Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare (30 page)

That did it. The stare dissipated. The thin man slid a few steps away. “So what? He was playing both sides.”

“So, you knew him. And you know what he was doing. It sounds like angles to me.”

“You want something, right? I can always tell.”

“Of course, that’s why I’m so sure you’re in SSD. It’s hard to fool your type. How long have you been working there?”

“Long time, too long, I’m thinking. Listen, if you get the idea you’re leading me, forget it. I do interrogations, too, you know. I know how this works.”

“Sure, you do. Probably good at it, am I right?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I had my entrée to SSD, and if I had to pay him one more compliment I was going to throw up. “It’s good for the circulation to get out in the fresh air like this, but I’ve got to hurry over to see Major Kim. I’ll pull out first, but I’ll drive so you can catch up. Spit whenever you feel like it.”

“Thanks for nothing.” He stripped a few leaves off one of the branches and put them in his mouth. “Sort of medicinal, you know? Good for headaches, that’s what they say.” He spit out the leaves. “Tastes like crap. Don’t forget, keep close.”

“Don’t forget.” I said it softly enough to make him slow down to catch my voice as he walked to his car. “Don’t forget who’s in the bull’s-eye.”

I kept my speed down. The thin man trailed by about thirty meters, which meant every time I went through an intersection I had to make sure he didn’t get stuck on the other side. I pulled over once or twice to let him catch up and then decided to hell with it. He knew where I was going.

There was a line at the tunnel. The guard was looking closely at everyone’s ID. Normally, the numbers on the plates would be enough, but not today. When I pulled up, the guard walked around the car. “You ought to get this thing cleaned, don’t you think?” He wrote down the license number. “Or maybe you should junk it. Pull around the side, behind one of the tanks, will you? We don’t want to drag down the tone of today’s meeting.”

“What meeting?”

The guard stepped back onto his platform. “Well, well, guess who wasn’t invited. Move it; there’s a line of cars behind you.”

When I started down the hallway to Kim’s office, a burly figure stepped in front of me. “Wait in the waiting room. That’s what it’s for.”

“I need to talk to Major Kim.”

“Good for you.” He gave me a little push. “In the waiting room. We’ll call you. Take a number or something.”

Two men, well dressed but with worried faces, hurried past us and disappeared into Kim’s office. “What if I told you I was with them?”

“Last time.” He drew himself up to his full height. “The waiting room. Shut the door behind you; it’ll be nice and cozy.”

An hour later, the door opened and the burly man pointed a finger at me. “The major wants you in his office.”

“The other meeting is over?”

“Let’s not have a long conversation, all right? Major Kim says you’re to get into his office. Do it.”

I stood up and stretched. “How come everyone is giving orders all of a sudden? It’s like all the imperatives are falling out of the bag at one time. You know, if you use them all up, there won’t be any more to go around.”

The burly man scowled. “You want me to tell you where I’m about to put an imperative?”

“Not necessary.” I walked into the hall. “Leave it to my imagination.”

The furniture in Kim’s office had been shifted around so that there was room for ten or fifteen people to sit in a semicircle. They all looked at me when I walked in. I didn’t recognize any of them. From the look of their shoes, it was a good bet that they were Kim’s people.

“Good morning, Inspector.” Kim was standing near the window at the back of the room. He pointed to the chair next to his desk, the brown one, and indicated I should sit down. “This is Inspector O, gentlemen. I’ve been telling you about him and about how busy he is. Fortunately, he can join us for a few minutes, is that right, Inspector?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m at your disposal.”

“That’s good, because we have some questions, and then we’ll need your thoughts on a few ideas we’ve been discussing.”

This struck me as a bad idea. I had nothing to say to this group. And they couldn’t possibly have anything in their heads that I wanted to hear.

“These gentlemen are all aware of the case we’ve tried to resolve. You want to tell them your progress to date?”

A little clarity edged into my brain. This wasn’t a group of Kim’s subordinates. These were senior people, and they were nervous. Kim hadn’t accomplished what he was supposed to accomplish, and they wanted to know why. Maybe this was connected with why Luís wanted to see me, to warn me.

“Progress has been slow because of the need for coordination between police forces with somewhat different procedures.” A
few heads nodded, but mostly I got blank stares, blank bordering on hostile. “Procedural delays are the price of doing business globally, as you know.” Apparently, they did not know and, judging from their expressions, they did not care. What they wanted was some signs of progress because—it didn’t take a genius to figure out—the case Major Kim told me to fix was very important to them. Very important. It was so important that this group had traveled all the way to Pyongyang to find out what was holding things up. If these were Kim’s superiors, they must be under a lot of pressure. Good, now we understood where we all stood.

“Inspector?” A man in a blue suit stood up. He had a self-satisfied air about him, which instantly put my teeth on edge. “That is your title, isn’t it? What do you inspect?” The others smiled. “Because if you can’t do this job for us, we’ll get someone who can. We’re not going to carry you people on our backs, you know.”

I looked at Kim, but he cut in before I could say anything. “This is a complicated situation, Inspector.” His eyes pleaded with me not to articulate what he knew I was about to articulate. “Perhaps you could mention something about your trip to Macau and your discussions there. That would give the group some context.”

The man in the blue suit was still standing. “I’ll be succinct,” I said, “because I know you all must be very busy.” That seemed sufficient abasement on my part, because the man sat down and the others shifted happily in their chairs. “The Macau trip went very well. The authorities were completely cooperative. All records and files were opened for my inspection. We believe that the work can be wrapped up in a week or so, at most. We did encounter some procedural delays, which I noted to you, but those are behind us. I’m only waiting for a final report and for the inter-governmental agreement to be signed in order to wrap things up.”

There was the deadly silence that comes when self-important people are at a sudden loss for words. Finally, a man sitting on
the edge of his chair spoke up. “Did you just say something about an inter-governmental agreement?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course, you knew that my government has no agreement covering the transfer between police authorities of information pertaining to political, economic, or capital crimes. Simply a formality, naturally.”

A wave of relief made its way around the semicircle.

“Once the papers are submitted for the agreement,” I waved airily, “it only takes around eight months, a year at most, for the legal documents to be drawn up, signed, and ratified.”

A deep silence ensued, very deep, deep enough to swallow a lot of careers.

“Well,” I said. “I hope that answers all your questions.” A couple of men looked up numbly, as if trying to remember how to swim.

“I should skin you alive for what you did this morning.” Kim slammed his door so hard a map fell off the wall. “What treaty? You never mentioned a treaty to me.”

“That’s because I didn’t know about it before. We have treaties with everyone, all sorts of treaties. The Foreign Ministry has a bureau that does nothing but treaties. When Macau became part of China, we had to redo all of our liaison agreements. You’re going to have to deal with them, replace them, renegotiate them, or something. You can’t just trash them.”

“Says who?”

“They’re legal. They’re on paper. That makes them sacred, isn’t that right?”

“I have news for you, Inspector. When your government goes out of business, everything it ever signed goes in the toilet.”

“You wish. What happens is, everyone goes to court and
things are tied in knots for years. Meanwhile, though, my government is still in business, and its treaties remain in force. That’s the law, comrade.”

“Since when are you an international lawyer?”

“I’m not, and neither, obviously, are you. The fact is we don’t have any exchange agreement with the Macau police on this particular issue. I checked.”

“We keep circling around on this, O. How is that? I don’t need any documents from Macau. I need you to fix a problem.”

“ ‘A little problem’ is what you said. Only it isn’t little. If it were little, Mr. Blue Suit wouldn’t have been up here. If it were a little problem, we might be able to wiggle between the words. But it’s big, a very big problem, and big problems fall under the heading of Treaties, Agreements, Memoranda of Understanding, and So Forth.”

“Can you or can you not fix this problem? The man in the blue suit wasn’t kidding. He’ll get someone else to do the job, and he won’t want people hanging around who are leftovers with a lot of information they shouldn’t have.”

“Tough guy.”

“Not tough, thorough. He doesn’t leave loose ends. He wasn’t happy with what he heard today. He made that clear after you left.” Kim picked up the map and put it back on the wall. “Funny how territory can be moved around, yet it always goes back to where it belongs. See what I mean?”

“It’s crooked,” I said. “Tilted to the right.”

“You haven’t told me, Inspector. I’ve been waiting patiently. But I’m not waiting anymore. Are you with me or against me? Your performance this morning was ambiguous. It raises questions. There can’t be questions about loyalty. It’s not possible.”

Loyalty? Did the man actually think I was loyal to him? Or might ever be? “Is that how things are in your world, Major? Do you imagine that people here are going to line up, once you’ve raised your flag and sounded the trumpets to announce a new
dynasty has swept aside the old? What are you going to do, have everyone sign oaths of allegiance? You don’t have enough pens.”

“They’ll come along, as long as there aren’t troublemakers stirring things up. The point is, it will be even smoother if they have someone at the top whom they can cheer and weep for, someone on the reviewing stand, waving as they march by. The lead on every newscast, the picture on the front page every day, the name that follows them around from the moment they wake up in the morning.”

“If that’s your idea of order, good luck.” That was the problem I was supposed to fix. That was why Kim’s assembled group was so anxious. They needed a shepherd for the sheep. It didn’t matter what he had done or not done. The past was irrelevant when the future was about to blow down the walls.

In the line standing at the front desk was a man whose wig was not straight. This was the sort of thing I used to focus on right away. These days, I might not have paid attention if not for the young woman on his arm. She was golden brown all over from what I could see, and I could see plenty. The fish on the carpet were goggle-eyed.

The bellboy was standing next to me. “My lucky day,” he said. “Brazilians! Hot! Hot! Hot!” He wiggled his hips. The people in line turned to watch him. The golden one put out her arms and made a noise with her tongue. Then she laughed. The man in the crooked wig laughed. The desk clerk—busy collecting passports and giving out room keys—frowned in concentration, but the group laughed as it did the samba up the stairs.

“You want a list of their rooms?” The bellboy had loaded the luggage onto his cart and was pushing it toward the elevator. “You never know when one of them will get lonely. Beautiful people. Very hot.”

“You fool around with tourists and you’ll get a one-way ticket to a coal mine.”

“These days? My, oh my, Inspector. You are a relic. We interact; that’s the word. We interact globally. Boy, I’d like to interact with the Golden One. Why don’t you have a drink with her
friend later? Give us an hour or three.” He winked at me as the elevator door closed.

I walked twelve floors up to my room and was sitting on the bed catching my breath, thinking about what Kim had told me, when an envelope came under my door. The note was on the hotel’s stationery. “Drinks at 4:30?” No signature. At 4:15, I went down to the bar and made my way to the darkest corner, farthest from the door.

“You don’t have any customers,” I said to the bartender as I walked past him. “I’m not here.”

“So what else is new?” he said. “Don’t tell me, you just want to sit.”

No one came in at 4:30. A few minutes later, a wig poked through the door. “This the bar?”

“It’s not the bus station,” said the bartender. “Have a drink?”

The rest of the man stepped inside and immediately was searching the corners of the room. “Sure,” he said at last. I could tell from the way he moved that he’d seen me. “A bottle of vodka, if you please, senhor. And two glasses.”