“A good source is a good source, especially in this Soprano state of yours.” He must have just come across the term, because he was trotting around with it like a dog carries a stick. “Where is that damned report?” A few papers dropped onto the floor. He looked at them as if they were part of a prison break. “It was right here. Isn’t that always the case? If you don’t want a file, it’s always there. Never mind. This source works in Sinuiju, good access to the relatives of ranking officials.” He paused. “Well educated. That’s important in my book. It’s all I can tell you.” Finally, he looked up at me. “Sit, Inspector; why are you standing? It makes me nervous when you stand.” His eyes searched the room. “Get yourself one of those black plastic chairs and bring it over here.”
“A woman, isn’t it?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“And this woman works where the wives of ranking officials drop by and chitter- chatter.”
“So?”
“So, one place those wives like to go is the cosmetics factory, and it has nothing to do with vanity. There is a bootleg store attached to the factory, and they can get discounts there. They take boxes of the stuff home, and then resell it at prices that undercut the state stores.”
“That’s not my concern. I’m not worried about the black market right now. How did you figure out who the source was? Not that you did, but what made you guess so confidently?”
“Sinuiju, access to relatives, educated. People don’t deal with male sources anywhere but Pyongyang. They figure any male still in the provinces-especially Sinuiju-isn’t worth much. Once you’re looking for female sources in Sinuiju with access to relatives of ranking officials, there are only a few places to consider. Most of those drop off the list if the source is educated. It could be in one of those fancy coffeehouses or the bar in the new hotel, but women don’t go there to talk about Zhao. It has to be in a place where money is changing hands, someplace like a black-market store in a factory that is selling something people have become convinced they really need-like cosmetics. This particular factory makes a lot of one product, and I think you might want to buy it in bulk?”
“What’s that?”
“Vanishing cream. You’re going to need great quantities of it before this is all over.”
“I’m not going to disappear, Inspector. Don’t you understand yet? I’m here and I’m not leaving. What I stand for is not leaving. The past is being washed away. Whether you like it or not, I am the future.”
It was very quiet. There was no air left in the office. It had all been consumed in a firestorm of righteousness.
“In that case, I’m going back to my mountain. When the future makes it up the road, I’ll stand at attention and salute.”
“Your house burned down. Very symbolic, isn’t it?”
“What do you want, Kim? You keep trying to get me to say that everything I did for the past sixty-eight years was wrong, that everything was for nothing. Why do you need to hear it? Will it validate something, keep the planets in their orbits? Won’t you be sure of your own beliefs until those words leave my mouth? Go ahead; hold your breath. You’ll never hear me say it.”
“But that’s what you think, isn’t it? That’s why you resigned.”
“What I think, Major, is mine. You don’t get to use it as a brick in your shining castle.”
5
I couldn’t stay anymore; I was done trying to exist in the same city with Kim. I was done watching the jockeying and maneuvering and people being murdered for no reason other than because someone needed to stand on their bodies to see over the next hill. I couldn’t stay, but I had nowhere to go. Nothing was far enough away. My cabin on the mountain was ashes; the hills of Chagang were in turmoil; the Amnok and the Tumen would soon run with blood. Even Lake Chon, high above everything, would weep.
I could leave completely. There was nothing holding me here. I looked out the window from my hotel room. This wasn’t my city anymore. Pretty soon, it wouldn’t even be my country. I had two shirts, three counting the one I was wearing. I still had the passport Kim had given me and some money left over from the trip. Not much, but it would be enough to get me to an embassy in Beijing. Richie’s people, maybe. I’d ring the bell, they’d let me in, and that would be that.
That was the choice. That was my real choice. I watched the light sparkle off the waters of the Taedong. How many times had I crossed that river? “It’s my choice,” I said, and went to the mirror. Kim had insisted the issue was a loss of nerve, that people looked in a mirror and suddenly couldn’t see anything familiar. I looked. “Well,” I said, “you just made your choice. You’re staying.”
That felt fine. I was in the middle of the most complex, tangled mess I’d ever been in, and it was fine. I was staying, there was work to do, and if it was the last thing I ever did, I’d get it done. I opened the bureau drawer and found a piece of chestnut. Stubborn wood-maybe. Touchy and ill-tempered-maybe. But it was beautiful, lustrous, hard, calm in the storm. I put it in my pocket, sat down on the bed, and began to review everything I knew.
This was a complicated moment in time, and so the relationships among people were more complicated than usual, or maybe it was just that they carried more weight. My normal practice would have been to make a chart, a web showing who was connected to whom, and how. Kim, Pang, Zhao-separate, disparate, contending; joined, cooperating, unified. It could be one or another, or it could be all of them. That’s what worried me most. It could be all of them, which would mean any move I made might be wrong. What had Li told me? These days you had to be right every time.
Even Kang might not be who I thought he was anymore. Kang, most of all, was a cipher, fitting everywhere and nowhere. He’d set up a meeting with someone who led me right back to him. He had me driven around the city with a beautiful woman who had been in Macau to do what? I turned out the light and lay down. Draw a chart, I thought.
6
When the phone woke me up the next morning, I had a better idea. Forget the chart. Focus on the murder in Macau. That’s where the lines were converging. Kim had sent me there; Zhao had tried to warn me away; Kang had pulled me out; the woman with the golden thread had been there right when the murder took place. The one person who seemed to know something about what had really happened was Luis. But Luis wasn’t going to give any more ground, not that I blamed him. To me, at least, he was pretending that he knew who the murderer was. I didn’t think he actually knew, and from a couple of things he’d said, he seemed perfectly aware that the conclusions-and the confession-were running well ahead of the evidence.
It was an open-and-shut case of a petulant young man murdering a beautiful and expensive whore. Only it wasn’t. At this point, it was still only open. As of right now, maybe no one other than the murderer and whoever paid him knew what had really happened. Why did I think someone had paid the murderer? Luis had put the motto over the gate: “This is Macau.”
I listed everything Luis and I had discussed. When you looked at them on a list, the facts as Luis recounted them were very convincing. That is to say, each fact was convincing. The problem was, they didn’t fit. I wouldn’t say there were holes. They were more like joints on a piece of badly made furniture. They weren’t tight. That’s why tables wobbled.
The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. “What?”
“Ah, good morning, Inspector. Can you hear me?” The connection wasn’t bad; it was just that there were too many people listening in at the same time.
