The man across from me fingered the edges of a folder. He was military, he sat like a military man, but he was wearing a civilian suit and you could tell he didn’t like it. “We know who you are,” he said. “And we know who we are. That should be sufficient.”

“Sufficient for you, maybe, not for me.” Something else would have been smarter to say, but that’s what came out. Living alone on a mountaintop, you lose a little social grace. “This meeting, it isn’t what was agreed. I agreed to stay away; you agreed never to call me back.”

“We know what was agreed, Inspector. What was agreed is right here.” The man slid the folder across the table. “Go ahead; look at it. Make sure that’s your signature and everything is in order, exactly what you signed. Nothing has been altered. This isn’t a copy; it’s the original, same bloodstains on page three.” The man to his right nodded slightly. The man sitting to his left, his hands folded over each other as if they were a pair of gloves, stared at me. It was one of those mean, I-could-make-your-life-miserable stares that colonels practice in the mirror.

Stares don’t bother me, but bloodstains? Blood I usually remember, especially if it’s mine. I seemed to recall that I had bled but only metaphorically in the struggle over the agreement’s final wording. They could have dictated the whole thing if they had wanted. That would have made it easier, but the battle was as important to them as the words. So we wrangled for a couple of weeks over details until I finally said, “Put down whatever the hell you want,” and they took that as surrender enough, even though they knew I didn’t mean it.

The signed document-the one in the folder on the table-allowed me to leave the Ministry of People’s Security in 2011, a year before my official retirement, get out of Pyongyang, and withdraw from everything that was about to happen if I promised never to speak of what I’d seen or heard during my years of service-or, equally important to them, anything my grandfather had told me.