Hidden Moon

PART II
Chapter One

Things went quiet for about a week. They do that sometimes. Like a sheet has been thrown over a whole case, and no one wants to lift up a corner to see if it’s dead or just sleeping. More than ever, I wanted to get rid of the whole thing, if I could figure out how. Three murders. I didn’t think it was coincidence that the bus had been there when the robber stepped into the street in front of the bank; I still didn’t buy the finding of “heart failure” in the noodle restaurant; and a knife in the back is pretty conclusive. Three murders and a bank robbery, all in my sector. Three murders but one body missing. And SSD, or somebody, breathing down our necks before I’d even sharpened my pencil.

On top of this, a foreigner with a funny past and no file. It was possible, a Kazakh-Korean woman with a British passport getting a job in a bank in Pyongyang. Barely possible. And hers the bank that was robbed, not that we had so many banks. I couldn’t picture it, her standing meekly while the robbers did what? Told everyone to lie on the floor? Went in the back room and cleaned out the euro bills? She hadn’t volunteered any information, just seemed offended that I was asking questions. She’d probably told the robbers to keep their voices down.

I wandered around the office, wrote a few reports, watched the willow trees across the street soak up the afternoon sun, and then I got tired of waiting. Nobody answered the phone at the morgue, or maybe the line was out of order. I tried the Ministry, but they still claimed to have no reports on the murder of the man in the red shirt. Not a surprise; if you’re well connected enough, a knife in the back can be kept pretty quiet. We hadn’t even opened a case file and the incident had been yanked out of our jurisdiction. That was fine, I didn’t want to know anything about the politics or the personalities, but I needed to find out a couple of details, enough to reset my operations if that’s what had to be done. Maybe Han would have some information. When I called SSD, the phone clicked once, and then the operator said he was “out of range.” I asked when he’d be back, and she said that was not for me to know. Okay, I said, have a nice day.

I picked up the Interpol notes on Kazakh bank robbery rings and read through them again, maybe for the fifth time. One sentence kept catching my eye. It said that some of the robberies had been aided by informants in the bank, usually women who were hired only a few months before, then disappeared. The rest of the report was mildly interesting. The list of countries where robberies had taken place included everywhere in Western Europe except Portugal and England. The only country where more than one bank had been robbed was Germany. The Germans had experienced three of these apparently related robberies, two at the same bank in Koln and one in Dresden, but that one-the latest-was more than four years ago. The overall spate of similar robberies had started in 1991; the pattern was one bank got hit every fourteen months. Two robbers had been caught but died mysteriously while undergoing questioning in a Berlin jail. Another, after the second robbery in Koln, got through the police roadblocks but was killed a day later when his stolen motorcycle went out of control and ended up in the Rhine. The most recent robbery had been in Sweden, five months ago, in the middle of a snowstorm.

That seemed like a pretty quick transition, from Sweden to Korea in only five months. I called SSD again. The operator said she would pass Han the message and he would call me back. The words were okay, but the tone of voice said not to call and bother her anymore. It took a few minutes, but finally the phone rang. When I answered, there were no clicks, just Han’s voice, good and clear.

“You know anything about a body with a knife in the back?” I figured I’d get straight to the point, skip the pleasantries.

“No.” A short silence, which can mean a lot of things. “What are knife handles made of, Inspector?” he asked, finally.

“I assume this is completely unrelated to my question.”

“Simple query, isn’t it? What kind of wood? I thought that was right up your alley, wood.”

If I wanted to know where he was going with this, the easiest thing seemed to be to answer the question. “A knife handle could be anything. It might not be wood.”

“Thank you for that. Your Ministry is known for offering alternative theories, Inspector. But let’s say it was wood. Can we do that?”

“Like I said, could be anything.”

“What if it were birch? Where would it have been made?”

“Birch? Probably not from around here. It could have been made in Russia, that’s the obvious candidate.”

“Recently?”

“Hard to tell. Besides, how would I know, over the phone? You’d have to look at the wood, maybe chew on it a little.”

“You kidding me?”

“Just slightly.”

“So, there is a way to tell how old it is. I mean, you’re saying it’s not impossible.”

“Few things are impossible, Han.”

“What if it wasn’t really a knife?”

“More like a bayonet, you mean.”

“What then?”

“Then it might depend on the marks on the blade. If the handle is birch, somewhere up north is a good guess. Like I said, Russia, maybe. Then you would want to look at the marks on the blade, to see if they point in the same direction.”

“Birch trees don’t grow in rich people’s gardens where it’s warm?”

“They do, but rich people don’t cut down the birch trees in their gardens for lumber to make bayonet handles.”

“Could it be Japanese?”

“No. Almost certainly not. No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Very.”

“Then why is there Japanese on the blade?”

“Because it’s Finnish.”

“What?”

“The Finns bought Japanese rifles in the 1920s, along with the bayonets. If the handles broke, they were replaced with birch.” I wasn’t making this up; I just happened to read it somewhere and it stuck in my memory. “The Red Army probably made off with a few of them when they were running from angry Finns. Now one of them has ended up in someone’s back. You want a guess, just idle speculation? It could have been put there by a Russian. Or someone who worked for the Russians. Someone born in Odessa, say.” I didn’t think Logonov was capable of murdering anyone, but I wanted Han to know I hadn’t forgotten about the Russian just because I had been warned off seeing him again.

“That’s the other thing your Ministry does, speculate on the basis of nothing. It’s not very smart.”

“Don’t tell me, you think it’s a sign of insecurity. If you’re finished, I have another question for you. Do you still have the bank lady’s file?”

“According to you, it’s not a file, only a cover page.”

“I changed my mind.”

There was a long silence. This was not always a bad sign. Some people think when they aren’t talking.

“Still with me, Han?”

“Inspector, if you need something, just ask, alright? I hate it the way you Ministry people tiptoe around.”

“That’s a wonderful image, the Minister on tiptoe. Nothing at all like you, asking straight out and flatfooted about knife handles. Tell me this. Does the file say when the lady entered the country?”

Another silence.

“You there?”

“I’m here.”

“Well, when did she enter the country?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“Isn’t there a copy of her entry visa?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“I guess it must not be a file. Good-bye, Inspector, I’m busy.” The phone clicked twice, and the operator came on the line. The connection wasn’t as good; Han must have been calling from somewhere else.

“Anything more we can help you with, Inspector?” Same tone of voice, edgy, maybe condescending, though with all the SSD buzzes and clicks this time of day you couldn’t be sure.

“Yes, tell your technicians congratulations. They’ve almost fixed those clicks.”

“That’s it?”

“I don’t suppose you know anything about cell phones.”

“No.”

“How about silk stockings?”

The line went dead. I went out to find some cold noodles in a quiet restaurant where people didn’t fall over dead or end up with knives in their back, knives with birch-wood handles.