waiting for my reaction.
“You mean you haven’t disbanded the camps?” The question was so obvious it was beside the point.
“No, not yet.” Kim looked up at me in a curious way. “It’s way too soon for that, don’t you agree?”
It must have been a stray note in his voice that rang the bell. That’s what he wanted; he wanted me to say yes to something-anything. Get a “yes” into the conversation, a tiny crack in the door. One single spark of assent, that’s all it took to light the fire. I’d nearly forgotten. I’d grown stale, up on a mountaintop forgetting everything I had ever learned, while he had been in this office, sharpening his technique every day. He was better than I thought, and that meant he was dangerous.
Kim appeared relaxed, but I could sense he was wondering if he’d moved a half step too fast. That’s why he followed up when he should have stayed quiet, let the idea simmer. “The camps, as you can understand, are a very delicate problem. We did try to disband a couple, but things turned disruptive. There were too many people walking around with too many bad stories. We don’t want an increase in negative feeling toward the current regime, do we?” He smiled to himself, a sarcastic smile, a smile that said he could afford to be ironic on this question because he was sitting behind the polished desk and I was not. “Negative feeling-that wouldn’t be very helpful. Besides, we had experience running our own camps not so many years ago, you know. And we’ve also learned from what other people have done, as well, to get ourselves ready for this situation. Running prison camps isn’t easy; neither is getting rid of them. So much complaining! No one approves of them. No one wants to touch them. But, everybody gets their feet wet sooner or later. It’s unavoidable. The result is, there’s a large body of experience to draw from.”
“Which means?”
“Which means we’re improving the conditions a little at a time, retraining your guards, instituting new rules. But the camps themselves stay, for a while anyway. We figure what they need is leadership.” This time he gave himself an extra beat for pacing. “That’s you. You have the credentials, grandson of a Hero of the Republic and all that.”
“What about the Prison Bureau? Are you going to leave those psychopaths in place?”
“How comforting to know you never agreed with what was going on in those offices, Inspector! A little rearranging is in the works; I can tell you that much. A replacement here and there.”
“This is the little problem you wanted me to fix?”
He said nothing. I looked at my bowl of soup. My grandfather had made soup every morning, relentlessly, without fail. Every 6:00 A.M., there it was, even in the heat of summer-soup. I pushed the bowl away. That’s why I was here, nothing to do with prisons. They needed my grandfather; they needed his blessing from the grave. Good luck, I thought. They weren’t going to get it, not through me.
“I can give you the names of plenty of people who would take the job,” I said. “You need someone with the right temperament for that sort of thing. You don’t want me.”
“Aren’t you going to ask which camp?”
“I’m not interested.”
“Of course, just like you were uninterested for the past fifty years in what went on inside those fences?”
This sounded very much like a knife cutting through flesh. A little soon, I thought, for him to make the move to the negative. He should have waited another round; he still had a few problems with pacing. Maybe they didn’t spend much time on that sort of thing in the South. “Apparently, this is the moment for me to chop wood for you,” I said. “Or maybe it is the day to polish one of the tanks?”
Kim looked at my bowl. “You finished with the soup? I’ll have the dishes cleared.”
“Yes, let’s bring in the trained monkey again.” We were done with the feint about the camp job, and he’d let the subject of my grandfather drop. So why did they send the ferret to fetch me from the mountain? What was so important that they needed me here?
The dishes were whisked away, and the first rays of sunlight came through the window behind me, glinting off a group of framed maps on the opposite wall. Somehow, they missed Kim’s eyes. Maybe he repelled sunlight, I thought. We sat in silence. Kim pushed a button and the shades on the window went down halfway. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “But I find the morning sun this time of year a little hard to take.”
Simple, I thought. Have Michael and Paul move the fucking desk.
Kim opened a file and began to leaf through it. He stopped with the last page, which he held flat on the desktop so I could see that it was a list of names.
“Tell me, Inspector,” he said finally. “Do I have your cooperation, or don’t I?” He had his pencil poised over the paper.
“No.” I stood up. That wasn’t the real question, and I didn’t plan to wait another hour or two for him to get to the main point. He had something he wanted me to do, and I had no intention of doing it. If he thought he had some power over me, let him try. “If there will be nothing else, I have to get to the hotel to pack my things.”
He made a mark on the list, a small
4
Downstairs, I realized I didn’t know how to get back to my hotel from here, because I didn’t know where “here” was. The duty driver was nowhere around, and no one offered me a ride. When I stepped outside and started down the walkway, I felt a tank gun barrel following me. Small-caliber weapons aimed at my back might not register, but a tank barrel-always. At the end of the walkway, a jeep sat idling, with a man in an unfamiliar uniform and a red armband at the wheel. He indicated I should get in, drove at high speed through the tunnel, and pulled over as soon as we emerged.
“End of the line,” he said.
“How far are we from my hotel?”
“Beats me,” he said. “This is your city, not mine. And as far as I’m concerned you can have it.” He put the jeep in gear and roared back through the tunnel.
I tried to orient myself, but there were no landmarks on the horizon to help. Off to the right, several new, tall buildings were going up. In front of me, an entire block had been leveled. A brief walk around convinced me that I was in the far western part of the city, some distance from the Taedong River and a long way from any subway stop that could get me back to the central district, close to my hotel.
When west, walk east. Maybe I’d run across a traffic cop whom I could ask for directions. They didn’t know much, but they could usually figure out which direction the river was. As far as I could tell, no one was following me. It didn’t really matter; in fact, it might be better if there was. If I got too lost, my tail might get tired and give me a ride back to the hotel.
I wasn’t in a hurry, I didn’t need to be anyplace particular, and the weather was good for a stroll. If I had to be in Pyongyang, a bright October morning was as good a time as any. The trees along the streets were turning color, and in an hour or so smoke from roasting chestnuts and sweet potatoes would be drifting from the kiosks. Already the air was painted with faraway hope. It was an autumn sky remembered from years past, always sparkling in anticipation-in anticipation of what I never understood. My grandfather said autumn was a party, that most trees acted foolishly drunk in the fall and then wept at their loss all winter long. He didn’t like evergreens, but he said at least they were sober.
I walked about a kilometer, taking in the sunshine and becoming more and more uneasy. The problem was that no matter which way I turned, Li’s warnings from the other night trailed beside me. No, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but I was beginning to get a few ideas. Major Kim had extraordinary authority, he was from the South, and Pyongyang had the indefinable feel of a tiny planet beginning to wobble on its axis. There were more babies, more children being pushed in strollers, more couples walking together. The traffic ladies
