"But you've decided not to."
"No, the temperature has given me no choice. I have to get straight to the point."
"Suddenly, I'm doubly not interested. Forget it. Whatever you are going to suggest, forget it."
He shook his head. "Listen closely. I need your assistance, and in return, you can have whatever you want."
"You're not serious. Only yesterday I told some fool that when it gets cold, people talk crazy. I thought I was making that up, but maybe it's true."
"I'm not trying to recruit you, Inspector. I'm not asking you to betray your country."
"Then why couldn't we stay in the hotel for this?"
"I don't want your brother agencies to know, that's all. There are people trying to prevent me from getting my work done. Some people want me to succeed. Some people don't."
"The latter group seems to be on top; tough for you. It's nothing that concerns me."
"Quite the contrary. You don't live in a bubble. Lots of things concern you, even if you know nothing about them."
I stopped. "Look at that line of trees over there, look at the tops, what do you see?"
"Let's keep moving. We're not talking about trees."
"You may not think so. What do you see?"
"The tops are even."
"Good. Now, look at the trunks, what do you see?"
"Inspector, I'm freezing out here. Can we get to the point?"
"The trunks, what do you see?"
He sighed heavily. "Some of them are on small mounds, some are on the ground, but the tops are all still even. Are we done with this?"
"Even, you say. None too short, none too tall. Now, let's move closer. What do you see?"
"The tops aren't even any more. Can we please go inside? I value my extremities. I'd like to keep all of my fingers." He looked at me oddly, but I pretended not to notice.
"Nice illusion, isn't it? The tops aren't actually even. You can see that with your eyes, but your brain insists on creating a sense of order where none exists. It's an illusion. What you see, and what is there-not the same."
"Have you ever seen pictures of those frozen mammoths in Siberia, Inspector? This is what they must have gone through in their final, excruciating moments. Listening to police-mammoths lecture until they turned to ice blocks."
"Ever since I was small, I noticed the illusion that trees gave, or rather that my eyes did. Things look uniform, only they aren't. We have a need to see uniformity, so we do. Eventually, I began to wonder if reality was someplace other than where I was. Ever have that feeling?"
"I have no feeling left. I think my lungs have begun to ice up."
"No, that doesn't happen for at least another ten minutes, don't worry. If you breathe through your nostrils, it might delay things a few minutes beyond that. In your case"-I looked at his nose-"maybe a little longer."
He groaned audibly. "I think I'm dying."
"The first time I can remember sitting on a train, staring out the window, I watched a farmer walk beside an oxcart along the edge of a field. The ox was plodding, the two of them barely moving. It confused me. The farmer was in sight for a few seconds, and then he was gone. Whose was the reality? His? Mine? Did he disappear? Or did I? Was he still there? Was I? I have that same feeling right now with you. If I look away, maybe you will disappear and not be there when I turn back."
"This is truly stunning, Inspector. How did I get mixed up with the only North Korean alive who imagines he is Spinoza? Stop worrying with metaphysical oxen. Pay more attention to the temperature."
"Don't you ever wonder about reality?"
"Yes! No! Who gives a damn about reality? We have to get out of this cold." I didn't move. "Do you know what absolute zero is, Inspector? It's the temperature at which I lose my temper. Forget the big questions right now. There are savage birds circling. We don't have time to worry about theories of existence."
I looked up, but there was nothing there. No birds. "Just suppose," I said. "Suppose this isn't reality. Suppose I'm actually somewhere else."
He stared at me oddly again. Then he shrugged. "The cold must be getting to you. Listen to me."
Chapter Two
Jeno talked, and I listened. He referred to his list of travel requests, said he could do without meeting anyone from the party, emphasized again and again how there were people who wanted him to succeed while he was here and thus it depended on me to help him do that. He mentioned that virtue was its own reward, but added that additional recompense was not beyond question. He threw in a few comments about bikinis and suntan lotion, but then his teeth started chattering so badly I decided we'd better get back to the hotel. At the front entrance, he repeated that there were dangers all around us, birds of prey circling and so forth.
I dismissed this as an exaggeration brought on by exposure to extreme cold. I'd seen it happen in the army when we were on guard duty for extended periods in winter. Frostbite of the brain, someone called it. I stuck around the hotel and kept my eyes open for the next twenty-four hours, nevertheless. I wandered through the lobby; I sat drinking tea; I shuffled into the hotel store and chatted with the salesgirls. I went up to the front door and looked outside. Nothing untoward occurred; nothing even looked about to occur. Day moved to night and back again without a hint of the unusual. There were no signs of bodily harm in preparation. People weren't hanging around the vicinity of the hotel where they shouldn't be. That was easy enough to see because the streets were empty. No one could be inconspicuous in this weather. Just in case, as I left to return to the office, I told the chief security man at the hotel to keep tabs on Jeno, something beyond their normal routine. I didn't completely trust the hotel staff or the BSD men hanging around, but there wasn't much I could do about that. We didn't have enough people left in the office to assign against phantoms, not new phantoms, anyway. The old phantoms were taking up all available personnel.
When I got back to the office and told Pak what Jeno had said, I thought he would laugh. He didn't. "That's all of it?" he asked.
"Every word." Some of what Jeno told me had been intended only for my ears, or at least that's what he implied. But I don't keep secrets from Pak, not when it comes to work. We don't always put it in the files, but I make sure Pak knows everything I know-almost everything.
"Go back there and sit around," Pak said. "I don't trust those security men, none of them. There's a reason they work at the hotel, and it isn't a good one. All I want is for our guest to leave in one piece. That's not too much to ask, is it, Inspector?"
I'd just spent a full day and night moping around the Koryo, watching the security men watch me. Why would I want to go back?
"The hotel has hot water," Pak said. This was true; they had more than the Foreign Ministry.
"The duty car is acting funny. You don't mind if I take yours?"
"Why should I mind? You take my car all the time." He tossed me the keys. "If you spin out on a patch of ice, don't call me, I don't want to know."
Back at my desk, I opened the top drawer and did a careful inventory. If I was going to sit doing nothing in the hotel, I might as well have a piece of wood that would help me sort through the case. Something pragmatic. Elm was good in that way. Most trees succumb to nonsense at some point in their lives. They get top-heavy. They forget their roots. Not elms. From beginning to end, they remain stately and pragmatic. I had a piece of elm somewhere.
"Get moving, O!" Pak yelled down the hall. "I don't want to explain to the Minister that something happened to our guest while my inspector was pawing through scraps of wood." I grabbed the first piece I could find. Acacia. Suboptimal for the work at hand, but it would have to do.
When I got to the hotel, I spotted Jeno sitting on a bench on the second floor. He waved but didn't make a move to join me. Well, I thought, if the molehill won't come to Mohammed.
"I'm tired of being in my room," he said as I stepped off the escalator. "There isn't a lot on TV at this hour, and I'm out of things to read." There was a book next to him on the bench.