The Man with the Baltic Stare

lay down on the bed. Simple, I thought. If Kang wants to contact me, he knows where I am. Let him take the next step.

From downstairs, I could hear the clerk yelling into the phone. Ah, the lullaby of Canton, I thought to myself, and fell asleep.

3

Next morning, I went in search of parks, meeting places, alleys, drop sites, anything I might find handy if Kang turned up. It also helped me to wander around, let all the half facts that Luis had thrown at me sift through my subconscious. If anything remained by the end of the day, any nuggets that didn’t turn out to be pixie dust, I’d give them a second look. Meanwhile, I had a little pixie dust of my own to contend with. Major Kim had deliberately left out the most important part of the case-who was allegedly, or actually, involved. Normally, this didn’t mean much. Guilt was relative; innocence, fleeting. The crime might be more important than the individual, the accusation more significant than the facts. If we were told to find a reason to clear someone, that’s what we did. It wasn’t healthy to inquire into the whats and whyfors.

The case that Kim wanted fixed wasn’t fitting into a normal pattern, however. For starters, there was the passport. Not a lot of Koreans carried one from the Dominican Republic. Then there was the message to the nominal Senhor Penza-and the fact that it had been so conveniently overlooked until almost the last minute. Finally, Luis was holding out on me. I didn’t expect him to dump everything in my lap, but I had the feeling he didn’t want to say too much, not because I was from a foreign service but because he wasn’t sure of his own footing. It wasn’t a matter of personal trust. After all, he had shared Lulu with me almost from the start.

The old city had a lot of small, green parks mostly filled with ficus trees, pretty much as Luis had said. Most of the trees had short trunks. They branched off quickly, after only a meter or so. “Wood from a ficus is like a promise of love,” my grandfather would say when I was a boy and he saw me watching girls as they walked past our house. “It doesn’t take you very far.” He had another warning-one he often used on holidays when the girls dressed up in bright chima chogori and strolled from one village to the next, eyes sparkling with fun. It was breathtaking, I thought, like a parade of flowers along our dusty road. “Go ahead; look,” he’d say, standing beside me, his hand on my shoulder. “Look. They’re like shiny leaves. Did you ever see a tree worth a damn that needed shiny leaves? Well, did you, boy?”

Near the post office, up a pleasant street called Travessa de S. Domingos, I came upon a square with a fountain in the middle and a large ficus spilling shade onto a bench. On two sides the square was enclosed by a low wall of blue and white tiles. It seemed like a good place to get out of the sun and even held some promise for a meeting with Kang, if things came to that. No one else was around, so I took the bench beneath the tree.

A few minutes later, Luis walked into the square. He threw a couple of coins into the fountain and sat down beside me. “You keep up a brutal pace in this heat,” he said. “You should slow down a little. Good thing you found this shade. I was about to drop.” He took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

“I thought we had finished our business.”

“So did I. But then a friend of mine asked me to find you.”

“A suite has opened up at the Venetian?”

“Better.” He stood up again and looked over the wall behind us at the street below. “Nobody here but us chickens. Or us people who eat chickens.” He studied his watch. “Lunchtime rolls around again, thank God, and not a moment too soon. In a short while, we’ll have visitors. Whenever I go out, MSS tags along at a respectable distance. They think I’m helping someone launder a lot of money. Me!” He laughed until the tears streamed down his face. “I can’t even wash my own shirts.” His shirt was white and crisp, except where drops of laughter glistened down the front. “Listen closely,” he said, once he pulled himself together. “Remember that fort we saw from the hotel room? The one on top of the hill? That’s where you must meet my friend.”

“I’m inclined not to trust anyone, especially people I’ve never met.”

“This is different. You’ll find out why soon enough.”

I didn’t even try to stop from appearing skeptical.

“I don’t want you to go into this in a state of disbelief, Inspector; it’s bad operational practice. That’s what our manual emphasized repeatedly. Yours did, too, I imagine. Tell me, what’s the matter?”

“Pretty exposed, that location, isn’t it?”

“So! You are a cautious man, Inspector. This caution is impressive. Perhaps where you live it is essential. Here in Macau, however, it can be fatal. The fort is a good choice; I’m sure of it. There’s only one way in. If you’re followed, it will be obvious.”

“Only one way in is fine. It’s the only one way out that worries me. Even if I’m not followed, what about people already in place?”

“You mean MSS? They pulled their surveillance a few years ago. It wasn’t worth their time, they said. Anyway, it’s a very steep climb up there. My people don’t cover it at all.” He shrugged when I didn’t reply. “All right, some security goes up a couple of times a month to make sure the fort is still there. They aren’t due again for another week, and they stick to a regular schedule. They’re afraid what they might find if they go to random visits.”

“We won’t bump into five other operations by five other organizations? The British have friends, the Americans, the French, maybe the Singaporeans. How can you be sure that no one else knows the place is wide open, that it isn’t being watched?”

“Who says it isn’t being watched?”

“Aha.”

“This will work. I know it will because we’ve never done it before, so there’s no pattern and absolutely no trail. They might catch on if we did it more than once, but we won’t. Think of it as a onetime pad.”

“Maybe some rough edges, though? The first time always has rough edges, a few things someone forgets to consider, minor details-the sort that can get a person killed.”

“None, no minor details, simple as rain. Just listen. You go up to the fort at nine A.M. tomorrow. It’s still cool enough then so you won’t give yourself heatstroke climbing that hill. Take a bottle of water with you, to be safe. Look a little touristy; you know the drill.”

“The place will be deserted at that hour?”

“Deserted? Good God, no. There will be squads of old ladies using it for exercise, a couple of tape players blaring that music they need to stand on one leg and sweat. Sometimes they practice with fans; other times it’s with swords. Don’t walk too close or you could lose something. Your main interest is the front wall and the nineteen cannons that line it.”

“Nineteen.”

“Three main groups-five, nine, and five.”

“That’s nineteen.”

“Face the front of the fort. You will see that there are two bulwarks-left and right. This is very common fort architecture for the period.”

“I’ll take your word.”

“Each bulwark has five cannons. For the sake of convenience, we’ll number those in the left bulwark one through five.”

“One through five.”

“Good. Now, forget they’re there. You actually start counting with the sixth cannon. As you face the Grand Lisboa, and you can’t miss it because the damned thing blots out the rest of God’s creation, cannon number six will be the first one on your left along the wall. Use that as an anchor point in your mind; get yourself oriented.”

“Should I close my eyes to imagine this?”

“As you wish. But you don’t want to focus on the left side yet. You want to stroll over to