James Church - The Man with the Baltic Stare

The phone wouldn’t stop ringing. “What?”

“Ah, good morning, Inspector. Can you hear me?” The connection wasn’t bad; it was just that there were too many people listening in at the same time.

“Good morning, Luís. Funny you should call. I was just thinking of you. How is the weather in Macau? Pleasantly humid, no doubt.” I could imagine the transcribers sitting up all of a sudden. They’d make a note-“WEATHER/MUST BE CODE.” Let them spend their morning chasing that.

Luís laughed. “Lulu sends her regards.” This time, I really could hear the scratching of pens-“LULU/NAME TRACE.”

“Always nice to hear your voice, Luís. Anything special I can do for you?”

“I was thinking of taking a trip, Inspector. I’ve never been to your country, and am in need of fresh scenery. A bulldog is angry at me. Northeast Asians are different, very industrious, not like us tropical people. You know how it is.”

“Yes, I know how it is.” In the background, pens write furiously-“REPETITION/5 + 1.”

“How would it be if I came for a visit? I don’t mean to invite myself. If you’re too busy, let me know and I’ll figure out something else. Maybe I could go to Changchun or Harbin.” Quick note-“LOCATION DATA.”

“No, I’d be delighted to show you around. I assume here none of your rules and regulations apply, which means you can sit for your meals.”

Luís laughed again. “Don’t forget, I like thighs.” A flurry of notes taken, pages torn off notepads and passed off for immediate action-“SEXUAL PREFERENCE/LEGS.”

“I’m looking at a plane schedule. According to this, the next flight is tomorrow.”

“What a coincidence. That’s the one I’m on. Can you meet me at the airport? I’m very bad with airport security procedures.”

“I’ll be there. Have a good flight.”

“Adeus, Inspector.”

Two phones clicked off, then, after a sigh of relief, a third. Amazing. One of them must have been Kim’s people. One of them was Zhao’s. I could only guess about the third.

I gave things the rest of the morning to cool off. Then I called Kim.

“I’m tired of being chauffeured around, Major. I need a car.”

“That takes paperwork, Inspector. Vehicles don’t grow on trees.” He laughed.

That afternoon, a note came under my door: “It’s old, it runs, and it has a tracking device.”

The next morning, there was no Luís at the airport. I watched as everyone came through the door and lined up at the immigration counters. Westerners, Koreans from Japan, a few Middle Easterners, an Indian family, a group of Chinese military officers, and a couple of South Korean businessmen. I hung around until they all had claimed their bags and gone through Customs.

“Waiting for someone?” Major Kim came up behind me.

“No. I enjoy standing in cold spaces and watching luggage ride on a conveyer belt.” I turned around. “And you?”

“The police in Macau cabled us that a visitor was coming to follow up on the investigation, the one I ordered you to fix. Apparently, it’s not fixed. They still haven’t changed their theory about who committed the murder. You were supposed to get them looking for another suspect. They’re not.”

If what Kang had told me in Prague was the truth, then Kim was still playing his game. He was a lying bastard, pretending to want to shift the blame for the murder. Lying bastards are a dime a dozen, but he was toying with me, and that I didn’t like. “Apparently, it’s still not possible to tell police in another country how to conduct their business.”

Kim scanned the empty terminal hall. “Shall we dance, Inspector?” He took my arm and guided me out the front door. We went past a short man pacing up and down at the edge of the parking lot, a Westerner with a hat pulled down over his eyes. Kim studied him for a moment, then turned back to me. “I don’t know why your friend wasn’t on the plane. You find out; you get hold of him; you fix this. Clear?” He tightened his grip on my arm. “Crystal clear?”

“Don’t paw at me, Major.” I shook off his hand. “It dilutes your authority. And it makes me stubborn.”

Kim straightened the sleeve of my jacket and brushed it clean with elaborate care. “There, all better?” He took a step back. “There’s only one reason I got you down from your mountaintop, O. Don’t make me sorry I did it.” His car pulled up. “I’d offer you a lift, but I know you have your own transport and things to do.” Right before he closed the door, he leaned toward me. “Fix it,” he said.

The man in the hat looked up and watched as the car drove away.

As far as I was concerned, things had taken the turn on which all cases ultimately hinged. This was the “good things come to those who wait” approach to investigations. It was rarely favored by chief inspectors, but I had never wavered in my devotion to the creed. Wait long enough and something would turn up.

Luís, apparently, had that “something.” He had something he wanted to tell me, and it must be important, because someone didn’t want me to hear it. Kim was at me again to fix the case, or he kept saying that’s what he wanted. He’d left it hanging long enough after my return to half-convince me that Kang had been telling the truth. Maybe Kim didn’t want it fixed.

Meanwhile, SSD was still fooling around outside of Kim’s authority. At this point, though, no more dead SSD operatives had turned up. Explaining the mistake that permanently turned off the lights of their operative in the lecture hall must have required a lot of fast thinking. Three police had been murdered in Chagang, in a tiny village where no one ever did anything before but nod and look the other way when officials from Pyongyang appeared. There were whispered rumors of incidents in other locations in the mountains on the east coast, but the facts were being tightly held.

I decided to drive around the city, over one of the bridges, and find the apartment house in my old neighborhood where I’d lived years ago. I turned down the street where I thought it should be, but most of one block of apartments had been leveled, and the road had been widened. There was new construction going up, nothing like what existed in the western part of the city. These were plain boxes with big painted numbers on their sides. One of them looked finished; the others still had cranes at the top. The street ended abruptly with a barrier. A traffic cop lounged against it. He held up his hand and frowned.

“You don’t read so good? The sign back there said: ‘No Traffic.’ ” He stuck his head into my car and checked the front seat. “That means you. Or do you drive wherever you want?”

A big black Mercedes nosed around the corner and blocked my way out. No one had been following me. I had no idea where this car came from. “What about him?” I said. The traffic cop pulled his head out and walked back. In the mirror, I saw a hand reach out from the front seat and give him an envelope. He put it in his big white hat and shuffled back to his resting place. A few seconds later, the car’s back door opened. Zhao climbed out. There wasn’t anywhere to go, so I turned off the engine, put my hands on the wheel and waited.

“I see we are both interested in the future, Inspector.” Zhao stood a few feet away and looked up at the construction cranes. “These are ugly buildings, wouldn’t you say? Pretty soon the whole city will look like this. Row after row of these boxes, just like in Beijing. It almost makes me pine for the Grand Lisboa.”

“I warned you, Zhao, after what you did to my house.”

“So you did. Why don’t we take care of that later? Just stay in your car, both hands on the steering wheel, and pay attention. Right now, we have something else to discuss.”