The car slowed at a guard post long enough for the guard to read the plates and wave us through. More lights, a turn into a long driveway, then down a ramp into an underground garage, very dark.
The car stopped, but Li let it idle. “Let me give you a piece of advice. For a change, maybe you’ll take me seriously.”
“Turn off the motor, will you, before we suffocate.”
“You don’t know what you think you know.” He turned the key and the engine quit with no complaints.
“That’s it? I don’t know what I don’t know? That’s helpful. I can put that in the bank. Maybe I’ll carve it in wood and hang it over my door. I’ll use beech if I can find any. Beech is the most inane wood on the planet.”
“We’re going inside for you to meet a few people. They outrank me.”
“You got rank? I’ll throw a party.”
“Save it for when this is over. Don’t forget-these people breathe different air from us. One of them is especially important; you’ll recognize whom I mean as soon as you step in the door. He doesn’t put up with crap. Can you remember that, after living on the mountaintop?”
“It’s only been four years.”
“Five.”
“Five. You make it sound like I’ve been away for centuries.”
“Amazing.” He shook his head. “You can’t even guess what you don’t know, and you’re not smart enough to realize it. Nothing much ever changes with you, does it? Come on; we’re late for this thing.” He took out a flashlight and pointed it at a door. “That way.”
Inside was a narrow hallway, another door, then an elevator with a silent girl who looked straight ahead at nothing, pushed the button with a white-gloved finger, and bowed as we stepped off into an anteroom with thick carpets and a high ceiling. A small man stood waiting, his hands behind his back. He nodded, took my coat, and ushered me into a room with tall, uncurtained windows along one wall and a long table in the center. There were floor lamps in two of the corners. They produced all the illumination the room had, other than what peeked in from the security lights along the perimeter fence about five hundred meters away. A big chandelier hung over the table, but this was its night off.
There were only four men in the room. Three sat in a row along the table, facing the door. The fourth stood in one of the dark corners, smoking. I didn’t recognize any of them. The man sitting in the center, apparently in charge, indicated I should occupy the chair across from him. Then nothing happened. The smoker gave no indication he’d seen me come in. No one spoke. Finally, he put out the cigarette in an ashtray balanced on the windowsill. He took a seat at the end of the table, apart from the rest of us.
“Good,” I said. “Everyone comfortable? I suggest we introduce ourselves. As you may know, I’ve been in the countryside for a few years and haven’t kept up with personnel news.”
The man across from me fingered the edges of a folder. He was military, he sat like a military man, but he was wearing a civilian suit and you could tell he didn’t like it. “We know who you are,” he said. “And we know who we are. That should be sufficient.”
“Sufficient for you, maybe, not for me.” Something else would have been smarter to say, but that’s what came out. Living alone on a mountaintop, you lose a little social grace. “This meeting, it isn’t what was agreed. I agreed to stay away; you agreed never to call me back.”
“We know what was agreed, Inspector. What was agreed is right here.” The man slid the folder across the table. “Go ahead; look at it. Make sure that’s your signature and everything is in order, exactly what you signed. Nothing has been altered. This isn’t a copy; it’s the original, same bloodstains on page three.” The man to his right nodded slightly. The man sitting to his left, his hands folded over each other as if they were a pair of gloves, stared at me. It was one of those mean, I-could-make-your-life-miserable stares that colonels practice in the mirror.
Stares don’t bother me, but bloodstains? Blood I usually remember, especially if it’s mine. I seemed to recall that I had bled but only metaphorically in the struggle over the agreement’s final wording. They could have dictated the whole thing if they had wanted. That would have made it easier, but the battle was as important to them as the words. So we wrangled for a couple of weeks over details until I finally said, “Put down whatever the hell you want,” and they took that as surrender enough, even though they knew I didn’t mean it.
The signed document-the one in the folder on the table-allowed me to leave the Ministry of People’s Security in 2011, a year before my official retirement, get out of Pyongyang, and withdraw from everything that was about to happen if I promised never to speak of what I’d seen or heard during my years of service-or, equally important to them, anything my grandfather had told me. My grandfather had fought with the anti-Japanese guerrillas. He knew the founding members of the new government; he knew what went on in headquarters during the war; he watched the postwar years unfold. They named him a Hero of the Revolution and buried him with high honors, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t always worried every time he opened his mouth.
I had thought they would pack me off to Yanggang, drop me as far away as they could, so the only ones who might listen to the old stories about people and events that were never supposed to be told would be a few pheasants and the ghosts of the tigers that had gone away long ago. But instead of Yanggang, someone picked an empty mountaintop near Changsong with a view of a little river valley. I don’t think it occurred to them that, as far as I was concerned, the view was a plus.
An old truck carrying a load of scrap lumber took me up the road to the top of the mountain one foggy morning in April. The driver and I had to get out a few times to move big rocks that had tumbled down the hillside and blocked the way. Near the top of the mountain was a small clearing, surrounded by a few tall trees. In the center was a hut that wouldn’t last another winter, so from the moment the truck drove away until the first morning of autumn-sharp with cold and crystal clear-I was mostly alone, building a one-room house using my grandfather’s carpenter’s tools. One afternoon in July, after three days of rain that made it impossible for me to work, a team of soldiers appeared. They had strung a phone line up the side of the mountain, and when I said I didn’t want it they told me they couldn’t care less. Two men in a Ministry car drove up with the phone three months later, just before the first snow. I told them I didn’t need a phone, but they said it was implied in the agreement and it had to be hooked up. In any case, the army had already installed the line and it would be a waste of the people’s resources if it stayed unconnected, they said.
After that, the phone rang a couple of times a year-it was usually an operator ostensibly running a line check and not interested in speaking more than a few words. I knew what this really was, a routine check to make sure I hadn’t disappeared. As further insurance, in case I fooled with the phone or learned to throw my voice really well, they put the guard shack on the road at the foot of the mountain. It was a waste of everybody’s time-the phone and the guards-but time was what they thought they had plenty of, and someone in the Ministry had decided they had nothing better to spend it on than me. When the road was open, food came once a month in the old truck. Twice a year, on the big holidays, a Ministry driver brought two bottles of liquor.
“Happy day, Inspector,” he’d say, stretching his legs and looking in all four directions at the view.
“I’m not an inspector anymore.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not a delivery boy, but I drove all the way up here to give you those bottles, so sometimes we have to be what we aren’t, I guess.”
4
“First of all.” I pushed the folder to one side. “Let’s get something straight. I’m not an inspector. I resigned, handed in all documentation, badges, identification, keys, and privileges attached thereto.” I checked to see if the mean stare across the table was still running; it was. “Second, maybe you can read in a dark room like this, but I can’t, not anymore. It’s the eyes.”
“Perhaps you’d rather be somewhere the lights are on twenty-four hours a day.” The staring man spoke up. He was younger than the other two, seemed comfortable in a dark room at a long table. I changed my mind. Probably not military, but I couldn’t figure out where he fit. He looked too intelligent to be SSD.
