CHAPTER Five
“There was about the place the curious and companionable silence of men at breakfast away from home.”
Pak seemed to be listening to me; I saw his head move to the side as it does when he is puzzled. But I was tired from the flight home, and he was slightly out of focus. Maybe his head hadn’t moved to one side. Maybe mine had.
“It was a plain room, like the rest of the hotel. We all ate in solitary fashion. The waitresses kept their voices low. I suppose it might seem like a funeral, but it wasn’t. It was oddly pleasant. Even though we didn’t know each other, there was a sense of unity. We frowned together when one of the tables started a conversation. Bankers, I think. They were the only ones wearing yellow sweaters and big glasses.”
This image of the breakfast room was still fresh in my brain. It was the only thing fresh in my brain. Otherwise, a brick occupied my skull, and had since I arrived back in Pyongyang around midday. The brick and I went straight to the office. “Don’t worry,” the customs official at the airport had said as he went through my bag absentmindedly, “it’s jet lag. They say it goes away sooner or later.” So far it wasn’t going away. My consciousness was still over the Pacific.
“That’s it?” Pak shook his head. “You were in New York for almost a week, and all you remember is breakfast?”
“I’ll go back to my desk and write a long trip report once I figure out what time zone I’m in.” If I went back to my desk, I could close the door and put my head down.
“No, I want to hear it from you directly, not on paper, not in your deadly prose. Come on, Inspector, I’ll buy you a beer later, or something stronger if you prefer.” He waited, but when I said nothing, he closed his eyes. If I dared do that, I’d be asleep where I stood. “It must have been amazing,” Pak said.
“It was.”
“I’m listening.” Pak’s voice had taken on a dreamy quality. He settled back in his chair, his eyes still shut. “Leave nothing out.”
“It’s just a city. A city is a city. Cities are all basically the same. They may be in better or worse states of repair, they may seem more or less orderly, but if the fundamental reality is straight in your mind, you don’t get overwhelmed.”
“The point?” Still that dreamy voice, as if he were listening to me from somewhere else. That wasn’t like Pak. Even when fully awake, I was the one who drifted; he was the anchor. If Pak began drifting, I’d float out to sea for sure, food for sharks.
“It’s a city, with buildings, streets, and noise.” I paused, irritated, sleepy, still not sure I could remember what I’d seen because I wasn’t sure I had really seen it. That reality problem again. “Lots of noise—cars, people, construction equipment. They are always tearing up streets, from what I saw, even in the dead of winter. There must be some flaw in their road construction technique. Huge holes in some of the streets.”
“There are always flaws. Maybe there’s a shortage of asphalt.”
“It is crowded during the day, but empty at night in most places.”
“Unsafe.” He stirred. “That’s what a lot of people say, it’s unsafe.”
“Could be, but I walked around a good bit and no one bothered me.”
“Were you followed?” As I should have guessed, the man was paying attention, he wasn’t dreaming.
“I thought you were going to listen.”
“Well, damn it, O, you’re wading too long through the preliminaries. I’m just interested, that’s all. So, were you followed?” He opened one eye to emphasize that this was a question that couldn’t be avoided.
“There are always a few thousand people behind you, who can tell? I think I caught sight of a tail once or twice, but there wasn’t much of an effort to disguise it. The same man came into every coffee shop and bookstore with me for an entire afternoon. When I sat down, he sat down. When I browsed, he browsed. It looked like they were pushing, trying to see what I would do. Either that or they share the same training manual with our special section.”
“Skip it. You can describe the operational stuff for the files later.” He sat up, alert again. The anchor was in place. “What was there to see? And don’t try to tell me all cities are the same. They aren’t.”
“There are buildings—lots of brick buildings, most of them old, though they think old is a hundred years. Not all of them are that tall.”
“Not tall? What are you talking about?”
“Some are pretty tall, of course, but not all of them.” Building height didn’t interest me that much. I didn’t mind craning my neck to look up at a tall tree. After all, it had grown to that place in the sky; the topmost leaves felt breezes the taproot could only imagine. But buildings didn’t know one floor from another, and didn’t care. “You know what was fascinating?”
Pak groaned. “You’re going to talk about trees, aren’t you?”
“There were signs painted on some buildings. These aren’t banners or rooftop signboards, but slogans actually painted on the buildings. And I don’t mean political slogans. I started taking notes about them while I was walking around. They were odd announcements, advertisements for goods, mostly. I saw one for ‘Undies.’ No one in the mission had any idea what it meant. I did an informal study to see whether those signs revealed anything, you know, sociopolitical insights into economic superstructure. That sort of thing.”
“I’m hearing, but I’m not believing. What do you know about economic superstructure?”
“It’s a small island.”
“Three and a half kilometers wide. Not even as wide as the demilitarized zone.”
“You were following me around?”
“When I have an inspector far away, I like to keep him close. I just needed a mental map of where you were, so I did some checking. I trust that was alright.”
“How long is it?”
“From the Battery or from South Ferry?”
Suddenly, I didn’t feel so sleepy. “You’ve been there, haven’t you?”
“I’ve been here in my chair, Inspector, waiting for you to return and regale me. And you were talking about the economic superstructure. Proceed.”
“I was about to say, we have a North-South problem, right?”
Pak wagged a finger. “It’s not a problem.”
“You want to comment on everything, or do you want to listen?”
“Speak, o traveler.” Pak settled back again and closed his eyes.
“They divide East-West, like Germany did.” I waited, but Pak didn’t stir. “I couldn’t see any difference between the eastern part of the island and the western part, but they can. So I did a little survey and discovered it shows up in subtle ways.”
“I’ll bet.”
“You know what I discovered? On cross streets—those are the streets that are numbered—most of the building signs are visible only for those coming from the west, walking easterly. On the avenues—the bigger streets that run north and south—there is a slight preference for those coming from uptown, moving south, but that may be a statistical anomaly, except on Park Avenue, which is, from all I could tell, a bastion of the rich. So ask yourself, who benefits? Who is supposed to be looking at these signs, and who is being disadvantaged?”
“Okay, I’m asking myself.” He opened one eye. “And you are going to tell me.”
“The conclusion is inescapable. It is wrapped in a subtle sociological and class message, a subtextual fly in what the Americans like to think of as their fabulous melting pot. Simply stated: If you come from the poorer section, the east side, and cross over to the richer west, you are on your own. There are few signs put up for your benefit. But do you think those on the east side simply accept this?”
“I have a feeling they don’t.”
“That’s right, they don’t. In protest, most of the signs on the east side are meant for east side eyes. There are plenty of signs on the backs of buildings not so far from our UN mission, along the east side of Lexington Avenue. Who are those signs for? Pilots on East River tugboats? Far-sighted people on the Queens waterfront? I don’t think so.”
“Queens?”
“Look on your map.”
“That’s it? The sum total of your report?”
I rubbed my hands together. “I’m only getting started. Maybe I should take up political analysis. How hard can it be? Let’s go for a walk.”
Pak sat up and looked out his window. “In this rotten weather? February is no time to stroll around.”
“Cold is good for you, it helps the new shoots.”
Pak laughed, finally. “Whatever works,” he said, and put on his coat.
When we were on the street, Pak put his hands on his ears. “I forgot my hat. This is a hell of a cold day to be outside, O.” He’d used my name twice in a row; it meant he was happy to see me back. “Walk briskly. Never give your blood a chance to stop moving.”
For some reason, it didn’t strike me as so cold. “You want to hear about New York, you’ll have to slow down a little. I can’t think when I’m slipping on the ice. All my mental energy goes into balance.” I slid on a patch that Pak had stepped around. “What has happened to the snow-clearing teams? Isn’t anyone responsible for keeping the sidewalks clean anymore? They do a pretty good job of clearing the sidewalks in New York.”
Pak slowed long enough for me to catch up. “You might want to go easy on the invidious comparisons. Think before you say anything for the next few days, until your feet are back on the ground.” He reached for his ears again. “What did you learn about our lady friend? That’s why you were sent there.”
“I thought you wanted local color.”
“Sure I do. What’s the sense of having you go halfway around the globe if you don’t bring back tales of dragons and giants? But the vice minister has been badgering me for information on that lady. You and I know he doesn’t actually give a damn. What really concerns him is that your trip came out of the Minister’s special budget, and so he needs to justify it. Of more concern to us, the Minister is being squeezed for information about the case. Every morning after you left, I got a barrage of phone calls from him. Each one had exactly the same message: He needed the answer today … this minute … this very minute …”
I didn’t care about the vice minister. He was a rat and sooner or later would be trapped like one. The Minister was another matter. Who was putting pressure on him? An inspector might bend in the breeze; the Minister had a more difficult time doing that. Big trees blew over more often than little ones.
“I don’t think I found much of anything that is going to help. It can be summed up in a couple of sentences. She was there for only a few weeks, at which point she left suddenly. She barely gave any notice. The security man at the mission said she told him a couple of hours ahead of time, that’s all. He was still mad. He’d never seen anything like it, he said. And when he sent in a negative note for her file, he was told to forget the whole thing. As far as I could tell, she didn’t do much in the office. The wives complained she didn’t fit in.”
“For instance.”
“They had a reception, and all of them were supposed to cook something. She didn’t cook. She bought something already made and unwrapped it right there in front of them. There was an argument about it, but word came down to leave her alone. People pouted that she got special treatment, and no one was sorry when she left.”
“They know she was murdered?”
“Some rumors. They figured that’s why I was there. I got furtive glances but not much cooperation.”
“Where was her husband?”
Her husband, the one who was going to get her in trouble with the locals. If she was so difficult to get a line on, he would be impossible. People seemed to know less about him than they did about her. “I got very blank looks whenever I brought him up. He was supposed to be there, they were expecting him, but he never showed up in New York. No one notified the mission that his orders had been changed. Guess where he went instead? Pakistan, or that’s what a few people thought they’d heard.”
“Maybe he’s still there. Anybody bother to check yet?”
“Not me, I was only a local broom, remember? She arrived in New York at the end of June, hung around until July, and then one night packed her bags and was gone.”
“She couldn’t have just left on her own. Someone must have taken her to the airport.”
“Well, she didn’t walk there, that’s for sure. The airport is too far away. But no one in the mission drove her. I looked at their logs.”
“Nobody bothered to find out how she got there?”
“The security man told me it was on his list of things to do. It’s a long list, he said.”
“What was she doing in the city when she wasn’t in the office?”
“Either no one knew or they wouldn’t tell me. People said she went for walks in the park in the center of town.”
“Not alone, she didn’t. She’d be petrified to go out by herself in that city.”
“Could be, though if she took after her father, I don’t think she had a lot of fear. You think she knew someone there?”
“Don’t you?”
“I’m not sure if she already knew someone, or maybe she met them by accident.”
“But she knew someone.”
“That’s what it looked like, but I wasn’t going to dig around in something like that. I had no authorization; the orders were a joke. Anyway, I didn’t know the territory. The main thing is, she didn’t act like a normal Foreign Ministry wife. And if she didn’t act like one in New York, I’ll bet she didn’t do it in Pakistan, either.”
“You were wrong.”
“This was useful?”
“No. It was more than a couple of sentences.” We stopped at a doorway. Pak knocked. There was no answer.
“It’s dark, they must have left. Let’s go back to the office.” By now I realized Pak was right, it was a crazy cold day to be outside.
“Don’t be so impatient, Inspector.” He knocked again, two taps; he waited, then one more.
The door opened a crack, barely wide enough for us to slip through. “Hurry up, you’ll let all the heat out.” A woman’s voice. Then laughter. Inside was nearly as cold as it was on the street. The room held a few small tables; two men sat drinking morosely. The woman who had shouted at us appeared. “All the heat!” She laughed again. “You’re welcome to sit as long as you want. If you want to drink, you can do that. No food, though. The shipment of twigs didn’t arrive.” At this, one of the men laughed, and the other stared into his glass.
“Good, here we are, warm and cozy.” Pak looked at the candle on the table. He had his jacket zipped all way the up. “Anything hot,” he said to the woman. “Hot water with sawdust sprinkled on it, I don’t care. As long as it’s hot. Bring it, and then leave us alone.”
The woman disappeared. When she returned, she had a tray with two bowls of soup and a pot of weak tea. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s as hot as it’s going to get. If I had some fish, it would be fish soup. But I found some salt, don’t ask me where, and that makes it seem like there’s fish in it. No charge for the leaves.” She put the tray down and disappeared again; this time she closed the door behind her.
We finished the meal quickly and in silence. The two drinkers stared at us. Pak reached in his coat for cigarettes. “Tell me a story, Inspector, about a faraway place.” He lit two cigarettes and gave me one. “Weave a magic carpet, take us to the land of fallen women and beggars. And if you can’t take us there, take us to New York.”
2
“It wasn’t much to see.” I looked over at the drinkers. They turned their attention back to their glasses. “Very simple geography. It’s on an island, like Yanggak-to, only bigger.” I waited.
“Three and a half kilometers wide,” Pak said. “Or did I already mention that?”
“It sits between two rivers, both broad enough to keep the population from moving back and forth except for the bridges. There are a few boats, but not many that I saw; maybe because of the cold weather. The wind was fierce, and there was snow piled so high in some places I could barely walk across the street. The whole place is pretty flat, though they haven’t leveled it completely. Some streets are steep going down to the river on the east side.”
“Like San Francisco.”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been there. I didn’t think I knew anyone who had.”
Pak hummed a few notes.
“What is that?”
“Called ‘Gone to San Francisco’ or something. It was on the radio when we were out on operations sometimes, and we’d sing it as a joke because the boss said if we got good enough, one day they’d send us to steal the Golden Gate Bridge.”
Again, I sensed problems with the anchor. Pak had never told me anything like that before, not even hinted it. Something was making him very bold, almost reckless. “Do you want to talk about San Francisco or New York?”
Pak smiled and studied his cigarette. “Go on, tell me a tale. What about the buildings?”
“Buildings,” I said, relieved he seemed to have calmed down again. “You’ve seen enough pictures to know what the skyline looks like. But you can’t really understand the traffic without being there. There’s noise from cars, horns honking, bus engines straining, almost the whole day long. At night there are trucks. I don’t know what they carry, but they are going fast and they make a hell of a racket. Most of the cars are old—plenty of speeding and not much attention to traffic laws. Hardly any traffic police, but otherwise lots of patrols in cars and some on foot. If we had that many police visible on the streets, there would be a revolution. There’s always an emergency vehicle screaming up one street and down another.”
“Pedestrians? Bicycles?”
“Hardly any bicycles. Must be banned, though you’d have to be crazy to ride a bike in that traffic. You can’t walk down the sidewalk without running into some beggars; in fact, a lot of beggars. Some prostitutes, too. A considerable number of people who looked very rich, if you find yourself in the right neighborhood. Women …” I paused to collect my thoughts because I still found it hard to describe. When I had seen it I could barely believe my eyes. “Women dressed up but obviously not satisfied with what they have because they are shopping for more. Prices are crazy; the prices of some of that clothing must be worth several months’ wages to the clerks. Countless restaurants and markets, plenty of vegetables. Even in winter.”
“Vegetables.” Pak nodded. “You journey to a distant civilization, and you tell me about carrots?”
“Wait, I nearly forgot. Where’s our foreigner? I should get in touch with him; we have unfinished business, remember?”
“Don’t bother. He left.”
“Left? When?”
“The day after I told him you were called away on another assignment.”
“Did he ask where?”
“He did.”
“Did you tell him?”
“No.”
“Strange that he should leave all of a sudden.” It didn’t sit right, somehow.
“Everything about him is strange. Strange is our byword these days. Get back to the buildings. You skipped over that part.”
“Old, new, tall, short, no empty spaces, just wall-to-wall buildings except for a few parks and the banks of the rivers. They’ve never been in a war, so nobody flattened the place. They do it themselves, the tearing down.”
“It doesn’t sound like you were in the office much, interviewing people.”
“The mission wasn’t interested in cooperating. Once I started asking about our subject, no one wanted to talk to me except to register complaints about her lack of cooking skills. So I went out, tried to get some feel on my own for where she’d been, whom she might have met, what she might have seen. Routine stuff.”
“And?”
“I got lost.”
“Were you followed?”
“Didn’t I already go over this?”
“Yes, but we’re going to get asked again and again, so let me make sure I know your story.”
“It’s hard to be sure whether I was followed. That’s my story.”
“Not the best, but we’ll work on it. You said you were followed into a bookshop.”
“Who knows? I told you, the same guy went into four coffee shops with me. I suppose it’s possible that he just liked coffee. I only went in to warm up.”
“You want me to guess? I’m guessing you were followed. Besides him, anyone approach you directly?”
I thought about it. “I was walking up a street, very steep, right where cars come out of a tunnel that goes under the river, east something street. There was a man walking down the hill. He stopped and asked if I needed help.”
“Strange. Did he stop everybody he saw, or just you?”
“I was looking up at the buildings. He might have thought I was lost, which I was. He said a few words of Korean that he seemed to know, but I pretended I was Chinese.”
“You think it was choreographed?”
“Nah, just chance. Old guy, colorful coat, though—red and black and white and I don’t know what else. He didn’t seem to have much to do. He wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere like everybody else.”
“You double-check?”
“Sure. I made a note about the episode and gave it to the security man. Don’t worry, we’re covered. No one of the old man’s description rang a bell with anyone at the mission. They said he could have been any one of a thousand religious Jews walking around. There was nothing in the contact logs fitting his description or that sort of approach.”
“Religious Jews.” Pak repeated it slowly. We looked at each other. “Maybe she was followed, too, and maybe she bumped into a religious Jew and maybe she never reported it. She wasn’t the type to fill out forms, as far as I can tell. Runs in the family, I guess.”
“Have you been doing your own research?” I was trying to remember the face of the old man on the street. It was mostly beard, so I couldn’t be sure of the rest of it.
“Her father called the Ministry to complain about you, and they told him to call me. We talked for a while, if you can call that research. What if she was approached in New York? That could have some connection to what happened to her later.”
Sure thing, I thought. The long arm of New York. “There is no way to know what she was doing. The local security man only had a chance to follow her two or three times. He thought she might have been tailed by the locals. Nothing subtle, as far as I can tell. How many relays of people in blue scarves can there be, he asked me. Each time, she lost them for a while, but they picked her up again without much trouble because she went to the same place each time, that park. Going there she’d walk using a slightly different route; but each time she took the same cab home. He was sure it was the same cabdriver, a female. I thought that might be something, but it wasn’t. When I tracked the driver down, it turned out to be a young Pakistani woman whose father had sent her to the U.S. to go to school.”
Pak nodded. “A young Pakistani woman. Sure, there must be lots of them driving cabs in New York. At least she wasn’t a Jew. Tell me, please, O, that there are no Pakistani Jews.” He paused, turning this over in his mind. Then he went on. “This driver, she told you a story, I suppose.”
“She did. I got in her cab and told her to take me to one of the train stations. She said she was bored with school and started driving a cab. She was worried because her father was coming for a visit. If he found out she wasn’t in school, she said, he would drag her home. She didn’t want to go. Why not, I asked. Because he would arrange a marriage to a man who would treat her like dirt. He might beat her. What will you do, I asked. She turned around to look at me. ‘If he beats me? I’ll kill him.’”
“Maybe she was just making the whole thing up.”
“Nope. All you had to do was to look into her eyes. This was real. She wasn’t kidding.”
Pak took a last puff on his cigarette. “Get some sleep,” he said. “You should take up smoking again.” He pointed at my cigarette, floating in the soup bowl. “Might help your jet lag.”