Hidden Moon

3

As I walked back to the office, bad thoughts kept running through my mind. My skills might be getting rusty, but I would not lose a woman on high heels unless she was very well trained. And she wasn’t alone, it seemed. What was it I’d heard at the bank party about Miss Chon, that she was good at slipping away? Away to where?

After losing the clerk in the underpass, I doubled back to make sure she hadn’t ditched me and gone for a bowl of noodles somewhere. She hadn’t, at least not along the route we’d covered. I might have missed her as she climbed the underpass steps; she might have come up the other side exactly at the moment I went down. There is such a thing as coincidence, but the Ministry doesn’t favor it as an explanation. Frankly, I didn’t, either, not in this instance. Who had trained her? Why would a bank clerk need to know how to lose a tail? Worst of all, was my technique getting so bad that she spotted me, even in the dark?

By the time I got up the stairs and into the hallway leading to Yang’s office, I knew it would be impossible to solve this case by putting together a clue here and a clue there. There simply wasn’t time, especially if everything was as complicated as it now appeared. The first thing I had to do was pin Yang up against the wall and make sure none of that crazy conversation we’d had the other night led anywhere. I wasn’t worried that he was involved, though I made it a point never to be sure about anything until I was. The fact was, he was mentioned in a report where he shouldn’t have been, and we needed to know why. Despite my first reaction, I knew it couldn’t be the Russians who had floated his name. Someone in our unit appeared in a Blue Paper, in the middle of everything that was going on-coincidence? Not a chance. This wasn’t from a foreign service. It was from the inside, people who knew something about Yang. They might have picked his name at random, but that would have been out of character. When they wanted to use someone, even for target practice, it was for a reason. If they put his name in a Blue Paper, they had thought about it, researched, weighed other options and other people. What was there about my melancholy colleague that rang bells for them, whoever they were?

I didn’t bother to knock. “Yang, I’m going to phrase this as delicately as I can. Whatever you’re up to, it’s not courage. It’s foolishness.” Yang was at his desk, staring off into space with a sad look in his eyes.

He glanced up and acknowledged me standing in his doorway, but he didn’t change expressions. “So, you figured out who was driving that car with the special plates,” he said. He waited, but I didn’t reply. Only then did he nod for me to sit down.

The visitor’s chair had one leg shorter than the others. It had been that way for years. Sooner or later we’d fix it or get another chair. “Did I?” I said, trying to stay upright. “Did I figure it out?”

“They’ve been watching you in order to watch me. And once they spotted me at your apartment, they became doubly interested.” Yang hunched over his side of the desk. He and Li shared an office; they sat on either side of a single worktable. Li was at the Traffic Bureau, checking reports on bus accidents. I hoped he might be able to shake something loose, where I had not.

“Alright, tell me. Why are they watching you?”

Yang shrugged, a minor movement of his shoulders. He blinked slowly while he took a breath. It was like a mask of death, his face when he closed his eyes. For a moment, I almost thought he had died right in front of me. Then he moved slightly and opened his eyes again. “You’d have to ask them.”

“Look, Yang, if I had the time, I’d probably play this game with you for weeks. I raise a subject obliquely. You parry implicitly. I tiptoe to the side door. You slip out over the roof. Back and forth. We’d even begin to look forward to it. Every day, a new line of attack; every afternoon, a new line of defense. But we don’t have time, and I just lost someone in a tunnel, which I always hate to do. So, I need to know why you are being followed. I need to know urgently, am I clear?” It made me uneasy to push him like this, but I didn’t have much choice.

“I told you, O, I don’t know. How would I? How would I know why anyone follows anyone else in this country?”

“ ‘In this country,’ Yang?” I smiled so broadly my cheeks hurt. “What would that mean?”

Yang stood up and took a half step toward me. “Nothing, O,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t worry, I’m not afflicted with a sudden dose of courage. I can see. But I can’t act. It’s a sort of moral paralysis. Many people have it, I’m beginning to understand.”

“My friend, nothing you’ve said in the past two minutes makes me feel better, put aside that most of it doesn’t make any sense at all.” There wasn’t any decision to make. It had nothing to do with believing Yang or not. I wasn’t going to throw him to the lions. “Alright, if you didn’t do anything, and you aren’t about to do anything, then how do we get this special squad off your neck?”

“Don’t bother,” Yang said. “It’s not worth your time.”

“I’m not bothering for your sake. The person I’m worried about is me. If they don’t like something about you, then it rubs off on everyone nearby, and I’m pretty near. I have enough to worry about. Don’t forget, the guy who was in here the other night said I stole his wallet. Min says the guy was well connected, and you told me he was pulled out of here by people with guns and funny plates on their car. He turns up dead, they go down a list of suspects.”

“No one is going to touch you, O. You lead a charmed life.”

I laughed.