"Nobody saw a thing." I was sure no one could have seen me from the road. I had been on a small rise, with another hill behind me. Anyone who looked up from the highway would have focused on the crest of the hill. People did that. You could send a marching band along the flank of a hill and no one would notice. They always eyed the line where earth and sky met. "Even when I was trying to take the picture, I was hunched down. Anyway, I had on a farmer's hat. If the driver took his eyes off that lousy road-which he would have been crazy to do at the speed he was traveling-he would have thought I was Kim Satgat."
Pak shook his head. "Don't tell me. I don't want to know."
Fine.
"Alright, who is Kim Satgat? Is he on file?"
"Probably, at one time. His real name was Kim Pyong Yon. Wandering poet from the old days."
"That's it?"
"Long story, but he accidentally criticized his grandfather. Badly unfilial thing to do. He went into hiding, wore a bamboo hat to cover his face."
"So, if they couldn't see Kim Satgat, why did they honk?" Pak bobbed his head back and forth a little when he already knew the answer to a question he was asking. He waited, until he sensed I knew it, too. "Yes, the radio."
"That car was monitoring frequencies? No one gets equipment like that without piles of paperwork." I thought it over. "Unless it came from the outside. Who are we talking about here?"
Pak shook his head. "I don't know. And don't ask."
"That stone head Kim isn't from any joint headquarters, is he?"
"Inspector, drop it."
"I thought so. His neck is too thick. Not pretty enough for a headquarters billet."
"Drop it." Pak held up his hand. "Stop, drop it, enough."
"I don't like this operation. Kim I don't like. Kang I really don't like. You notice? He never changes expression. It's like watching a trout on your dinner plate, staring up at you." We were both silent for a moment.
"Did you see Kim tap his foot?"
Pak's chair squeaked as he swiveled around to face the window. He slumped and put the tips of the fingers of both hands together, making small diamonds for the sunlight to shine through.
"They're not working together, are they, those two aliens?" Pak pretended to ignore me, which meant I was right. "I don't suppose anyone checked. Was there even a battery in that damned camera?"
Pak sat up and the chair squeaked again. "You go home." He turned to face me. "You put on a clean shirt, if you can find one. Maybe some new trousers, too. You get a cup of tea and something to eat. Then, as fast as your little legs can pedal, you get back here. No visiting friends.
No stopping at markets. No sitting under a tree, gazing at the summer sky." He looked at his watch. "It's 11:30. You got up early. Take a rest.
Be back here at 1:45, in time to call Kang."
"What does he have to do with this, anyway?"
"Out. Now!"
I got one foot out the door, and Pak called after me. "Inspector, don't forget."
"I know." I said. "The pin."
5
The day had turned into a summer steam bath, not good for pedaling a bicycle, especially with the back tire almost flat. Every morning, I put air in the tire. It leaked out a few hours later; no one could discover from where, or why it always stopped leaking by noon. Every couple of weeks, I brought the tire to an old man who fixed bicycles in the shade of a pair of chestnut trees not far from my office, until he finally told me in disgust not to come by anymore, it took up his time and ate into his profits. I asked him what happened to the spirit of cooperation among us working people, but he snorted and turned his attention to an old Chinese bike that had been hit by a car. "Now that," he said, "will pay for dinner."
"This is a controlled intersection." I turned toward a traffic lady standing a few feet away, her whistle held close to her mouth. "And I control it. No bikes. No pedestrians. Just cars." There wasn't a car in sight. Sweet-looking girl, tough as nails. She had pouty lips, like all the traffic ladies did. Soon after I was assigned to the office, Pak and I had a long discussion about whether they selected girls with those lips from the start or trained them to look that way, extra lipstick or something.
Pak told me it didn't matter; either way, he wanted me to keep away from them. "They're off-limits. Each one of them is special issue." He paused. "Let me rephrase that. Each one of them is to be respected. No leering, no clucking your tongue as you stroll by, no comments on their sweet blue uniforms, or their pertness, or anything. You get me? Everything about them has been checked out at the top. The top looks very kindly on them, and not very kindly on one of us if we ruffle their little feathers."
I didn't dismount. I'm not short, but sitting on a bike makes me look taller, and getting off the bicycle would make her think she had some authority over me. "Yeah, I know the rules, but I'm in a hurry.
Official business."
"There's an underground passage." She pointed to the corner. "Use it."
"In this weather, a fifty-six-year-old man has to carry a bicycle up and down those stairs?" I didn't figure she would back down, but I wanted to see her smile.
She didn't smile, not even close. "You don't look that old to me."
Someone guffawed in the crowd that was forming.
"Well, I'm in pretty good shape."
She looked me straight in the eye. "I wouldn't know." This provoked another guffaw. One old woman put her hand over her mouth.
"And I don't care."
My shirt was soaked with sweat when I emerged from the stairs on the other side. Still no cars. It did not improve my mood when I saw that the traffic lady had moved out of the sun into the shade. She was watching me casually, her uniform crisp and unwrinkled, her black boots gleaming as if there were no dust for a mile in any direction. I thought I saw a smile flit over her pouty lips, but I didn't feel like chatting anymore. A man on the corner looked up and waved as I passed by. "Bad tire. Get you a new one?" I coasted under the willow trees that lined the river, trying to catch a breeze, then gave up and pulled onto the old Japanese-built bridge that led to my street in the decaying eastern part of Pyongyang.
Inside my room it was no cooler, but with the shades down, the sun no longer glared in my eyes. The apartment house was already falling down when I moved in years ago. It was one of four buildings set around a square in which several small flowering bushes grew according to no particular plan. The apartments had been constructed from blueprints the East Germans brought with them in 1954 as part of their offer to help rebuild a Korean city after the war. They ended up restoring Hamhung, on the east coast, but the architecture was so appealing to someone in Pyongyang that the plans were "borrowed" and used for a number of offices and apartments in the capital. Later, to no one's surprise, it was decided that buildings in a "foreign style" were not a good idea. After the fact, special work teams went back and modified all of them, including my group of apartments, adding touches that would make them "our own."
The floors of the balconies had crumbled beyond repair, except for a mysterious few that survived and were crowded with plants. Much of the building's yellow facade on the first two floors had fallen away, leaving stained concrete that for some reason turned a deep green when it rained.
An East German police official I once drove around the city told me the apartments were "Bauhaus style," but he said that the tile roofs were nothing quite like they had in Berlin, and the designs on the balconies were- here he paused a moment looking for the right word-"interesting."
You could still see where the new exterior designs had been added, one marking each of the six floors and all topped by what had once been an intricate, probably very attractive molding just below the roof line. Whole sections of tiles had come off the roof, which was why the stairway always smelled dank.