A Drop of Chinese Blood (15 page)

“Yes, it’s elm, and that is exactly what I don’t need right now. What else do you have?”

I opened the drawer of my desk and read off the labels. “Larch. Mulberry. Cedar. Oak. Walnut.”

“Pitiful selection. Nothing worth a damn.” He paused, brow furrowed. “All right, give me the walnut.”

I picked out a piece of walnut and tossed it in front of him. “We’re low on everything. Pretty soon, it will be a choice between buying wood chips or rice.”

“No contest,” he said.

“You were reviewing where things stand, I think.”

“I was. I was marching through some of the coincidences. Let’s move on to the happenstance. There is a scuffle at the noodle restaurant, and who should emerge from the kitchen but an old acquaintance of mine.”

“At first you said you didn’t know who he was.”

“Surely you don’t believe everything I say.”

No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t. “I take it from the discussion I witnessed that he is not a cook.”

“Anyone eating his noodles would figure that out in an instant.”

“You say he’s not a cook, and I’d say he’s not much of an interrogator. Who is he? How do you know him? What was he doing in a kitchen on Lanxiang Hutong?”

“You keep your secrets, I’ll keep mine. We agreed. I’ll tell you this much. Our paths crossed in odd ways over the years. We never had much use for each other. He skated in and out of your father’s circles for a while. The last time, about thirty years ago in Romania, I saw him slumped in a chair in the Hotel Union with a bullet in his neck. Didn’t fill me with remorse. I thought he was dead.”

“He’s not, apparently.” I didn’t want to pursue the sly mention of my father’s “circles.”

“Apparently. Now he seems to be working for your side, which doesn’t surprise me. He’s not one of yours?”

No, he wasn’t one of mine.

“Whatever he’s involved in”—my uncle let my silence speak for itself—“I’d guess from where we found him whatever he’s part of has been in the planning for quite a while.”

“And why is that?”

“Your people wouldn’t try that ridiculous cover with someone they didn’t trust, and they don’t want it ripped open too easily. A North Korean pretending to be a North Korean on the Chinese border, cooking bad food in a restaurant run by the Fujian mob? That’s not for everyone. It means it isn’t part of a routine defector roundup operation either. They’re not interested in trapping teenagers from Onsong with this snare. This is something special.”

“You sound surprised.” He also sounded like he had it figured out, a step ahead of me.

“Surprised? I suppose I am, which isn’t good. On second thought, maybe it is. If he thinks I’m surprised, he’ll think I’m vulnerable. Let him. The best way to deal with double agents like him is to leave them alone. Sooner or later, they hang themselves.”

“An operational bromide, thank you. I’ll file it when I have a chance.” Next he’d tell me that this cook character and Fu Bin worked together, for whom, against whom, paid by whom not yet determined. “I have an idea, something straightforward. Let’s focus on what’s staring us in the face. How do we keep you from being shipped off to Beijing for a nasty bout of questioning? I know you think you can handle anything they dish out, but Headquarters has mood swings and can be very ugly about things when it wants to be. I may seem short-tempered with you, but you’re my uncle, and I’d rather not have to come and claim your corpse.”

“Very moving, nephew. I would do the same for you in similar circumstances. To prove it, I’m going to ask you a question. What do you know about your predecessor?”

“Excuse me?”

“Simple question. What do you know about your predecessor?”

“I can’t talk about that. Keeping you from of a basement room filled with rats and bugs is one thing, but operational details? Completely out of bounds. I told you more the other night than I should have.”

“Why, do you think it’s a big secret? You heard what that phony cook and I talked about. Your predecessor not only defected, he practically jumped into my arms. Shall I tell you what he was wearing when he appeared? What he had in his wallet? The papers in his briefcase? You don’t have to worry about his leaping out of the shadows and stealing your soul. For all I know, he really is dead and buried. Maybe dumped at sea.”

I digested this. It was more than I knew before, more than the briefing in Beijing seven years ago had imparted, multiple times more than the message the courier had recently delivered. Other than those scraps, I’d never picked up anything from around the office here in Yanji, though I’d probed where I thought I could. The previous chief had disappeared, his file was locked securely and put away, and no one raised the subject. Even the bravest of souls ventured no more than that he had probably been executed in secret, but none of them claimed to know for sure. The post of bureau chief had been kept vacant while Headquarters sent out teams to scour all of the regional bureaus for other snakes in the grass, but eventually there was need for a replacement in Yanji. My name came up. I told them I didn’t want the job. They said they weren’t asking.

“No, he wasn’t dumped anywhere.” It was time to feed out a little more information to my uncle. He already seemed to know a lot more than I did anyway. “I told you, he’s not dead. He wants to come back. That’s definite.” I narrowed my eyes. “And that’s not to leave this room.”

My uncle thought it over. “This would be the fish that will swim upstream to return home, I take it.”

“Yes.” I’d already stepped over the line, so it didn’t matter if I threw in a few more facts. Even so, I wanted to keep things on the vague side. That wouldn’t bother my uncle. He was comfortable with vagueness. Anything too precise made him nervous; anything tied up too neatly at the end made him suspicious. It was a sort of protective coloring, and he wasn’t about to shed it this late in his life.

“Yes, and…” He was happy to leave things vague, unless he wasn’t.

“And word is out that the fish has sent a message that he is ready to come back.”

“You believe he would risk such a thing after all these years?” My uncle was as close to incredulous as I’d ever seen him. “Or that he’ll be welcome after betraying his colleagues and his profession? What sort of deal could he possibly work out?”

“I don’t know what deal he has or might get, and I haven’t inquired.” I didn’t have to inquire. My instincts told me he would be eliminated, permanently, as soon as they had wrung from him everything he’d revealed to the North Koreans.

“In that case, I’d say, the subject is closed.”

“Not quite. I’m supposed to figure out how to get him back over here.”

“They want
you
to do it? His successor!” My uncle was stupefied. The concept seemed to strike him as coming from another universe, and not a parallel one. “Your people haven’t already made other arrangements on their own, like meeting him halfway across the bridge in Tumen?”

“No. He’s not being released, or traded, as far as I know.”

This prompted a long pause while my uncle mulled over this piece of news. “So,” he said finally, “it’s to be a redefection. Not a lot of those, if you don’t count triple agents.”

“Call it whatever you want. From what little I’m privy to, the preferred formulation is that he’s ‘returning home.’ Important noses will wrinkle if they ever hear the term ‘redefect.’”

“What do you propose to do, if I may ask?”

“You may ask. You of all people may certainly ask, because I’m convinced that’s why Beijing wants to see you. They want your advice on how to ease his passage back this way. Think about it. They know that Pyongyang isn’t going to kiss him on both cheeks and send him sailing home, so they need someone who can devise the route. They gave me the job, but they know perfectly well I don’t have any special insight into the solution. I don’t, but someone with a workshop off the back of my house does.”

My uncle snorted softly.

“They figure you can help, uncle, but can’t admit to themselves that they are looking for your advice. That means they have to go through the motions of arresting you. It will be more than just motions. No doubt, there will be bright lights and very uncomfortable seating. You may not be able to sleep on a regular schedule for a week or two.”

“Like hell I won’t.”

“They think you are still in touch with your friends, and that you could pull some strings.”

“Of course, you know better.”

“To be honest, I’m not sure.” I still didn’t want to say anything about the photographs. They weren’t conclusive, and besides they were very grainy. “Until Madame Fang showed up, I thought maybe you really had cut off all your ties, but now, first with her and then with the visit by the noodle cook, I have begun to wonder. That’s the nature of my job, I wonder about things. And if I’ve begun to wonder, imagine what is going through nimble minds in Beijing.”

“You actually believe your fish wants to come home, it’s as simple as that? First of all, he’s not a fish. He’s an eel, slippery and full of those bones that stick in your throat. He’s up to something. His type always is.”

“He’s been away from his family.” I was careful with my words. There was little sense saying that no Chinese in his right mind would want to live in Korea, north or south, for very long. “It can’t be all that pleasant in his situation, no matter what sort of creature comforts he has.”

“And his loyalties?”

“They’re not an issue. He threw them away. No one doubts that. So, yes, he’ll be kept at arm’s length once he’s back. They want him where they can see him, that’s all. They may put him in a hole for a few months, but after that, he’ll be allowed to walk around, on a long leash. They’ll make sure he dies of boredom.” If a bullet in the back of the neck could be called boredom.

“What will you do once he’s back, if I might inquire?”

“Do? I’ll do whatever it is that I do now.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“After he’s safe and sound in whatever hands are groping for him, it’s not my concern. He doesn’t have any current knowledge of the office or of our operations over the past ten years.” I stopped and gave the idea a moment to sink of its own weight. It didn’t sink. It was too buoyant with possibilities. “You think he has been running people over here, using his knowledge of our procedures?”

“If not that, something like it had occurred to me. It hadn’t occurred to you?”

“No, of course not, and I’ll tell you why. Because that would be traitorous, and he’s not a traitor.” I didn’t sound convincing, probably because I wasn’t convinced.

“Ha! If what he did isn’t traitorous, I’d like to see what is. He defected with two briefcases of documents.”

I thought of Mrs. Zhou’s missing files. “Names?”

“You mean to tell me you don’t know for sure what he had? You haven’t figured that out yet?”

I wasn’t part of the investigation of his disappearance. I hadn’t figured out anything. It wasn’t my job. “Were they names?”

“No, numbers.”

Code? Why numbers?

“He said they were his insurance. At first glance, I thought they might be bank records, maybe he had money stashed somewhere overseas. Then I thought, no, they were coded operational files—secrets to use to buy a safe harbor. I didn’t have time to examine things very closely. After I gave up trying to convince him to go home, I called Headquarters. They arrived in a crashing hurry, and hustled him away in a big car, tailed by two other big cars. That was the last I saw of him.”

“You never told me any of this. Not a peep. You’ve been here nearly two years, and you never told me anything. It didn’t occur to you that it might be relevant? That word of your connection with his defection might have found its way over here and into a file—a very active file?”

“You never asked. No one else did either. Anyway, it was better you stayed in the dark.”

“Beijing knows. They’ve probably known for a long time. Also with you here, they must have thought I knew all along, too. As far as they were concerned, I wasn’t in the dark. So now I’m in their gun sights. Thank you.”

“Sure, who knows? It might even be worse than that. Bad enough they think that you haven’t told them that you knew. From where they sit, they might even think you’re working with the other side. They’re awfully suspicious in your headquarters, awfully suspicious.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, it probably looks very bad.” He was thinking in the abstract, just tracing things out, like he was tying a hangman’s knot without reference to the fact that this was the rope likely to end up around my neck.

Bad as it was, it explained a lot. It explained why Fu practically took root in the office, beyond the normal tour of duty for a Third Bureau mole. It might even explain what he was doing in North Korea. Once my uncle showed up in Yanji, they couldn’t believe there was no evidence linking me to the whole defection affair. Fu must have been ordered to keep searching. Maybe even Mrs. Zhou had been recruited to help. I considered the idea for a moment and then dropped it. Mrs. Zhou wasn’t the type. Of course, Fu hadn’t seemed the type either.

My uncle was still measuring the noose he’d dropped around my neck. “Yet they’ve left you alone. Just waited and watched. Extraordinary system you have, very patient people. We wouldn’t have waited. You wouldn’t be sitting here now.” He looked at me thoughtfully, as if he might not see me again. “What did they think you were going to do, I wonder?”

“Good question.”

“If they suspect you, why would they put you in charge of getting him back, assuming they really want him? Two possibilities come to mind. First, this is a test of your loyalty. Mine, too, I suppose, though how they can imagine I’m loyal to this place escapes me. Do they think I’m grateful to be here?” He closed his eyes and shuddered slightly. “They’ll watch, and if something goes wrong with the return, wherever and however it occurs, they’ll conclude one of us leaked the details to the North Koreans in order to prevent the homecoming.” His eyes popped open. “Either that or he has insisted on your involvement as a guarantee of his safety.”

“My involvement? Or yours?”

“Mine? That wouldn’t seem to be a point in our favor either, but you can never tell about these things. Something like this has the mechanics of a pinball machine. So many crazy angles, you wouldn’t want to bet on the outcome.” He gave me a purposeful look.