James Church - The Man with the Baltic Stare

“I don’t know what all you have to do. I do know you’ll have to get out of this room.”

“Is it OK if he stays through the next meeting?” I pointed at the man from SSD.

“And why would it be OK if he stayed?” she asked.

“Because he’s dead.”

“Who knew?” I was sitting in a chair-not the green one, which had been moved to the other side of the room-in front of Kim’s desk while he chewed on pencils. “You could certainly argue that it was a day bad for somebody’s health.”

“I don’t think he just keeled over.”

“He didn’t keel over. He didn’t even slump. He was sitting up.”

“How did they do it?”

“How did who do what? I don’t have any idea what happened to him. All I know is that he sat down at one o’clock and by one twenty he wasn’t going anywhere.”

“They must have killed him.” Kim looked worried. “Why would they do that? He must have known something that he wasn’t supposed to know. Either that or he had plans to jump ship and they needed to stop him.”

“I doubt either one of those. I also doubt that SSD killed him. They don’t do that to their own people. It’s very bad for morale.”

“Maybe you were wrong. Maybe he wasn’t one of theirs.”

“Then whose was he?”

“I don’t know. It was in his file, but the file is gone.”

“Gone. Mislaid, I suppose.”

“Files do disappear sometimes, Inspector. This is a secure facility. I don’t think anyone here made off with it.” Kim was looking more worried by the second. The more he said out loud all of the reasons everything was all right, the more he realized that things were starting to go bad. “We’ll have to do an autopsy. That will tell us the cause of death. The police can take it from there.”

“The police? You really don’t understand this place yet, do you? The police won’t have anything to do with a dead SSD agent.”

“They won’t? Then who will investigate?”

“That’s a good question, Major. If he died of a heart attack, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief, because a big red check can go in the box on the file that says: ‘No Further Investigation Necessary.’ If his heart stopped for unexplained reasons, no one will answer the phone when you call.”

“What do we do? Forget it happened?”

“No, you keep it in mind at all times.”

“Was it a threat?”

“Against you? Not likely. They’re not going to threaten you. They aren’t sure who is going to come out on top. What if you emerge as top dog? They don’t want to be on your bad side.”

“They want to be on my good side. Then why murder that agent?”

“Fair enough: Why murder that agent? It could be they need you to keep some distance. Remember I told you to call off the operation? Actually, I don’t think they meant to kill their man to make that point. I think they meant to kill someone else.”

“You?”

“Could be. The question is, why?”

“Don’t they realize that killing you wouldn’t have mattered to me?”

“That helps.”

“They must think you’re working for me.”

“Or something.” It could be that. More likely, they got wind of my meeting with Kang in Prague.

Finally, I decided to ask the major. The man in the lobby, the one who stared at nothing but always seemed to watch as I walked in and out of the hotel, was there every day. The clerk said he’d been away for a weekend while I was traveling, but he was back on his chair the day before I returned. Who was he?

“Him?” Kim was glancing over a report. He made a notation in the margin, put a big star next to one passage, and turned the page over. “We don’t know who he is. Your people say they’ve never heard of him and have no records. Should I believe them?”

“My people? You mean the Ministry? They might not have any records, but someone sure as hell knows who he is. Anonymity is not a hallmark of what we have built here all of these years, believe me. Why not bring him in?”

“You worried? You want a personal bodyguard? The man is just staring, Inspector.”

“I was only letting you know, that’s all. If he’s one of yours, call him off, would you? It’s unnerving.”

“I told you, he’s not one of mine. Maybe he belongs to Zhao. His people don’t have much going on in their heads, so they tend to stare. That’s not your biggest problem right now.”

“I take it that means you can’t bring him in. I thought you were in charge.”

“In charge? What an idea! I’m hanging on for dear life, Inspector. An admission of weakness that I probably shouldn’t make to you, but you might as well know where things stand. There is no cooperation, only a sullen quiet when I walk into the room. What do you think is going on? You seemed to understand the situation with SSD. What else can you tell me?”

“How would I know?”

“How would you know, that’s exactly my question. Incidentally, I was told this morning that we lost track of you in Macau for several days. Why?”

“If you thought I was going to let that madman Zhao follow me around, you’re crazy. If you could keep tabs on me, so could he. I took some precautions. Nothing elaborate.”

Kim was suddenly alert. “What makes you think Zhao was in Macau?”

“Nothing. I just wasn’t taking any chances. I told you, I took some precautions, that’s all.”

“Like taking an airplane out of Macau?”

“I certainly wasn’t going to buy a train ticket to Beijing.”

“The idea is starting to bounce around, Inspector, that you aren’t on our side, that you are on the wrong side, in fact. That’s not good.” Kim walked over to a large cabinet and turned a switch on the side. “You’re not bothered by white noise, I trust. Now no one will hear our conversation. I hope you don’t have a transmitter in your shoe or anything.”

“I did, but it gave me bunions, so I threw it away.”

“Here’s your dilemma. You don’t mind if I speak frankly?”

“I wish you would.”

“This place,” he looked around the room, but it was clear he meant the gesture to be interpreted more broadly, “is gone. Frankly, all that holds it up is the fear in my capital that a collapse will be disastrous for us. Believe me, people are shaking in their Guccis.”

“I think you’re wrong. A bigger real dilemma is that if you move too soon, or the wrong way, the Chinese won’t sit still.”

“Thank you for your advice, Inspector, but I read the same file you did. We’re handling the Chinese, and we don’t have any new openings for policy advisors. I’ll tell you if we do.”

“Money, that’s your problem. It makes your world go round. You’re afraid of making history for fear of losing money. Here, we rely on power. So why would people with power in this city agree to fall into your lap? Purely for money? I find that hard to believe. This group has no desire to spend the rest of its days on the Riviera.”

“Not money, Inspector, loss of nerve. It happens-not often, but it happens. That’s all it takes. Someone wakes up one morning, looks in the mirror, and can’t see anything familiar. It’s contagious. The result is extreme loss of self-confidence on a grand scale. I think it might be connected with the same gene that causes animals to stampede.”

“No, that gene doesn’t exist here. Maybe somewhere else. India, for example. Not here.”

“You don’t think so? You don’t think the whole structure could crack, from basement to penthouse? The whole rotten lie? It was a lie, O; you know that. You always knew that.”

“You’re going to find this hard to understand, Kim, but it wasn’t a lie. That word can’t cover how tens of millions of people lived their lives for nearly seventy years. We had something to believe in, a way to order existence. Maybe people didn’t have much, most of them had very little, but for practically all of those years they felt they belonged to something. Not so long ago, we used to be friendly to each other; young people stood up and gave their seats to the elderly. There was a simplicity in who we thought we were. We even had hope for the future.”