Bamboo and blood

2

"Anything but soup," Pak said to the woman.

She shrugged. "I use only the finest bark. But tonight I also have a nice piece of fish, something that is not easy to get. It was supposed to be for some military group, but they didn't show up. It's all yours."

Once the dishes had been cleared away, Pak lit a cigarette. "I'm glad you didn't bring any of these back from overseas," he said. "Cigarettes from overseas are a corrupting influence." I'd left two cartons in his office, and he'd put them in his bottom drawer. "That's what Sohn always said, before he gave us each two packs of Gitanes. He thought it was funny, us smoking French cigarettes while we went through our drills."

I hadn't been very awake a moment ago, but I was now. Wideawake. "Sohn smoked French cigarettes?"

"See, that's just like you, Inspector. A bug on a cabbage leaf. Something wasn't right the whole time you were gone. Now I realize what it was. No sound of anyone chewing on tiny facts."

We sat in the near darkness and mulled things over. Pak ground out his cigarette. "I would smoke a second one, but it's bad for my health, everyone says." He snorted and lit another. "Can you believe it? They're telling us not to smoke because it's bad for our health! Have some more bark soup, Inspector. Now that's good for you."

"What about Sohn?"

"Ah, to business, always to business. The ship sinks, and Sailor O is for mending the sheets. The building burns, and Fireman O stops to polish the elevator buttons."

"I thought you wanted to talk about Sohn, that's all. Skip it. I don't care. He wasn't my friend."

"No, let's stay on that subject. You tell me he was murdered. For what? Did he stumble onto a robbery? But you don't break someone's neck in a hurry when you're running away from a robbery. You don't even break someone's neck when you're robbing him. Even in a fight…"

This might not be the best time, given Pak's mood, but I might as well say what I thought. "There was no fight. I think someone stepped behind him and snapped his neck. That's what they wanted to do, and that's exactly what they did."

Pak sat very still. I knew I'd touched a nerve.

"I hear they have Gypsies in Europe," he said at last.

"So?"

"Maybe they snap necks. Like the Mongols used to."

"That was backbones. The Mongols snapped backbones. I'm telling you, it wasn't a Mongol or Gypsy who broke Sohn's neck."

"Very helpful. We've narrowed the list of suspects. I can eliminate Genghis Khan. Any other ideas? Maybe Sohn saw someone he wasn't supposed to see. You were in the same city; you must have noticed something."

"I did notice one thing. I noticed someone tried to kill me."

"Anyone we know?" Pak frowned. "And don't tell me it was over a woman, either."

I sketched the events at the lakeside restaurant, Jeno?s explanation, and then what M. Beret had told me.

"Maybe you shouldn't have criticized the perch," Pak said. "Okay, someone tried to kill you, but they failed. On the other hand, they finished the job with Sohn. Why? Why the hell was Sohn even in Geneva? What was going on there?"

"Nothing special. Bribery, chicanery, excess-the usual. Other than that, the city is a swamp of boredom. The most interesting thing that happens is when they execute a wristwatch in public for running slow. I don't think we need to focus on the city. We need to look more closely at Sohn."

Pak took a deep drag on his cigarette. The smoke drifted out of his nostrils.

"Cut that out, would you?" I was annoyed.

"I forgot," Pak said. "You don't like it." He took another drag, and again the smoke came from his nose; it curled out and then floated upward, tendrils of smoke like vines from a corpse's skull.

"You're murdering your sinuses. It's enough I have to breathe it."

"I've got my problems; you've got yours. Which orifice I select for blowing out my smoke is up to me. It's something I can choose for myself, and you don't get to take that away. Maybe you've forgotten, but everything isn't cheese and chocolates around here."

That brought the conversation to a halt. It was already quiet in the room. It got a lot quieter. Pak looked at me, dismayed. "I can't believe I said that. Give me a minute." He shook his head. "No, I'll need more than a minute." He pulled smoke deep into his lungs and closed his eyes. "What are the odds of smoking as much as I do and being so damned healthy? I thought these things were supposed to kill me."

Suddenly, Pak put out the cigarette and pushed the ashtray aside. "Did I do something before I joined the Ministry? Who can remember?" He moved his chair closer to the table. "Listen to me. Sohn was more dedicated than anyone you'll ever meet. He didn't believe everything they handed out. He had to be convinced, and if he had doubts, they had to be put to rest. He argued with the lecturers, he argued with the trainers, he argued with the political cadres until they turned red in the face and nearly fell over. No one touched him, though; reports against him would go flying up the chain, but no one touched him because no one doubted that once he was convinced, he would be like steel. He had no use for ideology, thought it was a waste of time. What mattered was results. When he was in charge of a team, he didn't spend time worrying about our righteousness. He wanted us to do the job and come home safe. He was always waiting for us at the dock." Pak stopped. "That tells you all you need to know about Sohn. All and everything and nothing, because I could never figure him out. None of us could."

"That was then. This is now. What did he have to do with Pakistan?"

"Who said anything about Pakistan?" Pak's voice could get a cozy lilt to it sometimes. People who didn't know him thought he was getting chummy, taking them into his confidence. I knew better.

"I never drop anything. It's all over this case. The woman was killed in Pakistan. Our foreigner is mixed up with missiles, my brother was mixed up with missiles, and Pakistan grows missiles like Mt. Paektu grows blueberries. I think there is more going on than we know."

"Thank you, Inspector." Pak smiled. "My faith in you is restored. I think you can assume there is more going on everywhere than we can know, or want to know, or dare to know. Better to be a bug on a cabbage leaf-don't worry about what's happening on the next head of cabbage. You gave some thought to the lady?"

"I did. I think she may be part of the reason Sohn was killed." This wasn't what I thought sixty seconds ago, but something Pak had said rocketed this idea out of the darkness. "The woman herself wasn't important. It was that she was working for Sohn."

"What?"

"Sohn told me that. He didn't tell me what she was doing, and it may not even be that significant. But I think her death spooked Sohn. He was afraid that someone had discovered he was watching their operations in Pakistan."

"Who?"

"Think about it."

Pak thought about it. "Your brother," he said.

"You know what I think? I think you may have asked the right question. Did Sohn see something he wasn't supposed to? Did he stumble onto a meeting that wasn't supposed to happen?"

Pak stared at me, looking inside my head.

"Something the matter?" I asked, but I already knew. My brother was the matter.

"I think you're halfway there, Inspector," Pak said finally. "It isn't just what Sohn saw, but what he knew; and more important, who he was. A lot of people might have seen the same thing, but it wouldn't have made a difference because they wouldn't know what they were looking at."

"Which means…"

"Which means it must have been someone who recognized him, someone who knew him. That's not a big universe, when you think about it. The number of our people abroad at any one time is small. The number in Geneva is even smaller. Either the person Sohn saw wasn't supposed to be there, or he wasn't supposed to be meeting with whomever Sohn saw him with."

M. Beret had shown me a picture of my brother with the man from Sri Lanka; the same man had sat with his knees practically touching mine on the train, on his way to another meeting with my brother, maybe in Bern. They must have decided to do it outside Geneva, because they didn't like what had just happened in the city. It hadn't been in their plans, murdering a party official. "What if the meeting Sohn witnessed was approved, but no one was supposed to know about it?" I didn't believe that, but it was a theory that had to be crossed off.

Pak shook his head. "Not likely. For that they'd only have to bring him home and tell him to keep his mouth shut. No reason to break his neck."

"Missiles. What did Sohn have to do with missiles?"

"Always roaming with a restless mind." Pak pulled out another cigarette, looked at it for a moment, then put it back in the pack.

"Heart. The line is 'roaming with a restless heart.'"

"You should know; you're the poetic one, Inspector. Care to write a poem about missiles someday? Sohn thought they were a waste of resources. Not at first he didn't. At first he was part of a program to get plans and components. He ran it."

"When?"

"Let's leave it at that."

"The man is dead; I'm interested in who killed him, especially because my own neck seems to be on the line. I'm not sure I buy the story I was handed. Besides, I thought you liked him."

"Sohn said that people would die this winter and we'd be better off without them. Or did you forget that?"

No, I hadn't forgotten.

"My mother died last night. She was thin, like a piece of paper, O. What do you think Sohn would have said to me?" He grabbed his hair in his hands and pulled until it looked like he would rip it from his head. "Worse, much worse, what would I have said to him?" Pak put his head on the table and wept. There was nothing I could do.