Inspector O 02 - Hidden Moon (13 page)

One thing that had me more than a little worried was SSD’s involvement. I didn’t care if it smudged the Ministry’s image; that could be repaired. Something about Han’s approach suggested that somewhere at the core of this case were security concerns beyond what a simple bank robbery—even the first one on record—would warrant. As long as he was assigned to the case, I was supposed to check everything with Han first. Protocol gave SSD pride of place in a joint investigation. It was the main reason we made a point of leaving unopened any orders that had the word “joint” in the subject line. Apart from that, I was unsure about Han himself. He was smoother than he ought to be. His awkwardness was off; it was almost too practiced. It could be that he was from a new SSD breed trained to hide a level of competence that no one suspected they had. A new little warning flag, waving from its own rampart, didn’t think so. I had to admit, the SSD officers I knew didn’t spend a lot of time investigating. To them, everything was just bending thumbs. Han didn’t fit that mold. Anyone who could recognize a piece of oak was capable of learning; most of the people I’d met in SSD weren’t.

I got a little sleep and arrived at the office somewhat past the start of my shift. Min was gone, probably to a staff meeting at the Ministry. I had a few things left to do at my desk, some old paperwork to initial and send on, questions from an inspector in a sector at the other end of town to answer, a name trace file that had been on my chair for weeks. It was midmorning before I got out of the office and onto the street. Min was still stuck in his meeting, which was fine. My mobile phone was off, stuffed in the back of my desk drawer. When he complained later he couldn’t find me, I could say that I needed to go out and think, that the area around the station was nice this time of year, lots of people walking around, most of them in a good mood
because of the weather. What I didn’t have to say was that the reason I went over there was to find a Russian with a suitcase full of silk stockings.

Right away, there was a detour I hadn’t expected, because the sidewalks on the main route were torn up and new paving stones were being put down. There hadn’t been anything wrong with the old ones from what I could tell, but the city was being “beautified,” and that meant new sidewalks, new paint on the front of the buildings, even new windows for some of them. The work gangs didn’t mind being outside in this weather; only a few of them were actually working, anyway. The rest of them sat on the new curbs and watched. The detour took me onto a street with two or three new restaurants and a barber. The restaurants were still closed with the curtains shut, but the barber was in good spirits and waved me in. He thought he had found a “supplier” for new scissors and maybe even a hair dryer, at what he said was a “good price.” That meant it wasn’t legal, but I figured there were a few things higher on my list than stolen scissors.

The barber said the detour had increased his business and he hoped they would never get the new sidewalk finished. By the time he was through talking and started to cut my hair, one of the restaurants was open. It was too beautiful a day to eat near the station, so I hung around for another thirty minutes while they rearranged the tables to fit in more customers.

When I finally arrived at the station, it was early afternoon. The station and its neighborhood aren’t really in my area, and I had to make sure that the inspector with formal responsibility—an older man named Hyon, who had a keen sense for knowing when anyone crossed into his sector—didn’t get suspicious. If he did, he might file a complaint, and that could mean an exchange of angry memos followed by a meeting or two presided over by the lady with the shrill voice. The street patrols don’t give a damn, sometimes they don’t even know, when out-of-sector inspectors tiptoe through. But inspectors in charge keep careful track. They have to; otherwise, something funny might happen when they aren’t looking, and they could get blamed.
Most people can be very territorial when their backsides are at stake. As it turned out, Hyon had been unable to come up with a good excuse why he shouldn’t “volunteer” for farm work and so had been sent out to the countryside for a week. His fill-in didn’t care what I did, as long as I was quiet about it.

“I thought you might come by, Inspector.” The man sat on the ground leaning against a gingko tree twice the size of the ones in the courtyard outside Min’s window. A jacket folded up behind his head served as a pillow. He had taken off his glasses, and he looked up at me with a squint. “It took you longer than I expected.” He hadn’t shaved for several days.

“Is that so? Who might have told you that I was interested?”

“I have friends, you have friends; sometimes friends talk to friends. Sometimes they are even the same person.” He searched around on the ground for his glasses. A little anxious, it seemed to me; the sort of person who feels off balance if he can’t physically see what he’s confronting. The sort of person who doesn’t like to be interrogated in a dark room.

“We could speak Russian, if you’d be more comfortable.”

“No, Russian is the one language that doesn’t make me comfortable. Korean is fine. Not especially melodic to my ears. But good enough; just ignore my grammar.”

“You mind if I sit?”

“Inspector, please, it’s your country, for thousands of years, all yours. Maybe you had the same problem for a while with the Mongols that we did, a slight break in the chain of national custody. But that was temporary, wasn’t it, thanks God.” He finally found his glasses. He studied me closely, taking in the details that the squint had missed, and as he did, he became less anxious.

“So, you don’t mind if I sit?”

He smiled and indicated a place beside him. “Please, do me the honor.”

I didn’t move, but stayed where I was, looking down at him. “You seem a little pale. Are you feeling alright?”

“Me? Kind of you to express concern. Not many people do. I’m fine. Sometimes the food here doesn’t agree with me. This is not a criticism, just a reality. I have what you might call a nervous stomach. And I wouldn’t mind a bath. Sit, please, sit. Sit, Inspector, my neck is cramping, having to look up at you.”

I sat. “Your hotel doesn’t have a bath?”

“I’m not in a hotel, I can’t afford it. I’m staying with friends.”

“Friends.” I paused. “Your friends made sure you registered, as they should?”

“When in Rome, Inspector.”

“I’ve only made it as far south as Switzerland.” Which was true, in a manner of speaking. “Italy intrigues me, though.”

“Perhaps you should read Goethe. He was intrigued, as well.”

“Thank you, there’s probably a copy in the office.” To his credit, he did not laugh out loud. I got down to business. “Where are your papers, if I might ask? The hotel would normally keep them, but in this case . . . ”

“Ah! Fortunately, I happen to have them with me.”

He extracted his passport from a pocket in the jacket and handed it to me. His name was Yakob Logonov, born in Odessa in 1942. The three most recent stamps in his passport were forged, I could see that immediately. For six months, soon after I got out of the military, I had worked in the office that forges stamps for Ministry travelers. It was not the sort of work I would choose for a career. Too meticulous, too fine grained for me. Very fussy, like those miniature trees people sometimes grow in tiny pots. I had transferred to another office—foreign liaison—as soon as there was an opening.

I glanced at his passport again, casually. These were good forgeries, too good to be Russian, unless he paid more money for them than his clothes suggested he was worth. Then again, it was possible he was
here working for the Russian service. In that case, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the stamps were fake. But, to keep us guessing, sometimes they wanted us to notice the forgeries, so we wouldn’t think they were theirs. It was a complicated game. Foreign liaison was simpler, although dealing with foreigners could be painful.

“Now that I know who you are, or rather, who your passport says you are, let me introduce myself. Inspector O, Ministry of People’s Security—but it seems you already knew this, from a mutual friend.” He nodded solemnly. I continued. “About three weeks ago, you entered, is that right?” I took one last look, then handed back the passport; he put it in a different pocket. That was a little unusual. People tend to carry things like passports in the same pocket, all the time. When they get into the passport line, they sometimes move their documents to a more convenient place, but after they are past the immigration booth, they move them back again. You can stand at the airport and watch the line for hours; the only people who don’t follow that pattern are people who are going to forget where they put things. You see them off to one side, frantically going through their belongings. So, I could assume he had been waiting for me, just like he said, with his passport ready to offer. And now he figured he had passed through the line and could put it back in the accustomed place.

Alright, he wanted to make sure I saw his entry stamps. I had seen them. Whether he wanted me to react I wasn’t sure. In any case, my main interest at the moment was in stockings, not passport forgeries. If the stamps had been sloppy and obvious, I would have been forced to say something. But good work like that had a purpose, and there wouldn’t be any way to find out what it was if we took him into custody and packed him off back across the border. For sure, if I got bogged down in forged stamps, we would never get around to stockings.

“Not quite three weeks ago, that’s when I entered.” He spoke Korean well enough, though heavily accented. “It was still dusty then, millions of small grains of China swirling in the sky, blotting out the sun, reminding everyone that the central kingdom is a land not to be
ignored. Russian soil tends to stay put, even that which is not permanently frozen.”

“Train?”

“Yes, I came through Dandong, via Beijing.”

“Big city. Beijing.”

“Too big. It has no idea where it is going or what it is becoming. Too many upscale stores, barely enough room anymore for vendors like me.”

“You came here to sell stockings?”

“Yes.”

“What made you decide to do that?”

“Let me put it in nontechnical terms, Inspector. Korean legs have reached the point where they need stockings. There is pent-up demand. I recognized it as soon as I arrived here for the first time a couple of years ago. But I didn’t just act blindly. No, I studied the situation. I looked at a lot of legs, believe me, and there was no other conclusion to be drawn. Young women wearing baggy trousers, a great waste. So now I come twice a year, sell out a suitcase or two of stockings, then go home and reinvest the profits. Capitalism, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, is wonderful on this small scale.”

“Where’s the suitcase with the goods?” I glanced around the tree, though I already knew there wasn’t a suitcase nearby.

“All sold, completely gone, even the ones with runs up the sides. For good measure, I sell the suitcases, too, when I’m done. That way, I don’t take a lot of time with customs officials when I get home.”

“You’re a good salesman.”

“I do my best.”

“Regular customers?”

“Some.”

“Women?”

He smiled. “Mostly.”

“Your grammar is impeccable, but we seem to have hit a low point in your vocabulary. Or have you become unnaturally guarded in your answers?”

“What a coincidence, Inspector, I was going to ask the same thing about your questions. They’re somewhat curt. That makes it difficult for me to figure out what you want to know.”

“When I want you to figure out what I want to know, I’ll give you written notice. Meantime, what I want right now is enlightenment. If you had any merchandise left and I had a pressing need to buy some stockings, what would I look for?”

“Depends on why you want them. Pressing needs come in all shapes and sizes.”

I lay back and looked at the very top of the tree. “You ever notice, Logonov, my friend, that trees know when to stop growing? A tree line tends to be pretty even. None wants to stand above the others.”

“Maybe the really tall ones get chopped down, so the others try to keep unobtrusive.”

“Yes, I suppose you have a point. That would be something a good salesman would notice.”

“What’s that, Inspector?”

“Behavioral norms, the flow of the ordinary.”

He was silent and took off his glasses again. For the moment, he had decided I wasn’t a threat. He didn’t have to watch me so closely. Slowly, he smiled to himself, and when he spoke, it was with a lighter tone. “A good salesman has a feel for many things, Inspector. We can sense desire, obviously. When someone has an unfulfilled need, it speaks to us.”

“Like stockings.”

“Like many things. Please understand, I’m not talking about some minor cultural bauble, Inspector. Material needs are not simply extraneous. Most people don’t realize that acquisitiveness is not a cultural trait; it is not imposed by society. It cannot be squashed by government fiat, you realize what I’m saying? Not a criticism, please understand. Purchasing, buying, bartering, trading—this satisfies a need, somehow, that has been carried over from before we were human.”

“Very philosophical, very deep; not to mention very convenient,
for a salesman, to have identified such a universal basic human need. It must be a comfort, professionally, I mean.”