Kim looked down for a few seconds. When he looked up again, he wasn’t even the same person. He had reached for an unpleasant expression, and he’d found one that beat anything I’d ever seen. “Do you know how a tree dies, Inspector?”
“I guess you’re about to tell me.” I’d seen a lot of dead trees, but there was no sense ruining his game.
“They die one branch at a time. Does that sound good to you? I’m not talking about a tree that has been chopped down, of course. I mean one that rots slowly, bark peeling, dying in the sun, dying in the rain. You’ve seen them, I’m sure. Very painful to observe.”
“You should learn to avert your eyes.”
“Aha! Something you know quite a bit about, I take it. Ignore your surroundings and they will not harm you. Ignore pain, it goes away. Maybe it doesn’t even exist. Shall we test your theory?”
Kim was a compact man. Little effort had been put into creating his body. His shoulders sloped, and when he sat, his feet turned out at alarming angles. All of the craft and art of creation had been poured into making his face-and the frame that surrounded it. His ears were perfectly aligned, as were his eyebrows. His hair was perfectly clipped to resemble an expensive shaving brush. The setting was good, but the face was the jewel. There was no nuance it couldn’t convey. There was no season, no phase of the moon, no combination of cloud and sun that it couldn’t best; there was no joke it couldn’t tell, no lullaby it couldn’t hum, no verdict it couldn’t hand down.
The face had put unpleasant away for the moment and was smiling again. Maybe it remembered something amusing, or something pleasing. I didn’t like either choice, given the drift of our conversation.
“Don’t misunderstand, Inspector. I’m here to do a job. You’re only here because I received orders. Left to me, I wouldn’t have summoned you from the mountain. You are an unknown quantity, and I don’t like dealing with anything unknown in the midst of a fast-moving situation.”
This came as a relief of sorts. At least I knew Kim hadn’t handpicked me. My name had been put in front of him, by whom I didn’t know. “I’m delighted to have your full confidence and backing.”
“You could help me, but you remain skeptical about my commitment. Very well, I’m suggesting an experiment, if that will convince you how serious I am.”
“That’s surprising,” I said.
“Really? In what way?”
“I thought you’d looked carefully at my file. I thought you’d studied me.”
“Go on.”
“You should know that I don’t like experiments.”
“Pain, Inspector.” The stale smile lingered on his face. I definitely did not like that smile. I wanted it to go away. “Would you rather inflict pain or suffer it?” Kim let the question float on the currents of the moment. His pacing had improved. “Think it over this afternoon,” he said. “We’ll have drinks before dinner, and you can give me an answer; then we’ll see where we go from there.”
“Where we go from there? I thought I was going home. That’s what you said yesterday.”
“Simply a question of time.” The face appeared thoughtful, but not the sort of thoughts that led to a comfortable walk in the park. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Time?”
Actually, I thought as the door shut behind him, it’s not about time. It’s about running out of time. It’s about being nervous because SSD is up to something and the people in the market are up to something and a gorgeous woman and one of your officers are up to something and you, Major Kim, don’t know what it is.
I turned on the television. The announcer was listing the days on which people with respiratory problems should take extra care. I’d have to remember to tell Li.
2
The bar was in a building at the end of a small, deserted street. The side door opened to a narrow room, barely space for five or six tables. When it was full, it probably felt crowded, but there was no one else there at the moment. Kim indicated we should sit at the bar, where, on each end, there was a globe containing a fat white candle. In each globe, the flame stood straight up, barely a flicker, for a long time, then began a frantic dance, responding to a puff of air that swirled in the glass but nowhere else. Otherwise, the place was pitch-dark.
“Pain, Inspector. The question left hanging from this afternoon concerned pain.”
“Is that the essence of your world?” I don’t like it so dark when I’m talking to someone I don’t know and have reason to think doesn’t have my best interests at heart.
“I’m not sure you are concentrating. Are you? What are you looking around for?”
“A light switch.”
“This isn’t a game. I have a lot to accomplish, and only so much time to get it all done. An hour ago, I learned that the time is even shorter than I’d thought. You can imagine that I’m getting impatient, and when I get impatient I feel the urge to peel off some of the veneer of civilization.”
In other words, he was under a lot of pressure and wasn’t getting much help in solving his problem. “So the problem isn’t really pain, after all. We’re back to the question of time, that and these mysterious tasks of yours. Go ahead and get them done, why don’t you? By all means, do what you have to do. Work eighteen hours a day. Skip dinners with your girlfriend in the red dress. Just leave me out of it. Whoever put my name in front of you must have pulled the wrong file. It happens.”
The major signaled the bartender. “Two large drinks.”
The bartender nodded and went somewhere into the darkness.
“Large.” It seemed to me that he could at least have asked what I wanted to drink. “That is now an acceptable order, I take it. No need to worry with content, only size. Sign of the times?”
Kim patted my knee. “Get real, Inspector. We’re about to have a conversation, a true exchange of ideas. No more fencing, no more banter. We’re going to talk of pain and suffering on a large scale. Let me say at the outset, I honestly believe it would be good to avoid that if possible. If not, if it proves impossible, well, it won’t be the first time.”
When the drinks arrived, we moved to a table, deeper into the gloom. Other people’s eyes adjust to the dark; mine don’t. There was a young inspector in our office years ago with eyes like a cat. The darker it was, the better he could see. He would sit in the dark reading files all night long. If we were on surveillance, he could spot a suspect moving in the blackest night. It made the rest of us look bad. No one was sorry to see him assigned to another office.
“Obviously,” I said, “neither the pain nor the suffering is to be yours.”