"The man's dead. Why would I make anything up?"
He clicked his pen twice. A nervous habit. He wasn't trained very well, I thought, and his Russian was getting worse the more we talked. I walked over to the table and sat down. "You ready?"
"Yeah." He turned on a tiny silver tape recorder and put it on the low table in front of him. The table was dark wood, maybe black walnut, covered by a white cloth with blue and red birds embroidered around the edge.
They all had sharp, bright yellow beaks. The cloth was new; you could still see where it had been folded, "first a nice narrative, a bedtime story. Clean and simple. I don't need anything too Oriental." All of a sudden, his Russian was perfect.
3
I didn't knock. Just opened the door, tossed the camera on Pak's desk, and pulled up the only empty chair left in the room. My trousers hadn't dried from the wet grass; the camera hadn't worked; nothing had been accomplished. I was plenty irritated, and I wanted Pak to know it. I could tell he was annoyed as well. He ignored me. He kept writing on his blackboard, making a clicking sound with the chalk as he lifted it and then attacked the blackboard again. He battered the blackboard pretty good, pretending to be deep in concentration before saying, "Please come in, Inspector." There were two other men in the room.
Neither one spoke. Finally, Pak turned to me. "Inspector O, you know everyone here." His face took on the slightest hint of warning. "Or maybe you don't. This is Captain Kim, from joint headquarters."
I had never run across Kim, but I didn't have to look twice to know we weren't meant to be friends.