but he didn’t go to sleep, either.

“He was in an accident.” I didn’t think that would end the conversation. It didn’t.

“And?”

“And it was a bad accident.”

“And?” Pak was going to pull at this, no matter what. He was in that sort of mood.

“The man died. But apparently he didn’t.”

“To review: You worked together. Somewhere, not to be discussed, he was in a bad accident that killed him, but didn’t. And you haven’t seen each other since then. Shall I guess the rest, or are you going to tell me? Normally, I wouldn’t ask, but this nondead friend of yours seems intent on causing us grief. He was standing in my office this morning, and as far as I’m concerned, that means he has crossed the line from the unmentionable past to a place where none of us want to be—the present. Where was this operation you two were conducting?”

“We were where we weren’t supposed to be, not officially, though we had good reason to be there.” When I’d left that group, my final orders on leaving were to tell no one what we did—no one, not ever. So far, I’d stuck to that. But this was different. Resurrection hadn’t been mentioned as a contingency, one way or the other. “It was supposed to have been worked out ahead of time, our entry into the place we were supposed to visit. Only it wasn’t. I thought he was dead, there wasn’t anything I could do.”

“That’s all?”

“More or less. When I got back, they debriefed me, kicked me in the pants, and told me to forget the whole thing. They told me the chief of operations was unhappy, and that if I knew what was good for me, I’d stay as far away from him as I could. We never saw him, so I just assumed that was a fair description of his mood. The man with the fingers must have been overseas until recently; otherwise he’d have shown up sooner on my doorstep. Strange, isn’t it? His appearing at this moment? It gives me a funny feeling.”

“A funny feeling. Unique investigative technique, we’ll have to tell the Minister. These feelings, you get them often?”

“Did I use up my quota for the month already?”

The phone in my office started ringing. I walked down the hall to answer it. “O here.”

“Nice to hear your voice.” It was the dead man. “We need to meet. I’ll see you at the Sosan Hotel, in the coffee shop, let’s say at 4:00 P.M.”

“How about four thirty?” I hung up the phone because he was no longer on the other end. “Perfect,” I said to no one in particular. “Four o’clock is fine.” This meant getting the keys for the car from Pak.

Pak was examining his teeth in a small mirror when I walked in. After a minute, he put down the mirror and looked at me. “What?”

“I need the keys to drive over to meet someone.”

“Who?”

“The dead man.”

“Where?”

“You want to come along? That way you don’t have to ask questions, you can see for yourself. In fact, you can take notes. But you have to pay for your own coffee.”

Pak picked up the mirror again. “No, you go alone.” He smiled into the mirror, a big, phony smile with a lot of teeth. “See, Inspector, with the wrong diet, you can lose your teeth, incisors, molars, the whole works. I’ll probably lose mine by the end of the winter. They’re already getting loose. I think it’s scurvy. And then what will I do? Looks count for a lot, even these days. Everything is in the packaging, you know? At my age, the package isn’t doing so well.”

“You might be right; I hadn’t heard. People in my neighborhood don’t talk much about packaging. They don’t talk much about anything. Things are very quiet these days.” This was a bad conversation to be having. The weather was bad. News from the countryside was bad. I tried to lighten the mood. “I heard somewhere that eating tree bark is healthy for the gums.”

Pak opened a drawer and put the mirror away. “Something wrong with tree bark? Or do you have your own stash of rice somewhere?” He closed his eyes. “Forget it,” he said quietly. “Let’s change the subject.”

“Pick a topic.”

“How about getting back to your friend? His name is”—Pak looked at a paper on his desk—“Mun.” He paused. “That’s the name he uses now, anyway. You knew him as something different, one assumes.”

I reached in my trousers pocket