A Drop of Chinese Blood (13 page)

“You’re not interested in biology.”

“No, what interests me is that he is a North Korea police detective.”

“Retired.” Now we were getting somewhere, though not anywhere I wanted to be.

“Retired from North Korea, or retired from the police?” The old man closed the file and looked at Miss Bao. She picked up a new pen. The man smiled at me. “About your uncle, what is he up to?”

“Up to?” That wasn’t normal interrogation-speak. It was vague, left too much to the discretion of the person being grilled. “Up to? You mean right now?”

“Don’t repeat my questions. It wastes time. Just answer them.”

“Sure. Want to try being more specific?”

“Your uncle is still in touch with people across the river. How does he contact them?”

“Well, if I knew that the first part of your question was correct, I might have a clue how to answer the second part. As far as I know, he’s not in contact.”

“We’ve noticed funny people hanging around near your house.”

“You have any photographs? That might help.”

The old man nodded to Mr. Penguin, holding down the east flank of the office. “Show him the pictures.”

2

By the time the questioning and answering was done, the morning flight had left. So had the one at two o’clock. It was already late afternoon. The session had not been friendly; it certainly had not been short. By the end, I was tired, hungry, and plenty mad. I don’t like being badgered, especially for prolonged periods. If they weren’t going to drag me away, then they could go to hell as far as I was concerned, sore shoulders and all. I told them that. They finally stopped and looked at the woman with the pens. She shook her head; they straightened their ties and told me to go home, so I did.

The house was quiet when I stepped inside, which meant my uncle was in his workshop, either dozing or contemplating plans for another bookcase. It turned out to be the latter. He had a pencil in his hand and a slight frown on his face.

“I can come back,” I said. After being the object of a nightlong interrogation, I wasn’t about to deal with his moods.

“You could. Or you could come in.” He put down the pencil. “You have some sort of news or you wouldn’t be home this time of day. You left in the middle of the night; now here you are. You’ve been cashiered?”

“I need to sit. May I?”

“Sit, by all means. Of course, sit.” He pointed to a stool in the corner of the room. “Let’s see if the new glue I tried this morning dries as fast as they say.”

I sat gingerly. “First, if you see strange people hanging around the house with or without cameras, let me know, all right? Second, unknown quarters in MSS Headquarters filed an oversight complaint. That has worked its way up through channels, where it lodged in the brain of someone in charge of sending out special teams. One of those teams was in my office. That’s where I’ve been.”

My uncle picked up his pencil again and made a few marks on the bookcase plans. From what I could see, this one was to be built into a house with a fifteen-meter high ceiling. It actually looked like it might go well in Mrs. Zhou’s file room.

“The complaint is against you,” I said. “It is serious.”

My uncle grunted. “The problem with lumber around here nowadays is that it dries out too quickly. Even if I go to Harbin, it’s the same problem. You’d think good lumber would be easy to find at least somewhere in this country. You Chinese are buying up everyone’s resources, but you can’t import good lumber? If I’m going to build something fifteen meters high, the lumber has to be straight. Straight means straight, not curvy like that wall of yours in the front hall.”

“Apparently, Headquarters held the complaint for a week while it was discussed at higher levels. The highest levels, actually. A decision was dropped back down with a great deal of sizzle attached two days ago, and the team was dispatched almost immediately.”

“Your headquarters is nothing but trouble. It always was as far as we were concerned. When I was in the Ministry, we never liked going through Beijing on liaison trips. Too many of your people breathing down our necks. Moscow wasn’t so great either, believe me, but it was tolerable. They treated us like germs.”

“Germs?”

“They didn’t want to catch us. Too much paperwork.”

“There’s never too much paperwork here. I think it has something to do with inbreeding at the court. Like those little dogs.”

“Let’s be realistic. Why would anyone complain about me?”

I stifled my first response.

“Don’t stifle yourself, boy. What possible reason could they have? It wasn’t for making a scene in a noodle restaurant.”

“We’ve been through this already. You were among the last people to see Madame Fang before she disappeared, maybe the last. She must be close to someone in Shanghai who misses her pearls.”

“She’s been close to a lot of people, not all of whom miss her. She’d be the first to tell you. I can probably get a hundred testimonials to that effect, if you want.”

“I don’t want. I was told they have a bulging file of reports from people who say they saw her come here to meet you, and the next thing anyone knew, she was on the wrong side of the river.”

“And this has what to do with me? We’ve already established I didn’t lure her. Do they think I smuggled her across in a sack of rice?”

“They think you have connections.” I didn’t mention the pictures I’d been shown.

“Good for them. If I had connections, job one would be to get lumber that doesn’t warp, not fool around with Madame Fang.”

“Well, she came up here to see you, and that has a lot of people wondering why. The complaint recommends that you be brought in for questioning. ‘Recommends’ is a word you don’t want to see in communications from Beijing. It’s a nasty, explosive term.”

“I must add it to my vocabulary cards someday. They want to ask questions? Fine, go ahead, ask. You can do it right here. You’re authorized to ask questions, aren’t you? Then you can sit down, write a report, send it by one of your jazzy special couriers back to the imperial censor.”

“They don’t want a piece of paper. They want flesh and blood, not necessarily in equal measure. No, you’re to be brought to Beijing, unless…”

My uncle tapped the pencil on the worktable. “Go on.”

“Unless you agree to work for MSS.”

“Meaning they’re desperate. Pah!”

“That’s not all.”

“Of course that’s not all. They’re threatening to drag you in if I don’t cooperate, right? They think that’s leverage? Complete fools, all of them.”

“I suppose you did things differently in your day?”

“My day?” The voice became treacherously calm. “Let’s leave my day out of this. That’s the past, beyond anything you can understand. You don’t know what my day was like. Or your father’s, for that matter.” It was the closest I’d ever heard him come to saying something kind about his brother.

“Forget I brought it up.” The old interrogator had handed me a summary of the complaint just before things broke up. It had found its way into one of my pockets, though which one I couldn’t recall. My uncle watched as I searched.

“You looking for something special, or is this a spring cleaning ritual? Try the back pocket.”

It was in the back pocket. “This is what we have to deal with, here and now.” I held it up for him to see. “To be clear, I’m not asking you to go to Beijing. I’m not ordering you to do it either.”

“Good, because I’m not going. I travel to Harbin a few times a year. That’s enough of a concession to the wider world at my age.” He paused and drew a couple of lines on the plans. “I’ll do this much, I’ll meet them here.” He erased a line and drew another.

“Here? In this house? You expect them to crawl to see you?”

“In this workshop, about where you are now, though they won’t be sitting. And I won’t meet with a pack of them. It has to be only one.” He crumpled the plans and threw them in the corner along with the pile of his other ideas and dreams too bizarre or breathtaking to follow through to completion. “One or nothing at all,” he said.

“Impossible. They don’t do that sort of thing. Trust me.”

3

The knock on the door at 10:00
A.M.
wasn’t crisp or authoritative. It was barely halfhearted. We were expecting a visit by an MSS Headquarters team at 10:30, so I needed to get rid of whoever was there. The last time I checked, about an hour earlier, my uncle was on his bench in the workshop, writing poetry. I had made sure there wasn’t anything overly sharp within reach and then left him alone.

Outside the front door, for a change, wasn’t a beautiful woman. There were three men. Two of them I didn’t recognize, though I knew the type. The third was the cook from the noodle restaurant. From the way the others were standing, they had no doubt that he was in charge. He wasn’t carrying a knife, not that I could see, anyway.

My uncle had offered him a job. Why he had asked two friends to come along on an interview struck me as a little odd. Maybe they were references; maybe he was insecure, though people who cut off other people’s hands tend not to be. In any case, if he was here, it meant I wouldn’t have to send Li Bo-ting out to find out who he was. I could take him back to my uncle for fifteen or twenty minutes, slip in some of my own questions, and then show him the door.

“Welcome,” I said, not wanting to show surprise at seeing the cook again. I held the door half open. There was no chance I could keep all of them out if they charged in; there was no sense pretending I was going to slam the door. “Maybe your friends would like to wait outside. It’s a nice day, they can watch the birds.”

The heftiest man, with the neck of a bullock, hauled himself up to his full height, which wasn’t all that much. There’s going to be trouble, I thought and reached behind the door for a steel bar I keep handy.

The cook shook his head. “No need for anything physical. If my colleagues can wait inside, everything will be fine.” Colleagues? This was a gaggle of noodle chefs?

I made a command decision. “They can wait in the office,” which sounded more official than “the library.”

The cook’s eyebrows went up slightly. “And where is the royal audience to take place?”

“You’ll see.” I put the steel bar back against the wall and opened the door the rest of the way. The group followed me down the hall to the office/library. “You two amuse yourselves here. Those things on the shelves are books. None of them are cookbooks; otherwise you could find new ways to prepare bird’s nest soup.” The bullock scowled and occupied the red velvet chair. I closed the door and locked it from the outside.

“Won’t do any good,” said the cook evenly. “They’re both pretty good with locks. You’ll have noticed that Mr. Liang has a big right shoulder. Locked doors don’t stand a chance.”

We walked quickly down the hall and across the courtyard to the entrance of the workshop. At the doorway, the cook stopped suddenly. “Wait a minute. Is he here? Because if he’s not here, you’re going to be sorry.”

I put my hands in my pockets. “Calm down. This is his workshop.” I jerked my head in the right direction. “Lucky for you, he’s in a good mood. Don’t be nervous. He’ll just ask a lot of questions about noodles. Keep your answers short.”

As we entered, my uncle was pondering a sheet of paper. He put a finger to his lips. “A moment, please, I’m on the edge of finding the right word.” He concentrated again on the paper. “What I need is something that sounds like grass when the wind sweeps across a field.”

He looked up and frowned when he saw the cook. “You wouldn’t know anything like that, I suppose. Any language will do.”

“Very sweet. You’ve taken up poetry in your old age, O?” The cook glanced around the room. He was speaking Korean. “Still stuck on wood, I see. Any of these finished?” He pointed at the bookshelves against the wall.

“It depends on what you mean. I consider them finished. They served their purpose. To you they may appear incomplete, but that’s because you always had a bad habit of starting from the wrong place.”

“It’s never my starting point that has been the problem, it’s where I’ve ended up. I’m not going to play around with you, O. No one is anymore.”

I moved toward the door. If the man wanted a job, he was going about it the wrong way. The mood music didn’t seem scored for sharing fond memories. “Time for me to check on your sous chefs,” I said.

“They’re fine.” The cook took his eyes off my uncle and pinned them on me. “I want you here during the questioning. In fact, maybe you ought to make yourself useful and take notes.”

“Notes?” I echoed. “For what?”

My uncle nodded. “Good idea. We need a record of this encounter.” He sat back and smiled. “A complete record, nothing omitted. Nothing added afterward, either. I know how you make yourself look good in the reporting.”

“All right, O,” said the cook. “Let’s get this over with.” He took out a small notebook and flipped through several pages. “I’m going to ask a series of questions. They are perfectly clear, but I’m willing to repeat them once if you want to play your old games. Then you’re going to answer each one of them, and for a change, you’re not going to give me long, involved answers. I don’t want to hear any tortured logic or elliptical phrasing. You’re going to get to the point and stay on it. Don’t build me a watch. Am I getting through?”

“Like a brick over the transom.”

The cook smiled, only I didn’t think he was happy. “We’ll start with the obvious, and work from there.”

“Let me ask you a question first, if that’s allowed.” My uncle was also speaking in Korean, but it was very clipped so I had a hard time following. “Since when do you work for the Chinese? Or should I ask, how long have you been on their payroll? You can’t cook, by the way. You should be arrested for trying. You’re not with the MSS, I take it.”

“You can take it any way you want, O. My career path isn’t under the microscope here. Yours is.”

My uncle turned to me. “I want a verbatim record. Verbatim as in word for word. Even the pauses. Nothing left to the imagination. If you miss something, anything, just tell us to wait until you catch up. There’s a pad of paper on the top shelf of that red lacquered bookshelf.”