Hidden Moon

Chapter Five

Some people might have said a walk to the train station the next morning wasn’t the best use of my time, but efficiency was taking second place to survival. The investigation was becoming more complicated by the day. Murder does that. First the Ministry wanted the case solved, then they didn’t. And then they did. SSD was thrown in, so quickly it almost seemed to me that someone had planned their involvement all along-either to put pressure on us to get the matter solved, or to make sure it wasn’t solved at all. I was used to opaqueness in these things, but this exceeded what was normal. And now there were warning streamers attached to the normal little warning flags, all telling me that guessing wrong on this case would not be minor. Realizing I needed to stay on safe ground for the time being wasn’t much comfort; it just meant I had to worry about how to tell safe ground from a cesspool. I didn’t sleep much that night, until finally, about dawn, I decided that maybe the best course was still just plodding through the preliminary steps in a way that would make everybody happy. I would do enough to keep the Ministry off our necks if they really were panting for a solution. I would not do nearly enough to scare whoever might be watching from one of the darker corners of the city, if someone above the Minister was determined to keep us going through the motions without getting anywhere near the truth. Besides, I was still curious about the stockings.

One thing that had me more than a little worried was SSD’s involvement. I didn’t care if it smudged the Ministry’s image; that could be repaired. Something about Han’s approach suggested that somewhere at the core of this case were security concerns beyond what a simple bank robbery-even the first one on record-would warrant. As long as he was assigned to the case, I was supposed to check everything with Han first. Protocol gave SSD pride of place in a joint investigation. It was the main reason we made a point of leaving unopened any orders that had the word “joint” in the subject line. Apart from that, I was unsure about Han himself. He was smoother than he ought to be. His awkwardness was off; it was almost too practiced. It could be that he was from a new SSD breed trained to hide a level of competence that no one suspected they had. A new little warning flag, waving from its own rampart, didn’t think so. I had to admit, the SSD officers I knew didn’t spend a lot of time investigating. To them, everything was just bending thumbs. Han didn’t fit that mold. Anyone who could recognize a piece of oak was capable of learning; most of the people I’d met in SSD weren’t.

I got a little sleep and arrived at the office somewhat past the start of my shift. Min was gone, probably to a staff meeting at the Ministry. I had a few things left to do at my desk, some old paperwork to initial and send on, questions from an inspector in a sector at the other end of town to answer, a name trace file that had been on my chair for weeks. It was midmorning before I got out of the office and onto the street. Min was still stuck in his meeting, which was fine. My mobile phone was off, stuffed in the back of my desk drawer. When he complained later he couldn’t find me, I could say that I needed to go out and think, that the area around the station was nice this time of year, lots of people walking around, most of them in a good mood because of the weather. What I didn’t have to say was that the reason I went over there was to find a Russian with a suitcase full of silk stockings.

Right away, there was a detour I hadn’t expected, because the sidewalks on the main route were torn up and new paving stones were being put down. There hadn’t been anything wrong with the old ones from what I could tell, but the city was being “beautified,” and that meant new sidewalks, new paint on the front of the buildings, even new windows for some of them. The work gangs didn’t mind being outside in this weather; only a few of them were actually working, anyway. The rest of them sat on the new curbs and watched. The detour took me onto a street with two or three new restaurants and a barber. The restaurants were still closed with the curtains shut, but the barber was in good spirits and waved me in. He thought he had found a “supplier” for new scissors and maybe even a hair dryer, at what he said was a “good price.” That meant it wasn’t legal, but I figured there were a few things higher on my list than stolen scissors.

The barber said the detour had increased his business and he hoped they would never get the new sidewalk finished. By the time he was through talking and started to cut my hair, one of the restaurants was open. It was too beautiful a day to eat near the station, so I hung around for another thirty minutes while they rearranged the tables to fit in more customers.

When I finally arrived at the station, it was early afternoon. The station and its neighborhood aren’t really in my area, and I had to make sure that the inspector with formal responsibility-an older man named Hyon, who had a keen sense for knowing when anyone crossed into his sector-didn’t get suspicious. If he did, he might file a complaint, and that could mean an exchange of angry memos followed by a meeting or two presided over by the lady with the shrill voice. The street patrols don’t give a damn, sometimes they don’t even know, when out-of-sector inspectors tiptoe through. But inspectors in charge keep careful track. They have to; otherwise, something funny might happen when they aren’t looking, and they could get blamed. Most people can be very territorial when their backsides are at stake. As it turned out, Hyon had been unable to come up with a good excuse why he shouldn’t “volunteer” for farm work and so had been sent out to the countryside for a week. His fill-in didn’t care what I did, as long as I was quiet about it.