Hidden Moon

6

The door to the morgue was locked. I knocked, but no one answered. I knocked again, listened for movement from inside, then decided to let myself in. The morgue could be considered an official location, even if it isn’t part of the Ministry. Death was an official act, more or less. Anything that permanent had to be considered official. I was on official business, I told myself, and that meant I was allowed into official locations. The logic was weak; the lock on the morgue’s door, on the other hand, was not. It looked old, but it defeated every trick I tried with the cheap lock-picking set I carried around.

This job of picking locks was newly assigned to the local sector offices, and we had no standard-issue equipment. Once, there was a specialist who did nothing but pick locks. It was said that he learned his trade in Moscow during the years when the Russians pretended we were brothers and worth training. He was a very quiet man. Picking locks was a quiet profession, I always thought, so it didn’t surprise me that he never responded when I greeted him in Russian. If we needed to get into a building, we’d wait outside for him to arrive. He’d walk in past us without looking up, and emerge a few minutes later. In those days, most doors weren’t locked anyway, so it was rarely a problem.

After cuts in the Ministry’s budget-part of a larger move, we were told, to embrace “new realities”-the lock man moved on to other things. He opened his own shop, exactly when more people were installing locks to keep out the reality of an increase in the number of crooks. So, no more designated lock expert, no assigned equipment, and no approved procedures for entering all of the suddenly locked buildings. There was nothing to do but follow the old practice, sitting around outside, figuring whoever was inside would have to come out, or, if they’d already left, would eventually return to open the door and go back in.

One drizzling afternoon last autumn, when Chief Inspector Min was at the local market, he fell into conversation with a merchant, a Chinese-Korean who showed up a few times a year with a suitcase full of goods. Min came back to the office with two small bags, one of which he laid on my desk, like a cat bringing a wet, dead bird into the house.

“What is it?” I nodded at the bag.

“Exactly what we’ve been looking for, Inspector, a lock-picking set. I used what was left of our office funds, since we’ll never get anything from Central Supply.”

“Other office chiefs come back with rice cookers, or even a small icebox. What good is this?” I opened the bag and held up two narrow metal blades, one slightly thicker than the other, each attached to a wooden handle-some sort of junk wood, though I couldn’t tell for sure what it was because it was painted black. “Made in Romania.” I read the small stamp on the handle of one of them. “Good for breaking and entering in Bucharest maybe, but probably worthless in Pyongyang. Have you ever seen the bookcases they make there? Nothing fits with anything else.”

I was right, the lock-picking tool was worthless even for getting into a morgue. I went around the side to a window set high on the wall and tried to see in, but the window was curtained. Just as I got on the sidewalk leading back to my car, a harried-looking man in a blue coat walked past, opened the door with a key, then slammed it so hard a puff of dust rose from the top of the door frame.

Another knock on the door, answered this time; the peephole opened, and I could see an eye looking out at me. “What do you want? We’re closed for lunch.”

“I don’t want lunch. Inspector O.” I flashed my ID toward the peephole. “On a case. Open up.”

“How do I know you are legitimate? You aren’t even wearing a pin.”

This was no time for a discussion of political symbolism. “It fell off. Open the door. You know who I am, I just told you.”

The door opened. The man in the blue coat peered around the edge. Now that I got a good look at his face, he looked familiar. “Sorry, Inspector, I’m not trying to be difficult. My orders are not to let anyone in until we finish the autopsy. Believe me, it’s not my idea, I’m not looking for trouble. I don’t even want this job. I studied bridge engineering in college. Someday maybe I’ll show you my designs, very well received in their day. Cables, vaulted whatnots soaring above river gorges. Meanwhile, can you do me a favor? Go away.”

At least I knew that the body was still there. “Who gave you the order for the autopsy?” At that moment, my cell phone rang. No one had any reason to call me, and no one but Min was supposed to know my number. It was very loud. I’d wrapped it in a glove, but that did no good. Worse than the volume was the tune. Birds stopped singing, stunned, when they heard it. As soon as it rang, I knew I could never get to it in time to turn it off. I probably couldn’t find the switch, or the button, or whatever it took to kill the thing. The longer the tune played, the wider the little man’s eyes became. He stifled a laugh. He fluttered his hands delicately and put them to his brow. He stifled another laugh, this second one only barely. Still the phone wouldn’t quit; if anything, it got louder. From now on, the damned thing stayed in the car, under a blanket. Maybe I could even lose it; possibly it could slip from my hand into the river. No one in the Ministry knew how to change the ringer, or so they claimed. “Crazy, you’re the only one with that problem, O,” they said. “Must be preprogrammed or something. Try and find an instruction manual.”

Finally the phone fell silent. The little man coughed and looked away. I knew it was probably hopeless to try to regain a sense of control, but I was aggravated enough to make the effort. “The order for the autopsy, who gave it to you?”

The little man opened the door a crack wider. “I don’t know, it’s not signed, but it has a big party chop on it, and a number, in red ink. We get them maybe once a year. The courier quakes in his boots when he hands one of these over. The doctor reads them, shakes her head, then locks them in a little safe under her desk. I don’t know what they say exactly, I only get a quick glimpse. But I know what they mean. Do the body, then get rid of it, forget you saw it, tidy up. Does it look like poison? No, can’t be! Must have been natural causes. That look of agony on the stiff’s face was just a result of muscular resonance, happens all the time, check the box that says, ‘No further investigation necessary.’ Have a cup of tea, clear your mind, look to the future.” It was more than he meant to say, and he looked nervous when he had said it.

“What is muscular resonance? I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a made-up term.” This was said in a surprisingly matter-of-fact tone, as if morgues get to make up vocabulary as a law of nature. “Someone here invented it a while ago to satisfy the paperwork, and we’ve never had a question. By now, there must be a thick folder somewhere up top, marked ‘Muscular Resonance.’ ”

“What about the stiff in there that got hit by a bus?”

He paled. “No such animal, Inspector. Now, go away, would you?”

“You said you were doing an autopsy. How many bodies do you have in there?”

“We don’t deal in numbers, we deal in quality. Whatever we have, we have. I wouldn’t know about buses.”

Clearly, they still had the body of the bank robber in there. So why wouldn’t they show it to Min? And why didn’t they want to let me in? If this wasn’t category three, I didn’t know what was.

Curiosity is fine, but sometimes it impairs judgment. If they didn’t want anyone to see the body, it was because they didn’t want anyone to see the body, or to ask any questions about it, or even inquire about articles of clothing. Normally, I would have figured it was the morgue’s business and walked away. But not this time. This time I said, “You have any silk stockings lying around?” The little man responded with a blank look. I had been curious; now I was mad. It wasn’t an innocent blank look, not one tinged with puzzlement or edging toward incomprehension. It was defiantly blank, and I didn’t plan to spend the afternoon on the doorstep of the morgue held at bay by such a look. Then I remembered the face. “You may not know me, but I know you. Your aunt lives in my building, on the ground floor. She needed medicine last year. I got some for her.”

I could tell this registered. It was true, I did recognize him, and I did get some aspirin for his aunt. She had repaid me with a promise to be a matchmaker. She knew some girls in the countryside who would be good for me, she said. Hard workers. Simple needs. Knew how to boil water.

The door shut in my face, but there was no click of the lock. I decided to wait. A minute later it opened a crack; a hand stuck out, with a stocking dangling on the end of it. “You didn’t get this from me.”

“Only one?”

“That’s right.” The stocking was torn and had a considerable amount of blood on it. Still visible along the top and up one side were small designs. At first they were hard to read, but when I examined them more closely, I saw they were monograms, Western letters, CB.

“You’d look pretty silly with this over your face, wouldn’t you?” I held up the stocking.

He opened the door wider and peered around the corner. “No, because I wouldn’t put that thing over my face.”

“What do you think the CB means? I’ve never seen stockings like that.”

“You’re the inspector, not me.”

“There’s a place in my sector, Club Blue.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“No, I’ll bet you wouldn’t. You always have spare stockings lying around? Or only when they come in with corpses that were never here?”

He began to look like he was thinking of closing the door.

“You must have autopsy equipment in there, right?”

“Of course.”

“Little scalpels, tiny picks.”

“Something like that.”

“You can do fine work, delicate work?”

He shook his head. “Forget it, Inspector, I can’t dissect a cell phone.”

I patted my pocket. “Don’t jump to conclusions, it’s bad for your ankles. Just one thing more.”

He waited.

“You wouldn’t have any other suspicious deaths that you’ve been keeping to yourselves, would you?”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I’ll be seeing you around.”