“You realize I can’t hang around here for long. I’ll have to get back to Pyongyang by the day after tomorrow at the latest. They’re already wondering where I am.”
A key turned in the front door, and Kang walked in carrying a paper bag. “I brought you something, Richie.” He pulled out a bottle of whiskey. “Go easy on it, though. I don’t want you passed out on the couch.” He took off his hat and coat and threw them on the sofa. “Greetings, Inspector. Your day was good?”
“Nothing that I’d put in a logbook.”
Kulov came out from the kitchen with a couple of glasses. He gave one to Richie and one to me. “Inspector.” He nodded.
“You’re not drinking?” I asked Kang.
Richie was pouring himself a triple. Kang grimaced. “I drink, but only sometimes, and this isn’t one of them. Maybe you should wait until we’re done, as well.”
“Maybe I should.” I put my glass on the floor. “Do we talk here, or is there someplace else where the walls don’t have ears?”
“We’re in Prague, Inspector, land of the free. And we’re in a perfectly secure place, courtesy of Richie and friends. There is nothing here, not a single thing, that Richie hasn’t personally approved; besides which, he controls all the on switches. Let’s have our nice talk. How did you get along with Greta?”
“We’re old acquaintances, it turns out.”
“You saw her one time across a parking lot.”
“Well informed, as always. You have your own spy satellite or what?” Apparently, not a satellite that could see into noodle shops.
“She saw you, too. That’s how I knew you were in Pyongyang, home from the hill.”
“Greta… that’s what we’re going to call her?”
“That’s right.”
“Greta keeps you up to date on what’s going on, I presume.”
“It isn’t like the old days, Inspector. Getting information in and out of Pyongyang is not nearly as difficult as it used to be. For example, I know that Major Kim sent you to Macau on a mission he fully expected you to botch.”
“And did I?”
“Not yet.”
“Excellent, there’s still time. You know Kim, I take it.”
“Our paths have crossed.”
“What’s he doing in Pyongyang?”
“What he’s doing there, what he says he’s doing there, and what he thinks he’s doing there are separate things.”
“He thinks he is bossing people around. Me, for instance.”
“That’s good. Let him keep thinking that.”
“He reminds me in some ways of that Military Security goon that wanted to kill you. His name was Kim, too.”
“I know what his name was, Inspector.” Kang paused. “He got promoted, I heard.”
I waited to see if he would say anything else, but he let the subject drop.
Richie coughed. “I have a good idea: Let’s rake over the most hellish coals we can find.” He waved his glass at me. “Let’s remember every failure, every bit of pain, everything that should have worked but didn’t. Let not a single sleeping dog lie. Kick the shit out of every fucking one of them, how about that? Should I go first?” He finished the whiskey and banged the glass on the table. “God, what a bunch of stupid bastards I chose to die around.”
Nobody said anything for a couple of minutes. Kulov made some noise in the kitchen, rattling silverware and slamming drawers.
Finally, someone had to break the silence. “SSD is up to something, by the way,” I said.
Kang smiled at me. “Fine, let them think that nothing stands in their path.”
“Kim says he’s there to oversee a transition.”
“Did you ask him from what to what?”
“We didn’t get that far. We were only on the first date.”
“German sugarplums are dancing in their heads, Inspector. They think we’re going to fall on our knees and beg forgiveness for seventy years of sin, like the East Germans did.”
“Are we?”
“You can if you want to. I have other ideas.”
“So do the Chinese, apparently.”
“They’ve got Kim worried?” There was a note of urgency in the question, not much, but I was weighing every word Kang used, measuring every inflection. The question could have been nothing, but the way Kang asked it told me this was something he really wanted to know. And that told me his network had a hole in it.
I thought over what Kim had said about the Chinese. The file I’d read in the windowless room had contained page after page about Chinese penetration into the country-agents operating under different sorts of cover, defectors being fed back in, agents of influence in the security services. “Worried,” I said, “but not as much as I would have guessed. He thinks he has a handle on it.”
“A handle. He has a handle on China. Mull that over a little. I’ll be interested in what you conclude. And while you’re at it, think about what you were doing in Macau.”
“I was putting the Macau police off the scent. It’s not like they had a click-clack case.”
“Click-clack.” Kang closed his eyes and thought a moment. “You were talking to Luís.”
“You know Luís?”
“Luís helped me with a complicated funding issue some years ago.”
“That’s funny. He told me he couldn’t even launder his shirts.”
Kang smiled. “Luís knows more about laundering money than anyone alive or dead.”
“Tell me that he’s not MSS.”
“Luís? Not anymore. He and discipline don’t do well together. They transferred him to the police, where they figured he couldn’t do any harm.”
“When I was in Pyongyang, someone told me I don’t even know what I don’t know.”
“True.”
“So, maybe you can tell me. What don’t I know?”
Kang moved his coat and sat down on the sofa. “I’ll give you the thirty-second version. Two years ago, the center, aging and unwell, decided that by 2017 he wanted to achieve a first-stage unity between the two Koreas.” Kang turned around and yelled toward the kitchen, “Kulov, bring another glass and some of your awful vodka.”
Kulov appeared with both items. He put them on the table in front of Kang, nodded to me, and returned to the kitchen.
Kang poured a few drops for himself and a few for me. “Kulov keeps the vodka hidden, but I know where it is. Cheers, Inspector.”