James Church - The Man with the Baltic Stare

“Is there another exit?” I shook off the bellboy’s hand and stepped back toward the market entrance.

“On the other side.”

Three young women formed a screen around me, pushed through the crowd, and deposited me on the other side. The bellboy followed close behind. “There are a couple of taxis lined up near that apartment house across the street,” he said, “but I’d stay out of cabs if I were you.”

“You’re not me.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I’m lucky that way.”

When I got to the street, Li’s car came around the corner and stopped in front of me. “Don’t argue,” he said. “Get in.”

We drove for a few minutes before Li said anything else. “I don’t suppose you’re interested in knowing about Major Kim.” He rolled down his window. “You notice how stuffy it gets in a car this time of year?”

“No, I’m not interested in the major. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Clear enough?”

We turned into the hotel parking lot. A big blue car with two men in the front and all the windows open was waiting not far from the hotel entrance. One of the men jumped out and opened the rear door. A woman emerged from the restaurant attached to the hotel, walked straight to the car, and got in. The car pulled away in a hurry.

“I don’t suppose you’re interested in that, either.” Li watched the car disappear.

“Should I be?”

“The lady didn’t catch your eye? Very fashionable, don’t you think? Quite a looker.”

“Fashion was never my style. Expensive shoes, expensive coat, expensive scarf, that’s what it looked like from here. Everything looks expensive on a body like that.”

“So, who do you think wears expensive clothes these days?”

“Could be someone with money.” I got out of the car.

“What’s your hurry, Inspector? No way he’s going to let you go home. Incidentally, I hope you locked the front door on your mountain retreat. They took the guard off the road this morning.”

I got back in the car. “All right, you win. Who is Kim? I’m interested, after all. And you seem to know something you’re dying to tell me.”

“Wrong. I’m not dying for anyone, not anymore. That’s done with.”

“Who is Kim?”

“I’m not sure about everything, even though I’m in and out of his office. They don’t want us to know too much. He appeared about six months ago. After that, there were a lot of meetings up top, cars racing around, aircraft coming in at odd hours, street closings for high-speed convoys. I got pulled off my normal assignment and put into his group, or at least the group that sits up whenever he calls. We do a lot of bowing and scraping.”

“He’s a major. Since when do we cringe at majors?”

“Funny, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, funny. He acts like he owns the place. This morning I met him in an office I never knew existed. You must know what it was before he got there. It wasn’t a Ministry building; we don’t have that many chairs.” I opened my window. “The air smells different in autumn, don’t you think?”

“I hadn’t noticed. I just breathe the stuff. And I intend to keep breathing.” He gave me a sharp look.

“Noble goal,” I said. The conversation was over. If he knew anything else, he was going to wait to tell me. Maybe it was actually everything he knew, though I had a feeling he had something he was saving. Everyone was saving something. The lady in the market, the bellboy, maybe even the ferret. “What about the lady?” I said.

“Which one?”

“The one with the nice shoes we were talking about.”

“Forget you saw her; forget you saw her come out of that restaurant and get into that car.”

“What car? I think you need to have your medication adjusted.”

He laughed. “You think I’m edgy, you should see the people in the Minister’s office.” He laughed again, only this time it came out more like dead leaves in the wind. Dead tree limbs, dead leaves-laughs weren’t what they used to be. We used to laugh a lot in the office. It helped sometimes.

“Give me a call,” I said, though I don’t think he heard me. His eyes were on the rearview mirror, watching a black car creep into the parking lot. As soon as I closed the door, he gunned the motor and was gone. The black car didn’t follow, though I was pretty sure the driver said something to the person in the back before he got out and looked at me. He was missing most of his left ear.

Strange, I thought. Nice-looking woman like that. It seems a shame to pretend she was never there.

When I went back into the hotel, the man with the vacant look was leaning against one of the pillars. He had on a red-checked shirt, but it didn’t make any difference. As he shifted his gaze to me, everything around him turned gray; foghorns sounded in the distance; seabirds lost their way and plunged into the ocean. I nodded at him, and it appeared that he blinked, like the lamp in a lighthouse that swings around every minute to keep ships off the rocks.

Things seemed jumpy, but not in the normal way. People had always looked over their shoulders, and no one thought twice about it. That’s why your neck swivels, we used to say, to see who’s following you. This was different.

“You’ve been away a long time,” Li said when we met in a noodle place the next day.

“A long time,” I said, “but not forever. I can still tell the difference between a routine twitch and something more serious.”

“You’re imagining things. Relax.”

Only I wasn’t imagining anything. Li was nervous; each time I’d met him over the past few days, he’d become more antsy. Kim was nervous, too. That was harder to spot. From the few times I’d seen him so far, he was good at cloaking himself in an unflappable air. People who were scared didn’t look too closely at the cloak. But Kim didn’t scare me, so I could afford to watch him carefully.

I’d been out of my hotel a couple of times to get my mental bearings. Normal people walking along the street weren’t on edge; whatever the problem was, it hadn’t come down to their level. People had a certain stride, a certain way of moving when they sensed a big storm coming. I’d patrolled my sector long enough to spot that move, that odd swing of the shoulders. I wasn’t seeing anything like that, and it wasn’t just the particular part of town around my hotel. All the barometers were holding steady at street level, that’s how it seemed. The problem-whatever it was-had so far been kept over the horizon, as if one circle was wound tight and wasn’t interested in letting anyone else know. That usually meant things were going to get a lot worse.

“If you think you’re fooling me,” I said, “forget it. You’re about to jump out of your skin. When you saw that lady heading for the car yesterday afternoon, I thought you were going to have a stroke.”

“She’s a looker, that’s all.”

“Sure, and I’m the King of Siam. You have secrets? That’s fine with me. I don’t like secrets anymore. They ruin the digestion.”

“I told you before. I’ll tell you again, O. You don’t know what you don’t know.”

“Yes-and I can’t even guess. How about you tell me a little bit of what I don’t know. Maybe it would help me keep my balance.”

Li stared at the table.

“You want another bowl?” I said.

He shook his head. “You said you owed me a meal. We’ll let this one count.” An alarm went off, and he looked at his watch.

“You in a hurry?”

“Unlike you, Inspector, I have no choice.” He pressed a button on the watch and the alarm stopped. “It’s Swiss.” He held it up for me to see. “I don’t use all the dials, but it doesn’t matter. I like to look at it sometimes. It makes me think I’m someone else.”