whole thing back in the Ministry’s file of ‘cases-for-another-day.’ We only needed some background information on her. Nothing elaborate, remember? Shoe size, preference in blouse color, eating habits. Anything to fill up a few pages. Maybe if you’d done that like I told you, we’d have been able to unlatch ourselves from this whole thing.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“Doesn’t matter what I believe anymore. But, no, I don’t believe that.”

“So, why New York?” I already knew why, or part of it. Her father had told me.

“She was in New York for a short time before her final assignment. That much you’ve already discovered on your own, I take it. They want to know what she did, who she saw, where she went while she was there. They think it’s important, why I don’t know. I told you about those strange winds from strange places. This is one of those. Think of yourself as a seabird being blown off course to an exotic clime.”

“It’s January. New York isn’t exotic; it’s colder than it is here. I know, I read the reports from the security detail assigned to the diplomatic mission there. They say it’s miserable.”

“As if anything they write can be believed. Why you in particular were selected to go on this junket might seem odd, but these are odd times. You’ve been overseas before, so I suppose you naturally came to mind.”

“Is this another one of those favors?”

Pak could be impassive when he needed to be.

“You volunteered me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I protested being deprived of staff, especially now.”

“You wrote a complaint?”

“No. But I crumpled the order a couple of times.”

I smiled at Pak. He threw the file over to me. “Consider yourself doubly lucky. There’s a big meeting here next week, one of those national sessions. Ten thousand extra people in Pyongyang with no heat, no electricity, and no food. We’ll all have double shifts trying to keep them out of trouble. All of us but you. You will be happily away from the action, seeing new sights, dodging muggers and blond women with legs that reach all the way to heaven.”

“I’m not going. They can’t make me.”

“And will you cite the muggers or the legs as the reason?”

Chapter Four

I would have rather flown anything else, even a Chinese airline, but the Ministry insisted that I take their advice. “We’ve booked you on the U.S. national flag carrier,” the travel clerk said. “We know airlines, don’t worry.” So on Tuesday afternoon, I climbed into a middle seat and took my last full breath for twelve hours. The man next to the window was as big as an ox; the woman on the aisle had hips. The ox and the hips both ate their dinners without looking up. I left mine on the tray. When the lights went out for the movie, I listened briefly to the engines, closed my eyes, and tried to think.

New York. I was bound for New York, where I could expect orders that would officially tell me less than what Pak had already told me informally. The orders would be encoded, but try as the code clerk could, he would not be able to make them sensible because, at base, they would be meaningless, almost certainly designed to use what I already knew to lead me away from what I really needed to learn. Whatever I was supposed to discover in New York, I wasn’t supposed to understand how it fit into a larger picture. Pak had told me as much as he knew. Well, almost as much.

This had not been a simple investigation to begin with, even if that is what Pak insisted we could make it. Simple investigations don’t send inspectors to strange places, in such proximity to strange hips. Someone in Pyongyang was abnormally worried about the dead woman’s fate, and was frantically searching for clues on at least three continents, maybe more. More and more, it looked like that “someone” was Pak’s acquaintance, the one for whom he was suddenly doing favors. The one for whom I was only a Padua stone, put on the board wherever he needed. Nothing simple about it. Either the woman was extremely important in her own right—and what little I’d seen so far didn’t suggest anything along those lines—or she was involved in something very sensitive. Or maybe none of the above. There was still that final possibility, the one that kept popping into line and wouldn’t disappear. Maybe she wasn’t really the focus of whatever