It’s the temperature at which I lose my temper. Forget the big questions right now. There are savage birds circling. We don’t have time to worry about theories of existence.”

I looked up, but there was nothing there. No birds. “Just suppose,” I said. “Suppose this isn’t reality. Suppose I’m actually somewhere else.”

He stared at me oddly again. Then he shrugged. “The cold must be getting to you. Listen to me.”

Chapter Two

Jenö talked, and I listened. He referred to his list of travel requests, said he could do without meeting anyone from the party, emphasized again and again how there were people who wanted him to succeed while he was here and thus it depended on me to help him do that. He mentioned that virtue was its own reward, but added that additional recompense was not beyond question. He threw in a few comments about bikinis and suntan lotion, but then his teeth started chattering so badly I decided we’d better get back to the hotel. At the front entrance, he repeated that there were dangers all around us, birds of prey circling and so forth.

I dismissed this as an exaggeration brought on by exposure to extreme cold. I’d seen it happen in the army when we were on guard duty for extended periods in winter. Frostbite of the brain, someone called it. I stuck around the hotel and kept my eyes open for the next twenty-four hours, nevertheless. I wandered through the lobby; I sat drinking tea; I shuffled into the hotel store and chatted with the salesgirls. I went up to the front door and looked outside. Nothing untoward occurred; nothing even looked about to occur. Day moved to night and back again without a hint of the unusual. There were no signs of bodily harm in preparation. People weren’t hanging around the vicinity of the hotel where they shouldn’t be. That was easy enough to see because the streets were empty. No one could be inconspicuous in this weather. Just in case, as I left to return to the office, I told the chief security man at the hotel to keep tabs on Jenö, something beyond their normal routine. I didn’t completely trust the hotel staff or the BSD men hanging around, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. We didn’t have enough people left in the office to assign against phantoms, not new phantoms, anyway. The old phantoms were taking up all available personnel.

When I got back to the office and told Pak what Jenö had said, I thought he would laugh. He didn’t. “That’s all of it?” he asked.

“Every word.” Some of what Jenö told me had been intended only for my ears, or at least that’s what he implied. But I don’t keep secrets from Pak, not when it comes to work. We don’t always put it in the files, but I make sure Pak knows everything I know—almost everything.

“Go back there and sit around,” Pak said. “I don’t trust those security men, none of them. There’s a reason they work at the hotel, and it isn’t a good one. All I want is for our guest to leave in one piece. That’s not too much to ask, is it, Inspector?”

I’d just spent a full day and night moping around the Koryo, watching the security men watch me. Why would I want to go back?

“The hotel has hot water,” Pak said. This was true; they had more than the Foreign Ministry.

“The duty car is acting funny. You don’t mind if I take yours?”

“Why should I mind? You take my car all the time.” He tossed me the keys. “If you spin out on a patch of ice, don’t call me, I don’t want to know.”

Back at my desk, I opened the top drawer and did a careful inventory. If I was going to sit doing nothing in the hotel, I might as well have a piece of wood that would help me sort through the case. Something pragmatic. Elm was good in that way. Most trees succumb to nonsense at some point in their lives. They get top-heavy. They forget their roots. Not elms. From beginning to end, they remain stately and pragmatic. I had a piece of elm somewhere.

“Get moving, O!” Pak yelled down the hall. “I don’t want to explain to the Minister that something happened to our guest while my inspector was pawing through scraps of wood.” I grabbed the first piece I could find. Acacia. Suboptimal for the