Chapter One

Things went quiet for about a week. They do that sometimes. Like a sheet has been thrown over a whole case, and no one wants to lift up a corner to see if it’s dead or just sleeping. More than ever, I wanted to get rid of the whole thing, if I could figure out how. Three murders. I didn’t think it was coincidence that the bus had been there when the robber stepped into the street in front of the bank; I still didn’t buy the finding of “heart failure” in the noodle restaurant; and a knife in the back is pretty conclusive. Three murders and a bank robbery, all in my sector. Three murders but one body missing. And SSD, or somebody, breathing down our necks before I’d even sharpened my pencil.

On top of this, a foreigner with a funny past and no file. It was possible, a Kazakh-Korean woman with a British passport getting a job in a bank in Pyongyang. Barely possible. And hers the bank that was robbed, not that we had so many banks. I couldn’t picture it, her standing meekly while the robbers did what? Told everyone to lie on the floor? Went in the back room and cleaned out the euro bills? She hadn’t volunteered any information, just seemed offended that I was asking questions. She’d probably told the robbers to keep their voices down.

I wandered around the office, wrote a few reports, watched the willow trees across the street soak up the afternoon sun, and then I got tired of waiting. Nobody answered the phone at the morgue, or maybe the line was out of order. I tried the Ministry, but they still claimed to have no reports on the murder of the man in the red shirt. Not a surprise; if you’re well connected enough, a knife in the back can be kept pretty quiet. We hadn’t even opened a case file and the incident had been yanked out of our jurisdiction. That was fine, I didn’t want to know anything about the politics or the personalities, but I needed to find out a couple of details, enough to reset my operations if that’s what had to be done. Maybe Han would have some information. When I called SSD, the phone clicked once, and then the operator said he was “out of range.” I asked when he’d be back, and she said that was not for me to know. Okay, I said, have a nice day.

I picked up the Interpol notes on Kazakh bank robbery rings and read through them again, maybe for the fifth time. One sentence kept catching my eye. It said that some of the robberies had been aided by informants in the bank, usually women who were hired only a few months before, then disappeared. The rest of the report was mildly interesting. The list of countries where robberies had taken place included everywhere in Western Europe except Portugal and England. The only country where more than one bank had been robbed was Germany. The Germans had experienced three of these apparently related robberies, two at the same bank in Köln and one in Dresden, but that one—the latest—was more than four years ago. The overall spate of similar robberies had started in 1991; the pattern was one bank got hit every fourteen months. Two robbers had been caught but died mysteriously while undergoing questioning in a Berlin jail. Another, after the second robbery in Köln, got through the police roadblocks but was killed a day later when his stolen motorcycle went out of control and ended up in the Rhine. The most recent robbery had been in Sweden, five months ago, in the middle of a snowstorm.

That seemed like a pretty quick transition, from Sweden to Korea in only five months. I called SSD again. The operator said she would pass Han the message and he would call me back. The words were okay, but the tone of voice said not to call and bother her anymore. It took a few minutes, but finally the phone rang. When I answered, there were no clicks, just Han’s voice, good and clear.

“You know anything about a body with a knife in the back?” I figured I’d get straight to the point, skip the pleasantries.

“No.” A short silence, which can mean a lot of things. “What are knife handles made of, Inspector?” he asked, finally.

“I assume this is completely unrelated to my question.”

“Simple query, isn’t it? What kind of wood? I thought that was right up your alley, wood.”

If I wanted to know where he was going with this, the easiest thing seemed to be to answer the question. “A knife handle could be anything. It might not be wood.”

“Thank you for that. Your Ministry is known for offering alternative theories, Inspector. But let’s say it was wood. Can we do that?”

“Like I said, could be anything.”

“What if it were birch? Where would it have been made?”

“Birch? Probably not from around here. It could have been made in Russia, that’s the obvious candidate.”

“Recently?”

“Hard to tell. Besides, how would I know, over the phone? You’d have to look at the wood, maybe chew on it a little.”

“You kidding me?”

“Just slightly.”

“So, there is a way to tell how old it is. I mean, you’re saying it’s not impossible.”

“Few things are impossible, Han.”

“What if it wasn’t really a knife?”

“More like a bayonet, you mean.”

“What then?”

“Then it might depend on the marks on the blade. If the handle is birch, somewhere up north is a good guess. Like I said, Russia, maybe. Then you would want to look at the marks on the blade, to see if they point in the same direction.”

“Birch trees don’t grow in rich people’s gardens where it’s warm?”

“They do, but rich people don’t cut down the birch trees in their gardens for lumber to make bayonet handles.”

“Could it be Japanese?”

“No. Almost certainly not. No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Very.”

“Then why is there Japanese on the blade?”

“Because it’s Finnish.”

“What?”

“The Finns bought Japanese rifles in the 1920s, along with the bayonets. If the handles broke, they were replaced with birch.” I wasn’t making this up; I just happened to read it somewhere and it stuck in my memory. “The Red Army probably made off with a few of them when they were running from angry Finns. Now one of them has ended up in someone’s back. You want a guess, just idle speculation? It could have been put there by a Russian. Or someone who worked for the Russians. Someone born in Odessa, say.” I didn’t think Logonov was capable of murdering anyone, but I wanted Han to know I hadn’t forgotten about the Russian just because I had been warned off seeing him again.

“That’s the other thing your Ministry does, speculate on the basis of nothing. It’s not very smart.”

“Don’t tell me, you think it’s a sign of insecurity. If you’re finished, I have another question for you. Do you still have the bank lady’s file?”

“According to you, it’s not a file, only a cover page.”

“I changed my mind.”

There was a long silence. This was not always a bad sign. Some people think when they aren’t talking.

“Still with me, Han?”

“Inspector, if you need something, just ask, alright? I hate it the way you Ministry people tiptoe around.”

“That’s a wonderful image, the Minister on tiptoe. Nothing at all like you, asking straight out and flatfooted about knife handles. Tell me this. Does the file say when the lady entered the country?”

Another silence.

“You there?”

“I’m here.”

“Well, when did she enter the country?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“Isn’t there a copy of her entry visa?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“I guess it must not be a file. Good-bye, Inspector, I’m busy.” The phone clicked twice, and the operator came on the line. The connection wasn’t as good; Han must have been calling from somewhere else.

“Anything more we can help you with, Inspector?” Same tone of voice, edgy, maybe condescending, though with all the SSD buzzes and clicks this time of day you couldn’t be sure.

“Yes, tell your technicians congratulations. They’ve almost fixed those clicks.”

“That’s it?”

“I don’t suppose you know anything about cell phones.”

“No.”

“How about silk stockings?”

The line went dead. I went out to find some cold noodles in a quiet restaurant where people didn’t fall over dead or end up with knives in their back, knives with birch-wood handles.

2

After lunch I strolled around a few back streets. For April, it was hot, but it was still better outside than sitting in the office staring at the ceiling and pretending not to be thinking about a case I couldn’t even figure out if I was supposed to solve. If things were so quiet, something must be wrong. If no one was prepared to let me know which way to jump, then it was going to be a very long way down. I dodged a woman on a bicycle who pedaled as if she were daydreaming, and kept walking to nowhere in particular. Just as I turned a corner, I suddenly got that feeling—I was being watched. Someone had marked me, there was no doubt in my mind. Harmless glances, uninterested stares don’t register with me. This was no longer little warning flags flapping in front of my eyes. This was a skin-prickling, hackle-raising klaxon that somewhere, relatively near and directed specifically at me, was a pair of eyes brimful of death and destruction.

I never made a careful study of it, but I’ve looked at a few books about survival behavior. At one point in my career, it seemed a wise thing to do. The theory is that an animal—or a person—marked as prey can sense an intense look that pierces the invisible force surrounding everything living. The heart jumps, chemicals pour into the bloodstream, muscles tense. If it’s a deer, then the deer is ready to run, run for its life, crazy with fear, breathless to escape. I never altogether bought the theory; how could there be anything physical about looking? It sounded like death rays. Yet I knew the physical reaction was real enough. Theory or not, somehow when I was being watched, I sensed it.

With my heart pounding, I stopped to tie my shoe; it usually works better than bounding away like a frightened roe deer. When I stood up again, I walked slowly in the opposite direction. There was no one around who seemed to be paying attention, not even anyone who seemed conspicuously inattentive. I wandered aimlessly for about twenty minutes, long enough to be sure the lion, or the wolf, or whatever it was, had dropped away. Being followed doesn’t bother me, but I never like knowing I’m someone’s prey. At least now I knew where things stood. I was in someone’s sights. Whether that was because I was getting too close or not close enough remained to be seen. It was becoming vital to know which, but I hadn’t figured out yet exactly how to test the waters without getting swept away. I thought about it as I walked, but every conclusion suggested its opposite. Maybe it was the weather. It’s hard to be decisive when the air is so clear that you can see the buds on an old tree’s highest branches turning to the sun.

It could have been just coincidence, or a subconscious compass at work, but my wandering ended up at the top of the stairs leading to Club Blue. As long as I was there, I figured, I might as well go down and chat. The bartender was bound to know something useful. Whether he would volunteer it was another matter. Besides, it was hot and I was thirsty. The place was quiet when I sat down at the bar. No music playing. I looked around, then got up and poured myself a glass of beer.

“You shouldn’t be stealing drinks, Inspector. It can be reported.” I looked around and there was the bartender, holding something that looked like a crowbar.

“Funny thing for a bartender to use,” I said. “You need that to open those little bottles of olives? I can do it for you with these.” I wiggled my fingers.

He smacked the crowbar hard against his palm. “It comes in handy for lots of things.”

“That’s fine. Where’s the manager, the guy with the sharp trousers?”

The bartender hit his palm again with the crowbar. “He’s not around. I haven’t seen him today at all. So I guess you’ll be leaving.”

“No, I think I’ll have another glass of beer.” I walked behind the bar. That put something between the crowbar and me. “Your manager on vacation, is he? He forgot to put up that license we talked about.”

“Yeah, he forgot. Probably has a lot on his mind.” He laughed. “You know what I mean?”

“How long has he been gone?”

The bartender shrugged. “He comes and goes. I don’t keep track. That’s the job of your people, isn’t it, keeping track of us citizens?”

“You like it in those old apartments? The ones by the bank?”

“So, you been watching me? I’m flattered, Inspector, really I am.”

“Good. Let me give you a piece of advice. Don’t walk in front of buses.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Never.”

“What do you want here?”

“Want?”

“You know what I mean. You brought in that stocking the other day. I got nothing to do with that stuff.”

“You should have bought two pair, it would have been cheaper.”

“Ease up, will you?”

“You tell me what I need to know, I’ll think about it. And put down that crowbar before I stuff it down your throat.” It clattered to the floor, which surprised the hell out of me. I thought at least we’d argue about it a little. “Now, walk over here, sit down on one of those bar stools, and put your hands on the bar, both of them. Everything nice and slow.”

He did as I said. When he lifted one of his hands to scratch his cheek, I grabbed his wrist, just like I had the first time, and gave it a twist. He yelped. “Hey!”

“Hey, nothing. I told you to put your hands on the bar. I meant it. Once you answer my questions, you can pick your nose with all ten fingers for all I care. I’m asking you again, where is your manager, and don’t tell me you don’t know.”

“He walked out of here with a couple of guys.”

“Okay, he walked out of here. When?”

“Day before yesterday.”

“What time?”

“Afternoon, I don’t know, maybe four o’clock.”

“You know what I’m going to ask next?”

“Who were the guys.”

“Very good. Maybe you’ve been interrogated before. Maybe it’s in your file. Maybe you don’t want another report in your file because it would mean you’d have to leave Pyongyang and move out to the country. Very dull, out in the country.”

“Say, why don’t you let me answer the question?”

“Alright, who were the guys?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do.” I slapped him across the face, not very hard, but his head snapped back and for a moment he looked as if he might fall off the bar stool. He seemed surprised, but not half as surprised as I was. The pressure from the case must be getting to me even worse than it was getting to Min. I rarely get physical during an interrogation. A lot of inspectors do, but I don’t. It isn’t very effective; too many people just shut up after being hit, and then you either have to raise the ante or back off. I didn’t know why I slapped him; I hoped it wasn’t because he looked so scared. “And keep your hands on the bar.”

“If I tell you who they are, they’ll kill me.”

“Tough luck for you,” I said. “A couple of Kazakh boys, weren’t they?”

“I’m not saying yes, I’m not saying no.”

That made me mad, and I thought about it for half a second before I remembered reading somewhere that if you bottled up tension it was bad for you. I slapped him again, harder this time. A lot of tension drained off. But this time he was more ready, so he didn’t lose his balance. “Did they threaten him?”

“No.” He was grinning. He knew I wouldn’t hit him again.

“So why’d he go with them?”

“You’ll have to ask him, won’t you?”

“Have it your own way.” I patted him on the cheek. “From this afternoon, word will be out on the street that you talked to me and told me everything I needed to know about a couple of Kazakhs. I’ll come by your apartment tomorrow to claim your corpse.”

“You don’t scare me, Inspector.”

“That’s good,” I said and finished my beer. “I’d like your last memories of me to be pleasant ones.”

Back in the office, I picked up the second Interpol file, which was mostly background on Kazakhstan. When I had first skipped through it, there didn’t seem much of interest. There was a little history and a few economic statistics. But this time I noticed that attached to the second page was a list of prominent officials. The head of the security police was a fairly young man who had a degree in criminology. Whether that did him or the country any good was not made clear, but from the reporting on the crime rates, it did not seem to have made a major contribution. There were all sorts of crimes, crimes against persons, crimes against property, street crime, car theft, drugs. Bank robberies were not a special problem, apparently, except where they involved gangs of criminals who were armed and needed money for unspecified purposes. They shot the guards; the police shot the robbers. In one case, the robbers were caught in a cemetery. It sounded noisy and dangerous and not the sort of thing we needed in Pyongyang.

On the list of officials were a number of bankers, with an indication of their worth and addresses. Many of them were well-to-do. No reason they shouldn’t be, working in such close quarters with all that money. Several of them had second or third residences abroad, expensive residences. Why did people need to live somewhere else other than home, among strangers? I made a mental note to ask Miss Chon if she knew any of these people the next time I saw her.

3

“I don’t recognize any of them.” She put the list down on the table and looked at me coolly, defying me to contradict her.

“Naturally, it’s a big country, sixteen million people, maybe more. No one could be expected to know everyone, certainly not all the top bankers.” I nodded and smiled. No sense pretending I believed her. “Especially not you, someone interested in banking, I mean. You were probably focusing on other things at the time.”

She picked the list up again and studied it. “A few names, one or two may have been mentioned, I may have heard someone say something about them. What difference does it make?”

“Funny, I thought I had mentioned to you that this is an investigation. I get to ask you, and I don’t have to tell you why. That’s how it’s done. It’s a regular, accepted pattern in most places in the world, and we have adopted it.”

“Why all the interest in Kazakhstan?”

“Ah, tut! I told you—the pattern.”

“We’ll have to continue some other time with your pattern, Inspector. The bank is being audited tomorrow, and I have many papers to prepare.”

“Not unless you answer my questions, you don’t have anything to prepare. You still can’t seem to get it. We don’t have a lot of bank robberies in this town. So we don’t just shrug them off and say, oh, well, there goes another truckload of money. And we don’t just run down suspects and blast them to kingdom come in gun battles in cemeteries.” Her eyes flashed for an instant; it could have been a glint of sunlight off a passing car, but it wasn’t. She’d heard about the shootout in her country, the one connected with the bank robbery, and she knew what I was getting at. Maybe now she would start to cooperate.

“Whom do you know from Kazakh banking circles with a residence outside of the country? I’m not asking you to betray anyone, Miss Chon. You don’t have to tell me how they got the money. Actually, I don’t care how they got the money. I’m just following a line of thought. Do you mind?”

“Not at all, Inspector. I just don’t see the relevance, that’s all.” She fell silent, in a sullen sort of way.

I let her stew for a minute or so. While we waited, I found a piece of wood in my pocket, an old piece of Siberian elm I’d forgotten I had. Not very interesting wood, too needy, too eager to please; it took any shape you wanted to give it. It gives you a sense of being smart and in charge, not good on this case—and especially not good when dealing with Miss Chon. I put it back. “Let’s make it simple. Has anyone on this list moved out of the country, taken a pile of cash and gone overseas?”

“I wouldn’t know about piles of cash. A few of them have gone abroad, yes. One moved to New York, I heard somewhere.”

“Somewhere you heard someone moved to New York. That’s good, that’s very helpful.” I paused. “Expensive city, New York, that’s what they say. Must cost a lot to live there.”

She smiled. “Maybe for the working masses, Inspector, but not for a banker.”

“You wouldn’t know the name of this fellow who moved to New York?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Do that, I’d be very grateful.” I wasn’t so interested in Kazakh bankers, but I wanted to get her in the habit of answering my questions. She wasn’t there yet, and I didn’t know much about her habits. I decided to change the subject. Maybe it would put her off balance. “You ever go out to clubs? Ever been to a place called Club Blue?”

“We already discussed this.” The lady had a perfect center of gravity. She also had a better memory than I did.

“Is the owner there a friend of yours?” The image of the owner walking out of the bar with a couple of toughs and, so far as I knew, not returning didn’t fill me with happy thoughts. The little bartender didn’t seem worried, but he didn’t seem the sort who worried about much more than his own skin. If looking the other way when his boss disappeared was required, he could obviously do it. Once his cheeks stopped smarting, I’d have to go back to talk to him again.

“No. I don’t know the owner.” She was a good liar, very natural, but this resonated in a funny way. I had to think maybe she knew him pretty well.

“You told me he had an account.”

“He did. That doesn’t mean I know him.” This second time it almost came out more believable.

“The first time I asked you, when we were having drinks, you said he ‘had’ an account. Why ‘had’?”

“I didn’t realize you hung on my every word, Inspector.”

“Why ‘had’?”

“He closed it.”

“Is that so?”

“Anything else we need to discuss before I get back to my work?”

“He’s disappeared. Did you know that?”

She didn’t pale or take a funny breath, but she may have swallowed a little strangely, sort of out of sequence. It was difficult to be sure, because she was Kazakh, and I didn’t really know what Kazakh women did when they were surprised, or shaken. I shrugged. “Too bad. I’ll bet he could have sliced bread with the creases on his trousers. He promised me a drink. I guess that’s out now.” I stood up. “Well, I’m sure we’ll be running into each other again, Miss Chon. Call me if you remember the name of your friend in New York.”

4

A pall hung over the city the next day, the whole day, a gray that would not go away, would not be scrubbed out of the sky, no matter what. A breeze came up around noon, but the pall didn’t move. The wind rustled some trees and then stopped abruptly. The buildings were mute. They were resting, casting no shadows and finding no light. A few faded off in the distance, disappearing into the murk. Blurred at the edges, the city was silent in its center, the only noise the whistle of a traffic cop warning pedestrians out of the empty street.

After a day like that, the night came straight down, a deep black velvet blanket dropped from above. No sense of darkness creeping in from the east, street by street. The city, the buildings, the roads and alleys, even the river, all dissolved rapidly into a deeper gloom, the sky never touched with the final color that sometimes appears beneath the clouds on normal evenings. No sense of sunrise or sunset, no rhythm; the day simply disappeared. It went from gray to black in a heartbeat. Finally, a window twinkled, then a few more. Out of the gloom, building shapes emerged, like miners struggling from a coal mine that had collapsed, leaving them gasping for air.

I was on the street, walking in the darkness with no place to go and damned irritable about it. A few people clustered around a stall on the corner, one of those small stalls that sell little snacks, bread, fried cakes. The crowd fell silent when I walked up; one or two gave me ugly looks. The others moved away as if my presence were diseased. Inside the stall, lit by a row of candles, a woman was straightening the cakes on the shelf along the back. When she turned around and saw me, she made a low sound of disgust.

“It’s supposed to be a day off, Inspector. Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“I’m happy to see you, too. Close up shop. We have to talk.”

“Now? It’s my busiest time. It’s a holiday, in case you’ve forgotten. People are in a good mood for a change, and they like standing around my place. If I have to close up, I’ll lose money, and I can’t afford that. Come back later, around eleven o’clock.”

“I know the holiday calendar, thank you very much. I said now; I meant it.” I blew out several candles.

She studied my face. “Why do you make my life so miserable? What have I ever done to you?”

Someone behind me spat. I looked to see who it was, but it was too dark. I turned back to the woman. “You complain a hell of a lot, you know that? Close up this crummy shop, or I’ll throw your goods in the street and cite you for wasting the people’s resources.”

Without another word, she dropped the cloth curtain over the front and stormed out of the stall. “This is unfair, you’ll ruin me!” Her voice was barely under control, strands of hair stuck to the sweat on her forehead. Her fists clenched in anger.

“Over there.” I pushed her across the street and into an alley. When we were in complete darkness, hidden from view, I let go of her arm. “Overdid it, don’t you think?”

“You have a problem?” She straightened her hair and smoothed her apron. “I’m the one who should be offering criticism. Every time we have a meeting, I end up black and blue.”

“What have you got?”

“Plenty. But I don’t want to tell you here.”

“Where?”

“At the river. In an hour.”

“Are you really making money?”

“None of your business.” She walked back out to the street, rubbing her arm.

5

An hour later, I was sitting on a bench near the river, listening to the water go by. In a nearby tree, a bird was singing to itself against darkness broken only by the hesitant light of a half-hidden moon. The night breeze had swept the sky clear of all but a few clouds. Someone walked up behind me, slow, thoughtful steps that barely sounded on the pavement. “You want to meet here, in the open?”

“Just sit down, will you? Maybe you noticed, it’s the dead of night. Even if anyone sees us, they’ll think you’re trying to bribe me to leave you alone.”

“Shall I offer to sleep with you, to complete the picture?”

“Forget it. I don’t sleep with street agents.”

She sat down. We’d worked together for many years. Nice woman, very smart, excellent instincts, brave as a tiger. But the first time we met I thought something about her face was wrong, and that was the first thing I thought of every time we sat together. Her face was almost round, but not quite, and that sometimes seemed to me the root of the problem. If she had a perfectly round face, more like Chief Inspector Min’s, you wouldn’t have noticed her eyes were not on the same line; if you didn’t notice her eyes, it wouldn’t occur to you that her cheeks were too high; if her cheeks hadn’t been so high, her lips wouldn’t have looked so full, and with different lips, there is no way you would have noticed that her nose was a little too flat. And yet, altogether it fit, it was all perfect, somehow. My palms started to sweat every time I saw her.

“You want a report, or should we stare at the moon? It looks constipated tonight.” That was normal for her, a hard edge, as if she had to get back at me for something.

“Romantic to the core, as always. Well, you called the meeting,” I said. “Anytime you’re ready.” I noticed she wasn’t looking at the moon; she was staring into the black water.

“A German man hurried by the stall three nights ago just before I closed. He ran back and asked for directions. There were drops of blood on his shirt cuff. When I reached for the pen in his breast pocket to draw a map, he nearly went berserk.”

“Tall or short?” A German, how many could there be? Dieter was shorter. Or was it Jurgen? I hadn’t looked closely at either one. Neither had been standing; what I remembered best was the way they winced.

“Short. Late middle aged. I’d say he was about your age, or maybe a little younger.” She waited a fraction of a second, but she knew I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of reacting, so she resumed. “Atrocious accent, I could barely understand him. Actually, that was a good thing. He did a lot of gesturing to try to make me understand. So I got a good look at his sleeves. It was a white shirt. The collar was frayed. The right cuff had the blood. It hadn’t been there long.”

“What about the pen?”

“I don’t know. I had the feeling it was special, almost life or death.”

“Ever seen him before?”

“No.”

“Ever heard of a place called Club Blue?”

“Once or twice. You want to take me there?”

“Not your style. Anyway, I’m too old for places like that.” I stretched my arm along the back of the bench; someone looking might have thought I had my hand on her shoulder. “Good job, though a report a little earlier might have helped. Anything else?”

“Don’t patronize me, Inspector.” She stood up. “You know your trouble?”

“No, but I guess you’re about to tell me.”

“You want people to think you’re April, but you’re actually August.”

The moon had come out from behind the lingering clouds, and I could see her face in profile. She was looking at the stars. My palms were sweating.

“I’ve got a few other tidbits, but they go to the highest bidder. And you”—she looked good in pale moonlight, I noticed—“don’t even come close. Good night.” The sound of her footsteps faded quickly. I listened to the river for a while, heard the murmur of a couple sitting nearby, gentle laughter, like music, then wondered what life would be like if I paid less attention to details.

6

In the morning, Min appeared at the door to my office. He wore the expression of a dog hoping for a kind word. “How is everything, Professor?” You could almost hear the sound of his tail thumping against the floor.

I was reading something complicated and didn’t look up for fear of losing my place. “Everything’s fine.” It was the closest I could get to saying, “Go away,” and that wouldn’t have done any good.

“Progress?”

“Some.” I picked the book off the desk and propped it up in front of me.

Silence, but not because he had left. “Dammit, Inspector, what is so important that you can’t talk?”

I marked the page with a pencil check and put down the copy of the Criminal Code that I was trying to digest. “I’m doing background research. It’s something insignificant, probably, but I thought I’d try to figure out exactly what law these bank robbers broke.”

“Who cares? That’s not our job. Leave the details to the procurators. Just find the bastards.”

“You mean, keep going on the case?”

“Didn’t I just say find the bastards?”

It wasn’t the unambiguous set of orders I was looking for, but it would have to do for now. “Alright, here’s my thought. If I can figure out what law they broke, maybe I can put some pressure on accomplices, or abettors—as they are referred to in this.” I held up the book. “If you abet a crime, you’re liable to several years of labor correction, unless you confess or repent or didn’t know you were involved. But to prove you didn’t know you were involved, you have to give some indication of what it was that was going on so you can indicate how it was you knew nothing about it.”

“All true, Inspector, but given that we have a deadline staring us in the face, I don’t think we have time for these subtleties.”

“Just listen, it gets better. If I can find an abettor and put on a little heat, I can press him to prove why he shouldn’t be charged with not acting to prevent the crime.”

“He’ll just say he didn’t know about it until afterward.”

“Then he should have reported it,” I said. Min could have at least expressed appreciation for my effort.

“Inspector, I don’t want to know who abetted in the crime, I want to know who committed it, who planned it, who led it, and where the hell he is now.”

“What if the ringleader is the stiff who ended up in the morgue?”

“Tell me, Inspector O, that you don’t really believe any such thing. Ringleaders don’t step in front of buses. They tend to be survivors, and smarter than the people beneath them.”

“They just might step in the street if they have no reason to believe a bus will be coming; if they have been watching the bank for weeks and never saw a bus on that street; if they have timed it so they will be picked up by a car at the very moment when a bus occupies the same spot in space and time.”

“You’re making this all up, aren’t you? Or do you have something new from the traffic people?”

“They weren’t going to give me anything. Nothing but a pat on the head and an invitation to leave. Li might get them to be more cooperative. But think about it, what are the odds a bus would have appeared just at that moment? Buses don’t go that route; I did some checking with the people in the neighborhood. Once in a while army trucks use the street, but mostly as a place for the drivers to stop and smoke.”

“So, you are making this up.”

“No, it’s not fantasy.”

“What do you call it?”

“Surmise.” I threw the Criminal Code onto a copy of the Ministry regulations. It slid onto the floor.

Min pulled at his ear, then walked away without comment. A few minutes later, the phone rang. I knew what it was. “Yeah?”

“Don’t answer the phone that way, Inspector. What if it was somebody important?” He paused. “I mean . . . ”

“Never mind, I know what you mean.”

“Well, come in here, then. We need to talk.”

I put down the phone and frowned. It sometimes occurred to me that Min’s compulsion to call me into his office when he could just finish a conversation standing at my door wasn’t voluntary behavior on his part. Maybe it was a defect that had crept into the Min clan at the dawn of time, when the first Min male grunted and sweated while his bride shut her eyes and considered suicide. Maybe it was a trait that wouldn’t fall away, strengthened through intermarriage over the centuries until it was dominant in a whole layer of the population, like having a narrow nose or crooked teeth. Then again, maybe not. Maybe it was an idea, an impulse imparted from a childhood experience that just grew on Chief Inspector Min over the years like a wart. Who knew? I shrugged as I walked down the hall. At this late point in Min’s evolution, it couldn’t be helped.

As soon as I arrived at his doorway, he waved me in.

“A British official is coming to town, Inspector.”

“Bully for us.”

“We are assigned to security detail. The written orders will arrive tomorrow morning. The visitor will be here next week. We are in charge of presecurity checks of the schedule, and then we have to coordinate with the Traffic Bureau to keep the route clear from the airport to the hotel.”

“Easy, we can do that with our eyes closed.” Not really. I’d made a few enemies in the Traffic Bureau lately. “But it takes time, just filling out all the necessary forms. If I have to do that, I can’t work on the bank robbery, too.” Maybe I could get away from the robbery case after all. Visitors required a lot of effort, especially Westerners. “You could assign someone else to the security detail.”

“Like who?”

“There are other people in this office.” Not really. “How about Yang?” I knew Min would hate the idea.

“Don’t be absurd, Inspector. The man wouldn’t know how to behave. He’d have tears streaming from everyone’s eyes before you knew it. This is supposed to be a goodwill visit. No, not Yang, and not his tall friend, either. We can’t have someone on a security squad who walks like a circus bear.”

“Most of SSD does.”

“Forget SSD. This is Ministry business, and we’re going to do it right.”

“Implying what?”

“Implying nothing. I want a dignified, invisible security detail working this visit. That means you.”

“Where will you be hiding?”

“I’ll be here, coordinating, keeping the paperwork in order, that sort of thing. If necessary, we’ll hold Yang in reserve should anything come up, but you are the most experienced in field operations. Besides, you’ve been abroad and understand how to deal with those people.”

“What people?”

“You know”—he paused before saying the word—“foreigners. There is something about them, they are always so demanding, never satisfied. It’s hard to grasp the problem, actually.”

“What else?”

“What else, what?”

“What else do you want? This isn’t just about a security detail. It’s about the robbery, isn’t it?”

“Let’s go down to your office.”

“Why?”

Min stood up and looked out the window at the Operations Building. “It’s easier to talk in your office. I like the view better.”

We walked down the hall in silence. I sat down at my desk. Min leaned against the wall. “As a matter of fact, the British ambassador was complaining at the Foreign Ministry yesterday that British businessmen who had accounts in the bank were being harassed by the police. It’s not us, so it must be SSD. We need to show them that we do not harass people, and we certainly don’t harass investors. You can do that, Inspector. People respond well to you, somehow. If this British official’s trip goes well, it will be a plus for everyone.” He cocked an eyebrow slightly, to indicate this included the two of us.

The phone rang in Min’s office. It rang three times and stopped. Then it started ringing again. Min gave me a funny look. “That’s not normal.” He went down the hall, walking with an agitated gait. A minute later, he was back at my door. His color wasn’t good.

“You want to sit down?” I pointed at the chair next to my desk.

Min shook his head. “Inspector, that was SSD.”

“It can’t be all that bad. Han and I haven’t argued, not overly, and when we parted, we parted on good terms, I think.”

“It’s not the robbery. SSD has information.” He stopped. He gave no indication that he intended to continue until I said my line.

“And what was the information?”

“An attempt will be made on the life of the British official, on our visitor, on the very man you are assigned to guard.”

I considered the idea. “That I doubt,” I said finally. “SSD is just having one of its crazy nightmares. It’s a natural result of trying to digest too much bad information, like getting heartburn. Don’t get yourself riled up.”

“No, this is good information. It was picked up by another service, in a third country. It was passed to us recently, they said, in the past week. They’ve been checking it, checking the source, checking the channel. They think it’s believable.”

“They don’t like working with the Chinese, so it’s probably Russian. How good could it be? How come this information comes in at exactly the same time we learn about the visitor? Who could have planned an attempt on the life of someone we didn’t even know was coming? Isn’t it a little too convenient?”

Min shook his head. “Damnation, Inspector, every time I say something, you contradict me. I’m in no mood for that. This was from an SSD contact I trust, alright? If I say I trust him, then I trust him, and I don’t need your observations to the contrary.”

“Fine. So a trusted source told you about a plot. So your trusted source just found out about it himself. What if we simply accept the information and pronounce it good? Then what? Then we have to conclude that it lets us out of the game of the security detail. You want me to guess? Someone really didn’t want us in the middle anyway, because we don’t deal with assassinations, coups, or—”

“Who said anything about a coup, Inspector?” Min’s voice was low and very controlled. He moved over to my desk and leaned down so his face was nearly level with mine. “You will never say anything like that again in my presence, never, ever. Ever.” He straightened up slowly, his round eyes intensely black. “There’s no stepping back from that line, Inspector. You went over it, now you live there. If the question ever comes up, if I’m ever asked, I didn’t hear you say it. But I won’t wave good-bye as the truck drives you to the mountains. Try and remember that.”

I sat, stunned. Not at Min, at myself. I knew better than to talk about a coup. I knew better than even to think the word. It didn’t only endanger me, it endangered everyone around me, anyone who even looked at me in the street. Min walked out the door like a ghost, without a sound.

I didn’t leave the office that night. I wasn’t hungry and I wasn’t tired. I just sat at my desk, asking myself again and again, why had I mentioned a coup? The pressure must be at the breaking point. Or worse, my subconscious had spotted something and was screaming at me to pay attention. Min was right; at this rate, my subconscious was going to get me sent to away to a camp in the mountains, if not actually stood up against a wall. Yang came in once to ask if anything was wrong, but I only looked at him blankly. He shrugged and went down the hall. I heard his door close, and then it was quiet.