Inspector O 02 - Hidden Moon (17 page)

She stood up and took the dirty dishes to the kitchen. As she disappeared in the back, two customers walked in, a man and a woman. They sat down at a table near the window on the front wall, looked at the menu, then got up and left just as Miss Pyon emerged from the kitchen. She watched them with a disapproving frown. “Why’d they come all the way up the stairs? The menu is posted on the front door. You say anything to scare them away?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe they recognized you.”

“In that case, they would have stayed. I don’t have any enemies.”

She threw back her head and laughed. “Everyone has enemies, Inspector.”

I smiled. “Sure, everyone has enemies. The man with the red shirt, did he have enemies?”

She sat down and looked at her hands. Her fingers were short, the nails broken. The thumb on her left hand sat at an odd angle. She saw me looking at it. “Bent back until it broke. The sound was sickening. It never healed. The doctor said they must have twisted it to make sure it wouldn’t set. It hurts sometimes, but only sometimes. One of these days, I’ll kill the bastard who did it.”

“Have you got any fruit?”

“You’re loaded with sympathy, aren’t you? Yeah, I have some apples, though they’re scrawny.”

“Never mind, I’ll get one some other time. You don’t want to talk about the man in the red shirt. Too bad. He seems to be a Mr. Big. Did he ever mention some drinking place called Club Blue?”

“I don’t monitor conversations, it’s not polite. I run a restaurant, Inspector; it gets busy sometimes.”

“Yeah. Sometimes. Don’t worry about the red shirt, he won’t be here anymore.” The imparted information hung between us for a moment, then floated away. She didn’t try to stop it. “Well, back to the office for me. What time do you get off work?”

“My, my, Inspector, I didn’t think you were interested.”

“I’m not. I just wanted to know how late I could get noodles.” Nobody mentioned the bill.

Yang was on the phone when I stuck my head in his office. It was unusual; he didn’t talk much on the phone. I backed up and listened from out in the hall, but there was not much to hear. He said “yes” once or twice, “no” once, then banged down the receiver.

“Sorry, Yang, didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Nothing to interrupt, O.” He looked sick.

“Anything the matter?”

“No.” He paused, then said it again. “No.”

“I was wondering if you would do me a favor.”

“If I can.”

“What did you find out from that fellow you questioned the other night?”

“The red shirt? Very nasty, very assertive, very unhappy.”

“Who was he?”

“That I didn’t determine. He refused to give me his registration card, wouldn’t fill out any forms, threatened me with terrible punishment.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him his trousers were unzipped.”

“True?”

“No, but it sort of broke through his resistance. It’s hard to be adamant when you’re checking your fly. After that he calmed down a little. Still wouldn’t answer questions, though. I let him use the phone. Twenty minutes later, a big black car pulled up outside. Two toughs in long coats ran up the stairs into my office and told me they had jurisdiction.”

“And they were?”

Yang shrugged. “Didn’t matter. One of them had a pistol on his hip. I couldn’t keep the guy, anyway. He hadn’t done anything, remember?”

“We don’t know he had nothing to do with his dinner companion’s murder.”

“Murder, is it? I thought the doc said it was his heart.”

“Maybe.” I hadn’t shared the autopsy results with Yang, and I doubt if Min had. Yang wasn’t someone who rang up the morgue on a whim. I suppose the morgue might have called us late at night with some more information and he took the message, but I never got a message. Curious; maybe Yang did more than sit around in the quiet before dawn. Maybe he was coming out of his shell a little. “That’s all?”

“No, but there’s not much more. When they got downstairs, the two toughs shook hands with our nasty friend, then they all got in the car and drove away. The toughs in the front, him in the back. I got the license plate from the guard at the gate.”

“And?”

“Special. No traces.”

“You wouldn’t kid me.”

“No, I was surprised as hell. They didn’t dress like anyone I ever saw from around here. Greasy shirts, though not like his. They had funny accents.”

“I’ll bet.”

“The guy made a lot of threats, O.”

“Scared you? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you scared.”

“He made me angry more than anything. That’s what’s wrong with—” Yang choked off the thought abruptly. He waited a moment until it was gone, or buried back where it had been. “Anyway, he left this, though he didn’t know it at the time.” Yang put a small identification wallet carefully onto the desk. “He may be looking for it by now. But maybe not.”

“He left it?” If Yang didn’t know the man in the red shirt was dead, I figured it wasn’t my place to tell him.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“You lifted it from him? And you don’t think he’ll miss it?” I opened the wallet and thumbed through the contents. “Why is that?”

“All phony. Pretty good, but phony. The residence address is given as Huichon.”

“Swell.” When I got to my office, I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. “Hey!” I went back to Yang’s office. “Huichon. That’s in Chagang.”

Yang looked up. “You should get out of Pyongyang more often, O. Of course it’s in Chagang. Where’d you think it was, Scotland?” He smiled at me. I should have felt good, to see him smile again after so long, but somehow it gave me a funny feeling.

The stairs down to Club Blue were dark, but the treads were supremely quiet. Concrete stairs don’t make a lot of noise. There’s no give to them, either. They crumble sooner or later and break off in ugly chunks, but for stealth, nothing is better. Metal stairs are probably the worst. They clang when you stumble, which happens in the dark. In absolute darkness, wooden stairs are best. They may creak a little, but if you know enough to walk where they have support, you can minimize the sound. And the stairs near the top and the bottom have a different feel to them. With concrete, you never know for sure where you are, which might be why I missed a step and grabbed for the handrail.

At the bottom of the stairs, I kept close to the wall, found the door to the club, and then, as I rounded the corner, could finally see from a thin streak on the floor that the light was turned on in the office. The office door was shut, but I could hear voices from the inside. One of them was the owner, anxious but still with a polish to it. The other, high-pitched, insistent, and full of fear, was the bartender. Nothing else; the place was silent, no clinking of glasses, no laughter, no customers.

I could have tried the handle, but if for some reason the door was
locked, it would have given them time to react. So I just kicked it in. It was a cheap door, but the hinges were even cheaper, put in with screws that must have been made of tinfoil. The hinges came out of the frame, and the door sailed across the room.

“Anyone home?” I strolled in as if I were paying a friendly call. The bartender had been hit on the back by the door. It probably hurt a little, but from the look on his face, it scared him more than anything. The owner stood up, and as he did so he reached to open the top drawer.

“If that’s a gun in there,” I said, “leave it. Right now, you’re not in any trouble, nothing you can’t get out of, anyway. But if you pull a gun on me, I’ll make sure you regret it.” I don’t know why I kept imagining the owner had a gun. He looked like someone who knew how to use one, or had used one.

“If you’re still around.” The bartender looked at me balefully.

“I’ll be around, don’t worry your ugly face about it. I’ve got news for you, if you’re in the room when he pulls a gun on me, you’re in it, too. Only you probably don’t have the money to bribe the camp guards, so they’ll work you until you drop, if they don’t rape you first.”

“What?”

“Don’t listen to him.” The club owner still had his hand on the drawer handle, but I could tell he had already decided not to open it. He just didn’t want me to think I’d scared him. “No one’s going anywhere, isn’t that right, Inspector? This is just a friendly call to collect that drink I promised you. If you wait around a little, the girls will start showing up. Might be there’s one that likes cops.”

“Yeah.” The bartender smiled, so that the scar across his jaw writhed like a snake. “She probably likes all sorts of barnyard animals.”

I walked up close to him and bent down until my eyes were drilled into his. “Get out of my sight, now.”

“Go get ready for the first customers.” The club owner nodded his head toward the bar. “I’ll handle this.”

The bartender turned and walked into the dark barroom. He clicked a single light on and, from the sound of it, started sweeping.

“Inspector, what is this? Surely it’s not the license causing you to break in here. That’s not what you boys care about. But I can see I do need some protection—look at how that door came off the hinges. Let’s say a hundred euros a week, and drinks anytime.” He had his wallet out and was thumbing through some bills. “We can make the first payment a little higher, just to get things started on a good note.”

“You always open up so late? Hard to make money, if you don’t have any customers. Or are you running something else on the side?”

The manager counted out a few more bills. “You really are a bold one, aren’t you, Inspector? A real shakedown artist.”

“There was a body found in the alley next to your club.”

“You don’t say.”

“Friend of yours?”

“Everyone is my friend, Inspector, but since I don’t know what body you’re talking about, I’m not prepared to say whether I knew him.”

“Him?”

“What was this, er, body wearing? No identification papers? Now, that would be strange. In the alley next to the club, you said? There were no fights in here. Maybe it was a robbery.” He held out the bills.

“Put away your wallet. Wait, on second thought, let me see it.”

The club owner smiled. “Why settle for some when you can have it all, that’s the game now?”

“Sit down and keep quiet, would you?” I flipped open the wallet and looked at the money. All small euro bills, all in order, from highest to lowest, back to front. “Pretty meticulous, aren’t you?” I threw the wallet back at him. “The body had a knife in the back. I just thought I’d warn you. Maybe you want to get some extra security out front.”

“You volunteering?”

“Me? No, I don’t stand in front of rat holes.”

T
hings 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.