When I got back to the Nam Lo, the clerk was hurrying down the stairs. He pressed himself against the wall. “Nobody touched your room; don’t worry,” he said. “I was cleaning up the one down the hall, the one your girlfriend uses.”
“Out of my way,” I said. “I lost a suitcase full of money at the casino and I don’t want to talk.”
This seemed to cheer him up, because he said something using only six tones.
The room looked untouched. I closed the door, put the ratty chair against it, and opened the newspaper on the bed. Taped on page 3 was an airline ticket for tomorrow to Prague, though not nonstop. That meant changing planes, risking delays. Why Prague? I got a funny feeling. I’d been there once before, long ago. There was a return ticket, but it was for Shanghai. That did me no good; there were no flights from Shanghai to Pyongyang. That meant I was going to have to change the routing at the airport in Prague, with a lot of unnecessary questions from the ticket agent about why I didn’t book it that way to begin with. There would also be careful study of my identification, which meant the visa stamps would get attention. The ticket wasn’t in my name. It wasn’t in the name that was on my South Korean passport, either, but that was all right because on page 5 of the newspaper was an envelope with a Dominican passport inside. It had a better picture of me than the one Kim’s people had used. My name was Ricardo, and I was fifty-four years old, which was fine. That knocked almost fifteen years off the wear and tear on my body. The age on a fake passport might not be an elixir of youth, but it helps.
I went downstairs and gave the room clerk a sad look. “My uncle died. I have to leave a day early.”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s a curse. Whenever people have to leave early, they kill off an uncle. Never an aunt.”
“I’ll be back.”
“You get charged for the full stay. It’s policy.” He pointed at a sign behind him on the wall.
“That’s an explanation of the fire exits, in Chinese.”
“Say, you’re one smart Korean, aren’t you?” He let loose a few long sentences in Hakka.
“OK, I get it,” I said. “I pay for the day I’m not here, and you pocket the money.”
“Any complaints, fill out the form in the desk in your room.”
“There isn’t a desk in my room.”
“Really? Well, you can use one of the forms over there.” He pointed at a few dirty pieces of paper on the counter.
“Where do I put it when I’m done?”
He grinned.
“I’ll tell you what I need. I need a train ticket for tomorrow.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Macau is practically an island. No trains.”
“Yeah, I figured that out. But you must have travel agents that can make arrangements. I’ve seen one or two luggage stores, and that means people travel; if people travel, they have tickets, and they must get them somewhere.”
“Depends. Where you going?” He gave me the canny look of a man calculating how much he could get for selling the same information to three buyers.
“Shanghai, to pay my respects to my uncle, who ran a noodle shop there. Then to Beijing to see my aged mother, who lives with her sister in one of those new villas near the Kempinski. You know it? Then on to Yanji. Yanji is lousy with Koreans, in case you didn’t know.”
“Right.”
“Can you get me the tickets?”
“No, but I can tell you where to go.”
“A ticket office.”
“If you knew, why did you ask?” He was already reaching for the phone.