A Drop of Chinese Blood (11 page)

“How do you know people would just walk over your body? I bet someone would stop and give you a hand.”

He snorted. “Have you ever met anyone from Harbin? Don’t make bets you might lose. Don’t make bets, period.”

“I know lots of people from Harbin.”

“Name one.”

“None leap to mind.”

“When they do, you can call and tell me I’m wrong. Meanwhile, I’m not going until spring. It gets muddy up there, but mud is less lethal than ice.”

It was already late May, far into the safe zone by his calculation. “I’ll see you in five or six days,” he said. “If I’m not back in a week, send out a scouting party.”

“We don’t have scouting parties anymore. I’ll call the MSS office in Harbin and tell them to keep an eye on you. The chief there will be delighted to have something to do.”

My uncle picked up his small carry-bag. “Do you think I want a tail on me the whole time? Leave your boys in Harbin alone. I’ll call when I get there to let you know I arrived.”

“Take your cell phone.”

“I will not use that thing. Throw it in the garbage.”

There was no phone call, and four days later, my uncle returned, empty-handed.

“Nothing worth my time,” he said when I opened the door. The train from Harbin is overnight, and he was yawning as he walked past me. “They had something they called ‘fortune wood.’ What is it about you Chinese with naming things? It was jumped-up pine, that’s all it was. You think I couldn’t tell? Fortune wood! That whole lumberyard is full of crooks. They would cover their mothers with creosote and sell them as fence posts if they could. What a country!”

“Promise me you’ll never open a business where you have to deal with the public. Speaking of which, you must have scared away Miss Du. She never called us back.”

“She’ll call, don’t worry. She’s probably arguing with her brother right now about our fee and how to keep the body parts separate from his restaurant supplies.”

“What makes you think she’ll pay your price?”

“I’m tired. There’s no way to sleep on that train. It’s overheated and the windows won’t open. A gang of kids ran up and down the aisles all night. Don’t people control their children in this country?” He looked ready to fall asleep on his feet. “Have we got any noodles around here? I haven’t eaten since I don’t know when.”

“How did I know you would get back this soon? I wasn’t even sure you arrived there. For all I knew, you’d slipped in the mud and sunk in up to your ears. Anyway, I’ve been busy at work. No time for shopping. As a matter of fact, I was planning to get some dumplings at a place on Wenxue Hutong. It’s dependable. I’ve never had a bad dumpling there.”

“Dumplings? Why not go for noodles? You should try the noodle shop on Lanxiang Hutong.”

“Is there one? I haven’t seen it. Must be new. What makes you think it’s any good?”

“One never knows until one tries, nephew.”

“All right. You can join me if you like.”

My uncle walked into the office and put his carry-bag on his desk. “You still have a job?”

I followed him in. “One of us has to earn money.”

“You have your father’s gift for gab, like a saw with a broken tooth.”

I knew where we were heading—more comparisons with defective tools. “Never mind that. If you want noodles, I’m leaving in five minutes. Or you can go to sleep. Your choice.”

Five minutes later, my uncle was at the front door. I was half surprised to see him. Usually after a trip to Harbin, he retreats into his workshop and stays there for days. He never likes to be interrupted after being away. He insists it is important to have quiet and calm in order to bring everything back into harmony.

“It’s nothing mystical,” he said when I told him he sounded like a religious zealot. “I’m not casting a spell or invoking spirits. It’s simply a matter of settling in again, getting acquainted. All of us.”

By that he meant the tools and the lumber against the wall, the unfinished bookshelves, everything but the shellac. He viewed shellac as something purely functional, outside his circle. I asked once why this was so.

He screwed up his face, as if summoning the spirits from the deep. “If you’ve ever worked with shellac, you’d know the answer,” he said. “It might do you some good, as a matter of fact, getting acquainted with shellac. You need to know something other than pushing paper and padding files.”

5

Noodles any time are a nonevent, but especially in the morning. As far as I am concerned, at that hour they are simply warm and filling. There is little else to be said for them, or around them for that matter. Soon after he moved in, my uncle made clear that conversation and noodles don’t mix, certainly not in a noodle shop like the one we were in, where the din of other people slurping and smacking their lips makes it hard to hear anything else. It surprised me when he broke his iron rule and spoke.

“There’s something wrong with these.” He frowned into the bowl.

“Mine are fine,” I said. I’d heard of a rat’s head sometimes bobbing among the noodles. Noodle shop owners don’t always care what goes in the pots in their kitchen as long as the cash register is working. I glanced nervously at his bowl.

“Then what is this?” My uncle held up several noodles and let them dangle from his chopsticks. “They have dried ends.”

I realized right away there was going to be a problem. My uncle has no use for imperfect noodles. He pushed back his chair with a loud clatter and stood. A few customers looked up from their morning meal, annoyed at the interruption.

“It was your idea to come here.” I kept my voice low. “I was in favor of dumplings. Are you leaving?”

“No, I’m going back to the kitchen.”

“Don’t, don’t do that, uncle! They have large knives in kitchens, and they don’t like customers poking around. We have been getting a lot of in-kitchen violence calls from these little eating places.”

“Then they shouldn’t serve garbage.”

“Calm down. Let’s call over the owner and discuss this rationally.”

My uncle had no patience with half measures. A dimmer switch was not his idea of a sensible invention. “The owner? The man’s a crook, one of many in this country. He’ll only defend his noodles. Look at them!” As he pointed at the offending pasta, his voice cracked with emotion. “They are indefensible.”

“Uncle, sit down, will you? I’ll call him over. Maybe he’ll offer you another bowl.”

My uncle laughed grimly. “Why would I want another bowl of noodles in this place? I’m going to tell the cook he’s an idiot.” By now he was shouting. A few of the customers had grounded their chopsticks and were grinning.

“Lower your voice, would you? The whole place is looking at us. Calling the cook a name, what will that solve?”

“The goal is not to solve anything. I am not interested in pouring oil on bad noodles. Whoever made these is an idiot. The sooner that is made crystal clear, the better.”

“Uncle, listen to me just once, will you? I can’t have a scene here.” In fact, we had already crossed that particular threshold, but I still held out hope of containing the damage.

“Why? You said you never heard of this place. Is this where you meet sources? Is the owner on your payroll? Do you take convicts here and execute them with a bowl of bad noodles?”

“You know what I mean. If there is a scene, the newspapers will jump on it. MSS doesn’t like being in the news. Headquarters will be annoyed. I’ll get cited and have to write a long report. Please.”

“So, this abomination”—again he gestured at his bowl—“is to be perpetuated. Insanity!”

“What?”

“I said, insanity.”

“Let’s find another place if you feel so strongly.”

“I’m not paying for this animal feed.”

“Don’t worry.”

“And I forbid you to pay.”

“I can’t just walk out.”

“Since when can’t a security officer walk out of a restaurant without paying? What sort of bizarre social system have you created on the backs of the masses?”

“Let’s not start a revolution over a few bad noodles, all right? We don’t need a scene.”

“Ah, a scene! I nearly forgot. You’re worried about a scene. No wonder this country is about to come apart. It starts with bad noodles and escalates from there. I thought things were supposed to be different here. Streets paved in gold, everyone driving a Japanese car and sporting around in Italian underwear, that sort of thing.”

“If you want to go, let’s go. Quietly.”

At that moment, a thickset man walked in the front door, followed by three more men each incrementally thicker, and somewhat shorter, than the previous one. I knew there was going to be trouble. This sort of thuggish
matryoshka
never spells anything else. The manager knew it, too. He turned the color of the scum floating on top of the large aquarium near the door.

“Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt,” said the first man through. He turned to the manager. “You’re late. It’s two months in a row. I told you what would happen if you were late again.” He had on a dirty brown suit that bagged at the heels. He also had a heavy Fujian accent. Extended kin of Mrs. Zhou’s, I thought to myself.

The second man casually picked up a chair and smashed it against the aquarium. The tank fell to the floor; the fish inside scattered under the nearest tables.

The baggy suit laughed. “That’s you next time.” He took the manager by the scruff of the neck and shoved him against the wall. “Next time, you and your fishies get ground into little pellets for pig food. Nice fat pigs.” He nodded to the trio behind him. “Go get the cook.”

The three fell into line and disappeared into the kitchen. There was a crash of pots, dishes smashing onto the floor, then a howl of pain. One of the men emerged from the kitchen holding his left hand. It wasn’t attached to anything.

“What happened to you?” the first man snapped.

“He’s crazy. He cut off my hand with his fucking carving knife. What do I do now?”

My uncle looked deeply into his noodles.

“Put a towel on it or something.” The baggy suit looked away. “I hate blood. Where’s Wong?”

“The cook threw boiling water in his face. He can’t see. I think he passed out.”

The man put a dirty finger in the manager’s chest. “You’re dead, you get what I’m saying? You’re as good as dead, and this place is gone by morning. A grease fire is bad, and yours is going to be the worst.”

There was another scream from the kitchen. The cook appeared at the door. He stared hard at my uncle. “Someone got a complaint?”

My uncle stared back. “I want to talk to you about your noodles sometime,” he said evenly, but more surprising to me, in Korean. “Meanwhile, if you need employment, let me know.”

The manager used the moment to retreat behind his cash register. “We’re closed,” he shouted. “Everyone has to leave. Go away. You!” He pointed at the cook. “Go back where you came from. You people are nothing but trouble.” He turned to me. “Nothing but trouble from these people. Why do you let them pour across the border? Put up a fence or something. Take a look at those fish! Cost me plenty! Do you think I can serve fish that have been on the floor?” He paused, and I could tell he was thinking about it.

I grabbed my uncle’s arm and hurried him through the kitchen. We went past the cook without eye contact, out the back door, down the steps, and were already on the street when the first police showed up in front of the noodle shop. “Keep walking,” I muttered to my uncle. “Nice and calm. Don’t turn around, and don’t look interested. Look dumb, if you can manage that.”

Late that evening, as we sat in our library/office, I asked the obvious question. “How come you knew that cook in the noodle shop? How come you knew he spoke Korean?”

“Who said I know him?” My uncle was reading a book on trees. “It says here that the red sparrow tree was so rare in the Southern Sung Dynasty that the emperor used the wood from it for a marriage bed and then had the bed disassembled to reuse the boards for the imperial throne. The last red sparrow tree in China was cut down by the Red Guards in 1967.” He put down the book. “Crazy bastards. Of course, without them, your mother wouldn’t have met your father. Which would have left me with nowhere to go when the weather got unsettled in Pyongyang. Who do I thank? The Sung emperor, or the Red Guards?”

Since he’d arrived, my uncle rarely took the initiative in raising the situation in Pyongyang, and when he did, it was always indirectly. All he would say was that the weather there was “unsettled” and “unhealthy.” On rare occasions, he elaborated and said it was “stormy” or “peculiarly humid.”

Given my access to reporting from across the river, I knew he was talking about the political state of play, not the sun or the rain, and he knew that I knew. For the past few years, we’d been paying for rumors about jockeying in the leadership, sudden disappearances of key people and then, just as suddenly, their reappearance. None of this information was from Handout, of course; luckily we had other sources, all of varying degrees of reliability depending on individual quirks. Much of it came down to money. Personally, I didn’t trust any of them very far. It seemed to me likely that several of them were working for my uncle’s old outfit in Pyongyang, the Ministry of People’s Security, or worse, its rival, the State Security Department, which ran many of the operations on my side of the river. Beijing kept emphasizing to me that it didn’t want the North Koreans to think they had free reign on Chinese territory, so Yanji Bureau was supposed to spend a lot of time and manpower keeping track of them. Some of the North’s operations we penetrated easily; some we sat back and watched; some we couldn’t locate but knew were under way from the odd transmission or the stray body in an alley.

Beijing was modestly happy with my record of keeping Yanji as clean of North Korean operations as could be expected. The other bureaus in the northeast were told to send people a couple of times a year to learn from our technique. Li Bo-ting said it was no more complicated than swatting mosquitoes in August, but I never knew a mosquito that could handle a knife.

According to my uncle, he left the North because he could not stay. That’s all he would say, but our sources had uncovered a little more. Three or four years ago, his former employer was put under investigation, reorganized, and purged as a result of apparently well-founded suspicions that its leadership was taking money (and possibly orders) from a foreign intelligence service. My uncle, who had retreated to a rural mountaintop to live after retirement, received a timely message from an anonymous friend—the best kind, he maintained—that his file was in the next batch to be examined, and that people with old scores to settle with him would likely use the opportunity to do exactly that.