A Drop of Chinese Blood (7 page)

“Then why is the damn place still there? Someone must know how to keep it spinning.”

“Inertia. Gravity. Water running downhill, except when it was running uphill. I don’t have knowledge, if that’s what you’re looking for. All I have is experience, and some people will tell you even that falls on the wrong side of history.”

“All experience falls on the wrong side of history,” I said a little pompously, but it must have meant something to him, because I saw it register in his eyes. “Without going into detail,” I continued, “in order to deal with this problem, one particular…” I fumbled for the right word. “… concept is being studied at the moment.”

“Concept.” He repeated the word as if it had landed from another planet. “What happened to the fish?”

“A loose thread has appeared. We may pull on it.” Handout was the loose thread. If he had anything at all about new sources of payments from the North that were creating holes in the border around Tumen City, it would give us something to use against the smirkers from Headquarters. If he didn’t know anything, at least we could say we checked. Either way, it would cost me some operational funds, which I couldn’t spare.

My uncle shook his head. “Pah. Too many images. No wonder you’re drowning. My grandfather used to say that precision in thought is all that keeps the world in order. He was particularly suspicious of any idea too enthusiastically embraced, or the tendency on the part of some people to blurt things out. It’s one reason he was so disappointed with your father.”

Here we go again, I thought, plunging into the swamp of the past. “This isn’t about my father, and it isn’t about your father.”

“You mean my grandfather,” he said quietly. “My father died in the war, or have you forgotten? Is it so far away for you? He would have been your grandfather. Maybe it would have done you good to know him. Maybe you would have learned something.”

“Maybe.”

Whenever the subject of the family reared its head, it always brought on a pitched battle, with one of us throwing spears and swinging a club at the other’s head. This time, though, he wasn’t in a fighting mood. I wondered if seeing Madame Fang again had done him some good.

“Where were we?” He put his hand to his forehead. He seemed tired suddenly, weary. When he’d first come to live with me, he had been full of fire. Over the past year, I sensed it dying down, little by little. That would have been to the good, but as his died down, mine seemed to flare up. He was my father’s brother, about the only family I had left, and so I felt, at first, an obligation to give way to him and his eccentricities. That only led to resentment, though, and at the wrong times, I said what I shouldn’t have, usually in the worst possible way. It was taking more and more conscious effort on my part to keep myself in check. Every time it happened, I resolved not to let it happen again.

“Images,” I said, softly.

“Ah, yes. Pick an image, any image. I don’t care what it is. It doesn’t matter. But after you pick one, stick with it religiously. If you tell me we’re dealing in fish, and then you tell me that there has been a nibble on the hook, and then you add because of that you pulled on the line, there’s no doubt in my mind what you mean. At that point, we’ll know where we are and where we need to go next. Yet suddenly we find ourselves faced with a loose thread? Where did that come from? Was the fish wearing an old sweater? It isn’t a minor detail. It’s a question of being systematic. Or is that no longer considered worth anything, being systematic? That’s the problem with your gambling. It leads to sloppy thinking, leaning on chance.”

No, seeing Madame Fang hadn’t changed him. If anything, things were worse. Now he was using guerrilla tactics on me, seeming to retreat from the fight, only to attack from behind. Like every fire, this one could flare up suddenly.

“My imagery is fine,” I said. “We pulled on a thread. When I say a thread, I mean exactly that, a thread.” I kept my voice as even as I could.

My uncle sat lost in thought. Finally, he said in Korean, “Don’t clench your teeth when we talk, even mentally. And you don’t have to go on about this thread. You pulled on it, and now you wish you hadn’t. That is usually the case with thread pulling. It’s one thing experience taught me.”

When he spoke to me in Korean, it meant we were on the verge of his retreating into himself, indicating I should leave him alone in his workshop. That isolation could last a day or a week. I never knew how long it would be. This was a bad time for him to disappear down his rabbit hole. I needed him to stay engaged, much as I hated to admit it.

I tried a quick smile to lighten the mood. “It’s complicated, that’s all I’m saying. Complicated in this case means dangerous, ready to blow up in someone’s face, probably mine, exactly as you said.” It was not much of a nod in his direction, but it was the limit of what I could stand to dole out at the moment. “If the whole thing didn’t slop over onto your side of the river, I wouldn’t be bothering you, uncle. When you showed up here, we made an agreement, remember? I would never involve you in my official duties, and you would use me strictly during nonduty hours to help out in your private detective service.” I stopped myself from saying what I wanted to add, which was that he hadn’t taken a case in so long it wasn’t much of a bargain anymore.

“A bargain is a bargain, whatever its current state, and I will abide by it, don’t worry.” He was reading my mind. At least he’d switched back to Chinese. “If I don’t stick to our bargain, I’ll be up to my neck chasing fish, or pulling threads, or stepping around ill-considered concepts in defense of your imperial court.”

“It’s not an imperial court! We are still a socialist country, which is more than you have across the river.” It was a stupid remark to make now or anytime in his presence, something I knew even before the words were out of my mouth. He could criticize what went on over there. I could not.

My uncle fell silent again and closed his eyes. When he spoke, he was back to using Korean. “We aren’t going to argue about politics right now, or we will never get out of this workshop in one piece. We will go at each other hammer and tong, and I know where both the hammers and tongs are located, whereas you don’t, which puts me at a clear advantage.”

I searched around for a good exit line. “Why don’t we move to the library? That’s more neutral territory. We both need to cool off.”

He opened his eyes and looked at me sadly. “I know where the tongs are there, too. However, what you want to discuss is depressingly official, and staying here will upset the atmosphere in my workshop, so let’s move. These tools have no use for politics.”

I stood up and bowed to the T-square. “Please forgive my transgressions, O holy one,” I said.

“They don’t react any better to sarcasm than I do to imprecision,” my uncle said as he slid off his stool. His mood seemed to improve as his feet touched ground. “Lead the way, nephew. With banners flying and cymbals crashing we will proceed to more propitious surroundings and maybe even a bowl of noodles. It’s nearly lunchtime, my stomach tells me.”

After we were settled in the library, my uncle picked up a notebook from his desk, opened to a blank page, and began sketching plans for yet another bookcase. He had notebooks full of those sketches piled on the floor of his workshop, but there was always need for one more. I let him draw for a few minutes without interruption. The silence would do us good.

“I’m on a journey of discovery,” he said at last. “I’m going to discover the perfect form, pure harmony. This is the sort of bookshelf they might have in Plato’s Republic. Whether it can be built, I don’t know, but at least it needs to be put on paper. Your great-grandfather never made a sketch of anything. Did you know that? Just built things from images in his head. Times were simpler then, not as much crowding the brain, no microwaves or cell phones upsetting the air.”

“Ah, the peace of the past.” I sighed dramatically. It was bunkum, and he knew it. There was no sense arguing. “Unfortunately, we don’t live in such times anymore. That’s what I keep trying to tell you.” I thought over what he had said. “Where did you hear about Plato?”

I was at my own desk going through the drawers looking for a pen. There was none in the first drawer. The second drawer was filled with stacks of wood chips. Whenever we got into a case, which hadn’t been in a while, my uncle would call for a wood chip, but not just any chip. He’d want something specific. “Elm,” he’d say. “We need to empty our minds, and this time of year there is nothing more vacuous in the forest than elm.” Later on, he’d call for something else, depending on where he thought things stood. “Oak,” he might say. “Very straightforward tree, nothing devious about it.”

When we set up the office, a month or so after my uncle arrived, the drawer was a jumble of chips he’d brought in his suitcase. On our very first case together, the maiden voyage, things went badly. He had called for birch; that sticks in my mind for some reason. I handed him the first chip I found. He took it, closed his eyes, and sat back in his chair, swirling the wood with his fingers. Suddenly his eyes popped open. “When I say birch, I mean birch.” He had glared at me, his jaws working furiously. “This is Siberian elm, and I won’t have it.”

For several nights after that, I sat up late sorting through the pile of wood chips and arranging them in stacks, doing my best to make sure they were labeled as correctly as I could manage, given that I didn’t know one type of tree from another. Trees had branches, and birds sat on them—that much I knew. In the end, there were eight stacks, plus a few exotic loners, gathered from whatever was in his workshop. If something new came in, I made arrangements.

Now, searching for a pen, it occurred to me that I didn’t have chips from the new hardwood my uncle had brandished when Madame Fang came to call. If I’d had a pen, I would have made myself a note to remember.

My uncle carefully drew lines on the paper in front of him, ignoring me. Finally he looked up. “I read Plato after I read Kafka. When I was on the mountain, the year after I quit my Ministry job, there was plenty of time to read. A doctor came up to visit occasionally. He brought books sometimes. Nice man. Your father visited once, too. Did you know?”

“You hadn’t mentioned it.”

“He did. He seemed distressed by my living arrangements. He thought they were too crude; I had a one-room cabin I built myself. I think he was trying to tell me that he had intervened on my behalf, but we ended up arguing, as we always did. It was the last time I saw him.”

I didn’t say anything.

My uncle pushed the paper aside. “Begin at the beginning, or don’t begin at all. I can’t offer advice on how to get out of a box unless I know how you got into it.”

“Box?” I went on alert, sensing a possible breach in his defenses. “Box? I thought we needed to be consistent. What about the fish?”

“Flopping at the bottom of the box.” He closed his eyes and sat back in his chair. “I’m listening.”

7

I glided through what Li had told me, which I had to admit was moderately fuzzy. Whatever I told my uncle had to be even fuzzier so I couldn’t be accused of leaking sensitive information, even if I really didn’t have much of an idea what it was. The main thing was to put just enough clarity into what I said to indicate where things were headed. My uncle had a finely honed sense of danger; it wouldn’t take much for him to realize how dangerous things were about to become. Everything was complicated by the fact that when I came right down to it, I didn’t know whether my uncle had severed all ties with his former colleagues across the river. Some discreet checking after he moved in led me in that direction, but it still wouldn’t be a surprise to learn he had a few links left. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did, but in that case, I would also have an unpleasant time explaining to Headquarters what I was doing with a still-active North Korean security type living in my house, uncle or no uncle.

When I finished, my uncle looked up from the bookcase plans he’d been reviewing the whole time. Unusually, he hadn’t interrupted, hadn’t raised something extraneous, hadn’t even cocked an eyebrow.

“It’s late,” was all he said, before giving me a bland look and going off down the hall to bed.

I sat in the library for about ten minutes, then got up and went to the kitchen, where I fixed myself a bowl of noodles, read the paper, and tried not to think about fish or threads. The image of the hard strike operation—a lot of doors broken in and people chased down alleyways in their underwear—seemed even worse late at night, when everything was quiet. Two special squads from Headquarters would cause a lot of headaches, but that was nothing compared with what would happen if I pulled in the wrong visiting North Korean. It would help if someone would give us a list of people to stay away from, but no one would do that, not even Li’s sources. If a paper like that got into the wrong hands in Beijing, there would be too many questions about who was on the list and why. I thought about how Madame Fang had materialized at my front door, and then about her perfume. For some reason, that led me straight to tiny chocolate bricks. This was going nowhere good, so I gave up, walked softly to my bedroom, and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

Chapter Three

The phone rang the next morning, well before seven o’clock. I had climbed out of bed early, as usual, and after a cup of tea was sitting in our office reception room library scrutinizing the newest collection of unpaid bills. In a grim attempt at humor, I was separating them into piles: to be paid soon; to be paid eventually; to be paid if the creditor could figure out how to reach me in the grave. When I picked up the receiver, a woman’s voice, trembling softly and betraying a slight touch of the Yunnan backcountry, inquired whether I was Inspector O.

“I am not.”

“May I speak to him?”

My uncle did not accept calls unless I screened them. “I’m afraid he is unavailable at the moment.” Actually, he was sleeping, and there was no way I was going to wake him. He said he’d been up early his whole life, and that all it ever did was increase the amount of time during the day something could go wrong. When he moved to the mountain, he said, the birds woke him at dawn; there was no way to ignore the chatter of a bird in a pine tree. The only thing worse, he said, was two birds in a pine tree. “If you tell me what this is about, I’ll pass on the message. He’ll call you back later today or tomorrow at the latest.”