Bamboo And Blood Part 21

When I got back to the hotel, there was a bench across the street. A green felt hat sat on it, in case I had any doubt who to thank. The hotel lobby, as usual, was deserted. I walked past the desk clerk and was partway up the stairs when she called to me. "You have a message." She held up an envelope. "You want it?"

"Of course I want it if it's for me."

"It might be bad news."

I walked back down and held out my hand. "Do you mind?"

The note was from Sohn, though it wasn't signed. All it said, in Korean, was "Same place, tonight at nine." Today was the fourth, an even-numbered day. That meant I was supposed to subtract two hours from the time in the message. Or was it three? Which would mean we were supposed to meet at 6:00 P.M., a.s.suming I remembered the code right. Sohn thought codes were indispensable. To me, they were confusing and easy to forget. Maybe a code with bread in it had advantages.

I arrived at the Sunflower at six, right on time. The bartender looked at his watch, then pointed to the same table Sohn and I had occupied a few hours earlier. I waited. People came into the bar, and left. The tables near me filled up with groups of three or four. I hadn't paid much attention to the neighborhood, but it didn't seem to be a very bourgeois crowd. A couple of women with lots of makeup and long lashes came in and surveyed the scene. One of them caught my eye. If she was Portuguese, I couldn't tell and didn't want to find out. I shook my head.

Three hours later, it dawned on me that Sohn wasn't going to show up.

4.

"Tell me the truth, Inspector, do you prefer New York to Geneva? You have been to New York, haven't you?" M. Beret and I were standing in a tiny park. I didn't like being there. It was a small piece of land sandwiched between the lake and the street, the sort of thing city architects like because it meets their quota for green s.p.a.ce. There were lots of trees-a circle of maples around a fountain, lindens along the path, a couple of big beeches off by themselves. The beeches looked like they felt crowded and wished they were somewhere else.

"Can't we find another spot?" The more I looked around the little park, the more I didn't like what I saw.

"How about the airport? I can have your bags shipped later." M. Beret sat down on a bench facing the water. I especially didn't like that. It put our backs to the street.

"What makes you think I've been to New York?"

"A friend of a friend of a friend. A very long chain of friends. They met someone who talked to someone who saw you walking down a hill to Third Avenue. You looked lost, they said."

"Small world. I had no idea you had orthodox friends."

"Given your thought patterns, I'll take that for a yes. But how am I to interpret such information? A mere police inspector, going here and there, there and here, all in the s.p.a.ce of two or three months? It's very odd, is it not?"

"I thought so." I hadn't been walking down the hill, I'd been walking up. The other man had been walking down, the friendly man who had stopped. A friendly old man with distant connections to M. Beret?

"Again I ask, what am I to make of your frequent travels? More to the point, why is your pa.s.sport so light on visas if you travel so much? Do you just slip across borders like the March wind?"

"My pa.s.sport? Can we walk a bit? It's getting cold on this bench." The wind was whipping the lake into frantic wavelets that smacked against each other. In the sunlight they might have sparkled, but not under the leaden gray of the early morning clouds. When I pa.s.sed by Ahmet's place on the way to meet M. Beret, it had been closed; no sign in the window, but the shades were down and the door was locked. Maybe Ahmet was out getting his knife sharpened. That meant Dilara was alone, in her bedroom upstairs. Or was she not alone? It was an interesting question, but not as interesting as the one occupying my mind at the moment. When could I get something to eat? I waited for M. Beret to produce a roll from his pocket. This was how dogs were trained, and I could see why it was so effective.

"Obviously, you've checked," I said. "Funny, I examine other people's pa.s.sports with some care, but I never look at my own very closely, and it's not something I keep at home in a drawer. Surely you know that much about my country. I am handed a pa.s.sport, it has my name and picture in it, a birth date. That's good enough for me. Is it the same one as last time? Who cares? Maybe they lost the last one after I handed it in. Maybe they revised the covers and had to reissue new doc.u.ments to everyone. How should I know? Believe it or not, I have other things to worry about. If you want the truth, I didn't really want to come here, to this polished place under these friendless mountains. It was an order."

It took only a few minutes to walk around the edge of the park. His roll-hand stayed in his pocket the whole time. When we got back to where we started, M. Beret rested his arms on the railing that ran alongside the path. "What do you think, Inspector?" He pointed across the river.

"I've been wondering. Are those political slogans on the tops of those buildings?"

"Political slogans? No, we don't do that. They're advertis.e.m.e.nts. That one on the end is for watches."

"Then they're slogans for the rich. Ours exhort the people. Yours exhort the rich. We say, 'Victory!' You say, 'Buy!' Not a world of difference, is there?"

"Which one do you prefer?"

I was disappointed, somehow. He hadn't struck me as the type to ask that sort of question. We'd finally established good working relations, I thought. I didn't expect him to spoil things by dragging in politics. "Have you seen the trees on the street that runs alongside the lake? The street with the woman with the rump."

"Quai Gustave-Ador?"

"Is that her name?"

"The street."

"Well, those are plane trees along that street. When plane trees are free to grow, they grow tall, and the shade they produce is sweet all summer long. Those trees of yours, an entire line of them, have been butchered."

"You mean cut down?"

"They might wish they were dead. No, they have been mangled. Their tops have been hacked off. They are maimed."

"Pity the trees."

It was too snide to pa.s.s over. I went over to the bench and sat down. I wanted to be sitting when I put this knife between his ribs. "I happened to be out walking the other night. No doubt you noticed."

"I'm behind on my reports, but I'll take your word for it. Good, exercise is what you need. It helps with any lingering jet lag. Clarifies the senses." He sat down beside me. "I might wish for better weather, though. It's a bit windy. You must forgive me." There it was again-snide. That wasn't his normal style. Maybe he'd caught his fingers in a door.

"Yes, it is a bit windy, and a little chilly in the evenings. That's what I wanted to ask you about. I noticed that you seem to have an organization very similar to the Young Pioneers in my country. It seems to function after sundown."

"Is that so?" M. Beret looked at me warily. "What do you mean?"

"I happened upon several young girls. They all had on the same uniform, more or less. White boots. Long white boots."

I see.

"Coats with fur collars."

"Yes."

"I would have thought the skirts were too short for this weather. Maybe there is a shortage of cloth in Switzerland? Or problems with distribution?"

"And did you approach one of them?"

I ignored him. "The blue light. That's what got me curious. Does it signify the headquarters of this organization for young girls?"

"You would like to investigate?"

"Some of them seemed very young."

"They do."

"I also saw a man, very short, walking behind an African woman of proportions I never even imagined."

"Indeed."

"Isn't it dangerous, that sort of thing? Do you have ambulances standing by?"

He laughed. "He visits her once a month, sometimes more."

"I saw a Korean girl, too."

"Korean? No, she is Thai."

"Thai? M. Beret, give me the benefit of the doubt, please. She may sit in a Thai cafe wearing those long white boots, but that does not make her Thai."

He pondered this. I could see him mentally rearranging his tidy filing system. "We shall see," he said. "Thank you. It's always good to have an informed point of view." He adjusted the belt on his coat. It was a gesture of unease, grooming behavior that police of all backgrounds lapse into when they are unsure of their footing. "We don't claim perfection. Or won't that do for an excuse?"

He might have been apologizing for mislabeling the girl. It was something I was not prepared to leave ambiguous. "I am simply observing your wide world, M. Beret. I hope you didn't think I was casting the first stone."

He smiled grimly, the way a man who has gotten the point might do. "You never really answered my original question. Out of curiosity, if you don't mind, what were you doing in New York?"

"I can't believe you of all people are asking me that." He still hadn't produced the roll, and I was beginning to think I would have to buy one for myself once I got out of this cramped park. "Is it a requirement in the West that a person must account for his movements to every police department and intelligence agency in every country he visits?"

"This isn't an interrogation, Inspector." He stood up. "I'm simply curious, and I thought you would find it a novel experience to answer a harmless question." I pretended not to notice that he had put his hand in his pocket. Dogs do that sometimes, look away when they're interested. "Your friend, the one who arrived yesterday, is in the morgue. He has a broken neck. Someone has to identify him, and your mission refuses to do it. I thought you might do the honors, seeing as how you were in a bar with him yesterday." He held out half a roll. "Please, be my guest."

That explained why Sohn didn't make the appointment at the Sunflower. The question was, when did he send me that note? Or did he send it at all? "When did you find the body?"

"I can't very well cooperate with you, Inspector, if you don't cooperate with me."

"I don't need your cooperation."

"Yes, you do. If you don't want to end up like him."

"You going to break my neck?"

M. Beret looked offended. "No, but there is someone in the neighborhood who doesn't like you, that's the impression we're getting." He paused. "Don't ask me how I know." He paused again. "I don't want anything to happen to you, not here. Having one of you in the freezer is enough."

"He had plenty of enemies."

"Then we'll have to make a list, won't we? I'll find a thick pad of paper." He dropped both halves of the roll in my lap. "Two o'clock, I'll be at the bar, the one where you met him. If you hurry, you can make the start of the morning negotiating session. It's at your mission this time, is it not? Don't worry, you won't have an afternoon session today."

Chapter Two.

The morning session of the talks went nowhere, though there was a testy exchange that kept everyone awake as long as it lasted. The afternoon session was canceled; somehow, I wasn't surprised.

When I opened the door to the Sunflower a little after two o'clock, the man behind the bar was watching a small television on the counter next to the cash register. He looked up from the soccer game that filled the little screen with little figures running aimlessly. He frowned at me. I frowned back. Like I'd told the Mossad over dinner, I don't like soccer that much. They probably had already put that in my file. The man glanced at his watch, shook his head, and then pointed to an alcove in the back. M. Beret was there arranging a number of photographs on the table in front of him.

"Ah, Inspector. I knew you would make it." He pointed to the photographs. "Nothing out of the ordinary. Just an effort to connect names with faces, faces with places, that sort of thing. I'm sure you do it all the time."

There were twelve pictures, arranged in four rows of three each. The first three rows each had one clear photograph of a face; the other two were grainy or taken by cameras with fixed shutter speeds-and from a considerable distance. The last row was all landscape shots.

"We're going to do this in a certain order. All you have to say is yes or no to what I ask. Don't jump ahead; don't a.s.sume you know what I'm going to ask. Shall we begin?"

"I don't see a photo here of Sohn. I thought that's what you wanted me to do, identify him."

"Already! I make things simple, and you make them complicated." He took a deep breath. "Again, I'll go over the procedure again."

"'Don't jump ahead.' I heard you the first time."

The man from behind the bar appeared. He and M. Beret had a brief conversation in French, in raised voices. They both looked at me. M. Beret took out his wallet and handed some money to the man, who a moment later returned with a bottle of wine, two gla.s.ses, and a small plate of cheese. There was no room on the table, so he put everything on the seat of a chair, puffed out his cheeks, and left.

"Let's get the pictures out of the way first, then we can sit." M. Beret picked up the bottle and read the label. "No hurry, actually; this won't be ready to drink for another year or so."

"I'm supposed to wait until you ask me a question."

"Good. Top row, picture on the right end. Taken at night?"

I leaned over and studied the photo. "No." It might have been, for all I knew. I just wanted to get this over with.

"Excellent. Simple answer. Continue in that vein, if you please. How about the one just below it?"

That one was taken at a distance, maybe at dusk. Two men faced the camera, although they had their heads down as if they were talking quietly. One of them was short and had sharply chiseled features; you could see that much because of the angle of the shot. In the dying light, it was hard to tell, but he seemed to have a dark complexion. I couldn't see anything of the man standing next to him. Both had on short-sleeve shirts. There were palm trees in the background. If I had to guess, I would have said it was taken somewhere tropical, but the question hadn't been where but when. I don't volunteer information unless I'm going to get something in return. There was nothing in this for me, except to find out what happened to Sohn. "You mean was it taken at night?"

"Yes."

"No. Twilight, maybe." By now I knew he didn't care when the photographs were taken, and he probably didn't care what answer I gave. He was just warming up the machinery.

M. Beret put his hands behind his back and stood on tiptoe as he leaned over the table. "Now, I want you to listen closely. Do you recognize anything in the third row of pictures? Look at them closely before you answer."

"Third row?"

"Yes."

"Third row from the top?"

"Inspector ..."

I didn't recognize anything in the third row, but the middle picture in the second row was of my brother meeting with the short, dark man. My brother had on a hat, something stylish and worn at just the right angle. I didn't know he wore hats. From a distance, this one might make him look taller, but it didn't change his face. He looked angry, which didn't surprise me. From what little background was visible, it appeared they were in Europe, and fairly recently. I couldn't see any loaves of bread.

The last picture in the second row was of the facility in Pakistan where the Man with Three Fingers and I had botched the operation during those few minutes a lifetime ago. I had forgotten a lot of things in the meantime, but I still remembered the layout of the facility and the target building, and especially that one room, by heart. In the picture, the door was open; it hadn't been that night. The photo must have been old. All of the trees looked smaller, younger than they had been when I was there. What the h.e.l.l was M. Beret doing with that picture? "No," I said finally. "I don't recognize anything."

"Not even the first picture, the one of the individual?"

I shook my head. "In the third row?" I hadn't focused on that one before. "No."

"That's Sohn when he was younger. He's changed a bit, may have had some sort of operation. I think he may have gone by another name in those days."