No one called at noon to say a car was waiting. No one called at one o’clock. Or two. At two thirty, there was a knock at the door.
“Room service.”
Only it wasn’t. It was Major Kim, and he didn’t look happy.
“We’ve got a problem, O.” He walked past me as soon as I opened the door. “I’m supposed to be in Paris. I should have been in Paris, but no, no, I ended up here. Here!” He closed the curtains by hand.
“You just broke something,” I said. “Light bother your eyes?”
“I’ll tell you what bothers my eyes. Looking at the mess you call a city, that’s what bothers my eyes. Looking at that statue every morning on the hill, that bothers my eyes.”
“So, don’t look. Or take it down.”
He sat on the bed. “Not yet,” he said. “A problem, O, we have a big problem.”
“How come every time we meet, you say we have a problem? Last time it was little. This time it’s big. Doesn’t matter to me-whatever it is, it’s yours. I don’t have any problems.”
“Where are you, O?”
“In Room…” I went out and looked at the number on the door. “In Room Twelve Nineteen.” I stood in the hallway and looked from one end of the corridor to the other. No one was hanging around. I came back in the room. “Makes you wonder. Does this hotel have guests, or did you build it specifically for me?”
The major took a piece of paper from his jacket. “Close the door,” he said, “and read this.” He handed me the paper.
I glanced at it and shrugged. “This is a State Security Department operational order.”
“I know what it is. I want to know what it means.”
“Do I look like I work for SSD?”
“Don’t screw with me, O.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Major, I don’t owe you anything. I still don’t know who you are. At this point, I only have a vague idea of what is going on. And for as long as I can remember, I have made it a practice never to inquire too deeply into SSD orders. They have their own codes, and they don’t spread around the decoding instructions. SSD does not get high marks for sharing. One of those three dogs at the table the other night seemed to be from SSD. He’ll roll over if you order him to, won’t he?”
“Not him. You, you’re going to tell me, and you’re going to do it in the next thirty seconds.”
“Or?”
“Don’t push me, O. I don’t have any patience right now. Why is SSD using code?”
“That’s what they do. They do it all the time. It’s in their nature. They think in code. They sleep in code. They probably make love in code. Don’t let it worry you.”
“What does it say?”
“If I knew what it said, it wouldn’t be much of a code, would it?”
“What. Does. It. Say.”
I looked at the paper. The grouping of numbers on the top indicated it was an alert order of some sort; of what sort I didn’t know. The two letters at the end of the number group indicated it was an immediate-precedence message. I’d learned this much about SSD orders, because it was what I needed to keep my head above water when I was in the Ministry. Kim didn’t have to know. “I take it you and SSD don’t work together real close.”
Kim looked down for a few seconds. When he looked up again, he wasn’t even the same person. He had reached for an unpleasant expression, and he’d found one that beat anything I’d ever seen. “Do you know how a tree dies, Inspector?”
“I guess you’re about to tell me.” I’d seen a lot of dead trees, but there was no sense ruining his game.
“They die one branch at a time. Does that sound good to you? I’m not talking about a tree that has been chopped down, of course. I mean one that rots slowly, bark peeling, dying in the sun, dying in the rain. You’ve seen them, I’m sure. Very painful to observe.”
“You should learn to avert your eyes.”
“Aha! Something you know quite a bit about, I take it. Ignore your surroundings and they will not harm you. Ignore pain, it goes away. Maybe it doesn’t even exist. Shall we test your theory?”
Kim was a compact man. Little effort had been put into creating his body. His shoulders sloped, and when he sat, his feet turned out at alarming angles. All of the craft and art of creation had been poured into making his face-and the frame that surrounded it. His ears were perfectly aligned, as were his eyebrows. His hair was perfectly clipped to resemble an expensive shaving brush. The setting was good, but the face was the jewel. There was no nuance it couldn’t convey. There was no season, no phase of the moon, no combination of cloud and sun that it couldn’t best; there was no joke it couldn’t tell, no lullaby it couldn’t hum, no verdict it couldn’t hand down.
The face had put unpleasant away for the moment and was smiling again. Maybe it remembered something amusing, or something pleasing. I didn’t like either choice, given the drift of our conversation.
“Don’t misunderstand, Inspector. I’m here to do a job. You’re only here because I received orders. Left to me, I wouldn’t have summoned you from the mountain. You are an unknown quantity, and I don’t like dealing with anything unknown in the midst of a fast-moving situation.”
This came as a relief of sorts. At least I knew Kim hadn’t handpicked me. My name had been put in front of him, by whom I didn’t know. “I’m delighted to have your full confidence and backing.”
“You could help me, but you remain skeptical about my commitment. Very well, I’m suggesting an experiment, if that will convince you how serious I am.”
“That’s surprising,” I said.
“Really? In what way?”
“I thought you’d looked carefully at my file. I thought you’d studied me.”
“Go on.”
“You should know that I don’t like experiments.”
“Pain, Inspector.” The stale smile lingered on his face. I definitely did not like that smile. I wanted it to go away. “Would you rather inflict pain or suffer it?” Kim let the question float on the currents of the moment. His pacing had improved. “Think it over this afternoon,” he said. “We’ll have drinks before dinner, and you can give me an answer; then we’ll see where we go from there.”
“Where we go from there? I thought I was going home. That’s what you said yesterday.”
“Simply a question of time.” The face appeared thoughtful, but not the sort of thoughts that led to a comfortable walk in the park. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Time?”
Actually, I thought as the door shut behind him, it’s not about time. It’s about running out of time. It’s about being nervous because SSD is up to something and the people in the market are up to something and a gorgeous woman and one of your officers are up to something and you, Major Kim, don’t know what it is.
I turned on the television. The announcer was listing the days on which people with respiratory problems should take extra care. I’d have to remember to tell Li.