Bamboo and blood

6

Pak didn't look up when I stepped into his office. "We're in a lot of trouble, but you know that. Where you been?"

"I spent some time thinking about noodles. Then I did some walking around. I wanted to clear my head, that sort of thing. Another cold day, we're due for a little break, wouldn't you think? Not that I mind. Cold is good for clearing my head." The cold did nothing for my head besides making my ears ache. Pak knew I was only throwing up chaff in hopes of avoiding the question he was sure to ask.

He asked it. "You know that guy with three fingers?"

"Two fingers, actually; the other one is a thumb. Yes, I do." I sat down and looked out the only window in Pak's office. The view wasn't much, an inner courtyard and, across the way, the Operations Building. It was snowing again, though just a few flakes. Maybe if it snowed more it would warm up a degree or two. My ears still burned from being outside without a hat. This sort of cold gave me an awful headache. "We used to work together."

Pak said nothing, but he didn't go to sleep, either.

"He was in an accident." I didn't think that would end the conversation. It didn't.

"And?"

"And it was a bad accident."

"And?" Pak was going to pull at this, no matter what. He was in that sort of mood.

"The man died. But apparently he didn't."

"To review: You worked together. Somewhere, not to be discussed, he was in a bad accident that killed him, but didn't. And you haven't seen each other since then. Shall I guess the rest, or are you going to tell me? Normally, I wouldn't ask, but this nondead friend of yours seems intent on causing us grief. He was standing in my office this morning, and as far as I'm concerned, that means he has crossed the line from the unmentionable past to a place where none of us want to be-the present. Where was this operation you two were conducting?"

"We were where we weren't supposed to be, not officially, though we had good reason to be there." When I'd left that group, my final orders on leaving were to tell no one what we did-no one, not ever. So far, I'd stuck to that. But this was different. Resurrection hadn't been mentioned as a contingency, one way or the other. "It was supposed to have been worked out ahead of time, our entry into the place we were supposed to visit. Only it wasn't. I thought he was dead, there wasn't anything I could do."

"That's all?"

"More or less. When I got back, they debriefed me, kicked me in the pants, and told me to forget the whole thing. They told me the chief of operations was unhappy, and that if I knew what was good for me, I'd stay as far away from him as I could. We never saw him, so I just assumed that was a fair description of his mood. The man with the fingers must have been overseas until recently; otherwise he'd have shown up sooner on my doorstep. Strange, isn't it? His appearing at this moment? It gives me a funny feeling."

"A funny feeling. Unique investigative technique, we'll have to tell the Minister. These feelings, you get them often?"

"Did I use up my quota for the month already?"

The phone in my office started ringing. I walked down the hall to answer it. "O here."

"Nice to hear your voice." It was the dead man. "We need to meet. I'll see you at the Sosan Hotel, in the coffee shop, let's say at 4:00 P.M."

"How about four thirty?" I hung up the phone because he was no longer on the other end. "Perfect," I said to no one in particular. "Four o'clock is fine." This meant getting the keys for the car from Pak.

Pak was examining his teeth in a small mirror when I walked in. After a minute, he put down the mirror and looked at me. "What?"

"I need the keys to drive over to meet someone."

"Who?"

"The dead man."

"Where?"

"You want to come along? That way you don't have to ask questions, you can see for yourself. In fact, you can take notes. But you have to pay for your own coffee."

Pak picked up the mirror again. "No, you go alone." He smiled into the mirror, a big, phony smile with a lot of teeth. "See, Inspector, with the wrong diet, you can lose your teeth, incisors, molars, the whole works. I'll probably lose mine by the end of the winter. They're already getting loose. I think it's scurvy. And then what will I do? Looks count for a lot, even these days. Everything is in the packaging, you know? At my age, the package isn't doing so well."

"You might be right; I hadn't heard. People in my neighborhood don't talk much about packaging. They don't talk much about anything. Things are very quiet these days." This was a bad conversation to be having. The weather was bad. News from the countryside was bad. I tried to lighten the mood. "I heard somewhere that eating tree bark is healthy for the gums."

Pak opened a drawer and put the mirror away. "Something wrong with tree bark? Or do you have your own stash of rice somewhere?" He closed his eyes. "Forget it," he said quietly. "Let's change the subject."

"Pick a topic."

"How about getting back to your friend? His name is"-Pak looked at a paper on his desk-"Mun." He paused. "That's the name he uses now, anyway. You knew him as something different, one assumes."

I reached in my trousers pocket and found two small pieces of wood. One was junk pine. The other was chestnut. Pak's eyes narrowed.

"Whenever I ask you a question and you reach for that damned wood, I know you are about to hide something from me."

"Not so."

Some people think I use wood as worry beads. I do not. Beads are generic; wood is particular. Every type of wood has its own personality. I generally do not say this in the presence of strangers because it is not something they like to hear. They find it offensive, or walk away convinced I am being sarcastic. The truth is, with complete access to every type of tree on the planet, you could probably find a wood for every hue of emotion and then some. My grandfather believed wood was as close to goodness as a person could get. He never said it quite that way. What he said was, "You never saw trees abuse each other, did you?" He'd mutter this to me when we walked on summer afternoons, when the road was dusty and the sun was still hot. "Do they speak meanly? Do they lie? Do they grab more than their share, or sit in the shade while others do their work for them?" He'd walk a little more and then turn to me. "Well, do they, boy?"

"No, Grandfather, they do not." No other answer was possible, or so it seemed to me at the time. It was manifestly true, the wood he worked with, the furniture he made, none of it ever caused trouble in the village or to our neighbors. The only problem I can recall happened one autumn. A visiting political cadre, a young man with a thin-edged smile, looked into Grandfather's workshop and said, "This furniture of yours is too ornate. It must be cleaner, simpler to match the lives of the people." My grandfather continued to sand a piece of wood, a piece for a small writing desk that had been commissioned by an official in Pyongyang, an old friend from the days of the anti-Japanese war when they were guerrillas in the mountains near the Amnok River. The sanding seemed to go on for a long time. The cadre looked at me and pointed to his ears, as if to ask whether the old man was deaf. At last my grandfather raised his head. "It isn't me that makes the shapes. They come from the wood. There's a certain truth to wood." He fixed the cadre with a long, level gaze. "Or would that be the responsibility of another department?" The young man nodded slightly. "You'd better find some simpler truths somewhere, or we'll have to get rid of these trees you're using and plant new ones, simple ones." My grandfather returned to his sanding. The cadre went away, and the neighbors walked over, one at a time, to say hello and comment on the desk. We all watched the road for a few months after that, but no one ever came to touch the village trees.

Pak knew I kept a supply of several varieties of wood, small scraps, in the top drawer of the desk in my office. He sometimes complained, but he never told me to get rid of it. When I needed to calm down, or think, or let my mind go free, I'd go into my desk and search around for a piece of wood. Lately, I had started carrying a couple of pieces with me, in case the duty car broke down when we were out of town. We were being called out of town more and more, to manage crowds at train stations or help out if a local security man became sick, or disappeared. The car wasn't in good repair, and there wasn't much maintenance going on. I knew we'd get stuck sooner or later. That's why I had the piece of chestnut. It was cheerful, in its own way. Chestnut could take your mind off of things. It was a treat I had been saving for a bad day. This had all the makings of a bad day, and I hadn't even been to the Sosan Hotel yet. I put it back in my pocket.

"No," I said to Pak. "Mun is what he called himself then, too. We didn't know each other very well. We met just before the operation started, read the file, asked a few questions. The training was only for a couple of weeks. We didn't talk much. He kept to himself, and so did I." I shouldn't have been revealing even this much about an operation, even an old one that didn't matter anymore, but Pak could be trusted.

"You weren't interested in knowing more about someone who might soon have your life in his hands?"

"Nothing seemed very complicated in those days. Just in and out, they said. The less we knew about details, the better. That's what they said. Like teaching someone enough to jump out of a plane only one time."

"Not good."

"Awful. I think about it sometimes. I wonder if we were set up. Nothing went right from the start, nothing. When we got to the target, someone was supposed to have left a door open for us. They didn't. It was locked, and no one had bothered to teach us how to get past a locked door, not one like this, anyway. We managed to work the lock, but it took extra time we didn't have to spare. Guard schedules, that sort of thing."

"Why didn't you abort? I thought there were hand signals or something."

"You never went on one of these, did you?" I thought I saw Pak move in an odd way, nothing much, but something suddenly surfaced and then dove back into the deepest part of him. I let it go; it wasn't my business. He never spoke about what he did before he joined the Ministry, and I never pressed him to find out. Anytime we got to the edge of the subject, he found a way to steer the conversation onto something else. "The one thing they emphasized over and over to us was that there was only this single chance. Miss this and it would never come again, they said. The chief of operations wanted this done, they said, and he wanted it done right away. They never mentioned anything about aborting the mission."

Pak snorted. "Bunch of crap. There's no such thing as only one chance."

"You sound like my grandfather. One of your definitive bugle calls would have been helpful at the time. But you weren't there, as I recall."

"Neither was your grandfather." Pak mused a moment. "What happened to your friend Mun?"

"Something exploded. We finally got in and were looking around. There were some wires I had to cut, and I was concentrating on that. Red wire this, green wire that. Or the other way around. It's not the sort of thing I'm very good at."

"Details, you mean." Pak swiveled his chair to gaze out the window. It never bothered him, that there wasn't much to see. "No, actually, you're pretty good at details, Inspector." He sat for a moment, as if he might want to say something more, then turned his chair back and gestured for me to go on.

"Mun must have spotted something, because he moved a few steps to my left. I remember it was to my left, because I had the red wire in my right hand. One minute I saw him picking up a small box, the next minute he didn't have a face anymore, or a neck. No hands, either. He dropped like a cow that's been shot in the head. No moaning, nothing. Just a lot of gore that wasn't moving. Funny thing, whatever it was barely made a sound. No explosion, none that I remember, anyway."

"So you left."

"Not right away. First, I located what we had been sent in for, most of it, anyway. On the way out, I checked again, but he was dead. I stepped over him and walked back to where the escort team was supposed to be waiting. They weren't at the primary point so I had to go to the backup, which was not easy to find. I cursed the whole way. When I got there, I was sweating buckets. They were sweating, too, looking at their watches and mopping their faces. They didn't ask why I was alone."

"Why bother? They could see you were in no mood to talk."

"No one was, believe me. They were nervous, real edgy. The whole way back they wouldn't look at me, not even at each other."

"Now your dead teammate shows up again. In pursuit of this Israeli who tells us he is a Swiss Jew."

"What makes you think he's Israeli?"

"What makes you think he's not?"

"His mother is Hungarian," I said lamely, "that's why his name is Jeno. It's not Italian, by the way."

"Who cares about his mother? He's an Israeli as sure as I'm Korean, and he was up here in the cold where there isn't a camel for a thousand kilometers."

"I don't think they have camels in Israel."

"You know what I mean. He was way out of his territory, and so is your old friend Mun if he's come back from the dead. You think it's strange?"

"No, more like fearful symmetry."

Pak looked thoughtful. "Your phrase?"

"Borrowed."