"You lock the front door? Even out here in the countryside?"
"Got to. The town is full of robbers and thieves."
I shook my head. "Don't they have any regular police in this town?"
The clerk smiled grimly. "Sure, that's why we lock the door."
6
Maybe it was the cool wind coming through the open window, or maybe the voices from downstairs, but I woke at 2:00 a.m.
"Plenty of rope." Suddenly the sleep fell away. It was Kang's voice.
"I want him to have plenty of rope. Just let him roam."
"You're the boss." The desk clerk must have been asleep as well, because his voice had the irritated edge of someone who did not want to be awake.
"Say that one more time and I'll get you transferred. Far out into the countryside. Without books." Kang's voice didn't change pitch, and I was willing to bet that his face didn't betray any emotion. "And tell Grandma Pak to forget she ever saw him."
I sat up in bed.
"Don't worry about her."
"I worry about everyone." Finally, Kang's voice went up a notch, then fell back to normal. "That's my job. It's my calling. It makes me happy. If you haven't noticed, I have perfected worry to a fine art.
The front door slammed, and a car started up. It was an old Nissan, from the sound of it, badly in need of parts. So, Kang knew Grandma Pak. I wondered if she sent him to the Lotus. I wondered if he had filled out a registration form.
7
It was a bird in the pine tree that woke me at dawn, which came early.
The bird warbled, waited a moment, then warbled some more. It could have been calling a mate, but mostly it seemed to be talking to itself. I was sure there would be no tea in the inn, and I wasn't sure where I was going to get anything to eat at this hour.
"You slept well?" The clerk stood behind the desk, reading the same book, with a cup of tea beside him when I came down the stairs. The test pattern filling the TV screen disappeared, replaced by a man and a woman waltzing across the floor, with the man counting in Chinese.
He kept turning his face to the camera.
"It's a dance program. They teach people to dance, Western style."
The clerk lowered the book for a fraction of a second. "You like to dance?"
"No, not something I've thought a lot about. I wouldn't mind some tea, though, and maybe a bite to eat."
"No one in this town dances." The clerk returned to his book.
"Might be some food down the street." He didn't look up. I couldn't tell if he was really reading or just didn't want to make eye contact. It was barely light, and I still wasn't awake enough for an argument, but I like people to be friendly in the morning or it ruins my day, and this guy was pressing the limits. An invitation to dance didn't count as being friendly, not from him, anyway.
"Down left, down right, any place special, or do I just wander until I bump into something edible?"
"I'll draw you a map." He handed me a piece of paper. His face was puffy and his cheeks sagged, as if he hadn't slept much.
Out on the street, I held up the paper he had handed me. It was blank. I turned it over and saw two words: "Blue sky." I began walking back toward the railway station. "Blue sky" was Pak's emergency code.
He had worked out a list one afternoon during a typhoon in the middle of a political storm when we had nothing else to do but watch the trees blow and keep out of trouble. "Just in case," Pak had said when he handed it to me. "In weather like this"-Pak always said "weather" when he was talking about politics-"we need a way to communicate, just us." There were five or six terms. "Blue sky" meant "Call the office, now." Not so difficult in Pyongyang, but I didn't know where to find a phone I could use without attracting attention in Kanggye. When he handed me the train ticket, Pak had told me to stay away from phones.
Now he wanted me to get to one. And I knew Kang was around somewhere.
He'd been at the inn last night, ordering around the clerk who had slipped me Pak's message. It didn't surprise me that Pak might have a way to get to hotel staff around the country; if the Ministry couldn't do it, no one could. But Kang worked for an external intelligence group. What was he doing walking around Kanggye as if it were his territory?
And how did he know where I was?
"Buy an apple." It was Grandma Pak. The same collection of rice cakes, fruit, and cigarettes was spread in front of her. The book with the duck was gone, but the stack of newspapers was untouched. Nobody had bought the birthday edition.
"Good morning, Grandma. And thank you for sending me to that inn." She sat there as if she didn't know what I was talking about. Well, that's what Kang had said she was to do, forget. The blank look on her face was very convincing. "Remember me? I was here yesterday."
She shook her head. "Lots of people around. I don't spend time memorizing faces, you know."
If she was this tough now, I wondered what she'd been like before she got to be an old lady pushing foreign cigarettes. "Where can I find some tea? I haven't had a drop in days."
She picked out a small apple and two rice cakes. "Give one of these cakes to Comrade Dumbo in the station office." I had no idea what she meant. "The old man," she said, and then pointed at the sky. "Real blue today."
An old man with big ears sat behind the stationmaster's desk. He squinted at me, maybe from being in the sun too much, maybe from reading too many railway timetables without glasses. His mouth turned down at the corners, like Pak's, but he didn't look unhappy. I noticed that all his wrinkles went the right way. He had a cup of tea. "Next train isn't until tonight. The freight derailed just after midnight in the Number 6 tunnel. What a mess. Scrap all over the place, and it's black as pitch in there. You can bet they are stumbling over themselves trying to clean up. Nothing's moving up or down the line." He paused to take a sip from the cup, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"You might as well relax."
"How about a rice cake?" I put both of them on the desk. There was no response. When I reached to take one of them back, he nodded toward the corner of the office.
"Railway phone, to the rail switchboard. Tell them you want to route it through central, it'll get you anywhere in the country. Even China, if you talk sweet to the operator." He stood up, put one rice cake in his pocket, and walked out of the office holding the other.
The ancient phone was heavy, the weight itself a sign that only solemn matters of high importance to the people should be squeezed through the five unevenly spaced holes in the mouthpiece. You can say anything you want into a modern phone, an unending rush of lightweight, pastel words that float across continents. Not this phone. I clicked the cradle several times to get an operator. A voice from far off came on. "Okay, okay, you can't be that important, just take it easy."
"Sorry, I didn't realize I was interrupting."
"You want to be connected somewhere, or do you want to chat?
Who is this, anyway? It isn't the stationmaster."
"No, he told me I could use the phone to call Pyongyang."
"Lines to the Pyongyang rail switch are tied up. Always are at this time of day."
"I need central."
"This is a railway phone. I don't do central without authorization, and the stationmaster doesn't cut it."
"Grandma Pak says hello." It was all I could think of on the spur of the moment. The old lady sat at the train station all day; she watched who came and went. The hotel clerk knew her. Kang knew her. And she knew my grandfather. She certainly didn't look like any street agent I'd ever seen. She didn't act like one, either.