The Man with the Baltic Stare Page 6

  “The guards at the bottom of the hill emptied the box and looked at every damn screw. Normally, they wave me through without a second glance. There must be something going on.”

  “As long as it stays at the bottom of the hill,” I said, “I could give a fine fuck.”

  “Yeah,” said the old man, “that’s what I thought.”

  One of the few things I had brought with me, besides my grandfather’s tools and a few pieces of furniture he’d made, was a radio. Reception was poor, but I could hear something over the static the few nights a week I got electricity. At first there was only electricity a few hours a day and some days not at all, but by the third year the outages were only on Thursdays and usually only in the afternoons. At one point, I wondered if rumbling on Thursdays had anything to do with the power outages. Maybe every time they set off a charge, they blew over a power line by mistake. When I was in the army, things like that happened more than ever made it into the reports.

  A doctor visited twice a year. He said they told him it was owed me because of my family’s loyal service, but I had a suspicion my brother had sent him up to spy on me. If he was a spy, he was melancholy and soft-spoken. The second year, he brought books that he thought I should read. He brought Tolstoy and Chekhov in Russian, which I read slowly and with some difficulty. The third year, he carried in his pocket a small book that must have been read a hundred times.

  “What is this?” I asked as he handed it to me.

  “Kafka,” he said. “Make sure it’s a clear, sunny day and sit outside when you read it. Don’t try to read it at night, and whatever you do, don’t read it when the wind is blowing.”

  “Why not?”

  “If I know you, you’ll want to devour it in huge chunks. Don’t. Sip it as if it were boiling-hot soup. If you’re not careful, you can hurt yourself with Kafka. It can make you very cynical.” He smiled.

  3

  The house had not been so difficult to build. It was a simple structure, basically a box with two windows in the front and one in the back, a front door, and a flat roof. The ceiling was low, but I didn’t have many tall visitors. A few times every winter, I had to go up on the roof and shovel off the snow, so eventually I built a simple ladder permanently up the side. Rough carpentry was less a problem than perfecting the skills it took to make wooden toys. I didn’t have all the right tools, but I had a lot of time. I made cars and trolleys and sometimes boats. I could make a trolley a week; a boat took longer. Sometimes, what started out as a trolley turned into a boat, usually an ocean liner. For some reason, it never happened the other way around. A trolley is relatively easy-a few dowels to make the windows, an open platform on either end, two long rectangles for the ceiling and the floor, and a couple of round pieces as the headlamps. Cars were more difficult. At first, the cars looked like the ones we used in the Ministry to pick up subjects for questioning, but I didn’t want to think about that, so I started making them with only two doors, room for two people in the front seat looking out at the scenery. If the doctor noticed the change in models, he didn’t say anything. He usually took four or five-whatever I had ready-when he left.

  Living on the mountain, I trained myself to stand in one place and do nothing but watch the light move and the layers of the scene in front of me unfold. It was against all of my instincts, contrary to years of experience in the Ministry, to close down those nerve endings that had been put on permanent alert. I forced myself to become oblivious to distractions; I battled down the nervous habits of the hunted, the learned behavior of always shifting one’s gaze, ears twitching at every sound, ceaselessly trying to escape danger, to twist away from the doom that moved from front to back, right to left, at every moment.

  It took me almost a year, after I was finally settled, to purge myself of the urge to be completely aware of my surroundings each second. In the quiet, it was easier to do, to let the world pass without the overpowering need to recognize the shadow of the hawk, the soft beat of the owl’s wings, the talons that were just above your neck. It was only when I learned to be so still and hear things without listening that I caught the pattern within the rumble of explosions-three in a row, several seconds apart. The explanation from the farmer about the dam building had stopped making sense one crystal clear morning when I went to the top of the mountain and saw-across the valley that lay behind me-a heavy truck coming out of a building built directly against a hill. Big construction vehicles don’t come out of buildings next to mountains unless the buildings are covering tunnel adits.

  The old truck driver gave me a blank look when I asked him about the explosions. “I never hear them,” he said. “I don’t know about what I don’t hear. Maybe neither should you.”

  When the doctor came up in September, I asked if he had an idea what the explosions could be.

  “Blasting,” he said. “Dams, mines, tunnels-could be anything. This is a funny part of the country. I’m surprised they let you stay here.”

  “Yes, very gracious of them. Anything special going on?”

  “Always something going on. I’ve heard people say that Thursdays are a good day to stay off the roads around this mountain. But you don’t know it for sure, and neither do I.”

  In addition to the books, the doctor also brought a few pieces of wood on his visits-mostly scrap and almost always pine. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that used pine is almost never fit to be something else, and even then not without so much coaxing that it is rarely worth the effort. My grandfather wouldn’t take scrap pine, and that was at a time when it was almost the only thing he could find. He had nothing against scrap wood as a rule, but he said he would rather do without than argue with a pine board that thought it already knew what it was meant to be. Some people in our village fashioned new furniture out of old boards. The old man considered this a form of prostitution. I told this to the doctor, who laughed and shook his head.

  The last time the doctor showed up, he stood at attention and opened the back door of his car with considerable fanfare. He pulled out a long board.

  “I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but I think it’s a virgin.”

  It was hard to do much in winter. My fingers were too cold to hold the tools, and I didn’t want to run out of wood while the road was impassable, which it usually was from late December until March. Summers were often too wet, and even when it wasn’t raining, the wood swelled in the humidity and the joints in my fingers ached. Autumn was the best time to work. I started at noon and worked through the day until the sunlight began to fade.

  Most mornings in autumn I went for walks along the ridge of the mountain. There was no one to stop me from going into the valley on the far side, but I went only once and decided I would not go again. The trees were bent in odd shapes, which made the wind moan like a man dying of a grievous wound.

  Chapter Six

  No one called at noon to say a car was waiting. No one called at one o’clock. Or two. At two thirty, there was a knock at the door.

  “Room service.”

  Only it wasn’t. It was Major Kim, and he didn’t look happy.

  “We’ve got a problem, O.” He walked past me as soon as I opened the door. “I’m supposed to be in Paris. I should have been in Paris, but no, no, I ended up here. Here!” He closed the curtains by hand.

  “You just broke something,” I said. “Light bother your eyes?”

  “I’ll tell you what bothers my eyes. Looking at the mess you call a city, that’s what bothers my eyes. Looking at that statue every morning on the hill, that bothers my eyes.”

  “So, don’t look. Or take it down.”

  He sat on the bed. “Not yet,” he said. “A problem, O, we have a big problem.”

  “How come every time we meet, you say we have a problem? Last time it was little. This time it’s big. Doesn’t matter to me-whatever it is, it’s yours. I don’t have any problems.”

  “Where are you, O?”

  “In Room…” I went out and looked a
t the number on the door. “In Room Twelve Nineteen.” I stood in the hallway and looked from one end of the corridor to the other. No one was hanging around. I came back in the room. “Makes you wonder. Does this hotel have guests, or did you build it specifically for me?”

  The major took a piece of paper from his jacket. “Close the door,” he said, “and read this.” He handed me the paper.

  I glanced at it and shrugged. “This is a State Security Department operational order.”

  “I know what it is. I want to know what it means.”

  “Do I look like I work for SSD?”

  “Don’t screw with me, O.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Major, I don’t owe you anything. I still don’t know who you are. At this point, I only have a vague idea of what is going on. And for as long as I can remember, I have made it a practice never to inquire too deeply into SSD orders. They have their own codes, and they don’t spread around the decoding instructions. SSD does not get high marks for sharing. One of those three dogs at the table the other night seemed to be from SSD. He’ll roll over if you order him to, won’t he?”

  “Not him. You, you’re going to tell me, and you’re going to do it in the next thirty seconds.”

  “Or?”

  “Don’t push me, O. I don’t have any patience right now. Why is SSD using code?”

  “That’s what they do. They do it all the time. It’s in their nature. They think in code. They sleep in code. They probably make love in code. Don’t let it worry you.”

  “What does it say?”

  “If I knew what it said, it wouldn’t be much of a code, would it?”

  “What. Does. It. Say.”

  I looked at the paper. The grouping of numbers on the top indicated it was an alert order of some sort; of what sort I didn’t know. The two letters at the end of the number group indicated it was an immediate-precedence message. I’d learned this much about SSD orders, because it was what I needed to keep my head above water when I was in the Ministry. Kim didn’t have to know. “I take it you and SSD don’t work together real close.”

  Kim looked down for a few seconds. When he looked up again, he wasn’t even the same person. He had reached for an unpleasant expression, and he’d found one that beat anything I’d ever seen. “Do you know how a tree dies, Inspector?”

  “I guess you’re about to tell me.” I’d seen a lot of dead trees, but there was no sense ruining his game.

  “They die one branch at a time. Does that sound good to you? I’m not talking about a tree that has been chopped down, of course. I mean one that rots slowly, bark peeling, dying in the sun, dying in the rain. You’ve seen them, I’m sure. Very painful to observe.”

  “You should learn to avert your eyes.”

  “Aha! Something you know quite a bit about, I take it. Ignore your surroundings and they will not harm you. Ignore pain, it goes away. Maybe it doesn’t even exist. Shall we test your theory?”

  Kim was a compact man. Little effort had been put into creating his body. His shoulders sloped, and when he sat, his feet turned out at alarming angles. All of the craft and art of creation had been poured into making his face-and the frame that surrounded it. His ears were perfectly aligned, as were his eyebrows. His hair was perfectly clipped to resemble an expensive shaving brush. The setting was good, but the face was the jewel. There was no nuance it couldn’t convey. There was no season, no phase of the moon, no combination of cloud and sun that it couldn’t best; there was no joke it couldn’t tell, no lullaby it couldn’t hum, no verdict it couldn’t hand down.

  The face had put unpleasant away for the moment and was smiling again. Maybe it remembered something amusing, or something pleasing. I didn’t like either choice, given the drift of our conversation.

  “Don’t misunderstand, Inspector. I’m here to do a job. You’re only here because I received orders. Left to me, I wouldn’t have summoned you from the mountain. You are an unknown quantity, and I don’t like dealing with anything unknown in the midst of a fast-moving situation.”

  This came as a relief of sorts. At least I knew Kim hadn’t handpicked me. My name had been put in front of him, by whom I didn’t know. “I’m delighted to have your full confidence and backing.”

  “You could help me, but you remain skeptical about my commitment. Very well, I’m suggesting an experiment, if that will convince you how serious I am.”

  “That’s surprising,” I said.

  “Really? In what way?”

  “I thought you’d looked carefully at my file. I thought you’d studied me.”

  “Go on.”

  “You should know that I don’t like experiments.”

  “Pain, Inspector.” The stale smile lingered on his face. I definitely did not like that smile. I wanted it to go away. “Would you rather inflict pain or suffer it?” Kim let the question float on the currents of the moment. His pacing had improved. “Think it over this afternoon,” he said. “We’ll have drinks before dinner, and you can give me an answer; then we’ll see where we go from there.”

  “Where we go from there? I thought I was going home. That’s what you said yesterday.”

  “Simply a question of time.” The face appeared thoughtful, but not the sort of thoughts that led to a comfortable walk in the park. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Time?”

  Actually, I thought as the door shut behind him, it’s not about time. It’s about running out of time. It’s about being nervous because SSD is up to something and the people in the market are up to something and a gorgeous woman and one of your officers are up to something and you, Major Kim, don’t know what it is.

  I turned on the television. The announcer was listing the days on which people with respiratory problems should take extra care. I’d have to remember to tell Li.

  2

  The bar was in a building at the end of a small, deserted street. The side door opened to a narrow room, barely space for five or six tables. When it was full, it probably felt crowded, but there was no one else there at the moment. Kim indicated we should sit at the bar, where, on each end, there was a globe containing a fat white candle. In each globe, the flame stood straight up, barely a flicker, for a long time, then began a frantic dance, responding to a puff of air that swirled in the glass but nowhere else. Otherwise, the place was pitch-dark.

  “Pain, Inspector. The question left hanging from this afternoon concerned pain.”

  “Is that the essence of your world?” I don’t like it so dark when I’m talking to someone I don’t know and have reason to think doesn’t have my best interests at heart.

  “I’m not sure you are concentrating. Are you? What are you looking around for?”

  “A light switch.”

  “This isn’t a game. I have a lot to accomplish, and only so much time to get it all done. An hour ago, I learned that the time is even shorter than I’d thought. You can imagine that I’m getting impatient, and when I get impatient I feel the urge to peel off some of the veneer of civilization.”

  In other words, he was under a lot of pressure and wasn’t getting much help in solving his problem. “So the problem isn’t really pain, after all. We’re back to the question of time, that and these mysterious tasks of yours. Go ahead and get them done, why don’t you? By all means, do what you have to do. Work eighteen hours a day. Skip dinners with your girlfriend in the red dress. Just leave me out of it. Whoever put my name in front of you must have pulled the wrong file. It happens.”

  The major signaled the bartender. “Two large drinks.”

  The bartender nodded and went somewhere into the darkness.

  “Large.” It seemed to me that he could at least have asked what I wanted to drink. “That is now an acceptable order, I take it. No need to worry with content, only size. Sign of the times?”

  Kim patted my knee. “Get real, Inspector. We’re about to have a conversation, a true exchange of ideas. No more fencing, no more banter. We’re going to talk of pai
n and suffering on a large scale. Let me say at the outset, I honestly believe it would be good to avoid that if possible. If not, if it proves impossible, well, it won’t be the first time.”

  When the drinks arrived, we moved to a table, deeper into the gloom. Other people’s eyes adjust to the dark; mine don’t. There was a young inspector in our office years ago with eyes like a cat. The darker it was, the better he could see. He would sit in the dark reading files all night long. If we were on surveillance, he could spot a suspect moving in the blackest night. It made the rest of us look bad. No one was sorry to see him assigned to another office.

  “Obviously,” I said, “neither the pain nor the suffering is to be yours.”

  A woman appeared, a shadow emerging from the emptiness of space, and handed the major a piece of paper. He moved back to the bar where there was at least a little light to read by, wrote something quickly across the top, and held it up for the woman to take away. She didn’t move until he looked at her and nodded.

  “I have enough suffering of my own, Inspector. You might not think so.” He stared in the direction of the vanished woman. “Pain and suffering,” he laughed. The room echoed with the sounds of a five-hundred-year-old gingko tree losing a limb in a storm. “Sign of the times.”

  “Overall, though, we aren’t focused on your suffering.”

  “No, we aren’t. Disappointed?”

  “Then it must be mine.”

  The major sat down again and raised his glass. “Not yours exactly. Not in so many words. Let’s put it in broader terms. Let’s be grand in our vision, lofty in our ideals. Nation, race, family, individual-when one is in pain, all suffer, isn’t that the theory?”

  “Theories are junk.” I picked up my glass. “To better times.”

  The major shrugged, but in the dark I couldn’t be sure of the face. “To whatever comes next.”