"Nowhere special. I invited a friend. I was sure you wouldn't mind."
6
The delegation leader stood up to greet us when we walked in the door. He looked very much at home. "Surprised to see me, Inspector?"
I was. "Not really," I said. We were in Coppet, which set my teeth on edge. "Shouldn't you be somewhere nibbling cookies?"
Jeno gestured to a chair. "Good, we all seem to know each other. That saves time. There's no assigned seating here. Very informal." Informal maybe, but not without foresight. My chair put me between the two of them, so I couldn't speak to both at the same time, or watch them. I had to turn my head from one to the other.
The delegation leader picked up a menu. "Shall we order? If we don't do that right away, they'll think we aren't here to eat. That can change the atmosphere. The waiters get aloof, and the service goes downhill from there." Atmosphere-he must have been born with an extra sensory organ that measured "atmosphere" like other people felt hot or cold. Apparently, he'd been to this place before. Obviously not on his ministry's tab, so I had to wonder who had paid the bill.
Jeno ordered. We ate in silence, and I didn't think it was a comfortable one, either. The delegation leader made annoying, exaggerated gestures with his fork as he lifted the food to his mouth. He ate slowly and occasionally closed his eyes. At one point he moaned in pleasure. That ruined what little appetite I had. It was doubly annoying because Jeno had ordered the perch for all of us. At last, with a final smack of his lips, the delegation sat back. "Quite good," he said to Jeno. He looked at my plate. "Something the matter, Inspector? This fish was excellent."
"Yes," I said. "You seemed to enjoy it."
"More wine?" Jeno looked at my glass. "You're not drinking?" How to explain to the man that I wouldn't touch anything on the table until I figured out what was going on?
"Who is doing what to whom? Isn't that the question of the hour?" I looked from Jeno to the delegation leader, and then back to Jeno. The napkin was heavy linen. I didn't think it could be folded into a rabbit. Maybe it could be made into a blunt object.
"Why don't we move out to those chairs on the patio. We can have coffee and smoke cigars." Jeno signaled the waiter. "Don't worry, Inspector, we'll find time to talk, as well. Whatever questions you have will be answered, as far as possible."
"Sure, let's talk outside, if we can hear each other over the din of cameras clicking and recorders squealing." I looked under the table. "Did you bring your black bag?"
Jeno laughed. "Remember what I told you not so long ago, Inspector? About seeing Cossacks everywhere? Don't be so jumpy. This place is perfectly clear and clean. We won't be disturbed. It's covered, believe me. It's covered."
I shrugged. "If you say so." I turned to the delegation leader. "You realize you almost didn't make it here."
"Oh?"
"The other day, when you disappeared in the white car, the one whose mechanic hates women."
"No, I knew you were behind me the whole time."
"I'm not talking about me." I watched him tighten his lips. Jeno?s eyebrows did a quizzical two-step. "I don't know this for sure, but I'd say you're marked. And I don't mean for promotion."
The delegation leader twisted his napkin into a knot and put it on the table. "You're not telling me anything I didn't already know, Inspector. In fact, that's why you're here."
"Dessert, anyone?" Jeno stood up and led the way out to the patio.
7
"It's very simple, Inspector. I am working for Sohn"-the delegation leader held up one spoon-"and so are you." He held up a second spoon with his other hand. "That means we are working together. Our friend here"-he gestured at Jeno with my spoon-"has some interesting ideas that Sohn thinks should be pursued." He pursed his lips again, which I couldn't figure out. Was he just practicing on me? Maybe he was one of those people who forget the distinction between onstage and off. Some people go through the motions even when the motor is idling. "Sohn is working with Jeno," he said. He looked around for another spoon, but Jeno had picked up the third one and was stirring his coffee. "That means we work with Jeno as well. There's a certain mathematical precision to it all, don't you think? Like reducing fractions or finding a common denominator."
Reduced to essentials, everything was simple. But there were limits. It was just as Pak had said: Reduced too much, everything disappears. Not this, though. This wasn't simple. And it wasn't going to disappear. "When was the last time you saw Sohn?" Out here, by the lake, it was easy to be casual. Everything was perfect in this spot.
The delegation leader waved his hand, a gesture to show his answer wasn't intended to be precise. "Before I left for the talks here. Last month, maybe?" He didn't give any sign of knowing that Sohn had arrived a few days ago and would be returning to Pyongyang in a metal box. "I'll see him when I get home." Again, the hand waved vaguely. If I could be casual out here, so could he. He was used to lying, but I didn't think he was used to murder.
"Let's move on." Jeno cut into the conversation. "Time is running out, and we need to get down to details. We can worry about Sohn later."
Jeno was another story altogether. Jeno could lie about anything, anytime. If I'd had the slightest doubt before, I didn't anymore. He knew about Sohn's death. He could have learned about it from M. Beret, but then again, maybe he knew because he was close by when it happened. At the moment, all I knew for sure was what Sohn had told me, which wasn't very much. One of the few things he had emphasized was that I needed to keep the delegation leader from defecting. The delegation leader had just consumed an expensive lunch of perch with a Mossad agent. As far as I knew, that wasn't a classic indicator of imminent defection, though it didn't make the negative case very well, either.
"I don't think you're clear on what we face. I don't even think you know why you're here, Inspector," the delegation leader said. "It would be very much like Sohn to send you on a mission with the tiniest part of the picture he could afford to give. Just enough to keep you from stumbling into the lake. When the time came, he'd tell you what you needed to know to do your job."
"And you? You have a full picture?" The atmospheric meter ticked down.
"Probably better than yours, though not all of it from Sohn. We're kept in the dark about a lot of things, but anything to do with foreign relations we eventually find out. Facts, rumors, crazy ideas-if they touch on foreign policy, they all swim, or float, or tumble toward our building. Sohn understood that. He even used it to his advantage. He would throw a piece of information into the air, nothing too definite-maybe nine parts fluff, one part substance-then watch it drift into our windows. That way he couldn't be accused of giving us something we weren't supposed to know."
Jeno handed each of us a cigar. "If you smoke cigars, Inspector, you'll like these. I only bring them out for special occasions."
A breeze came off the lake. It had something of spring on it, though still not much. "If you don't mind, I'll save mine for later." Maybe for a victory celebration, even a minor one, if I could figure out how to define victory. "You said time was running out. Time seems to be an obsession here. People pay a lot of attention to it in this country. They make fistfuls of money from it. If time runs out, then the world won't need watches. What will you do then?"
"My people can't hold open this deal forever, Inspector. If your people want it, they're going to have to move soon. And from what I hear, if they don't move soon, there may not be so much left of your country. The famine is growing, order is breaking down, rumors are racing around. It wouldn't take much to tip over the whole structure."