"They can shoot you later, after you get back, if they want. Right now, we have no time to worry about the foreigner. You have seventy-two hours to tidy up your office, clear those piles of paper off your desk, and wheedle a decent pair of shoes from the supply clerk."
"I don't need shoes," I said. "I need an explanation. When I land in a city behind enemy lines, I like to have some idea of what I'm doing, don't you?" This sounded better; it even gave me momentary hope that I had found some firm ground on which to take a stand. Maybe Pak could turn it into something effective.
"No, you don't get to know anything." Pak had a better sense of footing than I did. If he didn't even pause to make a show of considering the argument, it meant there wasn't any firm ground on this one, only swamp for as far as the eye could see. "Obviously, they'll have to tell you something sooner or later. But nothing officially now, not yet, anyway."
"Nothing?" Paduk stones are given more notice of being put on the board than I was getting.
Pak shrugged. "You didn't hear it from me, but it has to do with the dead woman, the one for whom you were supposed to sweep up a few facts and then dump the whole thing back in the Ministry's file of 'cases-for-another-day.' We only needed some background information on her. Nothing elaborate, remember? Shoe size, preference in blouse color, eating habits. Anything to fill up a few pages. Maybe if you'd done that like I told you, we'd have been able to unlatch ourselves from this whole thing."
"You don't really believe that."
"Doesn't matter what I believe anymore. But, no, I don't believe that."
"So, why New York?" I already knew why, or part of it. Her father had told me.
"She was in New York for a short time before her final assignment. That much you've already discovered on your own, I take it. They want to know what she did, who she saw, where she went while she was there. They think it's important, why I don't know. I told you about those strange winds from strange places. This is one of those. Think of yourself as a seabird being blown off course to an exotic clime."
"It's January. New York isn't exotic; it's colder than it is here. I know, I read the reports from the security detail assigned to the diplomatic mission there. They say it's miserable."
"As if anything they write can be believed. Why you in particular were selected to go on this junket might seem odd, but these are odd times. You've been overseas before, so I suppose you naturally came to mind."
"Is this another one of those favors?"
Pak could be impassive when he needed to be.
"You volunteered me?"
"Don't be ridiculous. I protested being deprived of staff, especially now."
"You wrote a complaint?"
"No. But I crumpled the order a couple of times."
I smiled at Pak. He threw the file over to me. "Consider yourself doubly lucky. There's a big meeting here next week, one of those national sessions. Ten thousand extra people in Pyongyang with no heat, no electricity, and no food. We'll all have double shifts trying to keep them out of trouble. All of us but you. You will be happily away from the action, seeing new sights, dodging muggers and blond women with legs that reach all the way to heaven."
"I'm not going. They can't make me."
"And will you cite the muggers or the legs as the reason?"
Chapter Four
I would have rather flown anything else, even a Chinese airline, but the Ministry insisted that I take their advice. "We've booked you on the U.S. national flag carrier," the travel clerk said. "We know airlines, don't worry." So on Tuesday afternoon, I climbed into a middle seat and took my last full breath for twelve hours. The man next to the window was as big as an ox; the woman on the aisle had hips. The ox and the hips both ate their dinners without looking up. I left mine on the tray. When the lights went out for the movie, I listened briefly to the engines, closed my eyes, and tried to think.
New York. I was bound for New York, where I could expect orders that would officially tell me less than what Pak had already told me informally. The orders would be encoded, but try as the code clerk could, he would not be able to make them sensible because, at base, they would be meaningless, almost certainly designed to use what I already knew to lead me away from what I really needed to learn. Whatever I was supposed to discover in New York, I wasn't supposed to understand how it fit into a larger picture. Pak had told me as much as he knew. Well, almost as much.
This had not been a simple investigation to begin with, even if that is what Pak insisted we could make it. Simple investigations don't send inspectors to strange places, in such proximity to strange hips. Someone in Pyongyang was abnormally worried about the dead woman's fate, and was frantically searching for clues on at least three continents, maybe more. More and more, it looked like that "someone" was Pak's acquaintance, the one for whom he was suddenly doing favors. The one for whom I was only a Padua stone, put on the board wherever he needed. Nothing simple about it. Either the woman was extremely important in her own right-and what little I'd seen so far didn't suggest anything along those lines-or she was involved in something very sensitive. Or maybe none of the above. There was still that final possibility, the one that kept popping into line and wouldn't disappear. Maybe she wasn't really the focus of whatever it was that was going on.
Besides the woman, there was Jeno. No connection between the two of them that I could see, except that they dropped into my life more or less at the same time. Jeno had an inordinate interest in missiles. The woman might have been killed in Pakistan. I didn't know if there were tabs and slots in all that, but it was worth bearing in mind.
As long as there was nothing else to do, it would have been good to make a few notes, but there wasn't enough room to move my arm.
Chapter Five
"There was about the place the curious and companionable silence of men at breakfast away from home."
Pak seemed to be listening to me; I saw his head move to the side as it does when he is puzzled. But I was tired from the flight home, and he was slightly out of focus. Maybe his head hadn't moved to one side. Maybe mine had.
"It was a plain room, like the rest of the hotel. We all ate in solitary fashion. The waitresses kept their voices low. I suppose it might seem like a funeral, but it wasn't. It was oddly pleasant. Even though we didn't know each other, there was a sense of unity. We frowned together when one of the tables started a conversation. Bankers, I think. They were the only ones wearing yellow sweaters and big glasses."
This image of the breakfast room was still fresh in my brain. It was the only thing fresh in my brain. Otherwise, a brick occupied my skull, and had since I arrived back in Pyongyang around midday. The brick and I went straight to the office. "Don't worry," the customs official at the airport had said as he went through my bag absentmindedly, "it's jet lag. They say it goes away sooner or later." So far it wasn't going away. My consciousness was still over the Pacific.
"That's it?" Pak shook his head. "You were in New York for almost a week, and all you remember is breakfast?"
"I'll go back to my desk and write a long trip report once I figure out what time zone I'm in." If I went back to my desk, I could close the door and put my head down.
"No, I want to hear it from you directly, not on paper, not in your deadly prose. Come on, Inspector, I'll buy you a beer later, or something stronger if you prefer." He waited, but when I said nothing, he closed his eyes. If I dared do that, I'd be asleep where I stood. "It must have been amazing," Pak said.
"It was."
"I'm listening." Pak's voice had taken on a dreamy quality. He settled back in his chair, his eyes still shut. "Leave nothing out."