“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.”
Chapter Seven
Two days later, the captain and I stood about a meter apart, not far from the border with China. After I finished reading the file, Major Kim had made clear that he wanted me to drive to the border to see exactly where the problem was centered. The file mainly focused on Chinese plans to move into the North to stop a collapse. There were wild rumors that Chinese were already flooding into the country, though no one could ever seem to spot them.
“I don’t know what’s sparking these stories or who is helping to spread them, but they have to be stopped,” Kim said. His people in the South were alarmed, and they were making his life a nightmare. He was doing his best to keep them calm, he told me. For the time being, that was possible by playing down the more alarmist of the reports, but it wouldn’t work forever. He needed someone to go up there and look around. He didn’t trust his own people on such a mission, because he didn’t know which ones were really loyal to him and which were reporting to his many detractors in Seoul. He wasn’t overjoyed to have to use me, he said, but I’d been highly recommended and he didn’t have time to search for alternatives. “Your pedigree is considered impeccable, you were never in a responsible position, and you’ve been thrown out of Pyongyang. All that looks good on a bio sheet. Remember, one thing you don’t want to do is double-cross me,” he said. “But I think you already know that.”
The captain came along because Kim didn’t trust me, and I was there because Kim didn’t trust the captain. It was simple. The captain said he wasn’t supposed to let me drive, but would I mind because he had a bad headache from drinking too much the night before. So I drove, and he tried to sleep. We went through the mountains near Hyangsan, where the maples looked like a forest fire burning on the hillsides. I went off the main road to avoid a couple of ugly towns, then sped through Huichon to Kopun, where my grandfather and I sometimes went shortly after the war for wood from a special stand of oaks.
Past Kopun, the valleys had a few farms with goats on the hills and fruit trees along the road but nowhere really to stop, so I drove until I found a pavilion on a mountain thick with pine trees, overlooking a river. Not far from the pavilion was a glade of Erman’s birch, beautiful trees, almost twenty meters tall and at peace in the afternoon sun. I sat underneath them and closed my eyes until a couple of old women showed up, pushing bicycles loaded with apples.
“What are you going to do with those, Grandma?” The captain seemed better; he was picking his teeth with a silver toothpick.
“What do you think I’m going to do with them?” The first woman put her bike against a tree. “What does anyone do with fruit? Where are you from, anyway?”
“Never mind him,” I said. “How about giving us a couple of those apples. It will lighten
