Hidden Moon: An Inspector O Novel

PART I

Chapter One

The afternoon lay strangled in a gloom of Chinese dust. Brown light, brown shadows twisted slowly over a naked riverbed. A kilometer or so beyond—distances were hard to judge against the dim, muddied horizon—a dirt path struggled up a hillside, pulling a reluctant village of broken, brown-roofed houses. A crumbling embankment crept by. A man’s head appeared. His blank eyes stared into the passing windows, then looked away, his face dusty, lungs and mouth and teeth and thoughts all gone to brown dust.

Suddenly, laughter broke out in the coach; a few passengers moved to get a better view. One woman, her voice too loud, shouted, There! From nowhere, a flash of color became the shiny red boots of a small girl, her hair flying behind, arms pumping, breathlessly leaping, soaring across a single patch of newly turned, black-furrowed earth. The girl waved, both hands above her head; the passengers clapped and knocked on the windows. The whistle sounded. For a moment, it pierced the shroud, and then, suddenly, it was gone. People returned to their reading, sleeping, drinking tea, anything to make the time pass. The train creaked around a bend; the red boots disappeared from view. One or two watched for another sign of spring, a forsythia bud or the faint feathered green of a distant willow. But there was nothing to see besides the wind, wandering through fields of rotting brown stubble. It was too soon. Even late March was too soon. And there was still too much damned dust in the air.

2

Turning from the window, I realized a man in the aisle was standing quite still, staring at me. He smiled absently when he caught my eye and nodded as if we were acquainted. For a moment, I thought he might sit down and begin a conversation, but he walked past and into the next car without a word. It was hard to tell if he had a limp or if it was just the coach swaying. I settled back to try to sleep, but the image of the riverbed stared from the edge of consciousness. Rivulets of stone fed pebbled ponds; great rivers of rock flowed to a bouldered ocean that never knew the moon. A man was walking along the gravel shore. As he passed he glanced at me, and his sallow face became a sallow sky; the image was unnerving, and worse, it would not go away. I sat up again and looked around, but the man who had been staring at me was nowhere in sight. He had been wearing a brown cloth cap, a workman’s cap, though he didn’t carry himself like a workman. There was something self-assured about him; his smile never broke even when our eyes met. I had felt off guard for an instant, but he didn’t waver; it was as if he had been waiting for me to turn to around, to measure my reaction at being observed.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the idle smile on the man’s lips reminded me of a boyhood friend who wore a similar look when listening to the wind in the line of trees that marked the edge of our village. Often I had watched from a distance, wondering why he was smiling. Then one day I realized it wasn’t happiness but despair, a vacant smile attached to nothing, leading nowhere.

My friend, let’s call him Chung, was a year older than I, a head taller, with long legs that gave him a gait I could match only by taking a small hop every few steps. He ran faster, jumped higher, than anyone else in the village. We were neighbors, his house close to my grandfather’s. Chung’s father had been killed in the war, somewhere in the mountains on the east coast in the brutal winter of 1950. His mother never remarried. She was small and maybe a little crazy, a woman who kept to herself and rarely talked to other people except to worry aloud about her son’s health. She need not have bothered; he was never sick.

The summer before Chung and I joined the army together, we were both sent to a large cooperative farm about a hundred kilometers away to help tend the fields. Twice a month, when propaganda teams came by, we could sit on rough benches after dinner to watch a silent film playing shadows on the cracked wall of a whitewashed shed. The crickets sang but then grew still, listening to the click-click-click of the sprockets being torn, one after another, by the old projector. That was how Chung’s eyes flickered when he looked at you, a broken film playing on a hot summer night.

I turned back to gaze out the window. No, I decided, the man in the aisle was a stranger; we didn’t know each other. His smile meant nothing. At last I dozed, until with a groan and hiss of brakes the coaches bumped each other in protest, then came to rest. Stepping down to the platform, I shouldered my bag and made my way to the square in front of the station, wondering where to go to escape the windy gloom that swept the city. I set off toward a small restaurant a few blocks away, near the Koryo Hotel, where they served plain food, simple and cheap, a bowl of soup and, if they had any, a piece of fish. I needed something to wash the dust out of my throat. I needed to sit where the diners ate quietly, a place where, unlike in Beijing, people didn’t chatter loudly to no purpose. The street was deserted; no neon signs assaulted the dark. Two cars passed slowly, their lights off. It felt good to be home.

3

Min stood in the doorway of my office, watching me sand a scrap of oak. It was from the side of a blanket chest we’d found in an apartment abandoned by a smuggling ring. They might have been Ukrainian; we never knew for sure. The place had been empty for weeks. The smugglers knew we were on their trail almost before we realized they existed. It hadn’t bothered me, missing a band of foreign crooks, but the Ministry wasn’t pleased. Everyone who worked on the case eventually found an unflattering note in his file. The gang had used an axe on the blanket chest and on the few other pieces of furniture in the apartment as well. It was their way of telling us to keep our distance. The chest deserved better. I salvaged what I could; no sense wasting completely good oak.

I could tell from the way he fidgeted that Min had something to say. He was waiting for me to acknowledge his presence. After a minute or two, he coughed, a sign of surrender. Pardon me, Professor. Min sometimes used mild sarcasm to cover a retreat. If we’re not too busy, if we’re settled again in the office after our vacation, perhaps we could discuss police business. He paused for dramatic effect, one last effort to recapture the offensive. There’s been a bank robbery.

For a moment the sound of the sandpaper scratched at the quiet afternoon. ‘We’ weren’t on a vacation, I said at last. ‘We’ were on a delegation. I turned the oak over a few times in my hand to check for rough spots before looking up to acknowledge his main point. A bank what, did you say?

The central file must still have you listed as liaison. Why would they send an inspector on a delegation like that?

I just go where they tell me, Min.

Right. Remind me to check next time I’m near the file room. He gave me a sly look. Did you go out to any of those bars? Supposed to be some good places in Beijing.

I nodded. Supposed to be. Get yourself on a delegation sometime.

Min shrugged. The furthest I ever go is Nampo to deal with drunken sailors. Did I tell you about the one that got left by his captain, off one of those foreign ships?

Once or twice.

Out of curiosity, what is it you do on those trips? Your reports don’t say.

I sit a lot. Give advice.

You?

People always want to know where other people are. Sometimes they don’t even ask. They walk in, I point.

That’s it?

No. Occasionally it gets exciting. Someone needs something. I go and get it.

Fine. Min walked over to my window, which looks onto the front gate and the street. Don’t tell me what you do. He turned and stared outside. Nice view, he said. He was gathering his thoughts, and I wasn’t expected to say anything. Finally, he turned back to me. Someone robbed the bank. I think it’s called a ‘heist.’ He used an English term, something he rarely did, and then rubbed his broad forehead as he considered whether this was the right word. Or maybe ‘feist.’ You don’t watch the movies? I thought they had them on all the damn TVs in those fancy hotels in Beijing.

I was hardly in the room. The delegation was always in meetings.

So it said in your report.

I let that pass. To tell the truth, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Have we ever had a bank robbery here? None that I can recall, at least, not since I’ve been in the Ministry.

A long time.

Too long. I blew the sawdust off the oak and held it up to the light. Oak takes time getting smooth, especially a piece that has been axed into splinters. Even under the best circumstances, you have to be relaxed to tackle oak. If you also have to restore a sense of dignity to the wood, to coax it back to life, that takes even more concentration. If you’re not feeling patient, my grandfather would say, leave oak alone. I looked up again at Min. He didn’t look patient.

There’s nothing in the training manual about bank robberies. I pointed at the green-covered book on the floor behind me. It had been there when I came into the office years ago, and there had never been a reason to disturb it. That means no standard procedures, no approved plan of operations. I wouldn’t know where to start. I turned the piece of wood around a couple of more times in my hand and then tossed it into the out-box. In fact—I smiled because it was almost true—I’m not even sure where the bank is.

Some people might have frowned. Min’s expression didn’t change. Instead, he clasped his hands behind his back and began a familiar ritual, pacing in front of my desk. Since he became chief inspector two years ago, the rhythm never varied, spring or winter, sunshine or rain. Four steps up, a slow turn, a glance out my door into the empty hall, then four steps back. Two revolutions, never three, then he would speak. Don’t play dumb, Inspector. The bank is in your district. You drive by every day, and you know it. The Ministry says this needs to be solved quickly or it will scare away foreign investors. Our job is to keep them safe and happy. If we become known as a country where bank robberies go unpunished, investment will dry up, the flow of good things to those for whom good things are required will slow, and the Ministry of People’s Security will be blamed. He stopped pacing and gave me a meaningful look. Obviously, the Minister’s head is on the line.

Aha, the main point.

No, Inspector. Not the main point. He started moving again, but more slowly, more deliberately. If he resumed pacing, it usually meant the conversation would be extended. The main point is . . .

Why don’t you sit down, Min? I pointed to a chair.

This time he did frown, slightly. He didn’t like to sit in my office; he thought it broke the sense of hierarchy, what little we had. Frowning or not, at least he was standing still. The main point, he said, is that I want the crime solved. Yes, I’ve been away on other business for the past week, but I’ve not been idle. I’ve been in meetings. The silence was heavy. I let it sink, content to wait for Min to turn, look out the door, and then finish his thought. Important meetings.

Bank robberies, I said, are rarely solved. Certainly not in meetings, however important. The phrasing was delicate because there was no sense antagonizing Min over this point. He thought meetings were a key to the well-being of the office. To me they were a waste of time. We chalked it up to personal style, though I suspected it was something more, a character defect on his part.

So! You are familiar with bank robberies. I thought you didn’t know what I was talking about. No movies, you said.

Not from movies, from television, which I watch at the Foreign Ministry to keep up on the foreign news. We have to go there since—just to remind you—all we have in this office is a radio. A radio with bad reception, to say nothing about the choice of programs. I watched the complaint walk out the door, without Min even nodding in its direction. From what I’ve seen, every civilized country has bank robberies. It helps the circulation of money, one theory goes. You never heard of Robin Hood? Or John Dillinger?

Why are you hanging around the Foreign Ministry? You have no business there these days. Min sniffed the air suspiciously. Do you?

Liaison. It was the right response. The chief inspector likes to hear we are being modern, keeping up contacts with other departments, studying the latest international police techniques, learning the jargon. He grunted, so I continued. The liaison officer has a TV in his office. Some ministries do actually supply equipment to their people. I looked around my office to indicate where there was space for a television. I don’t know what he watches most of the time, but you can hear him switching to the news when he thinks someone is coming down the hall.

Min looked at me, then at my out-box, then turned without a word and walked back to his office. I closed my eyes. It was a wonderful spring day, the first Friday in an April of peace and calm; the air was fresh, the trees were budding, and I had nothing to do. My phone rang. It was Min. Wake up and get in here. We need to talk. He lowered his voice. Who is this Di Lin Ger character?

4

Min was leaning back in his chair, fingers laced behind his round head, his eyes half closed. With anyone else, this posture might have been a show of dominance, a touch of boredom to signal supreme disinterest in any conversation we were about to have. That wasn’t Min’s style. In all the time we’d worked together, he had never been overweening. Twenty years ago, when he was promoted to senior inspector, he pretended it didn’t mean anything and was careful never to let his old friends think his nose was in the air. When the Ministry was reorganized and he was handed the job of my unit’s chief inspector, he waded in carefully. For several months, he didn’t rearrange the pictures on the walls of his office; he even left the old calendar up well into the new year, just to make the point he was not trying to clean house. Min was not a man impressed with his own authority. This is why I liked him, for all our differences. His heart was in the right place, and that counted for something.

Though he never said so, I knew that Min had not expected to rise this far in the chain of command. He never would have but for the death of my former chief, Pak Su In, shot four times in a short, deadly gun battle with a Military Security squad that didn’t know he was armed and suffered its own casualties as a result. The incident, which officially never happened, led to the dismissal of the elderly Minister of People’s Security. The Minister’s replacement, a much younger man who never offended anyone in his life, was ordered to find someone to fill Pak’s vacant post, and to make sure—very, very sure—it was someone with no hidden strengths. Min was a realist. He knew why he had been picked, and he never pretended otherwise.

On one thing, though, Min did place modest emphasis, the prerogatives of his title, and here I did not fault him. Deference to a title was important, he said, because if we in the frontline Ministry offices did not observe a clear hierarchy and sense of order, how the hell could the people on the streets be expected to do so? Ritual, he liked to say, was the basis of civilization; a system of beliefs was what separated man from other animals. The phrase other animals came out with a certain grim satisfaction.

One of Min’s central beliefs—where it came from, he probably did not know—was that it was proper and necessary for power to be seated. He never paced around his own desk. Whatever people might think of him personally, he used to remind me, he was a chief inspector, and chief inspector bottoms belonged on chairs when the job called for addressing subordinates. Min was a smart man, he was cautious, and he preferred to sit.

There was a moment of serenity while I waited at the edge of his office. It was pleasant to lounge against the door frame, looking beyond Min and out the window that overlooked the courtyard separating our offices from the Operations Building. The two tall gingko trees in the corner had no leaves yet, but the tips of their branches were supple with promise. Pak had loved those trees. He had waited eagerly through each dreary winter to see them come alive in spring. Every October, he would stare out the window for long, quiet minutes. It was sweet mourning, he said, the way the leaves turned gold in the dying sun. One summer, the Ministry had sent two workmen over to cut the trees down. Pak demanded to see the orders, which said something about how the branches were scraping the sides of the building and the roots would make it difficult to lay pipes between the buildings—as if any pipes would ever be laid. Pak gave the workmen five US dollars each, signed the work order on the completed as instructed line, and told them not to come around anymore. Min, by contrast, paid no attention to the courtyard trees; he said he’d seen enough wood during his army days to last a lifetime.

When he realized I was standing at his door, Min sat up and looked at me uneasily, as if surprised to find me there. Eh, Inspector, he said at last, thank you for coming.

No matter we had seen each other less than two minutes before, or that he had just called me to his office. He liked to begin these sessions this way, with a certain practiced formality. I nodded. It did no harm to play along with these rituals, because in truth, Min had no hold over me. On paper, even on the creased, outdated organization chart that hung on the wall beside his desk, he was my superior. But we both realized that on what really counted, the advantage was mine. I had longer service in the Ministry and understood things about its scuffed corridors that he did not. He needed me; I didn’t need him. Reduced to brutally simple terms, if I retired, he would be assigned one of the new breed of police inspectors—total recall of new regulations, very concerned with promotion, little experience, and no sense. This, Chief Inspector Min did not want.

I was serious about the robbery. Min opened a folder and pretended to read. It happened Wednesday before last, about noon. Why the duty officer didn’t bother to look in the daily file and alert you, I’ll never know. From the way he squinted, it was clear he was skipping over details he didn’t want to tell me. It was equally clear he was not telling me the truth. There had been nothing in the duty file about a bank robbery. But he knew that I knew he was lying, so it didn’t bother me. He was trying to get to the point, and the best way there happened to be through a minor bending of fact. The Gold Star Bank. They used to deal in foreign investment, illegal currency swaps, funding overseas operations. He looked up to make sure I was listening. Last year, they saw which way the wind was blowing with all of this talk about new economic realities, so they set up a section for domestic customers—savings accounts for merchants who will stand in line for hours to deposit the week’s profits. Some of the local foreign businessmen opened euro accounts rather than keep stacks of cash in their hotel rooms. Nothing was insured. Why bother? Who ever thought a bank would be robbed in safe, gray Pyongyang.

In a heartbeat, I knew we didn’t want to get saddled with this case. The lack of entry in the duty log could have been an oversight. But if everything else Min had said so far was true, the Ministry wasn’t remotely interested in a solution as such; they wanted a political problem solved for political reasons, having to do with the current tides in the capital. Ocean tides were reliable and predictable, pretty much a function of the moon. Political tides were more complicated, and usually more dangerous.

Convincing Min to throw the case in the bottom drawer and forget about it would be difficult, but nothing was impossible; well, not this, anyway. The Ministry could be pacified eventually, and all would be well in our little sector of the world. Yes, good question, I said. Who would have thought there would be a bank robbery in the capital?

Someone obviously did, Inspector. Min closed the folder as if it were a precious old book and laid his hand atop it, to keep the facts from flying out. Somebody thought about it, they planned it, and then they executed it. In broad daylight. In your district, I might add, with silk stockings over their faces. That must have been a sight. Witnesses say they sounded like Koreans but not from Pyongyang. Some in the Ministry apparently think they might have been Chagang people. It’s possible, I suppose, though I don’t think there is anyone in Chagang smart enough to conceive something like this. You haven’t heard a peep from your contacts?

Min was Pyongyang born and bred. He thought this one of the luckiest things in his life, being born in Pyongyang, and seemed prouder of that than of being a chief inspector. Not surprisingly, he had a low opinion of anyone from the provinces, even if they outranked him. If he had to, he could leash his contempt. I’d seen him do it more than once with the Ministry’s senior party secretary, a wiry, bad-tempered man from North Hamgyong—the only place Min considered even more backward than Chagang. During army service, Min had been stationed in the mountains of Chagang. He was tight-lipped about what he did, but he made it plain the place hadn’t rubbed him the right way. He never had a good thing to say about it, or anyone he met there. Whenever we had a few drinks, he made especially unflattering comments about Chagang women.

I didn’t care where people thought the robbers were from; in fact, the last thing I wanted was a discussion of the suspects. My contacts are relaxing in the sweetness of the season, those able to buy their way out of going down to help the farmers for a few weeks. This was where I needed to plant a seed of doubt in Min’s mind. I have to say, already something about this case smells funny to me. This robbery—if that is what it was—happened over a week ago. There was nothing in the duty file—I watched, but Min’s face didn’t change expression—so why is the Ministry only getting around today to asking us to begin an investigation? By now, the people in those stockings could be anywhere. It seems to me that this isn’t going to get solved, not at our level, and we would be doing ourselves a big favor to let it expire from inattention.

Could be; the suspects could be anywhere, as you say. I had a momentary surge of optimism that we were about to drop the whole thing. But in fact—Min’s eyes darted into the hallway, then slid back to me tinged with conspiracy—one of them isn’t. Keep this to yourself, Inspector. He’s not just anywhere, he’s somewhere specific, by which I mean, specifically in the morgue.

This is a secret? It was painfully clear that Min was not going to let go of this as easily as I’d hoped. There was more to it than he’d first let on. If the bastards had all vanished without a trace, skipped back to wherever they were from, it would have been one thing. But now it appeared we had a body, and that would complicate matters. When there was a body, there was liable to be paperwork, and if there was paperwork, boxes would have to be checked.

No, Inspector, it is not exactly a secret, but we want to be discreet about this case. The fellow was hit by a bus, one of those new red double-deckers someone is shipping in from overseas. He paused to consider this fact. I doubt if the import approvals are in order, but that’s not our problem, bus imports.

I nodded but said nothing. If I waited, Min would find his way back to the main point.

The bank robber had run out of the bank and was in the middle of the street when someone—perhaps one of the foreign businessmen lolling around—pointed out he hadn’t taken the silk stocking off his face. Min gestured at an imaginary mask. So he stopped to remove it. That was the wrong thing to do, in the middle of the street, in front of a new red double-decker bus traveling, I’m reliably informed, at a high rate of speed. Where did a gang of bank robbers get silk stockings, do you suppose?

Was the gang from Chagang? Maybe they got the stockings there.

Min snorted. They don’t have silk stockings in Chagang, Inspector. The women all wear baggy pants and have sunburned faces. Besides, we don’t know where they were from. He made an odd noise with his lips, an expression of annoyance at my attempt to goad him. No one knows, but I can tell you, this one fellow won’t be going back there, wherever it is. He didn’t do well against the bus. Min looked down at his desk and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. I was called to the morgue this morning before you came in. The chief inspector did not like corpses and hated the morgue. He only went there under extraordinary circumstances. I mentally filed away the bad news that someone had convinced him that this case was extraordinary. I didn’t actually see the body, of course, they wouldn’t let me, but they showed me a photo, several photos, actually.

A warning flag went up. Where was the body? And you didn’t press the point, I suppose.

What point? Min looked at me with a hint of concern, a minute lifting of the eyebrows that no more disturbed his placid exterior than a wispy cloud might mar the sky at