by James Church
“I don’t give a damn about ancient trees.” He looked at me sharply. “Pigs eat corn that grows in the dirt. Do I eat dirt? Use your head.”
“It was in a book; that’s all.”
“Listen, I’m telling you that we don’t know about ancient trees any better than we know about ancient kings,” he said. “What we know is this day, right now, and you,” he pointed at me, but not with the ragged urgency that sometimes took hold of his being, “you are going to have to pay attention to each day as it comes. You’ll have to pay attention more than I ever did. Don’t let them tell you about the glory kingdoms of the past, old rotten trees that they want to make into diamonds. Did you ever see a tree that thought it was a diamond? Well, did you, boy?” There it was, the “they” my grandfather used on rare occasions, and only when we were alone. I never asked what he meant; I didn’t have to.
“You and Major Kim work together long?” I stood up and ambled around the room. Eyes followed me, alert eyes, not of the fog-bound stare. “He and I haven’t known each other long. Delightful man, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sit down.” The thin man got to his feet. “I don’t want you standing or moving around. You’re not going anywhere. Don’t even think about it.”
“You mean contemplate making a break? Are you kidding? I’ve got no reason to run. This is my territory; I’m perfectly comfortable here.” I stopped in front of the maps on the wall. They were old, Yi Dynasty. “Interesting maps,” I said. “My family is from here.” I pointed at the northern border. “The village was pulverized during the war. It was on a mountaintop, not worth anything to anyone, but bombs came down anyway.”
“Is that why you picked a mountaintop to go to?”
It stunned me for a moment. I hadn’t ever thought about it. It never crossed my mind before. But there it was. A perfect stranger finds a key lying around and unlocks a door you’ve walked past how many times in the dark?
“Who knows?” I said, only I did know. I had been migrating, no different from a bird or a fish that goes upriver to complete the perfect circle. And I understood why. Once, only once in all those years, I found my grandfather drunk in his workshop. That had been a terrible shock to me. Because of his status as Hero of the Revolution, he was given a bottle of whiskey every year in April, not rice whiskey, but something from Scotland, a mark of his standing and the esteem in which he continued to be held. Mostly he shared the whiskey with others in our village, but he always kept some of the bottle for himself. This he nursed, took small sips on anniversaries that meant something to him—the day one of his friends was killed in the anti-Japanese struggle, the day my parents died in the war, the anniversary of the death of his young wife. He drank only to mark sadness. I noticed that, even though I was quite young. But on this occasion there was no anniversary. It was, for all I knew, a normal day. When I walked into the workshop, I found him—eyes bright, cheeks flushed. He sat carefully on a small bench, his back against the wall. With effort, he focused on me. When he finally spoke, his voice was clear: “What have we done?” Each word came out deliberately. He said it again, and this time his voice broke: “What have we done?”
Years later, very near the end, he said the same thing when I came to his room at the hospital to say good-bye. The shades were pulled and the room was dark, but his eyes were bright and his voice was surprisingly young. I had a little speech prepared in my head, but after I’d said a few words, I realized it was for me, not for him, so I stopped. He looked into my face for a long moment. After a while, he sighed. “What have we done?” They weren’t his last words, but they were the last I heard him say.
That was the reason I turned in my resignation and retreated to the mountain.
“No,” they had dismissed it out of hand when I first put in the request. “Impossible. You can’t resign.”
“You don’t think so?” I said. “I’m through, and you can’t do anything about it. If you arrest me, I’ll be off the force anyway. It’s all the same.”
In the end, they let me leave Pyongyang, to “retire,” but only after I signed an agreement that I would not have contact with anyone, no one, ever again without permission. In turn, they agreed never—ever—to call me back to any official duties. I worked on the language with great care so everything was covered, because given half a chance, they’d come up with something and say I’d missed a contingency. I made sure there were no exceptions. I never meant to come back to Pyongyang again.
There was no other way, because one morning as I woke, I heard a voice, “What have we done?” When I sat up and looked around, there was no one. The voice was mine. And I knew it wasn’t a question. It was an indictment.
4
The thin man and I drove around the city all the next morning. I asked him if he wanted to go up to the top of the Juche monument and stare at the city; he repeated what he’d already said about not having to listen to me. Finally, the radio in his car squawked and the dispatcher told him to drop me at Kim’s compound.
“I’ll be sitting right here waiting,” he said as he parked in front. “Don’t get any ideas about going out the back way. There is no back way.”
Kim was in the lobby, chewing out a couple of pasty-faced guards.
“The last time, I’m telling you, this is the last time I’m going to warn you. If it happens again, you go home in a paper bag. You understand?”
They indicated that they did.
“Then get back to work, and this time do it right. If that bastard gets out of your sight one more time . . . it’s a big black car, for the love of Pete! How can you lose it?”
I waved from the doorway. “If this is a bad time, I can come back.”
“No, this is a good time. Come up to my office. I have something to show you.”
As soon as he sat down, Kim started looking through the papers piled on his desk.
“I have some good information. The source is reliable. A good source is a good source; that’s what I say.” He didn’t look like he was getting much sleep. The strain must be taking its toll. “What it tells us is that Zhao is getting paid by a foreign power, one other than China. I don’t know which one, yet. But this source had it right, and this is a good source.”
I knew what that meant right away. He had been ordered to break off relations with Zhao but wasn’t sure how to go about that and still keep both of his lungs. He had to go slowly, build a case.
Kim was getting more agitated, going through the piles. He had some information on a piece of paper, and the piece of paper was somewhere on his desk. I knew Kim well enough by now to know that on any single day reality was formed from the pieces of paper in front of him. Change the papers, change the world.
“I don’t trust a source unless I know him,” I said, “and if I know him well enough, that always means there are reasons not to trust him.”
“A good source is a good source, especially in this Soprano state of yours.” He must have just come across the term, because he was trotting around with it like a dog carries a stick. “Where is that damned report?” A few papers dropped onto the floor. He looked at them as if they were part of a prison break. “It was right here. Isn’t that always the case? If you don’t want a file, it’s always there. Never mind. This source works in Sinuiju, good access to the relatives of ranking officials.” He paused. “Well educated. That’s important in my book. It’s all I can tell you.” Finally, he looked up at me. “Sit, Inspector; why are you standing? It makes me nervous when you stand.” His eyes searched the room. “Get yourself one of those black plastic chairs and bring it over here.”
“A woman, isn’t it?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“And this woman works where the wives of ranking officials drop by and chitter-chatter.”
“So?”
“So, one place those wives like to go is the cosmetics factory, and it has nothing to do with vanity. There is a bootleg store attached to the factory, and they can get discounts there. They tak
e boxes of the stuff home, and then resell it at prices that undercut the state stores.”
“That’s not my concern. I’m not worried about the black market right now. How did you figure out who the source was? Not that you did, but what made you guess so confidently?”
“Sinuiju, access to relatives, educated. People don’t deal with male sources anywhere but Pyongyang. They figure any male still in the provinces—especially Sinuiju—isn’t worth much. Once you’re looking for female sources in Sinuiju with access to relatives of ranking officials, there are only a few places to consider. Most of those drop off the list if the source is educated. It could be in one of those fancy coffeehouses or the bar in the new hotel, but women don’t go there to talk about Zhao. It has to be in a place where money is changing hands, someplace like a black-market store in a factory that is selling something people have become convinced they really need—like cosmetics. This particular factory makes a lot of one product, and I think you might want to buy it in bulk?”
“What’s that?”
“Vanishing cream. You’re going to need great quantities of it before this is all over.”
“I’m not going to disappear, Inspector. Don’t you understand yet? I’m here and I’m not leaving. What I stand for is not leaving. The past is being washed away. Whether you like it or not, I am the future.”
It was very quiet. There was no air left in the office. It had all been consumed in a firestorm of righteousness.
“In that case, I’m going back to my mountain. When the future makes it up the road, I’ll stand at attention and salute.”
“Your house burned down. Very symbolic, isn’t it?”
“What do you want, Kim? You keep trying to get me to say that everything I did for the past sixty-eight years was wrong, that everything was for nothing. Why do you need to hear it? Will it validate something, keep the planets in their orbits? Won’t you be sure of your own beliefs until those words leave my mouth? Go ahead; hold your breath. You’ll never hear me say it.”
“But that’s what you think, isn’t it? That’s why you resigned.”
“What I think, Major, is mine. You don’t get to use it as a brick in your shining castle.”
5
I couldn’t stay anymore; I was done trying to exist in the same city with Kim. I was done watching the jockeying and maneuvering and people being murdered for no reason other than because someone needed to stand on their bodies to see over the next hill. I couldn’t stay, but I had nowhere to go. Nothing was far enough away. My cabin on the mountain was ashes; the hills of Chagang were in turmoil; the Amnok and the Tumen would soon run with blood. Even Lake Chon, high above everything, would weep.
I could leave completely. There was nothing holding me here. I looked out the window from my hotel room. This wasn’t my city anymore. Pretty soon, it wouldn’t even be my country. I had two shirts, three counting the one I was wearing. I still had the passport Kim had given me and some money left over from the trip. Not much, but it would be enough to get me to an embassy in Beijing. Richie’s people, maybe. I’d ring the bell, they’d let me in, and that would be that.
That was the choice. That was my real choice. I watched the light sparkle off the waters of the Taedong. How many times had I crossed that river? “It’s my choice,” I said, and went to the mirror. Kim had insisted the issue was a loss of nerve, that people looked in a mirror and suddenly couldn’t see anything familiar. I looked. “Well,” I said, “you just made your choice. You’re staying.”
That felt fine. I was in the middle of the most complex, tangled mess I’d ever been in, and it was fine. I was staying, there was work to do, and if it was the last thing I ever did, I’d get it done. I opened the bureau drawer and found a piece of chestnut. Stubborn wood—maybe. Touchy and ill-tempered—maybe. But it was beautiful, lustrous, hard, calm in the storm. I put it in my pocket, sat down on the bed, and began to review everything I knew.
This was a complicated moment in time, and so the relationships among people were more complicated than usual, or maybe it was just that they carried more weight. My normal practice would have been to make a chart, a web showing who was connected to whom, and how. Kim, Pang, Zhao—separate, disparate, contending; joined, cooperating, unified. It could be one or another, or it could be all of them. That’s what worried me most. It could be all of them, which would mean any move I made might be wrong. What had Li told me? These days you had to be right every time.
Even Kang might not be who I thought he was anymore. Kang, most of all, was a cipher, fitting everywhere and nowhere. He’d set up a meeting with someone who led me right back to him. He had me driven around the city with a beautiful woman who had been in Macau to do what? I turned out the light and lay down. Draw a chart, I thought.
6
When the phone woke me up the next morning, I had a better idea. Forget the chart. Focus on the murder in Macau. That’s where the lines were converging. Kim had sent me there; Zhao had tried to warn me away; Kang had pulled me out; the woman with the golden thread had been there right when the murder took place. The one person who seemed to know something about what had really happened was Luís. But Luís wasn’t going to give any more ground, not that I blamed him. To me, at least, he was pretending that he knew who the murderer was. I didn’t think he actually knew, and from a couple of things he’d said, he seemed perfectly aware that the conclusions—and the confession—were running well ahead of the evidence.
It was an open-and-shut case of a petulant young man murdering a beautiful and expensive whore. Only it wasn’t. At this point, it was still only open. As of right now, maybe no one other than the murderer and whoever paid him knew what had really happened. Why did I think someone had paid the murderer? Luís had put the motto over the gate: “This is Macau.”
I listed everything Luís and I had discussed. When you looked at them on a list, the facts as Luís recounted them were very convincing. That is to say, each fact was convincing. The problem was, they didn’t fit. I wouldn’t say there were holes. They were more like joints on a piece of badly made furniture. They weren’t tight. That’s why tables wobbled.
The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. “What?”
“Ah, good morning, Inspector. Can you hear me?” The connection wasn’t bad; it was just that there were too many people listening in at the same time.
“Good morning, Luís. Funny you should call. I was just thinking of you. How is the weather in Macau? Pleasantly humid, no doubt.” I could imagine the transcribers sitting up all of a sudden. They’d make a note—“WEATHER/MUST BE CODE.” Let them spend their morning chasing that.
Luís laughed. “Lulu sends her regards.” This time, I really could hear the scratching of pens—“LULU/NAME TRACE.”
“Always nice to hear your voice, Luís. Anything special I can do for you?”
“I was thinking of taking a trip, Inspector. I’ve never been to your country, and am in need of fresh scenery. A bulldog is angry at me. Northeast Asians are different, very industrious, not like us tropical people. You know how it is.”
“Yes, I know how it is.” In the background, pens write furiously—“REPETITION/5 + 1.”
“How would it be if I came for a visit? I don’t mean to invite myself. If you’re too busy, let me know and I’ll figure out something else. Maybe I could go to Changchun or Harbin.” Quick note—“LOCATION DATA.”
“No, I’d be delighted to show you around. I assume here none of your rules and regulations apply, which means you can sit for your meals.”
Luís laughed again. “Don’t forget, I like thighs.” A flurry of notes taken, pages torn off notepads and passed off for immediate action—“SEXUAL PREFERENCE/LEGS.”
“I’m looking at a plane schedule. According to this, the next flight is tomorrow.”
“What a coincidence. That’s the one I’m on. Can you meet me at the airport? I’m very bad with airport security procedures.”
“I’ll be there. Have a good f
light.”
“Adeus, Inspector.”
Two phones clicked off, then, after a sigh of relief, a third. Amazing. One of them must have been Kim’s people. One of them was Zhao’s. I could only guess about the third.
I gave things the rest of the morning to cool off. Then I called Kim.
“I’m tired of being chauffeured around, Major. I need a car.”
“That takes paperwork, Inspector. Vehicles don’t grow on trees.” He laughed.
That afternoon, a note came under my door: “It’s old, it runs, and it has a tracking device.”
7
The next morning, there was no Luís at the airport. I watched as everyone came through the door and lined up at the immigration counters. Westerners, Koreans from Japan, a few Middle Easterners, an Indian family, a group of Chinese military officers, and a couple of South Korean businessmen. I hung around until they all had claimed their bags and gone through Customs.
“Waiting for someone?” Major Kim came up behind me.
“No. I enjoy standing in cold spaces and watching luggage ride on a conveyer belt.” I turned around. “And you?”
“The police in Macau cabled us that a visitor was coming to follow up on the investigation, the one I ordered you to fix. Apparently, it’s not fixed. They still haven’t changed their theory about who committed the murder. You were supposed to get them looking for another suspect. They’re not.”
If what Kang had told me in Prague was the truth, then Kim was still playing his game. He was a lying bastard, pretending to want to shift the blame for the murder. Lying bastards are a dime a dozen, but he was toying with me, and that I didn’t like. “Apparently, it’s still not possible to tell police in another country how to conduct their business.”
Kim scanned the empty terminal hall. “Shall we dance, Inspector?” He took my arm and guided me out the front door. We went past a short man pacing up and down at the edge of the parking lot, a Westerner with a hat pulled down over his eyes. Kim studied him for a moment, then turned back to me. “I don’t know why your friend wasn’t on the plane. You find out; you get hold of him; you fix this. Clear?” He tightened his grip on my arm. “Crystal clear?”
