he said. “The bathroom is there.”
It was a big room, but not so big I couldn’t have figured out either of those on my own. “Sure.” I looked around. “Classy place. Wouldn’t want to confuse those two.”
“You can get music in the bath if you like. There’s a TV screen there, too, if you get lonely. Don’t worry; it only goes one way.”
I nodded.
“Also, the drapes open electronically. Don’t try fooling with them by hand or you’ll break something. I can find you something if you get real lonely, better than the TV.” He rubbed the fingers on one hand together.
“Why don’t you go back downstairs and be slimy with your friends?”
He didn’t seem offended; at least, the grin he gave me looked real enough. “I could do that.” He held out his hand.
“I already shook with you. Is this a new hotel custom, shaking hands on every floor?”
“A tip, you know—a gratuity, service charge, payment in advance for errands to be run, a friendly barrier against unfavorable winds and life’s unexpected turns. See what I mean?”
I walked past him to the door, held it open, and jerked my head in the direction of the hallway. “I’ll give you a tip,” I said. “Don’t play with matches.”
2
I sat on the bed and studied the place. It was square, and no attempt had been made to hide that basic fact. “You are paying to sleep in a box,” each of the walls said. One of them had a window in the center, which might have broken the monotony except that the window was square. If I’d had a suitcase, at this point I would have unpacked. There was a certain satisfaction, I recalled, in unpacking a suitcase in a hotel room. On overseas liaison trips for the Ministry, I stayed mostly in cheap rooms. To open the drawers and put something in, even only a pair of socks, gave an air of permanence, of personality, to a place.
The bureau was pine stained to look like something else. It had three drawers. I opened each of them. Usually there was a piece of paper, emergency instructions, something in them. These were empty, a mini-universe of infinite nothingness. I took the wood chips from my pocket and dumped them on the desk. This place needed something. There was nothing homey about it, not like the Koryo Hotel. Why hadn’t they put me up there? Maybe they were installing the neon lights and laying new carpets. I hated to think what had been done to its lobby.
A soft knock on the door brought me back. “What?” I wasn’t expecting visitors.
“Housekeeping.”
“Go away.”
“Turndown service.”
I walked over to the entryway. “Turndown what?”
“Turndown service.”
I opened the door to find a middle-aged woman in a maid’s uniform. “I’m supposed to turn down your bed and leave a candy on your pillow,” she said. “You want it or don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.” I started to close the door, but then a question occurred to me. “Who owns this place?”
“What?”
“Who owns this hotel? It’s foreign, isn’t it? It doesn’t feel right. The fellow in the tight pants even asked for a tip.”
She gave me a big smile. “I’m sure I don
’t know what you mean, sir.”
“Sir? Who taught you to say that? I suppose you curtsey now, too.”
She bobbed her head. “Good evening and pleasant dreams.”
The phone rang, so I closed the door and went over to the desk. The phone was white, new, with lots of buttons on it. I took a chance and punched one of them. “Yes?”
“Inspector, I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Who is this?”
“You don’t recognize my voice?”
“Should I?”
“This is Major Kim. We saw each other briefly this evening, though we weren’t introduced. I thought we might have a drink, talk a little, trade stories. That sort of thing.”
“That sort of thing.”
“If you’re hungry, we can get a bite to eat. I don’t think the hotel restaurant is still open, and the room service menu is not exciting, but there are other places nearby you might enjoy.”
“Noodles.”
“What’s that?”
“I said noodles. I like noodles.”
“Well, then, noodles it is.” A silence. “You there?”
“Sure.” This was the man who made everyone nervous. I didn’t need noodles all that badly. “I was thinking. It’s getting late; maybe I should skip eating tonight.”
“Don’t do that, Inspector. You never know when you’ll get another chance.”
No wonder he makes people nervous, I thought. “OK, where?”
“I’m in the parking lot in front of the hotel right now. Come down in five minutes. You’ll find me; don’t worry.”
“I’ll be wearing what I had on before.”
“I know.”
3
The restaurant was in a building that hadn’t been there the last time I was in Pyongyang. It was in my old patrol sector, and in those days I knew every crummy structure, every crack in every façade, every doorway out of plumb, and every crooked window. This place was modern, only three stories high but very sleek. The front door opened to a small vestibule where a young woman in a low-cut long red dress waited.
