The Gentleman from Japan Read online

Po shook his head. “You should get a housekeeper or something to look after the old man. Make it easy on yourself.”

  “We had a housekeeper. In fact, we already had three this year. They can’t stand it. They say my uncle is from another planet, and no amount of money will induce them to stay.”

  “But he’s still with it, right?” Po tapped his finger on his temple. “All there, from what I hear.”

  “And what exactly do you hear?”

  “Just this and that, Major. Nothing special. Yanji is still like a small town, and we keep our ears open.”

  “That’s good, Po. If your ears hear any more explosions going off, let me know. Otherwise, no reason to keep me up to date on your investigation, unless you run across signs of a noodle bomb. Thanks for dinner.”

  “What about some cooperation? You have a new deputy, don’t you? He’ll be useless for a few weeks. Why not send him over to me for a couple of days? I’d be grateful.”

  As far as I could tell, the new deputy would be useless to me for more than a few weeks, but I didn’t want the locals poaching on my staff. It set a bad precedent. Anyway, Tang might pick up a few bad local habits, and that would only make things worse. He already seemed to have brought along baggage from his previous assignment that I was going to have to pitch overboard.

  “Sorry, Po, nothing I can do for you right now. You handle the mayor; he’s the stone in your shoe. I have problems of my own. We’ll be in touch again next week, sooner if something big comes up. I’ll keep my eyes open, though I doubt if there is anything in this business that falls under my jurisdiction.”

  “What about the tourist? Foreigners are in your jurisdiction, aren’t they?”

  “I’m specifically enjoined by Beijing from dealing with anything that has blue eyes. Headquarters has its reasons, I suppose. Good night.”

  I decided to swing back to the office, but the long way, not through Fuzhou Alley. A good walk would give me time to think, and with luck, Uncle O would be asleep by the time I finally got home. He’d sleep most of the morning, then about noon drift into his workshop to plan bookshelves for the rest of the day. He planned more than he built, but he had built plenty in the three years he’d lived in my back room. I told him to stop until we found a way to deal with the ones already stacked up around the house. Besides which, we could barely afford the lumber. On this, as on almost everything else, he ignored me.

  Back at the office, I went into the file room to see if there was anything on the owner of the dirty restaurant. There was nothing on the owner, but at the very back of one of the cabinets was something better—an old-style piece of folded cardboard containing a single yellowed paper with entries on both sides, typed on an old typewriter. According to the paper, the place had been a large and prosperous silk shop during the Japanese occupation. Soviet Red Army troops had looted it when they came through in 1945. It was looted again and partially burned down when the Kuomintang troops hurriedly left town in 1948. The PLA took possession of what was left of the building and turned it into a local police headquarters. During the war in Korea a small wing to the main building and an underground storehouse were added, turning it into an intelligence base, which doubled as a medical supply station when the fighting got heavy. It remained in the army’s hands until the Cultural Revolution, when gangs of Red Guards, who terrorized the Korean autonomous region and ran roughshod through Yanji, took it as their base of operations and an interrogation center that was broken up into a series of small underground torture cells. When things returned to normal in the mid-1970s, there was another fire, this time burning the back half of the building to the ground. The last entry on the paper noted that in 1979 the place became a restaurant whose full ownership, very curiously, could never be determined. The only operating certificate dated back to 1985, which meant it had expired several times over. I was tempted to close the place down on security grounds, but decided to leave well enough alone for the moment.

  The second file I wanted to see was on the noodle shop where the three old men had been found dead. Whether they had actually died there, I didn’t know. I also didn’t know exactly what I was looking for in the file. Mostly, I wanted to make doubly sure that seven local deaths, more if Po was right, weren’t going to cause me trouble I didn’t need. The noodle shop’s file was fuller than the first one because for some time we’d had a low-level watch on the Uighur who supposedly ran the place. Uighurs were rare up here in the northeast. They were from the western fringe of the empire, not Han people, largely Muslim, and considered more and more by Beijing to be troublemakers. Uighurs thought China was occupying their land, oppressing them. I didn’t have to make a judgment on that, so I didn’t. All I knew was we were supposed to keep an eye on them if they showed up in our area, so that’s what we did. Alert bulletins from Headquarters arrived at least once a month to remind us in case we forgot.

  In the file there were several elliptical reports about characters we didn’t like moving in and out of the restaurant, taking an overly long time with their noodles, leaving newspapers they hadn’t read on the tables when they walked out without paying their bills. It was one of only three noodle shops in Yanji that an ex-triad chief who called himself Mike hadn’t put the arm on. The two other shops which he hadn’t touched were both run by the Russian mafia. We knew Mike was afraid of the Russians. We also knew he was looking for new opportunities. Noodle shops were small potatoes.

  We’d sent the file on the Uighur’s place to Beijing for review along with a request for a technical team to be sent up to wire the place. The file and the request sat there for nearly half a year, and then three months ago the file had come back with a note: “No interest.” That surprised me. It also annoyed me enough that I hadn’t lifted the watch. How the Uighur left town without my knowing it was something I needed to find out, assuming he had actually left town. I didn’t have to close the place. Three dead customers would probably be enough to queer the business for a while.

  The file on the upscale hotel where the chef had been making a sauce while his sole customer keeled over was missing. There was no recent signature on the checkout sheet. The last record was from three years ago, signed out to my former deputy. “Former” because he had been shot in the head by a local gangster working for someone—another of our local thugs—my uncle had soon afterward tossed into the hold of a coal freighter. My uncle hadn’t actually done the tossing himself, but he was the proximate cause. Both of the thugs—the gangster and his boss—had been in Mike’s employ; they were supposed to pass along to him whatever money they got from whatever rackets they ran, minus what they thought they could keep without his finding out. What Mike did with his money I didn’t know. He didn’t throw it around. He only had a shabby apartment in Yanji, which was his base for shaking down noodle shops throughout the northeast.

  The only thing I like less than the triads, even ex-triads, is missing files. I made a mental note to ask the file clerk if she had any idea what was going on in her file room.

  That was enough for one night. I was going out the front door when the duty officer glanced my way.

  “Anything up, Major? You’re here late, or early depending on how you look at it. The sun will be up before you know it.”

  “Late,” I said. “I’m here late. Have you looked at the duty log recently? We’re hemorrhaging diners.”

  “Yeah, I heard about it when I ate before I came in.”

  “Oh? Where was that?”

  “My usual place, an Indian restaurant. It’s called the Bay Leaf, very artsy interior.”

  “And the food?”

  “Some people call it ‘curry from hell.’ It’s OK if you need to sweat.”

  “What was the rumor?”

  “Someone is poisoning restaurants to get them to pay protection money.”

  “Nice theory.” I stepped over to the duty desk. “Too simple. By the way, there’s a file missing.”

  “Uh-oh.” The duty officer knew what I thought abo
ut the sanctity of the file room. “Want me to do anything? Look around for it?”

  “Just keep your bottom glued to that chair until your relief arrives. And answer the phone, will you? If it’s the mayor, don’t tell him I’m at home.”

  “No, sir. You want me to call you?”

  “You know that the only time you’re supposed to call me at home is if the entire North Korean Politburo paddles across the river in a rubber boat and asks for asylum.”

  He grinned. “And if you don’t answer?”

  “Leave a message. No, wait; cancel that. No message.” I didn’t want my uncle waking me with a sly look on his face as he said he had something I might find interesting.

  I took a roundabout route home, past the new department stores with the names of swank European designers plastered across the front, and stopped off in a bar I visited sometimes. I liked the place. It stayed open until dawn, and no one ever bothered to look up when I walked in. A long drink later, I felt prepared to face Uncle O.

  Chapter Two

  It was already getting light when I opened the front door to my house. I smelled burnt vegetables, so I knew my uncle had been in the kitchen. That meant he was up early. Sometimes he got dressed around sunrise to go for a walk. He maintained that the air at dawn was healthy. The police had warned me that he was walking aimlessly and that I should keep my eye on him, but I knew my uncle didn’t know the meaning of the word “aimless.” The door to the courtyard was open, so it was a good bet my uncle was in his workshop, contemplating the design of another bookcase. There was no reason to check. He didn’t like to be disturbed in his workshop, and I wasn’t in the mood for conversation.

  I had slept for a couple of hours when sounds from the alley, piglets squealing, woke me. The neighbor raised them, illegally. He and his wife were mortal enemies, but they shared the profits from the pigs.

  “Good morning to you.” My uncle stood in the doorway to my room. “I have something that might be of interest.”

  “How about later? I only got in when the sun was coming up, and I need a little more sleep. Can’t we shut those pigs up?”

  “I know when you got in. I heard the door open, and I heard you creeping down the hall. Floorboards creak louder when you walk on tiptoe, did you know that? You want breakfast?”

  “Since when do you make breakfast?” I let his observation on creaking floorboards slide past without comment. It was meant not very subtly to suggest that I still had things to learn about operations. Ignoring his jibes was useless. My uncle always knew when one of his darts had hit home. It was all the more galling when he made a show of not pressing the point.

  “Do you think,” he asked, “I have lived to this old age without knowing how to make breakfast?”

  I gritted my teeth. He was waving the victory flag in my face, pretending that what I had said was more important than what I had ignored.

  “What do you want with your tea?” My uncle pressed his advantage. “We still have an apple.”

  “If you are telling me I need to go shopping, I already know that. Maybe this afternoon I can do it. Meanwhile, go ahead, eat the apple, it will do your digestion good. All I need right now is sleep. Do you mind?”

  “I don’t mind. I’ll go out for noodles.”

  “No.”

  My uncle caught something in my tone. “Problem?”

  “No problem. You should realize that noodles are not good for you all the time. Too much starch, that’s all.”

  “This sudden concern with my health is nice, nephew. It hits me here.” He touched his chest. “But I’m not going to die young, and I’m not giving up noodles.”

  I could tell he wasn’t really concerned about noodles at the moment. “You have something else on your mind, am I right?”

  “Not on my mind, no. But I still have something you might find interesting, which is where we started.”

  This was exactly what I did not want to hear him say, and he’d said it twice. I threw off the quilt and yawned. “What you mean is, you know something you think I don’t, and you’re dying to tell me. You’re also going to tell me it’s urgent.”

  “It’s not urgent for me, it might be for you.”

  “All right, what is it?”

  “Mike is back.”

  Sleep did a two-step out the window as I sat bolt upright. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Around.”

  “When did you hear it?”

  “Yesterday.”

  I lay back down again and stared at the ceiling. “Not good enough, and you know it, uncle. ‘Around’ and ‘yesterday’ score low on the answer scale. You have more. I need the details.”

  My uncle smiled. It was his totally impenetrable, most annoying smile. “You wish. In this case, I don’t know much more. Details?” He shrugged. “That’s what investigations are for.”

  “I’m tired, uncle. I had a bad dinner last night, and I’m in a black mood from lack of sleep. I have a new deputy who is going to give me a worse headache than I already have, and the mayor is on one of his bureaucratic jihads against my office.” I rolled over and shut my eyes.

  “Not to mention terrorists killing diners,” my uncle added, “and the tragic loss of a blond tourist whose passport is missing and whose husband is the owner of one of the biggest manufacturing plants in the country. Makes phony designer bags, or something.”

  The husband was news to me. So were the bags. I sat up again. “How you do know this? And don’t tell me you heard it ‘somewhere,’ or I’ll burn every last one of your bookcases.” It was an idle threat, but the thought of it made me smile.

  “Which do you want to hear first, the news about Mike or this interesting food problem that is already making trouble for your friend the mayor?”

  “Forget the mayor. Give me what you know about Mike. And I mean everything.”

  “I told you, he’s back. Showed up in Changchun a week ago. Someone spotted him here on Tuesday at the train station getting into a taxi.”

  “And if he showed up on Tuesday, and you knew about it, why didn’t I know about it before today, which is Friday, as if I needed to remind you.”

  “Probably for the same reason you don’t know that he went across the river on Wednesday night.”

  This news was galling, as he knew it would be. “Now you’re fantasizing. Mike wouldn’t do that. He doesn’t like boats. And anyway he couldn’t. We’d have noticed. The river is covered.”

  My uncle was running his fingers along the top of the doorjamb. “Damned thing is out of alignment. Who built this place? Hold on, I’ll get some tools.”

  “Never mind the door. We’re talking about Mike. He would never go across the river.”

  “Tell him yourself, why don’t you? He’s sure to be back here, I’d guess in a week, two at the most. He might fly out of Pyongyang, but I doubt it.”

  When the phone rang down the hall in the room we sometimes use as an office for private cases, my uncle flashed that smile again. “Pretty early in the day for a phone call. Must be for you. A lady friend, perhaps. Want me to get it, or should they just leave a message?”

  “I’m not talking to anyone. Could be it’s for you. Maybe it’s someone calling for a private detective, you know, a job so we can earn money to buy groceries.” I paused for effect. “Or maybe it’s one of your old friends.”

  My uncle laughed. “My old friends leave messages under trees. You never know who’s listening on the phone.”

  “Then let it ring,” I said. It did, eight times, before it went silent. I waited for my uncle to pick up the conversation, but he stood there, looking at me with a bemused smile. It was my move as far as he was concerned.

  I decided to try a direct question, something that rarely worked with my uncle. “You said someone spotted Mike. Who?”

  “We didn’t exchange name cards.”

  “Fine, no name. Anyone you’d recognize if you saw him again?”

  “Walked with a limp, leaned to the side
a little. Short, bad teeth, faraway look in his eyes, like he was dreaming of another day.”

  “Why would a dreamy-eyed stranger pick you out to pass on something important like that? And where did this little chance rendezvous happen, uncle?” More questions for which I knew enough not to expect answers.

  “If you’re not going to make breakfast, I’m going out for noodles.”

  “The noodle shops are all closed, uncle. The police aren’t taking any chances.” I didn’t know if the chief had actually issued the order yet, and even if he had, if all the shops had complied. I could think of a half dozen that wouldn’t close until the police came and nailed their front doors shut. “Try something else for a change. You might like it.”

  “For instance?”

  “I don’t know. How about youtiao?”

  “Fried dough? All that grease is bad for my heart. It’s probably old motor oil, considering everything else that happens around here. What a country!” He disappeared into the hall, and a minute later, the front door clicked shut. I lay back and asked myself, as I do at least once a week, when my uncle would figure it was safe for him to cross the river back to his home in the mountains of North Korea.

  2

  Grabbing more sleep was not an option. My brain was jumping with possibilities. Mike did not go in for mass murder, but the coincidence of his reappearance and the demise of the seven diners, with more body parts possibly littering the countryside north of town, raised ugly possibilities. True, if my uncle was to be believed, and that usually turned out to be the smartest thing to do, Mike had gone across the river to North Korea the day before the murders. That timing helped, but not much. It’s unlikely he would do a job like that himself. He had staff, “contractors” actually. Mike thought contractors reduced expenses. He was from south China, and very concerned with overhead.

  Why Mike would want to mess up the noodle business, however, was a good question. It could be that the Uighur was behind on his protection payments, but three dead diners felt like overkill for a simple bookkeeping problem. Besides, poisoning diners, assuming that was how the three old men died, sent the wrong message to the eating public. And why the man in the fancy restaurant? Or the two hookers? Or the blonde?