I looked around the room. “Nice place. Wouldn’t be so nice if it were covered with broken glass. There are some Chinese boys on Yanggak Island who love to break glass, for fun.”
As the bartender turned to look at the champagne bottles and the expensive glasses, I saw he had a long scar down the left side of his face, a scar from a knife or maybe a broken bottle. Most of the bartenders in these drinking clubs are pretty boys, white jackets on pinched waists, high cheeks and soft hands. This one was ugly. Ugly isn’t always mean, but in this case, I had a feeling it was.
“I’ll be back after I’m off duty, to collect on that drink. No doubt that license will have arrived and be on the wall by then.”
The man in the herringbone jacket nodded slightly to the bartender before he smiled at me, though it wasn’t the sort of smile that leads to long friendships. “We’ll look forward to that, Inspector.”
As long as I was out and about, enjoying the spring air, there was no harm going to the bank. For one thing, it would give me ammunition to use when Min complained I wasn’t doing anything. “Been to the bank,” I could say, giving him a level gaze. “This is category three, Min. Why don’t we cut it loose? Let SSD kill themselves over it.” Then I’d nod, gravely if the moment seemed right.
The bank was in a three-story building with a gold star on a signboard. There was nothing else to show it was a bank; the guard post at the base of the uneven steps leading up to the entrance was empty. The front windows on the first floor had been bricked up, except for slits along the top to let in some light. The original door had been replaced with something a little sturdier, metal with designs to make it look like a brass gate in a palace. There was even a fake iron grate in
front of it. A bright metal plate surrounded the double locks, and the handle felt solid. Inside, the place was dark and musty. The light slits on the front wall were stingy, and the overhead fixtures were short on bulbs. The floor was carpeted, something flowered under the dirt; off to the side a series of desks sat behind a low wooden railing. Along the back wall was a counter with three teller windows. One of them was broken and had a piece of plywood filling the gap; the other two were shut. The plywood caught my attention, and I started over to look at it more closely.
“Can we help you? Would you like to open an account?” At a desk off by itself, in the corner, a middle-aged woman in a pale yellow dress looked at me. She brushed a wisp of hair from her face and stood up. I took my ID from my pocket. “I’m from the Ministry of Public Security. We have some questions for you, or maybe your manager.”
The woman leaned back against the desk. “I thought you had changed your name to People’s Security. Or are you still Public?”
I looked quickly at my ID. “People’s, Public, it doesn’t concern you.”
“Questions from police of all descriptions belong behind there, in the offices. We don’t want to scare the customers, especially the foreigners.”
There was no one else in the room, so I assumed she was speaking metaphorically. “Were you here the other day, during the robbery?”
She walked over to me, on high heels that accentuated her height. She was tall and slender, maybe younger than I first thought. “I told you, we don’t want to scare the customers, or don’t you get it?”
There was nothing wispy or slender about her manner. She was rude like a hammer before it comes down on a nail. “The office is in the back. If you want to talk, that’s where it’s done. Out here, we do business. Okay with you?”
“Fine,” I said. I pointed to the windows along the back. “That plywood in the teller window is a nice touch, gives an impersonal place like this a more natural feel. Where’d you get it? Plywood isn’t easy to find.”
She looked at me in disbelief, then shook her head. “How the hell should I know? It isn’t part of the decorating scheme. The window broke, and the janitor put it up.”
“So, you do answer questions out here. There aren’t any customers. There isn’t even a guard out front. Isn’t he posted all the time?”
“We didn’t have enough operating capital to pay him. Everyone told us it was safe in this city, anyway, so we let him go.”
“He was a private guard?” I never heard of such a thing.
“No, he was from one of your security departments, I don’t remember which one. But the agreement was we were to pay his salary. They insisted that they weren’t going to spend their budget for a guard to look after our money. Can you believe it?”
“When did he leave?”
“About ten days ago.” She watched me steadily. “Yes, that is just before the robbery. We don’t think there is any connection.”
“Good, always good when the victim analyzes the situation. That saves us a lot of time. How about you lock the front door and sit over there with me while we review what went on. By the way”—I looked down at her legs—“you don’t wear silk stockings, do you?”
“I can’t lock the front door during business hours, it’s against bank regulations. And if you start harassing me I’ll file a complaint that will dump you in a pig farm so far away you’ll have to check a map each time you take a crap.” She paused and brushed the hair out of her eyes again. “I need to see your ID up close. You can’t just come in here and flash a piece of cardboard across the room.” A lock clicked on the back door, the one she said led to the offices. Suddenly, the whole city was nothing but locks.
“What a shame.” I shook my head. “Don’t tell me, everyone just went out to lunch and I should come back later.” At some point, I’d want to get into that room, if for no other reason than they didn’t want me to see it. Though she had said if I wanted to talk about the robbery, I should go back there. And then they had locked it. If there had ever been anything of interest in there, it must be gone, but maybe not everything. There was no reason to push my way in just
now; I’d only end up looking around at blank walls and a swept floor. I couldn’t do a thorough search by myself. Better to wait; maybe someone would put something back, get careless, if they thought the coast was clear.
“Wrong, not later, never. The bank has an internal investigation under way. We don’t need you, and we don’t need your ministry nosing around.” I may not have been listening closely. She had a face that was unusually pretty. Her skin was the color of copper, her cheekbones were high, and I realized she spoke with a slight accent. “There are ways of making that point stick, if you choose not to pay attention to me. Do I make myself clear, Inspector”—she looked again at my ID—“O, is it?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You get high marks for clarity. If I could go out that door and not come back, it would be fine with me. But that’s not possible. I have my orders, and until I get new ones, you are on my list.” I took a scrap of paper from my shirt pocket and held it up. “You’ll find I’m persistent. Polite, mostly, but persistent. I don’t know your name, by the way.”
“You don’t need to know it, but if you must, it’s Chon. Good day, Inspector.” She stood in a solid enough way, more solid than you’d think someone with her waist could stand. In the howling wind of a winter storm she might sway, but not here. I hadn’t eaten since early morning, and it was a good time to find a bowl of noodles. I nodded, looked at the plywood again, and went back outside into the sunshine.
S
o far, anyone looking casually at the whole thing would say there was nothing interesting about the case itself, other than that it was the first bank robbery we had ever had in Pyongyang, perhaps in the whole country. Maybe there’d been one over on the east coast, or maybe up in the special zone with the casinos, and they hadn’t told us. But I doubted it. I also wasn’t looking casually. Admittedly, there were interesting angles to it. The stockings were interesting. The lady with the waist was interesting. The real problem was that even at this early stage, I knew, knew absolutely, beyond any doubt, that somebody didn’t want the case solved. There wasn’t anything big or obvious I could point to, just little warning flags. Over time I’d learned that the size of the flags was not important, the real question was the number. Already there had been plenty, and they had
STAY AWAY
written all over.
I knew it. I had a feeling Min knew it. But there was a certain dance we had to perform first. Until Min actually ordered me off, formally, I had to keep following footprints leading nowhere. At least
I had to hope they led nowhere. If by accident I stumbled on a real clue, it would be nothing but trouble. Looking into the stockings seemed safe enough for the moment.
Min was staring out his window when I climbed the stairs and knocked on his door after lunch. He didn’t turn around, but from the way his back was tensed, you had the sense he didn’t feel he was on solid ground and he didn’t know when he’d find some again soon. There were only two reasons Min stared out his window like this, looking at trees he did not like. Either he was deeply worried, or he was miffed.
“You took the office car.” His voice sounded miffed, but his back told me he was worried. “You know perfectly well you are supposed to use the duty car. It may not be quite so pretty, but that’s what you’re assigned, it’s on our books for daily use, and more to the point, it has the plates you need to get around. No one has driven it in weeks. What if the battery goes dead? I know, I know, following the rules is sometimes difficult, irksome.” I could see his reflection in the window; his lips moved slightly as he groped for another word. “Burdensome. I hope we’re not putting too much stress on you, Inspector. If we are, please note it in the daily log—the same log that doesn’t even have an entry in it for your using the car, either car. Maybe we can find a more tranquil place, out in the countryside. Working in a rice field, they say, is quiet.”
“I’ve been thinking.” Ignoring the chief inspector is sometimes the wiser course, especially when he begins speaking in threes. It means he is feeling pressure from above, and provoking him only makes matters worse. I turned to the subject at hand. “You say the Ministry wants this solved. According to you, the upper levels are hell-bent on a solution. The funny thing is, no one I’ve talked to today will tell me anything. Everything they say points toward unknown figures at higher levels that want me to go away. Why is that, I wonder.”
Min laughed, though he didn’t bother putting any mirth into it. It was a very tense laugh. “You wonder. Just take my word for it, will you?” He finally turned and gave me a smile that looked like he had
bought it in the state store; maybe it came from one of those cans that had sat on the shelf a long time. “I already told you, this is sensitive. The Ministry thinks it might scare the damned foreigners, and if they go, where do we get investment?” He said the last word as if even speaking it cost a lot.
“Investment? Since when is the Ministry in charge of economics?”
“You and I are frogs in the mud, Inspector, but there are those with the means all around us. We have a lot of enlightened people in this Ministry, believe it or not. They know what is going on.”
“People with means are enlightened. Frogs are not, I take it.”
“Foreign money fuels growth, there are no two ways around it. The Ministry understands that, and it understands that keeping the foreign pocketbooks happy has benefits all around.” He looked at me, and I looked at him. “Well,” he said, “almost all around.”
A small warning flag popped up. “Yes and no. I can see that it’s obviously sensitive, which is why I’m inclined to go back to my office and forget the whole thing. But this isn’t about scaring foreign money away. That’s what the woman at the bank wanted me to think, only she wasn’t very convincing. She really wasn’t even trying that hard. Nice waist, by the way.”
“Inspector, I warn you.” Min sat down, and his eyelids fluttered once or twice. “I know you have a hard time getting the central point sometimes, but please try. This . . . case . . . is . . . important. That means we have to concentrate, not go off on wild goose chases, and not stop to admire waists. You went downtown to one of those drinking clubs. Why?”
I indicated I’d be back, quickly crossed the hall to my office, and dug around in the top drawer of my file cabinet for a piece of pine. Good, dependable pine. It was the best thing to have at the beginning of an ugly case. Nothing fancy or elaborate, nothing with any quirks or special needs. Pine was uncomplaining, not proud, lazy as a summer day, and just as complacent. That’s why pine trees take so long to grow, sheer laziness. I found what I was looking for, a small oblong piece with one edge smoothed and the other still with that prickly feel
where a rough saw bit the wood. As soon as it fit into my palm, I took a deep breath and stepped back into Min’s room.
“Don’t tell me you want me to stay away from that drinking place. For one thing, it’s in my sector.” Conversations with Min get picked up easily enough. We were both used to interruptions. “Between the ugly bartender and the slick owner, the two of them know something about this robbery, though I wouldn’t say they were directly involved. At least not the owner; his bartender might be a different story. For sure, even if they’re not involved, and even if they don’t know exactly who was involved, they must know someone who does. That sort of place attracts bad types.” I looked down at the piece of wood in my hand. I was supposed to tell Min to drop the case, and here I was arguing in favor of following up at the club.
“Where did you get that silk stocking?”
“If you know everything I’ve done today, why don’t you just write the report yourself?”