James Church - The Man with the Baltic Stare

“Please, sit, Inspector. This wasn’t my first choice for an assignment, believe me. I was due for Paris, but this came up, unexpectedly, you might say.” His eyes wandered the room without much interest. “Destiny calls; personnel decisions trump everything. So I found myself here six months ago. That’s a long time to be sitting in meetings with people who hate your guts, don’t you think?”

“Only six months? Six months is nothing. If it’s so bad, why don’t they send you home? Declare you persona non grata.”

The major laughed, but it wasn’t particularly pleasant. It was more like the sound of a dead limb coming off a tree on a hillside nearby. For the first time, I noticed he had a classic Korean face, the sharp features that opened the gateway to a thousand different expressions. My grandfather had warned me that people with these faces were real Koreans-the purest of the pure, he called them-and that you couldn’t trust them because you could never figure out what was going through their minds. “The women are the worst,” he’d say. “A woman with that face will be a princess one minute and a bird of prey the next. I don’t like Chinese, but a little Chinese blood mixed in isn’t altogether bad. Your grandmother had Chinese blood. Remember that, boy,” and I’d nod, wondering if any of the girls in the next village were pure-blooded and, if they were, would they ever take the road in front of our house so I could watch as they passed by.

Kim’s voice battered into my consciousness. “Kick me out? How could they? I countersign all of their orders, and much as I would be tempted, I couldn’t chop off on that one.” He laughed; another limb crashed to the ground.

“You countersign all of the orders?” I lifted my glass and tilted it toward the major to show him how empty it was.

“Another drink?”

“Tell Michael to bring the whole bottle.”

He pushed the button and Michael materialized.

“Shall I bring the bottle, sir?”

“As always, you read my mind, Michael.”

“Michael, the mind reader,” I said as the white coat vanished. “He also runs your very good recording machines and picks locks, am I right?”

“No, Inspector, the lock man is the busboy. You had a question about my countersigning orders?”

I did but decided to skip it for the moment. That was a detail. I didn’t need to know details right now. I needed to know the guts of what this was, this man, this restaurant, the woman with the soft accent, the hotel room stocked with liquor. “Actually, my question was more fundamental. Who are you? After that, I might have a second question.”

“Which is?”

“Let’s do them in order. Who are you?”

“Put it this way: I’m your best friend starting today. Whatever happens, you can rest assured that I’m going to help you. Things may come unglued, but you don’t have to worry, because I am your insurance policy.”

“Very comforting. Or it would be but for one thing. You still haven’t told me who you are. I don’t mean your name. I don’t mean your title. I mean, who are you? A few gaps in my knowledge I have learned must be accepted. This one, though, I’m not prepared to live with. I could fall into this sort of gap and never be seen again.”

“Let me give you some background, Inspector.”

“No background. Let’s avoid background. Let’s try facts. Or don’t you recognize those?”

He took out a pack of cigarettes and put them on the table. “We are dealing with a situation of considerable delicacy. Facts are not delicate. They can be upsetting, a burden actually. Anyway, as you know, facts are often in dispute. And there is no time left for disputes. May I smoke?”

“The tune sounds familiar.”

“Excellent. In that case, you probably know the dance, as well. You did it long enough, all through your life in this country as a matter of fact. All that’s required at this point is a change of partners.” He searched his pockets and found a book of matches. I looked quickly at the cover. They were from a hotel I never heard of. The picture looked like a space robot, something Gallic. Maybe it was where he planned to stay in Paris. “Don’t worry.” He put the matches back in his pocket. “You can’t betray what no longer exists.”

I pushed the chair back the rest of the way and stood up. Any alcohol not already in my brain hurried up to see what the excitement was about. It was a gamble, but I thought I might make it to the door without running into one of the other tables. “I think I have lost my appetite. Pass my compliments to the girl in the red dress.”

“Your hotel is to the left as you exit, Inspector.” The major tilted his head slightly but remained seated. “It’s a fine walk at night; the sidewalks are well lit. Enjoy the air.”

The bed was comfortable enough, though it had more pillows than anyone could use and the light switch for the lamp on the bedside table wasn’t where it should have been. I thought of looking over the agreement before falling asleep, just to be sure no one had altered it, but decided that would be useless. Everything I’d seen so far that night made clear that it didn’t matter what had been agreed to four, no, five years before. I wandered around the room and looked at the furniture. It was mostly compressed wood-agreeable enough on the outside but nothing really to it. That was getting to be the theme of the day: unreality. I froze. Something was missing-my wood chips. They weren’t on the desk. The desk drawer had a room service menu, a piece of stationery, and a flight schedule. Odd, I thought, and opened the top drawer of the bureau. There were two new shirts in it, both of them my size. The wood chips had been put in a neat pile to one side.

“Well, what do you know about that?” I said, and lay down. The next thing I knew, the phone woke me.

“Good morning, Inspector. This is your wake-up call.”

“Did I ask for one?”

“Someone must have. It’s early. Take a shower and have some coffee, you’ll feel fine.”

“Tea. I don’t want coffee. I want tea.”

“Breakfast is on the second floor. They have plenty of tea. It doesn’t start for two hours, though.”

“You mean it’s only four thirty?” I gave up looking for the light switch and went to take a shower. This was low-level harassment, and I knew there would be more where that came from. Nothing too rough, but enough to make clear who was in the lead and who was supposed to trot behind. Trot behind for what, I still didn’t know. I’d left the restaurant before finding out what the “small problem” was. Just as I stepped under the water, the phone rang again. Nice, I thought. I got out and picked up the phone. “Go to hell.”

“Good morning to you, too, Inspector.”

“What do you want, Major?” I put a towel over the TV screen.

“Simply wondering if you slept well.”

I slammed the phone down.

Twenty minutes later it rang again. “Is this a better time? I thought we could have breakfast together in my office.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“The driver is waiting out front. See you soon.”

The office was large and deceptively plain, the sort of plain that comes only with careful thought. Nothing was there by chance, everything had a purpose, and the purpose of the whole was to make it clear that this was a place in which central levers of power were located. Here, the room announced, was not merely the appearance, not simply the trappings, but power in pure form. Pure power didn’t need elaborate decoration. A simple blade cuts clean. All right, I said to myself, we’re making progress-we know the man has power beyond making people nervous.