by James Church
I started pulling away burned timbers. The ashes were still hot; in places a flame flared when it found a breath of oxygen. Li stood and watched. Finally, I touched a piece of metal. It scorched my fingers, but I didn’t care, because I knew what it was—the old wood plane that my grandfather had given me fifty, no, sixty years ago.
“Look at this, Li.” I pulled the plane from the wreckage. “My grandfather said it had been his father’s and that he wanted to give it to his son. But that wasn’t to be—he would always say that more to himself than to me. He hated to talk about what happened to his son, my father. Everyone lost someone in the war, so he didn’t want to be seen as complaining. But he felt the loss deeper than anything I could imagine then. Even now, I don’t think I can feel anything that deeply.”
Li didn’t say anything. He was listening the way people do when someone else reaches inside for the story that they never want to tell.
“It wasn’t until I was older, maybe ten or twelve, that he went into any detail about how my parents had died. He had told us right away, my brother and me, that they were dead. The same night he found out, he sat us down and told us, but he hadn’t gone into detail. We were too young, and he didn’t know what words to use. So he waited. When he finally told me, he was sanding a piece of ash. It was from a tree that had crashed through a neighbor’s house in a windstorm a few weeks before. The whole family had died. I still remember that storm.”
Li was looking down the road. He was pale.
“Something wrong?”
“No, just thinking about the wind. I grew up on the coast. When the wind blew hard, the fishing boats couldn’t go out. A few did, but they never came back.” He blinked, and his face seemed to clear. “Before the storms would come in off the sea, I would wake up. Even at three in the morning, I would wake up. Maybe it was something about the air pressure; no one could figure it out. But I always knew when a storm was coming.” He looked back down the road. “Always.”
He seemed to have drifted somewhere else in his mind, so I left him alone and went back to digging through the remains of the house. There was nothing. The green vase with the cranes, the chest made for my grandmother, a small box of old photographs—all gone.
“You said something about an ash tree?” Li had moved so quietly that the sound of his voice startled me.
“I did. You know what one looks like?”
“Not if it smacked me in the face.”
“You wouldn’t want that. It’s very hard wood. I nearly lost my arm once because of it. The pain wouldn’t go away for months. Still hurts sometimes. That’s ash.”
“So your grandfather had a piece of ash, and he was talking to you. That’s where you left off.”
“No, he wasn’t talking to me so much as to the years that lay around us. That’s what he said, sometimes—that the years don’t pass; they don’t disappear. They were still here, he’d say, invisible, infinitely thin piles of them, heaped in the corners of rooms. It was one of those things that he’d say that wasn’t clear to me at the time. In winter, he’d often brood and tell me that the past was never gone; it was inside of us and all around. I wasn’t to believe what people said, that on January first everything was new.”
“You know, if I could come up with a single year that I wanted to keep, it would be nice. But there isn’t one, not even one.” Li pointed at what had been the front entrance to the house. “Every December thirty-first, I open the door at midnight, to let the old year out. Who taught me to do that, do you suppose? I can’t remember.” He looked into the smoking ruins. “Go ahead; keep looking for whatever there is to salvage. I’ll watch the road. If I see a car, I’ll whistle. We’ll need to get out of here fast. Someone will take care of Zhao eventually; don’t worry.”
“I don’t want ‘someone’ to take care of the son of a bitch. I’m going to do it myself.”
“As soon as we get off this mountain, I’ve got to find a phone to call Kim. He won’t be happy to hear about you and Zhao spitting at each other. He’s afraid of Zhao. Everyone seems to be.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when two big guys appeared from nowhere. They each took one of Li’s arms and dragged him to the edge of the cliff. Then they threw him over. One of them watched for a few seconds before they both turned to me. They didn’t say anything. What remained of the house made a sound, a painful sigh as the wood died for the last time. The sun dropped over the next hill, and in the darkness the wind picked up. I turned away and walked back to Li’s car, expecting the whole time that they’d stop me, permanently. Li had left the keys in the ignition. That was how we used to do it, I thought, as I started the car and turned around to drive down the hill. We always left ourselves a way out. Only I was starting to think there wasn’t one left.
Chapter Two
“Let me get this straight. You were standing there. Two husky guys materialized, threw him over the cliff, and watched as you drove away.” Kim swallowed hard but kept writing. “That’s it? He didn’t struggle, or yell? Big guy like Li, you’re telling me when they grabbed him, he went limp?”
“Maybe he did. I think one of them jammed something into his neck. It was getting dark, and it happened pretty fast.”
“You were a policeman for all those years, a trained observer, and you’re not sure what you saw?”
“I was upset. They’d just burned down my house.”
On the drive back, I’d gone over the whole thing ten times. There was no other conclusion. Kim must have known what Zhao was going to do. That’s why he was hesitant to let me go home until he got that phone call. And Li? He didn’t have to assign Li as the driver.
“Your house.” Kim kept marking his list. “I didn’t realize there was such attachment to material goods around here. I thought it had been squeezed out of you people.”
“We don’t wallow in it, if that’s what you mean. But we don’t go around destroying each other’s property, either.”
“That sounds like an accusation, Inspector, and I don’t like it.”
“Sorry, I’m still a little rattled.” If someone had handed me a pistol, I would have shot him right there, point-blank. I wouldn’t have even told him to look up. “Do you mind if I ask you a question? Why is it that people who work for you end up dead?”
That stopped him. He put the pencil down and sat back in his chair. Some people do that to show how relaxed they are, but sometimes it’s a fighting stance. With Kim, my money was on the latter.
“You’ve admitted that you gave the captain to the Great Han. Then—I’m thinking out loud here—maybe you gave the Great Han to Zhao.” That wasn’t my insight, it was Kang’s, but I could use it if I wanted. “Then, what do you know, Li gets shoved off a mountain.”
“It’s funny, Inspector. I was thinking that you’re the common thread in all these deaths. You—not me.”
“How do you figure that?”
“All of them were killed to make an impression on you.”
“Well, good, we can stop now, because I’m impressed.”
“Zhao wants you to work with him; that’s clear. And he’s trying to scare you away from working with me. Captain Sim was the first step.”
“Really? I thought you said you arranged for Sim’s execution.”
“I did, but only because Zhao thought he was betraying us to the Chinese.”
“Really? What does Zhao consider himself? A Druid?”
“He considers that his interests transcend the normal concerns in modern Beijing. He pretends not to care about tradition, but if you ask him after a few drinks, he’ll tell you about his sick dreams. They take place in the imperial court. It seems he’s always wearing an ermine robe with nothing underneath. Colonel Pang was very Chinese, and so, in his own way, is Zhao. I’m supposed to keep them all out of here, Inspector. I would have thought that was something you wanted, too.”
“I bar the back door and you come marching in the front, is that it?”
“At the moment,
to tell you the truth, I’m less concerned with who is at either door than who is already inside. What do you know about the opposition that’s been scurrying around here? It’s like listening to rats scamper across the ceiling at night.”
“What did you expect? Sheep?”
“They need to understand, Inspector, that they have no chance of changing the course of history. I think somebody is filling their heads with bad ideas. You wouldn’t know who that might be, would you? I’m afraid Li might have been talking to them.”
“You killed him for that?”
Kim didn’t respond, he didn’t even register the question, but I knew he had heard it, and I knew he wouldn’t forget. “And you, Inspector, you wouldn’t be working for somebody else, would you? Because if you are, it won’t take me too long to find out.”
“Then what? Are you going to turn Zhao loose on me, too? You don’t scare me, Major, because I don’t have anything left to lose—nothing at all. The good die young. I missed the cutoff a while ago.”
“Maybe you really are more useful dead than alive.” Kang mused on that thought. His posture mused. The face fell to four types of musing. It seemed a shame to interrupt the show. I waited. He looked at me. “Should we test that theory?”
That did it. I wasn’t a mouse he could bat back and forth between his paws. “You know your problem? You are convinced that you know this place, but you don’t. You speak Korean, we speak Korean, and that makes you absolutely sure that you know what we think. But we don’t think alike at all. With you, everything is hierarchy. You’re in charge, and you need everybody else to salute and shut up. Maybe that works where you’re from, but not here. If you’re going to take over, you’d better get that through your head.”
“Discipline is the essence of civilization, Inspector. It’s the only way people know their place.”
“Keep butting your head against that wall if you want.”
“You don’t like discipline? What about fear? That works almost as well, though apparently it breaks down after a while.”
“Use whatever you think works. Don’t blame me when it doesn’t.”
Kim’s fist came down on the desk; several pencils jumped but landed again, I noticed, without his say-so. “I understand what I need to understand, Inspector. Nuances don’t interest me. And you damn well better be clear on that.”
It was a perfect moment to sit back in my chair and look relaxed. There was nothing to say. Whatever was going to happen was grinding its way along. I wasn’t going to bet against Kim, but I wasn’t going to help him, either.
2
At that moment, the radio in the office came alive. A flood of calls tumbled in all at once, they overwhelmed the system, and it fell silent. The last brief call made clear what had happened: “Gunfire . . . casualties . . .” Then the transmission stopped.
Kim was white-faced. He paced into the hallway, and when he stepped back into the room he slammed the door. “Now they’ve gone too far,” he said. He picked up the phone. “Did you monitor that? I don’t want to see it on the TV, I don’t want to hear it on the radio news, and I don’t want anything about this to get to Seoul. Not a word, not a whisper. I will personally beat to a pulp any son of a bitch who leaks this.” He paused, listening. “Pull a team together and get to the scene. I don’t care about the goddamned roads, you hear me? You find who did this and bring them in. If we don’t make an example of them, it’s all over.” He hung up and turned to me. “You have any ideas? Because if you do, I want to hear them. This was no bunch of old women pushing cops around at the market. These were your colleagues that were butchered. It was a Ministry of People’s Security patrol, not a squad of goons. Just police, and now their brains are all over the street.” He sat down behind the desk and broke a pencil.
“All we know is that the transmission cut off. I wouldn’t jump to conclusions.”
“You heard the reference to casualties, same as I did. Don’t forget, you’re the one who told me to go look at the mountains in Chagang. That’s where this happened; that’s where that patrol was assigned. Did you know it was in the works, Inspector? Have you heard whisperings on the wind that blows through this barren, pathetic Soprano state of yours? If you know something, you’d better tell me, because I promise you, this is going to stop, right now.” He tightened his lips; that seemed to calm him. “If something like this happened before, how would your leadership have responded?”
“My leadership? I left five years ago, Major, and you know it. I’m not privy to their thinking, past or present. Ask them yourself.”
“That’s exactly what I intend to do. Why don’t you come along? I’m sure they’ll be interested in what you have to say.”
“Me?” I wasn’t about to get myself into those airless rooms trailing behind Major Kim. “No, thank you. Anyway, it won’t do your case any good having me in tow. I’ll diminish your stature. They were never crazy about me.”
“I thought they liked your grandfather.”
“They made him a Hero of the Revolution, but I am nobody. That was my goal in life, and I achieved it.”
“I’ve decided to shorten your leash, Inspector. For the past few weeks, I’ve given you a lot of room to roam. I thought it would help you adjust to what is happening. I even entrusted you with a sensitive assignment as a way of our building confidence. It was an experiment. It had to be tried, but as of now, this minute, it’s over. We’re switching to something completely different, an approach advertised to be effective in breaking wild horses. Maybe it will work in your case, too. For the next week, two weeks, as long as I can spare the manpower, someone is going to be with you every second. If you move, they move. Go right, they’ll be next to you. Go left, they’ll be there waiting. I’m telling you this so you won’t be tempted to do something stupid.” Kim stood up and went to the door. A man appeared, the thin man. He stared at Kim, then turned his gaze on me.
“I thought you said you didn’t know who he was.”
“Since when do I owe you the truth?” Kim indicated the man should stand next to my chair. “This is your new friend,” Kim said to me. “You and he will be inseparable. He’s one of mine, but he knows this place pretty well.”
I nodded at my new friend.
“You’re plotting again, Inspector. Don’t.” Kim turned to the thin man. “Your instructions are bare-bones simple. Do not let him out of your sight. Not for a second. No excuses.” He seemed to weigh what to say next. “None.”
3
Once Kim left, the thin man took a seat across from me. That’s when, out of the blue, it came to me.
“I’ve figured it out,” I said. “People who stare are special. That’s how my grandfather put it—special. He said if someone gave you a Baltic stare, it meant you would have good luck for a year. That was the term he used—‘Baltic stare.’ He didn’t know why it was called that, but he had heard it when he was in Russia, and the name stuck. How about it? Let’s have a real Baltic stare. I need some luck.”
No response, an empty lighthouse on a windswept coast. Well, I thought with some disappointment, might as well pick at the scab you have rather than the one you hoped to find. “Ever been to Estonia?”
He didn’t react to that, either, and I wondered if we were going to have trouble communicating. As I was drawing a breath to repeat the question, he said evenly, “Why don’t you just shut up? I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight, but that doesn’t mean I have to listen.”
“Right,” I said. I closed my eyes for a minute or two. “What’s a Soprano state? Kim used the term. You know what he meant?”
“Fuck off.”
We lapsed into more silence. “How about Latvia?” I asked at last. “I was in Riga once. Talk about fog! I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.” I held my hand up and opened my eyes. “No wonder people look like they’re staring into nothing. The fog can do funny things with sound, too. Did you notice? It muffles everything. Even the train was delayed; they couldn’t
find the tracks. I was glad to leave, no offense.”
“I’m not Latvian.” The man glared at me. “Do I look Latvian to you? What the hell do I care if a Latvian train was delayed?”
“Well, Kim said you were one of his. But he uses that phrase so much it starts to lose any real content. Besides, there are still Koreans in Latvia; did you know that? Or there were a few years ago. Most likely Stalin put them there. He shuffled Koreans around a lot, like cards in a crazy deck. I’d guess they made their way back to the motherland by now. Did you come with them? It must have been an emotional moment, uniting again with the nation, women weeping, flags flying, and so forth. I guess they gave you some sort of welcome home money, compensation, pocket change so you could get around. Or am I wrong?”
As I spoke, the thin man was transformed before my eyes into a block of granite. How he willed his entire being into this unmovable, unresponsive mass was the sort of thing that might have intrigued me when I was still working in the Ministry. In those days, I often wondered how during interrogations people became inanimate without warning. It seemed to me it was a defense mechanism and my job was to find a way to break it down. Now, I could care less if he turned into the Taj Mahal.
In fact, I was never much taken with stones. Other kids would skip them in the pond, or throw them at birds. My grandfather thought rocks were a nuisance, a blight on the earth, and he infused me with the same worldview. He would not even let us have an inkstone in the house. He sharpened his axe on a whetstone only rarely, and then with an expression of obvious distaste. “Look at this,” he’d say as the sparks flew. “When one hard thing meets another, you get nothing but sorrow.”
“Diamonds are hard,” I said to him once, wanting to see his reaction.
“So what if they are?” he countered. He was studying a piece of corkwood he’d found. “Damnedest wood,” he said, holding it up to the light. “Might as well build something out of air.”
“Diamonds, if you go back far enough,” I said, “come from trees, ancient trees.”
