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

one morning when Pak walked in and dropped some orders on my desk. Normally, he says something when he gives me a set of orders. This time, he walked out again without saying a word. Not happy, I thought as I tore open the envelope.

    I read the paper three times before the thought formed clearly in my mind: crazy. I was to go to Beijing to meet Jenö at the airport and escort him back to Pyongyang. It was beyond comprehension, given the thinly veiled—nearly naked, actually—threats from the Man with Three Fingers about how we shouldn’t have let Jenö out of the country to begin with. The man had barely got out, and now I was supposed to fetch him back? I walked over to Pak’s office and stuck my head in.

    “Just do it.” He said without looking up. “Don’t ask me what is going on. I don’t have a clue.”

    4

    At the Beijing airport, Jenö smiled and followed me onto the plane. Considering the run-in we’d had in Pak’s office with the special section, the man seemed unnaturally calm, even for him. There wasn’t a drop of tension evident in his bearing, no cloud of concern on his brow, no spark of apprehension in his eyes. Someone watching us—and for sure there was someone watching us—would have thought I was more nervous than he was. Neither of us spoke for a while after takeoff. Finally, he looked out the window as the plane banked and the view opened up in a break in the clouds. “More snow than before, a lot more. January must be a bad month here, and it’s not even half over.” He pointed and his finger tapped the oblong window. “See that?” I leaned over his shoulder. “That’s the plane’s shadow playing across the ground. The snow is an odd color, isn’t it? Looks like butterscotch pudding spilled from the hills.”

    “I wouldn’t know,” I said and moved back in my seat. “To me, it looks like pumpkin porridge dripping from the rim of a pot.” No one made pumpkin porridge like that anymore. My grandfather made it in the autumn, from pumpkins we gathered off the vines that grew on the fence behind his house. He said he learned to make porridge from his father, and that I should learn it from him. After I moved to Pyongyang, I couldn’t get pumpkins. Or when I did, I couldn’t find the time.

    “Sounds delicious, pumpkin porridge. Can you make it?” Just then the pitch of the engines changed. Jenö glanced around nervously, straining to hear what might come next. The engines dropped back to normal, and he relaxed. “I am very sensitive to sound, Inspector. Some people respond to visual cues. I am hypersensitive to sounds of all types.”

    “I’ll keep that in mind.”

    “The people behind us, incidentally, are Israeli.” This he said in Korean, accented, but perfectly understandable. In fact, too good; it was as if the sound were coming from a machine. It nearly knocked me off my seat.

    “You speak Korean? Why didn’t you let on before?” I had meant that to come out as complimentary, but the annoyance was quicker on its feet.

    “Surprised? Your language isn’t so difficult, no worse than Hungarian. Besides, they’re related. Come to think of it, maybe we’re related. Wouldn’t that be something? Ancient brothers from tribes that wandered apart in the misty past.”

    “I don’t think so. I don’t like paprika.”

    The trolley with drinks stopped beside us. The stewardess looked down at me. Why don’t these good-looking girls work in my office, even near my office? I thought. Why are they confined to this ancient Russian tube ten thousand meters above the earth? Jenö nudged my arm. “Don’t pant. Just tell her what you want.”

    “Nothing.” I nodded to the stewardess. “Nothing for me. Perhaps our guest would like something, though. Go ahead, ask him in Korean. Or Hungarian. No, wait, try Hebrew.”

    “You really shouldn’t refuse me, Inspector,” the girl tossed her head back, just a little, just enough to notice, then she smiled at the