At my hotel, there was a message waiting for me. The clerk handed it over without saying anything. He waited until I started up the stairs to my room.
“Russian guy nosing around. Wanted to know if you were still here.”
“And you said?”
“I yelled at him in Hakka.”
“You don’t speak Russian?”
“I don’t like Russians. Except the young ones.” He licked his lips.
I walked back to the desk. “You touch her, I’ll kill you. You understand that?”
He shrank back. “You can’t scare me. I’ve got friends.”
“I’ll bet you have scabies, too.”
When I got to my room, the door was slightly ajar. I walked calmly downstairs, took the clerk by the collar, and dragged him back upstairs. “See that?” I shoved his head into the door. “Do that again and I’ll burn this place down.”
“Hey!” He unleashed all twelve tones at me. “What was that about?”
“It’s called negative reinforcement, and there’s more where that came from.”
“I’ll call the cops, you touch me again.”
“Go ahead; call the cops. Call MSS for all I care.”
He rubbed the top of his head. “That’s the last time I rent to a Korean,” he said. “You people are crazy-mad, not to mention being murderers.”
“Wait a minute.” I grabbed his arm. “What do you know about murders?”
“Nothing.” He grinned at me. “Not a thing.”
After the clerk disappeared, I opened the message. All it said was: “Blue sky.” Everyone seemed to be getting short messages these days, but this one shook me. It shook me up so much I sat down in the ratty chair next to the television. “Blue sky” was a code a chief inspector of mine had used as an emergency signal. But he was dead, shot years ago by Military Security in an incident that wasn’t recorded anywhere and thus never happened. It couldn’t be from him. I had never heard of spirits using code.
There was only one other person who might have known the code, and he had disappeared. His name was Kang. He’d been a deputy director of what was then known as the Investigations Department-the party’s foreign intelligence arm. He had also been on the Military Security hit list, but they never got him. I may have been the last person to see him before he went into permanent hiding. A few people wanted to get in touch with him over the years, and they thought I knew how to do it. I didn’t, and I never wanted to find out. Now this. “Blue sky,” another way of saying: “Make contact at once.” But where? How? I pushed the door shut and lay down on the bed. Simple, I thought. If Kang wants to contact me, he knows where I am. Let him take the next step.
From downstairs, I could hear the clerk yelling into the phone. Ah, the lullaby of Canton, I thought to myself, and fell asleep.