Joy Brigade (6 page)

“If you win this tournament,” Hero Kang continued, “you will be able to enter the confines of their compound and make contact with our agent. You will be able to tell us what their plans are.”

“Their plans?”

“You’re not a fool,” he said. “You know that at this moment, when our so-called ‘Great Leader’ is about to step down …” He flicked the photograph hanging at his neck with his forefinger, “… every mind in the country is on his succession.”

“You want to stop his son from taking over the government.”

“Don’t worry about such things,” he replied. “Let others worry about that. Only worry about the mission.”

“I haven’t accepted the mission. I came here to meet Doctor Yong In-ja.”

Hero Kang leaned forward, as if he were about to spring at me, and let out a sigh of exasperation. He cocked his head to the right for what seemed a long time. I tensed, prepared to defend myself. Finally, he turned his head and gazed up at me. “All right,” he said finally. “We’ll see what we can do.”

“No,” I replied. “Not ‘what we can do.’ I must see her.”

His face flamed red. He held up a thick forefinger, as if to waggle it at me, then thought better of it and let it drop to his lap.

“It will be dangerous for her,” he said. “But if that’s what you want, that’s what we will do. Wait here.”

He left through the back door, slipping off into the dark alleys of Nampo. I’m not sure where he went, but I spent the time sweating, wondering if he’d decided I wasn’t worth the trouble. I wondered why I had been so obstinate. After all, I was alone in North Korea and this man held all the aces. I’d never escape from here alive if he didn’t help me. Still, the more I thought about it, the more I believed I was right. I had to see Doc Yong. That’s all that mattered.

After more than half an hour, Hero Kang returned.

“I sent a message,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “Tomorrow, early, we go to Pyongyang.”

“I’ll see Doc Yong?”

“Yes.” He was angry now. “I already told you.”

He hadn’t already told me, but I didn’t argue the point. “On the way to Pyongyang won’t we be stopped?” I asked. “Won’t I be arrested?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t trust me very much, do you?”

When I didn’t answer, he shook his head.

“No, you won’t be arrested. In this country, no one is arrested as long as they act boldly. What you must do is spread fear; with every step, with every glance, with every word, you must spread fear. Then others will wonder what powerful people are behind you and they will respect you. Then they will do your bidding.”

From what I’d seen so far, Hero Kang was good at spreading fear. He rummaged through a duffel bag and pulled out a brown uniform. He tossed it to me.

“Here,” he said. “Fold this neatly, lay it on the hot floor, and sleep on it tonight. Tomorrow, at dawn, the wrinkles will be gone.”

I held the uniform up to the light. Pants. Tunic. He also tossed me a pair of boots. Apparently, Hero Kang had been briefed on my size. Everything looked as if it would fit. I set the uniform down.

“You want me to wear this?”

“Yes. It is the only way.”

I had recognized the uniform immediately. I’d seen it in innumerable intelligence briefings. It was the uniform of an officer of the Warsaw Pact.

3

W
e didn’t bother to buy tickets. In fact, I’m not even sure there was a booth. Hero Kang already had what he called
yoheing zhang
, travel permits, two of them. All through the station people gawked at me. But when I looked back, they quickly averted their eyes. Afraid, I suppose, that I might stop and talk to them. In a country that prizes loyalty to the Great Leader above all things, being spoken to by a foreigner could prove fatal.

The uniform fit well, except for the sleeves, which were about two inches too short. This morning, behind the warehouse, Hero Kang and I had washed up at the single faucet and he let me borrow his old-fashioned straight razor to shave. After scrubbing my armpits and rinsing my teeth, I felt human enough to face the world. Hero
Kang told me to leave behind the old peacoat and wool trousers and leather boots I’d worn on the
Star of Tirana
. They weren’t the type of clothing an officer of the Warsaw Pact would be carrying around.

“Someone will burn them,” he told me.

I didn’t ask who. It was enough to know that Hero Kang wasn’t acting alone.

The two of us, both wearing our military uniforms, were about to board the train when a commotion broke out behind us. Nervously, I swiveled and looked back. An old woman, bearing a huge bundle in her arms and balancing another on her back, was arguing with a uniformed official. Apparently, she wanted to travel to Pyongyang, carrying dried mushrooms and garlic cloves to present to her family there as a gift. But the rail cop accused her of planning to sell the goods in the big city. She kept moving forward, arguing, trying to make her way onto the train. Finally, the uniformed officer shoved the old woman. She stumbled backward, tripping over her own bundle, and crashed to the ground. Her skull hit the blacktop with a crack.

I stopped on the metal steps of the train, staring at the scene, my fists clenched. In South Korea, no cop would ever do that to an elderly woman. The spirit of Confucius wouldn’t allow it. Hero Kang grabbed me roughly by the arm, and when I didn’t budge, he shoved. “Move,” he hissed, almost spitting in my ear. “Not here. Not now.”

The old woman’s bundles had busted open. She lay on her back on the ground, moaning. Passersby, instead of helping her to her feet, surreptitiously knelt and stuffed a few cloves of garlic or a few handfuls of mushrooms into their pockets. One of them mumbled
“bobok juija.”
Revanchist. In Seoul, I’d studied the Marxist terms that people learned during their two-hour daily indoctrinations sessions. Now I knew they actually used them. The guard who had shoved her stood with his hands clasped behind his back, staring off above the heads of the crowd, a posture of triumph stiffening his shoulders.

“I ought to punch him,” I said in Korean.

“No!” Hero Kang replied, shoving me again. “Move.”

We boarded the train, but I kept glancing out the window at the old woman lying supine on the ground. Hero Kang bulled me forward and reluctantly I marched toward the front car.

Hero Kang’s
yoheing zhang
were the best kind issued. It wasn’t called first class, that would be too bourgeois, but there was a sign saying that the front passenger car was a restricted area. Unlike the hard wooden benches in the other passenger cars, the seats here had plenty of legroom and were padded and covered with something that resembled leather. The windows were clean and the aisle swept clear of the debris found throughout the rest of the train. This car was for the
dongji
, Hero Kang told me. The comrades. The Communist cadre.

I would’ve thought these were exactly the people we’d want to avoid, but Hero Kang’s style was to confront them head-on and dare them to question us. It was Hero Kang’s size, his bulk, his aura of confidence that made people move out of his way. That and the photograph of the Great Leader hanging from his neck. I wanted to know more about how he’d attained his exalted position as Hero of the Nation, but last night he’d seemed reluctant to talk about it, so I dropped the subject.

Other cadres took their seats around us, a few of them nodding in recognition to Hero Kang. Bored, he nodded back. Some of them were military officers and I noticed their ranks, almost all colonels or above. A lot of brass in this car. The ones who took on the greatest air of superiority, though, even greater than the military men, were the ones wearing military-type clothing but no symbols of rank. Both men and women, they had bright red badges pinned to their chests. I figured these for the Communist Party cadres. They crossed their legs, lit up cigarettes, and chatted calmly. People of power and ease. In the West, they would’ve been wearing suits tailored in London and talking to one another about stockbrokers and offshore tax shelters. Here, they spoke of the Great Leader.

I felt like a rabbit on a live-fire range. Everyone in this restricted passenger car, with the single exception of Hero Kang, was my enemy. I sat staring grimly ahead, trying to control my breathing. As long as I held tightly to the wooden armrest, I figured my hands wouldn’t shake too much. So far, no one had approached us and I was praying that no one would.

My uniform was that of an officer of the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe with the rank insignia of a lieutenant colonel. Last night, Hero Kang informed me I would pose as a Romanian officer by the name of Enescu. The identity, including the papers, had already been established, but when I asked if we had backup at the Romanian Embassy, he interrupted me and warned me not to ask too many questions.

“We are a professional organization,” was all he’d say.

Apparently, they were very professional. If he could
buffalo the boss of the Port of Nampo, establish safe houses amidst the city’s grain distribution network, send messages to Doc Yong, and set up contacts within a foreign embassy, the organization of resisters he belonged to was very professional indeed. But the more people participating, the sooner they’d be compromised.

When I pointed out to Hero Kang that I neither spoke nor understood Romanian, he said not to worry, no one we were likely to run into on the train did either. Military officers from other Communist countries are occasionally seen in Pyongyang, usually Russian or Chinese, but a Romanian shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows. As long as we kept moving. Like that rabbit on the firing range.

A whistle sounded and the train started its engines. Slowly, we chugged forward. Outside the window, ratty old wooden buildings rolled by, some made of brick but nothing that looked too permanent. I hadn’t expected there to be. During the war, Korean cities had been bombed mercilessly by the American Air Force, so much so that the pilots complained that all they were doing was making “rubble bounce on rubble.” Since then, the North Korean government had been in constant preparation for the resumption of war. The only structures that were designed to last were military fortifications.

I expected someone to walk down the aisle, as in South Korea, with trays full of drinks and cigarettes and snacks. But not here. The only people who marched through the train were a couple of rail-line policemen. When I turned to look back, I saw that they were checking the other passengers carefully, not only for their travel permits but also for their fare tokens. In our passenger car, the men did
nothing more than nod at the various dignitaries and, without checking anyone’s permits or fare, scurried out of the car. No wonder Hero Kang had chosen to sit here.

Five minutes out of the station, we were in rolling countryside, heading north past fallow rice paddies toward the capital city of Pyongyang, the heart of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. I fought panic, taking deep breaths, reminding myself that Hero Kang would take care of me.

On some inaudible cue, people all around started to rise from their seats and make their way into the next car. Hero Kang rose and motioned for me to follow. I didn’t want to move. Impatiently, he gestured for me to get up, so I did, fighting a brief moment of vertigo. Then I pulled down my tunic, thrust back my shoulders, and followed Hero Kang.

It was a dining car.

All the cadres were taking seats at round tables, each of which could accommodate eight to ten. Hero Kang guided me to a stool in the corner. Just as we sat down, we were joined by a group of people wearing the same bland Communist uniforms everyone else was. Immediately, I went on alert. They weren’t speaking Korean. They wore high-collared jackets and the men’s hair was combed across their heads and cut in a severe straight line; the women had soft caps pulled over short hair. They were chattering to one another in the singsong dialect of Mandarin, the language of Beijing.

Hero Kang ignored them. Already, men in military uniforms were shoving trays filled with noodle soup in front of us. Each person grabbed for a bowl, offering it to
the person next to him or her, until we all had steaming bowls in front of us. Then the same servers ladled white rice into smaller bowls and passed those around. Spoons and wooden chopsticks were distributed. Without further ado, all the comrades started shoveling soup and rice into their mouths. Two large bowls, each of turnip and cabbage kimchi, were placed on the table, the pieces cut in rough chunks. Hero Kang dipped his chopsticks into them with gusto. A couple of the Chinese women tried some morsels. I decided that, as a Romanian, I would steer clear of the kimchi. I even pretended to fumble with the chopsticks and then set them down and ate strictly with my spoon, which made shoveling clumps of noodles into my mouth awkward.