“No. You won’t be doing any guessing, Inspector. There’s no margin here for that. I move according to stone-cold facts. And that’s what you will do from now on, too.” He shrugged. “Confused? I suggested to you last night that facts are inconvenient, but so is reality. Facts may be a problem, but reality is a killer. There’s no way around reality, in my experience. Admittedly, you seem to have spent a lifetime avoiding it.”
3
“Let me get this straight.” I reached in my pocket for a piece of pine.
The major frowned. “What’s that? One of those wood chips you carry around?”
“This?” I held it up for him to see. “It’s pine, that’s all, a very uncomplicated wood. It helps me think uncomplicated thoughts. Nothing threatening about it, don’t worry. It won’t explode or anything.”
“Uncomplicated thoughts? By all means, Inspector, let’s keep things simple. Maybe I should pass out some of that wood to my staff. Do you have more?”
I considered that. “No, I don’t think it would do any good. What works for me might not work for them.”
“And what work is that? More adducing of the evidence assembled so far? Is this a reflection of your training or your temperament, Inspector?”
“The three dogs at the long table last night knew who you are. Paul the pliant waiter has a reasonably good idea. Everyone around here knows, I take it. Everyone but me.”
“Not everyone. Let’s say everyone that matters.”
“So, do I matter?” I got up and walked over to the window. The view told me nothing. It was an inner courtyard with two wooden benches, a few flowerpots with bright yellow mums, and a stone fountain made to look like a mountain waterfall, but it wasn’t turned on. The sky above the courtyard was still dark, but there was soft lighting around the fountain to illuminate the scene. “Must be pleasant, hearing the sound of water. It soothes the nerves; do you think that’s why they put it there? Very stressful, I imagine, working here. This office, for example, it must have been for someone with real power. Whose was it?” I looked at the windows across the way. The curtains were closed. It reminded me of the Operations Building across the courtyard from my old office. Our courtyard had no flowerpots and no fountain. We made do with three old gingko trees and a pile of bricks. “Before you moved in, who had this building?”
“You don’t know?”
“Never been here. Never even been near here, I don’t think. I never had much to do with buildings surrounded by tanks.”
“Let’s just say that whoever was in these offices has moved. They were happy to pack up when they were offered something better.”
“You’re not going to tell me.”
“At the moment, you wouldn’t be interested even if I did, because you wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”
“I might.”
“No, Inspector, I’m quite serious. This building was for a group formed after you left. Or is ‘retired’ the term we’re supposed to use?” I didn’t rise to that crummy piece of bait. “The group was put together for a very specific purpose. That purpose has been overtaken by events. A lot has happened since you left.”
“People keep telling me that.”
“Perhaps you should pay attention.”
I went back to the brown chair. There was no way to relax in it, no way to strike a pose of nonchalance in front of Kim. “I’m listening. I’m not going to interrupt. Sit and absorb-will that suffice?”
“We want you to take charge of a camp.” The idea came out of nowhere. It might have been better phrased, probably more effective, if he’d led up to it. But maybe he figured that the direct approach would catch me off balance. It did.
Sitting down again had been a big mistake, I realized. I should have remained standing. That way I could have walked out the door as soon as I heard him-out the door, down the walkway, over the hills, anywhere but here. But now I was sitting, and getting out of the chair would take those few extra few drops of will that his words had bled out of me in the hurry. Kim didn’t add anything. He watched the reflection on the desktop, waiting for my reaction.
“You mean you haven’t disbanded the camps?” The question was so obvious it was beside the point.
“No, not yet.” Kim looked up at me in a curious way. “It’s way too soon for that, don’t you agree?”
It must have been a stray note in his voice that rang the bell. That’s what he wanted; he wanted me to say yes to something-anything. Get a “yes” into the conversation, a tiny crack in the door. One single spark of assent, that’s all it took to light the fire. I’d nearly forgotten. I’d grown stale, up on a mountaintop forgetting everything I had ever learned, while he had been in this office, sharpening his technique every day. He was better than I thought, and that meant he was dangerous.
Kim appeared relaxed, but I could sense he was wondering if he’d moved a half step too fast. That’s why he followed up when he should have stayed quiet, let the idea simmer. “The camps, as you can understand, are a very delicate problem. We did try to disband a couple, but things turned disruptive. There were too many people walking around with too many bad stories. We don’t want an increase in negative feeling toward the current regime, do we?” He smiled to himself, a sarcastic smile, a smile that said he could afford to be ironic on this question because he was sitting behind the polished desk and I was not. “Negative feeling-that wouldn’t be very helpful. Besides, we had experience running our own camps not so many years ago, you know. And we’ve also learned from what other people have done, as well, to get ourselves ready for this situation. Running prison camps isn’t easy; neither is getting rid of them. So much complaining! No one approves of them. No one wants to touch them. But, everybody gets their feet wet sooner or later. It’s unavoidable. The result is, there’s a large body of experience to draw from.”
“Which means?”
“Which means we’re improving the conditions a little at a time, retraining your guards, instituting new rules. But the camps themselves stay, for a while anyway. We figure what they need is leadership.” This time he gave himself an extra beat for pacing. “That’s you. You have the credentials, grandson of a Hero of the Republic and all that.”
“What about the Prison Bureau? Are you going to leave those psychopaths in place?”
“How comforting to know you never agreed with what was going on in those offices, Inspector! A little rearranging is in the works; I can tell you that much. A replacement here and there.”
“This is the little problem you wanted me to fix?”
He said nothing. I looked at my bowl of soup. My grandfather had made soup every morning, relentlessly, without fail. Every 6:00 A.M., there it was, even in the heat of summer-soup. I pushed the bowl away. That’s why I was here, nothing to do with prisons. They needed my grandfather; they needed his blessing from the grave. Good luck, I thought. They weren’t going to get it, not through me.