Bamboo And Blood Part 11

Pak slowed long enough for me to catch up. "You might want to go easy on the invidious comparisons. Think before you say anything for the next few days, until your feet are back on the ground." He reached for his ears again. "What did you learn about our lady friend? That's why you were sent there."

"I thought you wanted local color."

"Sure I do. What's the sense of having you go halfway around the globe if you don't bring back tales of dragons and giants? But the vice minister has been badgering me for information on that lady. You and I know he doesn't actually give a d.a.m.n. What really concerns him is that your trip came out of the Minister's special budget, and so he needs to justify it. Of more concern to us, the Minister is being squeezed for information about the case. Every morning after you left, I got a barrage of phone calls from him. Each one had exactly the same message: He needed the answer today ... this minute ... this very minute ..."

I didn't care about the vice minister. He was a rat and sooner or later would be trapped like one. The Minister was another matter. Who was putting pressure on him? An inspector might bend in the breeze; the Minister had a more difficult time doing that. Big trees blew over more often than little ones.

"I don't think I found much of anything that is going to help. It can be summed up in a couple of sentences. She was there for only a few weeks, at which point she left suddenly. She barely gave any notice. The security man at the mission said she told him a couple of hours ahead of time, that's all. He was still mad. He'd never seen anything like it, he said. And when he sent in a negative note for her file, he was told to forget the whole thing. As far as I could tell, she didn't do much in the office. The wives complained she didn't fit in."

"For instance."

"They had a reception, and all of them were supposed to cook something. She didn't cook. She bought something already made and unwrapped it right there in front of them. There was an argument about it, but word came down to leave her alone. People pouted that she got special treatment, and no one was sorry when she left."

"They know she was murdered?"

"Some rumors. They figured that's why I was there. I got furtive glances but not much cooperation."

"Where was her husband?"

Her husband, the one who was going to get her in trouble with the locals. If she was so difficult to get a line on, he would be impossible. People seemed to know less about him than they did about her. "I got very blank looks whenever I brought him up. He was supposed to be there, they were expecting him, but he never showed up in New York. No one notified the mission that his orders had been changed. Guess where he went instead? Pakistan, or that's what a few people thought they'd heard."

"Maybe he's still there. Anybody bother to check yet?"

"Not me, I was only a local broom, remember? She arrived in New York at the end of June, hung around until July, and then one night packed her bags and was gone."

"She couldn't have just left on her own. Someone must have taken her to the airport."

"Well, she didn't walk there, that's for sure. The airport is too far away. But no one in the mission drove her. I looked at their logs."

"n.o.body bothered to find out how she got there?"

"The security man told me it was on his list of things to do. It's a long list, he said."

"What was she doing in the city when she wasn't in the office?"

"Either no one knew or they wouldn't tell me. People said she went for walks in the park in the center of town."

"Not alone, she didn't. She'd be petrified to go out by herself in that city."

"Could be, though if she took after her father, I don't think she had a lot of fear. You think she knew someone there?"

"Don't you?"

"I'm not sure if she already knew someone, or maybe she met them by accident."

"But she knew someone."

"That's what it looked like, but I wasn't going to dig around in something like that. I had no authorization; the orders were a joke. Anyway, I didn't know the territory. The main thing is, she didn't act like a normal Foreign Ministry wife. And if she didn't act like one in New York, I'll bet she didn't do it in Pakistan, either."

"You were wrong."

"This was useful?"

"No. It was more than a couple of sentences." We stopped at a doorway. Pak knocked. There was no answer.

"It's dark, they must have left. Let's go back to the office." By now I realized Pak was right, it was a crazy cold day to be outside.

"Don't be so impatient, Inspector." He knocked again, two taps; he waited, then one more.

The door opened a crack, barely wide enough for us to slip through. "Hurry up, you'll let all the heat out." A woman's voice. Then laughter. Inside was nearly as cold as it was on the street. The room held a few small tables; two men sat drinking morosely. The woman who had shouted at us appeared. "All the heat!" She laughed again. "You're welcome to sit as long as you want. If you want to drink, you can do that. No food, though. The shipment of twigs didn't arrive." At this, one of the men laughed, and the other stared into his gla.s.s.

"Good, here we are, warm and cozy." Pak looked at the candle on the table. He had his jacket zipped all way the up. "Anything hot," he said to the woman. "Hot water with sawdust sprinkled on it, I don't care. As long as it's hot. Bring it, and then leave us alone."

The woman disappeared. When she returned, she had a tray with two bowls of soup and a pot of weak tea. "Don't worry," she said. "It's as hot as it's going to get. If I had some fish, it would be fish soup. But I found some salt, don't ask me where, and that makes it seem like there's fish in it. No charge for the leaves." She put the tray down and disappeared again; this time she closed the door behind her.

We finished the meal quickly and in silence. The two drinkers stared at us. Pak reached in his coat for cigarettes. "Tell me a story, Inspector, about a faraway place." He lit two cigarettes and gave me one. "Weave a magic carpet, take us to the land of fallen women and beggars. And if you can't take us there, take us to New York."

2.

"It wasn't much to see." I looked over at the drinkers. They turned their attention back to their gla.s.ses. "Very simple geography. It's on an island, like Yanggak-to, only bigger." I waited.

"Three and a half kilometers wide," Pak said. "Or did I already mention that?"

"It sits between two rivers, both broad enough to keep the population from moving back and forth except for the bridges. There are a few boats, but not many that I saw; maybe because of the cold weather. The wind was fierce, and there was snow piled so high in some places I could barely walk across the street. The whole place is pretty flat, though they haven't leveled it completely. Some streets are steep going down to the river on the east side."

"Like San Francisco."

"I don't know, I've never been there. I didn't think I knew anyone who had."

Pak hummed a few notes.

"What is that?"

"Called 'Gone to San Francisco' or something. It was on the radio when we were out on operations sometimes, and we'd sing it as a joke because the boss said if we got good enough, one day they'd send us to steal the Golden Gate Bridge."

Again, I sensed problems with the anchor. Pak had never told me anything like that before, not even hinted it. Something was making him very bold, almost reckless. "Do you want to talk about San Francisco or New York?"

Pak smiled and studied his cigarette. "Go on, tell me a tale. What about the buildings?"

"Buildings," I said, relieved he seemed to have calmed down again. "You've seen enough pictures to know what the skyline looks like. But you can't really understand the traffic without being there. There's noise from cars, horns honking, bus engines straining, almost the whole day long. At night there are trucks. I don't know what they carry, but they are going fast and they make a h.e.l.l of a racket. Most of the cars are old-plenty of speeding and not much attention to traffic laws. Hardly any traffic police, but otherwise lots of patrols in cars and some on foot. If we had that many police visible on the streets, there would be a revolution. There's always an emergency vehicle screaming up one street and down another."

"Pedestrians? Bicycles?"

"Hardly any bicycles. Must be banned, though you'd have to be crazy to ride a bike in that traffic. You can't walk down the sidewalk without running into some beggars; in fact, a lot of beggars. Some prost.i.tutes, too. A considerable number of people who looked very rich, if you find yourself in the right neighborhood. Women ..." I paused to collect my thoughts because I still found it hard to describe. When I had seen it I could barely believe my eyes. "Women dressed up but obviously not satisfied with what they have because they are shopping for more. Prices are crazy; the prices of some of that clothing must be worth several months' wages to the clerks. Countless restaurants and markets, plenty of vegetables. Even in winter."

"Vegetables." Pak nodded. "You journey to a distant civilization, and you tell me about carrots?"

"Wait, I nearly forgot. Where's our foreigner? I should get in touch with him; we have unfinished business, remember?"

"Don't bother. He left."

"Left? When?"

"The day after I told him you were called away on another a.s.signment."

"Did he ask where?"

"He did."

"Did you tell him?"

"No."

"Strange that he should leave all of a sudden." It didn't sit right, somehow.

"Everything about him is strange. Strange is our byword these days. Get back to the buildings. You skipped over that part."

"Old, new, tall, short, no empty s.p.a.ces, just wall-to-wall buildings except for a few parks and the banks of the rivers. They've never been in a war, so n.o.body flattened the place. They do it themselves, the tearing down."

"It doesn't sound like you were in the office much, interviewing people."

"The mission wasn't interested in cooperating. Once I started asking about our subject, no one wanted to talk to me except to register complaints about her lack of cooking skills. So I went out, tried to get some feel on my own for where she'd been, whom she might have met, what she might have seen. Routine stuff."

"And?"

"I got lost."

"Were you followed?"

"Didn't I already go over this?"

"Yes, but we're going to get asked again and again, so let me make sure I know your story."

"It's hard to be sure whether I was followed. That's my story."

"Not the best, but we'll work on it. You said you were followed into a bookshop."

"Who knows? I told you, the same guy went into four coffee shops with me. I suppose it's possible that he just liked coffee. I only went in to warm up."

"You want me to guess? I'm guessing you were followed. Besides him, anyone approach you directly?"

I thought about it. "I was walking up a street, very steep, right where cars come out of a tunnel that goes under the river, east something street. There was a man walking down the hill. He stopped and asked if I needed help."

"Strange. Did he stop everybody he saw, or just you?"

"I was looking up at the buildings. He might have thought I was lost, which I was. He said a few words of Korean that he seemed to know, but I pretended I was Chinese."

"You think it was ch.o.r.eographed?"

"Nah, just chance. Old guy, colorful coat, though-red and black and white and I don't know what else. He didn't seem to have much to do. He wasn't in a hurry to get anywhere like everybody else."

"You double-check?"

"Sure. I made a note about the episode and gave it to the security man. Don't worry, we're covered. No one of the old man's description rang a bell with anyone at the mission. They said he could have been any one of a thousand religious Jews walking around. There was nothing in the contact logs fitting his description or that sort of approach."

"Religious Jews." Pak repeated it slowly. We looked at each other. "Maybe she was followed, too, and maybe she b.u.mped into a religious Jew and maybe she never reported it. She wasn't the type to fill out forms, as far as I can tell. Runs in the family, I guess."

"Have you been doing your own research?" I was trying to remember the face of the old man on the street. It was mostly beard, so I couldn't be sure of the rest of it.

"Her father called the Ministry to complain about you, and they told him to call me. We talked for a while, if you can call that research. What if she was approached in New York? That could have some connection to what happened to her later."

Sure thing, I thought. The long arm of New York. "There is no way to know what she was doing. The local security man only had a chance to follow her two or three times. He thought she might have been tailed by the locals. Nothing subtle, as far as I can tell. How many relays of people in blue scarves can there be, he asked me. Each time, she lost them for a while, but they picked her up again without much trouble because she went to the same place each time, that park. Going there she'd walk using a slightly different route; but each time she took the same cab home. He was sure it was the same cabdriver, a female. I thought that might be something, but it wasn't. When I tracked the driver down, it turned out to be a young Pakistani woman whose father had sent her to the U.S. to go to school."

Pak nodded. "A young Pakistani woman. Sure, there must be lots of them driving cabs in New York. At least she wasn't a Jew. Tell me, please, O, that there are no Pakistani Jews." He paused, turning this over in his mind. Then he went on. "This driver, she told you a story, I suppose."

"She did. I got in her cab and told her to take me to one of the train stations. She said she was bored with school and started driving a cab. She was worried because her father was coming for a visit. If he found out she wasn't in school, she said, he would drag her home. She didn't want to go. Why not, I asked. Because he would arrange a marriage to a man who would treat her like dirt. He might beat her. What will you do, I asked. She turned around to look at me. 'If he beats me? I'll kill him.'"

"Maybe she was just making the whole thing up."

"Nope. All you had to do was to look into her eyes. This was real. She wasn't kidding."

Pak took a last puff on his cigarette. "Get some sleep," he said. "You should take up smoking again." He pointed at my cigarette, floating in the soup bowl. "Might help your jet lag."

Chapter Six.

"His name is Sohn and he's from the party," Pak said. The next morning, we were in my office, and Pak seemed a little ill at ease. It wasn't unusual these days. All of us were that way-a little ill at ease all the time. Bad stories were coming in from the countryside. Here in the capital, people were disappearing from offices, food was scarce, heat was random, electricity was unpredictable and even when there was some, it didn't last very long. No one pretended things weren't bad, though we didn't talk a lot about it. The question was whether we would get through it.

"Am I supposed to be impressed with his party status? Because I'll tell you frankly, I'm not. Not these days. You know him, maybe?" As I spoke, Pak drummed his fingers on my desk. In better times, that would have meant he was impatient. Or in some cases, usually in the spring when it was possible to smell the earth again, that little gesture meant he was full of energy, ready to go for a long walk along the river. Now, more and more, he did it because he was nervous and depressed. "How much longer are we supposed to stand around and snap at flies?" I said. "He should have been here a half hour ago. I can't wait all day. I have things to do."

"Like what? That report you haven't touched? Just relax, Inspector." I almost laughed out loud-him telling me to relax. His fingers had settled into a slow, steady drumbeat, sort of funereal. I realized he might keep it up the rest of the week if I didn't figure out some way to get him to move his hand. "Try not to antagonize him," Pak said, and his fingers went thrum thrum thrum thrum. "You can annoy me all you want, but for him, I need you to sit quietly and listen to what he says. Let him throw his weight around." Thrum Thrum.

"I'm losing track," I said. "Who's on top these days? I can't keep score. Is the party up or down? Is the army the army of the party, or does the party emulate the military? Which is it this week? Why don't you draw me a chart?"

"Forget that. This is no time to be choosing sides. Who knows where things will be in another six months."

Six months, I thought. Long time. He must have been thinking the same thing. We just sat there for a minute or so, wondering.