I spent the rest of December sweeping up a few inconsequential facts about the woman who had been murdered. Or not murdered. Anything was still possible, based on what little I knew. Maybe she'd just dropped dead. I didn't actually have a single fact about what happened to her, and the paper we had on her case told me exactly nothing. It asserted she'd been murdered. That didn't mean anything to me. But I was starting to lean. That happens sometimes. A few facts here and there, a feeling stirs an intuition, and the next thing that happens, I'm leaning in the direction of a hypothesis.
Her father told me she said she couldn't sleep because of the chanting in the morning. She wouldn't tell him it was the call to prayer, but that's what it could have been. This was circular, I knew. I assumed that what she was complaining about was morning calls to prayer for no good reason other than that Mun had suddenly shown up. Circular logic isn't wrong, it's round. If it was a call to prayers, it could have been any Islamic country, but again, not if I threw Mun into the equation. True, I didn't know where Mun had been for all of these years. I knew where he and I had been, though, and it wasn't a cosmic coincidence that he had suddenly appeared and wanted to talk over "old times" with me. Or that he had showed up just after someone had delivered an Israeli or a Swiss Jew, or whatever Jeno was, on our doorstep. If I had to choose, I'd choose circular logic over cosmic coincidence.
This is how I get when I start to lean, even when I know it would be better to assume things are unconnected. I looked, I swept, I dug into the woman's background, but there wasn't a lot of information about her where there should have been, and every time I found a gap, even a little one, I leaned a little more. She was dead. People had a habit of doing that, and afterward, there were always gaps. Some gaps are natural. That's how people live their lives-gaps, empty places, silences. But not like what this woman left behind.
I had no description of where she'd been when she died, or what time of day it was, or what color clothes she was wearing, or which way her legs crumpled when she hit the ground for the last time, assuming she'd been standing just then, at that moment. If I knew some of that, I might have some sense of where to start filling the gaps. So I dug into holes that already existed, and swept small voids into bigger ones. That's when it hit me, the pattern. Someone had given us this assignment, and then nothing. No pressure to finish the report. None. Mun had showed up out of nowhere, then disappeared again. No more contact. The special section had paid us two visits, and then they were off our backs. Not even a phone call. Gears were turning somewhere and then getting stuck. Not my business why, and as far as I could see, Pak didn't think it was his business, either.
To my surprise, it didn't turn out to be such a bad way to spend the end of the old year and the first weeks of the new one, poking around files, gathering odd facts, staring into the blank spots in the dead woman's life. There wasn't much else to do, and I wasn't in the mood to do nothing. The folder I was supposed to be assembling was still on the thin side, and I was wondering how to make it appear fatter one morning when Pak walked in and dropped some orders on my desk. Normally, he says something when he gives me a set of orders. This time, he walked out again without saying a word. Not happy, I thought as I tore open the envelope.
I read the paper three times before the thought formed clearly in my mind: crazy. I was to go to Beijing to meet Jeno at the airport and escort him back to Pyongyang. It was beyond comprehension, given the thinly veiled-nearly naked, actually-threats from the Man with Three Fingers about how we shouldn't have let Jeno out of the country to begin with. The man had barely got out, and now I was supposed to fetch him back? I walked over to Pak's office and stuck my head in.
"Just do it." He said without looking up. "Don't ask me what is going on. I don't have a clue."