"Pretty fine-grained questions for a cop. You sure you're not one of those security snakes?" I shook my head and pulled out my ID. He didn't bother to look. That wasn't what generals did. Other people, guards at the gate, checked IDs.
"We didn't talk long." He was changing the subject. "She just wanted to know if I would send her something."
"What was that?"
"Got your attention now, don't I?" He went silent, so I waited. I could wait as long as he could. We stared at each other for a couple of long minutes. Finally, he walked into the next room and emerged with a book. "She wanted one of these. One of her books." He held it out for me to see. "Something about music. By the time I found someone to carry it out to her, she was dead." He felt bad about that, I could tell, but he wasn't going to say to me that this or anything else on earth bothered him. "Dead," he said again. "I don't remember where I put the damned book, if that's what you're going to ask me next."
"That's not the book?" I pointed to the one he was holding.
"I told you, I can't find that one now. I put it somewhere when I heard she was dead. I have this one, that's all. It was hers. I look at it sometimes."
Time to change the subject. If he sank any deeper into melancholy, I'd never get him back on dry land. I should have seen it coming as soon as he said he'd told her to be careful in New York. "You still go to the office? I thought you were retired."
"How long you been at this job, Inspector?"
"A while."
"A while. You were in the army?"
"I was."
"They boot you out?" The melancholy had been vaporized.
"No."
"Why'd you leave? Army not interesting enough? Too tough?"
"Maybe I should go out and come back in, so we can start this all over."
"Maybe you should just go out and not come back."
I looked around the room. "No, I don't think so. I think I have some more questions to ask, and I think you're going to answer them."
"If I don't?"
"But you will. Sit down, General. I don't really want to be here, and you don't really want me here, so we're on equal footing. I said sit down."
The old man squinted at me. When he was younger, it was a steely look; now it was just a squint. "You have a hell of a nerve." He paused. "No, I'm not going to sit. But I'll answer three questions. Then you're done. And don't think I'm not serious, because I am. People in the army still stand at attention when I break wind." He grinned. "You want to test me?"
"No. Three questions are fine, for now." I let that sink in for a moment. "First, when you spoke to your daughter, you said she sounded excited. Do you mean agitated? Did she sound worried about anything, anything seem to be bothering her, any concerns she voiced to you about her personal safety? That's all one question, by the way."
"No, she said everything was fine." I thought he might just shrug off the question again, but he seemed to take it seriously. "Something funny that I recalclass="underline" When she called from New York, she said she'd walked in his footsteps and now she could die happy. That's all she said before we were cut off. The second time, it was a few months later. It wasn't a good connection, but I'd say she sounded tired. Trouble sleeping. The chants or singing, whatever it was, woke her early. It made her edgy, she said, everything being so foreign. One more thing, she said that fool husband of hers was going to get her in trouble with the locals. I'll save you a question. No, she didn't say why and I didn't ask."
"You saved me two."
The old man grunted and walked over to the window. He moved one curtain to the side. The light didn't exactly spill into the room-it was already late afternoon and there wasn't much left-but the gray from outside crept along the walls until I could see that the place hadn't been cleaned in a long time. We fell back into silence. I figured I'd give him a chance to say something else, if that's what he wanted to do.
Finally, I stood and walked to the door. "I have a few other things to check, but I'll be back for the last two questions. If you remember something that you think you ought to tell me, something you forgot, let me know."
"Don't bother coming back. There's nothing else. You'll be wasting your time." He closed the curtain again. "I told her not to get into this stuff, but she wouldn't listen to me."
"What stuff?"
He moved over to the door. "I'm done talking to you, Inspector. Your people want something from me, tell them to put it in writing."
3
I spent the rest of December sweeping up a few inconsequential facts about the woman who had been murdered. Or not murdered. Anything was still possible, based on what little I knew. Maybe she'd just dropped dead. I didn't actually have a single fact about what happened to her, and the paper we had on her case told me exactly nothing. It asserted she'd been murdered. That didn't mean anything to me. But I was starting to lean. That happens sometimes. A few facts here and there, a feeling stirs an intuition, and the next thing that happens, I'm leaning in the direction of a hypothesis.
Her father told me she said she couldn't sleep because of the chanting in the morning. She wouldn't tell him it was the call to prayer, but that's what it could have been. This was circular, I knew. I assumed that what she was complaining about was morning calls to prayer for no good reason other than that Mun had suddenly shown up. Circular logic isn't wrong, it's round. If it was a call to prayers, it could have been any Islamic country, but again, not if I threw Mun into the equation. True, I didn't know where Mun had been for all of these years. I knew where he and I had been, though, and it wasn't a cosmic coincidence that he had suddenly appeared and wanted to talk over "old times" with me. Or that he had showed up just after someone had delivered an Israeli or a Swiss Jew, or whatever Jeno was, on our doorstep. If I had to choose, I'd choose circular logic over cosmic coincidence.
This is how I get when I start to lean, even when I know it would be better to assume things are unconnected. I looked, I swept, I dug into the woman's background, but there wasn't a lot of information about her where there should have been, and every time I found a gap, even a little one, I leaned a little more. She was dead. People had a habit of doing that, and afterward, there were always gaps. Some gaps are natural. That's how people live their lives-gaps, empty places, silences. But not like what this woman left behind.
I had no description of where she'd been when she died, or what time of day it was, or what color clothes she was wearing, or which way her legs crumpled when she hit the ground for the last time, assuming she'd been standing just then, at that moment. If I knew some of that, I might have some sense of where to start filling the gaps. So I dug into holes that already existed, and swept small voids into bigger ones. That's when it hit me, the pattern. Someone had given us this assignment, and then nothing. No pressure to finish the report. None. Mun had showed up out of nowhere, then disappeared again. No more contact. The special section had paid us two visits, and then they were off our backs. Not even a phone call. Gears were turning somewhere and then getting stuck. Not my business why, and as far as I could see, Pak didn't think it was his business, either.
To my surprise, it didn't turn out to be such a bad way to spend the end of the old year and the first weeks of the new one, poking around files, gathering odd facts, staring into the blank spots in the dead woman's life. There wasn't much else to do, and I wasn't in the mood to do nothing. The folder I was supposed to be assembling was still on the thin side, and I was wondering how to make it appear fatter one morning when Pak walked in and dropped some orders on my desk. Normally, he says something when he gives me a set of orders. This time, he walked out again without saying a word. Not happy, I thought as I tore open the envelope.