Bamboo and blood

7

"It's very simple, Inspector. I am working for Sohn"-the delegation leader held up one spoon-"and so are you." He held up a second spoon with his other hand. "That means we are working together. Our friend here"-he gestured at Jeno with my spoon-"has some interesting ideas that Sohn thinks should be pursued." He pursed his lips again, which I couldn't figure out. Was he just practicing on me? Maybe he was one of those people who forget the distinction between onstage and off. Some people go through the motions even when the motor is idling. "Sohn is working with Jeno," he said. He looked around for another spoon, but Jeno had picked up the third one and was stirring his coffee. "That means we work with Jeno as well. There's a certain mathematical precision to it all, don't you think? Like reducing fractions or finding a common denominator."

Reduced to essentials, everything was simple. But there were limits. It was just as Pak had said: Reduced too much, everything disappears. Not this, though. This wasn't simple. And it wasn't going to disappear. "When was the last time you saw Sohn?" Out here, by the lake, it was easy to be casual. Everything was perfect in this spot.

The delegation leader waved his hand, a gesture to show his answer wasn't intended to be precise. "Before I left for the talks here. Last month, maybe?" He didn't give any sign of knowing that Sohn had arrived a few days ago and would be returning to Pyongyang in a metal box. "I'll see him when I get home." Again, the hand waved vaguely. If I could be casual out here, so could he. He was used to lying, but I didn't think he was used to murder.

"Let's move on." Jeno cut into the conversation. "Time is running out, and we need to get down to details. We can worry about Sohn later."

Jeno was another story altogether. Jeno could lie about anything, anytime. If I'd had the slightest doubt before, I didn't anymore. He knew about Sohn's death. He could have learned about it from M. Beret, but then again, maybe he knew because he was close by when it happened. At the moment, all I knew for sure was what Sohn had told me, which wasn't very much. One of the few things he had emphasized was that I needed to keep the delegation leader from defecting. The delegation leader had just consumed an expensive lunch of perch with a Mossad agent. As far as I knew, that wasn't a classic indicator of imminent defection, though it didn't make the negative case very well, either.

"I don't think you're clear on what we face. I don't even think you know why you're here, Inspector," the delegation leader said. "It would be very much like Sohn to send you on a mission with the tiniest part of the picture he could afford to give. Just enough to keep you from stumbling into the lake. When the time came, he'd tell you what you needed to know to do your job."

"And you? You have a full picture?" The atmospheric meter ticked down.

"Probably better than yours, though not all of it from Sohn. We're kept in the dark about a lot of things, but anything to do with foreign relations we eventually find out. Facts, rumors, crazy ideas-if they touch on foreign policy, they all swim, or float, or tumble toward our building. Sohn understood that. He even used it to his advantage. He would throw a piece of information into the air, nothing too definite-maybe nine parts fluff, one part substance-then watch it drift into our windows. That way he couldn't be accused of giving us something we weren't supposed to know."

Jeno handed each of us a cigar. "If you smoke cigars, Inspector, you'll like these. I only bring them out for special occasions."

A breeze came off the lake. It had something of spring on it, though still not much. "If you don't mind, I'll save mine for later." Maybe for a victory celebration, even a minor one, if I could figure out how to define victory. "You said time was running out. Time seems to be an obsession here. People pay a lot of attention to it in this country. They make fistfuls of money from it. If time runs out, then the world won't need watches. What will you do then?"

"My people can't hold open this deal forever, Inspector. If your people want it, they're going to have to move soon. And from what I hear, if they don't move soon, there may not be so much left of your country. The famine is growing, order is breaking down, rumors are racing around. It wouldn't take much to tip over the whole structure."

"Is that so? You think we're about to start begging?"

The delegation leader lit his cigar. "Face it, things are bad."

"Bad?" I hadn't expected him to be so direct about anything, certainly not in front of a foreigner. "Bad is nothing. Bad is normal. We've been through worse. We'll survive."

"Really?" Jeno looked thoughtfully at the mountains in the distance. They were covered with snow. "Then why turn to us?"

Fair enough, I thought. Too bad Sohn hadn't told me. Too bad Sohn hadn't told me much of anything before his head ended up at an odd angle on his shoulders. "I wouldn't know who turned to whom in this case. Maybe you came tapping at our window. You'll have to talk to someone who toils in the foreign affairs field, like him." I pointed at the delegation leader. "He might be able to supply you with some answers. You two seem to know each other. I'm just a policeman."

The delegation leader laughed. "Do you really think you'd be here if you were just a policeman? That's like saying your grandfather was just a guerrilla fighter."

"My grandfather has nothing to do with this."

"To the contrary, Inspector, I'd say he has everything to do with where we are, and where we might decide to go. You can be sure Sohn didn't pluck you out of some Public Security rabbit hole by accident."

"Plucked is the right word. I'm not here by choice." No, Sohn hadn't picked me because of my grandfather but because of my brother. "The ambassador wants me out of here. He's made that clear. I'm leaving as soon as I can. I've got no reason to stick around."

"Even before the job is done?" Jeno tapped the ash from his cigar. "Even when we're so close to the goal?"

"Goal. You want us to stop selling missiles to your neighbors. That's your goal. It's not mine. I don't have any goals that relate to missiles. Believe it or not, I don't even think about missiles. As long as no one carries one in my sector, missiles aren't on my list of worries." I was getting wound up. Nice weather, nice setting, but I wasn't in the mood to enjoy it. Maybe I was still tired from the night before, still smarting from Di-lara's crack about her little policeman. Well, if Jeno wanted to talk about goals, that was fine with me. I could talk about goals. "Everyone in the world is allowed to sell military hardware but us, right? Big powers do it because they're big, and that means they can do whatever they want. Middle powers do it because that's how they make a lot of money. Little powers like you"-I pointed my unlit cigar at Jeno-"do it because the big powers find it useful. They let you operate on the margins where they don't want to be, or they don't want to make the effort to stop you, or they don't give a damn. But none of those conditions pertain to us." I made clear I was including the delegation leader. "We're a special case, right? You all sell missiles until you don't want to do it anymore, then you say no one else can. Too bad for you. We need the money." I didn't know if we needed the money or not, but if my brother was involved, I had to assume money was part of the mix. "If we had rich uncles to give us aid to build steel mills, or ships, or computers, we'd be happy little piglets. But we don't, we don't have anyone to shovel money at us, so we sell what we sell and you can fuck a duck if you don't like it." Little policeman! What the hell did she mean by that?

"No one said anything about stopping you from selling anything. If you think it's your God-given right to lug weapons around the world, be my guest." Jeno smoothed the air several times. The afternoon became calm again. The light settled on the lake. It seemed wrong for me to be here. I was taking up space I had no right to occupy. I was tired of people looking at me like I was a freak. I had roiled enough waters. I wanted to go home.

Jeno nodded at me, and his smile, the one that played on his lips most of the time, turned enigmatic. "You can sell whatever you want, it really makes no difference to us. Not one bit. Just don't sell to our enemies. That's all we ask." He was in full soothe-the-barbarian mode. You could almost hear the violins playing in the background. "And we're not just asking. We're prepared to make it worth your while, Inspector. In the long run, you'll get a lot more from good relations with us than you'll ever get from the people you're dealing with now. Do you really think they spend any time thinking about your interests, your concerns, your history? Don't be ridiculous. They only care about one thing, getting rid of us-and they'll play you for everything they can if they think it will advance that goal. That's their goal. What's yours?"

It was a little vague, his formulation, and I didn't think it was an accident. Did he mean me, in particular? Were Jeno and his colleagues prepared to make it worth my while? I yawned. Somewhere I'd read that was what a defeated animal did-yawned. I wasn't tired, but I was beaten. This place by the lake had defeated me. Maybe that's why they took me here. I was sure it was the two of them, together, who had carefully chosen the place. "And we're supposed to be shocked, that people thousands of kilometers away don't care about our history? Do you think we care about theirs?" I wanted to get the emphasis away from the singular and back on the collective. "Anyway, none of this is my business. How many times do I have to tell you? No one listens to me. And that includes Sohn." Which was certainly true now. I found myself yawning again.

"Someone assigned me to you when I was in Pyongyang a few months ago. That wasn't an accident." Jeno wasn't interested in signs of submission. He was poking me with a stick; he wanted to get a rise out of me.

"They just wanted someone to blame if things went wrong," I said. "That's how they work."

"Well, things are about to go wrong. I'm getting negative messages from my people: Get this done, or we pull all of it, the whole thing, off the table." Jeno looked at the delegation leader. For the first time, I sensed that they were still on separate sides of the divide. "You're going to lose it all. I have it right here." He patted his jacket pocket. "The whole deal. And you're about to see me throw it in the trash."

The delegation leader shook his head. "You trash it, then nothing will change, you still won't like your neighborhood, we'll struggle back to our feet, and life will go on. Unless Mr. Sohn has given the inspector a plan he hasn't yet revealed."

They both turned to me.

"I'll say it again, I'll say it all afternoon long if you want. I'm not the person you need to deal with."

The delegation leader put his cigar carefully into the ashtray, an oversized ceramic triangle with an abstract drawing of a fish in the center. It was spotlessly clean except for the mound of ash in the center. "Let me get this straight," he said. "Sohn sent you out here, to pass a message, I assume. You haven't done that as far as I know." Wrong, but never mind. "You probably think I've been in your way, which means Sohn didn't tell you anything about me." Wrong again. Sohn told me I'd be up to my ears in shit if you defected. "We both know how bad things are at home. Sometimes I sense the youngsters on my delegation can barely sit still. They're worried about their families, they feel guilty about being here, they can't figure out what we are doing. They're waiting, Inspector. All day long in those talks, we sit across from people who can really help us, and what do we do? We stall, because they won't give anything if we don't ask, and we won't ask because we can't afford to look weak. What are we going to do? Make more cardboard and plywood missiles? We don't even have enough plywood anymore. We probably don't even have enough screws." I heard my grandfather laugh, somewhere in the distance. "We can't sell our way out of this. We can't growl loud enough, or puff ourselves up big enough, but that is what we're going to do anyway. You want to see my instructions sometime? My job is to bluff and to stall. And when that doesn't work, I have backup instructions to stall and to bluff."

"From what I've seen, you're very good at it," I said. "If that's what you're here to do, you're doing it beyond what anyone might expect. If you ever need one, I'll write a recommendation letter."

"You don't get it, do you? One week I'm supposed to make sure nothing happens. The next week I receive instructions to make progress. I keep two files-one for angry messages asking me what the hell do I think I'm doing, the other for angry messages asking me why the hell I'm not doing more."

The ash from his cigar fell onto his trousers. As he leaned to brush it off, a shot rang out. The cushion on the back of his chair exploded. In an instant, practically before the sound died away, Jeno reached across the table, pushed the delegation leader down, shouted at me to take cover, and screamed some commands into a small radio that he pulled from his pocket-all a split second before he yanked a pistol from a holster under his jacket. Then it was over, almost as if nothing had happened, except that Jeno was breathing hard. I wasn't breathing. I wasn't scared or rattled, just amazed. I had yet to see cows with cowbells walking up a dainty Swiss hillside. The only travel calendars I could bring back home with good conscience had men with broken necks and people under a table by the lake. I started to get up. Jeno grabbed my arm and pushed me down. "Nobody moves," he said, "until I say it's okay."

"Sure, I like it under tables with black bags." I shook off his hand. "But if my pal here gets shot while I'm under a table, any table, I'll never live it down in the Ministry." I climbed to my feet and looked around. What was left of the cushion lay on the ground. It must have been hit by a tank round, judging by the hole in it. "I guess cigar smoking isn't bad for your health, after all," I said to the delegation leader.

"You're not helping things, standing there like that, Inspector," he said, looking up at me.

"You want me to go find the cannon that did that?" I pointed to the cushion.

Jeno put the earphone in his ear and listened for a moment. "Don't bother. We already have it." He put the pistol back in its holster; his eyebrows did a skeptical promenade. "That's why there wasn't a second shot."

"What took you so long to get him?"

Jeno smiled at me. He seemed genuinely amused. "I guess it's hard to be a sniper like that."

"Like what?"

"You know, with only three fingers."

That made me sit down. "Where is he?"

"The shooter? Under a tree. Must have fallen. He broke his neck."

The delegation leader picked up his cigar. "Anyone have a light?"