conversation, appearing to concentrate on turning the meat.
“A Peruvian sailor named Jose Aracadio Medin,” she said, “disappears from an Albanian ship. Then a Warsaw Pact officer turns up on a train unexpectedly, traveling north out of Nampo, but for some reason he doesn’t speak Russian. Now that same Romanian officer wins a Taekwondo tournament.” With her beautiful black eyes she peered up at me. “Who are you?”
Again, I didn’t answer. I knew if she hadn’t exposed me already, she wouldn’t until she could figure out whether or not powerful people in North Korea were behind me. If she exposed me too early, she took the risk of also exposing the incompetence of her clients, the commander of the Port of Nampo and the security apparatus at the Pyongyang Train Station. And incompetence in North Korea can prove fatal. Mistakes are not tolerated by the Great Leader and are dealt with harshly. Therefore, bad news is suppressed; information flows downhill but never uphill. Senior Captain Rhee’s task was to follow me, capture me if possible, question me, and keep everything quiet until she was sure of who, and what, she was dealing with.
“Hero Kang claims you are a hero of the invasion of Prague,” she said, staring intently into my eyes, searching for any sign of understanding. “But the Romanians didn’t participate in that invasion.” She leaned even closer to me. I felt her fresh breath mingling with mine. “You are a liar,” she said, pausing for a while to let the insult sink in. When I didn’t react, she said, “In this country, everyone lies. It is how we live. But you are after something. What is it?”
Her hand reached out and touched mine. The fingers were soft, long, clinging.
“We are the same, you and I,” she said. “You can trust me. Maybe we can do business.”
The music ended with a rousing crescendo. The gorgeous young dancing women took a bow and started to back out of the room. Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook leaned away, pulling her hand back quickly. She looked around. I couldn’t help admiring her lovely profile. Her figure was full, and even under the covering of her silk tunic and high- waisted skirt, it was clear that Captain Rhee Mi-sook was all woman.
“I will talk to you later,” she said. “Stay away from the women here. Anyone you touch will be cast off and sent to work in the rice fields.”
Still, I didn’t answer. She couldn’t be sure I spoke English. She stood and gave me one last exasperated look. “Do you understand me?” she asked. But it was time for her and all the women to leave. She sighed in frustration and disappeared in a whoosh of swirling silk.
The lights lowered. Somewhere behind us, a movie projector clattered to life. A beam of light found a white screen and then we were feted with sports highlights of recent international events. In each clip, North Koreans competed and were victorious. Not one loss was reported. As the film flickered, the young women started to filter back into the room. However, they were no longer wearing their military uniforms. Now they were wearing skirts and blouses of either pure white or flowery patterned silk. Some of them went straight to a particular table and a particular young man. Other women held back, unsure of where to go, until one of the young men called to her. Then they bowed and scurried forward eagerly, taking a seat next to the man and almost immediately snuggling up next to him. The commissar had disappeared. Soon no one was paying attention to the sporting events on the screen and I realized that there was a lot of heavy breathing going on. Skirts were lifted, blouses opened.
I’d been in brothels before. Plenty of them. Even the worst of them offered a little privacy. But here, none of the young athletes were grabbing some girl by the hand and sneaking off into a back room. They all stayed where they were. It didn’t seem natural. But this was North Korea. The bosses wanted to reward these young champions, but they didn’t want to offer any of these young people privacy, where they might be able to form an even more intimate relationship, where they might talk about their hopes and dreams, where they might-by some fantastic stretch of the imagination-begin to plot against the Great Leader. I felt very uncomfortable.
And then a young woman appeared by my side. The flickering light of the newsreel fell on a round face and a mouth set in a determined line. She was still wearing a military uniform.
“Even in the harshest of winters,” she whispered in Korean, “the mugunghwa blooms.”
The purple mugunghwa is the ancient national flower of Korea. The sturdy blossom springs to life throughout the length and breadth of the Korean peninsula. In recent times, the North Korean regime designated the mongnan, a type of magnolia, the new national flower in its place-a move the South Koreans never agreed with.
She waited for my answer.
“Especially, I’m told, on the highest mountains,” I whispered back.
She picked up a tray of cold meat and slipped a key in my hand. Without looking back, she carried the tray away through the side door of the hall. Holding it low so no one else could see it, I studied the key. It was large, old-fashioned, apparently made of brass. A number had been etched along its side: 444.
I stared at the key, twisting it in the dim light to make sure I was reading it right. There it was, three Arabic numerals: 444. I was surprised because I’d never before seen such a combination in South Korea. South Korean hotels don’t have a fourth floor, or even a room number four, much less a room numbered four forty-four.
Still, there it was. I clutched the key in my hand. Everyone seemed preoccupied. I slipped into the shadows by the wall and edged through the rustling clothes and gasping breaths until I’d made my way out into the empty hallway. In the moonlit courtyard, I crouched for a moment behind a tall shrub with sturdy branches.
I waited. No one was following. No sign of Captain Rhee Mi-sook. I crept away toward buildings that I hoped would be lodging for the cadres, still wondering about the curious numbers. Still wondering if I’d live through this night.
Four is the number of death.
In Chinese, the character for the number four is pronounced like the “su” in “surreal.” In Korean, the same character is pronounced “sa.” And in both cases the character for death is pronounced in exactly the same way. That’s why hotels in the Far East skip the fourth floor. Some hotels, especially those catering to Westerners, also manage to do without a thirteenth floor, thereby covering superstitions developed on both ends of the Eurasian landmass.
So I wondered at a room numbered 444. Were the North Koreans actively trying to eliminate old superstitions? If so, that was laudable. One of the few laudable things I’d seen this government do since I’d arrived.
The woman who’d handed me the key wasn’t after me for my body. In fact, a North Korean woman with any brains would avoid me like a cholera epidemic. Relationships with foreigners are nothing but trouble. Any sign of anything other than complete and utter loyalty to the Kim clan, any allegiance to any foreign power, could result in not only the offending person but also their entire family being sent to the North Korean version of the gulag. Conditions there were so bad that for most people a prison sentence was the equivalent of a death sentence.
So the woman who’d handed me this key had been very brave. It was my job now to find her without exposing her to more danger.
When I was sure no one was watching, I emerged from the shadow of the bush and strolled toward a tile- roofed building on the far side of a gurgling pond. It would be best to avoid people, to stick to the shadows, but not to seem that I was hiding. In case I was caught, I could play the role of the dumb foreigner-a role that every North Korean had been propagandized to accept-and claim that I was lost.
There were no lights on in the building. It was single-story, about twenty yards long. Above the doorway at the end, I searched for some sort of numbering system. Then I saw it, carved into an oblong wooden placard attached to the doorframe: 73. Building number 73. So this key probably belonged to building number 44. I gazed around me. Nothing moved, just dark buildings all about the same size as this one, moonlight glimmering off their tiled roofs. A lot of real estate, I thought, and a lot of well-maintained buildings not being put to good use. The Communist cadres could afford waste like this, while the working people, whom they were supposedly sworn to protect, lived in poorly heated hovels with one family crammed on top of another.
This country truly was paradise, if you had the right connections.
Would they miss me back at the main hall? Probably not for a while. At least not until the newsreels were over and the heavy breathing stopped.
Sticking to the shadows, I continued my search.
Just as I approached the building that I thought was number 44, I heard the whistle. It was low, so low that I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t only the gentle evening breeze wafting through the rose bushes. So low that I thought I’d imagined the sound and that it was no more than the quivering of my nervous system.
I froze, hidden behind a low rock wall.
There it was again, another low whistle.
