Hidden Moon

6

A Japanese businessman was on the stage, singing karaoke along with one of the bar girls, who was doing her best to look happy and attentive. The man was sweating; his voice wouldn’t have been quite so grating if he had been a little more sober. He couldn’t hit the high notes, but it was apparent that, in his state, he didn’t care.

Boswell watched the stage for a moment. “Make sure no one asks me to go up there and sing, Inspector. I only know songs that aren’t on your machine.”

“You never know. Ever heard of Willie Nelson? A Pakistani scientist did Willie Nelson one night. Everyone clapped.”

“Well, I don’t seek applause. But will you have a drink? We may as well get better acquainted, seeing that you’re stuck with me for the next few days.”

There was a tall, thin girl tending the bar. She said hello quietly and asked if we wanted anything. I shook my head, and she went back to writing in a notebook she had open on the counter, next to the bottles of liquor. She knew enough not to stare at Boswell.

“No, not stuck,” I said. “You’re a guest. What’s more, you’re here on a mission, apparently important to your government, and to mine. If I don’t make your visit comfortable or help it succeed, I will not have done either of us any good.” Just saying that made my shoulder start to throb.

“I’ll make you a deal.” Boswell leaned against the bar and looked around the room. The Japanese businessman had finished singing and stumbled to a table in the corner, where he sat alone, swaying gently from side to side. Otherwise, the place was deserted. “The deal is this. I won’t cause you trouble, and you help me get through this assignment without incident.”

“That’s it?”

“Too simple? You want me to add some complicating factors?”

“No, I like it just the way you said it. Alright, it’s a deal, let’s have a drink.”

I called the bar girl over. “How about some brandy?” I asked Boswell.

“Brandy is for French touts. We’ll have Scotch. And none of that Japanese stuff.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a flask. “This is real Scotch whiskey, tastes like Scotland on a wet spring evening. You’ll like it.” He switched to his odd Korean. “Give us two glasses, young woman, maybe three if you’d like a sip yourself.” He turned to me and was back to English. “No harm in that, is there, Inspector? She seems a fine fresh lass, as the other James Boswell would say.”

“Just a drop for her,” I said. “Her name is Miss Kwon, and she doesn’t drink much. To you, she may look like a kind and gentle maid, but she rules this bar with an iron hand. I wouldn’t underestimate her.” Miss Kwon smiled sweetly at me and brought the glasses.

“We had a man from Scotland here last year,” she said. “He sang in a sad voice, pretty but sad. The songs were all mournful. I tried to get him to sing something happy, but he wouldn’t, insisted he didn’t know any. We talked about it afterward, when he’d gone. The other girls said they never heard anything so depressing. On his last night here, he said he would come back soon, but we never saw him again.” She looked at Boswell for a moment. “Will you do the same, disappear forever?”

Boswell poured the liquor into her glass, then into mine, and finally into his own. “I don’t sing, and I can’t promise to return to your happy land.” He raised his glass and gave Miss Kwon his full attention; she held his gaze, and though he probably didn’t see it, I noticed a touch of defiance in her face. “But I’ll drink to your happiness,” he said, “and that of your loved ones, as well.”

Miss Kwon flushed, the defiance melted away, and she hesitated before she spoke. “Come back tomorrow night,” she said at last. “I’ll sing you a good song. Maybe you’ll want to join in.” She raised her glass. “To Scottish friends.”

They both turned to me. “To hell with sentiment,” I said. “The two of you are putting a damper on the evening, and we haven’t even started.” I picked up my glass the same way the man in the brown suit had done, made a flourish with it. “I’ll drink to our deal, and to songs with happy endings.”

“Let’s get comfortable, Inspector.” Boswell pointed to a dark corner, where there was a table by itself, as far away from the stage as possible. He turned to Miss Kwon. “Maybe we can encourage that Japanese chap not to sing anymore. Why doesn’t someone sit on his lap?”

Miss Kwon laughed. “Unless you want to be the one, we don’t do that sort of thing here, do we, Inspector?”

“Probably against the law, in both cases, whether it’s you or me,” I said, “though I’d have to check for sure which one is considered worse.”

We sat without talking very much for twenty minutes, or rather, I didn’t talk. Boswell went on at length about the history of Scotland. I was still sipping my first drink; Boswell was on his second. “Oh, yes.” His knees barely fit under the table, and whenever he shifted position, the table tipped. “We Scots have been everywhere, and if I may say so, everywhere we’ve been we’ve improved things.”

“A shame you didn’t make it here sooner.”

He pinned me with a glare, then softened his expression and bowed slightly. “From what I have seen so far, it would have done no good.”

“True, perhaps, but one never knows. We might have been apt pupils, once.”

“Oh, no, you misunderstand, Inspector. I don’t doubt that even this place could have used a good dose of Scottish influence.”

“You make it sound like the clap,” I said.

“What I mean is, the Chinese were here first, and if you got the clap, I should think you got it from the T’ung, or the Ling, or whatever they are.”

“T’ang. But not the T’ang. More likely it was delivered by the Khitan or Jurcen or some nameless barbarian tribe that favored rape and pillage. Of course Westerners don’t know it, but we had our own kingdoms, our own greatness before the Chinese. Now all we do is catch their dust. Hard to fathom what went wrong.” I looked around the dark room. “I’d say, when Scots still painted themselves blue, we already had a very civilized court life.”

“For the love of Mike, Scots never painted themselves blue. Picts, maybe, but not Scots.” He sighed and put down his glass. He peered into the flask, then shook it sorrowfully. “That’s the last of it. What will I do for the next two days?”

“You don’t have any more in your room?”

“I do not, and your little friends who are even now going through my bags won’t find any.”

“No one is going through your bags, Superintendent. And even if they did, if you had any extra Scotch, it would be quite safe.”

“I suppose all you have down here is that Japanese whiskey. I don’t favor it. It’s not real.”

“It’s expensive enough to be real.”

“You’ll never taste the peat in Japanese whiskey, Inspector. You know why?”

“I don’t.”

“Artificial. Imitation. Copied.”

“If we had anything in our glasses, we could drink to that.”

“Aye, but we can’t.”

“I have a question for you, Superintendent, if you don’t mind. What is a ‘cowering beastie’?”

He cocked his head and blinked slowly. “A what?”

“A ‘cowering beastie.’ I read it somewhere, a poem, seems to me it was Scottish. I can’t remember anything else, but those words stuck with me.”

Boswell sat in contemplation. “You are full of surprises, Inspector. It is from a poem by Robert Burns. How did you ever get hold of it? I wouldn’t think he made it into your required reading.”

“You’d be surprised what we read in our spare time, Boswell.” I waited to see how he would react to my using his name.

He showed no emotion. Then he waved to Miss Kwon. “Bring some of your best local whiskey over here, my fair, iron-fisted lass. The Inspector and I have some serious conversation ahead of us.” He sat back in his chair and, in a sonorous voice, recited:

“Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!”

I nodded. “So, what is it, this cowering, timorous beastie?”

“The title of the poem, Inspector.” He gave me an odd look. “ ‘To a Mouse.’”

“Ah, now I remember. Yes, a mouse. That’s why I paid so much attention to the poem in the first place. Why is it, Boswell, that people think mice are afraid, that they cower?”

“James. If we’re to discuss Robert Burns, call me James. Did you prepare for my visit? Tell me, Inspector, just as one cop to another. Did they give you books, background files to read up?”

“I didn’t know you were going to visit. You were a bolt from the blue. But we were speaking of mice. Why are they always portrayed as afraid?”

Boswell shrugged, wary. “Dunno. In my house, if you turn on the kitchen light and catch one at midnight, it scoots across the floor, nose twitching in terror. Perhaps you have a different species.”

“Mice are small, Superintendent.”

“How about if we use our names instead of titles? More friendly, like.”

“Small. Size is equated with cowardice; see something small, assume it is afraid.” The mountainous Scotsman looked at me thoughtfully, waiting for me to complete the thought. I did. “But they don’t correlate. We never make that mistake. I suggest you don’t, either.”

Boswell rose from his chair slowly, and when he was at his full height, he looked down on me. For a moment, I could tell he was weighing whether to pound me into the floor like a stake, to prove that size meant something after all. Then he exhaled mightily. “We’ll try this again tomorrow night, Inspector. You might do some more reading, if you’ve a mind.” He went over to the bar and whispered something to Miss Kwon, who was pouring our drinks, downed his in a gulp, then grimaced and walked out the door, singing a melancholy tune.