The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [104]
IT WAS MIDNIGHT before Division 42 approved our emergency memos. With our interrogation override authorization in hand, we went down into the torture wing, a place our team rarely went, to rescue Commander Ga. We had the interns check the hot boxes, even though the red lights were off. We checked the sense-dep cells and the time-out tanks, where subjects got some first aid and a chance to catch their breath. We lifted the floor hatch and descended down the ladders into the sump. There were many lost souls down there, all of them too far gone to be Ga, but still, we checked the names on their ankle bracelets and lifted their heads long enough to shine a light in their slow-to-dilate eyes. Finally, with trepidation, we checked a room the old-timers called the shop. It was dark when we swung open the door—there was only the occasional winking glint of a slowly turning power tool, suspended from the ceiling by its yellow pneumatic hose. When we threw the power switch, the air-recirc system started up and the banks of fluorescents flashed to life. The room—spotless, sterile—contained only chrome, marble, and the white clouds of our own breath.
Where we found Commander Ga was in his own room. While we were searching, he’d been replaced in his bed, head propped up on pillows. Someone had put him in his nightshirt. Here, he fixed the far wall with a quizzical stare. We took his vital signs and checked him for wounds, even though it was clear what had happened. On his forehead and scalp were pressure marks from the screws to the halo, a device that kept a subject from injuring his neck during the cranial administration of electricity.
We poured a paper cup of water and tried to give him a drink—it just dribbled out.
“Commander Ga,” we said. “Are you okay?”
He looked up, as if he’d only now noticed us, even though we’d just taken his pulse, temp, and BP. “This is my bed?” he asked us. Then his eyes floated around the room, landing on his bedside table. “That is my peaches?”
“Did you tell them,” we asked, “what happened to the actress?”
With a vague smile, he looked from each of us to the next, as if searching for the person who could translate the question into a language he understood.
We all shook our heads in disgust, then sat on the edges of Commander Ga’s bed for a smoke, passing the ashtray above his outline in the sheets. The Pubyok had gotten what they needed to know out of him, and now there’d be no biography, no relationship, no victory for the thinking man. Our second in command was a man I thought of as Leonardo because he was baby-faced like the actor in Titanic. I’d seen Leonardo’s real name in his file once, but I’ve never called him by either name. Leonardo set the ashtray on Commander Ga’s stomach and said, “I bet they’ll shoot him in front of the Grand People’s Study House.”
“No,” I said. “That’s too official. They’ll probably shoot him in the market under Yanggakdo Bridge—that’ll move the story by rumor.”
Leonardo said, “If it turns out he did the unthinkable to her, then he’ll just disappear. Nobody’ll find so much as a little toe.”
“If he’d been the real Commander Ga,” Jujack said, “a famous person, a yangban, they’d fill the soccer stadium for it.”
Commander Ga lay in the middle of us, sleepy as a rubella baby.
Q-Kee smoked like a singer, with the very tips of her fingers. Judging by the faraway look on her face, I figured she was warily pondering that unthinkable. Instead, she said, “I wonder what his question for us would have been?”
Jujack looked at Ga’s tattoo, ghosting through his nightshirt. “He must have loved her,” he said. “Nobody gets a tattoo like that unless it’s love.”
We weren’t crime detectives or anything, but we’d been in the game long enough to know the kind of mayhem that came from the fount of love.
I said, “The rumors are that he stripped Sun Moon naked before he killed her. Is that love?”
When Leonardo cast his eyes down to our subject, you could see his long eyelashes. “I just wanted to find out his real name,” he said.
I stubbed my