Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare (21 page)

“You ever notice that?” I dumped the endearments and knelt to run my hand across the grass.

“The palace? Looks like a cold place, too austere for me. I’d never want to get out of bed in December. Do you like to stay in bed in December, Inspector?”

“I meant the color of the grass. There is nothing in the world sadder than green, green grass on an autumn afternoon. Trees, crops in the field, animals—everything else alive knows this is
the season to prepare for the worst. But grass? Hoping against hope that the sunshine won’t ever go away. Or maybe too dumb to realize what is coming. It gives me chills just to look at it.”

“Why?”

“Too many memories of when I was the same way.”

The woman leaned down so that her face was even with mine, and very close. “Don’t bring up anything like that when you talk to Kang. Don’t talk about disappointment. Don’t rake over memories. He has a job to do, and he can’t lose focus now.”

She gave me her hand and pulled me up. The light was fading. The buildings’ shadows already buried the streets. “There’s a car up ahead fifty meters on the left, a brown Škoda. Here are the keys. Go ahead and get in. I’ll be behind you by about a minute.”

“I don’t think I should drive.”

“Nor do I, Inspector. I’ll take the wheel.”

And drive she did. From the sound of it, the engine of the car seemed to have been worked on recently. There was no way of knowing if the brakes had received equal attention, because she never used them. I was not sure where we were going, but then again, I had no idea where we had been. Wherever we were headed, it was in a great hurry. I tried to fix a location in case I needed to find the spot later, but at that time of night one sixteenth-century building looks like another. The last time I was in Prague, it had been in winter. Everything had looked different then, in the gloom. We pulled up in front of a narrow three-story building with an elaborate doorway.

“Out,” she said. “Ring the bell and if that doesn’t work, knock politely. I’ve got errands to run. I’ll see you later, old friend.”

“Good thing we’re not related.”

“You react badly to pastry.” She gunned the motor. “It’s bad for your heart.”

The front door opened before the sound of the bell had
faded. Richie stared out at me. He looked like hell. No, he looked like death itself.

“You better see a doctor, Richie.”

“What for? He’s not going to do anything for me.” He coughed, doubled over. “Let’s get inside; this cold air is bad for me. Everything is bad for me.”

“Where’s Kang?” I stepped in. The place was very tidy, very sterile. No one lived here.

“Kang’s not here yet. You’re early. Greta drives fast, doesn’t she?”

“Greta? Is that her name?”

“Wonderful woman, well trained, very thoughtful. She looks after Kang like she was his daughter.” He made a face. “Don’t do that again, mentioning what happened.”

“I know; I’ve been warned. He needs to stay focused.”

“Who told you that? Greta?”

“What’s her real name?̶

“Let’s sit down. I can breathe better when I’m sitting.”

We sat—Richie on the sofa, me in a pale yellow chair.

“Better? You want a glass of whiskey?” So, all right, no one was going to tell me Greta’s real name. I’d ask Li. He clearly knew who she was. He’d stopped breathing when he saw her in the parking lot at the hotel in Pyongyang.

“We don’t keep any alcohol here,” Richie’s eyes searched all the corners of the room. “In the other place, I can drink as much as I want. This is the safe house, and Kang doesn’t like liquor in a safe house. He thinks of a safe house as a chapel or something.”

“What was that charade in the square about?”

“Flushing quail.”

“And?”

“Working with Greta is a pleasure.” He coughed until his face turned red. “There isn’t a quail around who can remember to keep his head down when she gets moving. You must have done a good job getting here from Macau. There’s no one new in town that we can spot on your tail.”

“You realize I can’t hang around here for long. I’ll have to get back to Pyongyang by the day after tomorrow at the latest. They’re already wondering where I am.”

A key turned in the front door, and Kang walked in carrying a paper bag. “I brought you something, Richie.” He pulled out a bottle of whiskey. “Go easy on it, though. I don’t want you passed out on the couch.” He took off his hat and coat and threw them on the sofa. “Greetings, Inspector. Your day was good?”

“Nothing that I’d put in a logbook.”

Kulov came out from the kitchen with a couple of glasses. He gave one to Richie and one to me. “Inspector.” He nodded.

“You’re not drinking?” I asked Kang.

Richie was pouring himself a triple. Kang grimaced. “I drink, but only sometimes, and this isn’t one of them. Maybe you should wait until we’re done, as well.”

“Maybe I should.” I put my glass on the floor. “Do we talk here, or is there someplace else where the walls don’t have ears?”

“We’re in Prague, Inspector, land of the free. And we’re in a perfectly secure place, courtesy of Richie and friends. There is nothing here, not a single thing, that Richie hasn’t personally approved; besides which, he controls all the on switches. Let’s have our nice talk. How did you get along with Greta?”

“We’re old acquaintances, it turns out.”

“You saw her one time across a parking lot.”

“Well informed, as always. You have your own spy satellite or what?” Apparently, not a satellite that could see into noodle shops.

“She saw you, too. That’s how I knew you were in Pyongyang, home from the hill.”

“Greta . . . that’s what we’re going to call her?”

“That’s right.”

“Greta keeps you up to date on what’s going on, I presume.”

“It isn’t like the old days, Inspector. Getting information in and out of Pyongyang is not nearly as difficult as it used to be.
For example, I know that Major Kim sent you to Macau on a mission he fully expected you to botch.”

“And did I?”

“Not yet.”

“Excellent, there’s still time. You know Kim, I take it.”

“Our paths have crossed.”

“What’s he doing in Pyongyang?”

“What he’s doing there, what he says he’s doing there, and what he thinks he’s doing there are separate things.”

“He thinks he is bossing people around. Me, for instance.”

“That’s good. Let him keep thinking that.”

“He reminds me in some ways of that Military Security goon that wanted to kill you. His name was Kim, too.”

“I know what his name was, Inspector.” Kang paused. “He got promoted, I heard.”

I waited to see if he would say anything else, but he let the subject drop.

Richie coughed. “I have a good idea: Let’s rake over the most hellish coals we can find.” He waved his glass at me. “Let’s remember every failure, every bit of pain, everything that should have worked but didn’t. Let not a single sleeping dog lie. Kick the shit out of every fucking one of them, how about that? Should I go first?” He finished the whiskey and banged the glass on the table. “God, what a bunch of stupid bastards I chose to die around.”

Nobody said anything for a couple of minutes. Kulov made some noise in the kitchen, rattling silverware and slamming drawers.

Finally, someone had to break the silence. “SSD is up to something, by the way,” I said.

Kang smiled at me. “Fine, let them think that nothing stands in their path.”

“Kim says he’s there to oversee a transition.”

“Did you ask him from what to what?”

“We didn’t get that far. We were only on the first date.”

“German sugarplums are dancing in their heads, Inspector. They think we’re going to fall on our knees and beg forgiveness for seventy years of sin, like the East Germans did.”

“Are we?”

“You can if you want to. I have other ideas.”

“So do the Chinese, apparently.”

“They’ve got Kim worried?” There was a note of urgency in the question, not much, but I was weighing every word Kang used, measuring every inflection. The question could have been nothing, but the way Kang asked it told me this was something he really wanted to know. And that told me his network had a hole in it.

I thought over what Kim had said about the Chinese. The file I’d read in the windowless room had contained page after page about Chinese penetration into the country—agents operating under different sorts of cover, defectors being fed back in, agents of influence in the security services. “Worried,” I said, “but not as much as I would have guessed. He thinks he has a handle on it.”

“A handle. He has a handle on China. Mull that over a little. I’ll be interested in what you conclude. And while you’re at it, think about what you were doing in Macau.”

“I was putting the Macau police off the scent. It’s not like they had a click-clack case.”

“Click-clack.” Kang closed his eyes and thought a moment. “You were talking to Luís.”

“You know Luís?”

“Luís helped me with a complicated funding issue some years ago.”

“That’s funny. He told me he couldn’t even launder his shirts.”

Kang smiled. “Luís knows more about laundering money than anyone alive or dead.”

“Tell me that he’s not MSS.”

“Luís? Not anymore. He and discipline don’t do well together. They transferred him to the police, where they figured he couldn’t do any harm.”

“When I was in Pyongyang, someone told me I don’t even know what I don’t know.”

“True.”

“So, maybe you can tell me. What don’t I know?”

Kang moved his coat and sat down on the sofa. “I’ll give you the thirty-second version. Two years ago, the center, aging and unwell, decided that by 2017 he wanted to achieve a first-stage unity between the two Koreas.” Kang turned around and yelled toward the kitchen, “Kulov, bring another glass and some of your awful vodka.”

Kulov appeared with both items. He put them on the table in front of Kang, nodded to me, and returned to the kitchen.

Kang poured a few drops for himself and a few for me. “Kulov keeps the vodka hidden, but I know where it is. Cheers, Inspector.”

“We were on first-stage unity.”

“That year, as you realize, will mark the one hundred and fifth birthday of his father and his own seventy-fifth. The plan he has in mind, I’m told, is for a loose union, largely cosmetic but enough for him to be able to claim success in reuniting the ‘bloodlines’ of the Korean people, if not the territory. Last year, the two sides agreed to limited and quiet exchanges of personnel, mostly in the field of internal security.”

“Funny place to start,” I said.

“It would be in the real world, but, as we know, this isn’t the real world. So everyone decided that they wanted eyes and ears right where they could do the most good. Pyongyang sent two incompetents to Seoul from a department that shall remain nameless.”

“And whom did Seoul send?”

“Its very best, also incompetent but well shod and well fed.
This exchange led to a lot of stumbling around for the better part of twelve months. Then, in March this year, the center had another health setback, serious enough to be confined to bed but not so serious that it was impossible to issue orders. I have my suspicions about who else is in the room when those orders are signed, but we can talk about that later. In any case, the South saw this development as a chance to replace its people with someone who actually knew what he was doing, could consolidate the gains, and could even—with a little luck—go on to the next phase. In pursuit of these goals, the incompetents were recalled and Major Kim was sent to Pyongyang in April. He had orders to proceed in all haste to achieve the consolidation part of the plan, and then to move with caution to explore the possibilities for next steps.”

“How do you know so much about the South’s plans?”

“Not everyone in the North is incompetent, Inspector. And Kim is not as smart as he thinks.”

“All very interesting, but none of it explains why Kim sent me to Macau.”

“It does, in a way. Consider: Officials in Pyongyang with even one eye open are already concerned about the drift of events, and have been searching for a rallying point, some sort of brake on what they recognize as dangerous, almost fatal South Korean inroads. To buy time, they have been urging that one of the center’s sons be put in place immediately to ensure stability for an eventual transition. They gather all of this under the cloak of carrying out plans for the first stage of ‘national unity.’ That isn’t what they want, of course, but it’s the best they can hope for until they figure out something better.”

Click. Clack. “Up the chimney and out to sea,” I said. I nudged my glass nearer the bottle in hopes that Kang would pour more—a lot more. There was a leadership transition in the works? And a successor in play? And I figured in this exactly how? I had been brought down from the mountain to be thrown
headfirst into a pit of snakes, big snakes, the sort of snakes that swallow full-grown deer and then burp with pleasure. My hands weren’t shaking, but if Kang didn’t fill the glass right away, I might not be able to hold it still. “That was the chosen son whose tracks I was sent to erase in Macau, wasn’t it? Chopping up a prostitute can’t be very good for a smooth transition.” I remembered the room and its view. Nonchalance fled as reality knocked at the door. “No wonder Kim wanted me to get the evidence pointing somewhere else.”