“There are some times, Min, I have the feeling there is nothing
that will do any good.” That came out harsher than I meant it, but it was out and there wasn’t any way to make it softer. Better just to let things cool off. I left without saying anything else; Min’s sigh was audible all the way down the hall.
I was ready to waste a few hours at the Traffic Bureau trying to locate the file on the accident. The accusation about the wallet and the search of my apartment told me that the pressure on Min was at a danger point; the case had sharp edges, and anyone handling it was going to get sliced. The sooner we dropped it, the better. But I had to admit, there was something odd about it, something that made me want to hold it up to the light one more time before dumping it in the trash. For one thing, it wasn’t usual for a bus to hit a man wearing a silk stocking over his face. It would be interesting to see what the Traffic Bureau file said, and I figured the case would have been discussed enough in the halls that it would be easy to find what I needed. I just had to make sure I didn’t find out too much.
When I got to the Traffic Bureau, a sign on the front window said they were all in a political meeting and wouldn’t be open for business until after lunch. I walked in anyway. Sure enough, the front desk was deserted, but there was more laughter from a room in back than I normally associate with political meetings. Finally, the door opened, and a line of traffic officers in white uniforms came out. Most of them had deeply tanned faces, from being outside in the weather all the time. I recognized a couple of them. They nodded as they walked past but didn’t say anything.
I went up to the front desk as the officer on duty sat down and told him what I wanted. “Who needs to know?” He stared at my identification card. He was a little man, very fine bone structure. He moved like a bird.
“I do.”
“And who are you?”
“What do you mean, who are you? It says so right here, on this card. Got my picture, my name, the signature of the Minister of People’s Security. That is usually enough. You have special requirements around here these days?”
“What’s your problem? I asked a simple question, who needs to know. It has to go on the release form.”
“I told you—I need to know. And I told you who I am. That’s who goes on the release form. Me. We finished with the formalities?”
He took my ID, looked at it for a long time. “Sorry. No such incident.”
“What do you mean, no such incident? There’s a body in the morgue that says there was.”
“Really? You talked to him, did you, the body?”
“No, but I talked to the person who did the autopsy.”
“Really? Someone told you they did an autopsy?”
“Not exactly.”
“No, not exactly. Not at all, from what I hear. If there is nothing else, Inspector, we’re busy.” He picked up the phone. I put my hand on his little wrist, gently. Even so, it wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done.
He put the phone down, stared at my hand for a moment, then looked up at me. He was trembling with rage. “Never do that, Inspector. Never, ever do that.”
I patted his wrist. “That didn’t hurt, did it? But we weren’t done with our conversation. I showed you a valid identification card. You are blocking my investigation. That is against regulations.”
He stopped trembling long enough to sneer. “There is nothing to block, Inspector. That’s what I told you. We have no file; there was never any accident like you described. Go away. And I mean now.” The sneer was replaced by a grin. “I hear SSD is moving into the case. That’s bad news for you inspector-boys, makes you look like a bunch of ducks.”
This was sometimes called “healthy tension” between different parts of the Ministry. Actually, the Traffic Bureau hated us, the construction troops despised the traffic cops, and nobody could stand the guards at the camps. I could stay and make a nuisance of myself, but it would tie me up for an hour, and even then I knew I wouldn’t see the whole file—which, if I stopped to think about it, I had to admit I didn’t want to see. But I also didn’t want some runt of a Traffic Bureau clerk telling me what I could see and what I couldn’t. His superior would be more amenable, even offer me tea, but claim to have no information. He would make phone calls, he would tell me: You can rest assured, Inspector, I’ll call all the way up the line if that is what it takes. He would promise to make inquiries: Most certainly, Inspector, we will continue to search the records. He would get back to me: As soon as I hear anything, absolutely as soon as I hear, I’ll call you. None of it remotely true. Better to leave now and cut my losses.
On the walk back to the office, I decided enough was enough. I’d put the case file in the bottom drawer and forget about it. Min wouldn’t like it if SSD took over, but that was the least of my concerns. If he had to deal with it in the Saturday meeting, that was his problem.
When I got back to my office, I heard voices coming from Min’s room. A minute later, my phone rang.
“O here.”
“Inspector, come into my office, please.”
“I need to write up one of those daily reports for yesterday.”
“No, you don’t, and you didn’t get anything done at the Traffic Bureau, just like at the bank and that bar. We need to talk.”
Min was behind his desk, and in a chair against the wall was a lanky man, probably in his late thirties, wearing an open white shirt with cuffs that could knock your eyes out, a blue blazer, and tan slacks. His hair was short and neat. He had a dark complexion, made darker by the large, square sunglasses that hid his eyes and a good deal of territory around them.
Min stood up as I walked in, which put me on my guard. “Inspector, I want you to meet someone.” The other man nodded but didn’t get out of his chair. “This is Lieutenant Han, from SSD. He’ll be working with you on the bank robbery.”
So, the boom had been lowered, even faster than I’d expected. Maybe too fast. I eyed the man from SSD, a long, thoughtful look, nothing to suggest I was surprised, or concerned, or already felt quicksand up to my waist. The man from SSD returned my gaze, or maybe he didn’t. He might have been sleeping, for all I knew; you couldn’t be sure what was going on behind those big dark glasses. I turned back to Min. “Good of SSD to make the offer to work with us, but unnecessary. This is an important case.” I paused to make sure I had the next sentence phrased just right, with the sarcasm decently buried. “They should handle it, and we wouldn’t want to weigh them down.” Lieutenant Han didn’t respond, but Min did, before anything like an awkward silence had a chance to establish itself.
“The State Security Department has been assigned to this case, Inspector, in conjunction with us.” Min was talking fast, clipping words like hedges; that usually happened when he was nervous or in the presence of people who clearly were—or might conceivably be—a threat. “You can imagine how the Center wants all resources working together. The Minister has personally approved.” This I doubted, unless the word “approved” was taken in the strictly literal sense of signing one’s name to a piece of paper. Min must have read my mind. “The signed order is coming down later today. You and Han here can start before it arrives. Take some time to get acquainted, get used to each other’s mode of operations, that sort of thing. You’ll need to give him a full briefing on where things stand. Teamwork, Inspector.” Min’s voice was looking for a false bravado it couldn’t find. “That’s the new way. No more lone-wolf policing. Teamwork.” The word seemed to give him a certain ballast. I was afraid he might repeat it again, but he only looked at us in turn and fiddled with a pencil.
Now there was an awkward silence. Han finally stood up. I thought maybe the reference to wolves had stirred him. “All we have to do is solve this, Inspector. After that, we can go back to normal.” He spoke with his mouth mostly closed, in a voice that sounded like he was borrowing it from someone else. This kid was not going to be much help, already I knew that. I’d trailed along with SSD many times before, and it was never pleasant. At our level, they were a threat, alright, but not the usual type. When they weren’t lazy, they were stupid. The combination was inevitably lethal for someone; I always tried to make sure it wasn’t me. The only time it was really serious was when SSD headquarters became personally involved. Those people had heft, that we knew, and you didn’t want to get in their way.
“Fine, good to have you with us, Lieutenant.” I took the silk stocking out of my back pocket. “You wouldn’t have the match to this, would you?”
Min sat down. The chair creaked, but he said nothing as he covered his eyes.
Han followed me back to my office. He looked around the room. “Where’s your computer?”
“We don’t have computers.” This was the first sign of trouble. SSD had a bigger budget and was better equipped. Even more galling, it liked to rub our noses in the fact that it was operating from a higher plane than the rest of us. What SSD wanted, SSD got. “We don’t need them, actually.” I gestured around the room to suggest the office was more than sufficiently equipped.
“Is that so?” Han went over to my file cabinet. “You have everything in here?” He opened the top drawer, where I keep my wood scraps and my sandpaper. “What’s this?”
“I keep that mostly empty for evidence.” He didn’t say anything. I pushed the drawer shut. “You like wood?”
“I use it to pick my teeth. Where’s the paper on this case?”
“Wasn’t it in your computer?”
Han slowly took off his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket before he fixed me with a cold look. He did have eyes, after all. They were way too gentle for SSD, almost a girl’s eyes, but he had perfected the cold look pretty well. “It doesn’t matter to me how we get this done this, Inspector. Because when everything is over, I have someplace useful to go back to. You, on the other hand, will still be here.” He dusted off the chair with a handkerchief before he sat down. “You see what I mean?”
“Tell me, Han, harassed anyone interesting lately?”
“What?”
“That’s SSD’s main job, isn’t it? I mean, harassing people.”
“You want to be real careful, Inspector, from here on out. Real careful in what you say.”
“No, seriously, I’m interested, Lieutenant. You must have techniques, am I right? A phone call comes in; it’s anonymous and for some reason untraceable; someone tells you that someone else just said something questionable about—”
“Like I said, Inspector, be real careful.”
“Well, you know what I mean. So you start up a file or something. It must be hard to keep track of all those phone calls, all those people who say things in such soft voices. Hard to hear people talking that soft, sometimes. You never said ‘something’ yourself? I mean, you can tell me, Lieutenant, just the two of us here.”
“Inspector, I’m going to do you a favor and pretend my hearing has gone bad. We have a lot of work to do, let’s do it.”
“Good, let’s go harass someone, Lieutenant. You can show me how it’s done.”
Min stopped me on the way out. “Inspector, could I see you a moment?” He shut the door when I stepped into his office. “Lay off the kid, would you? He’s smart, he has a good reputation. Maybe if we stay on his good side, he’ll go away happy.”
“You forgot one thing. He works for SSD. The last thing in the world he wants to do is help the Ministry.”
Min went over to his desk and sat down. If his chief inspector
bottom was on the chair, it meant he was going to say something important. “I’m going to tell you this once, Inspector. One time, a single, solitary time. Listen carefully, please. We cooperate with SSD on this, or they eat us alive.” He closed his eyes. “Don’t argue, just do it and let’s get back to normal, like the man said.”
The two of us were in Han’s car, heading toward the Gold Star Bank. Han was driving with one hand, holding a cigarette in the other. It didn’t take much to convince him that his car was better than mine, and that if we were taking his car, he should drive. The driver always thinks he is in control, exactly what I wanted. Things would go smoother if Han thought that he had the lead and that I recognized his position. I looked out the window and wondered why no one from SSD ever knew anything about investigations. Or why they wouldn’t listen to anyone who did. Maybe it was the gene pool they pulled from. Han was driving too fast. That was another SSD trait.
“We in a big hurry?” I put my hand on the dashboard to brace myself as we pulled around a truck.
“I’m driving, Inspector. When you drive, you pick the speed. Let’s agree on that, shall we?” In that borrowed voice again.
I took a piece of poplar wood out of my pocket and began sanding it with an old scrap of sandpaper. There wasn’t much left of the sandpaper, and poplar isn’t all that interesting. I was just going through the motions. The car swerved as Han reached for my hand and yelled, “Hey! You’re messing up my upholstery.”
“You’re driving,” I said. “I’m sanding. Let’s agree on that.” I brushed the front of my shirt. It always amazed me how much sawdust came out of a little piece of poplar; sawdust and matchsticks. Trash wood, my grandfather would say.
Han pulled over and braked sharply in front of the train station. “Put it away, Inspector. I heard about you and wood. You can mess up
that dump you call an office with sawdust if you want, but not here. In fact, don’t do it in my presence, not on this case.” When he was angry, I noticed, he fell into using his real voice. It was younger, not so tough.