Hidden Moon

3

The woman in the next apartment had left a bowl of rice and a small glass filled with old kimchi on the wooden chest inside my front door. I gave her money every week, and she would go to the market for me. She didn’t prepare anything elaborate, but there was always something waiting, no matter when I came home. The food sat by itself on the chest; there was no wallet-with or without euro notes. It hadn’t been knocked onto the floor by mistake, and she hadn’t tried to be helpful by putting it in the drawer. I opened the window and lay down. Han occupied my thoughts for a couple of minutes, then I thought about stockings and Miss Chon’s waist, and then I did what I sometimes do when I lie down. I fell asleep.

By the time I got back to the office, it was already dark, but I could see from the street that the lights were on. That meant Min was there; he always turned the lights on in every office when he worked at night. He said it was good if people on the street thought the Ministry never slept. It was the right moment to walk into his office and tell him to either give me everything he knew about this case or take me off of it. The Ministry had assigned someone, a former waitress for crying out loud, to follow the manager of the Gold Star Bank. No one informed me. Min had sent Yang to my apartment and then told me Yang had not seen the wallet, which had been in plain sight on the chest next to the door. How could he not see it? It certainly wasn’t there now. My neighbor wouldn’t take it; no one in the apartment house would.

Min was on the phone. He was seated at attention, which meant it was an important conversation. The way he waved me to a chair told me he was being chewed out. By the time he hung up, he was sweating slightly. “Inspector, this is not going well.”

“Complaints? More threats to drop the case?”

“Worse, orders from the Ministry to solve it immediately. How can we do that? We’re bogged down with SSD, you say no one will open their files, that fellow from the other night-”

“The well-connected one?”

“Yes, him. He has connections with the Central Committee.”

“What about the bank manager?”

“What about her?”

“She’s being followed.”

Min began to doodle on a file folder. I didn’t say anything, leaving the only sound in the room the moths fluttering around the light. “That’s it?” he finally asked. “Okay, I knew she was being followed. Well, no, I didn’t actually know that. I just knew she was already high on the Ministry’s list of suspects.”

“And you didn’t tell me.”

“I don’t trust Ministry lists. I had to see if you came to the same conclusion. I think the real reason they have their eye on her is that she’s a foreigner.”

“Yes, I got that. She’s Scottish.”

“Scottish? Are you crazy, Inspector? She’s Kazakh.”

I shrugged. “She could be anything, for all I care. But her tail told me she has a Scottish passport.”

“You talked to the guy who is tailing her?”

“Not a guy. A woman, a waitress actually, as if you didn’t know. Maybe I should retire.” Panic flashed in Min’s eyes, raw panic, the same emotion passengers on boats convey when the water is up to their knees and waves are breaking through the windows. Time to put another hole in the hull. “I thought after all these years I was respected for my ability. I do at least know how to tail people. But I take it I am wrong, my abilities in that regard are no longer respected, and perhaps the Ministry thinks I am no longer needed. Very well, my request for retirement will be on your desk by tomorrow. Good luck working with Han.”

Min quickly picked up the phone. “Go away,” he said to me before he started dialing. “It’s late. Go sit in your office and work on your bookshelves. Let me check a few things. I’ll be down in a few minutes. Don’t fill out anything.”

An hour later, around 10:00 P.M., Min was at my door. I was studying the plans for the bookshelf that would fit on the far wall in my office. The office was small enough so that there was little to distinguish the far wall from the near one. The ceilings were very high, which made for a lot of space, but all of it on the vertical. It was like being a farmer on a mountaintop. The bookshelf wasn’t anything I’d ever get done, I knew that. I had found some lumber, but never exactly what I needed. When I could get any wood screws, they were the wrong size. But I enjoyed studying the plans.

“Inspector, I’ve got my footing back. I apologize for not being overly forthcoming these past few days, but I had the feeling a typhoon was coming. The problem was, I didn’t know from which direction. Now I do. No need for you to retire.”

“If you didn’t know whether or not a typhoon was coming, why did you put me in its path with a silk stocking in my pocket?”

“I would have told you when to jump for safety, don’t worry. But I needed some clarity first. I had to have a better focus.”

“And now you have it?”

“I have focus. And you, you have that wallet? I thought I told you to bring it in.”

I opened my desk drawer. “Right here.” Actually it wasn’t; I didn’t know where it was. It had disappeared, but I couldn’t tell that to Min. He would demand a search of each apartment on each floor, and not a light dusting, either. These would be thorough searches, everything turned upside down. The neighbors wouldn’t talk to me for months. I closed the drawer. “We’re not going to give it back to Mr. Well-connected, are we?”

“No, he won’t bother us.”

“And why not?” I could see from Min’s expression that we were off the wallet onto something more troubling.

“He was found dead, with a knife in his back, in a dark alley near a certain drinking establishment.”

“Ah, I love it when the plot thickens.”