The Man with the Baltic Stare

The young man in yellow came up in the elevator with me, opened the door to a room, turned on the lights, and stood next to the bed. “The TV is there,” he said. “The bathroom is there.”

It was a big room, but not so big I couldn’t have figured out either of those on my own. “Sure.” I looked around. “Classy place. Wouldn’t want to confuse those two.”

“You can get music in the bath if you like. There’s a TV screen there, too, if you get lonely. Don’t worry; it only goes one way.”

I nodded.

“Also, the drapes open electronically. Don’t try fooling with them by hand or you’ll break something. I can find you something if you get real lonely, better than the TV.” He rubbed the fingers on one hand together.

“Why don’t you go back downstairs and be slimy with your friends?”

He didn’t seem offended; at least, the grin he gave me looked real enough. “I could do that.” He held out his hand.

“I already shook with you. Is this a new hotel custom, shaking hands on every floor?”

“A tip, you know-a gratuity, service charge, payment in advance for errands to be run, a friendly barrier against unfavorable winds and life’s unexpected turns. See what I mean?”

I walked past him to the door, held it open, and jerked my head in the direction of the hallway. “I’ll give you a tip,” I said. “Don’t play with matches.”

2

I sat on the bed and studied the place. It was square, and no attempt had been made to hide that basic fact. “You are paying to sleep in a box,” each of the walls said. One of them had a window in the center, which might have broken the monotony except that the window was square. If I’d had a suitcase, at this point I would have unpacked. There was a certain satisfaction, I recalled, in unpacking a suitcase in a hotel room. On overseas liaison trips for the Ministry, I stayed mostly in cheap rooms. To open the drawers and put something in, even only a pair of socks, gave an air of permanence, of personality, to a place.

The bureau was pine stained to look like something else. It had three drawers. I opened each of them. Usually there was a piece of paper, emergency instructions, something in them. These were empty, a mini-universe of infinite nothingness. I took the wood chips from my pocket and dumped them on the desk. This place needed something. There was nothing homey about it, not like the Koryo Hotel. Why hadn’t they put me up there? Maybe they were installing the neon lights and laying new carpets. I hated to think what had been done to its lobby.

A soft knock on the door brought me back. “What?” I wasn’t expecting visitors.

“Housekeeping.”

“Go away.”

“Turndown service.”

I walked over to the entryway. “Turndown what?”

“Turndown service.”

I opened the door to find a middle-aged woman in a maid’s uniform. “I’m supposed to turn down your bed and leave a candy on your pillow,” she said. “You want it or don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.” I started to close the door, but then a question occurred to me. “Who owns this place?”

“What?”

“Who owns this hotel? It’s foreign, isn’t it? It doesn’t feel right. The fellow in the tight pants even asked for a tip.”

She gave me a big smile. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Sir? Who taught you to say that? I suppose you curtsey now, too.”

She bobbed her head. “Good evening and pleasant dreams.”

The phone rang, so I closed the door and went over to the desk. The phone was white, new, with lots of buttons on it. I took a chance and punched one of them. “Yes?”

“Inspector, I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Who is this?”

“You don’t recognize my voice?”

“Should I?”

“This is Major Kim. We saw each other briefly this evening, though we weren’t introduced. I thought we might have a drink, talk a little, trade stories. That sort of thing.”

“That sort of thing.”

“If you’re hungry, we can get a bite to eat. I don’t think the hotel restaurant is still open, and the room service menu is not exciting, but there are other places nearby you might enjoy.”

“Noodles.”

“What’s that?”

“I said noodles. I like noodles.”

“Well, then, noodles it is.” A silence. “You there?”

“Sure.” This was the man who made everyone nervous. I didn’t need noodles all that badly. “I was thinking. It’s getting late; maybe I should skip eating tonight.”

“Don’t do that, Inspector. You never know when you’ll get another chance.”

No wonder he makes people nervous, I thought. “OK, where?”

“I’m in the parking lot in front of the hotel right now. Come down in five minutes. You’ll find me; don’t worry.”

“I’ll be wearing what I had on before.”

“I know.”

3

The restaurant was in a building that hadn’t been there the last time I was in Pyongyang. It was in my old patrol sector, and in those days I knew every crummy structure, every crack in every façade, every doorway out of plumb, and every crooked window. This place was modern, only three stories high but very sleek. The front door opened to a small vestibule where a young woman in a low-cut long red dress waited.

“Good evening, Major Kim,” she said. “Your table is ready.” She didn’t look at me, not even a glance, before turning to lead us to a corner in the back, where there was a triangular table surrounded by a lot of plants. We sat, and the lady in red disappeared.

“You look to be in shock, Inspector. Anything I can do for you? Maybe we should start with a couple of drinks.” The major pressed a button on the side of the table, and a man wearing an austere smile and a white coat appeared.

“Your usual, sir?” he asked.

“Yes, Michael, thank you. And one for our guest, as well.”

The white coat vanished behind a fern.

“Michael?” I said. “Have we stopped the pretense of Korean names at last? Do I get to pick my own? Or have you already selected one for me? Let me guess. Paul? No, probably not. Matthew, perhaps? At least we’re not going for Japanese names again. My grandfather hated his. He never told me what it was.”

“Do you know who I am?” The major sat at arm’s length from the table, making clear to anyone watching that we were not trading secrets. “Why don’t we start there? The rest of the conversation will flow much more easily.”

An easily flowing conversation was the last thing I wanted with this man. “The girl in the red dress. Unusual accent.”

The major showed me his teeth. “Very good, Inspector. Most people don’t hear the accent. They’re too captivated by the neckline.”

“The accent, I can’t quite place it. It’s been nearly trained out of her, but something is still there, a faint echo. Sort of fetching, in its own way.”

“Anything else?”

“Smarmy group in the hotel; a few of them are still shy a coat or two of hospitality paint.”

“Something wrong with the hotel? The room not up to your expectations?” He leaned forward to show me that he cared.

“The room is fine. Everything is fine. Our meeting earlier this evening in that dark cave was fine. You’ve made a hit with those three house dogs, by the way. Maybe you should throw them a bone every so often, though.”

The austere smile materialized from around a potted palm, and drinks were placed in front of us.

“Thank you, Michael,” the major said. “We’ll order in a few minutes.”

The white coat disappeared into the jungle.

“Do you always circle around a conversation like this?” The major lifted his glass. “A toast to you, Inspector. Welcome home.”

“Major what? Major who? Major from where? Is there a new special group operating outside the normal channels?” I clinked glasses. “Normal channels. Normal. You know what’s normal? Dawn, the sun coming up over the next mountain. That’s perfectly normal. But this, I don’t get the feeling this,” I waved my glass in his direction, “is normal.”

“Off we go, circling again.”

“OK, no more circles. I’ll lunge. Where are you from?” I took a swallow of my drink.

“Seoul.”

I took another swallow. “Do they have menus here, or do we make it up? Incidentally,” I pointed over his shoulder, “whoever installed the wire in that ficus behind you didn’t know what he was doing. It dangles, like a water snake over a pond.” The drink had skipped my stomach and gone to my brain. “I wouldn’t use a wire if I were you. If you use something like that snake in the ficus, it has to be transcribed. Transcribers always fill in what they can’t hear, and they always get it wrong. Hire a note taker. I’ll bet that woman in the red dress is a terrific note taker.”

Major Kim shook his head. “Don’t worry. We don’t guess. We don’t have to. Our equipment is very, very, very good.”

Interesting, I thought to myself, he was from the South, and his girlfriend with the soft accent and the neckline was, too. That wasn’t so odd, was it? South Koreans had been coming up north for years. So there were two of them here, so what? My inner voice tried to keep a normal tone, nothing alarmist, but it wasn’t very convincing. Li’s words of warning to me hung like a wreath from the branches of the ficus: You don’t know what you think you know.

“You’re back in Pyongyang because we need your help, Inspector.” Kim swirled the liquor in his glass. “There is a little problem, and we think you might be able to fix it.”

4

Whenever I hear “we” in connection with the word “problem,” especially “little problem,” I start to worry. First my nerves go on alert; then I start to worry.

“Sorry,” I said, “I’m not in the problem-fixing business anymore. I’m in no business. I follow no professional path. I’m unencumbered, untroubled, and uninterested. To tell you the truth-and you are partial to the truth; I sensed that right away-if the price of dinner is listening to your problem, I can drink a beer in my hotel room. I hope that doesn’t seem rude.” I started to push back my chair. “Anyway, I don’t think I’m authorized to talk to you.” I wasn’t authorized to talk to anyone as far as I was concerned. That’s why I had gone up on the mountain.

“Please, sit, Inspector. This wasn’t my first choice for an assignment, believe me. I was due for Paris, but this came up, unexpectedly, you might say.” His eyes wandered the room without much interest. “Destiny calls; personnel decisions trump everything. So I found myself here six months ago. That’s a long time to be sitting in meetings with people who hate your guts, don’t you think?”

“Only six months? Six months is nothing. If it’s so bad, why don’t they send you home? Declare you persona non grata.”

The major laughed, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant. It was more like the sound of a dead limb coming off a tree on a hillside nearby. For the first time, I noticed he had a classic Korean face, the sharp features that opened the gateway to a thousand different expressions. My grandfather had warned me that people with these faces were real Koreans-the purest of the pure, he called them-and that you couldn’t trust them because you could never figure out what was going through their minds. “The women are the worst,” he’d say. “A woman with that face will be a princess one minute and a bird of prey the next. I don’t like Chinese, but a little Chinese blood mixed in isn’t altogether bad. Your grandmother had Chinese blood. Remember that, boy,” and I’d nod, wondering if any of the girls in the next village were pure-blooded and, if they were, would they ever take the road in front of our house so I could watch as they passed by.

Kim’s voice battered into my consciousness. “Kick me out? How could they? I countersign all of their orders, and much as I would be tempted, I couldn’t chop off on that one.” He laughed; another limb crashed to the ground.

“You countersign all of the orders?” I lifted my glass and tilted it toward the major to show him how empty it was.

“Another drink?”

“Tell Michael to bring the whole bottle.”

He pushed the button and Michael materialized.

“Shall I bring the bottle, sir?”

“As always, you read my mind, Michael.”

“Michael, the mind reader,” I said as the white coat vanished. “He also runs your very good recording machines and picks locks, am I right?”

“No, Inspector, the lock man is the busboy. You had a question about my countersigning orders?”

I did but decided to skip it for the moment. That was a detail. I didn’t need to know details right now. I needed to know the guts of what this was, this man, this restaurant, the woman with the soft accent, the hotel room stocked with liquor. “Actually, my question was more fundamental. Who are you? After that, I might have a second question.”

“Which is?”

“Let’s do them in order. Who are you?”

“Put it this way: I’m your best friend starting today. Whatever happens, you can rest assured that I’m going to help you. Things may come unglued, but you don’t have to worry, because I am your insurance policy.”

“Very comforting. Or it would be but for one thing. You still haven’t told me who you are. I don’t mean your name. I don’t mean your title. I mean, who are you? A few gaps in my knowledge I have learned must be accepted. This one, though, I’m not prepared to live with. I could fall into this sort of gap and never be seen again.”

“Let me give you some background, Inspector.”

“No background. Let’s avoid background. Let’s try facts. Or don’t you recognize those?”

He took out a pack of cigarettes and put them on the table. “We are dealing with a situation of considerable delicacy. Facts are not delicate. They can be upsetting, a burden actually. Anyway, as you know, facts are often in dispute. And there is no time left for disputes. May I smoke?”

“The tune sounds familiar.”

“Excellent. In that case, you probably know the dance, as well. You did it long enough, all through your life in this country as a matter of fact. All that’s required at this point is a change of partners.” He searched his pockets and found a book of matches. I looked quickly at the cover. They were from a hotel I never heard of. The picture looked like a space robot, something Gallic. Maybe it was where he planned to stay in Paris. “Don’t worry.” He put the matches back in his pocket. “You can’t betray what no longer exists.”

I pushed the chair back the rest of the way and stood up. Any alcohol not already in my brain hurried up to see what the excitement was about. It was a gamble, but I thought I might make it to the door without running into one of the other tables. “I think I have lost my appetite. Pass my compliments to the girl in the red dress.”

“Your hotel is to the left as you exit, Inspector.” The major tilted his head slightly but remained seated. “It’s a fine walk at night; the sidewalks are well lit. Enjoy the air.”