“No, certainly not. I hadn’t realized you were gone for another two days, Inspector.” There was only a feeble irony in Min’s voice. “Were you gone that long? I just figured, what the hell, O has probably gone on a vacation and neglected to mention it. So I came over to your place, and you were here, not in very good shape, actually. Did you know that you moan in a rich baritone, Inspector? You should take up singing, once your jaw heals, I mean.” Min’s twitch had moved from the corner of his mouth up to his cheek. He looked like he was in a gray pain. “What have you gotten into? What have we gotten into? Don’t answer; don’t say anything, just rest. Do me a favor, rest. I’m going out to find you something to eat. Don’t go anywhere. Tell
me you won’t get up. No, on second thought, don’t say anything. Just nod. You won’t get up, am I right?”
I nodded, and the motion moved something in my head against something else, so I didn’t want to go anywhere or say anything. Maybe some water would be good, a drink of water. But there was none. When Min had closed the door behind him, I blinked against the darkness and fell through a loose board in my consciousness.
Boswell was frowning when I woke up. To hell with him, I thought. What does he have to frown about?
“Well, at least you’re alive.”
I couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be an expression of sympathy. But he stopped frowning after he said it.
“How long have you been here?”
“A day.” He started to put out a cigarette. “You want a puff?” I shook my head, nothing vigorous. “Less, it just seems like a day. Min was hanging around, biting his nails, but he said he had to check something. He asked me to stay. You want something to eat?”
“Even if I did, there isn’t anything.”
There was the rustle of paper. “Don’t be so sure of everything, Inspector. I have here rice, soup, no longer piping hot, alas, and some vegetables. Roots maybe. I can’t tell.”
“Soup. Just a sip. Help me sit up.”
Boswell did as he was asked for once. “Jesus, Inspector, you looked like death when I got here. Min was in shock, sitting here looking at you. So was the restaurant lady.”
“What restaurant lady?”
“Where do you think the soup came from? I didn’t cook it myself. There’s no stove, no hot plate, nothing in here. You live like a caveman.”
“It’s my home, Boswell, don’t be so critical. What is it, “ ‘Home is the hunter, home from the hill . . . ’”
“ ‘And the sailor home from the sea.’ ” Boswell sat back and laughed. “Sweet Sisters of the Glen, Inspector, you are something. Finish your soup before it gets cold.”
“It is cold. Who let Miss Pyon in here? Keep her away, or she’ll get herself in trouble.”
“Pyon? Is that the restaurant lady? I don’t think you have to worry about her, Inspector. She seems to know her way around.”
I put the soup aside. “Any other visitors?”
“Now who could you be thinking of?”
My head hurt like hell. It made no sense fencing with him, I didn’t have the strength. The only thing left was to ask the question straight out. “What do you know about Miss Chon?”
There was a soft knock, and a piece of paper appeared under the door. Boswell sprang up and wrenched open the door, but the hallway was empty. He went out and walked from one end to the other; I heard him cursing under his breath about the lack of light. “Gone, never here, what a place!” He reached down and scooped up the paper. “Here, it’s in Korean.”
“You speak the language, I believe.”
“I do. That I do. But I don’t read it. Speaking isn’t so difficult, but reading takes effort. Especially if you have to learn a whole new alphabet. I never had time to memorize strange alphabets. What the hell difference does it make? The note’s for you, anyway.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Everyone knows you’re here, Superintendent. From the moment you got out of the car, everyone knew. They listened to you climb the stairs. Maybe it’s a love note; maybe some heartsick lass wants to be swept away to some loch or another, to sit over the fire and boil your oatmeal while you’re out in the damp fog.”
“Very amusing, Inspector. I like that in a man who has just had the piss beaten out of him by his own authorities.” He dropped the paper on my chest. “Read it and then try standing up. I’ll be downstairs, if I can find the stairs in the gloom.”
The note was typed. It said, “Native to Korea is one venomous
snake, whose bite is lethal but which is not aggressive. The tigers left long ago. New bears have been seen.” Snakes. I had to get back to the temple to see the old man.
Across the table, she lit another cigarette, puffed nervously, put it down, then picked it up again, just held it. It quivered as her fingers shook for an instant, then was still. “I have a child. A son.”
Just like that. It was a plea for forgiveness. She looked at me as if she had made a horrible admission, as if she had broken a favorite vase of mine. I never knew a more painful silence. It didn’t last more than a second, but I thought it had swallowed me up and left me in some other place on the other side of the world, so I didn’t know who she was or what language she was speaking. It wasn’t the fact that shook me, not that she had a child, but the anguish it caused her to say the thing out loud. I couldn’t see what there was to forgive.
We were sitting in her apartment. It made mine look like a closet. She had said she needed to talk to me, only this time I could tell she meant it. That was good, because I needed to talk to her. I was still wobbly from my last meeting with the man in the brown suit, but I couldn’t lie in bed forever. She came over to my apartment house to pick me up just past noon. A group from the apartment was sitting on the ground near the bushes, arguing about whose fault it was that the garden plot hadn’t been weeded. They pretended to ignore me when I passed them, but as I climbed into her car, a lot of necks were craning. She drove fast, with a nervous foot on the gas and not much attention to lanes. I closed my eyes and relaxed; after what I’d been through, there wasn’t any sense in worrying about my fate. When we got to her apartment, she pulled around the back. A guard checked her license plate, flicked his eyes at me, then waved her into a space reserved for six or seven cars. There was another guard at the door, but
unlike the old lady in my apartment house, he didn’t say anything as we passed by.
The apartment was on the tenth floor. The elevator worked, which I was glad of because I didn’t want to climb stairs. There were lights in the hallway, and the gray-white paint on the walls was only just beginning to peel from the moisture. She had a few framed photographs on a low table in the main room; they looked like they might be family. One had her posed in front of a mountain that came down to a rough and foggy beach. She wasn’t smiling in the picture.
“I can see it in your eyes, Inspector. You’ve already begun to look at me differently. You are one of those who can’t forget anything, aren’t you? Forgetting is a coin you can spend anytime you want, but you are a miser. You have no memories.” She wasn’t speaking to me now, not exactly, but off into the distance at someone else I couldn’t see. “An inability to forget is not memory. It’s a form of cowardice. Like pulling yourself back from sleep at the last moment. You remember too much, you forget too little. You know why? Because you are afraid if you forget often enough, it will become an addiction.”
I knew she wasn’t expecting me to say anything, not yet. My silence seemed to bring her back from wherever she had been. Her voice was calmer. “Is there something here”—she gestured not around the room but as if we were on a hill and she was pointing out the city and the fields and the solitude beyond—“something here you would choose to remember? Better forget it, or is there nothing else for you to hold?”
She was wrong. I had forgotten something; why had I come, what did I want to ask her? It was as if she had taken an eraser to my memory. I couldn’t remember anything except her face, and how close it was to mine. “That’s fine,” I said finally, but hearing the words I knew they were wrong, wrong words, wrong voice. I sat back. “What I mean is, it’s a fine thing, bringing children into the world.” I paused. What was that supposed to mean?
“He’s with my relatives in our village in Kazakhstan.” The cast of her features became impassive, like ancient rock, but her eyes were filled with fury. “No, he isn’t part Scottish. He’s all Kazakh.” Her
voice trailed off. She turned away, so I took a breath, nothing too deep because I was afraid it would sound like a sigh.
“A son is a good thing.” Not what I meant to say, not at all what I meant. My voice sounded strange in my ears. “All children, they’re good.” That sounded worse. She turned back and looked at me with such ferocity that I began to squint.
“Shut up! You bastard, can’t you hear me? I told you I have a son, Kazakh, he’s fifteen, do you know what that means?”
I started running through the list of possibilities in my head. That put her at least at thirty, maybe a little younger, but I was doubtful. It meant she’d been with a Kazakh man when she was just a girl. I sighed without thinking. Maybe an arranged marriage. I could feel the pulse pounding in my temples.
“You have nothing to say? You don’t care? You despise me?” At this rate, the volcano inside her would explode just as the headache broke across the top of my skull. I looked at her dumbly, more dumbly than I intended.
I shook myself into speech. “No, why should I despise you? You have a child. I’m glad of it.” I brightened at the sound of that thought. “Yes, I am, I’m glad of it. It makes you, I don’t know”—I held up my hands in hopes that the gesture would release me, but it only made me look like I was holding a watermelon—“it makes you fuller, more complete, even more beautiful.” Was that what I meant to say? It was, I think it was, or close to it. But it wasn’t why I had come over, or was it? I couldn’t remember. Such a horrible moment, when everything hung in the balance, maybe this was like being in front of a firing squad. I’d seen a prisoner shot, once. He had held his breath, waiting. I decided to breathe, chanced another breath, a small one. Unless she was listening closely, she wouldn’t know it was a sigh. She put her head down on the table and began to sob. “Yes,” I said, not knowing what to do, “a son is good, and I know he must be a fine boy.” This was an impossible conversation. I had never had a conversation like this, sat so close to a beautiful woman, a woman who was sobbing, her body convulsed with sobs, and I didn’t understand why, I couldn’t
have told anyone why. It escaped me utterly, what I was to do. I felt diminished, unequal, drowning. It was a relief when the sobbing stopped, when she lifted her head and looked at me, straight into my eyes, and I shivered at knowing, in that instant, who I was.
The next day, as soon as my head cleared, I went into the office. If I stayed in my place, I’d only think about Miss Chon, and I didn’t want to do that. If she knocked on my door again, this time I might not ask her to leave. And I still didn’t have any chairs. Even worse, letting another day go by without any progress in figuring out a rational way to arrange the pieces of this case simply increased the chances of another session with the ash club. Case? What case? I didn’t even know what this was about anymore. Or maybe I did. Maybe the man in the brown suit was trying to motivate me to find out what he couldn’t discover on his own. If so, it was effective technique, up to a point. Other than avoiding Miss Chon, there was nothing else on my mind except not seeing him again, either. I needed to solve the problem, but I couldn’t do that unless I defined it first.
“This is a simple bookshelf problem,” I said to Boswell.
“Textbook case, you mean.” Boswell’s eyes were closed. He was resting his head against the wall, the far wall where the bookshelf belonged.
“No, Superintendent, I mean bookshelf. As in, building a shelf to hold books. A box, basically, four ninety-degree angles. A plain board in the middle, maybe two, depending on your sense of symmetry and the number of books you own.”
Boswell opened his eyes. “We are not amused, as royalty used to say. What is the point, exactly?”
“Every problem is reducible to essential elements. Pull off the finials, the decoration, the brass fittings. There has to be a basic structure, something that holds the problem upright, keeps it unified.”
“And this structure, this problem we are dealing with, this is a bookshelf?”
“Apparently. It seems to have four ninety-degree angles.”
“Such as.”
“The two Germans did not enter the country legally. Neither did the robbers from Kazakhstan. Ninety degrees. Clear and crisp.”
“What does it mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything, necessarily. I’m just describing what is; in carpentry, you have to start with reality. Ninety degrees is just an angle, after all.”
“Well, what if the Germans had come in legally, but not the Kazakhs?” An interesting question. The answer might not be important, but the question was.
“Forty-five degrees,” I said.
“You can’t build a bookshelf with that angle?”
“No. Not even Scandinavians do that.”
“Go on, Inspector.”
“The Germans have both been associated with, or at least in close proximity to, banks that were robbed in the past in various countries. The man hit by the bus, one of the robbers, was Kazakh.”