A Corpse in the Koryo (2 page)

"You're interested in Kang?"

"Cut the crap."

"He's dead."

Not a lot of noise, suddenly, except for a bus in the distance and a bicycle bell ringing nearby. "Really?" He was speaking carefully. "We hadn't heard. We heard he was here, in Prague."

"Not likely. Last time I saw Kang, he was slumped against a tree, staring into space, a little hole right there." I walked over and put my finger between those red eyebrows.

He looked up, daring me to leave my finger where it was. I shook my head, but I didn't move away. Finally, he leaned back slightly. "Why should we believe you?"

"Maybe you shouldn't. Maybe you're not really interested." I took a step backward, toward the door. "Wasting your time, maybe."

"My name is Molloy. You can call me Rich
ie.
" He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. "Smoke?"

"No. Thanks." I backed the rest of the way to the door and stood there, looking bored.

"A drink, then. Vodka?"

"No."

"Christ, a bloody nun." He pointed to a round table in the middle of the room, with a tin coffeepot on it. "Alright, pour yourself a cup. Maybe it will make this less of a battle. Sort of friendly, like."

"Tell me what you want, or I'm out the door. If this isn't going to lead anywhere productive, I've got better things to do."

"Like what?"

"Like finding something to eat, then going to bed."

"Why are you people always so difficult?"

"Difficult? I think I've heard that before, somewhere. You'll accept my deep apologies, won't you? Must be a lack of breeding. Or civilization, maybe. Yes, probably that, lack of civilization on our part. You are the civilized ones. Obviously, we must learn from you."

He moved his head from side to side, as if he had fixed the problem with his neck but now his shoulders were sore. "Go ahead, leave if you want. Makes no difference to me."

"Will you be going out the front or the back after I'm gone? The front of the building is being watched. We always thought it was yours but weren't sure. Now we are."

His head stopped moving. I could tell he didn't know I had been watching the building for the past few days. Simple surveillance, straight from the Ministry's training manual. I'd seen the technicians come in to get ready for the meeting. I decided to push him a little. "We have a list of every license plate of every car you and your friends have in this city. And when you change plates, which you do from time to time, we know the numbers of the new plates before you receive them."

He was sweating, not much, but the light from the lamp picked it up. I didn't have any list, but it was worth the bluff.

"Piss off." He kept his voice low.

"Tell me, are there any mountains in Ireland?"

This relaxed him some because he suddenly realized what I was doing.

Getting ready to dance. The decision was his: He could tell me to leave, or he could join in. "Hills, yes, finer than girls on a sunny day." Good, he was in. Then he seemed to reconsider. He looked thoughtful, rubbed his chin. I thought I'd lost him. "Though I couldn't say if any of our hills look like an Irish woman lying on her side. An odd thought, that." He laughed gently, barely a laugh, more at a memory than at anything I'd said, but that was alright. I knew we were past the first barrier.

"Ever been to Finland?"

The big face cracked a smile, but the green eyes were steady, eyes like I'd seen once on a cat. "So, we're back to Kang. A long way around to get to the subject at hand, but here we are.You really did know him?"

"I did. I didn't kill him, though I should have. Anyway, he's dead."

"And you? What are you doing in Prague?"

"Nothing. I just happened to get off the train. There was a message for me at the hotel from my friend. I gave him a call. He talked to me, I talked to him, and your transcribers wrote it all down. How did you know I'd be in town, by the way? My orders are for Budapest."

"Not my concern, figuring out how we know what we know, or why we do what we do. I don't guess about such things. Big man like me, I just show up where they tell me to. I take notes, listen real close when people talk. You never know what they mean until you hear what they don't say.

Simple guy, that's what people call me.You, you're more complicated."

His cell phone rang. He answered it, softly. "Right. Right." He turned off the phone and gave me a long look. "Right." He walked past me to the window, moved the curtains aside, and peered outside. "You're wrong, but you knew that." He turned to me. "The front of this place isn't covered."

"Does this mean you throw me back into the Vltava?"

"Yourfriends would yank you out and put a bullet in your eye."

"Don't worry yourself No one knows I'm here, though they may be curious by now where I went."

"No one is trolling you?"

"No, nothing so crude or well planned."

"Excuse me, but I'm not convinced. You're out of your country, rolling around Eastern Europe like a billiard ball, and no one knows where you are? Sorry. I'm not in the market for a story like that. And you know what? If I don't believe you, we don't have a meeting. You go your way, I go mine. Good-bye, see you in a ditch."

"You want the truth? They don't care who I meet."

"You don't get it, do you?" He closed the briefcase that was beside him on the floor. "I'm only going to give you one more chance. Then I'm gone."

I didn't say anything.

"See, I'm a trusting fellow, but I'm not stupid. Let's say I hand in my notes. First question I'm going to get is, 'What was the SOB doing in Prague if his orders called for him to be in Budapest?' And I'm going to say, 'Wow, good question. It didn't occur to me to ask. I was thinking of hills and girls on their sides.'" He clicked the lock on the briefcase. "Like I said, see you in a ditch."

"Go to hell. I'm only a police inspector. Sometimes they need someone unmarked. They hand me my passport, tell me to go somewhere, see someone, do something. Nothing complicated. I'm like background noise. No one looks twice at me." I glanced at the red eyebrows. "Anyway, as far as they're concerned, I don't know anything that will do anyone like you any good.

Even if you chop off my fingers one at a time, I've got nothing to tell."

"We're not into fingers." He settled back on the couch. "Not this week."

"You asked about Kang. Still interested?"

He gestured toward the table. "Sit down, if you want. You got something to say, I'm listening. I doubt if it's worth a lamb's tit. We'll have to see. If it makes any sense, I'll take out my notebook. Otherwise"--the red eyebrows jumped on his forehead, then settled back into place--"I have a date."

"The man's dead. Why would I make anything up?"

He clicked his pen twice. A nervous habit. He wasn't trained very well, I thought, and his Russian was getting worse the more we talked. I walked over to the table and sat down. "You ready?"

"Yeah." He turned on a tiny silver tape recorder and put it on the low table in front of him. The table was dark wood, maybe black walnut, covered by a white cloth with blue and red birds embroidered around the edge.

They all had sharp, bright yellow beaks. The cloth was new; you could still see where it had been folded, "first a nice narrative, a bedtime story. Clean and simple. I don't need anything too Oriental." All of a sudden, his Russian was perfect.

3

I didn't knock. Just opened the door, tossed the camera on Pak's desk, and pulled up the only empty chair left in the room. My trousers hadn't dried from the wet grass; the camera hadn't worked; nothing had been accomplished. I was plenty irritated, and I wanted Pak to know it. I could tell he was annoyed as well. He ignored me. He kept writing on his blackboard, making a clicking sound with the chalk as he lifted it and then attacked the blackboard again. He battered the blackboard pretty good, pretending to be deep in concentration before saying, "Please come in, Inspector." There were two other men in the room.

Neither one spoke. Finally, Pak turned to me. "Inspector O, you know everyone here." His face took on the slightest hint of warning. "Or maybe you don't. This is Captain Kim, from joint headquarters."

I had never run across Kim, but I didn't have to look twice to know we weren't meant to be friends. He had short hair, unevenly cropped, a thick neck, and a dark face with an expression that might have been sullen except that his eyes were quick and sharp, like little paring knives. His summer uniform was good quality, better than his haircut, and someone had spent a long time shining his boots. He gave me a dismissive glance, then turned to frown at the camera on Pak's desk. No one had to tell me, it was pretty clear he was connected with the surveillance.

"No pictures," I said. "Battery's dead. Anyway, there were no plates on the car." I flashed Kim a grin meant to suggest we were about to share something that would amuse him, but his little eyes stayed metallic, and I could sense he only laughed when he was the one making the joke. Off to the side, I could see Pak bracing himself. "You may not believe this, but the bastard honked the horn as he drove by."

The man next to Kim sat back and folded his arms. "What?"

Before I could reply, Pak took my elbow and walked me to the door.

"You'll be wanting some tea, Inspector."

"No, he needs to answer my question." I recognized the tone of voice. It was like the tip of a whip being dragged slowly back along the floor, just before it cracked through the air. A certain type of party official used that tone. Not mean, but quick and always decisive.

"Actually," I said, "I would like some tea." Pak shut his eyes. He did that when he was embarrassed. Whether he was willing himself into an incorporeal state or hoping I might disappear if he could no longer see me was never clear. The man in the chair shifted his weight and stretched his legs, seemingly unhurried and at ease, but watching me the whole time. He put his fingers together, tapered fingers with well-manicured nails. Not someone who had recently been out helping the farmers. I knew what was coming.

"I see, Inspector, that you are not wearing your portrait of either of our great Leaders." The man paused for a fraction of a second. Captain Kim's polished right boot tapped the floor lightly, just once, like the flick of a cat's tail. Everyone pretended not to notice. "Can I assume there is some reason you choose not to wear one, unlike your fellow citizens in the capital?"

"We don't wear pins in the field," I kept my tone matter-of-fact.

Pak's breathing had become dangerously slow. One of his standard warnings to me, repeated endlessly, was, "Never call the small picture of the Leader a pin." But every time I put the little round badge on, it pricked my finger. Same place, every time. As far as I was concerned it was a nuisance, a sharp point in my life I didn't need, a pin. I shrugged.

"I haven't been home in three days. It's in my top drawer, on the left.

Actually, the top drawer is my only drawer." I could not resist what came next. "But you probably already know that."

"Inspector, this is Deputy Director Kang from the Investigations Department." Pak was back with us. His eyelids flew open, and he put a smile on his face, though his lips didn't take part. "We rarely get a Central Committee visitor to our small office. This is an honor."

Kang smiled in return, not to be friendly but to show me his teeth.

He had on civilian clothes. His trousers were a little too long and wrinkled; the white shirt, open necked, looked like it was worn for a week at a time. His belt and his shoes were from overseas. Carefully chosen, not too stylish. The shoes were nicely scuffed, almost in deliberate counterpoint to Kim's boots. "I asked a question," he said evenly. "I'm still waiting for an answer."

"What I said was, the bastard honked."

Captain Kim broke in. "Who did? You mean the driver?"

This caught my attention. I had assumed the two of them were cooperating, until Kim interrupted. Even in a session as informal as this, interrupting threw off the rhythm. Questions weren't the key to an interrogation; it was the rhythm. Lose that, you lose everything. Then you have to start all over again. Good teams wouldn't do that. Even bad teams observed basic rules.

"How do I know who honked?" I relaxed. These two, whatever they were doing in Pak's office, were pulling against each other. "The windows were smoked, and the car was moving so fast it was a blur."

"So how could you be sure it had no plates?" Kim picked up the camera. Unlike Kang's, his hands were calloused and hard. Not from helping farmers but from breaking bricks and boards. Maybe bones, though I wasn't going to ask. Kim's voice emerged from inside a dark cave, where even simple questions were mauled and came out nasty.

"How do we know you didn't fail to take the picture on purpose? How do we even know you really tried?"

"Look." My voice got an edge to it sometimes when it shouldn't, and this was one of those times. I put both hands on Pak's desk and leaned toward the two strangers, moving slowly, deliberately. It was either insubordinate or rude, I didn't care which. Kim's face darkened even more. He wanted a sign of deference, maybe a touch of fear, something to show I acknowledged his status, but I wasn't in the mood to be deferential.

Kang was almost the opposite: He didn't seem to care. He didn't change expression; his eyes followed me like a bear watching a rabbit. Not interested, not uninterested, just watching.

"I don't know about you, but I got up early to go sit on a hill in the dark, and for what? The battery in that camera is dead, like most batteries they issue us." I paused. "The car, a big black Mercedes, was waxed and shining, no mud on the sides, new tires, no identification plates. None, not front, not back. It was coming from the south, incidentally, though no one has bothered to ask." I paused again. Every time I paused, Kim got angrier. The metal in his eyes took on a dull sheen like the sky before a bad storm. "And the driver honked. A real nasty blast, more like a sneer. Why, in the middle of nowhere, on an empty road at dawn, would he do that? Lots of coincidences for just one morning, don't you think?" I glanced at Kang. His face was still blank.