The Man with the Baltic Stare

coming.” He looked back down the road. “Always.”

He seemed to have drifted somewhere else in his mind, so I left him alone and went back to digging through the remains of the house. There was nothing. The green vase with the cranes, the chest made for my grandmother, a small box of old photographs-all gone.

“You said something about an ash tree?” Li had moved so quietly that the sound of his voice startled me.

“I did. You know what one looks like?”

“Not if it smacked me in the face.”

“You wouldn’t want that. It’s very hard wood. I nearly lost my arm once because of it. The pain wouldn’t go away for months. Still hurts sometimes. That’s ash.”

“So your grandfather had a piece of ash, and he was talking to you. That’s where you left off.”

“No, he wasn’t talking to me so much as to the years that lay around us. That’s what he said, sometimes-that the years don’t pass; they don’t disappear. They were still here, he’d say, invisible, infinitely thin piles of them, heaped in the corners of rooms. It was one of those things that he’d say that wasn’t clear to me at the time. In winter, he’d often brood and tell me that the past was never gone; it was inside of us and all around. I wasn’t to believe what people said, that on January first everything was new.”

“You know, if I could come up with a single year that I wanted to keep, it would be nice. But there isn’t one, not even one.” Li pointed at what had been the front entrance to the house. “Every December thirty-first, I open the door at midnight, to let the old year out. Who taught me to do that, do you suppose? I can’t remember.” He looked into the smoking ruins. “Go ahead; keep looking for whatever there is to salvage. I’ll watch the road. If I see a car, I’ll whistle. We’ll need to get out of here fast. Someone will take care of Zhao eventually; don’t worry.”

“I don’t want ‘someone’ to take care of the son of a bitch. I’m going to do it myself.”

“As soon as we get off this mountain, I’ve got to find a phone to call Kim. He won’t be happy to hear about you and Zhao spitting at each other. He’s afraid of Zhao. Everyone seems to be.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when two big guys appeared from nowhere. They each took one of Li’s arms and dragged him to the edge of the cliff. Then they threw him over. One of them watched for a few seconds before they both turned to me. They didn’t say anything. What remained of the house made a sound, a painful sigh as the wood died for the last time. The sun dropped over the next hill, and in the darkness the wind picked up. I turned away and walked back to Li’s car, expecting the whole time that they’d stop me, permanently. Li had left the keys in the ignition. That was how we used to do it, I thought, as I started the car and turned around to drive down the hill. We always left ourselves a way out. Only I was starting to think there wasn’t one left.

Chapter Two

“Let me get this straight. You were standing there. Two husky guys materialized, threw him over the cliff, and watched as you drove away.” Kim swallowed hard but kept writing. “That’s it? He didn’t struggle, or yell? Big guy like Li, you’re telling me when they grabbed him, he went limp?”

“Maybe he did. I think one of them jammed something into his neck. It was getting dark, and it happened pretty fast.”

“You were a policeman for all those years, a trained observer, and you’re not sure what you saw?”

“I was upset. They’d just burned down my house.”

On the drive back, I’d gone over the whole thing ten times. There was no other conclusion. Kim must have known what Zhao was going to do. That’s why he was hesitant to let me go home until he got that phone call. And Li? He didn’t have to assign Li as the driver.

“Your house.” Kim kept marking his list. “I didn’t realize there was such attachment to material goods around here. I thought it had been squeezed out of you people.”

“We don’t wallow in it, if that’s what you mean. But we don’t go around destroying each other’s property, either.”

“That sounds like an accusation, Inspector, and I don’t like it.”

“Sorry, I’m still a little rattled.” If someone had handed me a pistol, I would have shot him right there, point-blank. I wouldn’t have even told him to look up. “Do you mind if I ask you a question? Why is it that people who work for you end up dead?”

That stopped him. He put the pencil down and sat back in his chair. Some people do that to show how relaxed they are, but sometimes it’s a fighting stance. With Kim, my money was on the latter.

“You’ve admitted that you gave the captain to the Great Han. Then-I’m thinking out loud here-maybe you gave the Great Han to Zhao.” That wasn’t my insight, it was Kang’s, but I could use it if I wanted. “Then, what do you know, Li gets shoved off a mountain.”

“It’s funny, Inspector. I was thinking that you’re the common thread in all these deaths. You-not me.”

“How do you figure that?”

“All of them were killed to make an impression on you.”

“Well, good, we can stop now, because I’m impressed.”

“Zhao wants you to work with him; that’s clear. And he’s trying to scare you away from working with me. Captain Sim was the first step.”

“Really? I thought you said you arranged for Sim’s execution.”

“I did, but only because Zhao thought he was betraying us to the Chinese.”

“Really? What does Zhao consider himself? A Druid?”

“He considers that his interests transcend the normal concerns in modern Beijing. He pretends not to care about tradition, but if you ask him after a few drinks, he’ll tell you about his sick dreams. They take place in the imperial court. It seems he’s always wearing an ermine robe with nothing underneath. Colonel Pang was very Chinese, and so, in his own way, is Zhao. I’m supposed to keep them all out of here, Inspector. I would have thought that was something you wanted, too.”

“I bar the back door and you come marching in the front, is that it?”

“At the moment, to tell you the truth, I’m less concerned with who is at either door than who is already inside. What do you know about the opposition that’s been scurrying around here? It’s like listening to rats scamper across the ceiling at night.”

“What did you expect? Sheep?”

“They need to understand, Inspector, that they have no chance of changing the course of history. I think somebody is filling their heads with bad ideas. You wouldn’t know who that might be, would you? I’m afraid Li might have been talking to them.”

“You killed him for that?”

Kim didn’t respond, he didn’t even register the question, but I knew he had heard it, and I knew he wouldn’t forget. “And you, Inspector, you wouldn’t be working for somebody else, would you? Because if you are, it won’t take me too long to find out.”

“Then what? Are you going to turn Zhao loose on me, too? You don’t scare me, Major, because I don’t have anything left to lose-nothing at all. The good die young. I missed the cutoff a while ago.”

“Maybe you really are more useful dead than alive.” Kang mused on that thought. His posture mused. The face fell to four types of musing. It seemed a shame to interrupt the show. I waited. He looked at me. “Should we test that theory?”

That did it. I wasn’t a mouse he could bat back and forth between his paws. “You know your problem? You are convinced that you know this place, but you don’t. You speak Korean, we speak Korean, and