The waiter came over to the table to see if we needed anything else. Kang waved him away.
I continued. “Almost as soon as our boy disappeared from Pyongyang, there was a frantic search. Alerts went out. He had to be found. And he was. I still don’t know how. You said it could have been that someone saw him walking around. Maybe. Or maybe you have a problem in your organization.”
“I can do without the free advice, Inspector. We’ll leave it where you put it-he was found, and we don’t yet know how. You said something about a trap.”
“Once he was found, a decision was made to make sure he never came back. It was a quick decision, almost instantaneous. It was one of those things that came out of nowhere. No one thought about it. The opportunity was too good to pass up, not merely because it was a chance to eliminate him physically, but because his reputation-and everything he stood for-could be destroyed as well.”
“Let’s not deal in ciphers, Inspector. You think you know who made this nondecision. Throw that in the mix.”
“You told me Major Kim wanted to destroy his reputation. I’ve had enough to do with Kim over the past several weeks to think he wouldn’t stop at that. And if he had second thoughts on murder-which he would-Zhao would have convinced him it could be done without danger. It was merely a question of activating certain connections, bringing to bear certain resources. Zhao knew people who were very good at what they did, and took pleasure in their work. They were on call. Yes, it was a challenge to carry this off on such short notice, but the greater the challenge, the more intense the pleasure. Have you ever seen Zhao’s eyes glow in the dark? Phone calls were made, probably to Russia. An order was placed. Money transferred. On the evening of October thirteenth, the goods showed up at Hong Kong Airport-a Korean-Russian who was unusually good with a knife.”
“Full stop, Inspector. You’re telling me Zhao put out this order? Not Kim?”
“Does it matter?”
“It might.”
“Then you’ll have to pursue it on your own. I have no way of knowing for sure. Kim is basically weak. If there hadn’t been someone to push him along, he wouldn’t have gone ahead with any of the murders on his own, not this one or the ones that followed. You want me to keep going?”
Kang nodded. “Do you have a name for this Korean-Russian killer?”
“Tanya.”
“You’re sure?”
“You asked for a name, Kang. That’s the name I came up with.”
“How? How would you know that? Did you meet this person?”
“No. But I got close.”
“How?”
“Pork buns. There was an MSS officer who kept an eye on the Russian prostitutes. He had lists of the girls, what they wore, how they worked, whether they had any clients that were on the watch alerts. Mostly, things were routine, so he ate pork buns and snoozed. Past midnight on October fourteenth, he noticed a new girl, a blonde. She didn’t dress like the others, didn’t walk like them, and only worked for a few hours before she disappeared. He never saw her again. He has an agreement with the Russian pimp who runs that group to be kept up to date on new faces. Who was the blond girl? The pimp was real nervous, said he’d only taken her on as a favor for a friend, but she was strange and he didn’t want her to scare away clients. He said her name was Tanya.”
“Tanya. I should have known.”
Kang knew Tanya? I felt like I had stepped off the continental shelf.
“After she killed him,” Kang was feeling his way here, “they killed her?”
“Yes, only it wasn’t a her. She was a he.”
“Tanya was a him?” Kang looked stunned. “You know this?”
“No, but I’m willing to bet. Someone with our boy’s appearance was on the ferry from the airport the thirteenth. He wouldn’t have gone to the airport, but the killer might have come from there. He came in as a male, maybe actually as a Korean from Russia, though the passport was probably fake. That’s getting to be depressing, all of the phony passports. Why do we bother with them?”
“Forget passports. What about the killer?”
“After he landed in Macau, he went somewhere to change. I don’t know where, but I think I know who helped him. He was on the streets for a couple of hours. After that, he showed up at the Hotel Nam Lo, trooping up and down the stairs a few times to make sure the front desk clerk didn’t miss him. Her.”
“How do you know this?”
“Someone told me, someone who had no reason to lie. They didn’t say it in so many words, because they didn’t know what they were telling me. And I didn’t know what they were telling me at the time.”
“This whole theory has a lot of supposition.”
“Life is uncertain, Kang, and theories have holes. That’s the way it is. Maybe it doesn’t seem to hang together because the plan wasn’t thought out ahead of time. As I said, the whole thing was probably put together in the hurry. They had a skill set that had to be matched with physical attribution, but basically they would take what they could get-essentially, any assassin who answered the phone and didn’t mind wearing a wig. They must have danced around the room when they came up with Tanya. They made clear that for full payment, it had to be a quick and dirty job-very dirty. They wanted a lot of blood. That had to be part of the story. Depravity piled on depravity. Yes, and when it was done, they killed him. Her.”
“Why?”
“Panic maybe, though in this case, I wouldn’t rule out bloodlust. Someone should check to see if the Macau police located the lungs.”
“Both sets?”
“Good point. There should be enough body parts for two-I wouldn’t bet on all the right parts, though. This case is so weird, I wouldn’t be surprised if the autopsy reports mention an extra set of arms.”
The waiter had moved into hearing distance. He had turned very pale. Kang waved him away, again.
“The thing that still puzzles me,” I said, “is how they got both bodies out. The tapes from the hallway security cameras showed someone leaving with two suitcases. How could he walk out pulling luggage that contained his own torso? Another thing, our boy only had one suitcase when he checked in. Where do you suppose the extra came from? I think someone supplied it afterwards. I think I know who.”
“You saw the tapes?”
“No, but I think I will-soon. What happens now?”
“A lot of uncertainty. A whole lot.” Kang drummed his fingers on the table. “A whole fucking lot.”
“I’ve been wondering, who benefits? And I’m not talking about motive exactly. Think about it. No one benefits, but everyone benefits. When you lay everything on this fancy tablecloth, it’s just the least bad of all the possible outcomes for a lot of people. I’d say that if you trim the fat, you end up with three basic possibilities.”