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

I had made it a point never to get involved with gangsters while I was in the Ministry, because I knew it would be nothing but a headache. There was a tiny section in a dark office in the headquarters building that dealt with all gangs—Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and whatever else the wind blew across the borders. Gangsters were tough people, very smooth for the most part, and for the most part deadly. That was only half the problem. The rest of the problem—and the most difficult part—came from the fact that other entities, various central committee departments, military groups, special services, and we never knew for sure what else, loved to run operations using foreign gangs. We were never informed ahead of time. If we got in the way of an operation, we were in trouble. It took a lot of careful footwork to stay clear of something you didn’t know existed. One hot summer, a Japanese gang tried to set up shop in my sector. It wasn’t a big operation, but I was against letting them hang around, so I complained through channels. Channels told me to mind my business. It turned out a couple of the gang members were working for a foreign intelligence service and weren’t very discreet about it, soafter a few months the whole operation was shut down and moved to the east coast.
    Around six o’clock, Kim called and asked if I wanted to go out for dinner. “Sure,” I said. Either he was working overtime to cultivate me or he was seriously isolated in his own machinery. The girl in the red dress met us at the door, only this time she was wearing blue. “Blue is definitely your color,” I told her.
    She tossed her head. “This way,” she said to Major Kim, and led us back to the triangular table.
    Michael had the night off. We were waited on by Bruce, who had the same austere smile. I figured they handed them out in the kitchen, along with the white jackets.
    Even before the drinks arrived, I got to the point. “Forget about it.” That was as direct as I knew how to be. “I’m not going to Macau or anywhere else, except back to the mountain.”
    Kim was looking at the menu. “The quail looks good,” he said.
    “I’m not about to get back into all of this running around. Consider me a candle with nothing left to burn. No flame, all consumed. Look around, Major. Look. Look for heaven’s sake!” I tried to keep my voice down. I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to look at.
    “Oh, Christ.” He put down the menu. “You’re wallowing like a pig in self-pity, Inspector. You sound like you’re about to start singing an anthem to regret. A life wasted, wrong turns taken. Don’t, please. Keep it to yourself.”
    “Look to the future, is that it? Let the past fall away. And where will it fall? In what peaceful graveyard do we bury the past?”
    “Graveyard? More probably, a garbage dump in your case. You’d better hope all the years you spent in service of this mob can be recycled. Is there a great universal machine that takes old time and makes it new? How should I know? And why should I care? We’re not here to compare philosophy notes. I’m supposed to throw a rope across this pathetic chasm of a country. I don’t look down. I don’t notice if there are rotting corpsesor rivers of gold. Makes no difference. They want a rope so they can build a bridge from here to there. It starts with a rope. That’s you, Inspector. That’s you.”
    I shook my head. “Don’t bet on it.”
5
     
    The next afternoon, I went downstairs to complain about my phone. It was blinking, and it wouldn’t stop.
    “That means you have messages,” said the clerk. With his wrist extended just so, he indicated the button on the phone that meant messages. “You push this and your mailbox will tell you what messages you have. We’ll make it easy. I’ll push the button; you listen,” he said. The message said I was to stand under the canopy at the front door at 1:00 P.M . It was almost one, so I started out the door. The man with