At least we’re not going for Japanese names again. My grandfather hated his. He never told me what it was.”
“Do you know who I am?” The major sat at arm’s length from the table, making clear to anyone watching that we were not trading secrets. “Why don’t we start there? The rest of the conversation will flow much more easily.”
An easily flowing conversation was the last thing I wanted with this man. “The girl in the red dress. Unusual accent.”
The major showed me his teeth. “Very good, Inspector. Most people don’t hear the accent. They’re too captivated by the neckline.”
“The accent, I can’t quite place it. It’s been nearly trained out of her, but something is still there, a faint echo. Sort of fetching, in its own way.”
“Anything else?”
“Smarmy group in the hotel; a few of them are still shy a coat or two of hospitality paint.”
“Something wrong with the hotel? The room not up to your expectations?” He leaned forward to show me that he cared.
“The room is fine. Everything is fine. Our meeting earlier this evening in that dark cave was fine. You’ve made a hit with those three house dogs, by the way. Maybe you should throw them a bone every so often, though.”
The austere smile materialized from around a potted palm, and drinks were placed in front of us.
“Thank you, Michael,” the major said. “We’ll order in a few minutes.”
The white coat disappeared into the jungle.
“Do you always circle around a conversation like this?” The major lifted his glass. “A toast to you, Inspector. Welcome home.”
“Major what? Major who? Major from where? Is there a new special group operating outside the normal channels?” I clinked glasses. “Normal channels. Normal. You know what’s normal? Dawn, the sun coming up over the next mountain. That’s perfectly normal. But this, I don’t get the feeling this,” I waved my glass in his direction, “is normal.”
“Off we go, circling again.”
“OK, no more circles. I’ll lunge. Where are you from?” I took a swallow of my drink.
“Seoul.”
I took another swallow. “Do they have menus here, or do we make it up? Incidentally,” I pointed over his shoulder, “whoever installed the wire in that ficus behind you didn’t know what he was doing. It dangles, like a water snake over a pond.” The drink had skipped my stomach and gone to my brain. “I wouldn’t use a wire if I were you. If you use something like that snake in the ficus, it has to be transcribed. Transcribers always fill in what they can’t hear, and they always get it wrong. Hire a note taker. I’ll bet that woman in the red dress is a terrific note taker.”
Major Kim shook his head. “Don’t worry. We don’t guess. We don’t have to. Our equipment is very, very, very good.”
Interesting, I thought to myself, he was from the South, and his girlfriend with the soft accent and the neckline was, too. That wasn’t so odd, was it? South Koreans had been coming up north for years. So there were two of them here, so what? My inner voice tried to keep a normal tone, nothing alarmist, but it wasn’t very convincing. Li’s words of warning to me hung like a wreath from the branches of the ficus: You don’t know what you think you know.
“You’re back in Pyongyang because we need your help, Inspector.” Kim swirled the liquor in his glass. “There is a little problem, and we think you might be able to fix it.”
4
Whenever I hear “we” in connection with the word “problem,” especially “little problem,” I start to worry. First my nerves go on alert; then I start to worry.
“Sorry,” I said, “I’m not in the problem-fixing business anymore. I’m in no business. I follow no professional path. I’m unencumbered, untroubled, and uninterested. To tell you the truth-and you are partial to the truth; I sensed that right away-if the price of dinner is listening to your problem, I can drink a beer in my hotel room. I hope that doesn’t seem rude.” I started to push back my chair. “Anyway, I don’t think I’m authorized to talk to you.” I wasn’t authorized to talk to anyone as far as I was concerned. That’s why I had gone up on the mountain.
“Please, sit, Inspector. This wasn’t my first choice for an assignment, believe me. I was due for Paris, but this came up, unexpectedly, you might say.” His eyes wandered the room without much interest. “Destiny calls; personnel decisions trump everything. So I found myself here six months ago. That’s a long time to be sitting in meetings with people who hate your guts, don’t you think?”
“Only six months? Six months is nothing. If it’s so bad, why don’t they send you home? Declare you persona non grata.”
The major laughed, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant. It was more like the sound of a dead limb coming off a tree on a hillside nearby. For the first time, I noticed he had a classic Korean face, the sharp features that opened the gateway to a thousand different expressions. My grandfather had warned me that people with these faces were real Koreans-the purest of the pure, he called them-and that you couldn’t trust them because you could never figure out what was going through their minds. “The women are the worst,” he’d say. “A woman with that face will be a princess one minute and a bird of prey the next. I don’t like Chinese, but a little Chinese blood mixed in isn’t altogether bad. Your grandmother had Chinese blood. Remember that, boy,” and I’d nod, wondering if any of the girls in the next village were pure-blooded and, if they were, would they ever take the road in front of our house so I could watch as they passed by.
Kim’s voice battered into my consciousness. “Kick me out? How could they? I countersign all of their orders, and much as I would be tempted, I couldn’t chop off on that one.” He laughed; another limb crashed to the ground.
“You countersign all of the orders?” I lifted my glass and tilted it toward the major to show him how empty it was.
“Another drink?”
“Tell Michael to bring the whole bottle.”
He pushed the button and Michael materialized.
“Shall I bring the bottle, sir?”
“As always, you read my mind, Michael.”
“Michael, the mind reader,” I said as the white coat vanished. “He also runs your very good recording machines and picks locks, am I right?”
“No, Inspector, the lock man is the busboy. You had a question about my countersigning orders?”
I did but decided to skip it for the moment. That was a detail. I didn’t need to know details right now. I needed to know the guts of what this was, this man, this restaurant, the woman with the soft accent, the hotel room stocked with liquor. “Actually, my question was more fundamental. Who are you? After that, I might have a second question.”
“Which is?”
“Let’s do them in order. Who are you?”
“Put it this way: I’m your best friend starting today. Whatever happens, you can rest assured that I’m going to help you. Things may come unglued, but you don’t have to worry, because I am your insurance policy.”
“Very comforting. Or it would be but for one thing. You still haven’t told me who you are. I don’t mean your name. I don’t mean your title. I mean, who
