Luis put the notebook back in his pocket. “If you get to De la Casa Pain, please give Senhor Penza my regards.” We shook hands. “The elevator is to your left as you exit. Why don’t you relax for a couple of days, take in a show? Go out to the Venetian. Everything there is first class. I know the manager.” Luis looked up at the ceiling. “He is an old friend, from before the regulations.”
“Old friends are like doors, isn’t that what they say?” I nearly tripped on the hallway carpet on my way out.
Chapter Two
I was eating a plate of roast pork-overdone in the worst way-in a small restaurant on the first floor of the Lisboa when the Russian girl with green eyes walked in. She headed straight to my table.
“May I sit?”
“I’m all out of engraved invitations.”
“You really shouldn’t stay in the Nam Lo. It isn’t proper for a man like you.”
“A man like me.”
“My boss doesn’t want you there. He says it scares clients away.”
“I know your boss?”
“You will meet him soon enough.” Her phone rang; she answered reluctantly. “Da, da.” She nodded at me. “Da.”
“That was your boss.”
“Yes, he told me to tell you he would see that you were out of the Nam Lo one way or another. I’m sorry.” She shook her head sadly. “You don’t know this man.”
“Would you like some dinner? Anything but the pork.”
She looked at the pictures on the menu and pointed at a bowl of noodles. “This is what I have mostly.” She shrugged, the way a young person does, not much weighing on their shoulders. “One more time won’t hurt.”
“You come here often?”
“Every night before I… go to work.”
“How about on your night off?”
She laughed so convincingly that it was almost impossible to find the pain. “What night off? I work seven days a week. It’s part of the contract.”
“You have a contract?”
“Oh course. That’s why I’m here. At the end of six months, I get paid and go home. Only five months to go. I’m never coming back.”
“There must be lots of Russian girls here.”
She shrugged, this time without the innocence. “I’m not pretty enough for you?”
“You? You’re the prettiest Russian girl I’ve ever seen. You’re also very young. Why don’t you go home?”
“Can’t. Told you. I have a contract.”
“You don’t have to abide by it. It’s not really legal.”
“You’re going to get me a passport, and a plane ticket, I suppose?”
“Forgive me for asking-how much do you have to make a night?”
“Ten thousand.”
“How much an hour?”
“A thousand.”
I did the math. “That’s awful. What kind of place is this?”
She pointed to a line of young, well-dressed Chinese women walking up and down the hallway next to the restaurant. “Ask them.”
“What is it, a fashion show?”
She laughed. “They are here to make love.”
“The whole group? We’re in a fancy hotel. Shouldn’t they at least be outside, on the street?”
“We walk the streets. The Chinese girls don’t have to. A guest picks out the one he likes. Some of the guests are old, so that way they don’t have to use energy walking so far back to the room. It’s a service, I guess. Respect for the elderly.”
I looked at the girls. “What if I don’t like any of them?”
“Then you eat noodles with me.” She patted my hand. “Just get out of the Nam Lo, will you?”
2
At my hotel, there was a message waiting for me. The clerk handed it over without saying anything. He waited until I started up the stairs to my room.
“Russian guy nosing around. Wanted to know if you were still here.”
“And you said?”
“I yelled at him in Hakka.”
“You don’t speak Russian?”
“I don’t like Russians. Except the young ones.” He licked his lips.
I walked back to the desk. “You touch her, I’ll kill you. You understand that?”
He shrank back. “You can’t scare me. I’ve got friends.”
“I’ll bet you have scabies, too.”
When I got to my room, the door was slightly ajar. I walked calmly downstairs, took the clerk by the collar, and dragged him back upstairs. “See that?” I shoved his head into the door. “Do that again and I’ll burn this place down.”
“Hey!” He unleashed all twelve tones at me. “What was that about?”
“It’s called negative reinforcement, and there’s more where that came from.”
“I’ll call the cops, you touch me again.”
“Go ahead; call the cops. Call MSS for all I care.”
He rubbed the top of his head. “That’s the last time I rent to a Korean,” he said. “You people are crazy-mad, not to mention being murderers.”
“Wait a minute.” I grabbed his arm. “What do you know about murders?”
“Nothing.” He grinned at me. “Not a thing.”
After the clerk disappeared, I opened the message. All it said was: “Blue sky.” Everyone seemed to be getting short messages these days, but this one shook me. It shook me up so much I sat down in the ratty chair next to the television. “Blue sky” was a code a chief inspector of mine had used as an emergency signal. But he was dead, shot years ago by Military Security in an incident that wasn’t recorded anywhere and thus never happened. It couldn’t be from him. I had never heard of spirits using code.
There was only one other person who might have known the code, and he had disappeared. His name was Kang. He’d been a deputy director of what was then known as the Investigations Department-the party’s foreign intelligence arm. He had also been on the Military Security hit list, but they never got him. I may have been the last person to see him before he went into permanent hiding. A few people wanted to get in touch with him over the years, and they thought I knew how to do it. I didn’t, and I never wanted to find out. Now this. “Blue sky,” another way of saying: “Make contact at once.” But where? How? I pushed the door shut and
