“My leadership? I left five years ago, Major, and you know it. I’m not privy to their thinking, past or present. Ask them yourself.”
“That’s exactly what I intend to do. Why don’t you come along? I’m sure they’ll be interested in what you have to say.”
“Me?” I wasn’t about to get myself into those airless rooms trailing behind Major Kim. “No, thank you. Anyway, it won’t do your case any good having me in tow. I’ll diminish your stature. They were never crazy about me.”
“I thought they liked your grandfather.”
“They made him a Hero of the Revolution, but I am nobody. That was my goal in life, and I achieved it.”
“I’ve decided to shorten your leash, Inspector. For the past few weeks, I’ve given you a lot of room to roam. I thought it would help you adjust to what is happening. I even entrusted you with a sensitive assignment as a way of our building confidence. It was an experiment. It had to be tried, but as of now, this minute, it’s over. We’re switching to something completely different, an approach advertised to be effective in breaking wild horses. Maybe it will work in your case, too. For the next week, two weeks, as long as I can spare the manpower, someone is going to be with you every second. If you move, they move. Go right, they’ll be next to you. Go left, they’ll be there waiting. I’m telling you this so you won’t be tempted to do something stupid.” Kim stood up and went to the door. A man appeared, the thin man. He stared at Kim, then turned his gaze on me.
“I thought you said you didn’t know who he was.”
“Since when do I owe you the truth?” Kim indicated the man should stand next to my chair. “This is your new friend,” Kim said to me. “You and he will be inseparable. He’s one of mine, but he knows this place pretty well.”
I nodded at my new friend.
“You’re plotting again, Inspector. Don’t.” Kim turned to the thin man. “Your instructions are bare-bones simple. Do not let him out of your sight. Not for a second. No excuses.” He seemed to weigh what to say next. “None.”
3
Once Kim left, the thin man took a seat across from me. That’s when, out of the blue, it came to me.
“I’ve figured it out,” I said. “People who stare are special. That’s how my grandfather put it-special. He said if someone gave you a Baltic stare, it meant you would have good luck for a year. That was the term he used-‘Baltic stare.’ He didn’t know why it was called that, but he had heard it when he was in Russia, and the name stuck. How about it? Let’s have a real Baltic stare. I need some luck.”
No response, an empty lighthouse on a windswept coast. Well, I thought with some disappointment, might as well pick at the scab you have rather than the one you hoped to find. “Ever been to Estonia?”
He didn’t react to that, either, and I wondered if we were going to have trouble communicating. As I was drawing a breath to repeat the question, he said evenly, “Why don’t you just shut up? I’m not supposed to let you out of my sight, but that doesn’t mean I have to listen.”
“Right,” I said. I closed my eyes for a minute or two. “What’s a Soprano state? Kim used the term. You know what he meant?”
“Fuck off.”
We lapsed into more silence. “How about Latvia?” I asked at last. “I was in Riga once. Talk about fog! I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.” I held my hand up and opened my eyes. “No wonder people look like they’re staring into nothing. The fog can do funny things with sound, too. Did you notice? It muffles everything. Even the train was delayed; they couldn’t find the tracks. I was glad to leave, no offense.”
“I’m not Latvian.” The man glared at me. “Do I look Latvian to you? What the hell do I care if a Latvian train was delayed?”
“Well, Kim said you were one of his. But he uses that phrase so much it starts to lose any real content. Besides, there are still Koreans in Latvia; did you know that? Or there were a few years ago. Most likely Stalin put them there. He shuffled Koreans around a lot, like cards in a crazy deck. I’d guess they made their way back to the motherland by now. Did you come with them? It must have been an emotional moment, uniting again with the nation, women weeping, flags flying, and so forth. I guess they gave you some sort of welcome home money, compensation, pocket change so you could get around. Or am I wrong?”
As I spoke, the thin man was transformed before my eyes into a block of granite. How he willed his entire being into this unmovable, unresponsive mass was the sort of thing that might have intrigued me when I was still working in the Ministry. In those days, I often wondered how during interrogations people became inanimate without warning. It seemed to me it was a defense mechanism and my job was to find a way to break it down. Now, I could care less if he turned into the Taj Mahal.
In fact, I was never much taken with stones. Other kids would skip them in the pond, or throw them at birds. My grandfather thought rocks were a nuisance, a blight on the earth, and he infused me with the same worldview. He would not even let us have an inkstone in the house. He sharpened his axe on a whetstone only rarely, and then with an expression of obvious distaste. “Look at this,” he’d say as the sparks flew. “When one hard thing meets another, you get nothing but sorrow.”
“Diamonds are hard,” I said to him once, wanting to see his reaction.
“So what if they are?” he countered. He was studying a piece of corkwood he’d found. “Damnedest wood,” he said, holding it up to the light. “Might as well build something out of air.”
“Diamonds, if you go back far enough,” I said, “come from trees, ancient trees.”
“I don’t give a damn about ancient trees.” He looked at me sharply. “Pigs eat corn that grows in the dirt. Do I eat dirt? Use your head.”
“It was in a book; that’s all.”
“Listen, I’m telling you that we don’t know about ancient trees any better than we know about ancient kings,” he said. “What we know is this day, right now, and you,” he pointed at me, but not with the ragged urgency that sometimes took hold of his being, “you are going to have to pay attention to each day as it comes. You’ll have to pay attention more than I ever did. Don’t let them tell you about the glory kingdoms of the past, old rotten trees that they want to make into diamonds. Did you ever see a tree that thought it was a diamond? Well, did you, boy?” There it was, the “they” my grandfather used on rare occasions, and only when we were alone. I never asked what he meant; I didn’t have to.