“I warned you, Zhao, after what you did to my house.”
“So you did. Why don’t we take care of that later? Just stay in your car, both hands on the steering wheel, and pay attention. Right now, we have something else to discuss.”
“Like what?”
“Sonnets from the Portuguese.” He indicated the traffic cop should move farther away. “I have a note for you from Luis.”
“You?”
“Luis and I have a long history, Inspector. I can’t get rid of him, he can’t get rid of me, and so we agreed to coexist. Nothing formal. It was only going to be temporary, but that was more than twenty years ago.” Zhao handed me a folded piece of paper. “It was hard for him to write, but he wanted to make sure you got this.”
I took the paper and put it beside me on the seat.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“What happened to him, Zhao? Same thing you did to Li?”
“No, I told you. Luis and I have an understanding. In fact, we found we became extremely useful to one another after a while. He is the last person on earth I would want to harm.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t try to sound sensitive. It would make a cat laugh.”
Zhao looked at me, then at the apartments again, and then at the ground. “Read the note, Inspector. Then get rid of it. If Luis wants to set up another meeting, he’ll let you know. Lulu will call in an emergency. Meanwhile, drive carefully.” The door slammed; the black car backed up at high speed. Barely slowing, it spun around and disappeared down the road. As I turned the key in the ignition, the traffic cop appeared again. He was counting a small wad of bills and listening to the earpiece of his radio.
“The bastard never pays what he says he’ll pay, Inspector. Can’t we arrest someone like that?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Well, think about it while driving. I just got a report that another car is headed in this direction, fast. You can turn into a dirt alley past that finished apartment building, go out the back way, and get on a road that will take you toward the river. Get moving.”
“You’re a funny guy.” I put the car in reverse.
He shrugged. “I’ll sell you to the highest bidder if I have to.”
The worst of it was, I believed him.
2
The note Zhao handed me consisted of only one word: “Fotos.” I read it several times when I got back to my hotel room. It might not really be from Luis, but something told me it was: intuition, I don’t know what to call it. After a while, you decide you can’t question everything all the time. I held the note up to the light, steamed it with steam from the shower, rubbed it with urine to make sure there wasn’t something else on it. Nothing. I turned out the lights in the bathroom, filled the sink with water and soaked the paper before tearing it into tiny pieces, rolled them into a ball, soaked it again, then tore it into more pieces before swallowing half of them and flushing the other half down the toilet. It was a lot of work for one word, but I didn’t have anything else to do, other than wonder what Luis meant.
Even though I had decided the note was from Luis, I went over again in my mind whether it was worth trusting Zhao. Intuition is good, but checking the doors and windows one more time never hurts. Obviously, it was crazy to trust Zhao. You might as well trust a python with your pet rabbit. But I wondered anyway. So what if he knew Lulu? I answered my own question: If he knew Lulu, he knew Luis. I was back to intuition.
So, where was Luis? The story line was simple. He wanted to see me with some information, but he didn’t make it to Pyongyang. Somehow, he got a message to Zhao, and Zhao got the message to me. No, that wasn’t the story line; this was: Luis had discovered that the open-and-shut case was more complicated. “Fotos.” Photographs could make things very complicated. People saw what they thought they saw, not what was there. Worse, photographs could be doctored. Videotapes could be altered. Anything digital could be made to appear the opposite of what it was. An entire section in SSD did that full-time. Maybe I should go see someone in SSD. Someone thin, maybe.
3
“What makes you think I work for SSD? If I worked for SSD, would I work for Kim? Answer me that. Anyway, you and me have a score to settle. You disappeared, and Kim kicked my ass all the way down the hall. Something happened to that transmitter on your car. I knew you’d screw with it. You screwed with it, didn’t you?”
“Me? Do I look like a mechanic?”
“Don’t disappear again; I’m warning you, O. Stay close. If I spit, I want it to land on your shirt.”
“Yeah, make your life easy. You really are from SSD, aren’t you?”
The thin man grinned, the first time I’d seen him do that. “It’s all about survival in these troubled times,” he said. “And my money is on survival. Angles, everyone is playing the angles.”
“No, not everyone. Some people are playing for keeps.”
Early in the morning, before the mist lifted, we stood on the bank of the river, beneath a row of willow trees. One or two trailed their branches into the water, but the rest stood back. Willows look loose and sleepy; they aren’t. “Don’t let them fool you for a second.” My grandfather would point to the willows when we went to the river to fish. “They’re wide-awake and a step ahead,” he’d say. “Nothing much gets past them.”
The thin man picked up a rock and threw it into the water. It disappeared without a sound. “What about you, Inspector? What angles are you playing?” When he had anything to do with stone, he tended not to stare. Rock beats fog, I thought, that sort of thing.
“None. I’m done with playing angles.”
“That’s what you say. I hear different. I hear you’re in the middle of it.”
“Really? In the middle? Then I guess that’s where you are, too. Right in the bull’s- eye.”
“What does that mean?” The thin man looked both ways, up and down the riverbank.
“You heard about Major Kim’s deputy, I suppose.”
“Maybe.” He gave me a Baltic stare that would bring the city of Riga to its knees.
“His name was Sim. He was a captain. Friend of yours?”
The stare deepened. Latvia fell; Lithuania was next. I avoided meeting his eyes. “The captain was standing about as far from me as you are right now.”
That did it. The stare dissipated. The thin man slid a few steps away. “So what? He was playing both sides.”
“So, you knew him. And you know what he was doing. It sounds like angles to me.”
“You want something, right? I can always tell.”
“Of course, that’s why I’m so sure you’re in SSD. It’s hard to fool your type. How long have you been working there?”
“Long time, too long, I’m thinking. Listen, if you get the idea you’re leading me, forget it. I do interrogations, too, you know. I know how this works.”
“Sure, you do. Probably good at it, am I right?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I had my
