this time you went too far, disappearing all day long. They’ll be waiting when we get back, believe me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The left hand moved for its shelter. The foreigner shrugged again but offered nothing.
“Don’t be a wise guy,” I said. “You say you’re from Switzerland. That’s nowhere near the Mediterranean, so why don’t we drop this image of suntan oil and bikinis?”
“Ah, very good, Inspector.” He threw back his head and laughed. “As always, perceptive and to the point. You’re right, I was born in Lausanne, but I’m still a Jew.” He paused, calculating the moment of maximum impact. His eyebrows wriggled, just enough to be noticed. “Genetic heritage, sunshine in my bones, a thousand generations in the desert. Can’t deny our genes, can we? What do yours tell you?”
“They’re off duty.” I glanced at Pak. He hadn’t changed expression, but I had no doubt he was digging himself out from the wreckage. A Swiss Jew? A Jew of any sort roaming around Pyongyang? Not just roaming around, but under the protection and observation of the Ministry—our little unit of the Ministry, to be precise, and there was no reason to doubt the precision that would ensue. Maddeningly sarcastic questions, sharpened to a fine and precise point, recorded in painful detail, asked again and again. Fingers would point, and I knew where.
Pak was still chewing things over. I could see his jaws working. The prolonged silence only intensified the cold.
“It could have been a Swiss gene that impelled our guest up that mountain like a goat in this weather,” I said, trying to keep some words aloft. Maybe they would push the air around, keep it from freezing solid. Maybe a touch of anger would help. Anger was heat in another form, after all. Pak didn’t join in. Normally, he would follow up my opening, keep things moving. Fine, I thought, let him come up with something better to get us out of this mess.
Or was it not a mess? Did someone else know exactly who this fellow was? It wouldn’t be the first time someone higher up left us hanging out to dry. I looked at the foreigner. Now there was no choice. Bad place for an interrogation or not, we had to find out something more about him. We needed answers before we got back to Pyongyang.
There is no sense questioning a man when you are wearing a hat, however, especially a hat with earflaps. It undermines all sense of authority. I took off my hat, and regretted it instantly. “Why do you wander around all the time? I’ve never seen anything like it. When it rains, you go for a walk. When it’s freezing, you go for a drive. Now it’s storming, it’s miserable, it’s getting worse by the minute, and what do you do? You go mountain climbing? What the hell did you think you’d find up there?” The wind screamed at the door, pulled it open and banged it shut again.
The temperature was still dropping. I didn’t want to be in this storm another minute. We might die, literally where we stood. They’d discover us months later, a threesome frozen in place, a perfect revolutionary tableau to be labeled “Interrogation of an Enemy Spy” and then visited by lines of schoolchildren ever after.
“Where’s your car?” I demanded. It was hopeless; the wind was slamming against the side of the hut. In another second it would send us swirling into the winter sky, earflaps and all, and take our cars with it. Pak looked at the ceiling, which was showing signs of giving way. The foreigner sat unperturbed. I put my face close to Pak’s and shouted, “Didn’t I tell you, letting him have his own car would be trouble?” This self-assured, wandering Jew in Pyongyang had been put in our charge, and what did we do? In response to his silken request, we’d gotten him his own car. His own car! Nothing fancy, but that wouldn’t count in our favor, not in the least. Already I could hear it, the lame route the conversation in the State Security Department’s interrogation room would take. At least I had to hope it would be SSD. Their interrogations rarely got anywhere with us; the plastic chairs became unbearable after an hour or so and no one could concentrate after that. But they would keep hammering on the same point—he had a car, he had his own car, and we had gotten it