James Church - The Man with the Baltic Stare

The man beside me is humming. He puts the book on the bench between us. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” he sings in a soft, high voice.

I take a sip of warm water from the bottle. What the deuce is that supposed to mean? “Yeah, me, neither,” I say.

He smiles and hums a few more bars. “Gaaz-ing at the sky.” He looks up through the leaves. “Going to be a pretty day. Puffy white clouds.”

That rings a bell. I nod. “Blue sky.” Wherever this is going, we are just about there.

“Too bad about your uncle.”

All at once, this isn’t the conversation I expected. I don’t have an uncle.

“Well,” he says finally. He walks away, holding the book. The newspaper is on the bench. I sit for a couple of minutes, wondering whether this is a trap. I don’t trust Luís, but he doesn’t seem to be the type to put me in a trap, I am pretty sure, almost sure. Still, that leaves a number of candidates. Pang didn’t really want me to be here, despite what he said. Zhao hadn’t tried to be devious; he had been absolutely explicit. The old man on thirteen has moved down to number eleven. He watches. It isn’t a trap, I decide, so I pick up the newspaper and skim the front page. Then I fold the paper under my arm and walk slowly down the stairs to the hill, and slowly down the hill to a bakery for a cup of coffee. This wasn’t the best handoff I’d ever seen, I think to myself, but apparently it was good enough for Macau.

When I got back to the Nam Lo, the clerk was hurrying down the stairs. He pressed himself against the wall. “Nobody touched your room; don’t worry,” he said. “I was cleaning up the one down the hall, the one your girlfriend uses.”

“Out of my way,” I said. “I lost a suitcase full of money at the casino and I don’t want to talk.”

This seemed to cheer him up, because he said something using only six tones.

The room looked untouched. I closed the door, put the ratty chair against it, and opened the newspaper on the bed. Taped on page 3 was an airline ticket for tomorrow to Prague, though not nonstop. That meant changing planes, risking delays. Why Prague? I got a funny feeling. I’d been there once before, long ago. There was a return ticket, but it was for Shanghai. That did me no good; there were no flights from Shanghai to Pyongyang. That meant I was going to have to change the routing at the airport in Prague, with a lot of unnecessary questions from the ticket agent about why I didn’t book it that way to begin with. There would also be careful study of my identification, which meant the visa stamps would get attention. The ticket wasn’t in my name. It wasn’t in the name that was on my South Korean passport, either, but that was all right because on page 5 of the newspaper was an envelope with a Dominican passport inside. It had a better picture of me than the one Kim’s people had used. My name was Ricardo, and I was fifty-four years old, which was fine. That knocked almost fifteen years off the wear and tear on my body. The age on a fake passport might not be an elixir of youth, but it helps.

I went downstairs and gave the room clerk a sad look. “My uncle died. I have to leave a day early.”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s a curse. Whenever people have to leave early, they kill off an uncle. Never an aunt.”

“I’ll be back.”

“You get charged for the full stay. It’s policy.” He pointed at a sign behind him on the wall.

“That’s an explanation of the fire exits, in Chinese.”

“Say, you’re one smart Korean, aren’t you?” He let loose a few long sentences in Hakka.

“OK, I get it,” I said. “I pay for the day I’m not here, and you pocket the money.”

“Any complaints, fill out the form in the desk in your room.”

“There isn’t a desk in my room.”

“Really? Well, you can use one of the forms over there.” He pointed at a few dirty pieces of paper on the counter.

“Where do I put it when I’m done?”

He grinned.

“I’ll tell you what I need. I need a train ticket for tomorrow.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Macau is practically an island. No trains.”

“Yeah, I figured that out. But you must have travel agents that can make arrangements. I’ve seen one or two luggage stores, and that means people travel; if people travel, they have tickets, and they must get them somewhere.”

“Depends. Where you going?” He gave me the canny look of a man calculating how much he could get for selling the same information to three buyers.

“Shanghai, to pay my respects to my uncle, who ran a noodle shop there. Then to Beijing to see my aged mother, who lives with her sister in one of those new villas near the Kempinski. You know it? Then on to Yanji. Yanji is lousy with Koreans, in case you didn’t know.”

“Right.”

“Can you get me the tickets?”

“No, but I can tell you where to go.”

“A ticket office.”

“If you knew, why did you ask?” He was already reaching for the phone.

That night I went back to the restaurant where the Chinese girls ate before they went to work in the hallway. The Russian girl was sitting in the same corner.

“Hi,” I said. “Can I sit?”

“Sit.” She smiled up at me. “Yes, sit.”

“You’re here again.” I scanned the menu. “You want something beside noodles and orange juice?”

She shook her head. “It’s good. You want some?”

“Nah, I never eat the night before I travel.”

“You leaving? Changing hotels? That’s good. You don’t want to be at the Nam Lo.”

“I’m going to Shanghai. My uncle died.” Might as well put the story out in more than one place, though I felt bad using her.

“Sorry.” She shrugged. “You’re a nice man. I will miss you.”

“And you’re a nice girl with beautiful eyes. I wish you’d go home.”

“I can’t. I have a contract.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“I already told you, a thousand dollars.”

“How many other girls does your boss control?”

“You want someone else?” She looked hurt. “All right. There are eight girls altogether. For a few days we were nine, but now it’s back to eight again.”

“Someone went home?”

“Who knows? We never got a good look at her. She was older than the rest of us, showed up suddenly. My boss put her in the Nam Lo for one night. I don’t even think she was there the whole time. She didn’t work, that’s for sure, and then she was gone. I saw her from the back, just briefly. She was blond. When she left, my boss told me to clean out the room she had been in. There was a small suitcase full of clothes and a razor. Otherwise, it was as if she hadn’t been there.”

“But she had been there.”

“Yes, but the room didn’t feel right. It didn’t smell right.”

I stood up to go. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

She stood and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Make sure it’s before April. My contract is up then, and I’m never coming back.”

I had time on my hands, money in my pocket, and things on my list. The first thing I did was stop one of the girls walking up and down the hall.

“Where are the best pork buns in town?” The girl was carrying a black patent-leather bag with matching shoes. I figured if anyone knew about pork buns, she would.

“Fifteen hundred,” she said.

“Maybe later,” I said. “Right now, I need pork buns, the best. When you go out for pork buns, where do you and your friends go?”

She called over one of her co-workers, frilly white blouse and her hair done up in a tight bun. Very fetching, but not what I needed. The two spoke between themselves for a moment.