James Church - Bamboo and blood

"At least I'm not the only one whose career will suffer. Did you know that even the fact that your negotiations with the Americans fell apart is being pinned on me."

"Career?" I laughed. "If that's your only worry, count yourself lucky. I'm going to have to write a long and very convincing report about what happened to Sohn, which will be doubly difficult because I have no idea what the truth is. And that means I can't even concoct a decent story. Sohn had enemies at home, but he had friends as well. And his friends will start from the assumption that it's all my fault."

"Well, at least you can report the man with the strange hand died doing his job."

"True, but I never took him for an assassin."

"Assassin? What do you mean?"

"He tried to kill the delegation leader. That shot would have blown his head off if he hadn't dropped cigar ash on his pants at just that moment."

M. Beret looked puzzled. "Is that what you think?"

"Of course it's what I think. I was there, wasn't I? I saw it. We were both under the table."

"You were at the lake. How could you see what was going on five hundred meters away?"

"Who do you think the target was?" My blood froze.

"Yes." M. Beret spoke slowly. "It was you."

"He was trying to shoot me?"

"No, he didn't fire the shot. He disrupted it. The bullet was aimed at you. I thought you were just showing sangfroid."

"Pardon me?"

"Unflappable. Cold blood, literally, but that may not be the best translation under the circumstances. You knew, of course, that his job was to protect you." He watched my face. "You knew that, yes? Someone in your capital was trying to disrupt the talks, completely blow them up. The best way to accomplish that, they figured, was the death of a delegation member. They couldn't kill an American; that would get them in a lot of trouble. But murdering someone on your side… well, it wouldn't be the first time, eh? Apparently, the most expendable one was you. I expect that's why Sohn came out here. He had discovered elements of the plot. He needed to warn you."

Warn me? He took his sweet time about it, if that was his intent. So much time he never got around to it, someone made sure of that. "M. Beret, there's no way you could possibly know any of what you just told me. I appreciate your sense of drama, but it is pure fantasy, and if you paid for such reporting, you really should demand your money back from the source. Out of curiosity, what is the rest of the fable? Who was in the tree, trying to kill me?"

"I believe they are about to close your gate, Inspector. Au revoir."

"Just tell me this, what happened to him, the Man with Three Fingers? Jeno said he was dead."

M. Beret paused for a fraction longer than he should have. "We have an unidentified Mexican in the morgue, if that's what you mean. Now hurry, please. If you miss your plane I will be inconsolable."

"I will miss you, too." I kissed him on both cheeks, which I figured was a photo he might like for the files.

"He's dead." I was in Pak's office, squinting against the sun that bounced off the windows of the Operations Building across the way. The gingkoes in the courtyard were useless, weeks away from getting leaves that could soften the light. Worst of all, three months into the New Year, their branches had all the charm of dinosaur limbs. March is bad enough, my grandfather would say, without having to look at gingko trees.

"Really?" Shock registered in Pak's eyes. "What happened?" He wasn't feigning ignorance. I could see that he really didn't know, which meant the news hadn't gotten back here yet. Pak might be only a chief inspector, but no one had more lines out than he did. If Sohn's death had been reported, no matter in what channel, Pak would have known. Even if the news were closely held deep in the Center, Pak would find it.

"The Swiss are classifying it as an accident."

"By which I take it, you don't think so."

"I think he was murdered. That's what they suspect, too, only it would cause them too much trouble to say so."

"And why would you think this was murder?"

"For one thing, his neck was broken. That doesn't just happen. You can fall through a gallows' trapdoor, or off a horse, or out of a car, or down the stairs, but generally it isn't easy to break your neck all by yourself. If he fell, there would have been bruises. He didn't have any. None."

"How do you know?"

"I saw the body in the morgue."

"Why, the question will be asked, did Inspector O go to the Geneva morgue?"

"The mission doesn't want anything to do with bodies of any description. They said no one was missing from their roster, and they weren't going to the morgue to stare at an unidentified foreigner. In fact, they complained it was an insult, suggesting something had happened to one of the staff. The Swiss threw up their hands and asked me. I thought I owed it to Sohn. Someone did, anyway."

"So, just for the sake of argument, we'll assume you are right." I expected Pak to ask a lot of things, but not what came next. "Does that bother you, his being murdered?"

"Strange, the Swiss put the same question to me."

"And what did you reply?"

"I said I'd have to think about it. I'm still thinking, but I'm not sure I like having so many people interested in my personal reaction. What if I asked you the same thing?"

"I'd say I am bothered by it. I'd say Sohn was a good man. He grunted and barked at times, his ears were too small and the back of his head too pointed, but he was good to his people and he knew what needed to be done."

Nicely vague, that phrase-needed to be done.

"So, you knew him from before you joined the Ministry. I figured you did. There was something about the way you spoke to each other."

"It's been a while, but I don't think he had changed much."

"From what I could tell, he had a lot of enemies."

"These days, that's not hard to do. Even back then, he had the knack for it."

"The Swiss told me they saw him meeting Jeno last year."

"Good for them." Pak stood up. This time there was nothing special in his eyes. Maybe he wasn't surprised. "I feel like going for a long walk. Come along?"

As soon as we were out the gate and past the guards, it was clear Pak didn't want to talk. Silence was fine by me. I was disoriented, and it wasn't just lack of sleep. I couldn't place where I was. I'd only been away for a month, but the city had a strange feel. Everything about it was unfamiliar-the buildings, the air, the sounds. It was as if I hadn't really come back.

The afternoon was awfully cold. All of the stores were dark, and there weren't many people lined up waiting for buses. We walked for almost twenty minutes without saying a word; finally Pak stopped and turned to me. "It may not come up in the course of later conversation, so let me remind you that we are still supposed to be working on that case, the woman who was murdered."

"Welcome home, Inspector O," I said.

"No, I don't mean you have to start on it today."

"When?"

"Tomorrow. No one will call on Sunday. You can work uninterrupted."

"Anyone bother to look at the file while I was gone?" I'd come to a few tentative conclusions, but I wasn't going to share them just yet. I planned to sleep the whole day tomorrow. I could give my conclusions to Pak on Monday, tell him I'd spent all of Sunday developing them.

"We're still shorthanded. Besides, a lot happened while you were gone."

"Such as?"

"I don't know this, and because I don't know it, I would have no way of telling you about a surge of activity in Hwadae county. There haven't been enough out-of-channel orders sent to our people to suggest anything imminent. But we have noticed more visitors going up there than normal. An Iranian delegation went through Sunan about a week ago. A special Pakistani visitor flew in, too. Our nearest post has been told to keep well back and look the other way when the cars go through."