James Church - The Man with the Baltic Stare

“Let’s put it this way: If Zhao is in a good mood, he can be your patron, even your protector, in faraway places. He’ll supply your needs and embellish your wants, beyond what you’ve got in that little envelope of travel money you’re holding. He can also put you in touch with the right people in Macau. His access to the influential is exceeded only by his bank accounts.”

“This, as you say, is if he is in a good mood. If not?”

“If not, he has a pet rat who can remove your lungs and use them to stuff the pillows of the orphans he’s had a hand in creating. Zhao believes grief is a bad thing, a burden on society, so if he murders a husband, he makes sure to murder the wife.”

“I have no wife.”

“No one to grieve for you? Then the man’s work is simplified.”

“I’d rather this Zhao stick to enlarging my wants.”

“ ‘Embellish,’ Inspector. I said ‘embellish.’ ”

“Another friend, another door?”

“You’ll have to ask him yourself. It’s not my job to read his mind. We coexist, that’s all.”

“You can’t arrest him?”

Kim smiled. I began recording a series of variables in my head-corners of the mouth, forehead, eye crinkling. This was the first entry, so there was no basis for comparison, but on the face of it, I thought it could go down as “wan.”

“No, Inspector, I can’t arrest him, not if I want to keep breathing. Unlike you, I do have a wife-a wife and two children.”

“What about the Great Han? Can’t he do something? Surely he doesn’t approve of someone like Zhao.”

“I guess you could say the Great Han prefers to keep breathing, too.”

I went back to the hotel to think things over. It still wasn’t too late to tell Kim to find someone else to go to Macau. I had made it a point never to get involved with gangsters while I was in the Ministry, because I knew it would be nothing but a headache. There was a tiny section in a dark office in the headquarters building that dealt with all gangs-Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and whatever else the wind blew across the borders. Gangsters were tough people, very smooth for the most part, and for the most part deadly. That was only half the problem. The rest of the problem-and the most difficult part-came from the fact that other entities, various central committee departments, military groups, special services, and we never knew for sure what else, loved to run operations using foreign gangs. We were never informed ahead of time. If we got in the way of an operation, we were in trouble. It took a lot of careful footwork to stay clear of something you didn’t know existed. One hot summer, a Japanese gang tried to set up shop in my sector. It wasn’t a big operation, but I was against letting them hang around, so I complained through channels. Channels told me to mind my business. It turned out a couple of the gang members were working for a foreign intelligence service and weren’t very discreet about it, so after a few months the whole operation was shut down and moved to the east coast.

Around six o’clock, Kim called and asked if I wanted to go out for dinner. “Sure,” I said. Either he was working overtime to cultivate me or he was seriously isolated in his own machinery. The girl in the red dress met us at the door, only this time she was wearing blue. “Blue is definitely your color,” I told her.

She tossed her head. “This way,” she said to Major Kim, and led us back to the triangular table.

Michael had the night off. We were waited on by Bruce, who had the same austere smile. I figured they handed them out in the kitchen, along with the white jackets.

Even before the drinks arrived, I got to the point. “Forget about it.” That was as direct as I knew how to be. “I’m not going to Macau or anywhere else, except back to the mountain.”

Kim was looking at the menu. “The quail looks good,” he said.

“I’m not about to get back into all of this running around. Consider me a candle with nothing left to burn. No flame, all consumed. Look around, Major. Look. Look for heaven’s sake!” I tried to keep my voice down. I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to look at.

“Oh, Christ.” He put down the menu. “You’re wallowing like a pig in self-pity, Inspector. You sound like you’re about to start singing an anthem to regret. A life wasted, wrong turns taken. Don’t, please. Keep it to yourself.”

“Look to the future, is that it? Let the past fall away. And where will it fall? In what peaceful graveyard do we bury the past?”

“Graveyard? More probably, a garbage dump in your case. You’d better hope all the years you spent in service of this mob can be recycled. Is there a great universal machine that takes old time and makes it new? How should I know? And why should I care? We’re not here to compare philosophy notes. I’m supposed to throw a rope across this pathetic chasm of a country. I don’t look down. I don’t notice if there are rotting corpses or rivers of gold. Makes no difference. They want a rope so they can build a bridge from here to there. It starts with a rope. That’s you, Inspector. That’s you.”

I shook my head. “Don’t bet on it.”

The next afternoon, I went downstairs to complain about my phone. It was blinking, and it wouldn’t stop.

“That means you have messages,” said the clerk. With his wrist extended just so, he indicated the button on the phone that meant messages. “You push this and your mailbox will tell you what messages you have. We’ll make it easy. I’ll push the button; you listen,” he said. The message said I was to stand under the canopy at the front door at 1:00 P.M. It was almost one, so I started out the door. The man with the long stare had been at the far end of the counter, watching me, the whole time.

“Do we know each other?” I walked over to him. “Because if we don’t, you’re getting on my nerves.”

He shrugged, a gesture with no impact on a stare.

I went outside, and a minute later a black car appeared.

A little man jumped out from the passenger side and opened the rear door. “In,” he said. “Now.”

I got in. The same man who had been in Kim’s office was sitting in the shadows. He had switched cologne. The new stuff seemed to destroy oxygen and possibly affected the light as well. I’d never seen the backseat of a car so dark. It was like taking a drive in a black hole. That was not a comforting thought, and I started to sweat. The door slammed shut. Now all of the light from the outside was gone. I could see Zhao, dimly, but I couldn’t see my own body. When I held up my hands, they weren’t there.

“A nice illusion, Inspector. It gives people a sense of disquiet-who is here and who is not? Well, life is transitory, like pleasure.”

“We have business?” Maybe it was only an illusion, but for some reason I had no trouble seeing Zhao’s eyes. He was looking at me with unrelenting dislike. A stare may be unnerving, but it is basically passive. This look was launching a thousand poison-tipped arrows. “Or are we going to discuss Aristotle?”

The driver accelerated around a curve, and the car jumped ahead. We might have been preparing to take off, for all I knew.

“Some of the roads around here aren’t all that good.” I felt around for a seat belt. “Your driver might want to take it easy.”

“Don’t worry about the roads, Inspector, or belting yourself in. These are the least of your concerns.”

“In that case, let me go to the obvious question: What are the most of my concerns?”

Zhao laughed. He might have been a panther sitting on a branch above the forest floor, licking his paws and laughing. His eyes were embers; his teeth shone; his hair was sleek. For the first time I could make out what he was wearing. Black, all black-black sweater, black trousers, black shoes. They should have been invisible in the darkness.