“No.” He was grinning. He knew I wouldn’t hit him again.
“So why’d he go with them?”
“You’ll have to ask him, won’t you?”
“Have it your own way.” I patted him on the cheek. “From this afternoon, word will be out on the street that you talked to me and told me everything I needed to know about a couple of Kazakhs. I’ll come by your apartment tomorrow to claim your corpse.”
“You don’t scare me, Inspector.”
“That’s good,” I said and finished my beer. “I’d like your last memories of me to be pleasant ones.”
Back in the office, I picked up the second Interpol file, which was mostly background on Kazakhstan. When I had first skipped through it, there didn’t seem much of interest. There was a little history and a
few economic statistics. But this time I noticed that attached to the second page was a list of prominent officials. The head of the security police was a fairly young man who had a degree in criminology. Whether that did him or the country any good was not made clear, but from the reporting on the crime rates, it did not seem to have made a major contribution. There were all sorts of crimes, crimes against persons, crimes against property, street crime, car theft, drugs. Bank robberies were not a special problem, apparently, except where they involved gangs of criminals who were armed and needed money for unspecified purposes. They shot the guards; the police shot the robbers. In one case, the robbers were caught in a cemetery. It sounded noisy and dangerous and not the sort of thing we needed in Pyongyang.
On the list of officials were a number of bankers, with an indication of their worth and addresses. Many of them were well-to-do. No reason they shouldn’t be, working in such close quarters with all that money. Several of them had second or third residences abroad, expensive residences. Why did people need to live somewhere else other than home, among strangers? I made a mental note to ask Miss Chon if she knew any of these people the next time I saw her.
“I don’t recognize any of them.” She put the list down on the table and looked at me coolly, defying me to contradict her.
“Naturally, it’s a big country, sixteen million people, maybe more. No one could be expected to know everyone, certainly not all the top bankers.” I nodded and smiled. No sense pretending I believed her. “Especially not you, someone interested in banking, I mean. You were probably focusing on other things at the time.”
She picked the list up again and studied it. “A few names, one or two may have been mentioned, I may have heard someone say something about them. What difference does it make?”
“Funny, I thought I had mentioned to you that this is an investigation. I get to ask you, and I don’t have to tell you why. That’s how it’s done. It’s a regular, accepted pattern in most places in the world, and we have adopted it.”
“Why all the interest in Kazakhstan?”
“Ah, tut! I told you—the pattern.”
“We’ll have to continue some other time with your pattern, Inspector. The bank is being audited tomorrow, and I have many papers to prepare.”
“Not unless you answer my questions, you don’t have anything to prepare. You still can’t seem to get it. We don’t have a lot of bank robberies in this town. So we don’t just shrug them off and say, oh, well, there goes another truckload of money. And we don’t just run down suspects and blast them to kingdom come in gun battles in cemeteries.” Her eyes flashed for an instant; it could have been a glint of sunlight off a passing car, but it wasn’t. She’d heard about the shootout in her country, the one connected with the bank robbery, and she knew what I was getting at. Maybe now she would start to cooperate.
“Whom do you know from Kazakh banking circles with a residence outside of the country? I’m not asking you to betray anyone, Miss Chon. You don’t have to tell me how they got the money. Actually, I don’t care how they got the money. I’m just following a line of thought. Do you mind?”
“Not at all, Inspector. I just don’t see the relevance, that’s all.” She fell silent, in a sullen sort of way.
I let her stew for a minute or so. While we waited, I found a piece of wood in my pocket, an old piece of Siberian elm I’d forgotten I had. Not very interesting wood, too needy, too eager to please; it took any shape you wanted to give it. It gives you a sense of being smart and in charge, not good on this case—and especially not good when dealing with Miss Chon. I put it back. “Let’s make it simple. Has anyone on this list moved out of the country, taken a pile of cash and gone overseas?”
“I wouldn’t know about piles of cash. A few of them have gone abroad, yes. One moved to New York, I heard somewhere.”
“Somewhere you heard someone moved to New York. That’s good, that’s very helpful.” I paused. “Expensive city, New York, that’s what they say. Must cost a lot to live there.”
She smiled. “Maybe for the working masses, Inspector, but not for a banker.”
“You wouldn’t know the name of this fellow who moved to New York?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Do that, I’d be very grateful.” I wasn’t so interested in Kazakh bankers, but I wanted to get her in the habit of answering my questions. She wasn’t there yet, and I didn’t know much about her habits. I decided to change the subject. Maybe it would put her off balance. “You ever go out to clubs? Ever been to a place called Club Blue?”
“We already discussed this.” The lady had a perfect center of gravity. She also had a better memory than I did.
“Is the owner there a friend of yours?” The image of the owner walking out of the bar with a couple of toughs and, so far as I knew, not returning didn’t fill me with happy thoughts. The little bartender didn’t seem worried, but he didn’t seem the sort who worried about much more than his own skin. If looking the other way when his boss disappeared was required, he could obviously do it. Once his cheeks stopped smarting, I’d have to go back to talk to him again.
“No. I don’t know the owner.” She was a good liar, very natural, but this resonated in a funny way. I had to think maybe she knew him pretty well.
“You told me he had an account.”
“He did. That doesn’t mean I know him.” This second time it almost came out more believable.
“The first time I asked you, when we were having drinks, you said he ‘had’ an account. Why ‘had’?”
“I didn’t realize you hung on my every word, Inspector.”
“Why ‘had’?”
“He closed it.”
“Is that so?”
“Anything else we need to discuss before I get back to my work?”
“He’s disappeared. Did you know that?”
She didn’t pale or take a funny breath, but she may have swallowed a little strangely, sort of out of sequence. It was difficult to be sure, because she was Kazakh, and I didn’t really know what Kazakh women did when they were surprised, or shaken. I shrugged. “Too bad. I’ll bet he could have sliced bread with the creases on his trousers. He promised me a drink. I guess that’s out now.” I stood up. “Well, I’m sure we’ll be running into each other again, Miss Chon. Call me if you remember the name of your friend in New York.”
A pall hung over the city the next day, the whole day, a gray that would not go away, would not be scrubbed out of the sky, no matter what. A breeze came up around noon, but the pall didn’t move. The wind rustled some trees and then stopped abruptly. The buildings were mute. They were resting, casting no shadows and finding no light. A few faded off in the distance, disappearing into the murk. Blurred at the edges, the city was silent in its center, the only noise the whistle of a traffic cop warning pedestrians out of the empty street.
After a day like that, the night came straight down, a deep black velvet blanket dropped from above. No sense of darkness creeping in from the east, street by street. The city, the buildings, the roads and alleys, even the river, all dissolved rapidly into a deeper gloom, the sky never touched with the final color that sometimes appears beneath the clouds on normal evenings. No sense of sunrise or sunset, no rhythm; the day simply disappeared. It went from gray to black in a heartbeat. Finally, a window twinkled, then a few more. Out of the gloom, building shapes emerged, like miners struggling from a coal mine that had collapsed, leaving them gasping for air.
I was on the street, walking in the darkness with no place to go and damned irritable about it. A few people clustered around a stall on the corner, one of those small stalls that sell little snacks, bread, fried cakes. The crowd fell silent when I walked up; one or two gave me ugly looks. The others moved away as if my presence were diseased. Inside the stall, lit by a row of candles, a woman was straightening the cakes on the shelf along the back. When she turned around and saw me, she made a low sound of disgust.
“It’s supposed to be a day off, Inspector. Why can’t you leave me alone?”
“I’m happy to see you, too. Close up shop. We have to talk.”
“Now? It’s my busiest time. It’s a holiday, in case you’ve forgotten. People are in a good mood for a change, and they like standing around my place. If I have to close up, I’ll lose money, and I can’t afford that. Come back later, around eleven o’clock.”
“I know the holiday calendar, thank you very much. I said now; I meant it.” I blew out several candles.
She studied my face. “Why do you make my life so miserable? What have I ever done to you?”
Someone behind me spat. I looked to see who it was, but it was too dark. I turned back to the woman. “You complain a hell of a lot, you know that? Close up this crummy shop, or I’ll throw your goods in the street and cite you for wasting the people’s resources.”
Without another word, she dropped the cloth curtain over the front and stormed out of the stall. “This is unfair, you’ll ruin me!” Her voice was barely under control, strands of hair stuck to the sweat on her forehead. Her fists clenched in anger.
“Over there.” I pushed her across the street and into an alley. When we were in complete darkness, hidden from view, I let go of her arm. “Overdid it, don’t you think?”
“You have a problem?” She straightened her hair and smoothed her apron. “I’m the one who should be offering criticism. Every time we have a meeting, I end up black and blue.”
“What have you got?”
“Plenty. But I don’t want to tell you here.”
“Where?”
“At the river. In an hour.”
“Are you really making money?”
“None of your business.” She walked back out to the street, rubbing her arm.
An hour later, I was sitting on a bench near the river, listening to the water go by. In a nearby tree, a bird was singing to itself against darkness broken only by the hesitant light of a half-hidden moon. The night breeze had swept the sky clear of all but a few clouds. Someone walked up behind me, slow, thoughtful steps that barely sounded on the pavement. “You want to meet here, in the open?”
“Just sit down, will you? Maybe you noticed, it’s the dead of night. Even if anyone sees us, they’ll think you’re trying to bribe me to leave you alone.”
“Shall I offer to sleep with you, to complete the picture?”
“Forget it. I don’t sleep with street agents.”
She sat down. We’d worked together for many years. Nice woman, very smart, excellent instincts, brave as a tiger. But the first time we met I thought something about her face was wrong, and that was the first thing I thought of every time we sat together. Her face was almost round, but not quite, and that sometimes seemed to me the root of the problem. If she had a perfectly round face, more like Chief Inspector Min’s, you wouldn’t have noticed her eyes were not on the same line; if you didn’t notice her eyes, it wouldn’t occur to you that her cheeks were too high; if her cheeks hadn’t been so high, her lips wouldn’t have looked so full, and with different lips, there is no way you would have noticed that her nose was a little too flat. And yet, altogether it fit, it was all perfect, somehow. My palms started to sweat every time I saw her.
“You want a report, or should we stare at the moon? It looks constipated tonight.” That was normal for her, a hard edge, as if she had to get back at me for something.
“Romantic to the core, as always. Well, you called the meeting,” I said. “Anytime you’re ready.” I noticed she wasn’t looking at the moon; she was staring into the black water.
“A German man hurried by the stall three nights ago just before I closed. He ran back and asked for directions. There were drops of blood on his shirt cuff. When I reached for the pen in his breast pocket to draw a map, he nearly went berserk.”
“Tall or short?” A German, how many could there be? Dieter was shorter. Or was it Jurgen? I hadn’t looked closely at either one. Neither had been standing; what I remembered best was the way they winced.
“Short. Late middle aged. I’d say he was about your age, or maybe a little younger.” She waited a fraction of a second, but she knew I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of reacting, so she resumed. “Atrocious accent, I could barely understand him. Actually, that was a good thing. He did a lot of gesturing to try to make me understand. So I got a good look at his sleeves. It was a white shirt. The collar was frayed. The right cuff had the blood. It hadn’t been there long.”
“What about the pen?”
“I don’t know. I had the feeling it was special, almost life or death.”