Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare (13 page)

“Of course, this is all fairly recent.” Pang gestured to someone I couldn’t see. “We’ve had the land for a long time.” He gave
me a bland look. “The current situation has called for a few adjustments in normal protocol. The paperwork always trails behind. I’m sure you’ve had the same experience.” A woman came out of a low white building some distance from the pavilion. She put down two porcelain teacups and a pot in the shape of a bird. “We’ll have tea,” Pang said. “Would you like ginseng tea?”

“No, I can’t stand it.”

“A Korean who does not like ginseng tea? Can this be? Well, in that case, let me suggest something else. I can offer you very good tea from Zhejiang. I’m sure you’ll appreciate it. General Su Dingfang drank the same tea from these very cups.”

The woman had moved away to stand beside one of the maples. Beneath the lanterns, a smile danced across her lips as she saw Pang pour the tea into my cup.

“Let the tea set for a moment, Inspector. The fragrance builds beautifully if you wait.”

I waited, but not for the tea. Su Dingfang was a T’ang Dynasty general who invaded Korea. He had the help of other Koreans, true enough. If these were his teacups, they were in remarkably good shape. Pang’s had a tiny chip on the rim. The glaze on mine was cracked, but I would be, too, if I were thirteen hundred years old. Assuming these were actually General Su’s teacups, what was Pang doing with them?

“If you like, Major Su over there could refresh your understanding of history.” The woman nodded. “She is a descendent of the general. The teacups have been in her family all these years. They wouldn’t be sitting here in front of us otherwise. It’s quite an honor, don’t you think?”

If I didn’t get up in another minute, I would never stand again. I put my hand on the floor behind me and leaned back to relieve the pressure on my knees. “Don’t tell me, the family thought it would be a filial gesture, returning the teacups to the general’s old battlegrounds.”

Pang rested his hand on the teapot. “They thought the cups
would bring the major good luck in her mission. And I am delighted to have her ancestor here with me.”

“A long, long time ago, Colonel. Didn’t you tell me that borders change? The border right now is down the middle of your beloved rivers. That’s where it is going to stay.”

“Don’t misunderstand, Inspector; I’m not here to seize territory. But if some of your countrymen want assistance in resisting pressure from another kingdom, there is a long history of our making ourselves available. Didn’t Baekche ask us for help? In fact, in recent years we’ve been happy to provide shelter for a number of generals from your army who thought it best to live on our side of the river for a while. Now? Well, now they have decided they might want to go home. And we quite agree. In any case, Chinese have been here before, and now they are here again.” He picked up his teacup. “We are quite tolerant, you’ll see.”

“The Japanese have also been here before,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean we want them back.”

“Surely, Inspector, you aren’t comparing us to them.”

“I know General Su was a great military leader.” I bid farewell to my knees. It was hopeless. I would have to be wheeled around from now on. “I also seem to recall—and you or the major will correct me if I am mistaken—that he went home in defeat, having failed to take Pyongyang.” I picked up my cup. It was very delicate. If I crushed it between my fingers, I would not be doing history any favors.

Pang sipped his tea. “All the better for Major Su to return and remedy that.” He smiled. “You could be valuable to your people, Inspector. If you’d rather work with your brothers in the South, of course I understand. But I can tell you that there is no way that they will reclaim this entire peninsula. And anyway, do you think there is any chance that they will integrate you into their fat and happy world? That would set their economy back decades, depress their living standards, lower wages, siphon off capital, create a burden to support twenty-four million needy
people—and your people are needy, Inspector. You cannot dispute that.” He waited to see if I would respond.

I put the teacup down gently. “I can dispute anything,” I said. “The question is, what good will it do?”

“Let me be blunt. We know that some of your southern brothers plan to set up a gangster state on your territory. They need it to make money, to hide money, to move money. Other people think such a state will be useful because it can become an ideal platform for operations of all sorts against my country. There used to be such places elsewhere—Macau, for example. But we’ve been shutting down Macau, inch by inch. It is very slow going. Ridding even that tiny island of corruption is not like washing your face. It’s not simply dirt; it has become organic. The job might take several more years to finish, maybe even a decade. Meanwhile, it has already become uncomfortable enough that the big people, important people, are looking elsewhere. People like Zhao. People who give Major Kim his orders. And where do maggots go? To a rotting corpse.”

“Should I start composing poetry now, or should we wait a few more minutes?”

Pang’s expression hardened. “We won’t let that take place on our border. We will never let events come to that. I told you not to go to Macau, but now I’ve changed my mind. Go; look around. It’s better if you get some sense of what happens when corruption takes root. I don’t mean the petty bribery that goes on everywhere; I mean the full-blown version that turns men rancid. If it doesn’t sicken you, if you don’t come back here and tell me that you will work with us, I will be surprised.”

“And you do not like to be surprised.”

“It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s that I’m careful to make sure surprise doesn’t touch my existence, in any way.” His mood visibly improved. “Why don’t I put on some music for us?”

“Chinese opera, perhaps?” I was not looking forward to that,
but it seemed all too likely in the presence of General Su and his cups.

“Do you like Chinese opera, Inspector? I can’t stand it. The spectacle is tolerable; at least the costumes are a distraction from the noise. But a recording? I wouldn’t even want to saw boards to it.” He must have realized his mistake immediately, because he reached in his pocket and pulled out a small, paper-thin piece of wood.

“I understand you are much attracted to trees. This is a piece of white birch, from a forest near Harbin. Mean anything to you?”

“As your research has obviously discovered, my father was born in Harbin.” Pang had done his homework. This was his way of telling me that he could step into my life and rearrange it any time he wanted. He didn’t care if I despised him for it, as long as I understood.

Major Su walked over and took away the teacups. Pang waited until she had disappeared inside the white building. “If you look carefully, you’ll see that on the piece of wood is a phone number. The digits are quite small and rather faint, but you should have no trouble making them out. If you see or hear anything in Macau that has a bearing on the fate of your country, call me. Tell the person who answers that you owe me money. They will put you through to me immediately, any time night or day.”

Major Kim had told me to make sure that the evidence in Macau pointed “elsewhere.” When I asked what the evidence was, he told me that was for me to find out. When I asked how bad it was, he said very simply, “Bad.”

“There wasn’t time to set up your trip through the normal contacts,” he said just before I left for the airport. “You may run into interference here and there. I’ll keep doing what I can to smooth things out from this end, but mostly you are on your own.”

“Do I have a number to call in case of a real emergency?”

“No.” Kim spread his hands. “Nothing. It’s not that sort of assignment. You’ll have to deal with things as they come up.”

“Do you know me if something goes wrong?”

“What do you think?”

“About the passport.”

“What about the passport?”

“I need something else.”

“You may as well get used to carrying ROK documents, Inspector. Besides, on such short notice, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t come up with anything else. Don’t worry; you won’t die simply from handling it.”

I wasn’t worried about a dread illness. I was worried about the entry stamps—they didn’t look right. If they don’t look right, even for a moment, they get a second glance from Immigration. And
if they got a second glance, it usually meant having to answer a lot of questions in a hot room. I had that happen in Copenhagen once, and I didn’t plan to go through it again. Some Danes are very persistent. I could see Kim wasn’t going to budge, though, so I moved on. People can be stubborn about passports, even phony ones. “What about emergency funds?”

“You have all you’ll need.”

“There’s not very much in this little envelope.”

“There never is. I don’t have more to spare. Be thankful you have an airline ticket and a hotel reservation. If you pay anything out of pocket, you’ll be reimbursed, though it takes forever.”

“How about advice? That’s free.”

“Stay away from your own people in Macau. They’re all over the place, and they won’t know you’re there. At least, they’re not supposed to know. Don’t wink or nod or give a secret handshake to anyone. Stay out of Korean restaurants. I don’t know who stands where on what issue, and we don’t want to find out the hard way.”

“You mean they don’t know what’s going on here?”

Kim shrugged. “Hell, Inspector, I don’t even know most of the time.”

We laughed. Neither of us thought it was funny.

My plane landed in Hong Kong around five o’clock on a muggy afternoon. I waited around in the airport for a couple of hours until the ferry left for Macau. We pulled up to the dock around eight at night; it was so humid that the raindrops were sweating. The immigration officer was bored, but not so bored that he didn’t look at every page in my passport. Then he did it again, this time flicking each page with a sharp click, letting me know he wasn’t fooled one little bit by all the travel that never happened. Finally, he stamped it wearily, unwilling to make an issue of
what he knew could not be easily dismissed. He handed it back, never looking at me, as one might not look at a bag of garbage dropped at the front door.

When I gave the cabdriver the piece of paper with the hotel’s address, he studied it for a long time. “OK,” he said finally. He shouted into his phone, and I heard laughter from the other end. We drove down a wide street lined with casinos, neon signs dancing and shouting and making a mess of the night. Finally, we turned onto a quiet street, went another block, and then turned again. The hotel was a hole-in-the-wall between two dark buildings that looked abandoned. There was lettering over the entrance, “Hotel Nam Lo,” and a piece of poster board just inside the door with pictures of the rooms. They looked bleak. The front desk was up a flight of stairs that led to a lobby big enough for a person to turn around and go back downstairs to find another place. Kim had said I should be grateful that I had a hotel. He had never met the desk clerk. The clerk looked up and shouted at me in Cantonese. Years ago I learned that having to cope with too many tones in a language makes a person angry. Who wants to go through all that effort to say something that someone else can coast through in a monotone? I let him vent.

“Three nights!” he said at last, in Mandarin. Having to deal in only four tones seemed to calm him down. “You must really think you’re something. For everyone else, the rooms are for a shorter time. A couple of hours, but not you! Must be some pills you got.”

“Is there a problem with three days?”

“No problem, as long as you aren’t doing something weird. I don’t want police around.”

“OK by me.”

“Absolutely nothing with animals.”

“Nothing with hooves.”

He put on his glasses and gave me a hard look. “Pay in advance. Extra day for damages.”

“Over my dead body.”

“Might be. That’s why you pay in advance.”

The room was up another flight of stairs. It was exactly like the picture, small and grim. I edged in. There was space enough for a ratty chair and one lamp with a minibulb. The television didn’t work; the phone made gurgling sounds when I accidentally knocked it off the hook.

Thumping noises came through the wall from the room next to mine, but nothing that sounded like an emergency. I wasn’t tired; it wasn’t that late yet. I knew I’d strangle myself if I stayed in the room for another minute, so I went for a walk. One block to the right of the hotel were buildings with pulsating signs; the block to the left was deserted, empty, almost completely dead. A couple of jewelry shops were open, but the clerks were dozing with their heads on the counters.

Climbing the stairs back to my room, I passed a young girl coming down—short skirt, white mesh stockings. She had green eyes; even in the dim light of the stairwell you couldn’t have missed those eyes.

“Watch yourself,” I said in Russian. “It’s dark outside.”

“You speak Russian.” She paused on the step below mine and looked back up at me with her green eyes. She wasn’t more than twenty.

“I speak Russian,” I said. “Go home; go back to your family.”

“In five months,” she said. “Good night.”