"Vegetables." Pak nodded. "You journey to a distant civilization, and you tell me about carrots?"
"Wait, I nearly forgot. Where's our foreigner? I should get in touch with him; we have unfinished business, remember?"
"Don't bother. He left."
"Left? When?"
"The day after I told him you were called away on another assignment."
"Did he ask where?"
"He did."
"Did you tell him?"
"No."
"Strange that he should leave all of a sudden." It didn't sit right, somehow.
"Everything about him is strange. Strange is our byword these days. Get back to the buildings. You skipped over that part."
"Old, new, tall, short, no empty spaces, just wall-to-wall buildings except for a few parks and the banks of the rivers. They've never been in a war, so nobody flattened the place. They do it themselves, the tearing down."
"It doesn't sound like you were in the office much, interviewing people."
"The mission wasn't interested in cooperating. Once I started asking about our subject, no one wanted to talk to me except to register complaints about her lack of cooking skills. So I went out, tried to get some feel on my own for where she'd been, whom she might have met, what she might have seen. Routine stuff."
"And?"
"I got lost."
"Were you followed?"
"Didn't I already go over this?"
"Yes, but we're going to get asked again and again, so let me make sure I know your story."
"It's hard to be sure whether I was followed. That's my story."
"Not the best, but we'll work on it. You said you were followed into a bookshop."
"Who knows? I told you, the same guy went into four coffee shops with me. I suppose it's possible that he just liked coffee. I only went in to warm up."
"You want me to guess? I'm guessing you were followed. Besides him, anyone approach you directly?"
I thought about it. "I was walking up a street, very steep, right where cars come out of a tunnel that goes under the river, east something street. There was a man walking down the hill. He stopped and asked if I needed help."
"Strange. Did he stop everybody he saw, or just you?"
"I was looking up at the buildings. He might have thought I was lost, which I was. He said a few words of Korean that he seemed to know, but I pretended I was Chinese."
"You think it was choreographed?"
"Nah, just chance. Old guy, colorful coat, though-red and black and white and I don't know what else. He didn't seem to have much to do. He wasn't in a hurry to get anywhere like everybody else."
"You double-check?"
"Sure. I made a note about the episode and gave it to the security man. Don't worry, we're covered. No one of the old man's description rang a bell with anyone at the mission. They said he could have been any one of a thousand religious Jews walking around. There was nothing in the contact logs fitting his description or that sort of approach."
"Religious Jews." Pak repeated it slowly. We looked at each other. "Maybe she was followed, too, and maybe she bumped into a religious Jew and maybe she never reported it. She wasn't the type to fill out forms, as far as I can tell. Runs in the family, I guess."
"Have you been doing your own research?" I was trying to remember the face of the old man on the street. It was mostly beard, so I couldn't be sure of the rest of it.
"Her father called the Ministry to complain about you, and they told him to call me. We talked for a while, if you can call that research. What if she was approached in New York? That could have some connection to what happened to her later."
Sure thing, I thought. The long arm of New York. "There is no way to know what she was doing. The local security man only had a chance to follow her two or three times. He thought she might have been tailed by the locals. Nothing subtle, as far as I can tell. How many relays of people in blue scarves can there be, he asked me. Each time, she lost them for a while, but they picked her up again without much trouble because she went to the same place each time, that park. Going there she'd walk using a slightly different route; but each time she took the same cab home. He was sure it was the same cabdriver, a female. I thought that might be something, but it wasn't. When I tracked the driver down, it turned out to be a young Pakistani woman whose father had sent her to the U.S. to go to school."
Pak nodded. "A young Pakistani woman. Sure, there must be lots of them driving cabs in New York. At least she wasn't a Jew. Tell me, please, O, that there are no Pakistani Jews." He paused, turning this over in his mind. Then he went on. "This driver, she told you a story, I suppose."
"She did. I got in her cab and told her to take me to one of the train stations. She said she was bored with school and started driving a cab. She was worried because her father was coming for a visit. If he found out she wasn't in school, she said, he would drag her home. She didn't want to go. Why not, I asked. Because he would arrange a marriage to a man who would treat her like dirt. He might beat her. What will you do, I asked. She turned around to look at me. 'If he beats me? I'll kill him.'"
"Maybe she was just making the whole thing up."
"Nope. All you had to do was to look into her eyes. This was real. She wasn't kidding."
Pak took a last puff on his cigarette. "Get some sleep," he said. "You should take up smoking again." He pointed at my cigarette, floating in the soup bowl. "Might help your jet lag."
Chapter Six
"His name is Sohn and he's from the party," Pak said. The next morning, we were in my office, and Pak seemed a little ill at ease. It wasn't unusual these days. All of us were that way-a little ill at ease all the time. Bad stories were coming in from the countryside. Here in the capital, people were disappearing from offices, food was scarce, heat was random, electricity was unpredictable and even when there was some, it didn't last very long. No one pretended things weren't bad, though we didn't talk a lot about it. The question was whether we would get through it.
"Am I supposed to be impressed with his party status? Because I'll tell you frankly, I'm not. Not these days. You know him, maybe?" As I spoke, Pak drummed his fingers on my desk. In better times, that would have meant he was impatient. Or in some cases, usually in the spring when it was possible to smell the earth again, that little gesture meant he was full of energy, ready to go for a long walk along the river. Now, more and more, he did it because he was nervous and depressed. "How much longer are we supposed to stand around and snap at flies?" I said. "He should have been here a half hour ago. I can't wait all day. I have things to do."
"Like what? That report you haven't touched? Just relax, Inspector." I almost laughed out loud-him telling me to relax. His fingers had settled into a slow, steady drumbeat, sort of funereal. I realized he might keep it up the rest of the week if I didn't figure out some way to get him to move his hand. "Try not to antagonize him," Pak said, and his fingers went thrum thrum. "You can annoy me all you want, but for him, I need you to sit quietly and listen to what he says. Let him throw his weight around." Thrum.
"I'm losing track," I said. "Who's on top these days? I can't keep score. Is the party up or down? Is the army the army of the party, or does the party emulate the military? Which is it this week? Why don't you draw me a chart?"
"Forget that. This is no time to be choosing sides. Who knows where things will be in another six months."
Six months, I thought. Long time. He must have been thinking the same thing. We just sat there for a minute or so, wondering.
"I'm not going to like him," I said finally. "This Sohn character will rub me the wrong way, and you know how I react when that happens?" I'd just asked Pak if he knew the man. He'd heard me, but he hadn't answered. I was getting a funny feeling about where this was headed. I didn't need to look six months down the road to see trouble. It might arrive in only a few minutes.