A Drop of Chinese Blood (33 page)

“According to you, your paths never crossed again until you saw him in the doctor’s office.”

“Our paths didn’t exactly cross, no.”

“But you heard things.”

“It’s hard not to hear things in Pyongyang. With this sort of incident, no one is authorized to tell anyone anything, which means everything is a rumor, even if it’s accurate.”

“And you heard what?”

“I’ll summarize what I remember, as long as it’s understood that I don’t remember as well as I used to.” He stared far off into the distance. “Funny, I could still tell you details about Mei-lin when we first met, how she lit a fire in me that to this day hasn’t died down.” He stopped. “Well, you want to know something else. This is everything I can summon out of the library that used to be my memory. I don’t need it taking up space anymore.”

“Go ahead.”

“After a thorough debriefing that lasted six months, Pyongyang faced the problem of what to do with Lu. His knowledge of MSS operations was extremely useful at first, but without constant refreshment, they knew it would become dated. A decision was made to park him at a desk and use him to concoct ways to engage the MSS from a distance, sniff out Chinese operations in the North, and string them along. By watching how MSS handled his bait, Pyongyang figured it could determine how much and in what way Chinese operations had been modified, new techniques employed, and technology integrated.”

“Which brings us to Handout.”

“On that I can’t help you, because I don’t know anything about operations or agents.”

I didn’t laugh in his face, much as I wanted to. He knew plenty about operations, though for once he might be telling the truth—he might not know about Handout.

“Very well, then I’ll tell you what must have happened. Interrupt me if you find yourself in possession of a stray fact that bears on the discussion.” I thought back to what I’d read in Handout’s file, those sections that had remained in the file in the office. “While still in China, Lu had recruited an agent, Handout, to work against the North Koreans. Handout had volunteered, but there’s no record of the reason. Lu either kept it to himself or expunged it from the files before he skipped out. When he defected, he withheld knowledge of Handout from your interrogators. It wouldn’t have been too hard to do; Handout wasn’t a very useful agent and even in a six-month debriefing would have been at the bottom of the list of things your boys would have asked about. And he wouldn’t have answered anything about which he wasn’t specifically asked.”

“Three Kingdoms again?”

I shrugged. “More like common sense. I’m sure your side does the same. You certainly do.”

Silence.

I continued with my review. “Once he was settled into his desk job, he could carefully explore the North Korean files to look for signs of Handout, little footprints that had been part of their previous operations. He couldn’t be sure who on the Chinese side would pick up handling Handout once he left; for a while he could be sure that no one would trust Handout, who would certainly be put on a shelf by MSS until he could be vetted all over again. I say all over again, but I’m not sure how thoroughly it was done the first time through.”

“He certainly would never have checked out if he’d been one of ours. The agent of a defector coming out clean in the wash? Ha!”

“I thought you didn’t know anything about operations.”

“Common sense.”

“Lu would also have been alert to the possibility of Handout stumbling into Pyongyang’s counterintelligence nets. If he ever did get tangled, Lu must have steered suspicion away, making sure his boy never came to the full attention of the North Koreans. At the same time, he filled Handout’s reports with as much straw as he could get away with so that Handout was never too valuable to the Chinese. That way, in case the North had another line into MSS, one that Lu didn’t know about, Handout wouldn’t be high on the list of Pyongyang’s candidates for elimination.” I hadn’t considered the last thought until I said it, but it sounded all right on first hearing. I wasn’t sure my uncle would agree. “Plausible?”

“Elementary. To this point, everything you’ve got in your bag is very simple. Tell me when it is about to become complicated.”

“Thank you, I will hold up one finger.” I smiled sweetly and demonstrated. “By this time, Lu had become, even in his own mind, Y. The plan became more complicated the more he thought about it, befitting a man who had nothing much to do all day long but plot. When the time came, he decided he had to reinvent himself as K, and as such use Handout to establish contact with the Tumen office of the MSS. Why? He already knew from North Korean reporting that his successor was Inspector O’s nephew, and so he calculated that would be the ideal place to set things in motion. It was convoluted, with a lot of dark corners and loose ends. Exactly for that reason he figured that he could get away with it long enough to skip out of North Korea and back to his native land. He knew it wouldn’t take anyone very long to figure out K was Y, but he didn’t need it to last forever. Having a ghost image in the picture would keep information in separate files for a few months. That would create a gap big enough for him to slip through.”

“What if someone had cross-filed the information? It would have become obvious almost immediately that they were the same person.”

I smiled. “Cross-filed? Does anyone bother to do that anymore? Everyone is drowning in information these days. Who can afford to take the time to cross-file? Does Mrs. Zhou cross-file everything? We’d run out of file space in a week.”

“Very risky, very convoluted,” my uncle said. “I would never have done it that way.”

“Ah, but you see, uncle, you’re Korean, while Lu is Chinese.”

“And never Mark Twain shall meet.”

“What?”

“I said, I can’t get over how similar in some ways this is to the Blue Sparrow case.”

“Not now, not here. Sitting in enemy territory is not the best place for storytelling.”

“Enemy territory?” My uncle looked taken aback, something I rarely saw from him. “Enemy territory? This is Korea; this is your homeland. Your father’s grave is here, as is his father’s and his father’s before him. How can it be enemy territory?”

“I didn’t mean that. You know what I meant.”

“All I know is what I see and what you say. It baffles me sometimes, I have to admit.”

“Go ahead, this is a pleasant spot, no one around.” I needed to make amends, quickly. “What about the Blue Sparrow?”

“You sure you want to listen?”

I closed my eyes. “You have my complete attention.”

“To review: The case got more convoluted the more we sank into it. We tried and tried to come up with another bag for our working hypothesis. We knew we had to. Several of us worried that things fit together in the investigation too neatly almost from the beginning. As you’ll recall, it was a woman’s ear that the vice minister of railways found on his doorstep.”

“Right ear.” I opened my eyes. “With a pearl earring.”

My uncle looked at me suspiciously. “The vice minister was a loud-talking man so we suspected, but weren’t sure, there might a connection between the ear and his brusque style.”

“You made that point already. Maybe it wasn’t the ear, maybe it was the pearl.”

Another look. “That’s unlikely. Did I also tell you that he was built like an East German boxcar gone to seed? We learned that it annoyed some people simply to be in the same room with him.”

“It annoyed someone so much that she cut off her own ear and put it on his doorstep? As I said before, it shouldn’t have been hard to find a woman with only one ear. And in my experience, women don’t cut off their own ears.”

“Did I mention we made lists of everyone who might have had a grudge against the vice minister?”

“You did. Come on, uncle, this isn’t a real case, is it? You’ve been making it up as you went along.”

“Of course it was a real case. It’s one reason why I never made chief inspector.”

He had never talked much about his career, so this jarred me. “All right, you went down the list of everyone who might have a grudge. It was a long list. Then what?”

“In those days, we were trained to be methodical, and that meant a lot of shoe leather. We didn’t have computers. Headquarters assigned eight people to the case, and each was given one province. Inherently, the workload was uneven, though there was some effort to smooth out the inequalities as things proceeded. If we found that the general had been in a particular province for any length of time, we devoted a second person. I remember the inspector who got Yanggang Province ended up with not much to do. The general had been there only once, to go hiking. By contrast, after he became vice minister, he often went to Wonsan to eat seafood and sit on the beach. He put down in his travel orders that he was going to give guidance and investigate conditions at the railcar repair facility there, but no one believed it. The point is, he met a lot of people in Wonsan and that meant a lot of grudges, so naturally Wonsan, even though it was just a city, got its own investigator. I had a pretty good idea that Wonsan would end up having nothing to do with the case, and on this, at least, I was right. It wasted a lot of manpower that could have been used elsewhere, but that’s a hard argument to make when people think that being methodical is a substitute for using their imagination and experience.”

“Did anyone look for other body parts?”

“Like fingers?”

“Like anything. I would have thought one team would proceed on the basis of hypothesis A, a nasty grudge, and another team would look at hypothesis B, murder. I’d even have assumed, for the sake of argument, that the vice minister committed the murder himself and put the ear there to shuttle the investigation off on the wrong track. Maybe he had railroad images in his head.”

My uncle smiled. “You are your father’s son, and yet you are my nephew.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant. It might have been praise, and considering the circumstances, for once I gave myself the benefit of the doubt.

The brown car with the policemen in front cruised by again. About thirty meters past us, they pulled over and turned off the engine.

My uncle took this in without much interest. “Where’s the seal, do you think?”

“Don’t play games. You already know, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t know. Although I have a hunch.” He stood up slowly and began strolling in the opposite direction from the car. “Let’s go home.”

Chapter Three

The return trip was easier than I would have guessed, and was more comfortable than the shipping crate. Back in Yanji the next evening my uncle went straight to his workshop to commune with his woodworking tools. I never saw a man so happy to be reunited with a Turkish saw. The first thing I did was to call the office. Waiting for the connection, I started having second thoughts. It had been almost two days since I’d disappeared. My unexplained absence and the discovery of Lieutenant Li’s corpse must have set off alarm bells from one end of the Ministry to the other. They would have instantly concluded that, like my predecessor, I had defected to North Korea, and that my uncle’s presence for the past two years had all along been meant to facilitate the operation. As far as the Ministry was concerned, it would all fit neatly with what had already been suspected in some quarters. A terse message from the Mongolians would have told them that K had been murdered, poisoned. The boulder-sized nurse would have implicated both my uncle and me in K’s demise. The nurse’s story was unlikely to stand up under serious investigation, but the Mongolians would be doing the investigating, and MSS—having only one hypothesis bag—wouldn’t be looking for alternative explanations.

No, calling wasn’t going to do me any good. It would simply raise the level of tension. Before the second ring, I hung up the phone. Yanji was probably already crawling with special MSS teams gathering information, questioning people, rooting around for evidence to confirm what they’d decided already—that I was a traitor and had doubtless benefited from a hidden support structure long in place.

It would be best if they didn’t suspect I had returned, at least not before I had a chance to get in touch with someone in the Ministry who would listen to my explanation. If the teams had been watching the house, of course, they’d already know where I was, but the chances of that were slim. They thought I’d defected, and defectors didn’t return home to make sure the windows were closed or the lights had been turned off.

The lights! I hurried back to my uncle’s workshop.

“Turn off the lights. Were your shades closed when we left?”

My uncle was working on an old set of sketches. “Why, are we under air attack?” He didn’t look up.

“No, but I don’t want anyone to know we’re home.”

“So if the shades had been closed while we were away, it would be no problem if we left on this light because no one could see.”

“Uncle, if they think we’re here, they’ll bust in with guns blazing. You’ll never get those plans finished.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Turn off the light, by all means. I can sit in the courtyard and sketch. No one can see me in there. I promise not to sing.”

“And don’t answer the door. Even if it’s Madame Fang.”

“
Especially
if it’s Madame Fang. Where are you going? If you see Gao, make him cough up the money he owes us.”

“I’m not going to see Gao. I’m not going to see anyone until I get back to the office and put things straight.”

“Tell me how it turns out.”

“I’m taking two empty bags for hypothesis, do you think that will be enough?”

“Better take three.”

“Uncle, you realize they probably think I defected and that you helped me.”

“What a thought! And yes, it already crossed my mind.”

“I also don’t know who is on our side in all of this.”

“Don’t worry, the advantage is with the defenders if they are on the high ground.”

“Are we?”

“We’d better be.”

2

At some point, a team was going to be sent over to the house to do a thorough, regulation-style search: bookshelves ripped from the walls, floors pulled up, water pipes cut open, the entire ceiling taken down. There were a number of reasons to avoid things getting to that point, not least that they never cleaned up or repaired the damage if they didn’t find anything. Nothing of mine would cause problems—my wife had taken all of my money, which meant, fortunately, there wasn’t any unexplained cash lying around. My main worry was that I couldn’t be sure what my uncle might have in his workshop beside tools or in those notebooks other than plans for bookshelves.