A Corpse in the Koryo

3

The pine needles made a soft bed on the slope of the hill facing the temple. No one could see anything from below; the spot was screened by wild azaleas and a grove of scrub pine trees. Lena had circled around and approached me from behind. I heard her footsteps, but not until the perfume reached me did I turn to look at her.

She had on the same long skirt and the white blouse she'd been wearing the night I first saw her. The blue buttons were even brighter in the sun, but mostly it was her eyes that took the light.

"We missed our picnic last time," I said. "I thought we could try it here."

"If I'd known, I would have brought something." She was speaking Chinese, and I was never able to read much emotion drifting in the tones of that language.

"I have the black bread and blueberry jam." She didn't look amused, and I began to worry that the whole thing was a mistake.

"A small joke," I said. "Sorry. I did bring some rice cakes from the hotel and a couple of apples. They're tart this time of year."

"I see you have a bottle of beer, too. Do you have any glasses, by any chance?"

"No. We'll have to drink out of the bottle. Not so elegant, I guess.

Next time I'll bring some cups that I made a few years ago, out of persimmon wood. Liquor takes on the flavor. So does tea. Do you like persimmon?"

I reached in my pocket, then remembered all I had was a piece of oak. "Persimmon is pretty wood. Has a nice glow. But it hides itself. Some wood tells you almost as soon as you touch it what it means to become.

Not persimmon. It's beautiful on the surface, almost unfathomable underneath.

That's why furniture made out of persimmon often looks odd.

Someone tries to shape it into something it was never meant to be."

"Is that the greatest tragedy you can think of, Inspector, being shaped into something you were never meant to be?"

"It is a sad thing, don't you think?"

"You're not married, are you, Inspector? I've heard you live alone.

Didn't you ever want to be with someone?" It wasn't the question I was expecting.

"I'm fine. I'm with other people enough. I'm with you right now."

"That's not what I meant." She stopped and I waited. The silence grew, but there was nothing awkward about it.

"In the house where I grew up," I said after a while, "there were only two of us, my grandfather and me. Both my parents died in the war. My older brother went away to a school for the children of war heroes, but I was too young. Grandfather said that I had to be more filial than any kid whose parents were still living, I had to respect the memory of my father and mother with all my heart. If I'd been a tree, he used to say, I would have had to be the straightest one in the forest."

"Trees in the forest aren't alone. My father used to tell us that when you see a tree standing by itself, it's a sign that something sad will happen."

"Maybe my father would have said that, too. I don't know what he would have told me. It isn't something I wonder about." The silence fell between us again. I looked at her face and was surprised to find she was crying softly. I handed her a handkerchief. "I've heard that when a man and a woman part, he gives her a handkerchief." I paused. "I hope you won't keep that."

She laughed, the mixed-up laugh that sometimes comes from a woman who has been crying. "This is very nice of you, Inspector. It's the sort of thing I imagined you'd do. Maybe that's why I've thought about you so much since we met." She dried her eyes. "What do you want?"

"Wasn't this your idea?"

We sat down on the pine needles. She was close beside me but with enough distance to leave open what she had in mind. "That must have been long ago," she said. "A week, a decade. Time moves in funny ways in this country. Did I suggest a picnic? I must have been intoxicated with the idea of a quiet afternoon. Maybe I thought it would be like at home, by the lake. Maybe I thought you and I would have something to talk about. Do we? Pardon me for asking again, but what you do want?

It's not an unreasonable question, under the circumstances. You didn't drive up to Hyangsan to see me. You didn't even know I'd be here."

"You're right. I was surprised. I'm just wondering, how is it that you happen to be so far away from where you normally stay?"

"This is a resort, as you may have noticed. There are tourists here, with dollars." She let the thought hang in the air. "Not very pretty, I realize.

Do you still want to have a picnic?"

"Tell me about Finland."

"You mean, why would a Finn come here, to this country?"

"You know a guy named Pikkusaari?"

She turned her head away quickly. I hadn't even thought about that question. It just came out, like Lake Keitele.

"I don't know him well. He used to work for the Finnish National Police. He and my father often did business, though he was very young at the time."

Now it was my turn to blink. Maybe she was making this up. She probably made a lot of things up, but I didn't follow that thought too far.

"Your father did business with the police?"

"No, Inspector, my father was a spy. I never knew exactly who he worked for. As a businessman, he traveled all over. He was gone every winter and spring, but every year on June 21, without fail, he always came home. We waited at the train station for him, my sisters and I. Pikkusaari came to see him a couple of times a month, in the summer. The two of them went for long walks beside the lake, moving slowly, their hands behind their backs. Sometimes they would be gone for hours. When they came back down the path, they looked exactly the same, moving slowly, hands behind their backs, as if they'd never said a word to each other the whole time. For all I know, they didn't.

"When they returned, Pikkusaari would always say, 'You're a lucky man, Ollie. You've a good wife and fine children. All you lack is a son.

I wish I could say the same.' Then they would drink a bottle of vodka, sitting on the wicker chairs we put under the birch trees in the back of the house, and listen to old records. My father had a good collection of classical music, but he insisted it be kept for winter, when everything was dreary. Summer was for jazz, he'd say. With the record player perched on the ledge of the open window, the sound turned up, he liked to sit facing the lake, tapping his feet. Pikkusaari liked jazz, too, but he said he couldn't listen to it at home. His mother couldn't stand what she called 'that noise.'

"That's how they'd sit, my father and Pikkusaari, drinking and listening to jazz. Neither spoke, except to say something in English, 'Oh yeah,' or 'That's the stuff.' After a few glasses of vodka, Pikkusaari would stand up and start to dance by himself, perspiring, his face tilted toward the sky, eyes closed, his hands swaying over his head as he turned in small, tight circles. Where we lived was quiet, no other houses nearby, and the scratchy sound of jazz, a trumpet and then a piano wildly taking flight, would make its way down to the water, where my sisters and I lay on our backs on the pier, watching the clouds. Around nine or ten o'clock at night, with the summer sky still bright and small waves from the lake splashing against the wooden pilings, Pikkusaari would stagger toward his car. My father would call after him, 'You're drunk, you fool, drive slowly.' "

"Did your father ever come here?"

Lena shook her head. "To this godforsa… isolated country? He said it wasn't worth his time."

"Any Asians ever come out to see you at the lake?"

"My mother was Chinese, Inspector. It was rare enough among all those blondes. We always had visitors." She was dodging the question; I didn't know why. Or maybe I did, but I wasn't going to spoil the picnic.

"If you must know, Pikkusaari came out the most. My mother said it wasn't to see my father really, but to see me."

"Fine. Enough questions. Let's just enjoy the view." As I moved closer to her, my hand touched hers. I could see the pulse in her throat, and the way the breeze floated strands of her long hair over her shoulders.

Then it was gone. She stood up and brushed the pine needles off her skirt. "I think we're out of luck again, Inspector. I have to be back in the hotel before dinner, to change and put on my makeup.

Anyway"-she looked up at the sky-"it's going to rain." She pointed across the valley, where a huge cloud bank was piling up, dwarfing the hills and rapidly replacing the high blue of autumn with a heavy blackness that squeezed the light out of what might have been a glorious afternoon.

"People think I'm absentminded, that I forget things. Maybe. To me, it's more complicated. I know something, but I choose not to remember it. I can do both at the same time."

The Irishman looked tired, but I knew he was wide-awake. He turned off the tape recorder and put his hand over his eyes. "That's not good for a detective, is it? Detectives are supposed to see everything, remember everything.

"

"So you think. But knowing too much can only lead to trouble. You know what you need to know. I'm not talking about instincts. No, my instincts are fine. Sometimes they move sideways, like an ox stumbling across a muddy field, I let them move however they wish. People think instincts should be sharp, they should fly like arrows. I don't believe that. I think instincts should wander and meander, like streams coming down the mountain.

An arrow can miss the target. A stream always knows where it is going, eventually."

"Maybe. But if you forget things, you make mistakes."

"And why not? Mistakes are good. The more mistakes, the better. People who make mistakes get promoted. They can be trusted. Why? They're not dangerous. They can't be too serious. People who don't make mistakes eventually step off cliffs, a bad thing because anyone in free fall is considered a liability. They might land on you." I stood up and stretched. "Listen, Richie, where I live, we don't solve cases. What is a solution in a reality that never resolves itself into anything definable? For you, life is optimistic, endless in possibilities, but you think the parts are limited and self-contained.

That's why you make lists. You think it is possible to check off what is done.

Me, I don't ever make a list. What if someone sees it? It would lack something important, surely, and that would be evidence to be used against me.

Not today, maybe, but someday. For the same reason, I don't draw diagrams.

/ don't connect dots. Unnecessary, because I know that nothing is a straight line. Everything is circles, overlapping circles that bleed into each other."

"Bleeding circles?"

"To solve a case you have to put the wind in ajar. For me, life consists of badly limited possibilities, but I know the parts are endlessly rearranged, always shifting, always changing. Nobody puts down their foot twice in the same place. I once heard a Westerner say, 'What you see is what you get.'

We laughed for days about that at the office. Nothing is like that. Nobody is like that. But it's what you people want to believe. Straightforward, direct, what's the term?"

"Transparent."

"Ah, Richie, you are trying to read my mind. You shouldn't do that.

No, not transparent. It doesn't matter. I'm not saying your way is wrong.

It doesn't exist, not for me."

"So nothing is ever solved. That is a grand excuse if ever I heard one."

"An excuse? Could you live with uncertainty, moving shapes and shadows, morning, noon, and night, my friend? The mountains have become the only certain thing in my life. When they disappear, I die."

"Glorious words, Inspector. Put them to music and they'd make a fine, sad drinking song. But we're not here to sing, are we? You're to talk, I'm to listen." He wrote something in his notebook and then turned on the tape recorder but quickly turned it off again. "The tragedy, Inspector, is that you have poetry in your soul, but all my ears are trained to hear is facts."

"Don't worry about it, Richie. There's less poetry as you go along."