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walked down the hall to answer it. “O here.”

    “Nice to hear your voice.” It was the dead man. “We need to meet. I’ll see you at the Sosan Hotel, in the coffee shop, let’s say at 4:00 P.M.”

    “How about four thirty?” I hung up the phone because he was no longer on the other end. “Perfect,” I said to no one in particular. “Four o’clock is fine.” This meant getting the keys for the car from Pak.

    Pak was examining his teeth in a small mirror when I walked in. After a minute, he put down the mirror and looked at me. “What?”

    “I need the keys to drive over to meet someone.”

    “Who?”

    “The dead man.”

    “Where?”

    “You want to come along? That way you don’t have to ask questions, you can see for yourself. In fact, you can take notes. But you have to pay for your own coffee.”

    Pak picked up the mirror again. “No, you go alone.” He smiled into the mirror, a big, phony smile with a lot of teeth. “See, Inspector, with the wrong diet, you can lose your teeth, incisors, molars, the whole works. I’ll probably lose mine by the end of the winter. They’re already getting loose. I think it’s scurvy. And then what will I do? Looks count for a lot, even these days. Everything is in the packaging, you know? At my age, the package isn’t doing so well.”

    “You might be right; I hadn’t heard. People in my neighborhood don’t talk much about packaging. They don’t talk much about anything. Things are very quiet these days.” This was a bad conversation to be having. The weather was bad. News from the countryside was bad. Itried to lighten the mood. “I heard somewhere that eating tree bark is healthy for the gums.”

    Pak opened a drawer and put the mirror away. “Something wrong with tree bark? Or do you have your own stash of rice somewhere?” He closed his eyes. “Forget it,” he said quietly. “Let’s change the subject.”

    “Pick a topic.”

    “How about getting back to your friend? His name is”—Pak looked at a paper on his desk—“Mun.” He paused. “That’s the name he uses now, anyway. You knew him as something different, one assumes.”

    I reached in my trousers pocket and found two small pieces of wood. One was junk pine. The other was chestnut. Pak’s eyes narrowed.

    “Whenever I ask you a question and you reach for that damned wood, I know you are about to hide something from me.”

    “Not so.”

    Some people think I use wood as worry beads. I do not. Beads are generic; wood is particular. Every type of wood has its own personality. I generally do not say this in the presence of strangers because it is not something they like to hear. They find it offensive, or walk away convinced I am being sarcastic. The truth is, with complete access to every type of tree on the planet, you could probably find a wood for every hue of emotion and then some. My grandfather believed wood was as close to goodness as a person could get. He never said it quite that way. What he said was, “You never saw trees abuse each other, did you?” He’d mutter this to me when we walked on summer afternoons, when the road was dusty and the sun was still hot. “Do they speak meanly? Do they lie? Do they grab more than their share, or sit in the shade while others do their work for them?” He’d walk a little more and then turn to me. “Well, do they, boy?”

    “No, Grandfather, they do not.” No other answer was possible, or so it seemed to me at the time. It was manifestly true, the wood he worked with, the furniture he made, none of it ever caused trouble in the village or to our neighbors. The only problem I can recall happened one autumn. A visiting political cadre, a young man with a thin-edged smile, looked into Grandfather’s workshop and said, “This furniture ofyours is too ornate. It must be cleaner, simpler to match the lives of the people.” My grandfather continued to sand a piece of wood, a piece for a small writing desk that had