"And your country doesn't?"
"I just told you, we are melancholy, but it's in our blood, nothing to do with leaders. It goes way back. Maybe it's the mountains. If you can't look off toward the horizon, if there's always a mountain in front of you, you start to brood."
"The Swiss have lots of mountains."
"I know, I've been there. If you ask me, they're cold, not melancholy.
To be melancholy, you have to have blood flowing in your veins.
Have you ever heard them yodel? Depresses the hell out of me. It's an unnatural sound."
She sighed. "Why don't we just stop talking. It's too difficult, finding something we agree on. The silence will do you good."
I opened my eyes and looked at those blue buttons. "Surely you can find another bed." It was a mean thing to say and I said it in a nasty tone, something I find is easy when I'm tired and in pain from having been hit on the head needlessly.
Her face betrayed no emotion, but the voice changed, much less honey to it, and it wasn't just because she had switched to the Mandarin she learned at home from her mother. "As I told you, I wish I were in Finland, but I'm not, I'm here. What I did not tell you was that I despise this place. I despise this country. And I despise you. This room"- she looked around it as if surveying a battlefield-"this room is all I have. So you can eat the bread or you can choke on it." She finished off in a language I didn't recognize. She switched back to Russian. "That was Finnish. It's the language of endless forests and lakes so blue you feel it is impossible to drown in them." She smiled grimly. "And what I just said is, 'I couldn't care less.' Only it wasn't that polite. Good night, Inspector." She lit another cigarette and blew the smoke very carefully in my direction.
I started to wonder how everyone knew to call me "Inspector," but then I closed my eyes again and went to sleep.
3
"Why do Koreans get mad so quickly." Richie laughed. "A good question."
"Not coming from an Irishman, it's not," I said softly.
"There's that low voice of yours again, Inspector. Come on, we're alone, you can roar at me if you want. Lei off a little steam."
"I'll tell you a story, Richie. Take it for what it's worth. One day I was driving down a road in the countryside, and on the slope of a hill, sitting on a rock, was an old woman. In front of her was a small girl. The girl stood with her head bowed, sobbing. Finally, she turned and walked into an empty field, as if she wanted to disappear into the earth itself Why, Richie?"
"Why what?"
"Why would anyone want to make a child so unhappy? Why would anyone who had already lived their life want to grind a child into the dirt?
What possible reason, do you think?"
The Irishman hunched forward, his hands on his knees. "That happens sometimes."
"No, not like this. This wasn't a scolding. This wasn't a lesson. This was destruction, an A-bomb on a dollhouse. That child had nowhere to go, no sun left to shine, no birds to sing, desolation and sorrow in front of her as far as her eyes could see. She had collapsed, you could see it. I cannot imagine she could ever be made whole. Richie, listen to me. That girl had nothing left to hold her together, no tomorrow, no hope. She wasn't really crying. Tears are for the living. She walked into that field like she was already dead."
"Inspector." The color had drained from his face. "Children are like that. They collapse, then they bounce back."
"You didn't answer my question, Richie. Why would the old woman want to destroy that girl?"
"How can I know? I wasn't there."
"You see? You can't believe it would be done for no reason. And you know what is worse? You can't possibly understand. So don't talk to me about anger."
4
When I woke, the sun was streaming through the window. The curtains were long gone, but the rods remained, as if waiting for the return of better days. The plate with the bread was on the floor. There was no sign of the girl, her perfume, or my shirt. I needed to find the Manpo Inn. I needed to buy a jacket, and I needed some tea. I limped to the window again. Judging by the sound of a train whistle and the rumble of a locomotive, I was not far from a rail yard. It seemed very close. Off to the right stretched a line of hills. The river was nearby; I could smell it on the morning breeze. Probably that was where I needed to start.
Though start what, I didn't know. With luck, Pak would get a message to me explaining why I was here with a throbbing head and an aching back, instead of in Pyongyang. In Pyongyang, I knew, things didn't always make sense, but at least there I was not inclined to care.
I dozed off again, and this time when I woke, my shirt was folded on the chair. There was a note in the pocket, written in Russian. "Perhaps we will meet again, Inspector." It wasn't signed, but it looked like it could be her handwriting, and the hint of perfume was enough to make me fold the paper and put it back in the pocket.
Downstairs, the clerk looked at me suspiciously. "Checking out?"
"I didn't realize I had checked in, but I might need a room for tonight."
"Got none."
"The place is empty."
"Yeah, so?" I saw him open a drawer behind the counter with his right hand, while his left hand tapped a pencil on the magazine he had been reading.
"Nothing. This isn't up to my standards, anyway. Not even close.
Bread crumbs on the floor. Attracts roaches."
"Well," he said, "it's not the Ritz."
"What would you know about the Ritz, my friend?"
"What's it to you? You Pyongyang people think you are the only ones that know about the big, wide world and the rest of us are just yokels? Time for you to leave. I've got work to do."
"Friendly town. Who says I'm from Pyongyang, anyway?"
He started thumbing through the magazine. "Door is behind you.
Beyond that, the street. Watch where you walk, the jeeps are murder."
"Just one thing." I figured if he wanted to get rid of me so badly, maybe he would answer a simple question. "A restaurant."
He didn't even look up. "Too early. Plenty of vendors. They take cash, foreign currency, none of those lousy food coupons."
"One more thing, where is the Manpo Inn?"
He looked quickly in the drawer, which was still open, then shut the magazine and examined his fingers. When I didn't move, he glanced behind me. "Like I said, the door."
As I walked out into the street, I turned briefly back to see if the clerk was using the phone. He wasn't. The magazine again had his full attention. The sign over the door said new manpo inn.
At this time of year, there were another fifteen hours until sunset, when I was supposed to meet Kang. It was likely he was already here.
Driving would have been quicker than the train, even over bad roads.
Hell, for all I knew, Kang had ironed my shirt. I wondered if Elena worked for him.
The streets were already filled with traffic, mostly small trucks. All of them were heading toward an area some distance away, on the other side of the train station. It was a peculiar layout, making the town seem split in two. The Inn was in a run-down section, the usual ramshackle buildings on narrow dirt streets that dissolved into narrower alleys. On the main road there were a few tall trees, a building that had the air of a local party office, and further on, a large shed with a rusted metal roof that sagged badly in the middle and looked as if it would collapse but probably wouldn't. In the other direction, about two hundred meters this side of the train station was a one-storey wooden building. It stood pretty much alone, almost aloof. There were no windows along the front, just a blank wall right on the street, with four wooden steps that stuck out into the traffic. The building must have been there a long time, even before the road was built, maybe before the Japanese took over, but not longer than the hills, which it faced on the back. Beyond the old building was a cleared area, where a market had been set up, and a few more trees.