Bamboo and Blood (34 page)

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?”

Jenö 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.

Jenö 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 Jenö 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 Jenö. He looked at my plate. “Something the matter, Inspector? This fish was excellent.”

“Yes,” I said. “You seemed to enjoy it.”

“More wine?” Jenö 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 Jenö to the delegation leader, and then back to Jenö. 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.” Jenö 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?”

Jenö 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. Jenö?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?” Jenö stood up and led the way out to the patio.

“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 Jenö 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 Jenö,” he said. He looked around for another spoon, but Jenö had picked up the third one and was stirring his coffee. “That means we work with Jenö 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.” Jenö cut into the conversation. “Time is running out, and we need to get down to details. We can worry about Sohn later.”

Jenö was another story altogether. Jenö 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.”

Jenö 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.”

“Is that so? You think we’re about to start begging?”

The delegation leader lit his cigar. “Face it, things are bad.”

“Bad?” I hadn’t expected him to be so direct about anything, certainly not in front of a foreigner. “Bad is nothing. Bad is normal. We’ve been through worse. We’ll survive.”

“Really?” Jenö looked thoughtfully at the mountains in the distance. They were covered with snow. “Then why turn to us?”

Fair enough, I thought. Too bad Sohn hadn’t told me. Too bad Sohn hadn’t told me much of anything before his head ended up at an odd angle on his shoulders. “I wouldn’t know who turned to whom in this case. Maybe you came tapping at our window. You’ll have to talk to someone who toils in the foreign affairs field, like him.” I pointed at the delegation leader. “He might be able to supply you with some answers. You two seem to know each other. I’m just a policeman.”

The delegation leader laughed. “Do you really think you’d be here if you were just a policeman? That’s like saying your grandfather was just a guerrilla fighter.”

“My grandfather has nothing to do with this.”

“To the contrary, Inspector, I’d say he has everything to do with
where we are, and where we might decide to go. You can be sure Sohn didn’t pluck you out of some Public Security rabbit hole by accident.”

“Plucked is the right word. I’m not here by choice.” No, Sohn hadn’t picked me because of my grandfather but because of my brother. “The ambassador wants me out of here. He’s made that clear. I’m leaving as soon as I can. I’ve got no reason to stick around.”

“Even before the job is done?” Jenö tapped the ash from his cigar. “Even when we’re so close to the goal?”

“Goal. You want us to stop selling missiles to your neighbors. That’s your goal. It’s not mine. I don’t have any goals that relate to missiles. Believe it or not, I don’t even
think
about missiles. As long as no one carries one in my sector, missiles aren’t on my list of worries.” I was getting wound up. Nice weather, nice setting, but I wasn’t in the mood to enjoy it. Maybe I was still tired from the night before, still smarting from Di-lara’s crack about her little policeman. Well, if Jenö wanted to talk about goals, that was fine with me. I could talk about goals. “Everyone in the world is allowed to sell military hardware but us, right? Big powers do it because they’re big, and that means they can do whatever they want. Middle powers do it because that’s how they make a lot of money. Little powers like you”—I pointed my unlit cigar at Jenö—“do it because the big powers find it useful. They let you operate on the margins where they don’t want to be, or they don’t want to make the effort to stop you, or they don’t give a damn. But none of those conditions pertain to us.” I made clear I was including the delegation leader. “We’re a special case, right? You all sell missiles until you don’t want to do it anymore, then you say no one else can. Too bad for you. We need the money.” I didn’t know if we needed the money or not, but if my brother was involved, I had to assume money was part of the mix. “If we had rich uncles to give us aid to build steel mills, or ships, or computers, we’d be happy little piglets. But we don’t, we don’t have anyone to shovel money at us, so we sell what we sell and you can fuck a duck if you don’t like it.” Little policeman! What the hell did she mean by
that
?

“No one said anything about stopping you from selling anything. If you think it’s your God-given right to lug weapons around the world, be my guest.” Jenö smoothed the air several times. The afternoon became calm again. The light settled on the lake. It seemed wrong for me
to be here. I was taking up space I had no right to occupy. I was tired of people looking at me like I was a freak. I had roiled enough waters. I wanted to go home.

Jenö nodded at me, and his smile, the one that played on his lips most of the time, turned enigmatic. “You can sell whatever you want, it really makes no difference to us. Not one bit. Just don’t sell to our enemies. That’s all we ask.” He was in full soothe-the-barbarian mode. You could almost hear the violins playing in the background. “And we’re not just asking. We’re prepared to make it worth your while, Inspector. In the long run, you’ll get a lot more from good relations with us than you’ll ever get from the people you’re dealing with now. Do you really think they spend any time thinking about your interests, your concerns, your history? Don’t be ridiculous. They only care about one thing, getting rid of us—and they’ll play you for everything they can if they think it will advance that goal. That’s their goal. What’s yours?”

It was a little vague, his formulation, and I didn’t think it was an accident. Did he mean me, in particular? Were Jenö and his colleagues prepared to make it worth
my
while? I yawned. Somewhere I’d read that was what a defeated animal did—yawned. I wasn’t tired, but I was beaten. This place by the lake had defeated me. Maybe that’s why they took me here. I was sure it was the two of them, together, who had carefully chosen the place. “And we’re supposed to be shocked, that people thousands of kilometers away don’t care about our history? Do you think we care about theirs?” I wanted to get the emphasis away from the singular and back on the collective. “Anyway, none of this is my business. How many times do I have to tell you? No one listens to me. And that includes Sohn.” Which was certainly true now. I found myself yawning again.

“Someone assigned me to you when I was in Pyongyang a few months ago. That wasn’t an accident.” Jenö wasn’t interested in signs of submission. He was poking me with a stick; he wanted to get a rise out of me.

“They just wanted someone to blame if things went wrong,” I said. “That’s how they work.”

“Well, things are about to go wrong. I’m getting negative messages from my people: Get this done, or we pull all of it, the whole thing, off
the table.” Jenö looked at the delegation leader. For the first time, I sensed that they were still on separate sides of the divide. “You’re going to lose it all. I have it right here.” He patted his jacket pocket. “The whole deal. And you’re about to see me throw it in the trash.”

The delegation leader shook his head. “You trash it, then nothing will change, you still won’t like your neighborhood, we’ll struggle back to our feet, and life will go on. Unless Mr. Sohn has given the inspector a plan he hasn’t yet revealed.”