Bamboo and Blood Read Online Free PDF Page B

crap. There’s no such thing as only one chance.”

    “You sound like my grandfather. One of your definitive bugle calls would have been helpful at the time. But you weren’t there, as I recall.”

    “Neither was your grandfather.” Pak mused a moment. “What happened to your friend Mun?”

    “Something exploded. We finally got in and were looking around.There were some wires I had to cut, and I was concentrating on that. Red wire this, green wire that. Or the other way around. It’s not the sort of thing I’m very good at.”

    “Details, you mean.” Pak swiveled his chair to gaze out the window. It never bothered him, that there wasn’t much to see. “No, actually, you’re pretty good at details, Inspector.” He sat for a moment, as if he might want to say something more, then turned his chair back and gestured for me to go on.

    “Mun must have spotted something, because he moved a few steps to my left. I remember it was to my left, because I had the red wire in my right hand. One minute I saw him picking up a small box, the next minute he didn’t have a face anymore, or a neck. No hands, either. He dropped like a cow that’s been shot in the head. No moaning, nothing. Just a lot of gore that wasn’t moving. Funny thing, whatever it was barely made a sound. No explosion, none that I remember, anyway.”

    “So you left.”

    “Not right away. First, I located what we had been sent in for, most of it, anyway. On the way out, I checked again, but he was dead. I stepped over him and walked back to where the escort team was supposed to be waiting. They weren’t at the primary point so I had to go to the backup, which was not easy to find. I cursed the whole way. When I got there, I was sweating buckets. They were sweating, too, looking at their watches and mopping their faces. They didn’t ask why I was alone.”

    “Why bother? They could see you were in no mood to talk.”

    “No one was, believe me. They were nervous, real edgy. The whole way back they wouldn’t look at me, not even at each other.”

    “Now your dead teammate shows up again. In pursuit of this Israeli who tells us he is a Swiss Jew.”

    “What makes you think he’s Israeli?”

    “What makes you think he’s not?”

    “His mother is Hungarian,” I said lamely, “that’s why his name is Jenö. It’s not Italian, by the way.”

    “Who cares about his mother? He’s an Israeli as sure as I’m Korean, and he was up here in the cold where there isn’t a camel for a thousand kilometers.”

    “I don’t think they have camels in Israel.”

    “You know what I mean. He was way out of his territory, and so is your old friend Mun if he’s come back from the dead. You think it’s strange?”

    “No, more like fearful symmetry.”

    Pak looked thoughtful. “Your phrase?”

    “Borrowed.”

Chapter Two

    The weather got better for a few days, not so cold, and finally, a lot of sun in the mornings, though the sun was still weak, like a dying man’s eyes. Every afternoon the clouds came in, but that didn’t matter much because it got dark early this time of year, so it wasn’t as if the afternoons were much use anyway. Pak was jumpy. He drifted down to my office every couple of hours. Half the time, he’d just stand there, looking into space. Sometimes, he’d ask if everything was going smoothly. Nothing more specific than that. I pretended not to know what he was talking about. I just said, “Fine, everything’s fine.”

    That was true, if a meeting in the Sosan with the long-dead Mun could be construed as “fine;” if listening to Mun recite a litany of complaints and threats from the special section could come under the rubric of “fine;” if “fine” could be stretched to include a final warning that I should consider myself as being on notice that “some people” were waiting for one more incident to bring down the hammer and shatter my status as the grandson of a Hero of the Republic. This sort of