A Drop of Chinese Blood Read online

  “Your tuning fork needs work. I never saw him before. Some people I dislike at first sight. I have good instincts, finely honed, in that regard.”

  “He told me he saw Madame Fang last night.” I dropped this little bomb casually.

  “Gao said that? Was that before or after you hit him in the mouth?”

  “I don’t hit people. I try not to, anyway.”

  “What would Mei-lin be doing in a low-class place like that?”

  “I thought you could tell me.”

  “I don’t have a tracking beacon on her fanny. Believe me, it’s been tried.”

  “Maybe you were there with her.”

  “You interrogating me? I already told you, we didn’t meet. Did Gao say he saw us together? If he did, he’s lying. Him and his stinking Egyptian cigarettes.”

  This caught my attention. “How do you know they’re Egyptian?”

  “Was I once a police inspector?”

  “You were, and a good one, too, from what I hear.”

  This stopped the conversation. I didn’t praise my uncle to his face very often. He looked at the ceiling and then at the floor. “Never mind that,” he said finally. “Did he say I was with her?”

  “No, not exactly, but it occurred to me. Just a hunch.”

  “Good, I’m in favor of hunches. Nothing wrong with hunches, except that most of them turn out wrong. Maybe yours are better than mine used to be. When you go back tomorrow to get the money, ask him directly whom she was with. Don’t let him slip around the question. If he doesn’t change his story and insists she was there, did she show up to meet someone? Or was it that she simply wanted to make a bet?” He took the kettle of boiling water from the hot plate and poured some into a small celadon cup with a tiny bit of tea on the bottom. “That would be like her. She’s been known to gamble a little. Maybe going into Gao’s den appealed to her sense of adventure.” He closed his eyes and took a sip of tea. “Now about this Headquarters order you mentioned. It’s number one?”

  “That’s what I said. I shouldn’t have even told you that much. You agreed when you moved in here that you wouldn’t pry into my work.”

  “I wasn’t prying, simply repeating. Or is that not allowed either?”

  “What I meant to say was, if I received such an order.”

  My uncle moved a couple of awls to the side and found a pencil. “I must have missed the speculative part. My Chinese is fair, but it’s not perfect. What is it that signifies the uncertainty, a verb ending? Some sort of particle at the end of the sentence? Here, write it down for me.”

  His Chinese was good enough to know what I meant. His Chinese was better than mine, sometimes. “It isn’t about verb endings. Don’t play games on this.”

  “All right, if you ever did receive such an order, and if you did happen to mention it to me, do you know what I would say? I would say ‘so what?’ Where’s the problem? You want to find corruption? Stick a pan in the lake, and it comes out with fish, maybe one, maybe more, probably a whole school of them.”

  Away we go, I thought. I want to talk about corruption, my uncle talks fish.

  “There’s a lot of river between here and Quanhe, plenty of people trying to make a little extra money. I never blamed them.” He took another sip of tea. “Are you sure you won’t have some? Mei-lin gave it to me yesterday.”

  First fish, then tea. Sometimes I wondered why I even tried to have a normal conversation with him.

  “Corruption is like carbon; life on earth couldn’t exist without it. It might even be more widespread than we think.” At least we were back on the main subject, though the biological origins of corruption weren’t my concern at the moment. “Corruption in every corner of the universe, every life form, every stinking piece of algae—all corrupt. Ever considered that?”

  “For some reason I was hoping your experience would do me some good on this. Crazy idea, thinking you might be helpful. They want me to get rid of corruption, not rationalize it!”

  “If you don’t like my solution, don’t bring up the problem.” Uncle O closed his eyes again. His voice took on a soothing lilt, all the more irritating and he knew it. “Do your job, and leave me out of it. That way there’s no chance of my prying, as you put it.”

  “Nothing would please me more, but I’m afraid I can’t leave you out of it this time.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, it’s so, and I’ll tell you why. Because there are additional concerns here, connections with your old friends to consider.” I paused. Whenever I use the term “old friends” it almost always annoys him. As it did this time. His eyes flew open. I pretended not to notice. “How do I know there are connections? I can read between the lines.”

  Other than his eyes opening, my uncle maintained a posture of indifference, but I was sure it was just a facade. Sometimes he thought it useful to play dumb when we wandered onto the topic of North Korea. I decided not to hop around the cabbage patch on this anymore. “The current problem on this side of the river is tied to things on the other side. On your side, understand? We’re not talking happenstance. We’re not talking loosely connected, or hypothetical strings. We’re not talking biology, or astronomy, or fish. What I’m talking about is events, people, actions, all linked together on this side and your side, linked with a steel chain.” I didn’t know how they were linked, or even if they were linked. Li’s sources hadn’t gotten into that, but it was pretty obvious that’s what the target of this Headquarters operation was all about.

  “Linked?” My uncle lifted the teacup close to his nose and breathed in the aroma. “Here and there? You don’t say. What a surprise!”

  Under the irony, I sensed a flare of genuine interest. The subject of connections across the river always made him perk up his ears. He’d left North Korea in a hurry, under threat, but he still missed home. Though he pretended not to care, he devoured news from there, good news, bad news, anything to make it seem that he hadn’t left for good and abandoned everything he knew.

  “Nothing about that lousy border surprises me anymore,” I said, “and it doesn’t surprise you either.” It was true. The border was a nightmare. There was never a twenty-four-hour period where something didn’t go wrong. I had no control over the flow of people or things across it. I had no say in enhanced security measures, no say in better fences or more cameras. According to my job description, I was supposed to keep things quiet, and if they didn’t stay quiet, it was my fault because I was supposed to collect information that would alert Beijing to a problem before it happened. That was the reason the special bureau had been formed; it was the theory that underpinned our continued existence. It was complete monkey crap, but it paid the bills, of which I had plenty.

  “This isn’t our normal sort of problem,” I said, “not by a long shot. It’s bigger than you might imagine.” That didn’t seem to get a reaction, so I upped the ante. “Much bigger.”

  My uncle grunted. “I hope there isn’t a verb ending in all of this that I’m missing.”

  “You mentioned fish.” I couldn’t tell my uncle exactly what the problem was. Headquarters was holding its cards close for fear something would leak. Li might be able to come up with some more in a day or so, but meantime I had to work with what I had. Anyway, sharing operational information with my uncle was a bad idea; it could put him in jeopardy. Nobody could get in trouble talking about fish, though. “Let’s start there, that’s a good image.”

  My uncle understood discretion, but he didn’t like it when I was so obvious. He frowned slightly, but I stayed on track. “We both know that some fish are expendable. Some are not. Some fish swim upstream to where they were born, some fish don’t.”

  My uncle nodded slowly, so as not to dislodge the frown.

  “Some fish are less tasty than others. Some have too many bones.”

  At this my uncle gave me a sideways glance. “Bones,” he said. “Bones stick in the throat.”

  Something had caught his attention, or maybe i
t had just snagged on an old memory.

  “Have you eaten those little fish from Lake Geneva?” He moved the pot of shellac a couple of millimeters away from the hot plate. “They were full of bones. That’s what they were, all bones. I wouldn’t go near them again.”

  Still not the advice I was hoping for. “I’m not concerned with little fish,” I said, “and we’re not talking about Geneva.”

  “Why not? Little fish feed big fish. It’s nature.” He waved a rasp at me. “Let’s stop for a moment and review what you’ve just said, hidden as it is behind a veil of discretion so thick that you’re lucky we both haven’t smothered in it.”

  “Go ahead, review if you want to.”

  “You don’t have any idea which fish you are supposed to catch or which to throw back as unpalatable, possibly poisonous. It could be your bosses don’t know, or they don’t want to let on that they know and intend for you to stumble around. Either way, it’s clear that your hind end is the one closest to the fire.” He moved the shellac back to where it had been. “Something goes wrong, you’re the one who gets burned.”

  This was the sort of challenge I couldn’t let go unanswered. “You think I don’t know my territory? Actually, I have a pretty good idea about the fish on my side. I have files. I have subfiles. I have data files, personality files, grouped files, and computerized linkage files. If any two of these fish scratch their noses on the same day, it gets noted. I could bring in a half dozen of them before lunch. Don’t worry, I know my fish.”

  My uncle smiled slightly. “I’m half inclined to believe that you could. In that case, if you know so much, where’s the problem?”

  “The problem, as I’ve been trying to make clear, rests not on my side of the river but on yours. Yours. That’s where it always is. Always on your side we get ourselves in the muck. Simply by wading halfway across, everything becomes suddenly delicate. Heaven forbid I should offend anyone’s exquisite sensibilities! Your old friends can commit all sorts of mayhem over here, and I’m supposed to do what? Buy them dinner and a night with the girls on Dooran Street!”

  “You were saying…”

  I forced myself to calm down. “Via channels—never mind which or whose—it was intimated to me that I’m supposed to haul in some fish from your side, but if I hook the wrong one, we both know that the situation will get messy. And this mess, as we are both aware, will lap at my feet.”

  “Don’t mince words, nephew, come out and say it. You’ll be drowning in shit at that point. That’s why you want my advice.”

  Tied to me by blood or not, the man was exasperating beyond measure. Wasn’t it obvious why I was asking his advice? “You understand how things work over there, uncle. I need to know where to step and where not to step.”

  “No, no. How many times have I tried to tell you? I don’t know how things work over there, not anymore. I did, once, up to a point, anyway.” He held up his hand to keep me from interrupting. “That’s wrong. Let me restate the obvious. I never knew how anything worked. Nobody did. Sometimes I thought not even the Center knew how things worked. Clarity was not our strong point. We did not fuss much with transparency.”

  “Then why is the damn place still there? Someone must know how to keep it spinning.”

  “Inertia. Gravity. Water running downhill, except when it was running uphill. I don’t have knowledge, if that’s what you’re looking for. All I have is experience, and some people will tell you even that falls on the wrong side of history.”

  “All experience falls on the wrong side of history,” I said a little pompously, but it must have meant something to him, because I saw it register in his eyes. “Without going into detail,” I continued, “in order to deal with this problem, one particular…” I fumbled for the right word. “… concept is being studied at the moment.”

  “Concept.” He repeated the word as if it had landed from another planet. “What happened to the fish?”

  “A loose thread has appeared. We may pull on it.” Handout was the loose thread. If he had anything at all about new sources of payments from the North that were creating holes in the border around Tumen City, it would give us something to use against the smirkers from Headquarters. If he didn’t know anything, at least we could say we checked. Either way, it would cost me some operational funds, which I couldn’t spare.

  My uncle shook his head. “Pah. Too many images. No wonder you’re drowning. My grandfather used to say that precision in thought is all that keeps the world in order. He was particularly suspicious of any idea too enthusiastically embraced, or the tendency on the part of some people to blurt things out. It’s one reason he was so disappointed with your father.”

  Here we go again, I thought, plunging into the swamp of the past. “This isn’t about my father, and it isn’t about your father.”

  “You mean my grandfather,” he said quietly. “My father died in the war, or have you forgotten? Is it so far away for you? He would have been your grandfather. Maybe it would have done you good to know him. Maybe you would have learned something.”

  “Maybe.”

  Whenever the subject of the family reared its head, it always brought on a pitched battle, with one of us throwing spears and swinging a club at the other’s head. This time, though, he wasn’t in a fighting mood. I wondered if seeing Madame Fang again had done him some good.

  “Where were we?” He put his hand to his forehead. He seemed tired suddenly, weary. When he’d first come to live with me, he had been full of fire. Over the past year, I sensed it dying down, little by little. That would have been to the good, but as his died down, mine seemed to flare up. He was my father’s brother, about the only family I had left, and so I felt, at first, an obligation to give way to him and his eccentricities. That only led to resentment, though, and at the wrong times, I said what I shouldn’t have, usually in the worst possible way. It was taking more and more conscious effort on my part to keep myself in check. Every time it happened, I resolved not to let it happen again.

  “Images,” I said, softly.

  “Ah, yes. Pick an image, any image. I don’t care what it is. It doesn’t matter. But after you pick one, stick with it religiously. If you tell me we’re dealing in fish, and then you tell me that there has been a nibble on the hook, and then you add because of that you pulled on the line, there’s no doubt in my mind what you mean. At that point, we’ll know where we are and where we need to go next. Yet suddenly we find ourselves faced with a loose thread? Where did that come from? Was the fish wearing an old sweater? It isn’t a minor detail. It’s a question of being systematic. Or is that no longer considered worth anything, being systematic? That’s the problem with your gambling. It leads to sloppy thinking, leaning on chance.”

  No, seeing Madame Fang hadn’t changed him. If anything, things were worse. Now he was using guerrilla tactics on me, seeming to retreat from the fight, only to attack from behind. Like every fire, this one could flare up suddenly.

  “My imagery is fine,” I said. “We pulled on a thread. When I say a thread, I mean exactly that, a thread.” I kept my voice as even as I could.

  My uncle sat lost in thought. Finally, he said in Korean, “Don’t clench your teeth when we talk, even mentally. And you don’t have to go on about this thread. You pulled on it, and now you wish you hadn’t. That is usually the case with thread pulling. It’s one thing experience taught me.”

  When he spoke to me in Korean, it meant we were on the verge of his retreating into himself, indicating I should leave him alone in his workshop. That isolation could last a day or a week. I never knew how long it would be. This was a bad time for him to disappear down his rabbit hole. I needed him to stay engaged, much as I hated to admit it.

  I tried a quick smile to lighten the mood. “It’s complicated, that’s all I’m saying. Complicated in this case means dangerous, ready to blow up in someone’s face, probably mine, exactly as you said.” It was not much of a nod in his direction, but it was the limit of what I c
ould stand to dole out at the moment. “If the whole thing didn’t slop over onto your side of the river, I wouldn’t be bothering you, uncle. When you showed up here, we made an agreement, remember? I would never involve you in my official duties, and you would use me strictly during nonduty hours to help out in your private detective service.” I stopped myself from saying what I wanted to add, which was that he hadn’t taken a case in so long it wasn’t much of a bargain anymore.

  “A bargain is a bargain, whatever its current state, and I will abide by it, don’t worry.” He was reading my mind. At least he’d switched back to Chinese. “If I don’t stick to our bargain, I’ll be up to my neck chasing fish, or pulling threads, or stepping around ill-considered concepts in defense of your imperial court.”

  “It’s not an imperial court! We are still a socialist country, which is more than you have across the river.” It was a stupid remark to make now or anytime in his presence, something I knew even before the words were out of my mouth. He could criticize what went on over there. I could not.

  My uncle fell silent again and closed his eyes. When he spoke, he was back to using Korean. “We aren’t going to argue about politics right now, or we will never get out of this workshop in one piece. We will go at each other hammer and tong, and I know where both the hammers and tongs are located, whereas you don’t, which puts me at a clear advantage.”

  I searched around for a good exit line. “Why don’t we move to the library? That’s more neutral territory. We both need to cool off.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at me sadly. “I know where the tongs are there, too. However, what you want to discuss is depressingly official, and staying here will upset the atmosphere in my workshop, so let’s move. These tools have no use for politics.”

  I stood up and bowed to the T-square. “Please forgive my transgressions, O holy one,” I said.

  “They don’t react any better to sarcasm than I do to imprecision,” my uncle said as he slid off his stool. His mood seemed to improve as his feet touched ground. “Lead the way, nephew. With banners flying and cymbals crashing we will proceed to more propitious surroundings and maybe even a bowl of noodles. It’s nearly lunchtime, my stomach tells me.”