Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare (5 page)

“Is Michael on duty?” I glanced around the room. “Or will we have one of the morning crew? Paul, perhaps?”

A door off to the side opened and a middle-aged man in a suit and tie walked in. He eyed me briefly before turning his attention to Major Kim. “It’s not going to get any better if we continue to wait. You know that already, I assume.”

Kim took the top off the teapot and looked inside. “We have a meeting at nine o’clock.” He put the top back in place. “That’s why we call it a nine o’clock meeting.”

The man grimaced. “Your decision, of course.” He started out the door and nearly knocked over an aide carrying a tray.

“Paul.” I waved him in. “Good to see you. Put the things down and get out your notebook. Tomorrow, no four
A.M
. wake-up call, understood? Not four thirty, either. Let’s say nothing earlier than five o’clock. Go ahead, write it down; the major doesn’t object.”

Major Kim sniffed one of the dishes and handed it to the aide. “I don’t want this served ever again. Am I clear?” The aide nodded. “Good. And take note of the Inspector’s instructions about the wake-up call. If that’s what he wants, that’s what he gets.” The aide nodded again. “Dismissed,” said the major.

“Well,” said the major, after the aide had closed the door, “nothing here is easy. But then, there’s no reason to expect it should be. That’s part of the challenge. In case you’re wondering, the man in the suit is one of mine. The aide is one of yours.”

Mine. Yours. Marking territory, like a dog walking along the street. “A division of labor,” I said. “Very smart. Would you like me to haul a few buckets of water?” I looked around the room. “At the very least, let me arrange your chairs for the nine o’clock staff meeting.”

“Jumping to conclusions, aren’t we, Inspector?”

“You tell me.”

The major laid the dishes out on the desk. “Eat first, business later. I’m always hungry in the morning. You?”

“At my age, appetite is no longer central to existence. I don’t give it much thought anymore.”

“A weary thing to say, Inspector. You aren’t going to be glum all day long, I hope. We have a lot to accomplish, and we might as well be cheerful about it. If I weren’t careful, I could be depressed all the time, but what’s the use of that?”

“A new day dawns. The world is fresh, and yet we confront the same question as we did last night: What is this about?”

“Have some soup.”

“I don’t want soup. I want to know what this is about, because if I don’t find out damn soon, I’m leaving.” I didn’t think Kim would be fazed. He wasn’t.

“Leaving. Again. I would have told you last night, but you left in a hurry. Don’t press your luck, Inspector. I’d hoped to give you a lot of space to get used to things, but that’s not going to be possible.”

“I see.”

“No, I doubt that you do.” There was the tiniest flash of steel in his voice. “The fact is, from here on out, you are under my direct command. You take orders from me; you report to me; you jump when I tell you to jump.”

Really? What led him to believe such a thing? I’d just spent five years on a mountaintop not following anyone’s orders. I was going back in harness at the snap of his fingers? Not likely. “Yesterday, you were my insurance policy, my best pal. Now you are suggesting I am a draft animal. Something happen overnight?”

The major smiled obliquely; I checked off one of his thousand expressions. “I’m still your pal; don’t misunderstand. But I’ll crack your skull open and cook your brains for breakfast if you give me trouble. Is that clear?”

“Finally, we’re getting somewhere. Let me put two and two together. You’re from the South, as you told me last night. You
seem to be under the impression that you are my superior. Streetlights are on everywhere. And the room maid addresses me as ‘sir.’ Shall I take a guess at what has happened? Or what might happen?”

“No. You won’t be doing any guessing, Inspector. There’s no margin here for that. I move according to stone-cold facts. And that’s what you will do from now on, too.” He shrugged. “Confused? I suggested to you last night that facts are inconvenient, but so is reality. Facts may be a problem, but reality is a killer. There’s no way around reality, in my experience. Admittedly, you seem to have spent a lifetime avoiding it.”

“Let me get this straight.” I reached in my pocket for a piece of pine.

The major frowned. “What’s that? One of those wood chips you carry around?”

“This?” I held it up for him to see. “It’s pine, that’s all, a very uncomplicated wood. It helps me think uncomplicated thoughts. Nothing threatening about it, don’t worry. It won’t explode or anything.”

“Uncomplicated thoughts? By all means, Inspector, let’s keep things simple. Maybe I should pass out some of that wood to my staff. Do you have more?”

I considered that. “No, I don’t think it would do any good. What works for me might not work for them.”

“And what work is that? More adducing of the evidence assembled so far? Is this a reflection of your training or your temperament, Inspector?”

“The three dogs at the long table last night knew who you are. Paul the pliant waiter has a reasonably good idea. Everyone around here knows, I take it. Everyone but me.”

“Not everyone. Let’s say everyone that matters.”

“So, do I matter?” I got up and walked over to the window. The view told me nothing. It was an inner courtyard with two wooden benches, a few flowerpots with bright yellow mums, and a stone fountain made to look like a mountain waterfall, but it wasn’t turned on. The sky above the courtyard was still dark, but there was soft lighting around the fountain to illuminate the scene. “Must be pleasant, hearing the sound of water. It soothes the nerves; do you think that’s why they put it there? Very stressful, I imagine, working here. This office, for example, it must have been for someone with real power. Whose was it?” I looked at the windows across the way. The curtains were closed. It reminded me of the Operations Building across the courtyard from my old office. Our courtyard had no flowerpots and no fountain. We made do with three old gingko trees and a pile of bricks. “Before you moved in, who had this building?”

“You don’t know?”

“Never been here. Never even been near here, I don’t think. I never had much to do with buildings surrounded by tanks.”

“Let’s just say that whoever was in these offices has moved. They were happy to pack up when they were offered something better.”

“You’re not going to tell me.”

“At the moment, you wouldn’t be interested even if I did, because you wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

“I might.”

“No, Inspector, I’m quite serious. This building was for a group formed after you left. Or is ‘retired’ the term we’re supposed to use?” I didn’t rise to that crummy piece of bait. “The group was put together for a very specific purpose. That purpose has been overtaken by events. A lot has happened since you left.”

“People keep telling me that.”

“Perhaps you should pay attention.”

I went back to the brown chair. There was no way to relax in
it, no way to strike a pose of nonchalance in front of Kim. “I’m listening. I’m not going to interrupt. Sit and absorb—will that suffice?”

“We want you to take charge of a camp.” The idea came out of nowhere. It might have been better phrased, probably more effective, if he’d led up to it. But maybe he figured that the direct approach would catch me off balance. It did.

Sitting down again had been a big mistake, I realized. I should have remained standing. That way I could have walked out the door as soon as I heard him—out the door, down the walkway, over the hills, anywhere but here. But now I was sitting, and getting out of the chair would take those few extra few drops of will that his words had bled out of me in the hurry. Kim didn’t add anything. He watched the reflection on the desktop, waiting for my reaction.

“You mean you haven’t disbanded the camps?” The question was so obvious it was beside the point.

“No, not yet.” Kim looked up at me in a curious way. “It’s way too soon for that, don’t you agree?”

It must have been a stray note in his voice that rang the bell. That’s what he wanted; he wanted me to say yes to something—anything. Get a “yes” into the conversation, a tiny crack in the door. One single spark of assent, that’s all it took to light the fire. I’d nearly forgotten. I’d grown stale, up on a mountaintop forgetting everything I had ever learned, while he had been in this office, sharpening his technique every day. He was better than I thought, and that meant he was dangerous.

Kim appeared relaxed, but I could sense he was wondering if he’d moved a half step too fast. That’s why he followed up when he should have stayed quiet, let the idea simmer. “The camps, as you can understand, are a very delicate problem. We did try to disband a couple, but things turned disruptive. There were too many people walking around with too many bad stories. We don’t want an increase in negative feeling toward the current regime, do we?” He
smiled to himself, a sarcastic smile, a smile that said he could afford to be ironic on this question because he was sitting behind the polished desk and I was not. “Negative feeling—that wouldn’t be very helpful. Besides, we had experience running our own camps not so many years ago, you know. And we’ve also learned from what other people have done, as well, to get ourselves ready for this situation. Running prison camps isn’t easy; neither is getting rid of them. So much complaining! No one approves of them. No one wants to touch them. But, everybody gets their feet wet sooner or later. It’s unavoidable. The result is, there’s a large body of experience to draw from.”

“Which means?”

“Which means we’re improving the conditions a little at a time, retraining your guards, instituting new rules. But the camps themselves stay, for a while anyway. We figure what they need is leadership.” This time he gave himself an extra beat for pacing. “That’s you. You have the credentials, grandson of a Hero of the Republic and all that.”

“What about the Prison Bureau? Are you going to leave those psychopaths in place?”

“How comforting to know you never agreed with what was going on in those offices, Inspector! A little rearranging is in the works; I can tell you that much. A replacement here and there.”

“This is the little problem you wanted me to fix?”

He said nothing. I looked at my bowl of soup. My grandfather had made soup every morning, relentlessly, without fail. Every 6:00
A.M
., there it was, even in the heat of summer—soup. I pushed the bowl away. That’s why I was here, nothing to do with prisons. They needed my grandfather; they needed his blessing from the grave. Good luck, I thought. They weren’t going to get it, not through me.

“I can give you the names of plenty of people who would take the job,” I said. “You need someone with the right temperament for that sort of thing. You don’t want me.”

“Aren’t you going to ask which camp?”

“I’m not interested.”

“Of course, just like you were uninterested for the past fifty years in what went on inside those fences?”

This sounded very much like a knife cutting through flesh. A little soon, I thought, for him to make the move to the negative. He should have waited another round; he still had a few problems with pacing. Maybe they didn’t spend much time on that sort of thing in the South. “Apparently, this is the moment for me to chop wood for you,” I said. “Or maybe it is the day to polish one of the tanks?”

Kim looked at my bowl. “You finished with the soup? I’ll have the dishes cleared.”

“Yes, let’s bring in the trained monkey again.” We were done with the feint about the camp job, and he’d let the subject of my grandfather drop. So why did they send the ferret to fetch me from the mountain? What was so important that they needed me here?

The dishes were whisked away, and the first rays of sunlight came through the window behind me, glinting off a group of framed maps on the opposite wall. Somehow, they missed Kim’s eyes. Maybe he repelled sunlight, I thought. We sat in silence. Kim pushed a button and the shades on the window went down halfway. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “But I find the morning sun this time of year a little hard to take.”

Simple, I thought. Have Michael and Paul move the fucking desk.

Kim opened a file and began to leaf through it. He stopped with the last page, which he held flat on the desktop so I could see that it was a list of names.

“Tell me, Inspector,” he said finally. “Do I have your cooperation, or don’t I?” He had his pencil poised over the paper.

“No.” I stood up. That wasn’t the real question, and I didn’t
plan to wait another hour or two for him to get to the main point. He had something he wanted me to do, and I had no intention of doing it. If he thought he had some power over me, let him try. “If there will be nothing else, I have to get to the hotel to pack my things.”

He made a mark on the list, a small
x
next to a name. “Returning to the mountain, Zarathustra?” He crossed out one name near the top, then another. “I can have a car waiting for you. It can’t be done today. How about tomorrow? About noon?”

Downstairs, I realized I didn’t know how to get back to my hotel from here, because I didn’t know where “here” was. The duty driver was nowhere around, and no one offered me a ride. When I stepped outside and started down the walkway, I felt a tank gun barrel following me. Small-caliber weapons aimed at my back might not register, but a tank barrel—always. At the end of the walkway, a jeep sat idling, with a man in an unfamiliar uniform and a red armband at the wheel. He indicated I should get in, drove at high speed through the tunnel, and pulled over as soon as we emerged.