Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare (17 page)

“Would you like some dinner? Anything but the pork.”

She looked at the pictures on the menu and pointed at a bowl of noodles. “This is what I have mostly.” She shrugged, the way a young person does, not much weighing on their shoulders. “One more time won’t hurt.”

“You come here often?”

“Every night before I . . . go to work.”

“How about on your night off?”

She laughed so convincingly that it was almost impossible to find the pain. “What night off? I work seven days a week. It’s part of the contract.”

“You have a contract?”

“Oh course. That’s why I’m here. At the end of six months, I get paid and go home. Only five months to go. I’m never coming back.”

“There must be lots of Russian girls here.”

She shrugged, this time without the innocence. “I’m not pretty enough for you?”

“You? You’re the prettiest Russian girl I’ve ever seen. You’re also very young. Why don’t you go home?”

“Can’t. Told you. I have a contract.”

“You don’t have to abide by it. It’s not really legal.”

“You’re going to get me a passport, and a plane ticket, I suppose?”

“Forgive me for asking—how much do you have to make a night?”

“Ten thousand.”

“How much an hour?”

“A thousand.”

I did the math. “That’s awful. What kind of place is this?”

She pointed to a line of young, well-dressed Chinese women walking up and down the hallway next to the restaurant. “Ask them.”

“What is it, a fashion show?”

She laughed. “They are here to make love.”

“The whole group? We’re in a fancy hotel. Shouldn’t they at least be outside, on the street?”

“We walk the streets. The Chinese girls don’t have to. A guest
picks out the one he likes. Some of the guests are old, so that way they don’t have to use energy walking so far back to the room. It’s a service, I guess. Respect for the elderly.”

I looked at the girls. “What if I don’t like any of them?”

“Then you eat noodles with me.” She patted my hand. “Just get out of the Nam Lo, will you?”

At my hotel, there was a message waiting for me. The clerk handed it over without saying anything. He waited until I started up the stairs to my room.

“Russian guy nosing around. Wanted to know if you were still here.”

“And you said?”

“I yelled at him in Hakka.”

“You don’t speak Russian?”

“I don’t like Russians. Except the young ones.” He licked his lips.

I walked back to the desk. “You touch her, I’ll kill you. You understand that?”

He shrank back. “You can’t scare me. I’ve got friends.”

“I’ll bet you have scabies, too.”

When I got to my room, the door was slightly ajar. I walked calmly downstairs, took the clerk by the collar, and dragged him back upstairs. “See that?” I shoved his head into the door. “Do that again and I’ll burn this place down.”

“Hey!” He unleashed all twelve tones at me. “What was that about?”

“It’s called negative reinforcement, and there’s more where that came from.”

“I’ll call the cops, you touch me again.”

“Go ahead; call the cops. Call MSS for all I care.”

He rubbed the top of his head. “That’s the last time I rent to a Korean,” he said. “You people are crazy-mad, not to mention being murderers.”

“Wait a minute.” I grabbed his arm. “What do you know about murders?”

“Nothing.” He grinned at me. “Not a thing.”

After the clerk disappeared, I opened the message. All it said was: “Blue sky.” Everyone seemed to be getting short messages these days, but this one shook me. It shook me up so much I sat down in the ratty chair next to the television. “Blue sky” was a code a chief inspector of mine had used as an emergency signal. But he was dead, shot years ago by Military Security in an incident that wasn’t recorded anywhere and thus never happened. It couldn’t be from him. I had never heard of spirits using code.

There was only one other person who might have known the code, and he had disappeared. His name was Kang. He’d been a deputy director of what was then known as the Investigations Department—the party’s foreign intelligence arm. He had also been on the Military Security hit list, but they never got him. I may have been the last person to see him before he went into permanent hiding. A few people wanted to get in touch with him over the years, and they thought I knew how to do it. I didn’t, and I never wanted to find out. Now this. “Blue sky,” another way of saying: “Make contact at once.” But where? How? I pushed the door shut and lay down on the bed. Simple, I thought. If Kang wants to contact me, he knows where I am. Let him take the next step.

From downstairs, I could hear the clerk yelling into the phone. Ah, the lullaby of Canton, I thought to myself, and fell asleep.

Next morning, I went in search of parks, meeting places, alleys, drop sites, anything I might find handy if Kang turned up. It also helped me to wander around, let all the half facts that Luís had thrown at me sift through my subconscious. If anything remained by the end of the day, any nuggets that didn’t turn out to be pixie dust, I’d give them a second look. Meanwhile, I had a little pixie dust of my own to contend with. Major Kim had deliberately left out the most important part of the case—who was allegedly, or actually, involved. Normally, this didn’t mean much. Guilt was relative; innocence, fleeting. The crime might be more important than the individual, the accusation more significant than the facts. If we were told to find a reason to clear someone, that’s what we did. It wasn’t healthy to inquire into the whats and whyfors.

The case that Kim wanted fixed wasn’t fitting into a normal pattern, however. For starters, there was the passport. Not a lot of Koreans carried one from the Dominican Republic. Then there was the message to the nominal Senhor Penza—and the fact that it had been so conveniently overlooked until almost the last minute. Finally, Luís was holding out on me. I didn’t expect him to dump everything in my lap, but I had the feeling he didn’t want to say too much, not because I was from a foreign service but because he wasn’t sure of his own footing. It wasn’t a matter of personal trust. After all, he had shared Lulu with me almost from the start.

The old city had a lot of small, green parks mostly filled with ficus trees, pretty much as Luís had said. Most of the trees had short trunks. They branched off quickly, after only a meter or so. “Wood from a ficus is like a promise of love,” my grandfather would say when I was a boy and he saw me watching girls as they walked past our house. “It doesn’t take you very far.” He
had another warning—one he often used on holidays when the girls dressed up in bright
chima chogori
and strolled from one village to the next, eyes sparkling with fun. It was breathtaking, I thought, like a parade of flowers along our dusty road. “Go ahead; look,” he’d say, standing beside me, his hand on my shoulder. “Look. They’re like shiny leaves. Did you ever see a tree worth a damn that needed shiny leaves? Well, did you, boy?”

Near the post office, up a pleasant street called Travessa de S. Domingos, I came upon a square with a fountain in the middle and a large ficus spilling shade onto a bench. On two sides the square was enclosed by a low wall of blue and white tiles. It seemed like a good place to get out of the sun and even held some promise for a meeting with Kang, if things came to that. No one else was around, so I took the bench beneath the tree.

A few minutes later, Luís walked into the square. He threw a couple of coins into the fountain and sat down beside me. “You keep up a brutal pace in this heat,” he said. “You should slow down a little. Good thing you found this shade. I was about to drop.” He took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

“I thought we had finished our business.”

“So did I. But then a friend of mine asked me to find you.”

“A suite has opened up at the Venetian?”

“Better.” He stood up again and looked over the wall behind us at the street below. “Nobody here but us chickens. Or us people who eat chickens.” He studied his watch. “Lunchtime rolls around again, thank God, and not a moment too soon. In a short while, we’ll have visitors. Whenever I go out, MSS tags along at a respectable distance. They think I’m helping someone launder a lot of money. Me!” He laughed until the tears streamed down his face. “I can’t even wash my own shirts.” His shirt was white and crisp, except where drops of laughter glistened down the front. “Listen closely,” he said, once he pulled himself together. “Remember that fort we saw from the hotel room? The one on top of the hill? That’s where you must meet my friend.”

“I’m inclined not to trust anyone, especially people I’ve never met.”

“This is different. You’ll find out why soon enough.”

I didn’t even try to stop from appearing skeptical.

“I don’t want you to go into this in a state of disbelief, Inspector; it’s bad operational practice. That’s what our manual emphasized repeatedly. Yours did, too, I imagine. Tell me, what’s the matter?”

“Pretty exposed, that location, isn’t it?”

“So! You are a cautious man, Inspector. This caution is impressive. Perhaps where you live it is essential. Here in Macau, however, it can be fatal. The fort is a good choice; I’m sure of it. There’s only one way in. If you’re followed, it will be obvious.”

“Only one way in is fine. It’s the only one way out that worries me. Even if I’m not followed, what about people already in place?”

“You mean MSS? They pulled their surveillance a few years ago. It wasn’t worth their time, they said. Anyway, it’s a very steep climb up there. My people don’t cover it at all.” He shrugged when I didn’t reply. “All right, some security goes up a couple of times a month to make sure the fort is still there. They aren’t due again for another week, and they stick to a regular schedule. They’re afraid what they might find if they go to random visits.”

“We won’t bump into five other operations by five other organizations? The British have friends, the Americans, the French, maybe the Singaporeans. How can you be sure that no one else knows the place is wide open, that it isn’t being watched?”

“Who says it isn’t being watched?”

“Aha.”

“This will work. I know it will because we’ve never done it before, so there’s no pattern and absolutely no trail. They might catch on if we did it more than once, but we won’t. Think of it as a onetime pad.”

“Maybe some rough edges, though? The first time always has
rough edges, a few things someone forgets to consider, minor details—the sort that can get a person killed.”

“None, no minor details, simple as rain. Just listen. You go up to the fort at nine
A.M
. tomorrow. It’s still cool enough then so you won’t give yourself heatstroke climbing that hill. Take a bottle of water with you, to be safe. Look a little touristy; you know the drill.”

“The place will be deserted at that hour?”

“Deserted? Good God, no. There will be squads of old ladies using it for exercise, a couple of tape players blaring that music they need to stand on one leg and sweat. Sometimes they practice with fans; other times it’s with swords. Don’t walk too close or you could lose something. Your main interest is the front wall and the nineteen cannons that line it.”

“Nineteen.”

“Three main groups—five, nine, and five.”

“That’s nineteen.”

“Face the front of the fort. You will see that there are two bulwarks—left and right. This is very common fort architecture for the period.”

“I’ll take your word.”

“Each bulwark has five cannons. For the sake of convenience, we’ll number those in the left bulwark one through five.”

“One through five.”

“Good. Now, forget they’re there. You actually start counting with the sixth cannon. As you face the Grand Lisboa, and you can’t miss it because the damned thing blots out the rest of God’s creation, cannon number six will be the first one on your left along the wall. Use that as an anchor point in your mind; get yourself oriented.”

“Should I close my eyes to imagine this?”

“As you wish. But you don’t want to focus on the left side yet. You want to stroll over to the right bulwark to look for the go,
no-go signals. If any of them are missing—any of them—back off.”

“How many altogether?” My memory is normally good, but humidity does funny things with the circuits.

Luís looked up at the sky and counted silently. “Three.” He nodded to himself. “Three. The first and second are in the right bulwark, where you will find that two of the cannons face the front.”

I reached for my pen. “Can I write any of this down? Cannons to the left of them, cannons to the right of them. Maybe a diagram would help.”

“No notes. Just listen. The cannon on the extreme right has the symbol of a crown stamped into the top of the barrel, fairly near the touchhole. I’m supposed to tell you
not
to touch that hole. I wasn’t told why; I just pass it on. The next cannon over, to the left, has no crown on the barrel. Perhaps it did not get a royal blessing. Purchased in bulk, maybe. Instead of a crown, it has a diamond filled with a cross. Are you following?”