The Man with the Baltic Stare

No one called at noon to say a car was waiting. No one called at one o’clock. Or two. At two thirty, there was a knock at the door.

“Room service.”

Only it wasn’t. It was Major Kim, and he didn’t look happy.

“We’ve got a problem, O.” He walked past me as soon as I opened the door. “I’m supposed to be in Paris. I should have been in Paris, but no, no, I ended up here. Here!” He closed the curtains by hand.

“You just broke something,” I said. “Light bother your eyes?”

“I’ll tell you what bothers my eyes. Looking at the mess you call a city, that’s what bothers my eyes. Looking at that statue every morning on the hill, that bothers my eyes.”

“So, don’t look. Or take it down.”

He sat on the bed. “Not yet,” he said. “A problem, O, we have a big problem.”

“How come every time we meet, you say we have a problem? Last time it was little. This time it’s big. Doesn’t matter to me-whatever it is, it’s yours. I don’t have any problems.”

“Where are you, O?”

“In Room…” I went out and looked at the number on the door. “In Room Twelve Nineteen.” I stood in the hallway and looked from one end of the corridor to the other. No one was hanging around. I came back in the room. “Makes you wonder. Does this hotel have guests, or did you build it specifically for me?”

The major took a piece of paper from his jacket. “Close the door,” he said, “and read this.” He handed me the paper.

I glanced at it and shrugged. “This is a State Security Department operational order.”

“I know what it is. I want to know what it means.”

“Do I look like I work for SSD?”

“Don’t screw with me, O.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Major, I don’t owe you anything. I still don’t know who you are. At this point, I only have a vague idea of what is going on. And for as long as I can remember, I have made it a practice never to inquire too deeply into SSD orders. They have their own codes, and they don’t spread around the decoding instructions. SSD does not get high marks for sharing. One of those three dogs at the table the other night seemed to be from SSD. He’ll roll over if you order him to, won’t he?”

“Not him. You, you’re going to tell me, and you’re going to do it in the next thirty seconds.”

“Or?”

“Don’t push me, O. I don’t have any patience right now. Why is SSD using code?”

“That’s what they do. They do it all the time. It’s in their nature. They think in code. They sleep in code. They probably make love in code. Don’t let it worry you.”

“What does it say?”

“If I knew what it said, it wouldn’t be much of a code, would it?”

“What. Does. It. Say.”

I looked at the paper. The grouping of numbers on the top indicated it was an alert order of some sort; of what sort I didn’t know. The two letters at the end of the number group indicated it was an immediate-precedence message. I’d learned this much about SSD orders, because it was what I needed to keep my head above water when I was in the Ministry. Kim didn’t have to know. “I take it you and SSD don’t work together real close.”

Kim looked down for a few seconds. When he looked up again, he wasn’t even the same person. He had reached for an unpleasant expression, and he’d found one that beat anything I’d ever seen. “Do you know how a tree dies, Inspector?”

“I guess you’re about to tell me.” I’d seen a lot of dead trees, but there was no sense ruining his game.

“They die one branch at a time. Does that sound good to you? I’m not talking about a tree that has been chopped down, of course. I mean one that rots slowly, bark peeling, dying in the sun, dying in the rain. You’ve seen them, I’m sure. Very painful to observe.”

“You should learn to avert your eyes.”

“Aha! Something you know quite a bit about, I take it. Ignore your surroundings and they will not harm you. Ignore pain, it goes away. Maybe it doesn’t even exist. Shall we test your theory?”

Kim was a compact man. Little effort had been put into creating his body. His shoulders sloped, and when he sat, his feet turned out at alarming angles. All of the craft and art of creation had been poured into making his face-and the frame that surrounded it. His ears were perfectly aligned, as were his eyebrows. His hair was perfectly clipped to resemble an expensive shaving brush. The setting was good, but the face was the jewel. There was no nuance it couldn’t convey. There was no season, no phase of the moon, no combination of cloud and sun that it couldn’t best; there was no joke it couldn’t tell, no lullaby it couldn’t hum, no verdict it couldn’t hand down.

The face had put unpleasant away for the moment and was smiling again. Maybe it remembered something amusing, or something pleasing. I didn’t like either choice, given the drift of our conversation.

“Don’t misunderstand, Inspector. I’m here to do a job. You’re only here because I received orders. Left to me, I wouldn’t have summoned you from the mountain. You are an unknown quantity, and I don’t like dealing with anything unknown in the midst of a fast-moving situation.”

This came as a relief of sorts. At least I knew Kim hadn’t handpicked me. My name had been put in front of him, by whom I didn’t know. “I’m delighted to have your full confidence and backing.”

“You could help me, but you remain skeptical about my commitment. Very well, I’m suggesting an experiment, if that will convince you how serious I am.”

“That’s surprising,” I said.

“Really? In what way?”

“I thought you’d looked carefully at my file. I thought you’d studied me.”

“Go on.”

“You should know that I don’t like experiments.”

“Pain, Inspector.” The stale smile lingered on his face. I definitely did not like that smile. I wanted it to go away. “Would you rather inflict pain or suffer it?” Kim let the question float on the currents of the moment. His pacing had improved. “Think it over this afternoon,” he said. “We’ll have drinks before dinner, and you can give me an answer; then we’ll see where we go from there.”

“Where we go from there? I thought I was going home. That’s what you said yesterday.”

“Simply a question of time.” The face appeared thoughtful, but not the sort of thoughts that led to a comfortable walk in the park. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Time?”

Actually, I thought as the door shut behind him, it’s not about time. It’s about running out of time. It’s about being nervous because SSD is up to something and the people in the market are up to something and a gorgeous woman and one of your officers are up to something and you, Major Kim, don’t know what it is.

I turned on the television. The announcer was listing the days on which people with respiratory problems should take extra care. I’d have to remember to tell Li.

2

The bar was in a building at the end of a small, deserted street. The side door opened to a narrow room, barely space for five or six tables. When it was full, it probably felt crowded, but there was no one else there at the moment. Kim indicated we should sit at the bar, where, on each end, there was a globe containing a fat white candle. In each globe, the flame stood straight up, barely a flicker, for a long time, then began a frantic dance, responding to a puff of air that swirled in the glass but nowhere else. Otherwise, the place was pitch-dark.

“Pain, Inspector. The question left hanging from this afternoon concerned pain.”

“Is that the essence of your world?” I don’t like it so dark when I’m talking to someone I don’t know and have reason to think doesn’t have my best interests at heart.

“I’m not sure you are concentrating. Are you? What are you looking around for?”

“A light switch.”

“This isn’t a game. I have a lot to accomplish, and only so much time to get it all done. An hour ago, I learned that the time is even shorter than I’d thought. You can imagine that I’m getting impatient, and when I get impatient I feel the urge to peel off some of the veneer of civilization.”

In other words, he was under a lot of pressure and wasn’t getting much help in solving his problem. “So the problem isn’t really pain, after all. We’re back to the question of time, that and these mysterious tasks of yours. Go ahead and get them done, why don’t you? By all means, do what you have to do. Work eighteen hours a day. Skip dinners with your girlfriend in the red dress. Just leave me out of it. Whoever put my name in front of you must have pulled the wrong file. It happens.”

The major signaled the bartender. “Two large drinks.”

The bartender nodded and went somewhere into the darkness.

“Large.” It seemed to me that he could at least have asked what I wanted to drink. “That is now an acceptable order, I take it. No need to worry with content, only size. Sign of the times?”

Kim patted my knee. “Get real, Inspector. We’re about to have a conversation, a true exchange of ideas. No more fencing, no more banter. We’re going to talk of pain and suffering on a large scale. Let me say at the outset, I honestly believe it would be good to avoid that if possible. If not, if it proves impossible, well, it won’t be the first time.”

When the drinks arrived, we moved to a table, deeper into the gloom. Other people’s eyes adjust to the dark; mine don’t. There was a young inspector in our office years ago with eyes like a cat. The darker it was, the better he could see. He would sit in the dark reading files all night long. If we were on surveillance, he could spot a suspect moving in the blackest night. It made the rest of us look bad. No one was sorry to see him assigned to another office.

“Obviously,” I said, “neither the pain nor the suffering is to be yours.”

A woman appeared, a shadow emerging from the emptiness of space, and handed the major a piece of paper. He moved back to the bar where there was at least a little light to read by, wrote something quickly across the top, and held it up for the woman to take away. She didn’t move until he looked at her and nodded.

“I have enough suffering of my own, Inspector. You might not think so.” He stared in the direction of the vanished woman. “Pain and suffering,” he laughed. The room echoed with the sounds of a five-hundred-year-old gingko tree losing a limb in a storm. “Sign of the times.”

“Overall, though, we aren’t focused on your suffering.”

“No, we aren’t. Disappointed?”

“Then it must be mine.”

The major sat down again and raised his glass. “Not yours exactly. Not in so many words. Let’s put it in broader terms. Let’s be grand in our vision, lofty in our ideals. Nation, race, family, individual-when one is in pain, all suffer, isn’t that the theory?”

“Theories are junk.” I picked up my glass. “To better times.”

The major shrugged, but in the dark I couldn’t be sure of the face. “To whatever comes next.”

We drank in silence and sat awhile in contemplation. With barely enough light to see your own glass in a bar, there isn’t much else to do. I was not inclined to say anything more. The man was baiting me. He was trying to ratchet up my interest. I took another sip of the large drink. It was gin, but I drank it anyway. The flame in the far globe flared enough so at last I could see the major’s face. He was staring at me, not in a friendly way, but at least it wasn’t a mean, practiced stare. I made a note to myself to start a file on stares. Laughter wasn’t of much use. All it did was point to more pain. A typology of stares might be more instructive. Something to do with the eyes, I guessed. Maybe we were seeing the impact of all the light flooding the city, light that, for some reason, couldn’t find its way into this bar.

“Things will change,” Kim said at last.

“They do, sometimes.”

“From what I’ve seen, that hasn’t been the case here in the North for quite a while.”

“Let’s leave that discussion for another time. Purely for the sake of argument, we’ll posit that things will change. And next you’re going to tell me, that means for the better.”

“You’re doubtful?”

“Oh, not at all.”

“Then what?”

“Loss, my dear major. Loss.”

The light from the globe was giving out, but I could see that his face was appropriately puzzled.

“Now, truly, I am disappointed,” I said. “In another minute you will tell me that we have nothing to lose but our chains. Yet freed we will become what?”

He waved a hand in front of his face. “And you, you’re about to rattle on about the joys of the collective. Spare me, please, Inspector.”

“Freed we will be what?” I asked again. This was something I’d thought about on the mountaintop, watching shadows climb out of the little valley and then fall back. “Smarter? Richer? And, in the end, why do you care what is best for us? Is it your business? Do you really care at all?”

At this the major shook his head. “Apparently, not only is it my business; it is my unhappy fate. To make you happy, all right, I’ll admit it. No, I don’t care what happens to you, because of everything you and your friends have done-or allowed to be done-to this place for the past fifty years. You can all hang as far as I am concerned. I’d spring the trapdoor myself, but I have no choice in the matter. I am here to deliver you into freedom, and that is exactly what I am going to do.”

“I know you were bound for Paris. A pity you didn’t go.”

3

“The game is over, Inspector. It comes down to that. All of the planning and plotting and maneuvering-all done. For some reason, your side has decided the best offense is to give up.” We were back in the major’s office. The night before in the bar, after I had finished my large drink, a man had appeared with a message in a locked black dispatch case. The major had read the message and left in a clatter. “We’ll continue this tomorrow morning, Inspector, in my office,” he said before disappearing.

The driver was waiting in front of my hotel at 5:00 A.M. We were back to the ferret. He told me to get in the rear seat. “We aren’t pals,” he said. “I’m a driver; you’re the passenger. Keep it that way, OK?”

When I walked into Kim’s office, breakfast was already on his desk. He handed me a bowl of soup. It was pumpkin, but I put it to one side.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. I’d mulled it over through the night and decided this would be my opening line. It wasn’t strictly true. I did believe him. What he’d said about surrender at the top was the only explanation possible. All that I lacked was evidence. Not counting Kim himself seated behind the big desk, the neon sign on my hotel, and the low-cut red dress, where was the evidence of such surrender, exactly? The woman with the baseball cap in the market was actually evidence to the contrary. She didn’t sound like someone who was giving up. Besides, from everything I’d seen, there was a lot that hadn’t changed. Buses continued not to run on time, in some cases not to run at all. People walked across the bridges as they always had. A few new buildings stood here and there, and yes, there were all of those extra streetlights, but did that really suggest anything as sweeping as Kim was laying out-wholesale surrender?

“Fortunately for all of us,” Kim picked up his bowl to drain it, “the state of your belief is unimportant.”

This, I could be sure, was untrue. I was of no utility to Kim and his people unless I bought into what he was telling me. He needed me for some reason; that much was clear. That, I knew in my bones, was my leverage. It was not the heavyweight crowbar I would have liked, but it was something. It was more than something; it was all I had.

Kim looked at my bowl. “Are you sure you won’t have any? It’s pumpkin, and it’s pretty good. The cook is one of yours. I’m glad to see your people haven’t forgotten how to cook.”

“I’m always pleased when you’re glad, Major. Nothing for me, though.”

“Well, as I think I mentioned before, it wasn’t my idea to bring you into this. I didn’t even want you in the city. I said you’d be trouble, and it turns out I was right.”

This did not seem to be adding to my leverage.

“But you’re here, and things are moving. You can be useful, as long as you don’t get in the way.”

“I’ve heard the same thing said about doorstops.”

“We have decided that talking of ‘surrender’ is a bad idea. The problem is not simply in use of the term but in the concept as well. Bad idea, bad concept, bad approach-that’s why you won’t hear me talking about it. Surrenders lead to vacuums; things become unstuck; people wander aimlessly and go bump. Some of them get crazy ideas about history and destiny. It makes for a lot of noise.”

“And blood.”

“Yes, that, too. Messy, ugly, painful.”

“Costly.”

He was silent, but I could see I had hit upon the word that swirled up from his cable traffic every morning. Cost. Expense. He needed calm and quiet, he needed to avoid bloodshed, because chaos ran up the budget.

“There we are,” I said. “You do need me. For some reason you need me to save your skin.”

“Never overestimate your place in the universe, any universe. Yes, your skills,” he looked as if the word caused him some pain, “might prove useful. And whether you believe it or not, for a change you will actually be doing something good, in the long run.”

“An interesting place to live-the long run. What do you suppose they’re serving for lunch, in the long run?”

“You mean to tell me that you don’t care about the future?”

“In case you’ve forgotten, Major, at one time you and I were the future. Now, here we sit.”

“Yes, here we sit. And there’s a way yet to go.”

“Not for me.”

“Ah, I keep forgetting. You’re no longer part of the human race. You are some sort of new mountain-dwelling species. I saw something to that effect in your file.”

“I don’t think you’ve seen my file, not the whole file.”

“You’d be surprised, Inspector, what I’ve seen. You’ll be pleased to know that your file and all its annexes have been pulled from the inactive archive and put back into active status.”

“In other words, I’m to be paid.”

“In other words, you take orders.”

“From whom?”

This earned a broad smile, a number one on the chart. “Lucky you.”

4

“For one thing,” the smile fell from the face as if held on with old cello tape, “it’s time to stop playing the angles, stop acting like a rat in the shadows.”

“Rabbit.”

“Another thing, stop contradicting me. I said ‘rat.’ I meant ‘rat.’ ”

“So, I should be more like… what?”

“When you’re sitting here, you’re working for me. Don’t try to figure out how to get around me, or play me off against someone else. There is no one else. For all intents and purposes, I am it. I am the party center.” He paused and glared. I could tell he was gauging my reaction. I only glared back, so he went on. “You don’t have to check with anyone else; you don’t have to worry about orders being countermanded, or signals being switched, or my waking up one day with a new agenda.”

“You say jump, I jump. Fairly simple.”

“You jump, and you don’t come down…”

“… until you finish your soup. You still expect me to believe you’ve read my file? I’m not by nature a jumper. Everyone says so. There are whole chapters in my file filled with complaints about how I failed to jump.”

“No, but you will. You will. And you know why?”

“I can’t guess.”

“Because I could snap your backbone right here, Inspector. I could throw your guts out the window and let them hang there until…” He had to think about it, just for a second, but that was all it took. It told me he wasn’t as tough as he wanted to be. I didn’t need to get around him. When the time came, I could walk right over him, but only when the time came. If it came. Meanwhile, there wasn’t much I could do.

He fixed me with a baleful stare, his entire being concentrated in his eyes, sending probing rays into my skull. “I know what you’re doing. You’re calculating, Inspector. Don’t.” He stood up, switching off the ray machine. “Follow me. There’s something you need to see.”

We went into a hallway lined with old photographs: a woman walking down a dirt road, the village in the distance behind her, the sky overhead heavy with summer’s heat; two men sitting in the shade on a wooden bench in front of a house; a line of trees at midday; a bridge in the late afternoon with a woman and a young boy standing together, looking over the edge. I stopped at each photo. It was impossible not to fall deep into each one. They were from the 1930s, judging from the clothes the people wore and the way the trees leaned against the sky. When I looked up, Major Kim was watching me.

“They’re very good, don’t you think?” He put his hand on my shoulder. “I brought them with me. Another age.”

“The light is pure, almost liquid. It breaks your heart.”

Kim turned and led the way down the hall. He took out a key and opened a door to a small room. Inside was an old wooden armchair, a small table with a file on it, and, next to that, a green teapot. The colors were jarring after the black and the white of the world in the photographs. Against the far wall sat a young man with alert eyes. He didn’t stand up when we walked in. The major didn’t seem to notice.

“This is the file room. That is the file. Here you will read the file all the way through. No notes. Commit it to memory; make riddles or songs of the key points to help you remember if you like. Whatever you want, as long as it stays here.” He tapped his forehead.

I looked at the man who hadn’t stood up. He was pretending not to care, but he was studying me closely. His eyes moved bit by bit across my face. “Sometimes,” I said, “my lips move.” I nodded toward the man. “Should I read with my mouth open?”

“This is not someone you need worry about.” The major looked at his watch. “The file on the table is dense. It may take you a while to get through it. I don’t want you to become lonely.”

“You mean, you don’t want me alone. Already we are without trust?”

The man in the chair suddenly relaxed. “You got that right, pal,” he said.

“Inspector O is a colleague.” Major Kim’s voice was flat. “Remember that, Captain. He gets every courtesy-and ‘pal’ is not his name or his title.”

The captain gave me a mock salute. “I am at your disposal.” He turned to the major. “Better?”

“It may take you the rest of the day to absorb the file.” Major Kim moved to the door. I had thought he would hand the captain his head. It was odd to see him retreat. “We’ll talk later,” he said, frowning again. The door shut. It clicked, locked.

5

The file took all afternoon to finish. I had hoped it would be possible to skim most of it, but the major was right. The information was dense. Many names. Many connections. I didn’t bother to try to memorize anything. Whatever stuck, stuck. The captain didn’t say a word the whole time. He looked at his watch now and then but did nothing else that suggested impatience.

“All done,” I said finally, and stood up to stretch. The room was cold, windowless, no pictures or mirrors on the walls. No decoration of any kind. It was a room. It had a door that locked from the outside. Either it was soundproof or the rest of the world had gone away. This was an interesting thought: The captain and I were the last people on earth, in a cold room with no windows.

“No one could hear your screams,” he said.

“They couldn’t hear yours, either.”

“Well then, let’s not scream, shall we?”

“Like I said,” I closed the file, “I’m done. You want me to sign anything?”

“Sign? Sign what? No one gets to see that file. Ever. You didn’t see it. I didn’t see it.”

“The major didn’t see it.”

“Especially the major.”

“If no one has seen it, it must not exist.”

“You might be right.”