a completely pointless question. “Something going on up there?” Of course something was going on, why else would anyone want to go to North Hamgyong, especially in January?

“Nothing either of us needs to know about.”

“But he does?” Another pointless question, but one that, I had no doubt, would eventually need an answer.

“I’m not going to start guessing about his agenda,” Pak said, “and neither should you. Don’t let me hear that you’ve started checking around, either. Stay away from the subject. Our visitor isn’t getting out of the city, not unless he can pay off a lot of people. I don’t care who he has behind him.” He stopped. That was all he wanted to say about what or who we couldn’t see. “At the moment, the man is not a police matter. We are assigned to wipe his nose if he sneezes, that’s all. Anyway, the roads are piled with snow and no one is around to clear them these days, which for a change is a blessing. If he asks again, tell him about the bad road conditions.”

“None of that will worry him. He can pay off whoever he needs for permission and still have enough left to pay his own road crew. He has plenty of money, a wad of dollars. I saw it, and I don’t think he declared it all when he came through customs.”

“How much has he offered you?’

“Nothing. I think he’s waiting for me to ask.”

“So ask.”

“Maybe later, not yet. I still have some dignity left.”

“That’s good. Dignity is good. See how much rice your dignity will get you.”

I kicked myself for standing around and talking. The conversation had just lurched onto the subject I most wanted to avoid. Pak frowned. “You know, this morning I ran across an old friend in the Ministry, someone who has been stuck in the mountains in Yanggang for the past year. He looks like a skeleton.”

“That bad?” I could sense huge cloudbanks of depression looming over us.

“It’s worse than bad.”

“Construction unit?”

“Not anymore. The unit was so depleted they had to disband it. Everyone was out looking for food. He told me that the countryside …” Pak shook his head again. “It’s bad. Very bad.”

I sat down. We were in the thick of it; there was no sense trying to avoid the subject anymore. “Are you alright? I mean, the family?” Pak had a young son. His wife was sick, and his mother was getting weaker by the day.

Pak stared out his window. The view was enough to depress anybody, especially in the middle of winter. “Two meals a day, very healthy. Isn’t that what they say on the radio? If two is healthy, what do we call one meal a day? Or does hot water count as nourishment now?”

“I hear that the radio doesn’t operate in the provinces most of the time. Not enough fuel for the generators. Not enough technicians left to fix the transmitters that still have fuel.”

“Careful what you repeat, Inspector,” Pak said quietly. Then even more quietly, “Most of the time, neither do the trains. Almost nothing moves out there these days.”

“And?” The situation in the countryside was not a secret; the local security offices had stopped trying to prevent the stories from circulating. One Ministry officer who was in town to plead for backup support told me it was like trying to blot out the sun with a rat’s turd. When I told him to come up with a better image, he grinned quickly. “It’s a joke, Inspector. We’ve eaten all the rats. There aren’t any rat turds left.”

“And?” I repeated the question.

“And, and we do what we do,” Pak said. His voice was back to normal. “That’s all there is to it. A couple of the other districts in Pyongyang are running short on people; some of the shifts have been lengthened.” I’d heard officers were disappearing for days at a time without notice, looking for food, sick from the cold, but there was no use mentioning it. Pak cleared his throat and looked away. “You going or staying?” He didn’t want to ask because he didn’t want to make me answer. Just posing the question was an admission of where things stood.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

He nodded slowly. I didn’t say anything else, and neither did he. In the silence, there was no doubt we were both thinking the same thing. I knew better than to mention it, but I kept wondering. Suddenly, I realized Pak was looking at me