Bamboo and blood

8

"I didn't know you were allowed to travel these days." My brother was never happy to see me, and certainly not by accident. I wasn't happy to see him, either. When I woke up in the morning after a few hours of sleep, my stomach was bad. The talks had gone on all day, and my stomach hadn't let up once. I wrote a cable for Sohn, but the code clerk wouldn't take it for a couple of hours and I couldn't leave it, so I sat around until almost 8:00 P.M., which was already 4:00 A.M. in Pyongyang. No one would read a message at 4:00 A.M., unless they couldn't sleep. If I were in Pyongyang, I wouldn't read a message at that time of the morning. If I had been in Pyongyang, I never would have run across my brother, who was standing in front of me in Geneva. I didn't follow his travels, but I usually heard something whenever he left the country. This time I hadn't heard a thing. Strange coincidence, us being here at the same time. I didn't like it from any angle. I didn't like being here with him, and I didn't like the coincidence.

My brother and I agreed on nothing other than that we wanted our few meetings to be carefully planned ahead of time. In some ways, he and the Man with Three Fingers were alike, nothing left to chance, though my brother was smarter and more devious.

It had not always been this way between us. Our relations had never been good, but when we were younger, there had been less poison. When it was that things changed, I could not say and had stopped trying to understand. He traveled overseas frequently, ate at restaurants with crystal wineglasses, or so he liked to say. I didn't know about the glasses that touched his lips, but I could see with my own eyes that he wore shoes with leather soles. He wouldn't say what he did on those trips, and I never tried to find out. I could have flipped a file or made a call, but I didn't want to know. My trips were simpler, easy liaison missions, cheap seats on trains, cheap meals, cheap liquor. No wonder my stomach was bad.

"Once in a while, there's something to do," I said. He looked like a prosperous Asian businessman, well-cut suit, perfectly fitted, pale blue shirt. "I do whatever there is to do, then go home. How was I to know you'd be here? If I'd known, I would have told them to get someone else." His eyes were not as dangerous as they had once been. When he was younger, he could flay a person with his eyes.

"You never make things that simple. Who sent you here? Don't bother being so secretive. All I have to do is make some phone calls."

There was never a moment to breathe; as soon as we stepped into each other's line of fire, the guns started booming. "What do you care? My orders are valid."

"They can also be canceled."

There was no sense standing in the damp evening continuing a struggle that would only end when both of us were dead. "Then get them canceled, it doesn't matter to me. It wasn't my idea to come out here in the first place."

My brother stepped around a puddle. He looked carefully at his shoes. "I have a dinner. It will probably last until midnight. We can finish this conversation later. There's a bar near a hotel on the main street that runs through Coppet, about ten kilometers up the lake." He reached down and picked a wet leaf off the tip of one shoe. When he stood upright again, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his fingers. This was his way of annoying me. It always worked. "Can you find it on your own? You'll have to take a taxi or hire a car. Meet me there at 1:00 A.M. Everything else in town will be closed but that bar; it will be hard to miss." He folded the handkerchief carefully, so that all the edges were in line, then put it back into his pocket.

"There may be a parade of people tagging along behind me. They think I'm selling missile parts."

My brother froze. It was only for a heartbeat, but I saw it. "Surely you're not peddling missile parts these days," I said. "Isn't that beneath you?

"And surely you're not digging into other people's business these days. Oh, wait, I forgot, that's your job, isn't it?"

I turned and walked away, up the hill to the drab hotel where I was staying. The mission said it didn't have space for me, and anyway, my instructions from Sohn were to keep clear of the mission as much as possible when we weren't in talks. If I seemed to be operating outside the normal bubble, that would attract attention, he said, which is what he wanted me to do. Attract attention. From the two cars parked at either end of the street, it appeared I was succeeding. I decided not to go back to my room yet. I'd seen some beech trees that had been cut down a few streets away; maybe there would be a few chips I could pick up to bring home.

It was hard to find beechwood in Pyongyang. One year my grandfather went to great lengths to have some shipped from Bulgaria. I had imagined a whole trainload would pull up to our door, but there were only a few boards. He treasured them. The day they arrived, we celebrated as if there had been an addition to our family. For months they sat in the house, carefully leaning against the wall in the room where my grandfather sat and wrote letters. I asked if I could help saw them. The old man shook his head. It was much too soon to talk about such things, he said. The boards needed to get accustomed to the place; they weren't used to the climate, to the way we talked, to our dreams. The wood had to feel rested and comfortable, then it would be ready. Finally, on a spring afternoon nearly four months after our "guests" arrived, he said it was time. When I asked what he was going to make out of the boards, he looked surprised. "How would I know? The wood and I have to decide together, don't we? Don't think you can just impose your will on things. Don't listen to this talk you're hearing these days about man being at the center of creation. Wood doesn't know about politics. And thank goodness for that." It turned out that the beech wanted to be part of a chair. I only sat in it once, before my grandfather gave it away, a present to a friend in the army, a man with a long title and a nice office. When I went to visit him a few years after my grandfather died, he had disappeared, as had the chair.

The two beech trees had been cleared away. From the pale light of the single streetlight, I could see a little sawdust on the road, but nothing else. I walked down the hill again to town, figuring I'd sit in a quiet bar until it was time to go meet my brother. If anyone was following me, they would just have to wander around a bit or find a place to relax until I set off for Coppet. I wasn't sure where Coppet was, but I wasn't going to let my brother know that. It would give him too much satisfaction, dictating directions to me. It was bad enough he just assumed that I would accept a summons to meet him someplace out of town at 1:00 A.M. The only thing worse was that he was right.

I had been given a pocket map of Geneva before I left Pyongyang; I'd check it as soon as I found a place to sit down. It was an old map made in Hungary. Sohn had handed it to me with an odd look on his face. "What makes them think you'll find this of any use," he said, "I'll never understand. It's probably what Geneva looked like during the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Let's hope it's better than nothing."

A woman in high heels, spikes that could go through your heart, passed me when I turned onto a main street in search of a cafe. She was blond, Russian, a face like a fox, though I don't imagine a fox, even in a leather skirt, looks that way from the back. When she walked up to a man standing on the corner, it was clear they knew each other already. He put his arm around her waist. She drew away, just a tiny gesture, then settled against him. She doesn't like him, I thought. Maybe she'll murder him tonight, with those stiletto heels.