Woke Up Lonely (34 page)

The questions came fast: if Thurlow knew in advance the feds were coming, if the kidnapping was premeditated, if she knew anything about his contacts in North Korea, not that he had contacts, but if he did, the stipulations of that arrangement, the whereabouts of his arms cache, if he had an arms cache, the whereabouts of his second and third in command, the whereabouts of the hostages because, my God, it had been two days and
no one knew where they were,
and then of course, Thurlow, the vanishing cult leader, and Esme, who was now in violation of the Espionage Act, the Patriot Act, the Human Decency Act—
Poof!
they were gone.

Vicki swatted down every question with ignorance, and when they pressed her and began to suggest she was lying, she recalled them laughing about the Bible and got pissy.

“I don’t
know,
” she said. “Why don’t you ask the brains?” and she pointed at the sky because Esme was out there somewhere. “I’m just the hooker you hired, remember?”

The chairman closed his eyes. And people wondered why everyone in D.C. was having affairs and secretly gay—like his wife of nine hundred years could relieve the tension and annoyance of having to cycle through the gears of justice, the gears lubed in molasses, and he close to tears.

It was time for the butler. In every murder mystery—Murder? Who said anything about murder?—the butler either had the answers or knew how to get them.

Martin took the oath, though not even the girl deputized to hold the Bible was listening, so that when the time came for
I do,
Martin had to say it thrice before she stepped away.

Order, order. Where is Esme Haas? I don’t know. Where is Thurlow Dan? I don’t know. The hostages? No wait, let us guess: You don’t know. Correct. Is there anything you do know? No.

Well, so be it. In some universe, this must count as progress.

The last hour of the hearing was given over to the index cards recovered at the crisis site. Could Martin decipher them? They were in code. And written in multiple inks, ballpoint and felt tip, as though the author wrote on the move. Esme’s scrawl had no regard for the architecture of letters or the language to which these glyphs should bow down, assuming she wrote in her mother tongue, which was English, though possibly in the tongue of her learning, which was Korean. The latitudes of this scrawl were formidable, from left to right, and graved into the card stock with the intensity of a last chance.

The cards were bound with a thick blue rubber band. Only reason the fire investigator who collected the bundle knew it was any more important than the other ten tons of wreckage was that it had been doused in a fire retardant.

He took notes at the scene: Points of entry undisturbed. Walls strafed with bullet holes. Smoke lifting from the carnage in duffel bags. His soles weeping into the asphalt. A birdcage melting down.

Alongside the ambulances and helicopters, there was music. The sizzle and wheeze of wood and plaster, parquet and trusses, of memories risen from the char, all consolidated in dirge for a fire well spent.

He knew exactly what everyone wanted to hear, which was that this fire had been started inside and on purpose.

If this stack of index cards could survive a blowup like that, someone wanted them read. He put them in his bag, intending to return to the site tomorrow.

Trouble was, he’d been taken off the case overnight. Was he a
federal investigator?
No, he was part of the Cincinnati Fire Department, est. 1853, oldest in the country, thanks. Fine, but go home. And then to D.C., where instead of being asked to testify, he’d produce some killer evidence in the form of index cards that would earn him a seat in the front row, so that on day one of this joint hearing of the House Committee on the Judiciary and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a fire investigator from Cincinnati took real pride in his work.

Into record: an affidavit in code, comprising sixteen index cards, the content of which might be germane to the unpacking of motive charged to a hearing such as this. Perhaps if the committee knew what Esme Haas had been thinking, they could better suss out the whereabouts of the hostages. No doubt they were with her, or vectored out of the compound by her? If, of course, they were not dead. Please do not be dead.

Martin was put to work. Apparently, it wasn’t masquerade he liked so much as transformation. Because, in an irony that belied his life’s commitment to disguise, he laid bare the stuff of Esme and her monologues issued for the wooing of Thurlow Dan out of his house.

Ensuing: debate about who should read the cards into record. Ensuing: was it prudent or even tasteful to hire an actress? If so, would she sight-read or practice? Come time to animate someone else’s beating heart, this can make all the difference.

And so, into record:

45. Lo, I want to tell you about North Korea and what actually happened when you were there. Looking back, I realize it was a flash point for us. Or for me, anyway. So I guess, after all these years, this is my Helix moment. This is me confessing all.

It’s true I’d been to Pyongyang a few times, with J.T. or as part of a tourist consortium from Japan, but for this last trip to see you there, it seemed prudent to enter the country with greater stealth and regard for the peril attached to my plans. The dissident movement in North Korea is alive and metastasized now that cell phones and digital cameras have breached the border. You can reach people on the inside, and they can reach you. This was how I made enough contacts to get down to Pyongyang from the north, where I’d enlisted help from Christian missionaries in Yanbian. They ran an orphanage for North Korean kids whose parents were living in the woods until they died, there being small opportunity for escape to Vietnam and even less to Mongolia, where the Chinese border patrol was much less easily bribed than the North Korean.

46. I was to hide with a couple and their five-year-old son until dark. It was a big risk for them, but since I’d come with rice and cured beef, a Zippo and butane, they took me in. To their home, which was a lair they’d dug by hand from the hillside. It was five by five, tops. Sustained by a four-foot square of wood that was rotted through and a tarp that caught moisture from the ground above and had to be drained several times a day. This family had already been repatriated to North Korea once, survived a detention center, and fled the second they got out. Yet, for a sack of beef jerky, they were willing to jeopardize what they had and keep me safe.

47. This day was also trial run for my Korean countenance. The nose, flared and recessed. The uncreased single eyelid and epicanthal fold. The ebon hair I’d had cut to accommodate a ponytail and bangs. The Yoo family had not been told about me; they expected a Korean, which is what they got. I knew how to act, and I kept my mouth shut. But it was difficult. Their son was stunted; he looked about three years younger than he was, though the time lost on his body was taken up by his parents, who looked sixty-plus, though they were half as old. They spent much of the day rubbing his hands and feet, and lapping the den on all fours, frostbite being the least dangerous but most avertable consequence of this lifestyle. The boy did not know the alphabet or numbers; he had not learned how to hold a pencil; probably this couple would have to give him up; and then what? Why go on? What illusion of value could they impose on the day-to-day once they’d parted from their child? Nightfall could not have come sooner.

48. Christmas is heretic in North Korea, but Constitution Day, at the end of December, usually means fewer guards on the border. I headed out at 3 a.m. I hiked the two miles from the hills between Liangshui and Mijiang to the Tumen River, which marks the border. In winter, it’s ten below and dark as tar. You can walk for an hour and still not make it. During that hour, either you meet no one, you bribe border patrol, or you beg for your life. The land is pack ice, but the snow keeps prints all season, and for how remote and forbidding is this terrain, only despair can explain why it’s so well traversed.

49. The dark was condensed in the valley between hilltops, though if I wanted to find my guide’s spangle—he’d be waiting for me on the North Korean side of the river—I’d have to depart from this safety and get to high ground. I was wearing canvas sneakers swaddled in washrags; the ascent was slow going. And not much reward once you got there. Paddy fields in spring and summer, tundra in the winter months, and at night no lights, cars, industry, or people. And yet, for the pandemonium in my heart, it was as though I stood among the eight hundred thousand who had made this crossing to date. Only they went in the other direction, from the certainties of famine and death to mortifications unknown but free. Only for love does anyone willingly go back.

50. The river was frozen, and the crossing a skeleton race at half speed, chest pressed to the ice. I met no guards, just Chul-min, who’d sat behind a bush for the three-hour window in which he’d been told I would come. From there we went to a farmhouse just a mile east of the train station at Simch’ong-ni. Then: Hoeryong to Musan to Hyesan to Kanggye to Pyongyang. Three hundred eighty miles. A six-hour drive by car, six days via North Korean rail.

51. There’s a reason most people never see anything of North Korea but Pyongyang. It’s because the rest of the country is squalid beyond all imagining, and this to spite the homogeneity of its design: single-story homes in a grid, whitewashed timber or stucco walls, the rooftops an orange clay tile, and every plot squared in with a brindled picket fence. There is no cement to pave the roads and no shoes to walk the cement, so mostly people are barefoot, even in the snow. The filth seems meticulous and prolific in its outreach—even the soap can’t stay clean— which makes sense of the delimited color scheme of people’s clothes: black, gray, black, brown. No one stands out unless you know what to look for. The border towns are crammed with smugglers and People’s Security Force officers not sharp enough to serve in Pyongyang, and all are engaged in one illegal activity or another—trucking in contraband like PCs or just stealing fertilizer from a truck—and with one motive in mind: to stay alive. For this reason, strangers are unwelcome. I spent that first day in a janitor’s closet at the train station. Fuel being scarce, the schedule was a joke. A train came when it came. By the tracks: people asleep on the ice, in wheelbarrows, playing cards, trading nylon for corn, which cost a lot of corn. Faces wan and tapered, and everyone’s hair falling out. Amazing how hair and dust always find each other; the stuff blew across the tracks like briar.

52. You couldn’t travel without a permit. Mine was forged, and so when a train finally did arrive, I boarded the caboose and sat in the back. Two boys tried to freeload but were tossed by a female guard so shrill, two other kids gave up the con before she even got there. In North Korea, arrest and gulag are redress for most any crime, but often it depends on who’s watching.

The train was four cars, three of which looked Korean and one that was slightly larger, probably imported from Romania twenty years ago. I doubt it had been serviced since, and for the shrieks issued from the engine, the chassis, God knew, I didn’t think we’d get far. I wore a wool hat, pulled low, and stared through the window, past the black rime cleaved to the pane and at the countryside that could probably walk itself to Pyongyang faster than us.

53. The track skirts the Yalu and cuts into the base of one mountain range after another. My viewing options were this: the relatively prosperous towns on the Chinese side—Tumen looks like Six Flags at night—or the wasted and unrelentingly depressed landscape of North Korea on the other. I passed the hours undisturbed until we stalled just outside Hoeryong, next to a fishery qua morgue because there’d been no electricity to recycle or purify the water or just no money for food. Either way, the fish were dead and suffusing the air with a vapor so pungent it made everyone weep. My nose ran; my lungs threw up whatever came down, which became a problem since the one thing a prosthetic face cannot sustain is tears. I deboarded the train and fell in line with several women headed to a factory down a gravel road paved in snow. It was 5 a.m. Maybe they’d get an hour’s worth of electricity today and make a sock. I covered my mouth with a scarf and tried not to breathe; the effluent was ammonia and methane, though no one else seemed to care.

54. I was about to sever from the group when one of the women had the same idea. She had a look I’d seen before. It said: Soon I will be dead. The others did not argue, didn’t even break stride. But the one who trailed had come to a stop, pitched left, right, and, when neither direction appealed, straight down. She wore black sweats and a thin parka, a shawl round her head, and slip-on sneakers. Nothing fit; this was not clothing so much as coverage. But it was still worth money, so that when she called me over it was to ask if I’d buy it off her in bulk. She was at least seventy years old; she’d fit in my carry-on luggage.

I looked around. It was still dark, and anyone not at work would not be coming. She sat in the snow and began to undress. It was December, freezing, and her jacket seemed to unzip one tooth at a time for how slow she went. I risked speech and said, “What makes you think I have money? Get up,” and since I could hear the generators kick on at the factory, I said, “There’s work.”

She smiled, but even the black before dawn had nothing on what opened up from inside this woman. She was dying; she was ready. And there was nothing unusual about it. Every day, millions of lives were resolved in this horrible place in the same way.

“I have a daughter,” she said, and she took off her sneakers, which she held out to me. “Three thousand won.” A month’s salary. “Just give it to her. I know you won’t steal. I can tell you have a child, too.”

I wanted this dialogue to end, but I couldn’t leave her in the snow. I tried to help her up. No chance. It was as though the end of her life had consolidated in her body, given her heft and presence. I took the sneakers, sat down. Probably she had roundworm. The skin of her face was almost brittle, her eyes punched deep into her skull, but I still thought she could make it.