Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare (26 page)

I stepped into the hall and closed the door, almost the whole way.

“Again?” Kim said. “I don’t like it.” A pause. “Then take care of it yourself.” I closed the door completely. When Kim opened it, I was looking at the photographs on the wall.

“These look like plane trees in summer,” I said. “See how they droop? It’s a form of anger—passive resistance, isn’t that what people call it? My grandfather used to say that lumber from plane trees should never be used to make a wedding chest.”

“When can you be ready to leave?” Kim blocked the door. He wanted to get rid of me.

“How about in an hour? You found a driver?”

“Just wait in your hotel room. Someone will call. They’ll ask if your TV is working or if the sound needs adjusting. Don’t go with anyone else.”

“You are one scared rabbit, Major. One day you’re telling me you are about to take over; the next day you’re peeking out from behind the curtains. Which is it?”

“Cautious, Inspector, cautious. No one ever lost a lung being cautious.”

The call came at noon. The voice said, “I heard there was something wrong with the TV. The volume control or something.”

“Yeah, something.”

“Well, get it fixed, why don’t you?”

“I’ll be right down.”

I was surprised to see who was waiting in the car. “You have more sage advice for me, Li?”

“Get in and close the door. We’re going to have to drive like a house on fire to get there and back before dinner.”

“Where have I heard that before? Never happen. I can cook something at my place. It won’t be anything elaborate.”

As soon as I closed the door, we were moving. Once we were out of the city, the colors of the harvest took over. “If you’ve got to die, autumn is best, my grandfather used to say.” I thought about that as we sped past a checkpoint. “He was probably right.”

“When did he die?”

“Summer.”

“Can’t exactly set the date, I guess. When it comes, it comes. Any season it wants. What do you think your grandfather meant?”

“What did he mean about anything? He used to talk about rhythms, about how things had to be aligned. He thought trees understood that better than any other living being. Not embodied it,
understood it.
On summer nights, when he was making benches for the village, he’d grumble at me, ‘You’ve got to look at a tree, listen to it, see how it grew, before you know how to use the wood. These people just chop them down and cut them up. What sense is that? No wonder everything is ugly these days. And I’m not talking about just ugly to look at, you know what I mean, boy?’ ”

We drove for a while. I opened the window and let the wind rush in.

“Nice drive,” I said. “The fields look pleased with themselves. The harvest must have been good this year, though I haven’t heard anything.”

“What would you know about harvests, O?”

“Hey I know plenty. I grew up in the countryside, don’t forget. My grandfather didn’t like cities, not after the war, anyway. He said he wanted to smell earth that hadn’t been pulverized by bombs.”

“Who wouldn’t? Do you mind closing your window? I start sneezing otherwise, this time of year.”

I cranked up the window. “How is that you got assigned to watch me?”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. For some reason, I’ve been getting the impression you and Major Kim don’t get along.”

“Come on; you know me, O. I get along with everyone. That’s my nature.”

“So you’re working for him?”

“I’m not working against him, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“He’s very interested in loyalty, have you noticed? Doesn’t like divided loyalties. He’s after me to choose.”

“And what do you tell him?”

“What did you tell him?”

“Me? I’m loyal as they come. Loyal as the day is long.”

“It’s autumn.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So the days are getting shorter.”

He laughed. “Maybe your grandfather was right; maybe autumn is the best time to die.” When we got off the pavement onto the dirt road that led up the mountain to my house, he turned to me. “Watch how you choose, O.”

“I’m always careful.”

“That’s good. But careful isn’t enough anymore. You have to be right every time. Take your hands off the wheel for one second,” the car hit a rut and careened off to the side, “and it could be all over.”

“Watch where you’re going,” I said. “Other than handing out advice, what do you do all day?”

“Don’t laugh, but I’m a chief inspector now. Surprised? They did a scrub of the chiefs after Kim got here, let several of them go, and moved up some of us who had been sitting around all these years. You probably could have made chief, too, if you hadn’t been up on your mountain. What were you doing there for all those years?”

“Making wooden toys. You have to concentrate when you make toys. They’ve got to look simple. It’s a lot of work, making something look simple.”

“Is that so?”

“Like doing a ‘scrub.’ Sounds cleaner than a ‘purge.’ But that’s what it is, a purge.”

“I know what it is.” He opened his window partway. “All of a sudden, it’s stuffy in here, don’t you think? That’s my dilemma; I have to choose between stuffy air and my allergy.”

“It’s going to get cold pretty soon, a couple of weeks maybe. Then you won’t have to worry.”

“Yeah, I won’t have to worry.”

For the moment, the car was headed almost due east. The setting sun poured light across the fields in front of us.

“Did I tell you about the woman I met in Macau, the one whose voice sounded like wildflowers?”

“What kind?” Li lifted his head slightly. His nostrils flared, like an animal when it senses danger.

“You smell it, too? It must be from a wood fire,” I said. “That’s strange, because no one lives out here. The nearest village is behind us and the wind is blowing the wrong way.” I put my head
out the window to get a better look. There was a glow at the top of the mountain, my mountain. “You see that?”

Li stopped the car and peered out the windshield. Then he accelerated sharply, so the tires spun in the dirt before we jumped ahead. “I hope you didn’t leave the stove on for all this time.”

“I don’t have a stove.”

We tore up the road past the abandoned guard shack and hit the steepest part of the grade going so fast I thought we might flip over. We went around turn after turn, sliding close to the edge in places, brushing against the sides of the mountain in others, going at a reckless speed that seemed to be in slow motion, a dream speed, a horror film remembered years after. When we burst into the clearing, my house was gone. The roof had caved in, and the only wall left standing was pitched at a funny angle. The remains were still smoking. The tallest of the tall pines had been chopped down; it had fallen against an outcropping of rock. The next big wind would bring it down onto the road. Another car inched away as we drove up. It stopped when it came abreast of us, and the rear window rolled down.

“A total loss,” Zhao’s voice came out from inside. “A pity. I’d come up here to see if we could do business, and I find your house in flames.”

“My grandfather’s carpentry tools were in there, you Chinese bastard.”

“Well, that’s a loss, I’d say.”

I got out and ran over to Zhao’s car. “By the time I finish with you, you’ll beg me to kill you.” It wasn’t clear what I was going to do next. I wasn’t armed, and beating on the car with my fists didn’t seem much of a follow-up.

Zhao moved closer to the window, so I could see him clearly. He stared at me for a moment; then the glass went up and the car drove away. Li got out on his side and watched as it made its way down the hill.

“Let’s get out of here, O. We can come back tomorrow or the next day, after the place cools down. They must have used gasoline. It’s going to stay hot for a while. You can feel it all the way over here.”

“I’m not leaving until I go through the ashes.”

“That’s what they’re counting on. They’ll be back, and you’d better not be here when they are.”

“Why? You think they can do any worse than this? Look at that tree. They cut it down. Can they do anything worse than that?”

“Yes.”

“Go, if you want. I’m staying. Maybe I can find something that wasn’t completely destroyed.”

Li shook his head. “Have it your way, but first we need something to eat. We’ll have to drive back to the nearest village, that’s almost fifteen kilometers away, unless you know somewhere closer. Even there, they may not have anything to give us.”

“You can drive all over the damned county. I’m staying. If Zhao comes back, I’ll rip him to shreds.”

“Easy, Inspector. You heard what he did to the Great Han. We don’t want that to happen to you.”

I started pulling away burned timbers. The ashes were still hot; in places a flame flared when it found a breath of oxygen. Li stood and watched. Finally, I touched a piece of metal. It scorched my fingers, but I didn’t care, because I knew what it was—the old wood plane that my grandfather had given me fifty, no, sixty years ago.

“Look at this, Li.” I pulled the plane from the wreckage. “My grandfather said it had been his father’s and that he wanted to give it to his son. But that wasn’t to be—he would always say that more to himself than to me. He hated to talk about what happened to his son, my father. Everyone lost someone in the war, so he didn’t want to be seen as complaining. But he felt the
loss deeper than anything I could imagine then. Even now, I don’t think I can feel anything that deeply.”

Li didn’t say anything. He was listening the way people do when someone else reaches inside for the story that they never want to tell.

“It wasn’t until I was older, maybe ten or twelve, that he went into any detail about how my parents had died. He had told us right away, my brother and me, that they were dead. The same night he found out, he sat us down and told us, but he hadn’t gone into detail. We were too young, and he didn’t know what words to use. So he waited. When he finally told me, he was sanding a piece of ash. It was from a tree that had crashed through a neighbor’s house in a windstorm a few weeks before. The whole family had died. I still remember that storm.”

Li was looking down the road. He was pale.

“Something wrong?”

“No, just thinking about the wind. I grew up on the coast. When the wind blew hard, the fishing boats couldn’t go out. A few did, but they never came back.” He blinked, and his face seemed to clear. “Before the storms would come in off the sea, I would wake up. Even at three in the morning, I would wake up. Maybe it was something about the air pressure; no one could figure it out. But I always knew when a storm was coming.” He looked back down the road. “Always.”

He seemed to have drifted somewhere else in his mind, so I left him alone and went back to digging through the remains of the house. There was nothing. The green vase with the cranes, the chest made for my grandmother, a small box of old photographs—all gone.

“You said something about an ash tree?” Li had moved so quietly that the sound of his voice startled me.

“I did. You know what one looks like?”

“Not if it smacked me in the face.”

“You wouldn’t want that. It’s very hard wood. I nearly lost
my arm once because of it. The pain wouldn’t go away for months. Still hurts sometimes. That’s ash.”

“So your grandfather had a piece of ash, and he was talking to you. That’s where you left off.”

“No, he wasn’t talking to me so much as to the years that lay around us. That’s what he said, sometimes—that the years don’t pass; they don’t disappear. They were still here, he’d say, invisible, infinitely thin piles of them, heaped in the corners of rooms. It was one of those things that he’d say that wasn’t clear to me at the time. In winter, he’d often brood and tell me that the past was never gone; it was inside of us and all around. I wasn’t to believe what people said, that on January first everything was new.”

“You know, if I could come up with a single year that I wanted to keep, it would be nice. But there isn’t one, not even one.” Li pointed at what had been the front entrance to the house. “Every December thirty-first, I open the door at midnight, to let the old year out. Who taught me to do that, do you suppose? I can’t remember.” He looked into the smoking ruins. “Go ahead; keep looking for whatever there is to salvage. I’ll watch the road. If I see a car, I’ll whistle. We’ll need to get out of here fast. Someone will take care of Zhao eventually; don’t worry.”

“I don’t want ‘someone’ to take care of the son of a bitch. I’m going to do it myself.”

“As soon as we get off this mountain, I’ve got to find a phone to call Kim. He won’t be happy to hear about you and Zhao spitting at each other. He’s afraid of Zhao. Everyone seems to be.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when two big guys appeared from nowhere. They each took one of Li’s arms and dragged him to the edge of the cliff. Then they threw him over. One of them watched for a few seconds before they both turned to me. They didn’t say anything. What remained of the house made a sound, a painful sigh as the wood died for the last time. The sun dropped over the next hill, and in the darkness the
wind picked up. I turned away and walked back to Li’s car, expecting the whole time that they’d stop me, permanently. Li had left the keys in the ignition. That was how we used to do it, I thought, as I started the car and turned around to drive down the hill. We always left ourselves a way out. Only I was starting to think there wasn’t one left.