The Man with the Baltic Stare

Chapter One

I didn’t bother to tell Kang I was leaving. After a testy exchange at the airport with a clerk who insisted it was impossible to change the routing on my ticket, I booked the afternoon flight to Beijing and then caught a plane the next day to Pyongyang. When I walked in the door of the hotel, I was greeted with a loud shriek.

“Stay where you are!” A woman was shampooing the carpet, giving the fish a run for their money. “Don’t move. It’s wet. You’ll leave footprints.”

“Inspector?” The bird was on duty. “We didn’t know where you were, and we were getting ready to move your things out of the room this afternoon, not that you have much there. Oh, and there’s a message for you. It came about an hour ago.”

The note was from Zhao. All it said was: “2.” I went upstairs to wash my face and give Kim a call but decided to let him stew. When I came down again a little before two o’clock, the man who never blinked was standing at the front desk. He stared at me.

“I missed you,” I said. “On the plane, I was trying to remember something my grandfather once told me. It’s one of those things that if you think about too long, you can’t remember. But as soon as you stop thinking about it, you remember. Maybe if you went away, I’d stop thinking about it and then it would pop into my head.”

He didn’t have much to say to that, so I went out in front. I only waited for a couple of minutes when the car pulled up. The little man went through his routine.

“Game time,” said Zhao as soon as the door shut and we pulled away.

“What game would that be?”

“Ask Pang, why don’t you.” Zhao laughed his panther laugh. I saw the driver smile to himself.

“Is there a way we could talk, just between ourselves?” We could always get rid of his other ear, I thought. Why don’t we do that?

Zhao pressed a button on the armrest. The driver frowned.

“Is that better?”

“Fine,” I said.

“The last pieces are in place, and we are ready to put the machinery in motion. In case you hadn’t figured it out, the Russians have the northeast. The Japs have everything on the east coast below Chongjin. And I have the west coast. I don’t want anything to upset this arrangement.”

“Pyongyang?”

Zhao appeared to consider this. “You want it? It’s yours.”

“No, thank you.”

“Then stay out of the way.”

“Like Pang?”

The panther’s eyes looked sated. “Shall we mourn Colonel Pang, Inspector? Would you like a moment to grieve? It’s not such a great loss, you know. He had orders to secure the entire northern half of your country. I don’t think he would have tried to get everything all the way down to Kaesong, but one never knows what might happen in these situations. He was on the verge of sending in the stable of your sniveling defector generals he had been holding in reserve. They’ve been well treated, every need attended to. In return, they were going to help Pang stuff your country back under the imperial wing, exactly where the mandarins in Beijing think it belongs. Who can say? Pang might even have been appointed governor-general. I’ve saved you from that, and more.”

“So far, I feel no stirrings of gratitude.”

Zhao growled softly. “I told you not to go to Macau, but I know you went anyway. And then you disappeared. I don’t like that, but I’ll let it go this time if you give me what I want.” There was sweat on Zhao’s upper lip.

“And what would that be?”

“Keep an eye on Major Kim for me. He isn’t your friend. He doesn’t have your interests at heart. If he has his way, you’ll be licking his boots.”

“I doubt it. That would ruin the shine.”

Zhao reached over and touched my chest. “We have a lot in common, Inspector. We both hate to be bossed around; we both want to preserve what is best about the old ways. And neither of us gives a damn about politics. This is the time when we need to work together.” He pushed me back against the seat. “I know, you don’t think that is possible. But I do. I think we are the perfect couple.”

I slipped sideways. “You might be right,” I said. “But I need some time to think it over. You see what I mean?” I put his hand in his lap.

Zhao moved away, his face twisted in rage. He stabbed the button on the armrest. “Pull over,” he said. “Get this bastard out of my car.”

We swerved to the side of the road. The little man jerked the door open. “Get the fuck out,” he said. “Get the fuck out of the car right now.”

“Very good,” I said. “You’ve been studying.”

“Take a deep breath.” He grinned at me. “Go ahead, take a couple, while you’re at it.” He slammed the door, and the car sped away.

2

After getting out of the car, I went back to my hotel, hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on my doorknob, and tried to sleep off the memory. At six o’clock, the doorbell rang.

“Room service.”

“Go away. Look at the sign.”

“That’s for the room-cleaning staff. I’m not cleaning. I’m checking the minibar.”

Sleep was impossible, so I had the hotel arrange for a taxi to take me to Kim’s office. Under blazing lights, both tanks followed the taxi as soon as it emerged from the tunnel. The duty officer at the entrance to the building almost wouldn’t let me in. I wasn’t in the mood for barriers. I bared my fangs. Duty officers don’t like trouble; it makes for work. He waved his pencil at the stairs. “Try not to have a heart attack on your way up.”

“You don’t look so good, Inspector. Did Zhao make a pass at you?” Major Kim stood up and walked around the desk to greet me.

“If you won’t do something about Zhao, maybe I will.” I sat down in the green chair.

Kim didn’t seem pleased. “Zhao’s a Chinese citizen. If something happens, our friends in Beijing will be unhappy. They will say we are endangering their countrymen, and that they must send in protection. They’re waiting for an excuse. Stay away from him.”

“Me stay away from him?” I laughed; it sounded like a cypress tree in a forest fire. “Zhao murdered Colonel Pang. That Beijing doesn’t mind?”

“So, you know about Pang’s demise. Word gets around, I guess.” He pointed out the other chair where he wanted me to sit, the brown one. “Everything is calculus, Inspector, a matter of mathematics, of complex equations. For example, according to the etiquette of nations, Pang was not supposed to be here. He was here illegally, you might say, skipped the normal entry procedures, so his death has no standing. He was running operations that never officially existed, using people without faces to obtain results that were never written down. Zhao, on the other hand, is a legitimate businessman representing the best interests of his country. He has documents. And he has money.”

“He rips out the lungs of people who get in his way.”

“A businessman, like I said.”

“He’s an animal. Worse than that, actually.”

“Yes, worse than that. And if you care to go to the east coast, I can introduce you to his Japanese counterpart. I won’t list the body parts that are his focus.”

“What about the Russian in the northeast?”

“Him we can handle, for the moment anyway. My big fear is that he will get himself eliminated and then we’ll have to deal with someone who has more brains than muscle.”

“Out of curiosity, how did Zhao get Pang?”

Kim studied my face, looking for clues. How much did I know? “Lack of attention, I guess. A momentary lapse, that’s all it takes. You might say it was a surprise. He was lying in bed, listening to music on his earphones. Maybe dozing. When the killer left, the CD player was set on continuous loop. A macabre touch. It would probably have gone on forever if we hadn’t broken the door down and found him there. The machine had been plugged into a wall socket. Him, too, as a matter of fact.”

“Did you look to see what CD it was?”

Kim shook his head. “I didn’t look, but from what I heard, it sounded like Chinese opera.”

What a bunch of sadists. “He hated Chinese opera.”

The television in the corner of Kim’s office was on, and the 8:00 P.M. news was ending. Kim started to say something more, but I shushed him. The announcer read a report about “unfavorable days” due to “geophysical factors” and warned that those afflicted with high blood pressure or other maladies needed to take precautions on November 1, 4, 9, 12, and 15. I took a scrap of paper out of my pocket and made a note to myself.

“You don’t believe that stuff, I hope, Inspector.”

“No, but you’d better. It’s what you told me to figure out.”

“Which was what?”

“The SSD code. They’re using the television, right under your nose.”

“Impossible.” Kim moved back to the safety of his side of the desk.

“Absolutely impossible. But they’re doing it anyway. I worked on it while I was traveling. Something to pass the time.”

“You only went to Macau.”

“True, but even a short flight can sometimes seem long. At the end of every month, the television announces what days in the coming month are bad for health. It’s a regular feature. No one thinks twice about it. Only old ladies pay attention, them and doting mothers.”

“And?” The major finally sat down.

“And the bad-health days are apparently the days that are bad for your health, literally. Those are the days of the SSD operations, or maybe when they pass around the plans for the next set of moves. Go back and look at those dates. Take the first date in the series, and apply it to the announcement of the lectures at the Grand Study Hall each month. If the first unfavorable day is the third, for example, you look for lecture number three.”

“Are you crazy? That’s unbelievably complicated.”

“No, it’s pretty simple. Ask me when we have more time, I’ll tell you about complicated operations.”

“So, I look through the records, then what? What does it tell me?”

“That you’ll have to figure out yourself. I didn’t even try to get that far-too many possibilities. If I had to guess, I’d guess it’s something about the lecture, or the lecturer, or the room where the lecture is being held.”

“Or something else entirely.”

“Could be. Meantime, you’d better hurry. The new series of lectures begins tomorrow.”

“It’s too simple. It’s too complicated, and that’s what makes it too simple. That’s how everything is up here. Madness, pure madness.” He gave me a wary look as he reached for the phone and pressed a button. “Get me the domestic radio transcripts for the last day of every month.”

Television, too, I mouthed.

“Television, too,” he said into the phone. “I want everything here in thirty minutes… What? Go back six months; no, wait, go back a year.” He hung up. “You’re sure about this? Not pulling my string?”

“When I do that, you’ll know.”

A half hour later, a man brought in a folder. “You want it, you got it.”

“Sit.” Kim waved the man into one of the plastic chairs near the wall.

I stood up to leave. “No, you stay, too, Inspector.”

Kim went through the transcripts. He used a pencil to make marks here and there, but mostly he bit on the end of it.

“You can get lead poisoning that way,” I said.

“You can get lead poisoning from a bullet, too. Only I don’t think anyone in the Grand Study Hall will be armed tomorrow. Let’s hope not, because no one on our team will be. I’m not handing out firearms until I know who is doing what to whom.” He looked at the transcripts again. “I don’t know if I see a pattern or not. Cracking codes is not part of my job description.”

“You’re supposed to be in Paris, eating fine food and recruiting college girls.”

“Don’t remind me.” He put the transcripts to one side. “I hope you don’t have a picnic already planned for tomorrow, Inspector.”

“Not at all. As a matter of fact, I think I’m coming down with the flu.”

“Well, drink plenty of fluids tonight, because you lead the team tomorrow afternoon to the lectures to find out what is going on. There isn’t time for a long investigation, so we might have to jump from gathering facts to shooting people in a hurry.”

I coughed. “With what? You said no firearms.”

“Not tomorrow. Maybe the day after that.”

“Ever have the flu that makes your joints ache? That’s what I’ve got. Most likely, I’m in the most contagious period right now.”

“Tough for you and your joints.”

“We’d better be careful. It could be the start of a pandemic. Maybe I picked up something in Macau eating monkey parts. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Forget it, Inspector; I’m not giving you sick leave tomorrow. I don’t care if you infect the whole country.”

I coughed in Kim’s direction. “How can I lead a team I’ve never met? It’s not even assembled yet. We need at least a couple of days to get to know each other’s quirks.”

“Your quirks alone could take years to explain. Besides, a team of strangers doesn’t bother me. I’m not worried about people not knowing each other. I’ll go through the files tonight, and we’ll notify the ones we pick at the last minute. It’s much better that no one has an inkling about this operation until the last possible minute. If the first they know about it is when they get to my office at the crack of dawn tomorrow, there’s no chance someone will mention it to someone else on the phone. That should cut the possibility of SSD picking up a reference to the plans to zero. You,” he pointed to the man who had brought in the files, “shut up if you know what’s good for you. And you,” he turned to me, “I know won’t talk to anyone. You don’t have anyone to talk to.” He looked at his watch. “Get some rest. I don’t want you falling asleep during the lectures. See you in the morning, early. Think about the operation overnight while you feverishly toss and turn. There will be a car in the usual place, at four A.M. If the night clerk asks where you’re going so early, tell him you have a business meeting with an Egyptian investor. Everyone thinks the Egyptians are crazy anyway.”

“I’m not on your payroll, Major. Don’t forget that.” My joints really were aching. I sneezed twice on the way out.

3

Not counting Kim, there were four of us standing around the table pretending to be awake. Dawn wasn’t for another hour, and it was raining hard. The others were already there when I came through the door. That made me uneasy. I don’t like walking into a group that has already bonded. If this hadn’t been about SSD, I would have stayed in the hotel and sipped tea all day. There was a stand on Yonggwang Street not far from the hotel where they sold special tea. The doorman said he could get it brought to my door if I was too sick to walk over there, but it would cost me. To deliver a cup of tea? I told him to forget it.

“This is Inspector O,” Kim said to the group. “It’s his operation. You follow his orders. If you don’t, you’ll live to regret it. Or maybe you won’t live that long. Don’t try pushing the envelope.” Kim turned to me. “You know these guys?”

I looked at each one of them carefully. “No. All from where?”

“What do you care?” Kim said. “They’re here, and I picked them. That’s what matters.” This was going to be an unpleasant morning all around. My joints ached, my head ached, and Kim was a pain in the ass.

“Their pedigrees don’t interest me,” I said. “I really don’t care if they’re all hicks from the hills of Kangwon. I need to know what organization spawned them. Training differs; skills differ; operating philosophies differ. In some organizations, they’re taught to duck behind a woman if shooting starts.”

“You kidding me?” Kim sounded alarmed. “Up here? I thought you people chewed barbed wire for snacks. Who teaches ducking?”

“That would be SSD.” I watched the other three. Two of them smiled. I smiled back. It was the third one, the one who smirked, who worried me.

“Well, go ahead; introduce yourselves. You,” Kim pointed at a short man, “tell the Inspector something about yourself. Not much, just enough to give him a sense of who you are. Then the rest of you do likewise. For the next few days, maybe longer, you’ll be like brothers.”

“Maybe some of us don’t get along with our brothers.” The man from SSD looked at me. “Isn’t that right, Inspector?”

“Off to a good start,” I said.

The short man shook his head. “You want me to talk or not?”

“Sure I do; go ahead.” So the SSD man knew who I was; he knew that my brother and I didn’t get along. He probably knew plenty more. As far as I was concerned, this operation had died before it got out the door.

“You listening?” The short man raised his voice a notch. “Because if you’re not interested, I’d as soon save my breath.”

“You’re right. I’m all of a sudden uninterested. It’s better if no one knows anyone else. Instead, we’ll use the time to go over the operation.” I didn’t have a clue what Kim thought we were going to do. Not that it mattered. “There are lectures today at the Grand Study Hall. The first one starts at one P.M. Lecture Room Six. We go in and sit.”

“What are we looking for?” The SSD man took out a notebook.

“No notes!” Kim nearly leaped across the table. “You listen, that’s all.”

“Actually,” I said, “that is the interesting part of this whole thing. We don’t know what we’re looking for. Most of the time, the lectures start at four o’clock. Someone needed this one earlier, and we need to figure out why the hurry.”

“Can we take notes when we get in the room, or what?”

“On the lecture? Sure.” I looked at the list from the radio. “If you’re interested in ‘the application of technology to take care of the boiler water and heat net supplementary water through the separate lime softening method,’ or how about ‘the relevance of nanotechnology to self-replicating systems’? I don’t know for sure which one of those we’ll get.”

The short man looked glum. “How long do we have to sit there?”

“Until you’re so bored you think you’re about to die. Then pinch your bottom and sit some more.”

“I don’t like this,” said the other man, the one who hadn’t opened his mouth until now. “We get called in here the day of an operation and then find out no one knows anything about what we’re doing.”

Kim moved around the table and pushed the man so hard he almost fell over. “No one asked you for your opinion, did they? When someone asks, maybe then you can whine. Until then, you do as you’re told.” He turned to the other two. “Same goes for you. I thought that’s what you people did best, followed orders. If you can’t do that, there’s not much left, is there? All right, get out of here. There’s a room down the hall where you can sit around and complain. I’ve got a few things to go over with Inspector O.”

After the three of them left, Kim picked up the phone. “Get Li in here.”

4

Li stood at the door. “You wanted me?”

“Yeah, come on in. Tell the Inspector what we found out last night.”

“We were going through your file again. There was a piece of paper tucked away that said someone heard you had a stroke.”

“Not so.”

“It says your health is not very good.”

“I’m fine. Better than fine.”

“What was it, then? Something scared you off the mountain into a doctor’s office last year. That’s not like you.”

“It was nothing. Well, maybe it was something. A sign, an omen.”

“That’s what the doctor said?”

“In his own way. He said everybody dies eventually.”

“A doctor said that?” Kim threw up his hands. “I could have told you the same thing. Li could have told you. Some doctor you have. Who needs to hear that from a doctor?”

“How much longer you have?” Li looked a little unsure of how that sounded. “I mean, do you need a glass of water or something?”

“I’m perfectly fine, in the pink of health. Better than either of you, I’ll bet. And you want to know why? When I realized what had happened, I had this sense of ecstasy. I was in my cabin on the mountain, looking out the window at the trees, when all of a sudden my brain shook. And then I got weak; not just weak, it was beyond that, the other side of weak. It was like going through the secret door in the floor of our house when I was young.”

“It sounds like you were stunned, kind of in shock or something. The driver said the ceiling in your place looked kind of low. Maybe you hit your head.” Li was trying to be helpful. This was the Li I remembered from a long time ago, when we first worked together.

“Shock? No, I’d say it was the opposite of shock. Maybe revelation. In that instant, I realized that I wasn’t doomed to wind down like an old clock. I could go all at once, in a moment that I controlled. Not controlled consciously, of course, but something deeper, older, a self within, one that knew more, had seen more, like starlight passing through the earth, a speck of dust on the way to the other side of nowhere, everywhere, boundless.”

“Careful, you’re getting out of breath, O. Sit down. I think you might be hyperventilating.” Kim moved the green chair closer.

“I don’t need a chair.” My eyes must have had a strange gleam in them. Kim looked frightened, as if he wasn’t sure who I was. “Don’t you get it? It means I’m not on a leash. No one owns me.”

“Good. Forget the leash and sit. I’ll get you a glass of water.” He turned to Li. “Do we have a physician around here?”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “It’s only a power surge in the system. I get a little boost of energy once in a while, nothing to worry about.” I felt my blood pressure dropping back to normal. “It’s like stepping on the gas when the transmission is in neutral, that’s all. Probably helps clean the carburetor.”

“Don’t pay attention to him,” Li said. “Mechanical things are not his specialty.”

“Cancel your operation, Kim. The guy with the smirk is from SSD; I’m sure of it.”

“We now classify people according to their smirks?” Kim’s face ran through a dozen expressions. “What about these?”

“You think I’m kidding? If we’re lucky, they’ll leave us twiddling our thumbs and move things to another time. If they really want to make a point, they’ll do something ugly.”

5

The lecture hall was deserted when we walked in. It wasn’t a big room-maybe twenty chairs-and it was going to be harder to blend in if we ended up with only a lecturer, my team, and three or four SSD operatives. Kim refused to cancel the operation. He said I was afflicted with a fear of shadows, that it was a result of my living too long in a warped environment. That left us at the mercy of SSD. In the best case, SSD might send only one person, but I had a feeling there would be what we always called belts of security-the key agents, then a team watching them, then a team watching them. The Ministry never worked that way, but SSD was in the business of shooting ghosts, or at least tracking them. They needed a lot of people to do that.

I had assumed the room would also have a few students, several academics, a couple of bureaucrats desperately trying to learn new vocabulary that would help them keep their jobs, and the inevitable party types taking notes on what was said and who was there. It was beginning to look like my assumptions were wrong. At 1:10 there was no lecturer and still no one else in the hall. The short man leaned over to me.

“Maybe we’re in the wrong room.”

“You have inside information?” I said. “Maybe you know something the rest of us don’t?”

He sat back and let a faint frown settle around his mouth. The man from SSD had closed his eyes and was resting comfortably. The third man, the one who didn’t say much, was looking at his hands.

The room was still empty at 1:20 when the door opened. “The lecture has been canceled for unavoidable reasons.” A young woman walked to the front of the room. “We have another group coming in at one thirty, so you’ll have to leave.”

“When was it canceled?” I looked at the man from SSD.

The short man was on his feet. “And why didn’t someone bother to come in and tell us before? We’ve been sitting here waiting. Do you think that’s all we have to do?”

“I don’t know what all you have to do. I do know you’ll have to get out of this room.”

“Is it OK if he stays through the next meeting?” I pointed at the man from SSD.

“And why would it be OK if he stayed?” she asked.

“Because he’s dead.”

6

“Who knew?” I was sitting in a chair-not the green one, which had been moved to the other side of the room-in front of Kim’s desk while he chewed on pencils. “You could certainly argue that it was a day bad for somebody’s health.”

“I don’t think he just keeled over.”

“He didn’t keel over. He didn’t even slump. He was sitting up.”

“How did they do it?”

“How did who do what? I don’t have any idea what happened to him. All I know is that he sat down at one o’clock and by one twenty he wasn’t going anywhere.”

“They must have killed him.” Kim looked worried. “Why would they do that? He must have known something that he wasn’t supposed to know. Either that or he had plans to jump ship and they needed to stop him.”

“I doubt either one of those. I also doubt that SSD killed him. They don’t do that to their own people. It’s very bad for morale.”

“Maybe you were wrong. Maybe he wasn’t one of theirs.”

“Then whose was he?”

“I don’t know. It was in his file, but the file is gone.”

“Gone. Mislaid, I suppose.”

“Files do disappear sometimes, Inspector. This is a secure facility. I don’t think anyone here made off with it.” Kim was looking more worried by the second. The more he said out loud all of the reasons everything was all right, the more he realized that things were starting to go bad. “We’ll have to do an autopsy. That will tell us the cause of death. The police can take it from there.”

“The police? You really don’t understand this place yet, do you? The police won’t have anything to do with a dead SSD agent.”

“They won’t? Then who will investigate?”

“That’s a good question, Major. If he died of a heart attack, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief, because a big red check can go in the box on the file that says: ‘No Further Investigation Necessary.’ If his heart stopped for unexplained reasons, no one will answer the phone when you call.”

“What do we do? Forget it happened?”

“No, you keep it in mind at all times.”

“Was it a threat?”

“Against you? Not likely. They’re not going to threaten you. They aren’t sure who is going to come out on top. What if you emerge as top dog? They don’t want to be on your bad side.”

“They want to be on my good side. Then why murder that agent?”

“Fair enough: Why murder that agent? It could be they need you to keep some distance. Remember I told you to call off the operation? Actually, I don’t think they meant to kill their man to make that point. I think they meant to kill someone else.”

“You?”

“Could be. The question is, why?”

“Don’t they realize that killing you wouldn’t have mattered to me?”

“That helps.”

“They must think you’re working for me.”

“Or something.” It could be that. More likely, they got wind of my meeting with Kang in Prague.

7

Finally, I decided to ask the major. The man in the lobby, the one who stared at nothing but always seemed to watch as I walked in and out of the hotel, was there every day. The clerk said he’d been away for a weekend while I was traveling, but he was back on his chair the day before I returned. Who was he?

“Him?” Kim was glancing over a report. He made a notation in the margin, put a big star next to one passage, and turned the page over. “We don’t know who he is. Your people say they’ve never heard of him and have no records. Should I believe them?”

“My people? You mean the Ministry? They might not have any records, but someone sure as hell knows who he is. Anonymity is not a hallmark of what we have built here all of these years, believe me. Why not bring him in?”

“You worried? You want a personal bodyguard? The man is just staring, Inspector.”

“I was only letting you know, that’s all. If he’s one of yours, call him off, would you? It’s unnerving.”

“I told you, he’s not one of mine. Maybe he belongs to Zhao. His people don’t have much going on in their heads, so they tend to stare. That’s not your biggest problem right now.”

“I take it that means you can’t bring him in. I thought you were in charge.”

“In charge? What an idea! I’m hanging on for dear life, Inspector. An admission of weakness that I probably shouldn’t make to you, but you might as well know where things stand. There is no cooperation, only a sullen quiet when I walk into the room. What do you think is going on? You seemed to understand the situation with SSD. What else can you tell me?”

“How would I know?”

“How would you know, that’s exactly my question. Incidentally, I was told this morning that we lost track of you in Macau for several days. Why?”

“If you thought I was going to let that madman Zhao follow me around, you’re crazy. If you could keep tabs on me, so could he. I took some precautions. Nothing elaborate.”

Kim was suddenly alert. “What makes you think Zhao was in Macau?”

“Nothing. I just wasn’t taking any chances. I told you, I took some precautions, that’s all.”

“Like taking an airplane out of Macau?”

“I certainly wasn’t going to buy a train ticket to Beijing.”

“The idea is starting to bounce around, Inspector, that you aren’t on our side, that you are on the wrong side, in fact. That’s not good.” Kim walked over to a large cabinet and turned a switch on the side. “You’re not bothered by white noise, I trust. Now no one will hear our conversation. I hope you don’t have a transmitter in your shoe or anything.”

“I did, but it gave me bunions, so I threw it away.”

“Here’s your dilemma. You don’t mind if I speak frankly?”

“I wish you would.”

“This place,” he looked around the room, but it was clear he meant the gesture to be interpreted more broadly, “is gone. Frankly, all that holds it up is the fear in my capital that a collapse will be disastrous for us. Believe me, people are shaking in their Guccis.”

“I think you’re wrong. A bigger real dilemma is that if you move too soon, or the wrong way, the Chinese won’t sit still.”

“Thank you for your advice, Inspector, but I read the same file you did. We’re handling the Chinese, and we don’t have any new openings for policy advisors. I’ll tell you if we do.”

“Money, that’s your problem. It makes your world go round. You’re afraid of making history for fear of losing money. Here, we rely on power. So why would people with power in this city agree to fall into your lap? Purely for money? I find that hard to believe. This group has no desire to spend the rest of its days on the Riviera.”

“Not money, Inspector, loss of nerve. It happens-not often, but it happens. That’s all it takes. Someone wakes up one morning, looks in the mirror, and can’t see anything familiar. It’s contagious. The result is extreme loss of self-confidence on a grand scale. I think it might be connected with the same gene that causes animals to stampede.”

“No, that gene doesn’t exist here. Maybe somewhere else. India, for example. Not here.”

“You don’t think so? You don’t think the whole structure could crack, from basement to penthouse? The whole rotten lie? It was a lie, O; you know that. You always knew that.”

“You’re going to find this hard to understand, Kim, but it wasn’t a lie. That word can’t cover how tens of millions of people lived their lives for nearly seventy years. We had something to believe in, a way to order existence. Maybe people didn’t have much, most of them had very little, but for practically all of those years they felt they belonged to something. Not so long ago, we used to be friendly to each other; young people stood up and gave their seats to the elderly. There was a simplicity in who we thought we were. We even had hope for the future.”

“That’s what innocence is, Inspector, hope.”

“You southerners lost it along the way, and now we have, too.”

Kim looked about to say something but changed his mind. He gestured for me to continue.

“You think your skirts are clean, rid of the camps you used to have. But I notice you’re not rushing to close the ones up here. Too complicated, you think. You’d rather draw up a list of particulars, crimes against humanity after the fact. Maybe you already have. Maybe that’s one of the lists on your desk.”

“And you, Inspector? How did you fit into this idyllic society?”

“I lived according to the prevailing myth, that’s all. Everyone lives by myths. Prettied up, they’re called truths-basic truths, natural truths, self-evident truths.” None of this sociopolitical pabulum was worth a damn. All that mattered was that I was not going to give Kim the pleasure of seeing me admit that my entire existence had been wrong. Never in a thousand years, I thought to myself-not now, not ever-will you see me grovel. “What I knew or thought a year ago is beside the point. The problem is today. Even if the past was a lie, what am I supposed to replace it with? Another lie? All that’s necessary is to pull the old one out and put a new one in, like a circuit board? Your lies have more diodes. I suppose they work faster, more color and noise.”

“What you replace your empty past with, Inspector, is your business. I’m giving you something different. I’m giving you a choice. Think about it. You choose, and that becomes your fate. Whatever years you have left, it’s all in your hands. Can you handle that? Can you make a decision on your own, without someone telling you which way to go?”

Kang had wanted me to choose. Now Kim wanted the same thing, only he couldn’t help being nasty about it. People who know the truth are that way. “And what if I don’t want to make a choice?”

“Dead. Very simply, dead. We’ll shoot you. In fact, I’ll do it myself. We’ll make it something dramatic, something that will send a message to the others. ‘What a waste,’ they’ll say as they cluck their tongues. ‘O had a choice to live, and he chose to die. Too bad.’ ”

“Maybe that will turn out to be your worst nightmare. What if I end up being a martyr?”

Kim’s smile told me the thought had already occurred to him. “You aren’t martyr material, Inspector. You have no cause; no one will rally around anything you have ever said, or been, or imagined. It will be as if you stepped off a cliff for no reason.”

“I could choose to go back to my mountain, fade away, not cause you any trouble. What’s wrong with that?”

“Not possible. We can’t have you on the fence. It would be a bad precedent, and we’re dealing with a period right now when setting precedent takes priority over normal considerations of right and wrong. I may not accomplish much in the next couple of months, but one thing I will get done and that is to establish precedents.”

“So you’d rather eliminate me. Nothing personal, simply setting precedent.”

“Look, O, here’s a list.” He pulled a paper from the folder. “See the names with the check marks next to them? They’re with us.”

“The familiar name list. I’m not on it, I hope. It seems an unstable place to be. You keep fiddling with the order. These are the ones you’re propping up, I assume.” I glanced at the list. Nobody I’d want to have drinks with. “You don’t pick your friends all that carefully as far as I can see.”

“I’m not picking them; they’re picking me. They come knocking on the door in the dead of night, promising to deliver whole sections of the country, army units, security files, whatever I want.”

“They have probably done the same with the Chinese.” Most of the names were of people used to landing on their feet.

“I don’t care whose tummy they are rubbing, as long as they realize they can’t afford to ignore me. We need a quiet transition, as seamless and unremarkable as we can make it. Nobody raises his head, nobody gets hurt. This is a list of what we like to call our guides, people who know where the paths are, and where they lead. If these are the right paths, and everyone cooperates, all that happens is that the sign in the front window changes. ‘Under new management.’ ”

“The immaculate omelet, made without breaking a single egg. I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so. I don’t think so, either, but that’s what the plan calls for. If you ask me, there’s no chance things will stick to the script, and when they don’t, we have to go to plan B.”

“Always plan B. Why not start there?”

“You won’t like it. Trust me, no one will like it.”

“Tell me honestly, Major. Do you really think you can blow the whistle, point to the scoreboard, and convince twenty-three million people that you’ve won the game?”

“I don’t know why anyone would believe it, but I’m telling you it’s already happened. It doesn’t matter what the people at the bottom think. They’ll do as they’re told. But the ones at the top, they can see what has happened. I’m not going to spend a lot of time analyzing the causes. The fact is, I’ve never seen so many whipped dogs in my life.”

“Is that so?”

“You saw that group at the table the first night. If I shift my chair, they wet themselves. They’re not cooperative, but they are resigned.”

“Good. In that case, you have probably already looked into how many of your army divisions are going to have to stay for the next hundred years to keep all the dogs in line. Do you think you’re going to pacify the whole country? Go up to the mountains in Chagang sometime and tell me that. Try driving a tank through hills and dales of Yanggang. How long do you think the railroads will last? Will you guard every tunnel and every bridge?”

“It’s one country, for the love of God, O.”

“Of course! You’re a Christian. I should have guessed.”

“That’s not relevant.”

“Oh, no? You expect me to think that your heart doesn’t race when you look around and think of the possibilities for converts.”

“Be serious. Are you with us or against us? I don’t have time to kick this ball around.”

“I know, I know; you are on a tight schedule. Only I don’t think you realize yet what is going on outside the bubble of this compound.”

“Let me try inserting something you may find interesting. Your grandmother was a Christian.”

“Is that so?” Pang did his homework. Kim did his homework. Pretty soon, I’d have a nice genealogy chart to hang in my house.

“She was educated at a Methodist school in Haeju. That’s where she grew up, wasn’t it?”

“You seem to have the file on my grandmother. You tell me.”

“I thought you knew.”

“Fascinating, all fascinating. And it means what? I’m next in line to be Pope?”

“The Pope isn’t a Methodist.”

“What a coincidence. Neither am I.”

“Look, O, you may not believe it, you may not like it, but the biggest change either of us will ever see is already here. Not on the doorstep, not in the wings. It is here, now. In a year, this rump state of yours will not exist. Understood?”

“Within a year, I get to bring in the tray with your breakfast.”

“Maybe.”

“And my friends? What happens to them?”

“Depends who they are.” Kim picked up his pencil. “Who are they?”

“And my world?”

“Your world? I should think you’d be happy to see it disappear. Besides, the new one won’t be so bad.”

“Is it already on display at the hotel? I get headaches.”

Kim put all the papers in a neat pile. “Things have been quiet up to now. But we go into phase two soon. I need a decision from you. Help me make it smooth, or I guarantee you won’t live to see the end of it. That’s the way it is going to be.”

“More threats. That’s the sum total of what you have in your fancy knapsack.” Kim’s eyes dared me to keep going down that path. I decided it was time to try a new tack. I didn’t have a lot of options at the moment; I might as well try purring. “You’ll keep Zhao off my back?”

“He won’t come near you.” The response was automatic, almost as if he was hypnotized. Zhao was a fixation. It was clear to me that nothing worried Kim as much as, nothing blotted out more light or consumed more oxygen than, his fear of Zhao. He didn’t control the gangster, and it scared the hell out of him.

“You’re going to protect me sort of like you protected Captain Sim.”

“Sim was working against me, Inspector. I let Pang have him. In fact, I told Pang where he’d be.”

“Don’t try that with me. There’s a key difference. Sim was one of yours. He didn’t know which way was up around here. I do.”

“Are you bargaining with me? Because you don’t have any leverage, Inspector. None. Not a tiny bit, not a sliver. None.”

“Keep believing in angels if it makes you sleep any better.” Purring was hard work. I’d have to practice.

8

The next day, I stayed in my hotel. The phone rang; I didn’t answer it. A note came under the door; I didn’t open it. When the maid came to make up the room around ten o’clock, I went downstairs and stopped at the front desk. The man of a thousand stares was waiting in the lobby. He had on a striped shirt. It accentuated his thinness. He made Luís look like a water buffalo.

The desk clerk looked annoyed. “Who is that guy? He won’t talk to anyone. He just stands around, staring at nothing. I’ve put up with him long enough. I’ve had it. End of the line.”

“It only looks like he’s staring at nothing. Actually, he has wide-angle vision, sort of like a walleye pike. If you pay attention, you’ll see his eyes move independently.”

“Yeah, sure. And my fingers dance the rumba on Thursdays. He looks like a friend of yours. He only showed up when you did, as I recall. When you go away, so does he. He’s like a wart. Get rid of him before I call security.”

The only person I liked less than the staring man was this clerk. “That probably won’t do any good. He works for them, or somebody like them. What harm is he doing, standing there?”

“It makes the guests nervous.”

“I’m your only guest. Do I look nervous?”

“Why did you come down here? You’re not the chatty type.”

“It gets lonely up there in the room. Besides, I thought you might give me some help.”

“You, I don’t help. The word is out to keep a healthy distance from you for now.”

“Why’s that?”

He looked at his watch. “Listen, I’m busy. I’ve got to call a girl. Two girls, actually. You don’t mind? Come down again sometime, we’ll talk more.” He turned away.

The man in the lobby stared at him. “That’s it,” said the clerk. “I don’t care if his eyes are diamond studs, I’m calling the security boys.”

9

It was a little past eleven o’clock when I arrived at Kim’s compound. My name must have been put on an approved list, because the tanks ignored me as I hurried up the walk.

“I’ve been away from home for weeks already.” I was at the window looking into the courtyard. “If I’m going to stay here any longer, I’ve got to go home to pick up some stuff.”

“Why?” Major Kim was half-listening. “We can supply you with whatever you need. We’ve got more shirts if you need them.”

“I’m not talking clothing.”

“What then?”

“Wood. I didn’t think I’d be here so long, so I didn’t take more than a few pieces with me. It’s autumn. Things get melancholy sometimes in the evening when I’m out walking. All these lights you’ve installed, they make it worse.”

“Light makes it worse?”

“You’re a creature of the wrong civilization, Major. The sun goes up; the sun goes down. That’s natural. Light blazing at midnight is abnormal. It’s unhealthy.”

“So close your curtains. Get yourself some eyeshades. Put your head under your pillow. Think happy thoughts.”

“Let me go home for a day, I’ll pick up some wood, and then I’ll be back.”

“I don’t think I can spare a driver. We’re having some people coming in for inspections.”

“I can drive myself. I still have a license. Or have you voided all of them?”

“It’s for your safety. I don’t want you on a mountain road by yourself.”

“Afraid I’ll decide to end it all?”

“No, afraid Zhao will decide to do it for you.”

“Ah. I get it. Well, I can wait a day or two. Am I going to need a pass to get around my own country?”

Kim’s phone rang. He stared at the button that had lit up and gave me a funny look. “Can I take this, Inspector?”

I stepped into the hall and closed the door, almost the whole way.

“Again?” Kim said. “I don’t like it.” A pause. “Then take care of it yourself.” I closed the door completely. When Kim opened it, I was looking at the photographs on the wall.

“These look like plane trees in summer,” I said. “See how they droop? It’s a form of anger-passive resistance, isn’t that what people call it? My grandfather used to say that lumber from plane trees should never be used to make a wedding chest.”

“When can you be ready to leave?” Kim blocked the door. He wanted to get rid of me.

“How about in an hour? You found a driver?”

“Just wait in your hotel room. Someone will call. They’ll ask if your TV is working or if the sound needs adjusting. Don’t go with anyone else.”

“You are one scared rabbit, Major. One day you’re telling me you are about to take over; the next day you’re peeking out from behind the curtains. Which is it?”

“Cautious, Inspector, cautious. No one ever lost a lung being cautious.”

10

The call came at noon. The voice said, “I heard there was something wrong with the TV. The volume control or something.”

“Yeah, something.”

“Well, get it fixed, why don’t you?”

“I’ll be right down.”

I was surprised to see who was waiting in the car. “You have more sage advice for me, Li?”

“Get in and close the door. We’re going to have to drive like a house on fire to get there and back before dinner.”

“Where have I heard that before? Never happen. I can cook something at my place. It won’t be anything elaborate.”

As soon as I closed the door, we were moving. Once we were out of the city, the colors of the harvest took over. “If you’ve got to die, autumn is best, my grandfather used to say.” I thought about that as we sped past a checkpoint. “He was probably right.”

“When did he die?”

“Summer.”

“Can’t exactly set the date, I guess. When it comes, it comes. Any season it wants. What do you think your grandfather meant?”

“What did he mean about anything? He used to talk about rhythms, about how things had to be aligned. He thought trees understood that better than any other living being. Not embodied it, understood it. On summer nights, when he was making benches for the village, he’d grumble at me, ‘You’ve got to look at a tree, listen to it, see how it grew, before you know how to use the wood. These people just chop them down and cut them up. What sense is that? No wonder everything is ugly these days. And I’m not talking about just ugly to look at, you know what I mean, boy?’ ”

We drove for a while. I opened the window and let the wind rush in.

“Nice drive,” I said. “The fields look pleased with themselves. The harvest must have been good this year, though I haven’t heard anything.”

“What would you know about harvests, O?”

“Hey I know plenty. I grew up in the countryside, don’t forget. My grandfather didn’t like cities, not after the war, anyway. He said he wanted to smell earth that hadn’t been pulverized by bombs.”

“Who wouldn’t? Do you mind closing your window? I start sneezing otherwise, this time of year.”

I cranked up the window. “How is that you got assigned to watch me?”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. For some reason, I’ve been getting the impression you and Major Kim don’t get along.”

“Come on; you know me, O. I get along with everyone. That’s my nature.”

“So you’re working for him?”

“I’m not working against him, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“He’s very interested in loyalty, have you noticed? Doesn’t like divided loyalties. He’s after me to choose.”

“And what do you tell him?”

“What did you tell him?”

“Me? I’m loyal as they come. Loyal as the day is long.”

“It’s autumn.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So the days are getting shorter.”

He laughed. “Maybe your grandfather was right; maybe autumn is the best time to die.” When we got off the pavement onto the dirt road that led up the mountain to my house, he turned to me. “Watch how you choose, O.”

“I’m always careful.”

“That’s good. But careful isn’t enough anymore. You have to be right every time. Take your hands off the wheel for one second,” the car hit a rut and careened off to the side, “and it could be all over.”

“Watch where you’re going,” I said. “Other than handing out advice, what do you do all day?”

“Don’t laugh, but I’m a chief inspector now. Surprised? They did a scrub of the chiefs after Kim got here, let several of them go, and moved up some of us who had been sitting around all these years. You probably could have made chief, too, if you hadn’t been up on your mountain. What were you doing there for all those years?”

“Making wooden toys. You have to concentrate when you make toys. They’ve got to look simple. It’s a lot of work, making something look simple.”

“Is that so?”

“Like doing a ‘scrub.’ Sounds cleaner than a ‘purge.’ But that’s what it is, a purge.”

“I know what it is.” He opened his window partway. “All of a sudden, it’s stuffy in here, don’t you think? That’s my dilemma; I have to choose between stuffy air and my allergy.”

“It’s going to get cold pretty soon, a couple of weeks maybe. Then you won’t have to worry.”

“Yeah, I won’t have to worry.”

For the moment, the car was headed almost due east. The setting sun poured light across the fields in front of us.

“Did I tell you about the woman I met in Macau, the one whose voice sounded like wildflowers?”

“What kind?” Li lifted his head slightly. His nostrils flared, like an animal when it senses danger.

“You smell it, too? It must be from a wood fire,” I said. “That’s strange, because no one lives out here. The nearest village is behind us and the wind is blowing the wrong way.” I put my head out the window to get a better look. There was a glow at the top of the mountain, my mountain. “You see that?”

Li stopped the car and peered out the windshield. Then he accelerated sharply, so the tires spun in the dirt before we jumped ahead. “I hope you didn’t leave the stove on for all this time.”

“I don’t have a stove.”

We tore up the road past the abandoned guard shack and hit the steepest part of the grade going so fast I thought we might flip over. We went around turn after turn, sliding close to the edge in places, brushing against the sides of the mountain in others, going at a reckless speed that seemed to be in slow motion, a dream speed, a horror film remembered years after. When we burst into the clearing, my house was gone. The roof had caved in, and the only wall left standing was pitched at a funny angle. The remains were still smoking. The tallest of the tall pines had been chopped down; it had fallen against an outcropping of rock. The next big wind would bring it down onto the road. Another car inched away as we drove up. It stopped when it came abreast of us, and the rear window rolled down.

“A total loss,” Zhao’s voice came out from inside. “A pity. I’d come up here to see if we could do business, and I find your house in flames.”

“My grandfather’s carpentry tools were in there, you Chinese bastard.”

“Well, that’s a loss, I’d say.”

I got out and ran over to Zhao’s car. “By the time I finish with you, you’ll beg me to kill you.” It wasn’t clear what I was going to do next. I wasn’t armed, and beating on the car with my fists didn’t seem much of a follow-up.

Zhao moved closer to the window, so I could see him clearly. He stared at me for a moment; then the glass went up and the car drove away. Li got out on his side and watched as it made its way down the hill.

“Let’s get out of here, O. We can come back tomorrow or the next day, after the place cools down. They must have used gasoline. It’s going to stay hot for a while. You can feel it all the way over here.”

“I’m not leaving until I go through the ashes.”

“That’s what they’re counting on. They’ll be back, and you’d better not be here when they are.”

“Why? You think they can do any worse than this? Look at that tree. They cut it down. Can they do anything worse than that?”

“Yes.”

“Go, if you want. I’m staying. Maybe I can find something that wasn’t completely destroyed.”

Li shook his head. “Have it your way, but first we need something to eat. We’ll have to drive back to the nearest village, that’s almost fifteen kilometers away, unless you know somewhere closer. Even there, they may not have anything to give us.”

“You can drive all over the damned county. I’m staying. If Zhao comes back, I’ll rip him to shreds.”

“Easy, Inspector. You heard what he did to the Great Han. We don’t want that to happen to you.”

I started pulling away burned timbers. The ashes were still hot; in places a flame flared when it found a breath of oxygen. Li stood and watched. Finally, I touched a piece of metal. It scorched my fingers, but I didn’t care, because I knew what it was-the old wood plane that my grandfather had given me fifty, no, sixty years ago.

“Look at this, Li.” I pulled the plane from the wreckage. “My grandfather said it had been his father’s and that he wanted to give it to his son. But that wasn’t to be-he would always say that more to himself than to me. He hated to talk about what happened to his son, my father. Everyone lost someone in the war, so he didn’t want to be seen as complaining. But he felt the loss deeper than anything I could imagine then. Even now, I don’t think I can feel anything that deeply.”

Li didn’t say anything. He was listening the way people do when someone else reaches inside for the story that they never want to tell.

“It wasn’t until I was older, maybe ten or twelve, that he went into any detail about how my parents had died. He had told us right away, my brother and me, that they were dead. The same night he found out, he sat us down and told us, but he hadn’t gone into detail. We were too young, and he didn’t know what words to use. So he waited. When he finally told me, he was sanding a piece of ash. It was from a tree that had crashed through a neighbor’s house in a windstorm a few weeks before. The whole family had died. I still remember that storm.”

Li was looking down the road. He was pale.

“Something wrong?”

“No, just thinking about the wind. I grew up on the coast. When the wind blew hard, the fishing boats couldn’t go out. A few did, but they never came back.” He blinked, and his face seemed to clear. “Before the storms would come in off the sea, I would wake up. Even at three in the morning, I would wake up. Maybe it was something about the air pressure; no one could figure it out. But I always knew when a storm was coming.” He looked back down the road. “Always.”

He seemed to have drifted somewhere else in his mind, so I left him alone and went back to digging through the remains of the house. There was nothing. The green vase with the cranes, the chest made for my grandmother, a small box of old photographs-all gone.

“You said something about an ash tree?” Li had moved so quietly that the sound of his voice startled me.

“I did. You know what one looks like?”

“Not if it smacked me in the face.”

“You wouldn’t want that. It’s very hard wood. I nearly lost my arm once because of it. The pain wouldn’t go away for months. Still hurts sometimes. That’s ash.”

“So your grandfather had a piece of ash, and he was talking to you. That’s where you left off.”

“No, he wasn’t talking to me so much as to the years that lay around us. That’s what he said, sometimes-that the years don’t pass; they don’t disappear. They were still here, he’d say, invisible, infinitely thin piles of them, heaped in the corners of rooms. It was one of those things that he’d say that wasn’t clear to me at the time. In winter, he’d often brood and tell me that the past was never gone; it was inside of us and all around. I wasn’t to believe what people said, that on January first everything was new.”

“You know, if I could come up with a single year that I wanted to keep, it would be nice. But there isn’t one, not even one.” Li pointed at what had been the front entrance to the house. “Every December thirty-first, I open the door at midnight, to let the old year out. Who taught me to do that, do you suppose? I can’t remember.” He looked into the smoking ruins. “Go ahead; keep looking for whatever there is to salvage. I’ll watch the road. If I see a car, I’ll whistle. We’ll need to get out of here fast. Someone will take care of Zhao eventually; don’t worry.”

“I don’t want ‘someone’ to take care of the son of a bitch. I’m going to do it myself.”

“As soon as we get off this mountain, I’ve got to find a phone to call Kim. He won’t be happy to hear about you and Zhao spitting at each other. He’s afraid of Zhao. Everyone seems to be.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when two big guys appeared from nowhere. They each took one of Li’s arms and dragged him to the edge of the cliff. Then they threw him over. One of them watched for a few seconds before they both turned to me. They didn’t say anything. What remained of the house made a sound, a painful sigh as the wood died for the last time. The sun dropped over the next hill, and in the darkness the wind picked up. I turned away and walked back to Li’s car, expecting the whole time that they’d stop me, permanently. Li had left the keys in the ignition. That was how we used to do it, I thought, as I started the car and turned around to drive down the hill. We always left ourselves a way out. Only I was starting to think there wasn’t one left.