“What do you know that you aren’t sharing?”
“I know, Inspector, that gloom only leads to more of the same.
This morning I got up, put my feet down on the floor, and told myself that nothing can be as bad as it looks. We have troubles? Other people have more. This summer it may flood, the rivers may overflow their banks, and the glorious dams we read about every day in the newspapers may burst. But not today, and this is the day we are going to live in.”
I groaned. “On second thought, don’t share it with me. Just leave me alone for another hour.”
Min shook his head. “Your problem is, you don’t get enough exercise.” He grinned and walked back to his office, humming.
A moment later the phone rang. “O, get in here.” There was no lilt in his voice, just naked urgency. “Now.”
Min was staring openmouthed at a single piece of pale blue paper when I walked in. Actually, not very blue, but very lightweight, the paper that the Ministry uses for Most Sensitive information. Sometimes it is even on regular white paper, because the blue stuff runs out. But we still call it a Blue Paper. If we need to see one of those reports, we go to the Ministry to read it. They never get out of a special area in the Ministry, and certainly never make it to our office. Never, except of course for the one that was in plain sight. Min looked up. “Shut the door.”
“There’s no one else here.”
“Shut the fucking door, Inspector!”
I swung it shut. “You want it locked?”
Min rubbed his face with both hands. “Sit down. This”—he picked up the single sheet of paper between his thumb and forefinger and waved it limply like a flag of surrender—“this was in the daily mail I picked up before coming here. It isn’t supposed to be in our mail. I think we aren’t even supposed to know it exists.”
“Bad?”
“Bad? Oh, no, not bad. Terrible, appalling, horrifying.” He didn’t even have to pause to find the triplet; I mentally braced myself. “It says SSD suspects Yang is part of the plot against the British VIP.”
“Ridiculous,” I heard my subconscious mutter.
“It also says that you and me and Li are to be put under special surveillance.”
“Finally, a useful piece of information.” I had the sensation of threads being pulled together. “That explains the squad Yang saw at my apartment house the other day.”
“What? Surveillance? If he saw them, that means they saw him near your apartment. And they may have heard what you said yesterday.”
“About what?”
“First, you suggested that Yang lead the security detail. The man is part of the plot, and you recommend him to get on the inside! We don’t even have to guess how they’ll interpret that.” He looked at me strangely for a moment, then shook his head. “And then, you know, the other thing.” Min got up from his desk and looked out the window. “They’re probably over at the Operations Building right now watching us. I knew this was going to be a bad day, as soon as I woke up.”
“What about Yang?” If that report was right, Yang was in danger. He was in danger even if it was wrong. Anything on paper was dangerous.
“What about him?”
“Do we let him know?”
“Are you crazy, Inspector? I want him out of this office, immediately.”
“Why? Yang wouldn’t hurt a fly. SSD is being fed a line by someone, and I have a feeling I know who it might be—a Russian who sells stockings.” Logonov might not be capable of murder, but spreading disinformation was another story. The Russians liked to keep SSD jumpy, overload the circuits. Somehow a few years ago they got hold of a Ministry phone book, and they just went down the list. Someone’s big Slav finger ended up on Yang’s name, and it got cranked into the disinformation machinery. They probably hadn’t even checked to see who he was. “That Russian’s visa stamps are phony; Han was furious I had anything to do with him. I think he’s mainly here as a spotter, but who knows what he passes in those stockings? Tell me, why would Yang get himself involved in a plot of any sort? The man
can barely stumble down the stairs without feeling he has offended someone.”
“I’m not interested in the drama of his inner life. We need to get him out of here before he takes us all to the coal mines. And you need to stay away from SSD’s operations; I shouldn’t have to tell you that. We have enough trouble of our own, without stepping on their flowers.”
“You going to take that Blue Paper back to the Ministry?”
“How can I? If I take it back, they’ll know I read it, and I’m not supposed to have done that.”
“They’ll know it’s missing, not right away, but it’s numbered. By the end of the week, when they count the copies, they’ll see it’s gone. Then they’ll search. They’ll question people. Nasty questions. Bad technique.” I paused. “Wait a minute. How do we know they didn’t plant that in your mail bundle? How do we know they just don’t want us to think Yang is involved?”
Min glumly turned that idea over in his mind. “Sure, and how do we know this isn’t a test of my honesty? They want to see what I’ll do. What am I going to do?”
“But what if it’s real?”
“You just said Yang wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Yes, but they don’t know that. They may think the information is real, and they need to know if we can be trusted.”
“Inspector, we can go on like this for hours. Anything is possible.”
“Get rid of it. The Blue Paper. Get rid of it.”
“But if they planted it . . .”
“Trust me, Min, I was just thinking out loud. They didn’t plant it. It was a mistake, an unintentional security breach. If you report it, the clerks in the central mailroom will be put through hell. As soon as they realize it’s missing, they’ll fix their logs. No one else will know it’s gone. It’s happened before. But we have another problem.”
“I don’t want to know.”
Min knew the problem, he just didn’t want to hear it out loud. We had to do something about the case in order to bury these crazy
reports that someone in our office—and by implication, all of us who dealt with that person—was involved in a plot against a foreign visitor. It was so ridiculous it could only be a cover for something else. I put a gag in my subconscious before it could say what I was thinking.
“You do what you have to do,” Min said. “If it doesn’t work, don’t forget, I won’t be there to wave when the truck drives away.”
“Don’t worry, if it doesn’t work, we’ll both be in the back of the truck.”
Even a man with short legs will take long strides. He walks along the street, you tag along behind, simple as can be. A man can be followed at a reasonable distance, comfortably. I once followed someone we suspected of trafficking in bad medicine for two days. The weather was good. It was a pleasure to be outside. I almost bought him dinner afterward, he made it so easy. But women are different. They amble, they saunter, they stop for no particular reason to look at nothing at all. It is impossible to adjust your pace, to anticipate what they will do, and so you end up running up their backs if you aren’t paying attention. It does no good to find yourself standing next to the woman you are tailing. She won’t turn her head to look, but she’ll notice you out of the corner of her eye, and then you might as well go home.
If I was going to get serious about the bank robbery case, I had to make up for lost time. Someone didn’t want us to be on it, whoever was floating those stories about Yang and the British visitor. But someone else did want us on it. The only thing I had to go on was the weeklong silence, and the fact that people who seemed to be connected with the robbery, or to know something about it, were disappearing. Or turning up dead. Silence never meant quiet, not on these sorts of cases. It meant a frantic, ferocious struggle in offices I never visited, on phones I never called, in places I had no wish ever to see.
Getting Yang in the clear, and pulling everyone else in the office to
a safe place, required our getting traction on the robbery case. Whether that meant actually solving it, I didn’t yet know. Either way, we had to be seen pursuing it, and to do that, we had to start up the active investigation with something simple. Jumping too far ahead would suggest that we realized this was more than a robbery. The easiest, safest thing at this point was checking each one of the bank clerks. Little Li was too conspicuous. Yang didn’t like crowds, and anyway I couldn’t put Yang out on the street now; he’d be followed by a train of people from a special group whose purpose and place in the scheme of things we didn’t know. It was unlikely there would be a move against him; it was too soon for that. But sometimes people get desperate out of sequence, and if they did, they might try something against Yang.
Luckily, the weather was good, and I liked walking at sunset this time of year. The light was pure, and the air was very soft. How bad could it be, following a young woman and watching the sun go down?
I picked up the first clerk as she left the bank at dusk. The files said she came from an unremarkable family, and there was nothing in her background to excite suspicion, except that her grandfather had gone south during the war. There was a vague note about tragedy on her mother’s side, but no details. You’d have thought someone would have included a page on that; maybe it had fallen out. Tragedy was leverage, or weakness. Her school records seemed fine. She wasn’t married, but she lived in her own apartment rather than with her parents. That was a little unusual; it probably meant that someone was keeping her. The one thing in the file that grabbed me was the entry under her employment. She had been hired at the bank about two months ago.
The clerk had long hair and wore a trench coat that went to her ankles. It was slit in the back. The tiny picture in her file showed her to be plain looking—small oval face, sharp chin, wide-set eyes, high forehead. I couldn’t see her face very well as she came out of the bank, but I thought I recognized the chin. She had on dark brown high-heel shoes but couldn’t walk in them very well, so it meant we would not be going too fast. It wouldn’t be much trouble to keep her in sight, even as the light faded and the moon climbed into the night. I kept
back about seven or eight meters. Once I dropped my keys and pretended to hunt for them while she stopped to talk to an older man. I didn’t get a good look at him, but when he walked away, he moved slowly, as if his feet hurt.
From the route she was taking, I felt pretty sure that the clerk was headed for a bus stop near the train station. That was a guess, but it seemed a good one. If nothing else, it let me walk as if I really had a destination in mind in case she started noticing me. If I needed to, I could drop back a little. I didn’t even have to look at her anymore; to anyone watching, it would appear we simply happened to be heading to the same place.
Getting too congratulatory over your own technique is never a good idea. Keeping back is smart, until it isn’t. I lost her for a long minute in a crowd of people unloading onto the sidewalk from a broken-down tram, but I just kept walking toward the train station and finally picked her out of the gloom again about ten meters ahead.
When she went down the steps of an underpass, I gave her an extra twenty seconds. The underpass was dark, and you could lose someone in there. I wanted to see her come up the other side. A minute passed, then two. She didn’t emerge. People were streaming up and down the steps, but she wasn’t one of them. Finally, I went down. No one was stepping over a body; people weren’t swerving to avoid someone standing still. She wasn’t there, she hadn’t climbed up the other side, she hadn’t doubled back and come up the steps where I was waiting. She was gone.
As I walked back to the office, bad thoughts kept running through my mind. My skills might be getting rusty, but I would not lose a woman on high heels unless she was very well trained. And she wasn’t alone, it seemed. What was it I’d heard at the bank party about Miss Chon, that she was good at slipping away? Away to where?
After losing the clerk in the underpass, I doubled back to make sure she hadn’t ditched me and gone for a bowl of noodles somewhere. She hadn’t, at least not along the route we’d covered. I might have missed her as she climbed the underpass steps; she might have come up the other side exactly at the moment I went down. There is such a thing as coincidence, but the Ministry doesn’t favor it as an explanation. Frankly, I didn’t, either, not in this instance. Who had trained her? Why would a bank clerk need to know how to lose a tail? Worst of all, was my technique getting so bad that she spotted me, even in the dark?
By the time I got up the stairs and into the hallway leading to Yang’s office, I knew it would be impossible to solve this case by putting together a clue here and a clue there. There simply wasn’t time, especially if everything was as complicated as it now appeared. The first thing I had to do was pin Yang up against the wall and make sure none of that crazy conversation we’d had the other night led anywhere. I wasn’t worried that he was involved, though I made it a point never to be sure about anything until I was. The fact was, he was mentioned in a report where he shouldn’t have been, and we needed to know why. Despite my first reaction, I knew it couldn’t be the Russians who had floated his name. Someone in our unit appeared in a Blue Paper, in the middle of everything that was going on—coincidence? Not a chance. This wasn’t from a foreign service. It was from the inside, people who knew something about Yang. They might have picked his name at random, but that would have been out of character. When they wanted to use someone, even for target practice, it was for a reason. If they put his name in a Blue Paper, they had thought about it, researched, weighed other options and other people. What was there about my melancholy colleague that rang bells for them, whoever they were?