A Corpse in the Koryo (26 page)

I thought she would go back to the kiosk to finish her tea, but instead she stood there, looking at me as if she'd asked a question that I was so far failing to answer. I had started to say something about the weather when a gust of wind blew closed the shutter on the ticket hut.

It swung shut with a loud bang, there was a muffled scream from inside, and then the second guide burst out the door. She was shorter than the first guide; her hair was long, and her face was exactly like those in old folk paintings. Cute, like a kitten or a puppy, with big, wide-set dark eyes. "You'd probably get tired of her after a while," I could hear Pak saying to me.

The second guide propped the shutter open and walked over to us. The front of her skirt was wet. "I was pouring myself a cup and spilled the whole kettle when that shutter banged shut. Could have burned myself like a chicken." She was agitated. Her friend tittered, then caught herself and looked away. It was incumbent on me to say something polite if I had any thought of seeing the kitten again. All I could think was that this had the earmarks of another morning without tea.

The second guide glanced down at her skirt, which was clinging to her legs. "It's soaked through. I can't give tours walking around like this, none of the men will listen. I've got to hike back to the room and change. If I can find any, I'll bring some extra tea, too. What we had left is all over the floor."

Amazing, I thought, and kicked a pinecone halfway across the parking lot. One lousy cup of tea wouldn't do me any harm. I strolled over for a closer view of the low orange flowers that bordered both sides of the walkway leading to the temple grounds. The first guide floated beside me. "It's going to rain again later this morning anyway, so there won't be any tours." She brushed against my arm. "As long as you've walked this far up the hill, you may as well look around the grounds.

When the rain starts, we can duck into one of the old buildings. The roofs leak a little, but you don't look too delicate to me."

The sky had lost the freshness of morning and was turning a hard blue. The light on the grass and the flowers was brilliant, but it stopped suddenly at the edge of the main path, which was deeply shaded by ten or fifteen old Chinese elms standing in a row. Their trunks curved gently near the ground, as if they had once seen court ladies gathering their skirts and longed to do that, too.

With the sun climbing above the peaks, the near side of the hills was no longer in shadow. The dwarf pine trees looked farther away, and smaller, while the rocks they were growing from had become larger and more foreboding in the light. The guide looked up at the mountain.

"There is a legend about those trees. They were planted by the monks who had to flee the fighting here centuries ago. The story is that they deliberately planted the trees in the most inaccessible places, to be a constant reminder to any invaders that nothing could crush our spirit."

"Nice tale. But I think they only live to be about fifty years old, at most, then they reseed. Though how anything could reseed on those rocks is beyond me."

The guide motioned me over to a boulder sitting behind a low wooden fence. The face of the rock had been carved away and a poem in ancient Chinese characters chiseled on it, but these had been worn by the weather, making it hard to read more than one or two in each line.

"If I told you this boulder has been here for a thousand years, would you tell me it is not so?" The guide's voice remained professionally pleasant; nothing about her tone suggested she was irritated. It was a simple question. But her gait had changed: She wasn't floating anymore, and her skirts brushed the stepping-stones.

"Nothing is impossible," I said. "Everything you tell me on this beautiful morning, I believe."

She walked ahead of me without saying anything more until we reached a low bench in the middle of a semicircle of tall plane trees.

They all leaned slightly in the same direction. It was their effort to catch the sun but gave them the look of a group of strangers, each trying to hear the same conversation. The guide sat looking away from the eavesdropping trees, her back to the mountain that rose above the river. In front of us, a stone's throw away, was a small wooden building surrounded by a hedge of roses.

"This is my favorite building in the complex. No matter what, it carries an air of tranquility." She spoke softly, her voice barely rising above the sound of the river and the birds. Almost as an afterthought she said, "There have been a lot of visitors here recently." She laid her hands calmly in her lap and put her face up to the sky. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn't resting.

I thought she was expecting me to say something, to pick up on her remark. Then I realized she was getting her thoughts in order. "Am I interested?"

"I know who you are, Inspector. Isn't that what we're best at, keeping track of other people? Surely you're not surprised that someone called to tell us you were coming."

"No, I suppose not."

She closed her eyes again. I wasn't sure if she was trying to remember a story she'd been given to tell me, or was searching her memory for some facts that had fallen into the dark places where they were sitting quietly until she found them. Facts are like that sometimes, especially unpleasant ones. I make it a point to give people the benefit of the doubt if they say they don't remember, even when I'm not positive I can afford to believe them.

"Busier than normal?" It might help to start where she left off. If there was a story line, she'd feed it to me no matter what I said.

She opened her eyes and turned to me. "I didn't say 'busy.' I said we'd had a lot of visitors."

Good, she was paying attention, that meant no story line. But she seemed uncertain, trying to keep her balance mentally "You're right, that's what you said--a lot of visitors. The usual tour groups?"

She stood up and moved slowly from under the trees into a patch of sunlight. I stayed on the bench. It isn't a good idea to question people when they are moving around--breaks the concentration--but when she didn't come back to sit down, I got to my feet and walked beyond her to a bed of yellow mums that were starting to bloom. Chasing after her wasn't going to work. It would confuse our roles. If she had something important to say, something she was nervous about, she was going to have to come to me. "Interesting thing about flowers," I said. "No matter when you plant them, they open on schedule. Once in a while you get a bush or a tree that lags behind, or gets anxious. Flowers don't do that."

When I looked up, she was beside me. She had started floating again. That was good. "Two weeks ago, five Military Security agents were here. They climbed that hill." She didn't turn around or point, but she meant the hill behind us, the one with the small pine trees. "People who come to the hotel sometimes climb up there, though they usually need permission. Normally, I wouldn't pay much attention. It's the local security man who is nervous, because if there is an accident, he gets blamed."

"You know the local security man?"

She reached over to pull off several wilted flowers that had been broken at the stem. "You know better than to ask a question like that.

How could I not know him? He's been here a long time. And he has a good singing voice, so we sometimes have him come to the bar in the hotel. I can usually tell if a tour group is going to be trouble later, in the bar. I give him a call and he sings karaoke for a few hours. The tourists like it. If anyone has too much to drink, he helps them to their room. Otherwise, they become too friendly with the waitresses. Nothing special most of the time, just annoying. Once in a while, there's real trouble."

"How long have you been a guide here at the temple?"

"You mean, was I a waitress in the bar before I got this job? I can sing a little, feed tidbits to the guests, But I'm not a prostitute, if that's what you're thinking." She floated down the path, as if to emphasize that she could break the conversation anytime she wanted. I turned and looked up the hill at the pine trees. She'd told me everything I needed to know for right now. She could tell me more about the hotel, the guests, and the Military Security team later.

One thing worried me. A team of five men was unusual. I tried to remember if I'd ever heard of anything like that. Normally, they work in threes, like the three men in the jeep at Manpo, or the three standing around afterward. Five either meant two teams had been joined for a special operation, or they had been moved in without coordination, under separate orders. Even so, in either case, there should have been six.

The Military Security Command made its share of mistakes, and its operations were still unclear to me, but this much they did by the book.

A team was three men, an iron triangle.

I needed a picture of Colonel Kim, and maybe one of his dead agent, Chong, to show to the staff. There was no reason to think either of them had been here, but I wanted to know if there was any connection between Military Security's operation up here and their efforts to get at Kang.

Some of them might have regional responsibilities, but others were probably assigned to particular cases, and I had to start one somewhere.

Maybe one of the guides or the floor lady would recognize them. He wouldn't want to do it, but Kang could get me the pictures. His department kept files; he'd told me they took photographs of the three-man team that broke into the consulate in Beijing. For that matter, maybe Kang knew something about why Military Security had been up here.

Before I set off down the road to the hotel, I needed only one more thing from the guide. "In all those visitors, all the continents were represented?"

She

thought a moment. "Funny way to put it. We don't usually divide up the groups like that, but--no. None from Antarctica."

2

Song Chon Kun, the local security man, was about fifty years old, tall, very fit, a firm handshake and a winning smile. I did not like him. It did not help his case that I knew about his singing ability. His speaking voice was rich and melodious, and he used it dramatically. Another black mark. "Nice to see you up here, Inspector," he said, cocking his head slightly as if he expected me to break into an aria in reply.

"Business brings me here, not pleasure. Official business, the capital investigative body." I figured inflating my rank a little might wipe the smile off his face. He only beamed all the more.

"Then it is a true pleasure, a true pleasure." His hair was dyed, a shade too dark. Most young girls didn't have shining black hair like that, much less a middle-aged security officer at a resort hotel, never mind how easy his job was. "Anything I can do, anything at all. My humble resources are at your disposal."

This must be his Japanese upbringing. Either his resources were at my disposal or they were not. Humble didn't make a damned bit of difference. "I will need your discretion, your knowledge of the surrounding countryside, and your memories about anything unusual over the past two or three weeks. This pertains to a murder investigation in the capital."

Song's eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. He realized I was not going to share very much with him, and he was not used to being squeezed for information. Hyangsan was rated as a special area, and that gave Song special privileges. He could sense I was threatening his cozy existence. His voice lost its golden cover for the briefest moment, then regained it as quickly. "Let's get away from the hotel and go down by the river, where we can talk."

We walked the whole way in silence. A little small talk about the weather wouldn't have cost either of us anything, but I figured he was sore at me. That was alright; it meant he was on edge, probably trying to figure out how much damage I could do if he didn't answer my questions.

When we got to the river he faced the water, his back to the hotel.

The water pounding over the rocks was even louder than it had been earlier in the morning and was throwing up a spray.

"I apologize, Inspector, for seeming rude, but I didn't want to speak until we were standing here. It makes it hard for them to calibrate the microphones up there on the balcony."

Alright, so I had misjudged him; his voice didn't detract from his critical faculties as much as I'd thought. "We don't go in much for technical stuff in the Ministry, so I assume they aren't our mikes," I said.

On a hot July day the spray might have been refreshing. Now it was just damp.

Song took out his handkerchief and mopped his face. "Gesture toward the river or up the mountain, would you? Otherwise they're going to become suspicious."

I stabbed my finger at the top of one of the hills. Song laughed, a rich baritone laugh. "No need to be too theatrical, Inspector. Now, you have some questions for me? You are quite an expert on our pine trees, I hear." Okay, so I had doubly misjudged him. He had already talked to the tall guide.

"I take it those mikes aren't here all the time. Something special going on?"

Song's hand pointed for a moment at the largest boulder midstream and then moved languidly in a smooth motion toward a bird in the trees, "See that rock?" I saw that the top had been chipped recently.

"I hose fools wanted to put a remote microphone on there, disguise it with some leaves or something. I told them it was crazy, that as soon as it rained and the river rose, it would wash away. Two of them tried it anyway. One of them fell into the river and broke his shoulder. Had to be carted away. The other five decided to take my advice."

That explained why the guide saw five, not six, Military Security monkeys climbing the hill. There were two whole teams originally.

"What are they doing up here now? They aren't checking up on tourists or the hotel staff with remote microphones." Song didn't respond. "So who is the target? And I'll know if you are screwing with me."

Song picked up a small stone from the riverbank and threw it into the water. "In the time I've been here, we had this sort of thing once before.

Two years ago." He paused. "No, three. You remember the nephew of a Politburo member who held some position in the party's Youth League? He was forever bouncing up here to 'rest,' but he never rested. He was always meeting people, Chinese businessmen in plaid shirts, Koreans from Japan with extra-oiled hair. Automobiles would come up from Pyongyang, carrying girls, always discreet, never more than one in each car." Song started moving up the riverbank, in small steps, keeping his back to the hotel. "About three or four months after the first visit by this guy, a captain from Military Security showed up.