Bamboo and blood

6

After a session like that with Pak, I wasn't going to my office and stare at the walls. A long walk would do me good. If it got cold enough as the sun went down, it would drive everything from my mind. I could get back to the office after dark, finish a little paperwork, and then go home.

"Don't take my car," Pak said. "I need it later to get to some meetings. Take the duty vehicle. It's back from repair, guaranteed to start. Just in case, don't go too far."

The Potong River wasn't too far, and I liked walking there. By then, there wasn't much left of the afternoon. It turned to dusk, but dusk didn't hang around; nothing wanted to linger at this time of year. That was why I didn't see her coming.

"Hello, Inspector."

"Hello, yourself." There wasn't much else to say. She was the last person I expected to run across. Then it occurred to me, maybe it was fate. Why not? I was due for some fate. "I was just thinking about you."

"Is that so?"

"I've been wondering, what if I want a transfer?"

"Something wrong between you and Pak? You finally exhausted his patience? The man has a reservoir of patience deeper than the ocean, but you have drained it."

"No, Pak is fine, still putting up with me. I'm just thinking ahead. A whole career in Pyongyang, it might not look so good when it comes time for my promotion."

"If either of us lives that long. Face it, you're not ever going to be promoted, O. Besides, when did you start craving advancement? 'Don't make the offer,' you said the last time the subject came up. 'I won't take it. I'm fine where I am.'"

She was a woman I'd met in the army; "an old friend" is how I described her to people when they asked. A few years ago, she had been made a deputy in the Ministry's personnel section. It was her chief who had disappeared. The whole section had been put on report for not predicting that the boss was going to defect. No one knew for sure if he had defected, but he was gone, and it was pretty clear he wasn't on vacation in Cuba.

With the day finished, the temperature was looking for a place to spend the night. It would be good if we could go to her office to talk. As head of the section, she'd likely have some heat. If anyone had heat, she would. No one wanted the acting chief of personnel in a bad mood, whether she was on report or not. Little presents came her way, small bags of rice, pieces of fruit. She also had a lot of people slithering under her door in hopes of getting a good assignment. I wasn't one of them. Once, we had been very close, but things had changed. I had forgotten why.

"Well, then," I said, "let's just pretend. If I was going to get promoted, wouldn't I need to serve outside of Pyongyang?"

"What is this about? I don't have time for games, O, not these days. They're crawling up our backsides, trying to figure out where he went."

"I assume that's the one place he isn't." I smiled in the dark; she looked at me with ice in her eyes. Even in the blackness, I could see that. That look, it started to jar loose in my memory what had gone wrong. "Let's just say I wanted the toughest, most undesirable post you could find. Let's say I got headquarters really mad at me, and they decided it was time to exile Inspector O to teach him a lesson. Where would they send me?"

"You don't want to go to North Hamgyong, and I'm not sending you. It's suicide these days. You never struck me as suicidal. Obtuse and heartless maybe, but not suicidal. This isn't about postings. What is it?"

"I need your help."

"You need my help, you bastard?" She laughed, the way an axe laughs at a piece of kindling. "After all this time, you knock on my door and say you need my help? How, specifically?"

"Hwadae county." Might as well get straight to the point. Romancing her up to the question clearly wasn't going to work.

"Are you crazy?" She considered. "No, you're not crazy, you scheming bastard. I'll tell you what I should do. I should put you in the coldest, deadliest, sickest, hungriest place I can find. I should make you a mine guard, a camp guard." She took a deep breath. "I might still do that, don't push your luck. But I won't send you to Hwadae."

"I don't want to be assigned there. I need to know what's going on."

"Of course you do. Every crummy sector cop in the capital needs to know what is happening in an isolated, out-of-bounds county on the east coast." She snorted, which was never her best noise. "Don't ask me. It's military, and they keep us out. That's all I know, and if I knew anything else, you're the last person in the world I would tell." She was lying, very openly, which was the only way she could tell me what I wanted to know. Amazing! As angry as she seemed to be after all of these years, she was willing to help. Maybe she still liked me. Not bad, having a chief in the personnel section, even an acting chief, with the hots for you. It was more than I had a right to ask; but it was exactly what I needed.

"There's a visitor who wants to go there," I said and put my step in cadence with hers. "Body rhyming," we used to call it when we went for walks. That popped into my memory from somewhere. I shut the door in a hurry. "Should I take him?"

"You couldn't get him past the first barrier. He'd need special orders. So would you, incidentally. A Ministry ID doesn't go as far as it used to."

"He's an Israeli."

I could tell that stunned her. She took a half step out of rhythm and then stopped abruptly. "Well, well, well. He'll have some interesting company if he gets in there." No reason she should know about a visitor under our protection, but still, it surprised me that she didn't. I would have thought the news had gone up and down the corridors by now.

"Interesting company?" I thought my voice had just the right lilt of disinterest. "Like who?"

"Maybe Pakistanis. Maybe Iranians. Maybe Bolivians."

"Bolivians?" It was hard to sound uninterested.

"Why not? If I were from Bolivia, I'd want missiles to protect me against Venezuela."

"Venezuela isn't near Bolivia."

"My mistake." She walked away, down the path to a waiting car. Her engine probably got maintained pretty regularly.