Kang wanted to meet me at the top of the Juche Tower. He said there wouldn't be anyone there at this time of the morning; the observation deck wasn't even open. "It'll be nice and cozy," he said, "just the two of us. We'll lock the elevator, and I can guarantee no one is going to climb 170 meters of stairs to find out what we are doing."
Pak was noncommittal when I told him where Kang wanted to meet.
"That's his style, everything in plain sight. And you can't be any more in plain sight than at the top of that tower at nine o'clock in the morning."
"You think I shouldn't go?"
"I'm not wild about it." He tapped his teeth with a pencil. "But it doesn't really matter where you meet him. Every place is equally bad at this point. Let's just see what he has to say."
The drive over to the tower took twice as long as usual because the normal route was closed off for repairs, and they hadn't bothered to set up any signs. The next street over was blocked by a stalled trolley. I ended up on a flyover that took me the wrong direction, going toward an empty part of the city where there are a few stadiums and sports halls but nothing else. I looped around back into the center of town, took the old Japanese bridge downstream from the tower, and bumped along an alleyway between buildings to join the main road paralleling the river.
When I pulled up, Kang was standing by the ground-floor entrance, under the base of the monument. I could tell from the way he glanced over at my car that he wasn't happy that I'd made him wait again.
As I walked over, he made a show of looking at his watch. "You ever turn up on time, Inspector?"
I tried to look ashamed-no eye contact, the muscles in my neck relaxed so my head sort of hung down. "Screw you," I thought to myself, but as long as I was looking at the ground, he couldn't read my thoughts.
It was positively the last time I was showing any deference to this guy.
Kang nodded to a woman standing in the shadow of the low doorway behind him. "This is Miss Shin. She's been kind enough to put the elevator into service for us."
Miss Shin had a round face and playful eyes. Her hair was swept back into a single braid that was tied at the bottom with a band made of silver and gold thread. She wore loose-fitting leopard-spotted maroon pants and a white blouse with no collar-not exactly your everyday work outfit. The pin of the Leader rested over her heart, just above where her blouse swelled gently out. You pay more attention to some pins than to others.
"Let's get started." Kang went through the doorway and started down the long hall that led to the elevators. Miss Shin fell into step with me.
"You're not afraid of heights, Inspector?" she asked in a low, throaty voice.
"Don't worry, I've been to the top of this thing, many times.
Whenever foreign police officials visit, I have to take them up here and then walk around the grounds to hear the tour." I looked over at her.
"Funny, I've never seen you. Did you just start?"
"It takes plenty of people to keep this place in working order. When it opened twenty years ago, there was a small army. We've cut back since then, but still there's a lot to do. I've been here awhile. You've not seen me"-she winked-"but I've seen you."
None of us spoke in the elevator. Kang looked at his watch and then at Miss Shin. She gave a little shrug. I tried to figure out how well acquainted they were but gave up when I felt the pressure building in my ears. The motor whined for a moment just before we stopped moving and the doors opened. Miss Shin pressed a red button on the control panel. "Enjoy the view," she said.
Kang walked once around the observation deck alone, making sure it was clear. No one else could have been there, but like every intelligence type, he was a creature of habit. I stopped at the railing and looked out toward my neighborhood. East Pyongyang didn't look so run-down from this height. The breeze had picked up, which meant the day would remain as clear as it was now, giving the city a sense of life it lacked under cloudy skies. When they were built, many of the older buildings had been surfaced with shiny materials, either designs made of tile or glitter mixed in with the paint, so that when it was sunny they danced and sparkled. From the top of the tower, the light glinted off everything below, a window here, a building or a car roof there. I traced the road from my apartment to the chestnut trees where the old man fixed bicycles, but he didn't seem to be around.
Kang tapped me on the shoulder. "No sense in looking at the old part of the city. You want to see the future, it's there." He pointed across the river toward the big ceremonial square and the massive People's Study Hall on the opposite shore. "Funny, people say that Pyongyang resembles Washington. River down the middle, lots of parks and monuments, big tower in the center, not a lot happening. I don't think they have anything like Kim II Sung Square, though."
"I thought you said we'd be alone."
Kang shrugged. "You mean Miss Shin? Don't worry about her, she's fine."
I turned back toward the view. "The shade from the foliage along the streets looks deeper in this sunlight. See those trees, just at the bend in the river, on that little hill?" Kang followed where I was pointing.
"They're more than four hundred years old. They were planted by the royal gardener, who was executed a year later for treason. As if a gardener could have anything to do with politics!" I snorted. "Before he was executed, he asked to be buried beside the trees, so his body could feed them and, as they grew, he could demonstrate his loyalty to the king."
Kang looked skeptical. "What'd they do?"
"They chopped up his body and threw it into the river."
"Looks like the trees grew anyway."
"That's not the point."
"How far does your jurisdiction run, Inspector?" Kang waved his hand lazily toward the city across the way. "If someone chopped up a body and threw it in the river, let's say, from the base of that hill, would that be in your zone?"
"We don't really have geographic areas. We operate in three sections.
Concentric circles in theory, though they aren't actually circles because of the way the streets run and how the city developed. We call them fortresses. Inner fortress-key buildings and neighborhoods where mostly upper ranks live. Middle fortress-the hotels, monuments, subway stops, and major roads. And outer fortress-everything else."
"You?"
"We don't talk a lot about our individual assignments, if you know what I mean, Kang." He leaned back against the railing and waited. I did some quick calculations. The Ministry didn't want us discussing details of our assignments with other security offices. Coordination was not banned, but it wasn't encouraged. No service could run an operation or a surveillance or even a simple patrol without worrying about stumbling over someone else's activity. On the other hand, if Kang was determined to find out what I did, he could do that with a couple of phone calls to the right places. He knew it, but he wanted me to tell him directly. Part of the stupid games the Investigations Department people played. "Middle," I said.
"That means you end up doing most of the city. But whatever you don't handle must have a red line around it, an inner fortress that is someone else's concern."
"Something like that."
Kang looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then turned back to the view. "From this height, Inspector, the city makes perfect sense, wouldn't you say? It all fits together, tall buildings balancing traditional rooftops, rigid open squares balancing meandering parks, everything anchored visually and psychologically by this tower. Not like Beijing, with buildings springing up to no purpose and a jumbled skyline that can only create confusion and disorder in people's minds."
I wasn't about to interrupt. He wasn't talking about architecture.
Kang moved around to the northern side of the tower. "But this place doesn't exist in a vacuum. From here what do we see? Fields lapping at the edge of the city, and beyond that, in the distance, mountains. Mountains.
They last a long time, Inspector." He walked around to the southern side. "And there, in the distance, the glorious road south. Let's drive out there together some afternoon soon. Maybe we'll be able to find where they buried that boy's body."
Miss Shin had settled beside us, her eyes closed, a smile on her face as she enjoyed the breeze. The moment she heard Kang mention the body, she stopped smiling and drifted away.
"The corpse from the wrecked car was taken to the morgue last night. The boy's body was buried way back in the hills. His relatives never saw the body. They got an urn of ashes and a note from the hospital expressing regrets that the boy had been killed in an auto accident."
"And he wasn't?"
"I never knew a car crash that cut someone's throat. Did you?"
"Why are you telling me all of this?"
"You know some things I don't know. I know some things you don't know. Simple addition, Inspector."
"Not possible, Kang. What you know and what I know don't add up."
Kang turned to look upriver toward the trees I had shown him.
"Too bad about that gardener." He walked into the elevator where Miss Shin was waiting, reached around her, and pressed the red button.
"Come on, Inspector. Back to earth," he smiled. "Such as it is."