A Drop of Chinese Blood (21 page)

The woman put one hand to her lips, whether contemplating my observation or hiding a smile I wasn’t sure. “This one gets rowdy if more than two people are drinking,” she said. “Don’t worry, whatever it is I was warned about in the dream might not happen right this moment. But it will happen, it always does.”

You should know, sister, I thought to myself, it was your dream. I tried to steer us back on track. “Maybe you can tell me more about the seal in the meantime.” I quickly weighed my options. I could sit here sparring with her all day long, trying to figure out who she was. Or I could step on the gas. If she could go right to the point, so could I. “Can you get it for me?” I leaned forward a little to watch her reaction. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man at the bar move slightly. From then on, it seemed to me imperative to keep track of him.

“How come you don’t ask about your friend?” In a flash, the woman’s eyes became those of an eagle. If her fingers had been replaced by talons at that moment, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“Maybe I don’t have any friends,” I offered.

“That’s not wise,” she said. “Everyone should have friends. Of course, it’s up to you. What about my mother?” The woman reached into her blouse and fished out a small sliver locket, which, when she opened it, revealed an old, slightly grainy black-and-white picture of a girl in traditional dress standing out on the empty grassland and holding a lamb. The picture had at one time been folded in fourths, and the upper right quadrant was missing.

“Very beautiful. Your mother when she was young? Here in Mongolia?”

“I thought you were supposed to know everything. That’s what the old man said. No, this was taken back home, in the difficult times.”

The man at the bar reached for his ear but missed. It was early, but he was already drunk. If he fell off the stool, he might knock himself out. That wouldn’t be a loss as far as I was concerned.

“Sure,” I said, “the picture was taken back home. Don’t worry, I know plenty.”

“Do you see the man at the bar?”

“The drunk? He seems unusually interested in us. A friend of yours?”

“No, not a friend. We work together sometimes. He has few talents, but he follows orders.” She lowered her voice. “He’s not watching me. He’s watching that couple. They’re South Koreans. They’ve been tailing me for days. By now, they’re getting bored and stupid. As for the man at the bar, he’s not as drunk as he looks.”

A waitress came out of a back room and marched up to the table. She skipped the pleasantries. “You’re going to have to order,” she said. “If all you want to do is talk, there’s a nice bench outside. This isn’t a bus station, it’s a restaurant.”

I wasn’t about to be chased away by a waitress, especially in front of the Kazakh lady. “That couple over there doesn’t seem to be ordering anything. They’re just sitting and pretending to be infatuated with each other.”

“Tell me about it.” She crossed her arms. “You want coffee?”

“No, I don’t want coffee. What about juice? You have any in this place?”

“Juice? Orange, tomato, and apple.”

“How about orange? Is it fresh?”

“Honey,” she said, “it’s fresh. I squeeze it all night long.” She gave me a bland look. The man at the bar wheezed a laugh.

“I’ll have the apple juice.” I nodded at the woman across from me. “You want something?” I asked.

“Vodka.” She ignored me and spoke to the waitress. “Polish. None of your Mongolian rot. Bring the bottle. Maybe two glasses. Mr. Apple will have some, too, won’t you?”

When the waitress walked away, I grabbed several paper napkins off the next table. They were tiny, but I can write small. “All right with you if I take a few notes?”

She shrugged. “It would be better with a minitape-recorder. You ought to have one. It’s more professional.”

“Sure, I ought to be driving a shiny car and have shoes with new heels, but I don’t, so do you mind?”

At that point, who should appear but my uncle? He was carrying a tray with a bottle of vodka and three tall water glasses. “The waitress asked me to bring these over. She’s on a break, she said. If you ask me, she was in a hurry to leave. A little early for drinks, isn’t it?”

“Not where I come from.” The woman took the bottle, twisted the cap, and half filled each of our glasses. As she did, she sang in perfect English:

“It made him very sad to think

That some, at junket or at jink,

Must be content with toddy.”

I started to ask what the hell she meant by that, but my uncle quickly broke in.

“Cheers,” he said.

“Cheers.” She lifted her glass in a toast, drained it in one go, and poured herself another. She nodded at our glasses, untouched. “It’s rude if you don’t drink. In the rural villages, it’s even an insult. That’s how blood feuds start in my country.”

My uncle rose to the occasion. “Never be rude in a strange land,” he said to me. He turned to the woman and bowed slightly. “Here’s to finding your mother.”

“To your seal,” she said and downed her drink. She looked hard at my glass. “Mr. Apple, I can’t talk until you drink.”

“Go ahead, nephew, don’t disappoint Miss Kim.” My uncle held out his glass to the woman. “Another? I have heard many times that Kazakh women are beautiful,” he said.

“You’ve been with one?” She poured. “I thought your people were partial to Hoeryong girls. Very delicate, they say.”

“Yes, quite delicate, though for some reason it’s easier to get white apricots in season.”

“Am I missing something?” I hadn’t even smelled the vodka and the conversation was drifting away. We got reports from sources in Hoeryong all the time, but none ever mentioned apricots.

“It’s a saying,” my uncle explained, before downing his vodka in two swallows. He took a breath and seemed intent on clearing his vision for a moment. Then he continued. “The northern part of my country, especially the area around the city of Hoeryong, is noted for its beautiful girls and white apricots. The girls are all right, but at my age, I begin to prefer apricots.”

I nearly spilled my drink.

3

From the window of our hotel room I spotted a statue of Lenin. His back was to me, and as far as I could tell, he was hailing a taxi. I decided to make a mental list of what we’d learned and hadn’t learned up to now about what we were supposed to get accomplished in Mongolia. The list was lopsided. The list of things we hadn’t learned was much longer. Meanwhile, the forty-eight-hour deadline was shrinking fast.

Staring at Lenin’s backside gave me an idea. “That seal we’re after is being used to stamp phony decrees.” It wasn’t meant as a conclusion based on any evidence, but with only forty hours left, we needed something to shoot at, even a wobbly hypothesis. I turned around to watch my uncle’s reaction. “There are two possibilities as I see it—a counterfeit seal can be used to stamp real decrees, or it can stamp phony decrees. Either way, the result isn’t legal. If we can figure out how it’s going to be used, we might have a compass heading pointing us toward who has it.”

“A shot in the dark, hardly worth the effort.” My uncle wasn’t looking at me. He was sitting in the only chair in the room, flipping through a booklet on shopping and nightlife in Ulan Bator.

Coming from him, that response was positively encouraging, so I ventured on. “Might be underworld, might be designed to undermine a government, might be—”

“Where did we leave off on the Blue Sparrow?”

“A severed right ear. It was an unsolvable case, you said. It also has nothing to do with our present problem, and I still don’t know why you brought it up to begin with.” I gave this some thought. Something clicked, which is what things do sometimes. No reason, they just click. “Wait a minute. Until the other day, I never had a single case that involved body parts, not human body parts, anyway. Some of them concerned bear gall bladders, but that’s routine. Suddenly, you come at me with a story about a lonely ear, and then Miss Du shows up with a bag full of her dad.”

“I never said Blue Sparrow was unsolvable. I said we didn’t solve it, and we don’t know if it’s Miss Du’s father yet.”

“Can I remind you that we have to send her some sort of a report in the next few days or my house may be gone when we get back.”

“No, she won’t do that. She likes you.”

“What are you talking about? She threatened to neuter me if I touched her.”

“Pah. I think you are just skittish after your last”—he paused delicately—“experience. No need for that. Dust yourself off and get into the game again.”

“The game, as you put it, can wait. I’m talking reality, cold cash. We haven’t made any progress on Miss Du’s case, and she gave us a lot of money, remember?”

“You’re always complaining about money. Would you feel better if I gave it back to her?”

“My conscience doesn’t need that much soothing. Let’s just write down a few lines about what we’ve discovered and get them to her.”

“We haven’t discovered anything. Personally, I find it hard to believe that old Du would be rash enough to get himself dismembered.”

“He’s a forger.”

“The best, and in my experience, forgers are not rash. They are meticulous to a fault. They can worry the hell out of the tail on a numeral. Every little thing is a problem a continent wide to them. It’s annoying if you don’t share their passion.” He turned back the top of a page on bars and put the booklet on the low table that occupied whatever space in the small room the two beds and single chair didn’t. “I suppose you can be dismembered for being annoying same as you can for being rash.”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s better not to be annoying.” I would have liked to look him in the eye to drill that point home, but his eyes had closed. “Uncle!”

His eyes remained as they were. “I’m thinking.”

“Think about this. The seal, I’m telling you, is phony. I’ve got this feeling.”

“So you say, and now you’ve said it twice. Repetition is not an antidote to uncertainty. You might as well get that through your head. As it happens, you could be right, but I have no way of knowing one way or the other. I take it neither do you.”

“I know a good coincidence when I see one. A
phony
seal … and a forger? What if there’s a link? What if Du is connected to this seal? What if he was hired to produce the counterfeit? It’s a start.”

“You mean, what if he faked his own death and then counterfeited his own fingers. The ‘what if’ approach to problem solving, is that where you’re going with this? Yes, well, what if camels sprout wings? What if?” At this point his eyes opened and regarded me uncomfortably. “Phew, what a thought.”

“All right, if you think I’m chasing my tail, come up with something better.”

“You of all people don’t need a tail. It would only make you easier to read than you already are, like a puppy that has chewed on the furniture. Don’t flinch, that’s not meant as criticism. I tell you such things for your own good.”

“Maybe my own good is my business, uncle.”

“Then have it your way. Your business is your business. Be my guest if you want to grow a tail. I’d simply suggest that we need an alternate hypothesis to the one you just floated. Keep yours if you want, but let’s find another. With two you don’t end up stuffing all the evidence into one bag, whether or not it fits. It’s much too easy to fall into that trap. Bad investigations do that all the time. In the Blue Sparrow case—”

“Find me another bag. Let’s forget the damned birds!”

My uncle rolled on effortlessly. “In the Blue Sparrow case we tried and tried to come up with another hypothesis bag. We knew we had to. Everything fit together in the investigation too neatly almost from the beginning. As you’ll recall, it was a woman’s ear that the vice minister of railways had found on his doorstep.”

“Don’t worry, I recall.”

“The vice minister was a foul-talking man, a one-star general who thought the best way to get people to follow orders was to insult them in the loudest possible voice.”

I sat down on my bed. “Will this take long?”

“It was a little like doing a jigsaw puzzle of a picture of yourself looking in a mirror. Obviously, we said to ourselves, this is a grudge crime. Someone took badly to being yelled at all the time.”

“Sure, they cut off their own ear and put it on his doorstep. Very symbolic. Shouldn’t have been difficult to find a woman with only one ear.”

“That’s exactly what we thought, until a week later. We made a list of everyone who might have a beef with the vice minister. The man had a career going back forty years. It was quite a list. I pointed out that most of the names were of men, most of whom didn’t have shell ears or wear earrings. In fact, a good number of them were already dead of other causes. No matter, we had to check them all out. The byword of the Ministry in those days was ‘thorough.’”

“Do you have another bag for us, or don’t you?”

My uncle put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “Another bag? Consider this possibility—the seal isn’t Chinese.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s Korean. Probably South Korean.”

“No, that’s crazy. It doesn’t go anywhere. Why would Beijing worry about a phony Korean seal? The two of them, Seoul and Pyongyang, bark at each other all the time. Our standing orders from Headquarters are not to get between them on anything.”

“We’re creating hypotheses, not spinning answers. I’m not saying I’m sure. I’m saying it’s possible.”

“In that case, why not spin this—your people in Pyongyang forged it to use against the South.”

“At least you’re thinking. That could be right, it could be wrong, but it’s a thought.”

“Much as it pains me, I’ll give you this, uncle, you know plenty, but you don’t know Chinese like I do. I can’t see any way Beijing would break a sweat if this is about South Korea.”

“Pah! What you really mean is that you don’t see why you were hustled off to this place. Maybe your presence is beside the point. Maybe it doesn’t actually concern you.”

That opened up a hell of a big bag all of a sudden, so big I walked into it without having to duck my head. “Meaning, perhaps, it concerns you?”

“Two thoughts in a row, very good. Leave that aside for now. Let’s open a third bag and call it ‘loose threads.’ You are partial to threads, as I remember. What do you suppose all that talk you heard about corruption across the border actually meant? Do you imagine your headquarters really cares about corruption? Since when do Chinese care about corruption?”