"No goats?"
He sneered. "Not even for you. You Wonsan people are disgusting."
"Too bad about your tape." I started toward the stairs.
"Wait a minute. What if I knew a certain person interested in some fish?" He paused. "Or a truck."
Kang had told me that if I mentioned the extra truck, the clerk would go right for it. "Truck? I don't know. It's new, Japanese. Refrigerated.
Why would I want to sell it?"
"Because you'll never get rich with those stinking fish, but that truck is probably worth something."
"And if it disappeared, someone wouldn't be too happy, now would they?"
"Happens all the time, you know. Driver stops for a drink, or a trip to Finland." He smiled in his irritating way. "Leaves the keys in the truck. Comes out half an hour later, no truck. Driver is happy. Truck is happy. One big happy scene."
"Nice. Happy is good. But a new, sparkling white refrigerator truck is a work of beauty. Anyway, it belongs to Pyongyang, not to me.
There'd be hell to pay once they saw it was gone from the gasoline reports."
The clerk was getting hungrier and hungrier. The more I described the truck, the more he decided he wanted a part of it. Even mentioning Pyongyang didn't scare him.
"Pyongyang is full of stuffed shirts and dopes."
I looked up on the wall at the two pictures, father and son, staring down. The clerk gave a nervous laugh. "This is a small country, but the Center is far away. In Manpo, we look at Pyongyang like the moon. All you need to know is what phase it's in."
"You're talking trouble, old friend," I said quietly.
"Don't lower your voice in here, pal. Someone might think we're not having a normal conversation. Listen, this place is filled with police, agents, investigators, counterintelligence goons, Chinese, South Korean, Taiwan, Russian. Last year we heard there was a pair of Japanese trying to set up an operation. Come to think of it, they said they were moving fish." He looked at me real hard, then half smiled. "Maybe I should ask you for some papers or something, after all."
"Maybe you should. Good way to lose a refrigerator truck. New tires. Not that retread crap." If the clerk was talking to me about counterintelligence agents and Russian operatives, he knew plenty. I might as well see how much more he had. Maybe he had some information on that Military Security site. I wasn't going to bust in there based on the little I knew about it. The dog didn't look to be a problem, but the machine-gun posts were another story. "What do you know about that compound in the hills, the one with the new Mercedes parked in front?"
The clerk was practically drooling at the thought of a new, white, Japanese truck. He stopped in midthought when he heard my question.
"No idea what you are talking about."
"White Japanese truck, refrigeration brand-new, good tires. A battery in it as strong as a bull's-"
"Alright. Be at the river at sunset. Down by the bridge. There's a little restaurant off to the side, behind some trees. Run by an old Chinese man and his son-in-law. Just hang around outside."
"What have they got to do with it?"
"You want information, you show up there."
This did not smell right. I didn't even know why I had told Kang I'd help him out. Now I was going to be down at the river as the light was fading, probably in a deserted spot, to meet people who might or might not turn out to be helpful. "If I don't like the looks of it, I'm leaving.
No truck. And no fish for you, either."
The clerk yawned and then shook his head. "I'm getting the feeling you don't have any fish, anyway."
"What makes you think I have the truck?"
"People have noticed you, pal. I wouldn't go out on walks in the hills at dawn anymore, that's what I wouldn't do." He moved toward his room. "Pirates," he muttered and kicked at a tangle of tape. Then he turned back to me. "Oh, this came for you."
It was a telex, from Wonsan. It was short. "Good fishing weather, lots of blue sky."
Even the Ministry couldn't locate me so quickly in a place like Manpo. So how did Pak know where I was, unless he and Kang were talking? And how was I going to call him? The clerk thought a moment and then handed me a name card he retrieved from the drawer behind the counter. "I'll bet Grandma Pak could get me another video," he said thoughtfully, as he shuffled into his room and shut the door.
I almost wasn't surprised that the old woman's reach extended all the way up here, to the border. Though if the clerk knew her, maybe he knew Kang, too. In which case, the two Chinese at the river might be helpful after all. I decided I needed to sit and think where it was quiet-no jeeps, no logging trucks with bad brakes. Kang had killed a Military Security operative; maybe it was an accident, but Colonel Kim wouldn't care. Military Security had orders to get Kang; now they had the perfect excuse to shoot him on sight. My stomach growled. A cup of tea was waiting for me, somewhere. Maybe it was time to crawl to the train station and get a ticket back home. Except Military Security would be looking for me. Surely by now they had a lead on who I was.
Kim would have picked up something, noticed I was gone from Pyongyang, and put out a search bulletin. Someone would have read it and matched me with the man limping beside Kang a few days ago. Once they knew I was in the area, they would have doubled the surveillance.
Maybe that's why Chong followed me up the hill, though it was hard to understand what he was doing operating by himself, without the rest of his team. They wouldn't all be as dumb as Chong. For sure, Kim wasn't dumb. Mean as a snake, but not dumb.
When I got back to my room, there was a note under the door, in Russian. It said: "A fresh jar of blueberry jam arrived today. Perhaps we could go for a picnic. Lena."
Lena. That must be the name she used with friends. Pretty name. A picnic was just what I wanted. Maybe on an old pavilion overlooking a meadow up in the hills, by a stream somewhere, where it was quiet except for the birds and the wind in the treetops. No fish. No trucks. Just Lena.
I looked again at the small card the clerk had given me. Funny name card, blank, no name on it. The back of it was more interesting. There was a portion of a train timetable cut out and pasted on. It listed a train to Kanggye, but that was crossed out; beneath it, underlined, was a train Hyesan-Musan-Najin-Harbin. Except I knew there weren't trains anymore to Harbin. This was an old schedule. The date, in small print along the bottom, was "Year 11 of the Reign of Showa"-1936, the year my grandfather joined the anti-Japanese guerrillas, based not far from Manpo.
I held the card up to the light and thumbed the edges and bent it in the middle to see if there was an extra layer. This wasn't a message from Pak; we'd agreed on codes that had to do with weather reports, not travel itineraries. Pak had gotten through to me; the telex from Wonsan was from him. So who was this card from? Najin was all the way up the coast, near the border with Russia. Why would I want to go up there?
And Harbin. Harbin was out of the question. I didn't have a passport with me, I didn't have Ministry orders allowing me out of the country, and I wasn't carrying enough money to bribe the guards. I put the card on the table next to the bed and lay down to think.
12
The sky was clouding up rapidly, the tops of the hills shrouded in a gray mist; there was a thunderclap that echoed around the mountains with a deep rumble, and then it started to pour. It sounded like a freight train in a tunnel. The rain came in torrents, making it impossible to see anything, not even the trees in the yard. No picnic today. The window leaked as the rain blew against it. On top of everything else, this lousy town couldn't build a tight window frame. In winter, the cold air must pour into the room. My head still ached from the morning, and I needed to sleep.
The rain beating on the window reminded me of the first dinner I'd eaten in Budapest, in a quiet, frayed restaurant where I'd taken shelter from the darkness and the driving wind. The waiter had frowned when I spoke Russian to him, but when he saw I was alone, he softened slightly and assured me I was most welcome. He guided me to a table by the window, where the raindrops drummed against the old leaded panes.