Bamboo and Blood Read online

  “No, not if you’re not,” I said. I kept walking.

  “It would be better if you stayed in your plain little hotel, don’t you think? Things can happen to people at this hour, even in Switzerland.”

  “I felt restless, that’s all. Against one of your tidy laws?”

  Another man came out from a darkened doorway, turned suddenly, and walked quickly away.

  “Friend of yours?” M. Beret stopped and pulled a small pistol from his pocket. Then he spoke softly into a tiny radio. I stopped, too, and looked for a convenient place to hide if someone started shooting. Whatever this was, it wasn’t my fight, not as far as I knew. “You’ll remember”—M. Beret sounded somewhat annoyed—“I said that you’d be like a flower attracting bees. Well, that was a bee. You should stay off the phone; too many people on the other end.”

  “I wasn’t on the phone, but I’ll bear it in mind. You wouldn’t know any bars around here, would you? Now I’m not so restless, but I’m getting thirsty. Walking at night does that to me.”

  “Are you kidding? Nothing is open at this hour. Your brother isn’t here, if that’s who you’re looking for.”

  I digested this.

  “He had too much to drink at dinner, and his friends carried him back to his hotel on Rue Puits-St-Pierre. Not a very friendly man, your brother. He seems to think highly of himself, though; keeps his clothes clean and pressed.” M. Beret stared at my shoes, which were well worn. “He’s staying in a pretty nice place, not like the cracker box you’re in.” We had resumed walking, with less of a sense of urgency. M. Beret looked at me sideways. “You mad because I’m criticizing a family member?”

  “I’m just thirsty.”

  “I suggest you try the bottled water in your hotel. That’s all my budget will support tonight.”

  2

  “You’re not bamboo, you can’t just bend in the wind. You’re flesh and blood, much as you hate to admit it. And you will bleed like the rest of us when it comes to that.”

  “I’m surprised you even recognize the concept of bending, or stopped long enough to look at bamboo, for that matter.”

  My brother was still pale from too much alcohol, but nothing seemed to affect his air of nasty superiority. “I found out a little about what you’re doing here,” he said. “It’s crap.”

  “In contrast to your mission, no doubt one of extreme urgency—so urgent that you had to drink yourself into a coma.” His hotel room was bigger than mine. The bed was large enough for a whole family. I looked into the bathroom. A nice bar of soap. A little bottle of shampoo. Fresh towels everywhere. M. Beret was right, my hotel didn’t measure up to this.

  “I’m not answerable to you, or to anyone that you will ever deal with. Don’t forget that.” My brother slumped against the wall and closed his eyes. “Did you wait for me in Coppet?”

  “Briefly. I was joined not only by an unknown figure that walked quickly into the shadows but also by the Swiss service, which already knew you were falling-down drunk and wouldn’t show up.” I gave him an extra few seconds for that information to get past the last vestiges of alcohol before continuing. “They don’t like us.”

  My brother laughed, softly. “No one likes us. Fuck them all.”

  “Yes, but they all have food. Perhaps you’re too busy drinking to notice.”

  “Food?” His eyes opened slightly. “Is that what you’re here for, to crawl and beg for food? I’ll bet that bastard Sohn is behind this. Sure, he picked you for the annoyance factor. He knew you’d run into me out here. He must have planned it. This is his way of getting my goat. He didn’t mention I’d be here, did he?”

  “You two don’t get along, I take it.” My estimation of Sohn was climbing with every throb in the vein in my brother’s forehead.

  “Sohn has no authority to send people like you overseas. None. Pretty soon, he won’t have the authority to flush the toilet. Let me see your orders.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Let me see them.”

  “I don’t have any. Can you believe it? Completely paperless.” I held up two empty hands. He didn’t have to hear about Sohn’s instructions to me. They weren’t written down, so they weren’t exactly orders. “My orders were transmitted directly to the mission, apparently. I’ve never seen them.” This was true. “No one bothered to tell me until I arrived that I’m here as part of the delegation to the talks.” Not true, but the truth was none of his business. “How do you like that? Your brother, the diplomat.”

  “You?” He snorted. “You? You don’t know the first thing about diplomacy.” The phone rang. My brother cursed and grabbed it. “What is it?” He listened. “Alright, as many loaves as you can get. Yes, bakery bread is best. Yes, immediately.” He slammed down the receiver. “I can’t talk to you right now. Meet me tonight.” He wrote an address on a piece of paper and stuffed it in my pocket.

  “This time you show up, you hear me? I’m not at your beck and call.” I was at my limit. Five minutes was the maximum I could take, talking to him. “And make sure you pick a spot that won’t be swarming with police.” Whatever he was doing here, it was something that had to be conducted in code. My brother didn’t like bread, not of any kind.

  3

  “Did anything happen?” The meeting had just ended. It had gone on for a little more than two hours. I spent most of the time watching the pale light from the bank of windows that stretched along the opposite wall. Curious, I thought, the way nature provided for eyelids, but not lids for the ears. Ear lids could have been hidden, so no one would have known. When you shut your eyes, it was obvious to everyone. But ear lids could have been covert. With your eyes open but your ears closed, you could have sat for hours with no one the wiser.

  Short of going into a trance, it was impossible to shut out the drone of the negotiations. Their side said something, then our side said something else. Yes, no, not at all, let me repeat, just in case you misunderstand, I’ll say it once again if it would help, we seem to be going over the same ground, perhaps we should take a break. If progress was a rabbit, it was nailed through both feet to the middle of the big table between the two delegations. It was going nowhere.

  Mr. Roh closed his notebook. “Happen? We got through another session, and nothing went wrong. That’s in the target area. It got us to lunch, which means we have a three-hour respite from more lectures about how we shouldn’t be faxing blueprints to anyone the Americans don’t happen to like.”

  “You’re not telling me we’re going to meet again today?”

  “My, oh my, you really were tuned out, weren’t you? We agreed to resume at three o’clock. Meanwhile, we’re supposed to pretend to be contacting Pyongyang for instructions. They’re supposed to pretend they are waiting for us to consider their latest offer. In addition, they graciously invited us to a reception at five thirty. That means more crackers and bits of dry cheese. Don’t worry, we’ll make excuses for your not attending.”

  “I’m sure no one will miss me.” In the first blush of battle, I had insisted to the delegation leader I needed to attend all of the functions. Such foolishness.

  “True, no one will miss you.”

  It was a challenge of sorts, but Mr. Roh was a puppy and I didn’t have time to deal with small dogs. “I’ve got other things to do,” I said. Going to the reception might be the opportunity I needed to pass the message, but then again, probably not. There would be no chance to speak alone to anyone on the American delegation, and I couldn’t very well stand at the table with the little plate of grapes and pass a note saying, “We’re crazy and will go even more nuts if you don’t give us food.” As far as I could tell, Sohn had been right about one thing. There didn’t seem to be any danger of the talks succeeding, even if they lasted several more days. A lot of fixed stares across the table, an occasional frown, and then break for lunch, or coffee, or a trip to the bathroom. During lunch, I could write another report for Sohn. Before that, I needed to take a stroll. First things first. Geneva
was boring, but at least there was plenty of air.

  I set out down the narrow street in front of the mission, heading to the main road that ran beside the lake. A few reporters camped outside the gate looked up when I walked by. One of them shouted a question in Japanese and the others laughed, but no one followed me. When I reached the lake, I turned and walked along the shore in the direction of town. It would have been nice just to walk without thinking about anything, but you can’t think about nothing if that’s what you want to do. Things started slipping over the barriers and pretty soon they were running through my mind. At the front of the pack was my brother’s appearance. That disturbed me most of all. There wasn’t much doubt that he and Sohn despised each other. I didn’t care if they tore each other to shreds, but I wanted to be on another continent when they did it. I never believed anything my brother said, but he was probably right about one thing—Sohn must have known we’d run across each other in Geneva. My brother was a shark; that made me, in Sohn’s eyes, a tasty bit of chum. Maybe this whole story about passing a message to the Americans was fantasy, and the real purpose of my being sent here was to get my brother to lunge at a barbed hook. Sohn seemed to have something to do with the Israelis. My brother was selling missiles. Here we were again—another tab A and slot B.

  When I arrived at the statue of the naked lady, I stopped and looked up. Her backside faced the park. I took that as a sign and crossed the street. The park looked quiet, a good place to sit and think. Unlike the trees along the streets, the ones in the park were allowed to grow. The setting wasn’t what you would call wild. There was a plan to it; the paths wandered in a convincingly natural way, as they were meant to. Halfway up the long slope leading to a large house, there was an enormous plane tree towering above everything else, as if all the energy of the plane trees outside, the ones whose tops had been lopped off and had been forced to grow low and squat, had concentrated into this one tree. Across the lawn, there were big oaks, big maples—it was just the sort of place my grandfather would have wanted to come for an October afternoon, when the sky was blue and the first leaves, the eager ones that did not want to wait, had begun to turn. But it wasn’t October, it was mid-February and cold. Past an enormous pine tree with branches that grew just barely above the ground, I found a bench that looked out in the distance to the lake and, much nearer, a rose garden. When I sat down, I let my eyes take a slow tour around. No one seemed to be following me. M. Beret’s people were somewhere nearby, but for once they stayed out of sight.

  On the far side of the lake, low clouds obscured the tops of the hills. They weren’t much to look at anyway. A signboard next to the bench said that farther inside the park were Roman ruins. I didn’t want to see ruins. I didn’t want to think about ruins. Suddenly, it was lonely in the park, and I didn’t want to be there. I walked back down the hill to the street. The clouds had rolled in, and it was starting to rain.

  Halfway across one of the bridges that joined the two sections of the city, I stopped and looked down into the water. Footsteps came up beside me. I wasn’t in the mood to entertain guests. The rain had become serious, a winter rain that kept itself just this side of snow.

  “Thinking of climbing over the side?” The Man with Three Fingers had turned so his back was against the railing. “Don’t let me stop you.”

  “Well, if it isn’t the Mexican Jumping Bean. Did you buy yourself a watch yet, or are you late for your next appointment?”

  “No, I’m right on time. Right place, right time. And you, Inspector? Everything squared away?” He put the collar up on his coat. “You should check the weather forecast before you go out on these walks of yours. You’re not dressed for this.”

  “I tell you what.” I made a show of going through my pockets as the water streamed down my face. “How about I give you a detailed itinerary of my plans for the next several days? That way you won’t have to hang around out in bad weather, shadowing me. You can just pick a spot and I’ll be there, right on time. Twice a day should do it, don’t you think? Shall we set that as the goal?”

  “Goal? Inspector, my goal isn’t to see you twice a day. It’s not to see you at all, ever.”

  “And you think that’s doable?”

  “Oh, it’s doable, alright. Just a question of time.” He pushed himself away from the railing and brushed against me. “Well, take it easy, comrade. Buy a hat or something. Green felt is on sale this time of year. See you around.”

  He walked back in the direction I had come, toward the mission. I waited until he was out of sight. I was already so wet, it didn’t make any sense to hurry. There was a café open just at the end of the bridge. It looked quiet enough. The coffee had just been set in front of me when M. Beret sat down at the next table. He had a large umbrella, which he hung on the back of his chair. “A good afternoon to you, Inspector. You look a little damp. Go ahead and drink something hot. Do you take sugar in your coffee? Of course you do, one spoonful, then you stir it slowly, counterclockwise. Usually five times, six if you are feeling pensive. You don’t drink espresso. Well, once you did, but after a single sip you made a face, a very funny face, and left the rest of the cup. Brioche?” He took a croissant from his pocket and tore it in half.

  “That’s not a brioche. I know the difference.”

  M. Beret laughed. “Good for you, Inspector. Those talks, the ones that make your eyes glaze over, are almost wrapped up, I hear. Whatever you came to do, you’ll have to hurry because it seems that so far, you’ve gotten nothing done.” He pointed a finger at me. “If the talks end, then what? What is your final report going to look like? All those miles, all that travel money, all for nothing? Perhaps I could help. Should we conspire? Eh?”

  I stirred my coffee, three times. “Is your service so short of things to do that the chief has time to follow me around personally? Nothing more important?”

  “Three times, unusual, must be when you are agitated. Or wet.” He took out a notebook and wrote something down. “It’s not that I’m meticulous in all things, Inspector. But I want to take you apart like a Swiss watch, lay out all the pieces and examine them. Tick tock tick tock. What makes your machinery work? Things are grim at home these days, I take it. Tick tock tick tock. Pretty soon these talks you’re in will end, and you’ll be ordered back to your fatherland. Tick tock tick tock. What then?”

  I took off my watch and dropped it in the coffee. “I’m sure I’ll think of something,” I said and walked out. The gesture made me feel good for a couple of minutes, but then I wished I had drunk the coffee. It had started to snow.

  4

  I spent the rest of the day in my room, trying to warm up. When I called the mission to find out whether we were on schedule for the afternoon session, they told me the “instructions” hadn’t arrived yet and everything was postponed until tomorrow. I could almost hear M. Beret’s listeners scratching notes on a pad: “Instructions late.” The delayed arrival of nonexistent diplomatic traffic suited me. About three o’clock the maid knocked at the door, but I told her to go away. I kept the curtains shut, though it didn’t much matter, there wasn’t any sun anyway. Shortly before dusk the snow stopped. It drizzled for a few minutes, but then the clouds decided to call it a day and drifted off toward France. When night fell, I put on my shoes and went down the stairs to the tiny lobby. The girl behind the desk looked up. “Are you sick?”

  “No. I need another bar of soap. The little one you gave me has dissolved.”

  “You were in your room all afternoon. Maybe you feel sick.”

  “No, I feel fine.”

  “Because if you are sick, we might have to get a doctor. I hope you don’t have one of those Asian flu bugs.”

  “Thank you for your concern.”

  “Because if you do have one of those Asian bugs, we’ll have to clean everything in your room, and for that we’ll have to pay the maid extra. She’s Romanian, and she knows the law. It could be quite a bother.” I left before she could spin out the rest of the
complaint.

  This time my brother was waiting for me in the darkness. “There’s a bench down the way, where the street bends. We can sit and talk, probably for about five minutes before the Swiss show up. That will be long enough if you don’t interrupt me.”

  “Good, let’s get it over with. Maybe we won’t have to see each other again.”

  It was a quiet street, but then again, they were all quiet. The bench sat by itself in a small park, about thirty meters from the nearest house. The paving stones were uneven in places, but mostly the place was tidy and well kept; but then, so was almost everything in Geneva.

  The night mist was just settling through the trees when I heard a car stop; the engine wheezed before it died. My brother appeared and sat down, frowning. “We don’t have five minutes after all. We have two minutes. Check your watch.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You have been sent here by people who no longer enjoy the confidence of the Center. Your mission is terminated.”