Hidden Moon

4

When I walked back to the top of the hill, the man in the brown suit was waiting, looking down at Yang’s body. “Let him be,” he said. “He did us a favor, killing the Scotsman. I knew you wouldn’t do it. Though you should have, Inspector, it was your job.”

“My job? My job was solving the robbery. I almost did it, too.”

“Forget the robbery, Inspector. In fact, forget this whole thing.”

“Sure, forgetting is good.” I thought of Miss Chon. “A good habit, forgetting. But first I need to know a few details. Gives me more to forget, if that makes any sense. I think it does to you.”

“I owe you nothing, Inspector. But go ahead.”

“Who does Han work for?”

This made the man in brown smile. “Believe it or not, Inspector, I don’t really know. He doesn’t work for me. Beyond that, it was something I had on my list of things to find out. That’s why no one else is going to know about Yang’s death, or Boswell’s, no one but us for a couple of days. I want to see who scrambles around, trying to find them. No one is to know, not even SSD.”

“Han is SSD?”

“Very unlikely. He’s too clever, in his own way. He’s just attached to them for the moment.”

I nodded. “What about the special group, the ones with new shirts?”

“Might be connected to the army, might not. This much I know, they did a better job dressing them than training them. The group wasn’t as efficient as someone hoped. Apparently, it was formed to support the overall operation, and to tag people that needed to be eliminated at some point.”

“You know who’s on the list?”

“Better not to know, Inspector. Those sorts of lists are always upsetting.”

“Can I give you a theory? The bank robbery was just a diversion.”

“Nice theory, but wrong. They were serious about the robbery; at first they thought it would be enough, but then they got worried and decided to add a layer. Layers are always bad. They knew someone on the outside was playing, but they thought they had control of the whole operation. You, as it turned out, were a complicating factor.”

“Not by choice.”

“They knew you’d hang on, even if you said you wanted to dump the case. You are one hell of a problem, Inspector, for everyone.”

“I’m the one who tipped you off, remember?”

“We must have been at different sessions. You weren’t very helpful at all. You spent most of the time sparring with me, although the information you passed on about the temple having been rebuilt recently turned out to be useful. My people suspected you were in the middle of it. No one could believe you kept drifting into our sights like you did.”

I remembered that afternoon when I had the sense that I was someone’s prey. “You had people on me all the time?”

“Now and then. After you drove the Scotsman around the city, the concern spiked. And when the door to his room at the Koryo closed with you inside, it was almost decided to pack you off to the mountains.”

“But someone objected.”

“Someone did.”

There wasn’t much sense in saying thank you again, so I didn’t.

“Now I have a question, Inspector. He mentioned Prague to you?”

“I don’t think he said anything, no.” On the hilltop, looking at Yang’s body, it didn’t seem like a good idea, discussing Prague.

The man in the brown suit nodded. “If you say so.” Not that he believed me for a moment.

“You knew Boswell?”

“Me?” He smiled. “Until he showed up here, I never met the man. He wasn’t a policeman, though I know you eventually realized that. Based on how he went about his business, it looks like he had other connections. He acted more like an internal operative than he did someone who was used to being overseas. Of course, I’ll never know for sure.” The man in the brown suit laughed. “I rarely know anything for sure. You impress me as someone who doesn’t suffer from that same fate, Inspector.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Let me rephrase my question. Did Boswell say anything to you before he died?”

“No.”

The man in the brown suit looked at me. “You two were up there for quite a few minutes. You must have talked about something.”

“We did. Scotch eggs.”

He thought about this for a moment. “You realize, they decided to neutralize you. That’s why they let it be known you’d been talking to someone named Molloy, thinking you’d run into their arms.”

I figured it was time to change the subject. “Why were you on the train, staring at me that day?”

“I wasn’t staring, Inspector. I was just observing, quietly.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No, it isn’t, is it? Let’s just say, I’d already heard something about Prague, and I needed to get a sense of who you were. The question was starting to gnaw at me, what would happen when those same rumors reached you. I wasn’t sure; after I raised it during our”-he paused-“our session, either you would get mad at me, or you would get mad at them. I bet on the latter.”

“Am I so predictable?” The breeze had died, and the sun was hot. It occurred to me that spring never lasted as long as I hoped. “I’m just an insect in one of those webs?”

“Even insects fly off in strange directions. No, that’s why it was a bet, and all I could bet was that your grandfather’s blood runs in your veins.”

“My grandfather?” I looked over at the rows of graves on the hillside. “I thought you said we should let the dead rest in peace.”

“We’ve just had a shootout in a cemetery, Inspector. I don’t think anyone is sleeping soundly.”

“One or two more questions. Do you mind?”

“We’re on the top of a hill with no one around, no one that can still hear us, anyway. We both live by asking questions, Inspector, go ahead.”

“What if I ask you about silk stockings?”

“The Russian.” There was no hesitation. “He works part-time for SSD; the rest of the time he works against them. I don’t worry much about him, as long as I know where he is. I’ve never heard a single piece of information that came from him that could be trusted.”

I looked down at Yang. The man in the brown suit took off his jacket and hung it neatly over his arm. “What about Pang?”

The man in brown paused. “He didn’t want to come back in. He said he’d done enough already. But he couldn’t resist women with small waists.” So, Pang worked for him, and he didn’t care if I drew the conclusion about who had broken Pang’s cover.

“And Miss Chon? She seems to be in the center of a lot of this. If you drew one of your spiderwebs, she’d be the spider in the center. Though that wasn’t the way it was on the chart you showed me.” I didn’t believe Boswell’s story about her working for the Russians, channeling money. She was too complicated for something that simple. No one would waste her talents on that.

The man in brown turned abruptly and led the way back to the cars. When we got there, he put his hand on my right shoulder. “I’d say that it’s over, Inspector, except it never happened.”