James Church - Bamboo and blood

"Which means…"

"Which means it must have been someone who recognized him, someone who knew him. That's not a big universe, when you think about it. The number of our people abroad at any one time is small. The number in Geneva is even smaller. Either the person Sohn saw wasn't supposed to be there, or he wasn't supposed to be meeting with whomever Sohn saw him with."

M. Beret had shown me a picture of my brother with the man from Sri Lanka; the same man had sat with his knees practically touching mine on the train, on his way to another meeting with my brother, maybe in Bern. They must have decided to do it outside Geneva, because they didn't like what had just happened in the city. It hadn't been in their plans, murdering a party official. "What if the meeting Sohn witnessed was approved, but no one was supposed to know about it?" I didn't believe that, but it was a theory that had to be crossed off.

Pak shook his head. "Not likely. For that they'd only have to bring him home and tell him to keep his mouth shut. No reason to break his neck."

"Missiles. What did Sohn have to do with missiles?"

"Always roaming with a restless mind." Pak pulled out another cigarette, looked at it for a moment, then put it back in the pack.

"Heart. The line is 'roaming with a restless heart.'"

"You should know; you're the poetic one, Inspector. Care to write a poem about missiles someday? Sohn thought they were a waste of resources. Not at first he didn't. At first he was part of a program to get plans and components. He ran it."

"When?"

"Let's leave it at that."

"The man is dead; I'm interested in who killed him, especially because my own neck seems to be on the line. I'm not sure I buy the story I was handed. Besides, I thought you liked him."

"Sohn said that people would die this winter and we'd be better off without them. Or did you forget that?"

No, I hadn't forgotten.

"My mother died last night. She was thin, like a piece of paper, O. What do you think Sohn would have said to me?" He grabbed his hair in his hands and pulled until it looked like he would rip it from his head. "Worse, much worse, what would I have said to him?" Pak put his head on the table and wept. There was nothing I could do.

What I had learned about the young woman murdered in Pakistan fit on a tiny piece of paper, what you might call a short list. That list was in front of me, on my desk. It bothered me that it wasn't longer. I wanted to know what happened to her. It wasn't germane to anything, but it was the start of a chain of events that had almost left me with a big hole in my head. That sort of thing piques my curiosity.

The young woman had been murdered. The murder had taken place in Pakistan. She liked music, was infatuated with Rachmaninoff. That was it; end of list. Everything else was conjecture. She might be mixed up with missiles, and she might have crossed paths with Israeli intelligence. I still didn't know how she died, but if I found out that her neck had been broken, it wouldn't surprise me. French cigarettes somewhere in the picture, too-that wouldn't have surprised me, either. I'd told Pak that her murder wasn't important, that it hadn't meant anything. Maybe so, but I hated to leave it at that. I stared at the list for a few minutes; that didn't fill in any blanks.

Early Wednesday morning Pak was called in to explain why no reporting on the case had come from his unit yet. He was gone for almost four hours. As soon as he reached the front gate, just after noon in a pelting rain, he called me from the gate phone.

"Get over to my office this instant," he said. "Have a pencil and paper; be ready to take down everything I tell you, without a single interruption." He slammed the phone down so hard I could hear it all the way to the second floor.

I was sitting with paper and pencil when Pak walked in. He threw a file onto his cabinet and tossed his coat onto a chair.

"The Minister is angry. He told me he was angry, that's how I know. He did it in an angry voice, with an angry look on his face, in case I missed the point or harbored any doubts. You might say he chewed me out. And do you know why?"

"Tell me when I'm supposed to start putting pencil to paper, would you?"

"Sure, I'll also tell you what else you can do with the pencil."

"The Minister was not happy, that's where you left off. What was the problem?"

"The problem? The problem is that a certain case that was supposed to stay very low profile has become high profile. A certain European city where we are always supposed to blend in with the landscape has decided it doesn't want to have anything to do with us anymore."

"I can't be blamed for that."

"The hell you can't." He said it slowly, without any emotion. It wasn't a threat, more like a warning, and not the sort of warning Pak threw around idly. "When Sohn picked you out, it was for a reason. Or haven't you figured that out yet? I thought when your own skin was in jeopardy it would heighten your sense of reality, but maybe not."

"One thing at a time. Forget my skin. What about the Minister?"

"The Minister wasn't happy when Sohn said he needed to borrow you. The Minister frequently is unhappy, but he doesn't brood on it. If Sohn wanted you, that was that, it didn't matter what the reason was. The Minister, as he made clear to me, expected you to do what you were told and then get back to work."

"I thought Sohn and the Minister didn't get along."

"That's not the point, not even your concern, and I'll tell you why. It isn't your concern because it isn't my concern. It doesn't matter to me who gets along with whom these days. In fact, it's not even clear to me these days if anything matters at all."

I put down the pencil. "Strange, I never expected to hear that from you."

"Let's stay on target, shall we, Inspector? We're talking about you, not me. We're not dealing with your expectations, but with the mess you created."

"A minute ago it was a problem. Now it's a mess."

"Stick around, it's about to become a disaster. The ambassador at the mission in Geneva sent in a report. His security people asked around."

"I'll bet they did. I'll bet they found out everything they could from their Portuguese dollies."

"What?"

"I wouldn't pay attention to the security man. I'd wring his neck first."

"Wring it, or break it?"

"Don't tell me I'm being accused of murdering Sohn. Because if I am, I'm going back to my apartment. They can come for me there; I won't make you suffer the embarrassment of having me led out of your office." I stood up to go. "I know who is behind this, and so do you."

"Sit down, Inspector, we're not finished." Pak looked painfully grim. "You're getting paranoid. You think your brother is behind everything that happens?"

"Do we have something more to discuss?" I wasn't going to talk about a brother that I no longer had. "This whole place is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. No one is giving orders, and no one is following them. Have you seen the reports on internal travel from the countryside? None of the posts are even trying to enforce regulations anymore. They say it's hopeless, and not worth the effort. Besides, people need to eat. Our job isn't to enforce starvation, or did I miss something in the latest memo while I was away?"

"You're not focusing, Inspector. You're hip deep in someone else's business. I don't give a damn about internal travel regulations. I don't care if everyone in Yanggang skips all the way to the East Sea." He saw the expression on my face. "Alright, the question is survival-who will survive and who won't. Yes, this year is crucial. If we make it through this year, things will get better. Satisfied?"

"Says who? And more to the point, so what? I don't want to play in that arena anymore, Pak. Survival, collapse-big words, big concepts, very big. Once you warned me against reducing things to their essence. Now I'm warning you, don't stretch ideas past the point of meaning."