James Church - A Corpse in the Koryo

"I can find one, but meantime try not to drip on the furniture, would you? Every time you move, you drip. We'll have to take this mat out of the elevator and dry it." Someone at the hotel must have been overseas at a place where they put floor mats emblazoned with the day of the week in the elevator. In theory, the mats get changed every day.

If guests lose track of time, they only have to look down at their feet, assuming they can read English.

When I stepped into my room, the glass door to the balcony was wide open, letting in torrents of rain. A small lake had formed on the carpet. The desk lamp had fallen onto the floor, and the lampshade was soaking up water like a sponge. The balcony door latch couldn't have broken again; I'd watched the workman fix it. When I walked over to close the door, I could see that the latch had been pulled down. It had been snapped shut when I left for the temple.

The floor lady walked in with a towel. She looked at the window and then glanced around the room. "You going to stand there dripping all over the floor, like I asked you not to?"

"Funny how this window unlatched itself after I left," Frankly, I didn't give a damn about her floor. "In most hotels, things stay latched.

The laws of physics don't work around here, I guess."

She laid the towel on the bed. "I wouldn't know about any laws of physics. I don't control who comes and goes in these rooms." Her face was composed, as if she had made an important decision and felt comfortable with it. "The guide at the temple enjoyed talking to you. But I guess you didn't have time to finish your tour."

I decided to skip over what should have been a couple of sessions of questioning and get to the point. "Who is the maid on the fifteenth floor?" That got a blank look but no answer, so I repeated the question, this time with extra emphasis. "This hotel won't earn any profits if I have it closed, and I'll do that if I don't get cooperation. I can authorize a 'closure for cause' if necessary." I was making this up, but she wouldn't know it.

"No, you can't do that. This is a special tourist zone, and you people can't touch us without authorization." She had invented this on the spot, and it topped mine. The "you people" was surprising, but I figured it might be useful. She wouldn't be any more cowed by Military Security than she was scared of me, and with luck she might even be more annoyed at them.

"Let me rephrase my question. Do the guests on the fifteenth floor scratch the furniture with their equipment?"

"Damned right they do. Gear and boxes and wires all over the place.

Usually I don't work on fifteen, but the woman who normally does says she can't stand it with them around. One time she accidentally opened the door to their room and they nearly murdered her. She said she hasn't seen that many weapons since she was in the army."

I looked up at the ceiling, then glanced around the baseboard. The floor lady shook her head. "These rooms are clean, though no one believes it. Military Security can't put anything in without special permission.

We have to know. Otherwise we might rip the wires out by mistake. They tried it once and the manager nearly had a fit. Said they put back the baseboard so bad, the next guest in, an Iranian, filed a complaint. The only thing they are allowed are those gun mikes they set up on their balcony. We clean their rooms once a week."

"Rooms. Plural?"

"Yes, two rooms. The fifteenth floor has the best view, and the manager has called Pyongyang more than once to ask if they could be put on another floor."

"What about the rest of the fifteenth floor?"

"What do you think?" She put her hands on her hips and stood there defiantly. "We rent it out. They complained because you can see from one balcony to the next, but we told them if they didn't like it, they'd have to pay for the whole floor. That's a lot of rooms. And they'd have to disable the elevator button, too. You want to guess how many guests drink too much at the bar on the top floor, then stumble off the elevator on the wrong floor and end up fumbling with the knob to the wrong room? The halls are dark at night, so you can't read the numbers on the doors to save your life. Got to save electricity, you know what I mean?"

"Ah, yes, profits. Well, thanks for the towel. If the hot water comes on, maybe you can have someone ring me." From the way she frowned, I wasn't expecting hot water anytime soon.

There wasn't a sound as she shut the door behind herself. It occurred to me that if she could close a door so quietly, she probably could open one that way, too. Not like the Koryo, where the doors always clicked. I picked the lamp off the floor and set it up again on the desk, then unplugged it from the wall. Probably I should have done it the other way around. The chances of getting electrocuted were slim, but lately things weren't exactly working in my favor. I sat down on the bed and reviewed what I'd learned. Song was good and scared; I didn't trust him at all, but enough of what he told me fit with what the old farmer had described about the cars on the highway. Kim had taken over a car-smuggling operation. It had been regular, twice a month.

Then something happened to throw off the routine. There were more cars than there should have been, at times they weren't supposed to appear.

At least one of the drivers wasn't from Military Security. No one working for Military Security could be described as skinny. Muscular, maybe. Ugly, burly, thuggish. Not skinny. They all got plenty of food and plenty of exercise. This was starting to point in one direction.

Kang. That car I was supposed to photograph, the reason Colonel Kim had arranged for me to sit on that hillside at dawn-Kang. The reason I was in Manpo-Kang.

I lay down. A few minutes later, as I was sinking into sleep, I heard the river thundering over the rocks, tearing at its banks, willing itself away to the freedom of the ocean far to the west.

Pak walked into my office and sat on the only chair not piled with papers.

"I scrounged you a filing cabinet. Why don't you use it?" This was always his opening line, and he no longer expected an answer. He knew the first drawer held my vase, the one with the flying cranes, and the second drawer my collection of sandpaper. In the third drawer were the pieces of a simple bookshelf I kept hoping to build.

"We are near a dead end on this case. The hospital says it can't justify the refrigeration and is going to have to dump the corpse. The Minister says it's time to file this in the Unsolved drawer and let it be." Pak looked over at the file cabinet. "Where do you put the unsolved stuff, in the drawer with your bookshelf plans?" He put his feet on my desk and then pulled them off again. "Sorry, rude of me. I was trying to think."

When he walked in, I'd been making another rough sketch of a bookshelf on the back of another Ministry memo. We both knew there might never be time or materials enough to build anything. I put the sketch to the side and found my notepad. "We both know the Minister wants us to solve this case," I said. "The fact that the vice minister doesn't think we can do it makes it doubly important to the old man."

Pak made a noncommittal noise. "And we both know who has ordered the Minister to close the file. My brother. My former brother."

Pak stared off into space. He didn't blink, and for a while I thought he had stopped breathing.

"Not much we can do, Inspector," he said finally. "We're spending our time shuffling a pretty pile of facts that don't add up, and I can't justify keeping you on this much longer."

I didn't have to reply, because my phone rang. It was the local security man, Li, who handled the countryside district south of Pyongyang.

One of the farmers had found something, he said, and he wanted me to take a look before he made a formal report. I thanked him, said I would be right there, and hung up.