Read Online Bamboo and Blood by James Church - Free Book Online

if that’s what he wanted to do.

    Finally, I stood and walked to the door. “I have a few other things to check, but I’ll be back for the last two questions. If you remember something that you think you ought to tell me, something you forgot, let me know.”

    “Don’t bother coming back. There’s nothing else. You’ll be wastingyour time.” He closed the curtain again. “I told her not to get into this stuff, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”

    “What stuff?”

    He moved over to the door. “I’m done talking to you, Inspector. Your people want something from me, tell them to put it in writing.”

    3

    I spent the rest of December sweeping up a few inconsequential facts about the woman who had been murdered. Or not murdered. Anything was still possible, based on what little I knew. Maybe she’d just dropped dead. I didn’t actually have a single fact about what happened to her, and the paper we had on her case told me exactly nothing. It asserted she’d been murdered. That didn’t mean anything to me. But I was starting to lean. That happens sometimes. A few facts here and there, a feeling stirs an intuition, and the next thing that happens, I’m leaning in the direction of a hypothesis.

    Her father told me she said she couldn’t sleep because of the chanting in the morning. She wouldn’t tell him it was the call to prayer, but that’s what it could have been. This was circular, I knew. I assumed that what she was complaining about was morning calls to prayer for no good reason other than that Mun had suddenly shown up. Circular logic isn’t wrong, it’s round. If it was a call to prayers, it could have been any Islamic country, but again, not if I threw Mun into the equation. True, I didn’t know where Mun had been for all of these years. I knew where he and I had been, though, and it wasn’t a cosmic coincidence that he had suddenly appeared and wanted to talk over “old times” with me. Or that he had showed up just after someone had delivered an Israeli or a Swiss Jew, or whatever Jenö was, on our doorstep. If I had to choose, I’d choose circular logic over cosmic coincidence.

    This is how I get when I start to lean, even when I know it would be better to assume things are unconnected. I looked, I swept, I dug into the woman’s background, but there wasn’t a lot of information about her where there should have been, and every time I found a gap, even a little one, I leaned a little more. She was dead. People had a habit of doing that,and afterward, there were always gaps. Some gaps are natural. That’s how people live their lives—gaps, empty places, silences. But not like what this woman left behind.

    I had no description of where she’d been when she died, or what time of day it was, or what color clothes she was wearing, or which way her legs crumpled when she hit the ground for the last time, assuming she’d been standing just then, at that moment. If I knew some of that, I might have some sense of where to start filling the gaps. So I dug into holes that already existed, and swept small voids into bigger ones. That’s when it hit me, the pattern. Someone had given us this assignment, and then nothing. No pressure to finish the report. None. Mun had showed up out of nowhere, then disappeared again. No more contact. The special section had paid us two visits, and then they were off our backs. Not even a phone call. Gears were turning somewhere and then getting stuck. Not my business why, and as far as I could see, Pak didn’t think it was his business, either.

    To my surprise, it didn’t turn out to be such a bad way to spend the end of the old year and the first weeks of the new one, poking around files, gathering odd facts, staring into the blank spots in the dead woman’s life. There wasn’t much else to do, and I wasn’t in the mood to do nothing. The folder I was supposed to be assembling was still on the thin side, and I was wondering how to make it appear fatter