Inspector O 02 - Hidden Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

this time of year—is the result of too many bureaucrats with too little to do. Almost forgotten in the General Bureau of Urban Planning was a small unit of landscape architects looking for ways to justify their existence. Out for a morning stroll, one of the architects stumbled over the benches along the river. Several memos were dispatched claiming that riverside benches made for clutter, interfered with the natural beauty of the spot, and so forth. One of the memos landed on the desk of the People’s Culture Commission director, the man who had authorized, at some cost to his small budget, the benches along the river to begin with. He had justified the decision on the grounds that without benches no one would walk on the riverside path. I knew this, because I had to go back and look at the memos when everything landed on my desk.
    I discovered that what the commission director didn’t say was that if no one used the path, the snack vendors who had paid him monthly bribes for occupancy rights near the river would be out of business. The director impressed me as a thoughtful man and kind in his own way, but not to the extent of overly worrying about the fate of the vendors. However, he knew that, bribes having been paid punctually on the fifth of every month by all concerned, if customers stopped coming because the benches had been removed, letters of complaint would appear. Such letters inevitably ended up in a file, and in this case, he was certain, they would make their way to his.
    The dispute should have been solved in a dreary meeting with apolitical cadre, possibly a short woman speaking in hard-edged tones. Unexpectedly, it became a police matter. The commission director had no faith in political cadre, male or female, and the more he thought about it, the more he did not like the idea of letters of complaint in his file. One day, a Friday, he brought a few more wooden benches to the riverside, slopped on green paint he “found” along the road near his apartment, and went away. That night, the benches disappeared, every one of them. The director filed a complaint the next morning. He sat, vexed, in my office and said in a loud voice that he knew exactly who was responsible. I told him suspicions weren’t proof. That might have ended the matter because there was not much else to be done, and I was not inclined to do it, certainly not on a Saturday. We were shorthanded at the time, and chasing architects—which I had done early in my career—was not high on my list. But a few days later, a report came in from one of the security patrols. Around midnight on the night the benches vanished, a patrolman sitting under a bridge for a smoke had heard someone walk by speaking Chinese. He didn’t know if it meant anything, but he said it was rare.
    Pyongyang has a small Chinese population. Over the years, I’ve made it my business to stay friends with a young Chinese woman, fairly pretty and quite observant, who does a good job keeping track of who spits and who doesn’t among her countrymen. After a quiet dinner with her, and a phone call or two, it became clear that the landscape architects had hired Chinese thugs to get rid of the benches. They hadn’t planned for the cheap green paint, which never completely dried. When the bench robbers got back to the hotel on Yanggak Island where they sit around the lobby and bother the prostitutes, the paint moved from their clothing to the chairs. The manager told them to go to hell and not come back. They broke his revolving glass doors on the way out.
    It wasn’t much of a challenge to solve the case after that, though we never found all the benches—not even most of them. Apart from the green paint in the lobby of the hotel, they disappeared without a trace. The People’s Culture Commission was denied extra funds tobuy new ones, so the few that were recovered had to be spread out. They sat like lonely outposts, which was fine for the young couples who used them as