Hidden Moon

6

The two duty officers that night were Sad Man and Little Li. They were on duty most nights. No one else wanted the night shift, and they both hated working days. The Sad Man’s real name was Yang Tu Man. He had lost his family in a fire nearly ten years ago, two sons, his father, and his wife. The flames didn’t do much damage, but the smoke was toxic. For a long time afterward, he didn’t speak to anyone; he didn’t even show up at work for several months. Eventually, he started coming in nights so he wouldn’t have to deal with other people. Mostly, he worked on the files. After a while, they told him he’d have to answer the phone, too, but not to worry because no one who called at that hour was looking for conversation. When the phone rang, Yang would listen, then say, “Yeah, yeah. Okay.” And hang up. The central personnel section recommended transferring him out into the countryside, somewhere he could be alone. But when his case came up for review, the recommendation was reversed, no one could figure out why. So he stayed in the capital, in the same apartment where his family died. Some of his neighbors washed down the walls, but the place smelled of smoke for a long time.

Little Li-his name was Li Po Jin-was tall, maybe the tallest man in the Ministry, with a long face and a big chin. The Ministry’s construction sections tried every way they could short of kidnapping to get him into one of their battalions. He laughed at them. “My mother didn’t raise me to build dams,” he’d say whenever they called, and then he’d wander out to Personnel to make sure that no request for his transfer ever made it to the right desk.

Li and Yang got along better than any two people I knew. Whenever someone told the Sad Man to cheer up, Li would say, “Aw, let him alone, would you?” He’d put his big hand on the Sad Man’s shoulder. “How about a beer or something? Now’s the time.” And he’d bend down slightly to look into the Sad Man’s face.

The Sad Man had a good sense of a place as soon as he walked into a room. He picked up little clues that most people overlooked, things that were there and things that should have been but weren’t. Once when I asked him how he did it, he shrugged his shoulders and stared at me with melancholy eyes. “Being sad means you see the world as it is.”

Other than routing paper, Little Li wasn’t gifted in any way. Despite his height, he added nothing to the Ministry’s basketball team, which rarely won a game in the interagency tournaments. He was a mediocre inspector; his best point was his bulk. He wasn’t actually strong, but he looked like he could pick up a truck, and that was enough to keep most people from getting ideas about running away when I needed them to stay put. The two of them-Yang and Li-weren’t much good during normal working hours. Li had headaches in the sunshine, and Yang slipped into unbearable melancholy whenever he was in a room with more than three people. He couldn’t question suspects, even at night. They complained it was too depressing to be with him, and they clammed up.

Yang stood at the entrance looking into the dining room. His eyes swept over the tables, then he walked over to the body on the floor. “What’s with him?” He gave me a gloomy look.

“Dead,” I replied. “You here to help or to ask moronic questions?”

“Aw, leave him alone.” Little Li stepped beside me, frowning. “This one giving you trouble?” He pointed toward the short man still at the table, who was picking his teeth in a mean way. He had on a dirty red shirt with no collar, like a Russian waiter in a cheap restaurant. Li looked down at him. “Name.”

The short man examined the toothpick, then put it back in his mouth. “You plan to stand around jib-jabbing all night? I got places to be, people to meet.” He pointed at the body. “I think he had a heart attack or something. Damned shame, but what can you do?” He pushed back his chair and started to get up.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I said. “Be friends with the chair, and the chair will be friends with you. Make a mental note to sit still while we get some answers. In other words, relax.”

Little Li smiled. I could see him mouthing the phrase to himself, “Be friends with the chair.” Yang knelt by the body and started going through the pockets. He pulled a wallet from the jacket, a thick brown wallet filled with euro notes. “Hey, O.” He looked up at me. The man really did have awfully sad eyes. They made me think of cold, dark afternoons in November. Rainy afternoons, with the wind just starting to come down the street and nowhere to be but alone. “This guy was rich. Only I don’t think he’d been rich very long.”

“I’m listening.” I pulled the toothpick from the mouth of the man in red. “Show a little respect, pal. Your friend there just keeled over, picking your teeth is not polite.” I broke the toothpick in two and handed the pieces back to him. Little Li laughed.

“The bills are in perfect order, all facing the right direction, smaller ones in front, larger denominations in back.” Yang held up a wad of bills. “No one keeps money in a wallet in that sort of order. Maybe in a money clip, not a wallet.”

The man in red craned his neck to look at the bills in Yang’s hand. His face flushed before he turned to Little Li. “How about you and me go out for some fresh air, Inspector? It’s unhealthy in here, bodies on the floor and all. Anyway, the bathroom is on the first floor, and I got the urge.”

Li looked at me, then at Yang. “You okay?” he asked. Yang nodded.

“Go on, and put in a call for a wagon to take this body out of here while you’re downstairs.” I turned to Yang. “Here, give me the wallet.”

Yang looked at it intently; the sadness left his eyes for a moment but then returned. “All yours, O.”

The man at the table nudged Li. “You’ll never see that money again. He’ll take it all for hisself.”

Li put his big hand on the back of the man’s neck and lifted him out of his chair. “That was your money, was it, in your friend’s pocket?” The man gasped for breath until Li put him down and loosened his grip. “I still don’t know your name. Say, you’re breathing funny, you have asthma or something that interferes with your airways?” Li clapped his hand on the man’s shoulder, so he sagged slightly. “You want to walk by yourself, or you want me to carry you downstairs like a rabbit?”

“Don’t strangle him here,” I said to Li. “Wait till you get him back to the office.”

Yang scrambled to his feet. “You still need me?”

“Stay until the body gets moved, will you? Maybe we can talk a little.” I nodded to Li, and he took the man by the arm. I could hear him going down the stairs, saying, “Careful, stairs are bad for people with asthma.”

Yang pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and picked up the glass the man on the floor had held before he tumbled off his chair. He sniffed it. “We should take this in. Doesn’t smell like anything but soju, but you never know.” He turned to Miss Pyon, who was leaning against the wall, still pale, and then looked at me.

“She didn’t do anything,” I said.

“If you say so. I wasn’t here.” Yang looked down at the body.

“But something happened to him,” I said, “and it wasn’t his heart.”