Bamboo And Blood Part 10

He stopped and crumpled the piece of paper that had borne the brunt of his pen. Then he cursed, smoothed it out, and started writing furiously again. He didn't look up when I knocked on his open door. "Get packed," he said simply. He read over what he had written. "d.a.m.ned craziness." He put the crumpled paper in a file folder with a black band around it. "Well." He finally raised his head. "Are you packed?"

"For what?" I hadn't gone back to the office that night after seeing Jeno It was late, I was cold and tired, and the tale of my conversation with the general could wait until morning. Nothing, I figured, would happen in the meantime.

Pak pointed at the folder. "For this." Apparently, I had been wrong. Apparently, a gear somewhere had become unstuck overnight.

I looked at the folder. There obviously wasn't much in it. It must have been only a small gear. "I don't know what it says."

"Of course you don't. It's a secret, very closely held in the Ministry. I am even instructed to keep it from you. Can you believe that?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"You are ordered to New York effective immediately."

"What?" My mouth doesn't generally drop open, but for this it did.

"You have an aisle seat on Sat.u.r.day's plane to Beijing. There you wait for a visa, which may or may not be forthcoming from the Americans, and then onward as soon as possible to New York. 'Onward as soon as possible.' I sound like a dispatch cable."

"I can't do that." I was thinking fast but not coming up with much. The last thing I wanted to do was to fly over the Pacific Ocean to New York.

"Give me one good reason you can't."

"I have to take our foreigner to that site he mentioned. Don't you want to hear a report of what happened when I was up there? I'm not sure whether the note you signed made a dent, but at least they didn't shoot me." I was going to have to come up with something better, much better. The only problem was, I couldn't think of anything.

"They can shoot you later, after you get back, if they want. Right now, we have no time to worry about the foreigner. You have seventy-two hours to tidy up your office, clear those piles of paper off your desk, and wheedle a decent pair of shoes from the supply clerk."

"I don't need shoes," I said. "I need an explanation. When I land in a city behind enemy lines, I like to have some idea of what I'm doing, don't you?" This sounded better; it even gave me momentary hope that I had found some firm ground on which to take a stand. Maybe Pak could turn it into something effective.

"No, you don't get to know anything." Pak had a better sense of footing than I did. If he didn't even pause to make a show of considering the argument, it meant there wasn't any firm ground on this one, only swamp for as far as the eye could see. "Obviously, they'll have to tell you something sooner or later. But nothing officially now, not yet, anyway."

"Nothing?" Paduk stones are given more notice of being put on the board than I was getting.

Pak shrugged. "You didn't hear it from me, but it has to do with the dead woman, the one for whom you were supposed to sweep up a few facts and then dump the whole thing back in the Ministry's file of 'cases-for-another-day.' We only needed some background information on her. Nothing elaborate, remember? Shoe size, preference in blouse color, eating habits. Anything to fill up a few pages. Maybe if you'd done that like I told you, we'd have been able to unlatch ourselves from this whole thing."

"You don't really believe that."

"Doesn't matter what I believe anymore. But, no, I don't believe that."

"So, why New York?" I already knew why, or part of it. Her father had told me.

"She was in New York for a short time before her final a.s.signment. That much you've already discovered on your own, I take it. They want to know what she did, who she saw, where she went while she was there. They think it's important, why I don't know. I told you about those strange winds from strange places. This is one of those. Think of yourself as a seabird being blown off course to an exotic clime."

"It's January. New York isn't exotic; it's colder than it is here. I know, I read the reports from the security detail a.s.signed to the diplomatic mission there. They say it's miserable."

"As if anything they write can be believed. Why you in particular were selected to go on this junket might seem odd, but these are odd times. You've been overseas before, so I suppose you naturally came to mind."

"Is this another one of those favors?"

Pak could be impa.s.sive when he needed to be.

"You volunteered me?"

"Don't be ridiculous. I protested being deprived of staff, especially now."

"You wrote a complaint?"

"No. But I crumpled the order a couple of times."

I smiled at Pak. He threw the file over to me. "Consider yourself doubly lucky. There's a big meeting here next week, one of those national sessions. Ten thousand extra people in Pyongyang with no heat, no electricity, and no food. We'll all have double s.h.i.+fts trying to keep them out of trouble. All of us but you. You will be happily away from the action, seeing new sights, dodging muggers and blond women with legs that reach all the way to heaven."

"I'm not going. They can't make me."

"And will you cite the muggers or the legs as the reason?"

Chapter Four.

I would have rather flown anything else, even a Chinese airline, but the Ministry insisted that I take their advice. "We've booked you on the U.S. national flag carrier," the travel clerk said. "We know airlines, don't worry." So on Tuesday afternoon, I climbed into a middle seat and took my last full breath for twelve hours. The man next to the window was as big as an ox; the woman on the aisle had hips. The ox and the hips both ate their dinners without looking up. I left mine on the tray. When the lights went out for the movie, I listened briefly to the engines, closed my eyes, and tried to think.

New York. I was bound for New York, where I could expect orders that would officially tell me less than what Pak had already told me informally. The orders would be encoded, but try as the code clerk could, he would not be able to make them sensible because, at base, they would be meaningless, almost certainly designed to use what I already knew to lead me away from what I really needed to learn. Whatever I was supposed to discover in New York, I wasn't supposed to understand how it fit into a larger picture. Pak had told me as much as he knew. Well, almost as much.

This had not been a simple investigation to begin with, even if that is what Pak insisted we could make it. Simple investigations don't send inspectors to strange places, in such proximity to strange hips. Someone in Pyongyang was abnormally worried about the dead woman's fate, and was frantically searching for clues on at least three continents, maybe more. More and more, it looked like that "someone" was Pak's acquaintance, the one for whom he was suddenly doing favors. The one for whom I was only a Padua stone, put on the board wherever he needed. Nothing simple about it. Either the woman was extremely important in her own right-and what little I'd seen so far didn't suggest anything along those lines-or she was involved in something very sensitive. Or maybe none of the above. There was still that final possibility, the one that kept popping into line and wouldn't disappear. Maybe she wasn't really the focus of whatever it was that was going on.

Besides the woman, there was Jeno. No connection between the two of them that I could see, except that they dropped into my life more or less at the same time. Jeno had an inordinate interest in missiles. The woman might have been killed in Pakistan. I didn't know if there were tabs and slots in all that, but it was worth bearing in mind.

As long as there was nothing else to do, it would have been good to make a few notes, but there wasn't enough room to move my arm.

Chapter Five.

"There was about the place the curious and companionable silence of men at breakfast away from home."

Pak seemed to be listening to me; I saw his head move to the side as it does when he is puzzled. But I was tired from the flight home, and he was slightly out of focus. Maybe his head hadn't moved to one side. Maybe mine had.

"It was a plain room, like the rest of the hotel. We all ate in solitary fas.h.i.+on. The waitresses kept their voices low. I suppose it might seem like a funeral, but it wasn't. It was oddly pleasant. Even though we didn't know each other, there was a sense of unity. We frowned together when one of the tables started a conversation. Bankers, I think. They were the only ones wearing yellow sweaters and big gla.s.ses."

This image of the breakfast room was still fresh in my brain. It was the only thing fresh in my brain. Otherwise, a brick occupied my skull, and had since I arrived back in Pyongyang around midday. The brick and I went straight to the office. "Don't worry," the customs official at the airport had said as he went through my bag absentmindedly, "it's jet lag. They say it goes away sooner or later." So far it wasn't going away. My consciousness was still over the Pacific.

"That's it?" Pak shook his head. "You were in New York for almost a week, and all you remember is breakfast?"

"I'll go back to my desk and write a long trip report once I figure out what time zone I'm in." If I went back to my desk, I could close the door and put my head down.

"No, I want to hear it from you directly, not on paper, not in your deadly prose. Come on, Inspector, I'll buy you a beer later, or something stronger if you prefer." He waited, but when I said nothing, he closed his eyes. If I dared do that, I'd be asleep where I stood. "It must have been amazing," Pak said.

"It was."

"I'm listening." Pak's voice had taken on a dreamy quality. He settled back in his chair, his eyes still shut. "Leave nothing out."

"It's just a city. A city is a city. Cities are all basically the same. They may be in better or worse states of repair, they may seem more or less orderly, but if the fundamental reality is straight in your mind, you don't get overwhelmed."

"The point?" Still that dreamy voice, as if he were listening to me from somewhere else. That wasn't like Pak. Even when fully awake, I was the one who drifted; he was the anchor. If Pak began drifting, I'd float out to sea for sure, food for sharks.

"It's a city, with buildings, streets, and noise." I paused, irritated, sleepy, still not sure I could remember what I'd seen because I wasn't sure I had really seen it. That reality problem again. "Lots of noise-cars, people, construction equipment. They are always tearing up streets, from what I saw, even in the dead of winter. There must be some flaw in their road construction technique. Huge holes in some of the streets."

"There are always flaws. Maybe there's a shortage of asphalt."

"It is crowded during the day, but empty at night in most places."

"Unsafe." He stirred. "That's what a lot of people say, it's unsafe."

"Could be, but I walked around a good bit and no one bothered me."

"Were you followed?" As I should have guessed, the man was paying attention, he wasn't dreaming.

"I thought you were going to listen."

"Well, d.a.m.n it, O, you're wading too long through the preliminaries. I'm just interested, that's all. So, were you followed?" He opened one eye to emphasize that this was a question that couldn't be avoided.

"There are always a few thousand people behind you, who can tell? I think I caught sight of a tail once or twice, but there wasn't much of an effort to disguise it. The same man came into every coffee shop and bookstore with me for an entire afternoon. When I sat down, he sat down. When I browsed, he browsed. It looked like they were pus.h.i.+ng, trying to see what I would do. Either that or they share the same training manual with our special section."

"Skip it. You can describe the operational stuff for the files later." He sat up, alert again. The anchor was in place. "What was there to see? And don't try to tell me all cities are the same. They aren't."

"There are buildings-lots of brick buildings, most of them old, though they think old is a hundred years. Not all of them are that tall."

"Not tall? What are you talking about?"

"Some are pretty tall, of course, but not all of them." Building height didn't interest me that much. I didn't mind craning my neck to look up at a tall tree. After all, it had grown to that place in the sky; the topmost leaves felt breezes the taproot could only imagine. But buildings didn't know one floor from another, and didn't care. "You know what was fascinating?"

Pak groaned. "You're going to talk about trees, aren't you?"

"There were signs painted on some buildings. These aren't banners or rooftop signboards, but slogans actually painted on the buildings. And I don't mean political slogans. I started taking notes about them while I was walking around. They were odd announcements, advertis.e.m.e.nts for goods, mostly. I saw one for 'Undies.' No one in the mission had any idea what it meant. I did an informal study to see whether those signs revealed anything, you know, sociopolitical insights into economic superstructure. That sort of thing."

"I'm hearing, but I'm not believing. What do you know about economic superstructure?"

"It's a small island."

"Three and a half kilometers wide. Not even as wide as the demilitarized zone."

"You were following me around?"

"When I have an inspector far away, I like to keep him close. I just needed a mental map of where you were, so I did some checking. I trust that was alright."

"How long is it?"

"From the Battery or from South Ferry?"

Suddenly, I didn't feel so sleepy. "You've been there, haven't you?"

"I've been here in my chair, Inspector, waiting for you to return and regale me. And you were talking about the economic superstructure. Proceed."

"I was about to say, we have a North-South problem, right?"

Pak wagged a finger. "It's not a problem."

"You want to comment on everything, or do you want to listen?"

"Speak, o traveler." Pak settled back again and closed his eyes.

"They divide East-West, like Germany did." I waited, but Pak didn't stir. "I couldn't see any difference between the eastern part of the island and the western part, but they can. So I did a little survey and discovered it shows up in subtle ways."

"I'll bet."

"You know what I discovered? On cross streets-those are the streets that are numbered-most of the building signs are visible only for those coming from the west, walking easterly. On the avenues-the bigger streets that run north and south-there is a slight preference for those coming from uptown, moving south, but that may be a statistical anomaly, except on Park Avenue, which is, from all I could tell, a bastion of the rich. So ask yourself, who benefits? Who is supposed to be looking at these signs, and who is being disadvantaged?"

"Okay, I'm asking myself." He opened one eye. "And you are going to tell me."

"The conclusion is inescapable. It is wrapped in a subtle sociological and cla.s.s message, a subtextual fly in what the Americans like to think of as their fabulous melting pot. Simply stated: If you come from the poorer section, the east side, and cross over to the richer west, you are on your own. There are few signs put up for your benefit. But do you think those on the east side simply accept this?"

"I have a feeling they don't."

"That's right, they don't. In protest, most of the signs on the east side are meant for east side eyes. There are plenty of signs on the backs of buildings not so far from our UN mission, along the east side of Lexington Avenue. Who are those signs for? Pilots on East River tugboats? Far-sighted people on the Queens waterfront? I don't think so."

"Queens?"

"Look on your map."

"That's it? The sum total of your report?"

I rubbed my hands together. "I'm only getting started. Maybe I should take up political a.n.a.lysis. How hard can it be? Let's go for a walk."

Pak sat up and looked out his window. "In this rotten weather? February is no time to stroll around."

"Cold is good for you, it helps the new shoots."

Pak laughed, finally. "Whatever works," he said, and put on his coat.

When we were on the street, Pak put his hands on his ears. "I forgot my hat. This is a h.e.l.l of a cold day to be outside, O." He'd used my name twice in a row; it meant he was happy to see me back. "Walk briskly. Never give your blood a chance to stop moving."

For some reason, it didn't strike me as so cold. "You want to hear about New York, you'll have to slow down a little. I can't think when I'm slipping on the ice. All my mental energy goes into balance." I slid on a patch that Pak had stepped around. "What has happened to the snow-clearing teams? Isn't anyone responsible for keeping the sidewalks clean anymore? They do a pretty good job of clearing the sidewalks in New York."