Bamboo and blood

2

The next morning, Pak was writing furiously. He always wrote furiously. Before they stopped making requisition forms, he put in a request every month for a chalkboard. "I want to beat the hell out of something when I write answers to these idiots," he would say. "Chalk is good. A chalkboard is perfect. You can pound on it for hours, and then when you're done, you erase the whole damned thing."

He stopped and crumpled the piece of paper that had borne the brunt of his pen. Then he cursed, smoothed it out, and started writing furiously again. He didn't look up when I knocked on his open door. "Get packed," he said simply. He read over what he had written. "Damned craziness." He put the crumpled paper in a file folder with a black band around it. "Well." He finally raised his head. "Are you packed?"

"For what?" I hadn't gone back to the office that night after seeing Jeno It was late, I was cold and tired, and the tale of my conversation with the general could wait until morning. Nothing, I figured, would happen in the meantime.

Pak pointed at the folder. "For this." Apparently, I had been wrong. Apparently, a gear somewhere had become unstuck overnight.

I looked at the folder. There obviously wasn't much in it. It must have been only a small gear. "I don't know what it says."

"Of course you don't. It's a secret, very closely held in the Ministry. I am even instructed to keep it from you. Can you believe that?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"You are ordered to New York effective immediately."

"What?" My mouth doesn't generally drop open, but for this it did.

"You have an aisle seat on Saturday's plane to Beijing. There you wait for a visa, which may or may not be forthcoming from the Americans, and then onward as soon as possible to New York. 'Onward as soon as possible.' I sound like a dispatch cable."

"I can't do that." I was thinking fast but not coming up with much. The last thing I wanted to do was to fly over the Pacific Ocean to New York.

"Give me one good reason you can't."

"I have to take our foreigner to that site he mentioned. Don't you want to hear a report of what happened when I was up there? I'm not sure whether the note you signed made a dent, but at least they didn't shoot me." I was going to have to come up with something better, much better. The only problem was, I couldn't think of anything.

"They can shoot you later, after you get back, if they want. Right now, we have no time to worry about the foreigner. You have seventy-two hours to tidy up your office, clear those piles of paper off your desk, and wheedle a decent pair of shoes from the supply clerk."

"I don't need shoes," I said. "I need an explanation. When I land in a city behind enemy lines, I like to have some idea of what I'm doing, don't you?" This sounded better; it even gave me momentary hope that I had found some firm ground on which to take a stand. Maybe Pak could turn it into something effective.

"No, you don't get to know anything." Pak had a better sense of footing than I did. If he didn't even pause to make a show of considering the argument, it meant there wasn't any firm ground on this one, only swamp for as far as the eye could see. "Obviously, they'll have to tell you something sooner or later. But nothing officially now, not yet, anyway."

"Nothing?" Paduk stones are given more notice of being put on the board than I was getting.

Pak shrugged. "You didn't hear it from me, but it has to do with the dead woman, the one for whom you were supposed to sweep up a few facts and then dump the whole thing back in the Ministry's file of 'cases-for-another-day.' We only needed some background information on her. Nothing elaborate, remember? Shoe size, preference in blouse color, eating habits. Anything to fill up a few pages. Maybe if you'd done that like I told you, we'd have been able to unlatch ourselves from this whole thing."

"You don't really believe that."

"Doesn't matter what I believe anymore. But, no, I don't believe that."

"So, why New York?" I already knew why, or part of it. Her father had told me.

"She was in New York for a short time before her final assignment. That much you've already discovered on your own, I take it. They want to know what she did, who she saw, where she went while she was there. They think it's important, why I don't know. I told you about those strange winds from strange places. This is one of those. Think of yourself as a seabird being blown off course to an exotic clime."

"It's January. New York isn't exotic; it's colder than it is here. I know, I read the reports from the security detail assigned to the diplomatic mission there. They say it's miserable."

"As if anything they write can be believed. Why you in particular were selected to go on this junket might seem odd, but these are odd times. You've been overseas before, so I suppose you naturally came to mind."

"Is this another one of those favors?"

Pak could be impassive when he needed to be.

"You volunteered me?"

"Don't be ridiculous. I protested being deprived of staff, especially now."

"You wrote a complaint?"

"No. But I crumpled the order a couple of times."

I smiled at Pak. He threw the file over to me. "Consider yourself doubly lucky. There's a big meeting here next week, one of those national sessions. Ten thousand extra people in Pyongyang with no heat, no electricity, and no food. We'll all have double shifts trying to keep them out of trouble. All of us but you. You will be happily away from the action, seeing new sights, dodging muggers and blond women with legs that reach all the way to heaven."

"I'm not going. They can't make me."

"And will you cite the muggers or the legs as the reason?"