Inspector O 04 - The Man with the Baltic Stare by James Church Page A

like to know. Call it professional curiosity.”
    “Go downstairs to the second floor to pick up your tickets and passport. The ticket should be for the day after tomorrow. They’ll have some travel money for you, too. Don’t waste it; we’ll need an accounting. It will probably take you an hour to get everything done. When you’re finished down there, come back up here.”
    The passport had a ten-year-old photograph of me, but the clerk said it was close enough. It was a South Korean passport, which got under my skin. The travel money was practically nothing; the clerk said I was lucky to get as much as I did and if I played my cards right in Macau maybe I could turn it into a neat little pile. When I went back upstairs, there was a small man with an expensive haircut in a black shirt and black tie sitting in the green chair across from Kim. They stopped talking when I walked in.
    “That will be all,” Kim said to the man, who stood up and left without acknowledging me as he brushed by. He had on expensive cologne, a lot of it.
    “Who is your thuggish friend who gets the good chair?” I waved away a perfumed nimbus.
    “Just someone who thinks the northeast is his territory to dispense.” Kim was looking through a small notebook.
    “Oh, really? Of course, you set him straight. He understands it’s not his and it’s not yours, either.”
    “You got the passport?”
    “I assume he isn’t part of your operation.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “His shoes cost more than you make in six months. He’sbeen drinking. Even his cologne bath couldn’t cover the alcohol. Your discipline can’t be that bad. Besides, he is Chinese.”
    Kim looked up, momentarily amused.
    “I’m wondering, though, why you were so tense when he was here? He doesn’t look the type to have a hold on you. Still, your eyes have taken on that worried cast.”
    “Worried?” Kim blinked, twice. “No, Inspector. I may have braced myself, that’s all. Zhao is not someone with whom you have a casual conversation.”
    “So, why the sudden silence when I walked in? What’s he to me? You wouldn’t have left the door open like that if you didn’t want to make sure that we brushed antennae.”
    “Let’s put it this way: If Zhao is in a good mood, he can be your patron, even your protector, in faraway places. He’ll supply your needs and embellish your wants, beyond what you’ve got in that little envelope of travel money you’re holding. He can also put you in touch with the right people in Macau. His access to the influential is exceeded only by his bank accounts.”
    “This, as you say, is if he is in a good mood. If not?”
    “If not, he has a pet rat who can remove your lungs and use them to stuff the pillows of the orphans he’s had a hand in creating. Zhao believes grief is a bad thing, a burden on society, so if he murders a husband, he makes sure to murder the wife.”
    “I have no wife.”
    “No one to grieve for you? Then the man’s work is simplified.”
    “I’d rather this Zhao stick to enlarging my wants.”
    “ ‘Embellish,’ Inspector. I said ‘embellish.’ ”
    “Another friend, another door?”
    “You’ll have to ask him yourself. It’s not my job to read his mind. We coexist, that’s all.”
    “You can’t arrest him?”
    Kim smiled. I began recording a series of variables in my head—corners of the mouth, forehead, eye crinkling. This wasthe first entry, so there was no basis for comparison, but on the face of it, I thought it could go down as “wan.”
    “No, Inspector, I can’t arrest him, not if I want to keep breathing. Unlike you, I do have a wife—a wife and two children.”
    “What about the Great Han? Can’t he do something? Surely he doesn’t approve of someone like Zhao.”
    “I guess you could say the Great Han prefers to keep breathing, too.”
4
     
    I went back to the hotel to think things over. It still wasn’t too late to tell Kim to find someone else to go to Macau.