“One thing.”
“What?”
“You haven’t told me who didn’t do it.” It was the sort of thing I never wanted to say but did anyway.
“That’s not your concern.”
“Maybe not, but I’d like to know. Call it professional curiosity.”
“Go downstairs to the second floor to pick up your tickets and passport. The ticket should be for the day after tomorrow. They’ll have some travel money for you, too. Don’t waste it; we’ll need an accounting. It will probably take you an hour to get everything done. When you’re finished down there, come back up here.”
The passport had a ten-year-old photograph of me, but the clerk said it was close enough. It was a South Korean passport, which got under my skin. The travel money was practically nothing; the clerk said I was lucky to get as much as I did and if I played my cards right in Macau maybe I could turn it into a neat little pile. When I went back upstairs, there was a small man with an expensive haircut in a black shirt and black tie sitting in the green chair across from Kim. They stopped talking when I walked in.
“That will be all,” Kim said to the man, who stood up and left without acknowledging me as he brushed by. He had on expensive cologne, a lot of it.
“Who is your thuggish friend who gets the good chair?” I waved away a perfumed nimbus.
“Just someone who thinks the northeast is his territory to dispense.” Kim was looking through a small notebook.
“Oh, really? Of course, you set him straight. He understands it’s not his and it’s not yours, either.”
“You got the passport?”
“I assume he isn’t part of your operation.”
“What are you talking about?”
“His shoes cost more than you make in six months. He’s been drinking. Even his cologne bath couldn’t cover the alcohol. Your discipline can’t be that bad. Besides, he is Chinese.”
Kim looked up, momentarily amused.
“I’m wondering, though, why you were so tense when he was here? He doesn’t look the type to have a hold on you. Still, your eyes have taken on that worried cast.”
“Worried?” Kim blinked, twice. “No, Inspector. I may have braced myself, that’s all. Zhao is not someone with whom you have a casual conversation.”
“So, why the sudden silence when I walked in? What’s he to me? You wouldn’t have left the door open like that if you didn’t want to make sure that we brushed antennae.”
“Let’s put it this way: If Zhao is in a good mood, he can be your patron, even your protector, in faraway places. He’ll supply your needs and embellish your wants, beyond what you’ve got in that little envelope of travel money you’re holding. He can also put you in touch with the right people in Macau. His access to the influential is exceeded only by his bank accounts.”
“This, as you say, is if he is in a good mood. If not?”
“If not, he has a pet rat who can remove your lungs and use them to stuff the pillows of the orphans he’s had a hand in creating. Zhao believes grief is a bad thing, a burden on society, so if he murders a husband, he makes sure to murder the wife.”
“I have no wife.”
“No one to grieve for you? Then the man’s work is simplified.”
“I’d rather this Zhao stick to enlarging my wants.”
“ ‘Embellish,’ Inspector. I said ‘embellish.’ ”
“Another friend, another door?”
“You’ll have to ask him yourself. It’s not my job to read his mind. We coexist, that’s all.”
“You can’t arrest him?”
Kim smiled. I began recording a series of variables in my head-corners of the mouth, forehead, eye crinkling. This was the first entry, so there was no basis for comparison, but on the face of it, I thought it could go down as “wan.”
“No, Inspector, I can’t arrest him, not if I want to keep breathing. Unlike you, I do have a wife-a wife and two children.”
“What about the Great Han? Can’t he do something? Surely he doesn’t approve of someone like Zhao.”
“I guess you could say the Great Han prefers to keep breathing, too.”
4
I went back to the hotel to think things over. It still wasn’t too late to tell Kim to find someone else to go to Macau. I had made it a point never to get involved with gangsters while I was in the Ministry, because I knew it would be nothing but a headache. There was a tiny section in a dark office in the headquarters building that dealt with all gangs-Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and whatever else the wind blew across the borders. Gangsters were tough people, very smooth for the most part, and for the most part deadly. That was only half the problem. The rest of the problem-and the most difficult part-came from the fact that other entities, various central committee departments, military groups, special services, and we never knew for sure what else, loved to run operations using foreign gangs. We were never informed ahead of time. If we got in the way of an operation, we were in trouble. It took a lot of careful footwork to stay clear of something you didn’t know existed. One hot summer, a Japanese gang tried to set up shop in my sector. It wasn’t a big operation, but I was against letting them hang around, so I complained through channels. Channels told me to mind my business. It turned out a couple of the gang members were working for a foreign intelligence service and weren’t very discreet about it, so after a few months the whole operation was shut down and moved to the east coast.
Around six o’clock, Kim called and asked if I wanted to go out for dinner. “Sure,” I said. Either he was working overtime to cultivate me or he was seriously isolated in his own machinery. The girl in the red dress met us at the door, only this time she was wearing blue. “Blue is definitely your color,” I told her.
She tossed her head. “This way,” she said to Major Kim, and led us back to the triangular table.
Michael had the night off. We were waited on by Bruce, who had the same austere smile. I figured they handed them out in the kitchen, along with the white jackets.
Even before the drinks arrived, I got to the point. “Forget about it.” That was as direct as I knew how to be. “I’m not going to Macau or anywhere else, except back to the mountain.”
Kim was looking at the menu. “The quail looks good,” he said.
“I’m not about to get back into all of this running around. Consider me a candle with nothing left to burn. No flame, all consumed. Look around, Major. Look. Look for heaven’s sake!” I tried to keep my voice down. I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to look at.
“Oh, Christ.” He put down the menu. “You’re wallowing like a pig in self-pity, Inspector. You sound like you’re about to start singing an anthem to regret. A life wasted, wrong turns taken. Don’t, please. Keep it to yourself.”
“Look to the future, is that it? Let the past fall away. And where will it fall? In what peaceful graveyard do we bury the past?”
“Graveyard? More probably, a garbage dump in your case. You’d better hope all the years you spent in service of this mob can be recycled. Is there a great universal machine that takes old time and makes it new? How should I know? And why should I care? We’re not here to compare philosophy notes. I’m supposed to throw a rope across this pathetic chasm of a country. I don’t look down. I don’t notice if there are rotting corpses or
