No one had ever brought it in before, and exactly for that reason there must be something dangerous about it.
"It's sandpaper. I'm building wooden statues of the Leader, and to do it right, they have to be smooth, you know what I mean?" I winked.
"Smooth as a baby's bottom." That flustered him. Referring to the Leader and a baby's bottom in the same breath was vaguely troubling.
"You take away this sandpaper, the statues will be pretty ugly, and people will want to know why. They may question me. They may torture me. I'd have to tell them who confiscated the sandpaper." By now the guard was squirming, his face was flushed, and he was looking around for his squad leader, but his squad leader was probably off smoking behind a shed somewhere.
Anytime I wanted to build something, sandpaper was the bottleneck.
Sawing and drilling a few holes didn't take much time, but then things sat around because I couldn't get any fine sandpaper. My grandfather used to argue that fine sandpaper was an invention of the devil.
He believed, and said this with great conviction, that it was a question of concentration and patience. Any piece of wood could be made smooth and lustrous, he said. This only meant discovering what had been there all along; it had nothing to do with sanding. People who sanded wood without thinking were more apt to ruin than improve it.
And people who used fine sandpaper were the worst, he insisted, because they wore down the wood instead of bringing it to life.
One day I found a book about inventions. It said that an American had invented sandpaper in the 1830s. "Who needed it!" my grandfather waved the idea away with an angry gesture. "My father's father prepared wood for furniture by smoothing it to a silken shine. He used a smoothing tool like a magic cloth, people used to say. There were no Americans around then, I can tell you that."
I wasn't going to argue, but I was interested in why he was so adamant. "Because we are always being portrayed as behind, beholden to others, backward and beggars." His face flushed when he spoke like this. "Not Americans, not Chinese, not Japanese-we've been making furniture for hundreds and hundreds of years. Beautiful furniture, when America was still covered with trees and peopled by savages who wore animal skin for clothing. What would they know about wood, about how to coax it, talk to it, romance it, sing to its spirit? Do they have any real carpenters there?" I didn't say anything, because when he was mad like this he treated me as if I were one of the enemy, someone who had gone abroad and come back tainted. "Well, do they, Mr.
Korea-Not-Good-Enough-for-You-Anymore?" He was glad I was being assigned on travel out of the country-it meant I was trusted-but he worried I would decide not to be Korean anymore. "Sand!" He snorted.
"Why would you use sand, anyway, on a piece of wood? Sand is fine for metal, maybe, but wood, wood, wood is like a beating heart."
"So now you're telling me that Koreans did not invent sandpaper because it is a bad idea."
"All I'm saying is that no one taught us how to smooth wood. We've known how to do it for a long time, longer than America has existed, and no American ever invented anything that I would want to use."
To please him, I said I would try the old way of smoothing wood.
"You wait," he said as he went into the back room and came out with the same simple scraping tool that I had dropped years ago. Heavy and unbalanced in my hand, it claimed its revenge by nicking the wood whenever my concentration drifted. When my grandfather took it from me, the damn thing assumed an intolerable grace, moving gently over rough spots with a soft "shhhusss." It sang so smoothly, he said, that the wood found its true shape and never wanted to be anything else.
Long after my grandfather died, I sanded wood in the evenings, alone in the back of the apartment house, as the stars came out. Constantly my fingers felt the wood; even in the dark I could tell if I was getting close to the heart. Concentrating on bringing the wood to life, listening for that song, my mind wandered until I was far away. My working alone like this annoyed our local security man, a tough veteran of the war. He limped from pieces of shrapnel still in his leg, dragging his left foot slightly behind him. Before he came around the corner of the apartment house, I knew it was him. He would stand silently watching me. Sometimes we would exchange a few words, but usually there was only the slight "shhhh-shhhh" of the sandpaper moving across the wood, not quite a song but tolerably close. Even on days when I was supposed to be in a study session, I was sanding, sometimes humming to myself. "Not healthy activity," said the paper they slipped under the door of my apartment. "Too solitary." Just to annoy them, when I finally did go to a study session, I told them that sandpaper had been invented by an American.
One night after work, I came back to the apartment and my stock of sandpaper was gone. Pak said it was my own fault for waving it under their noses. Then he told me he would help me build up a new stock. "Keep it in your office, but put it out of sight and don't invite other people to admire it. They won't care, believe me, and someone is liable to mention it to someone else."
The piece of sandpaper in my desk was worn but still had some life in it. I folded it carefully and put it in the third drawer of my filing cabinet, with the rest of my meager stock. Then I went back to my desk and stared at the sketch of the hotel room. I added the closet and drew a little button on the floor.
I was beginning to think that whoever had dumped the body had avoided the staff completely. No one was even trying to feed something tiny into the investigation, a crumb of a "clue" in an offhand answer that might have kept me chasing my tail for weeks. The whole staff saw "nothing," end and sum total of answer-except for Mrs.
Li, the floor lady, who had been nervous but surprisingly forthcoming, even indignant at what had happened in a room that was her responsibility.
The flowers were a dead end. All that effort to get around the staff, and then leave a vase that didn't belong, on a cheap pine table that would have broken in two if someone had fallen against it hard enough to crush his skull. Anyway, pine tables don't crush skulls. The wood is too soft.
Pak yelled at me to come to his office. He was pacing, like a tiger.
"Inspector, I don't care how our corpse got in the room, or how he met his end. Or even who led him to it. Right now, I need to know who he is. Was." Pak had been at a meeting the whole morning. I could tell he'd been sleeping through some of it. His eyes were puffy. I only hoped he hadn't been dozing during the part where he was supposed to be alert and keep us in the good graces of the vice minister in charge.
"Rough session?" Without meaning to, I was looking at the piece of walnut while working it in my right hand.
Pak stopped pacing and pointed at me. "You haven't broken that dirty habit yet? They're starting to bitch about it. Last month something almost got into your file. Someone called it 'antisocial.' I blocked it." He started pacing again. "Why the hell can't you just smoke, like everyone else?"
The vice minister in charge was named Yun. No one liked him, which he didn't mind. He was one of those people who felt safer surrounded by enemies. Maybe he thought it enhanced his standing with the Minister, though nothing would ever do that. The Minister was elderly, not quite one of the revolutionary veterans but old enough to have known them personally. He'd known my grandfather. They came from the same mountain village. When the war broke out, the Minister, who was then only a young army recruit and a country boy, was assigned to a headquarters element. They were under constant air attack, moving practically every night, trying to keep some semblance of order and discipline.