"Any information you have about the events or the scene is important to the solution of the crime, the apprehension of the criminals, and the dignity of the fatherland. You will be contacted by my office for a formal interrogation in a day or two. I trust we can work together."
She said nothing. Partly she was judging whether I was going to cause her extra grief, partly whether there was anything to gain from going along with my game. She nodded, not very convincingly I thought, and padded down the hall.
My second walk through the rooms took five minutes. There was still nothing to see. Everything had been bumped or jostled. The bedroom had been dusted and waxed in the three days since the body was moved out. I sat in the chair and turned on the TV with the remote.
There was a children's cartoon on. A weak old king, a lovely princess, a handsome commoner sitting under a tree looking at the mountains.
Even in a cartoon, mountains. I turned it off before the fire-breathing dragon appeared. There had to be a dragon, and he was going to threaten to barbecue the princess. Actually, he wanted something else, but they couldn't put that in a cartoon, not in this country, anyway.
The bathroom was spotless. The refrigerator was unplugged, and water from the melted ice had pooled on the bottom shelf. There was no water bottle, but there was a faint odor, as if something had been rotting. I looked in the sitting room again. No mess on the floor near the table. Skulls are not empty, and when they are crushed, they leak all manner of unpleasant things that don't clean up easily. There was no way the carpet had already been replaced, not in this hotel, not in this city. So what happened to the mess?
As I walked out the door, thinking about lunch, something nagged at me. I hadn't checked the closet. I went back and stuck my head inside.
The entry hall light didn't work, which made the entry hall dark and the inside of the closet even darker. I didn't have a flashlight with me; even if I did, the battery wouldn't work. My eyes refused to adjust; there was no light, nothing to adjust to. I felt along the shelves that took up one side of the closet, but they were empty. I swept over the long shelf along the top. There wasn't anything, not even an extra blanket. Finally, I got down on my knees and traced my hand along the edges of the closet floor. In the far corner, my fingers found something small and round. I picked it up, walked into the hall, and turned it over in my hand. It was a button, blue like the sky, blue like a lake in a Finnish summer.
5
I was at my desk, typing an initial report, when Pak walked in. "You dispatched a guard to the Koryo?"
"I did. The room is a joke, but we might as well preserve what we can."
"On whose authority did you send the guard?"
"Mine. I do it all the time. It was standard procedure, last time I checked. If I ask for permission, we lose a day or two getting approval, by which time a guard is useless."
"I've pulled him."
"You what?"
"Captain Kim said a guard would only attract attention, and he wanted no attention. Also the Foreign Ministry said it would scare the foreign guests."
I yanked the form out of the typewriter. "Then there isn't any sense in starting a file, because there can't be any investigation."
Pak leaned against the edge of my desk. "You seem unhappy these days, Inspector. Nervous, jumpy."
"No, thanks, I'm against another vacation to the border." I sat back in my chair and focused on the molding between the ceiling and the wall. Our offices were in an old building, one of the first to rise from the shattered city after the war as a symbol of defiance and a statement of victory for people who had lost everything. Most of the trim had been stripped off over the years, victory not being all it was made out to be. A little remained, though, miraculously in my office. The molding had been carved by someone who had taken pride in his work, but the features had disappeared under layers and layers of paint. I often promised myself, on quiet afternoons, that I would find a ladder tall enough, climb up and take the molding down, sand off the paint, and restore it to its original glory. Sometimes I thought it was flowers or vines, but it might also be birds in flight. I had to hope it wasn't something foolish, like a line of workers waving tools.
Pak moved to the doorway. "I leave for Kim's lair in fifteen minutes.
You can go partway. We'll stroll by the river. It's too nice to drive." That meant he hadn't received the month's gas ration yet, but he always hated to admit it to me.
A CORPSE IN THE KORYO
17
6
Sitting at my desk the next morning, I sketched the layout of the hotel room on the back of an old memo. I don't read memos-especially those that come from the Ministry once a week-but they make good scrap paper. The body had been moved to the hotel from somewhere else and dumped next to the lamp table. Dumped, I was sure of it. I put the sketch to one side and reached in my pocket for the persimmon wood. After I ran my fingers over the smooth surface, my thoughts settled into place. Whoever did it wasn't trying to cover up the murder.
They didn't even break a sweat setting it up like it was an accident.
Hell, they didn't even go to the trouble of renting the room. All their energy was spent covering their tracks, and that they had done effectively.
Not one of the hotel staff had seen anything, so they said, though that was hard to believe. The whole purpose of the staff, especially at a place like the Koryo, which is filled with foreigners, is to observe, to see. Making the beds is secondary. It is the ultimate negation of their purpose if a guest is murdered in the hotel or, even worse, a dead body is carried up-much less down-the elevator and none of them notice. Normally, if the staff has been instructed to say "didn't see anything," there is something indicating otherwise: a tightening of the shoulders, a glance held too long or not at all. I had sensed none of that in my first set of interviews with them. Some people can lie outright to me and get away with it. Not hotel staff.
I gave one last swirl to the persimmon; it was as smooth as it would get. I opened the drawer to my desk, tossed the piece in, and rummaged around for a chip that I hadn't worked on yet. There was some pine, but that was boring. Too easy, no character, nothing to help the concentration.
Next to it was a piece of camphor wood. Not bad for winter when I had a cold, but otherwise it would make my fingers stink and my eyes water. Near the back of the drawer was an old piece of walnut. Tough and hard. Just what I needed for this case. Under the walnut was something I didn't expect, a torn, worn piece of sandpaper.
Sandpaper was hard to get, especially good sandpaper. Whenever I went overseas, or knew someone going on a trip, I tried to get another piece. Other people wanted tins of biscuits or televisions. I asked for sandpaper.
Once, when I was coming back from supporting a delegation to Eastern Europe, a border guard at the train station opened my suitcase and found four sheets of medium sandpaper, the sort you use when you can't find the grade you really want. The guard was young, and I could see he was trying to do his job. "What is this?" He was scowling. There was nothing in the regulations about sandpaper, but he was suspicious.