James Church - The Man with the Baltic Stare

“The problem is, you might not be lucky forever. Life is a series of remembered tasks. What if you forget to inhale one day?”

“Don’t worry; I plan it out every morning when I wake up. So many breaths. So many heartbeats. So many trips to the bathroom. It’s too hard to dole out laughter daily, so I put it on a monthly ration. By the end of the month, people find me dour.”

Kang had a pistol in his belt. He put it on the desk. “What about surprise? What’s the quota for fear this month? Pain?”

“Overfulfilled. I’ve already borrowed against next month. I told you, if you’re trying to scare me, forget it.”

Kang moved to the window and looked outside. “This hotel. You like it?”

“It’s all right. You said so yourself.”

“I’d say you might want to consider moving to a new room. Even better, move out altogether; find a quieter place, something with a better character, maybe. It’s up to you, but that’s what I say.” He looked at the pistol, then at me. “You have something to protect yourself with in these troubled times?”

“My aura of invincibility.”

“Useful, but carry this when you go out from now on.” He took an extra clip out of his pocket. “If you use these up and need more, it means you’re out of luck, so don’t bother looking around for the exit door. Keep one for yourself. I’ll be in touch.” He stepped into the hall and, from the sound of another door slamming shut, took the stairs.

I didn’t have a suitcase, but I also didn’t have much in the way of clothes, so I put everything in the laundry bag. There was no sense checking out, since Kim, or at least his accounting department, was paying the bill. Downstairs, the bird clerk looked up as I walked by.

“It’s no problem for us to do the laundry,” she said. “Just dial six.”

“I thought six was room service.”

She held up one finger.

“Never mind. I prefer to do the laundry myself. Go down to the river and beat it on the rocks, that’s how we washed our things in the old days.”

“There are no rocks.”

“No? That’s progress. Every damn river in the country is filled with rocks except this one.” I smiled at her. She wasn’t bad looking when you saw her in the afternoon light. “Say, don’t I know you from up in Rajin? Didn’t you used to sing at the casino?”

“Me? I’ve never been up there.” She seemed pleased.

I hoisted the bag over my shoulder. “I’ve always done my own laundry.”

“You kidding me?”

“Sure, it’s how we did things. My grandfather, who you probably never heard of, said he hadn’t spent all that time in the forest fighting Japs just to make sure someone else would wash his shorts.”

“He said that? What about your mother?”

“She died in the war.”

“Oh.” The clerk looked serious. “You shouldn’t call them Japs.”

“Pardon me?”

“Japs. You shouldn’t say that. We get Japanese tourists these days, older ones, not many, but more and more. They like to come and look around at places they used to live, where they went to school, that sort of thing. We’re not supposed to offend them.”

A car, two cars roared into the parking lot. A lot of doors slammed all at once.

“You’d better get back here.” The clerk opened a door behind the counter. I moved quickly to see what she meant. There was a small space and what looked like a passageway, though it was too dark to see where it led. “Do it!” she hissed. “Now!”

I disappeared inside, and the door shut behind me.

“You can’t go up there,” I heard the clerk say.

“The hell we can’t.” A clatter of footsteps up the stairs. A few minutes later, footsteps coming down, not nearly as fast. “Where is he?” It was Major Kim’s voice. He was out of breath.

“I don’t know. He left a few minutes ago.”

“Where’d he go?”

“Out.”

“What out? Where did he go?”

“How should I know? You don’t pay us to put tracking devices in their undershirts.”

There was a slap and a yelp. “You were supposed to keep him here.”

“Yeah.” This time it was the thin man. “You were supposed to keep him here.”

“He didn’t take well to stalling tactics, all right? He left. He said he was going to do his laundry down by the riverside. That’s what I know. You hit me again and I’ll report you.”

Another slap, another yelp. From the sound of his voice, Kim had moved around the counter and was standing right outside the little door. “You people had better get it straight who’s in charge from now on. What happened to these TV monitors? You’re supposed to be taping everyone who comes in here.”

“They’re not on.”

“I can see that. When did they go off?”

“Yesterday, day before, who knows? I’m not a technician. We put in a request for maintenance, but they’re sealed, so someone special has to open them. He hasn’t shown up. Hey! Let go of me.”

“You screw with me once more, you’ll end up in a camp, you understand? And they aren’t nice, those guards. Get these monitors fixed. Everything else better be working, too. I’ll be back to check. And you,” I was guessing he had pointed a finger at the thin man, “you go down to the river and pick him up. If he gets out of your sight again, you’re going to be trading recipes with the crabs at the bottom of the West Sea.”

The car engines started up, and tires screamed out of the parking lot. A minute later, the clerk opened the little door and looked in. “You heard that?”

I came out and straightened up. “I heard.”

“One of these days, I’m going to put a bullet in his skull.”

“Good for you. Since when are we friends?”

“Beats me. I only do what I’m told.”

“By whom?”

“Someone better than him.” She rubbed her cheek.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what’s the handy little closet under there?”

“It leads into the main monitoring panels for the audio and video surveillance in all the room-phones, lamps, phony sprinkler heads.”

“TVs in the bathroom,” I said.

She shrugged. “Most of the time, whole floors in a hotel are devoted to monitors and transcribers and so forth, but these owners didn’t want to sacrifice profits. They must have had a lot of clout, because Security ended up with everything crammed into a room at the end of that tunnel.”

“Thanks.”

“You need another place to stay. Don’t leave me a forwarding address; I don’t want to know. If I were you, I wouldn’t leave by the front door.”

“Where?”

“There’s a back exit.” She fiddled with a dial on one of the monitors and a picture appeared. “Nobody around. They’d be in plain sight if they were back there.”

“I thought the monitors weren’t working.”

She twirled the dial again and the picture disappeared. “They’re not.”

The back door of the hotel opened onto a narrow street that snaked past a school and a collection of buildings that were under major repair. I wanted to get to the SSD offices, not the headquarters but a nondescript compound behind a sagging brick wall where the technical offices were located. Security was not as tight there as it was at the main building. I knew that because when I was still working at the Ministry I occasionally had gone to the compound on business. Assuming the compound was still there. Assuming the procedures hadn’t changed in five years. One thing, I knew, was working in my favor-bureaucratic time. Mountains might crumble, but regulations were for the ages. Five years was nothing for a bureaucracy. It wasn’t even worth opening a file.

As I emerged onto a main street, I heard a car slam on its brakes and watched in amazement as a blue Nissan with right-hand drive shot across six lanes up onto the sidewalk in front of me.