A Corpse in the Koryo (22 page)

"Kim is going to block it every way he can; the warrior woman at the morgue made that abundantly clear. But she let me go through the effects bags, on the sly. The Finn's trouser cuffs had pine needles in them. I took some. That gives us a place to begin."

"Good, you start with the pine trees on the west coast, I'll start on the east coast, and we'll work toward the center." Pak's head brushed the low-hanging willow branches as he stood up. "You done with this organic approach to crime solving? I've got paperwork up to here."

"They were short, fresh needles, not dry. Don't ask me what that means yet. I don't know. Also, I got two sets of keys from the Mercedes crash. Why two sets? The wallet of the driver had been stripped."

"So what's the connection? What does two sets of keys get us?"

"Do you want to know how those facts fit? Or how they work together?"

"I

don't give a damn."

"Maybe they get us some more information on the cars that are part of this."

"Maybe. But people lose keys. Maybe this driver needed to carry a spare. Don't give me a maybe." Pak gave one of the swings a push. "I'm supposed to go to the Minister and say, 'Maybe we've solved the case.

There were two sets of keys. I know because one of my best men stole them from the morgue.' Give me a fact, would you! And I don't want to hear about roots."

"We know the guy's a Finn."

"You keep saying that. What's this thing with you and Finns, anyway?"

Pak wasn't mad at me; he was just behind in figuring out what was going on. At this point in a case, when we still had only loose facts and not much else, he tended to get cross.

"One more thing." I owed it to Pak to tell him what I knew, or thought I knew. "I had to talk to a couple of farmers."

Pak took his sunglasses off, very slowly, the way he does when he senses bad news. "Meaning?"

"One of them was the uncle of the boy who was killed. Long story.

Anyway, they're on our side. I told them to call Li Min Sung if they wanted to check up on me." I smiled, without much conviction. "We need a little help from somewhere."

Pak nodded. "Good, now we have the floor lady at the Koryo and a couple of farmers working for us. And on the other side, Kim and his band of snakes." There was a pause. "You want to tell me about Chong?"

Before I could open my mouth, Pak held up his hand. "Never mind.

That's all I needed to know, and I don't want to know any more." He shook his finger at me. "I'll make a couple of phone calls. Can you please stay out of trouble for three or four hours until I get us some protection?

The Minister likes you, but then, he doesn't have to put up with your wood chips. If I can get through to him, he'll throw up a shield for us, though how much good it will do against Military Security is anybody's guess."

"I could start checking pine trees in the city, if you want." Pak didn't respond. I could see he was thinking of something else. "No, forget it. I'm not working with my former brother. I'm not going to talk to him. The only reason he's on the case is to lead us over a cliff, I'm warning you."

I dreamed of a plain, flat to the horizon, As if the mountains had crumbled To dust around us; we were mad With sorrow; and howled at the moon to Bring back the soft rolling hills That had echoed with our laughter.

-- Pvon Kil Sun (] 122-1 14!>) My brother had lost weight since I last saw him.

He didn't look all that good. His face was empty, flat. Even when we were little, in the midst of the war when other children were thin and frail, his cheeks had been full. Mine would be dull and chapped in winter; his cheeks turned ruddy with the cold. People would stare, wondering where he got the extra food. But he didn't eat extra, sometimes he even gave me a little of his portion. He just looked fuller than anyone else. When he got older, he got round, especially his face. At first, when he was moving up the ranks of the party and he was pleased with himself, it showed in his face: round and smooth, unmarked by all of those he rolled over. Later the roundness went to fat and then, with age, to a menacing, distorted mask.

He was sitting in the beer hall in the Koryo, at the same table where I'd met Kang, tightening his fingers around a bottle of beer. He was annoyed because I was late, and he knew I was late on purpose. It annoyed him that I did most things on purpose. Then he spotted my reflection in the front window. He took a sip of beer, and I saw his body tense up.

I walked over to the table and sat down without saying a word. We stared at each other. "This wasn't my idea," I said finally. "I told you five years ago I would never talk to you again, and as far as I am concerned, I'm not talking to you."

He rolled the beer bottle between his hands. I thought he might grab it by the neck and shove it into my face, but then he relaxed. "Let up, just for a minute, why don't you?" he said. "We turned out different, that's all. I believe in what I do. You don't believe in anything. I've been assigned to this case, over my objections. You don't like it. But we both have our orders."

"No, you're wrong. We're not working together on this. Not on anything, ever, not even in hell."

He glared at me, and I glared back. I deliberately took the piece of wood from my pocket and began working it over and over in the fingers of first one hand, then the other. Before I drove over, I'd retrieved the piece of persimmon from my out-box. I wanted to have it with me for our meeting. My brother wouldn't know the difference between persimmon wood and balsa wood. But it wasn't for him. It was for me.

My brother was one of those people who was annoyed when I held a piece of wood in my hand. He said it was a character fault, and he didn't have sympathy for people with faults. "If you're doing that to get on my nerves, forget it." He watched as I put the wood on the table, daring him to sweep it onto the floor.

"It's persimmon," I said. "Very hard. Your friends in the Central Committee wouldn't like it. They need something softer, more pliable."

Before my brother could say anything, the player piano started up: my piano roll with the Beatles on it. He grimaced. "Music like that is poison. Why do they play that garbage? No wonder the kids today are so unreliable."

"Unreliable." I let the word sit between us, oozing like a sore. "Go ahead, give me the rest of the speech, about the socialist renegades who are undermining the revolution, diluting the Leader's ideas, turning back the clock."

He went dead white. "You may be a blood relative"--he was hissing softly, like a lizard pinned by a rock--"but you'd better be careful. You can still be brought to justice, along with the rest of them."

"A purge? Are you going to launch a one-man purge?"

"Don't tempt fate. Things are happening. All this garbage will be swept away, along with everyone who has fostered it. I'm through protecting you." His narrow, mean eyes were never his best feature, and they got uglier when he started talking like this.

I leaned across the table, so I could stare into his ugly eyes. "Get your orders changed. I'm only going to warn you once. Get them changed, and get out of my way on this case."

"My brother, the police inspector, threatening me, a Central Committee department vice director?" He didn't budge or back away. "The Heartbeat of the Revolution won't be able to save you much longer, don't you know that, you fool?"

Pure rage must have flashed across my face almost before I felt it myself, because I saw him recoil. My voice was hoarse; I didn't recognize it when I spoke. "Get out of my sight. If you ever speak that way about Grandfather again, I will kill you." I sat back and took a deep breath. "With my bare hands, I'll rip your stinking heart from your chest."

He sipped his beer, a show of unconcern, but the glass was shaking when he put it down. Then he slid off the bench, stood up stiffly, and walked out the door. The doorman started to tip his hat but stepped back when he saw the expression on my brother's face. The waitress at the bar, trying to make herself invisible, stood still as a deer when it smells trouble. She had heard the whole thing. When she noticed I was watching her, she started wiping the bar with a rag, on the same spot, over and over again.

L

2

For the next two days, the weather turned back toward summer, hot, humid, the air stifling under a heavy gray sky. It felt like a typhoon was coming, but there were no warnings on the radio for the farmers to make preparations. I went into the office each morning, followed at a distance by people who didn't care if I noticed. Pak was gone most of the time, either in meetings at the Ministry or some other place, where he wouldn't say. He didn't do much more than mutter good morning, didn't call me into his office, didn't ask to review any files, just kept to himself. I could see he wasn't sleeping much, but then, neither was I.

During the day, I went over my notes on the case, called a few people who swore they knew nothing about the feud between Kang's department and Military Security, and made a few more sketches for the bookshelf I would never build. Pak still hadn't replaced our kettle, so the first morning I walked over to the Operations Building for a cup of hot water. They told me to get lost; their plumbing was out of order for the next week, and they didn't have any water at all. I was about to suggest we combine our resources, my water with their hot plate, when one of them said hot plates didn't grow on trees, and if I wanted to use theirs, why didn't I chip in? To hell with them, I thought, and retreated to my office. One afternoon I went over to the Koryo, just to look around the eighth floor and to check the back entrances. I didn't learn a thing.

Whenever I went out, it was obvious I was being watched. The pattern was the same. In the mornings, they let me see them. For the rest of the day, if I went out they hung back, played peek-a-boo, but never tried to disappear completely. At night when I opened the door to my apartment, I could tell it had been visited. Nothing rough, a few things moved a little to the side, just so I would know they'd been there. They weren't

looking for anything in particular, and I had a feeling they weren't about to plant anything.

On Saturday, the third day, Pak came into my office smiling.

"We're going to have a visitor. A senior detective from the Finnish National Police Agency. His name is Pikkusaari. Something like that." He waited for my reaction, because he figured I would say no. I didn't say anything. "Wonderful, you are finally struck dumb. I'll tell you, the decision caused a lot of screeching over the past forty-eight hours. The vice minister nearly had a stroke, complained it was a terrible insult to us. That was definitely the wrong thing to say." He smiled radiantly.

"The man has finally made a big mistake. I hope it's fatal. The leadership wants to show we have nothing to hide on this, so when the Finns made the usual request for information, someone at the top decided to invite them over." He went to my window and gazed into the empty street. "This Pikkusaari guy is supposed to get our fullest cooperation.

That means"--Pak turned around and pointed at the files on my desk--"you tell him about the pine needles and maybe about the new labels in the clothing, but not about the Mercedes or the dead boy."

"The boy? What does he have to do with the Koryo case? And who told the Finns the corpse was one of theirs, when we really don't know that for a fact, not yet, anyway? It's what Kang says, that's all. And what am I supposed to do if this Pikkusaari finds out about the boy and the Mercedes on his own? No one is going to want a foreigner to get a whiff of whatever is going on between Military Security and Kang's department.

In fact, if he does find out, someone around here will be accused of aiding the enemy, leaking sensitive information, something bloodcurdling."

"Don't worry, this Pikkusaari won't discover anything he's not supposed to. And you know why? Because you're going to be with him every minute he's here. He'll only be around for three days, arrives on the Tuesday flight and leaves next Saturday morning. Who knows, maybe he'll help positively identify the corpse. Maybe he'll even be able to supply something that will help us solve the case, miracle of miracles.

The main thing is, he gets as much cooperation as he needs." Pak cleared his throat with one of his nervous coughs. "I don't know who told the Finns it was one of theirs. Could be whoever it was that killed him."

He looked at me, and I looked up at the ceiling trim. "You ever wonder about that trim molding? I mean, what's under all that paint?"

"No, Inspector, I have not. You want a guess?"

"Sure."

"Whatever is under all that paint has nothing to do with Finland."

"Okay," I said, "this guy gets as much cooperation as he needs, and he only needs so much." Pak nodded. I dug around in my pocket for a decent scrap of paper and started making notes. "Does he have permission to leave Pyongyang?"

Pak was never hard to read, and I could see the expression on his face shift like the gears on a truck from worry to suspicion and finally settle on resignation. "Why? What are you already planning?"

"Nothing. But if he identifies the corpse, that may lead us out of the city, maybe even to where they have those pine trees."

"Which is where?"

"They're a type of mountain pine, short trees, grow out of rocks on the sides of hills."

"How do you know this?" I could see he was trying to imagine what rules I had broken while he was busy fending off the vice minister.

"I had to do something for the past two days. So I did some research."

"Inspector

O." Pak rarely called me by name; when he did it meant something like an official pronouncement was coming. "We're going to solve this case, despite the land mines being sown in our path. But we've got to do it in lockstep. And in this case, I choose the step, the pace, the direction. That means no bright ideas. No independent research. Can I be any clearer?"

"What about the boy?"

"Don't harass me about that boy, I'm warning you. We'll find out who did that, too. And eventually"--he stopped to let the word penetrate--"eventually, we may do some things your way. Hell, we'll probably end up doing most everything your way. Eventually. But for right now, you have to go along with me."