Bamboo and blood

2

"It wasn't much to see." I looked over at the drinkers. They turned their attention back to their glasses. "Very simple geography. It's on an island, like Yanggak-to, only bigger." I waited.

"Three and a half kilometers wide," Pak said. "Or did I already mention that?"

"It sits between two rivers, both broad enough to keep the population from moving back and forth except for the bridges. There are a few boats, but not many that I saw; maybe because of the cold weather. The wind was fierce, and there was snow piled so high in some places I could barely walk across the street. The whole place is pretty flat, though they haven't leveled it completely. Some streets are steep going down to the river on the east side."

"Like San Francisco."

"I don't know, I've never been there. I didn't think I knew anyone who had."

Pak hummed a few notes.

"What is that?"

"Called 'Gone to San Francisco' or something. It was on the radio when we were out on operations sometimes, and we'd sing it as a joke because the boss said if we got good enough, one day they'd send us to steal the Golden Gate Bridge."

Again, I sensed problems with the anchor. Pak had never told me anything like that before, not even hinted it. Something was making him very bold, almost reckless. "Do you want to talk about San Francisco or New York?"

Pak smiled and studied his cigarette. "Go on, tell me a tale. What about the buildings?"

"Buildings," I said, relieved he seemed to have calmed down again. "You've seen enough pictures to know what the skyline looks like. But you can't really understand the traffic without being there. There's noise from cars, horns honking, bus engines straining, almost the whole day long. At night there are trucks. I don't know what they carry, but they are going fast and they make a hell of a racket. Most of the cars are old-plenty of speeding and not much attention to traffic laws. Hardly any traffic police, but otherwise lots of patrols in cars and some on foot. If we had that many police visible on the streets, there would be a revolution. There's always an emergency vehicle screaming up one street and down another."

"Pedestrians? Bicycles?"

"Hardly any bicycles. Must be banned, though you'd have to be crazy to ride a bike in that traffic. You can't walk down the sidewalk without running into some beggars; in fact, a lot of beggars. Some prostitutes, too. A considerable number of people who looked very rich, if you find yourself in the right neighborhood. Women…" I paused to collect my thoughts because I still found it hard to describe. When I had seen it I could barely believe my eyes. "Women dressed up but obviously not satisfied with what they have because they are shopping for more. Prices are crazy; the prices of some of that clothing must be worth several months' wages to the clerks. Countless restaurants and markets, plenty of vegetables. Even in winter."

"Vegetables." Pak nodded. "You journey to a distant civilization, and you tell me about carrots?"

"Wait, I nearly forgot. Where's our foreigner? I should get in touch with him; we have unfinished business, remember?"

"Don't bother. He left."

"Left? When?"

"The day after I told him you were called away on another assignment."

"Did he ask where?"

"He did."

"Did you tell him?"

"No."

"Strange that he should leave all of a sudden." It didn't sit right, somehow.

"Everything about him is strange. Strange is our byword these days. Get back to the buildings. You skipped over that part."

"Old, new, tall, short, no empty spaces, just wall-to-wall buildings except for a few parks and the banks of the rivers. They've never been in a war, so nobody flattened the place. They do it themselves, the tearing down."

"It doesn't sound like you were in the office much, interviewing people."

"The mission wasn't interested in cooperating. Once I started asking about our subject, no one wanted to talk to me except to register complaints about her lack of cooking skills. So I went out, tried to get some feel on my own for where she'd been, whom she might have met, what she might have seen. Routine stuff."

"And?"

"I got lost."

"Were you followed?"

"Didn't I already go over this?"

"Yes, but we're going to get asked again and again, so let me make sure I know your story."

"It's hard to be sure whether I was followed. That's my story."

"Not the best, but we'll work on it. You said you were followed into a bookshop."

"Who knows? I told you, the same guy went into four coffee shops with me. I suppose it's possible that he just liked coffee. I only went in to warm up."

"You want me to guess? I'm guessing you were followed. Besides him, anyone approach you directly?"

I thought about it. "I was walking up a street, very steep, right where cars come out of a tunnel that goes under the river, east something street. There was a man walking down the hill. He stopped and asked if I needed help."

"Strange. Did he stop everybody he saw, or just you?"

"I was looking up at the buildings. He might have thought I was lost, which I was. He said a few words of Korean that he seemed to know, but I pretended I was Chinese."

"You think it was choreographed?"

"Nah, just chance. Old guy, colorful coat, though-red and black and white and I don't know what else. He didn't seem to have much to do. He wasn't in a hurry to get anywhere like everybody else."

"You double-check?"

"Sure. I made a note about the episode and gave it to the security man. Don't worry, we're covered. No one of the old man's description rang a bell with anyone at the mission. They said he could have been any one of a thousand religious Jews walking around. There was nothing in the contact logs fitting his description or that sort of approach."

"Religious Jews." Pak repeated it slowly. We looked at each other. "Maybe she was followed, too, and maybe she bumped into a religious Jew and maybe she never reported it. She wasn't the type to fill out forms, as far as I can tell. Runs in the family, I guess."

"Have you been doing your own research?" I was trying to remember the face of the old man on the street. It was mostly beard, so I couldn't be sure of the rest of it.

"Her father called the Ministry to complain about you, and they told him to call me. We talked for a while, if you can call that research. What if she was approached in New York? That could have some connection to what happened to her later."

Sure thing, I thought. The long arm of New York. "There is no way to know what she was doing. The local security man only had a chance to follow her two or three times. He thought she might have been tailed by the locals. Nothing subtle, as far as I can tell. How many relays of people in blue scarves can there be, he asked me. Each time, she lost them for a while, but they picked her up again without much trouble because she went to the same place each time, that park. Going there she'd walk using a slightly different route; but each time she took the same cab home. He was sure it was the same cabdriver, a female. I thought that might be something, but it wasn't. When I tracked the driver down, it turned out to be a young Pakistani woman whose father had sent her to the U.S. to go to school."

Pak nodded. "A young Pakistani woman. Sure, there must be lots of them driving cabs in New York. At least she wasn't a Jew. Tell me, please, O, that there are no Pakistani Jews." He paused, turning this over in his mind. Then he went on. "This driver, she told you a story, I suppose."

"She did. I got in her cab and told her to take me to one of the train stations. She said she was bored with school and started driving a cab. She was worried because her father was coming for a visit. If he found out she wasn't in school, she said, he would drag her home. She didn't want to go. Why not, I asked. Because he would arrange a marriage to a man who would treat her like dirt. He might beat her. What will you do, I asked. She turned around to look at me. 'If he beats me? I'll kill him.'"

"Maybe she was just making the whole thing up."

"Nope. All you had to do was to look into her eyes. This was real. She wasn't kidding."

Pak took a last puff on his cigarette. "Get some sleep," he said. "You should take up smoking again." He pointed at my cigarette, floating in the soup bowl. "Might help your jet lag."