The Minister became a noncommissioned officer when all the others were killed. By war's end, because the casualty rate was so high, he was a colonel. He often said he didn't know the first thing about commanding troops when he started and knew less when he finished, but he'd learned to yell convincingly into a field telephone so that whoever was at the other end stood at attention. When the war was over, he figured he'd go back to the village and farm. He got home and there was nothing. The village had been pulverized. No one could figure out why.
The bombs came out of nowhere; no one heard the planes arrive in the night sky, the survivors said.
A few people wanted to rebuild the village, but the forests were gone, the farmland had never been good for much, and the military decided to use the valley below for a special factory, so everyone in the surrounding hills was moved out. The Minister ended up in the capital.
He never got in anyone's way, and he was reliable. He carried out his orders. He was invariably cheerful, even when he was drunk. He trusted his subordinates, treated them with kindness, and established a loyalty that served him well in the bad years. Everyone in the ministry, including Pak and me, worried that he would retire and that Vice Minister Yun would get his job.
"The vice minister thinks he's going to use this case to knock the old man out, I can sense it." Pak walked over to the window and stared absently into the courtyard. I moved so I could look out, too. One of the gate sentries had left his post and was leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, trying to draw the last of the morning's coolness from the concrete blocks. Pak stood for a moment with his back to me, then turned and made a wry face.
"The vice minister is sure we'll screw up this murder investigation.
He asked if we needed help getting a camera that works. You know, in that bored tone of voice he uses before he sinks his fangs into someone."
"How much does he know? Who told him about the camera?"
"Not Kang. They hate each other. One of them isn't going to survive this." Pak gave me a funny look, then turned to stare out the window again. "So that leaves your favorite captain."
"You mean Colonel Kim? Does he know I was in Manpo?"
"He may have some sketchy report, but I doubt if he knows anything for sure. Just don't go to any fish restaurants with him."
"Humorous."
"What do we know about the corpse?" Pak rubbed at a spot on the window. "Can we get this washed, you think?"
"Nothing much. Dead. Caucasian. Male. Heavy blow to the temple crushed the right side of the skull. Never checked into the hotel. No papers. No identification. The name card in his pocket wasn't his, and the IAEA inspectors say they never met him."
"How hard can this be, Inspector?" Pak gave up on the window and moved over to his desk. "He didn't float down from the moon."
"Might have, for all we know at this point. It will take another day to run down the whereabouts of all foreigners in the country. Everyone in the city is accounted for.'
"Autopsy report?"
"They won't do an autopsy."
"What are you talking about? By tomorrow morning, tonight even, the Ministry will be screaming at me, and then others will take it up, like a convention of jackals."
"At the hospital, they say their orders are not to start the autopsy until there is an identification."
"Sure, they want to know what set of knives to use."
I started to work the walnut again, then stopped myself and put it in my pocket. "Can't you get Kang to make a phone call?"
"This is our business, not Kang's. He won't touch it. Besides, the vice minister would like nothing better than to find Kang's fingerprints on what is supposed to be a criminal investigation, not an intelligence romp."
"What about the procurator's office? They are going to have to bring charges against someone, sooner or later."
"This is a foreigner. They don't want to know anything about it.
They say it is foreign policy."
"I knew it. We're stuck working with the Foreign Ministry."
"The liaison guy, the short one with the ruddy face and the bad shoes, is coming here this afternoon after lunch. You want to sit in?"
"Maybe. No, on second thought I'd better get back to the hotel and shake the tree again."
"Just a minute. Let's play a game, Inspector. It's called Continents. I name a continent, you tell me if the corpse is from there."
"You already said he was a Finn. Anyway, all I've seen is the pictures, and they aren't very clear. The crime scene camera needs a new battery."
"I don't know if it's a Finn. That was just a hunch, fed by the card in his pocket. Apparently it was planted. But let's proceed. Africa?"
"No. Well, maybe yes. Could be South African. Could be an expat, I suppose."
"South America."
"Could be, but the clothes are wrong, from what little I could see."
"North America."
"Not likely. Wrong haircut."
"Europe."
"Probably."
"Russian?"
"Nyet."
"Australia."
"Look, boss-"
"Humor me, Inspector. Australia."
"Yeah, sure, could be. But, I mean, he's white, too white, maybe.
Not ruddy enough."
"Asia."
I thought for a second. "No."
"Lots of territory, a couple of billion people if you count India.
Care to change your vote?"
I shook my head. "Not Asia. That doesn't narrow it much."
"Maybe yes, maybe no."
I stood for a moment, waiting to see if Pak was going to draw any conclusions from all of this. He sat calmly and quiet as a stone.
"Is the game over?" I moved toward the door. "If you need me, I'll be at the Koryo for a couple of hours."
Pak nodded. He looked pleased with himself, and I walked down the hall wondering what he knew that I didn't.
7
The floor lady at the Koryo was not happy to find me back in the room.
She tugged at the sleeve of her dress. She refused to look me in the eye. It wasn't hard to see that by now she had been talked to by someone who had warned her that it was a bad idea to answer my questions. There was no sense in pressing her at this point. I told her that I'd call her later. She was relieved. "I'm busy this morning," she said. "A bus load of Romanian basketball players is arriving. Some friendship tournament. They are the worst. Tall, skinny, they all think because they have such long legs they are comedians. You should see what they do to the rooms.
With luck, they'll go to twelve and above." She backed into the hall and slipped away like a shadow. Real quiet, well trained.
I went through the room again inch by inch. Pak had said his first priority was finding out the victim's identity, but that would only be a process of elimination. There were a limited number of foreigners in the country; each provincial unit would make an accounting based on the entry cards and then be told to do it again. Eventually, someone would come up one short, and that would be our man. Or rather, our corpse. My real problem was to figure out who did it, and we were drifting backward on that. So far, all we knew was that the body had been found in this room in the Koryo. Though we hadn't nailed it down as a fact, I was almost sure he was a Finn. At the very least, he was a European, but I pretty much ruled out southern Europe. He wasn't a Slav, either. According to the initial inventory report, all the clothes were from stores in Vienna. If that checked out, then it probably meant he worked for an international organization. Lots of nationalities did. So what made me think he was a Finn? A blue button. But I didn't even know it was his.
None of his clothing had buttons like that. Maybe it belonged to his killer.
Maybe the murderer was a Finn. But I didn't think so. I'd been through the hotel records. The room had seen scores of Koreans from Japan, a few Americans, and plenty of Chinese. Also newlyweds from Turkistan. There were no signs in the room of any of them, unless that button was part of a Turkistan wedding night custom. I doubted it.