Inspector O 02 - Hidden Moon (26 page)

“I’m sure.”

Boswell gave me a look that suggested he could detect barely disguised sarcasm as well as the next man, no matter the language. I smiled at him. This broke no ice.

Min supplied a few more details of why an English—Scottish, I thought to myself—policeman had been dumped on our doorstep, and then he sent the two of us out to establish our own working hierarchy. Min indicated that Boswell was the visitor and thus was expected to follow my lead. This seemed unlikely to me. The visitor was twice my size. I imagined if an oak tree could walk, it would have his tread. We didn’t speak until we were down at the duty car, which had been sitting unused since I returned from Beijing. Besides being dirty, it wasn’t very reliable.

“It’s not new, but it runs and it gets us around,” I said when we were both inside. I had to hope it would start. The seats were worn, the dashboard was cracked, and the knobs were covered with a film of nicotine, so, no, it was not new. Normally I didn’t care what people thought of the duty car, but if we had known we were going to entertain a visitor, I might have cleaned the knobs. I turned the ignition key. There was a click, then nothing. We sat in silence as I turned the key twice more and got two more clicks, the second somewhat fainter than the first.

Boswell put his paws on the dashboard and looked out the window on his side. “It won’t dewwww,” he said in something that resembled English.

“I’m sorry?” I said. “What won’t?”

“So, you understand English, Inspector. Good.” He switched to his accented Korean. “You’ve no gas. Or your battery’s gone. Or your starter motor is shot. We’ll have to walk, wherever it is we’re going.”

“Could be,” I said. “Wait for a minute. I’ll check something.” Car engines I don’t understand, but I opened the hood and looked inside. I jiggled a few wires, thumped a dirty piece of machinery. I spat on what I knew was the air filter, which looked clogged, probably with that damned Chinese dust. I slammed the hood, got back in, and turned the key. A wheeze, then the motor caught.

The visitor sat back in his seat and crossed his arms. “We’re off,” he said.

Damned right we’re off, I thought. “First, we’ll stop at the hotel and get you a room. After that, we’ll review the procedures.”

“Forget the hotel. I need a drive around the city, get the feel of the place, look at the roads, gauge the shadows.”

“You must be tired after your flight.” I didn’t have a single approval to go with this fellow anywhere but to the hotel and then back to the office. I certainly wasn’t going to drive him around the city without filing the paperwork. The last thing I wanted was another session with the man in the brown suit, asking me about the time a foreign police official spied on the city as I motored him around. “We can take a drive later, perhaps.”

“Sorry, we don’t have time for later, Inspector. I have my orders, and my orders are to make sure the permanent undersecretary gets in and out of here in one piece, the same piece.”

“You’re not suggesting there is anything wrong with security in my capital, surely.” It sometimes puts foreigners off balance to use the possessive—“my” capital.

“I wouldn’t be here if the porridge didn’t smell bad.” Maybe Scots didn’t respond to the possessive. He put his hand up to his mouth and yawned, a particularly delicate gesture for a tree, I thought. He stretched his legs as best he could. “Incidentally, Molloy sends his regards.” He pretended it was an afterthought.

My shoulder screamed; I swerved slightly and shook my head. He waited until I looked over to flash me a sardonic grin. Then he leaned against the side window and closed his eyes. The only sound the rest of the way to the Koryo Hotel was the engine coughing, from the dust.

When we got to the Koryo, Boswell said he wanted to see the hotel store, maybe buy some gifts. That was fine with me. I wanted some distance between us. Sitting down and having a drink by myself would have been even better, but there was nowhere to get a drink, so I just sat. Prague. Molloy. I took a deep breath and looked around. No one was interested, no one was paying attention; no one except the man in the brown suit and his friend with the ash club. They were somewhere else, going over what I’d told them and whatever else they knew, or thought they knew. The question was, what did they know? What had they heard about me from the British and, equally important, how? Of course my meeting with Molloy had gone into the files in London; that wasn’t a surprise. And anything that is put in a file runs a risk of coming out again. A file gets pulled on a slow day, and someone gets a bright idea. Alright, it had happened; a slow day and my file had fallen onto someone’s desk. I’d been waiting for the British to make a move; sometimes I forgot about it, but mostly it was just below the surface. I thought it would be something subtle; I hadn’t expected it like this. Not so directly, not in Pyongyang. There was no reason to do it here; it was not only dangerous, it was incredibly inept. If they had wafted word of my meeting with Molloy onto the winds that blew over Pyongyang, why send someone so soon afterward? Or had Pyongyang known about this for a long time? Had they been waiting, too? I imagined what the report looked like in the file that the man in brown had on his desk. Probably neatly typed. Maybe with a photo taken of me as I walked out the door that night in Prague.

I stood up and strolled around the lobby. If Boswell had any other moves, he’d have to make them soon. I wasn’t going to give him any encouragement; in fact, I was going to get as far away as I could from him. Anything I did in his presence would be misinterpreted, by both him and the man in brown. Tonight I’d tell Min to assign someone else to this escort duty, that I couldn’t do it. Then I’d go home and wait for a knock on the door.

I walked over to the front desk. “I need a room for a visitor.” I showed the clerk my ID.

“I’m sure you do. But we don’t have any.”

“All I need is a simple room for that man.” I pointed at Boswell, who was examining the lobby. “I’m not asking for the royal suite.” I showed the clerk my ID again. “Someone must have a record of the reservation.” I knew there wasn’t one, Min had already made clear the Ministry had botched this, but I might as well put the clerk on the defensive. “If you have misplaced it, just assign a room. I don’t have all day to stand and argue with you. The hotel isn’t full.”

“I saw your ID the first time, Inspector. And tonight, I’d suggest the roving patrols should be doubled on the river between midnight and 5:00
A.M.
”

“What?”

“You an expert on hotel occupancy? Let’s make a deal. I’ll stick to my business, you stick to yours. I happen to know there was never a reservation, nothing was misplaced. But we’ll let that pass, alright? How long does your big friend intend to stay?”

I lowered my voice. “The man is a guest of our government, and he happens to speak Korean.”

The clerk didn’t seem to care. “I asked how long he intends to stay.”

“What difference does it make? The room will be paid for.”

“You bet it will be paid for. We have a big group arriving tomorrow, two big groups, actually, who will be here all week. I’m not about to give away rooms to strays who wander in and then discover we need the space for people with reservations.”

I looked around for Boswell, but he was walking down the steps
into the hotel store. There was no sense indicating to the clerk that I didn’t know how long he was staying. “He’ll be here until Saturday. Stop wasting my time.”

“Passport.”

“I just showed you my ID.”

“Yeah, but I need the tall man’s passport. He can’t check in without it, even the police know that, Inspector.”

“Give me a room key, would you? The man is tired and he needs to rest. I’ll get you his passport before we leave.”

“Not possible. You want me to read you the regulations?”

When I told Boswell that he would have to give his passport to the clerk, he shrugged. “As long as I have it back in order to leave this happy land,” he said. In the elevator going up to the room, I worried he would say something stupid, but he was quiet. When we stepped into his room, he suddenly found his voice. In big, booming English, he said, “I assume, Inspector, that all unnecessary devices have been disconnected or removed. I hope so. If not, I’ll do it myself.”

I stayed in the open doorway and replied with as much crispness as I could muster, in simple Korean so no one could miss my words, “I don’t understand what you are talking about, Superintendent.”

“Of course you wouldn’t.” He laughed loudly, went over to the phone, and held it up. “If there is anything in, on, or around this damned thing that doesn’t belong, I’ll throw it in the toilet. Dewww I make myself understood?” He walked into the bathroom, turned on the bathwater, and let it run a minute. “I’ll have a bath when there’s some hot water. Let’s go for our city tour now. What we don’t get done today, we can do tomorrow. I want to see some of the route in the morning sun, check the shadows.”

“Tomorrow isn’t possible. It’s a holiday, the anniversary of the army, lots of people dancing in the streets. I don’t dance, so I won’t be there.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. If you want, maybe we can arrange for you to take part in the dancing. It’s very chaste, but people have a good time.”

“Is there a parade?”

“You mean a military parade? No, not this year.”

“Speeches? I don’t want to go and listen to speeches. Maybe I’ll just stay in my room and sleep tomorrow. Let’s cover as much ground as we can today.”

When we returned to the hotel later that afternoon, Boswell told me he could find his way to his room, thanked me for my cooperation to this point, and disappeared through the glass doors. The doorman bent back slightly, pretending to look up as the visitor strolled by, then grinned at me. I started the car so violently it frightened a woman walking up the drive, and she fled back onto the sidewalk. What was the man talking about, cooperation “to this point”? My shoulder hurt and my fingers were tingling. It made me think of the man in the brown suit, and the uses of ash wood. That was just as they’d intended.

Min was at his desk, reading a magazine, his face serene, like an October moon coming up over the hills. “Our Englishman all settled in? Where have you been?”

I’d calmed down on the ride to the office, but only slightly. Min could tell I was riled about something. I could see his ears trying to tune themselves to catch my tone. “He insisted on seeing the ‘lay of the land,’ as he put it. We drove around the city.”

“Unwise.” Min was instantly sorry he had offered any criticism and strained to pull back the word before it reached me.

“Don’t worry.” It was something I always said when I was worried. “I was followed by two SSD cars and someone I didn’t recognize the whole way, so no one can say we did anything untoward. The only time we stopped was in the square.”

“Did he like it?”

“He said the man with the beard didn’t look Korean.”

“What did you say?”

“I said he was probably right.”

“You didn’t tell him who it was?”

“I didn’t have the heart. If he doesn’t recognize Lenin, I’m not going to rub his nose in it.”

We both laughed, Min a little harder than necessary.

“So, where is he now?” Min asked in what he meant to be an offhand manner.

“Safely in his room, I hope. He’s probably going through the lamps and the outlets. He will take it as a personal affront if he finds anything, or maybe if he doesn’t. Give this duty to someone else, Min.” I paused. “Please, I don’t have time for it. You know as well as I do that they didn’t beat me up for practice.”

Min started to respond, then thought better of it. He tapped his pencil on the desk. “Did you check the security route? Let’s handle one thing at a time.” He looked out the window at the Operations Building.

I could feel my shoulder getting stiff, and I only had part of one pain pill left. “We did, in a manner of speaking. Mr. Oaktree said he needed to drive the same route again tomorrow, at exactly the same time of day the visitor will, so he can check the shadows and the sun angles. He wasn’t very happy to hear about the holiday; he kept asking why I can’t get a pass or something to allow us to drive around tomorrow. Don’t ask me why or what he expects to discover or why he seems to be in such a hurry. He wasn’t talkative, spent a lot of time drumming those big fingers of his on the dashboard.”

“Mr. Oaktree?”

“He’s very big, Min.”

Min put his hand over his eyes and slumped in his chair. “Can we not bring foliage into this, Inspector? It’s complicated enough for me to keep track of everything that is going on.”

“We could use it as a code name, on the radio,” I said, “if we still used radios.”

I kicked myself for raising the subject of devices. It would lead us
onto cameras, and I didn’t want the topic to come up. Photography was a painful area for Min. A visiting public security delegation from Syria once refused to attend a banquet he was obliged to throw them. In the hotel lobby, they informed us with a lot of shouting and rude gestures that we had insulted them by confiscating their delegation leader’s camera. The delegation leader hopped up and down, bellowing that the trainload of army tanks was in plain view, none of them was covered with a tarp. This was true, but it was still against regulations to take any pictures of military equipment. In the middle of this, Min got called away to the Ministry. On his return, somewhat paler around the gills than when he left, he told me to give them the camera back.