The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [143]
She looked ready to storm off. “There’s one more thing,” she said. “Remember how Commander Ga asked whether those peaches were his or Comrade Buc’s? When I handed Comrade Buc the can of peaches, he asked me the same question.”
“What did you tell him?”
“What did I tell him? Nothing,” she said. “I’m the interrogator, remember?”
“Wrong,” I told her. “You’re the intern.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Interrogators are people who get results.”
Behind the cells where new subjects are first processed is the central property locker. It’s on the main floor, and before leaving I went there to snoop around. Anything of real value was looted by the MPSS agents long before bringing the subjects in. Up and down the rows I studied the meager possessions that people were carrying before their final visit here. Lots of sandals. Enemies of the state tended to wear a size seven, was my initial observation. Here were the acorns from people’s pockets, the twigs they used to clean their teeth, rucksacks filled with rags and eating utensils. And next to a piece of tape bearing Comrade Buc’s name, I found a can of peaches with a red-and-green label, grown in Manpo, canned in Fruit Factory 49.
I took the can of peaches and headed home.
The subway had started running, and jammed in one of the cars, I looked no different than the legions of gray-clad factory workers as we involuntarily leaned against one another in the turns. I kept seeing Buc’s family, beautiful in their white dresses. I kept hoping my mother, cooking breakfast blind, didn’t burn the apartment down. Somehow she always managed not to. And even one hundred meters underground we all heard the shock-work whistle’s five morning blasts.
COMMANDER GA’S eyes opened to see the boy and the girl at the foot of the bed, staring at him. They were really just the shine of first light in their hair, a thin blue across cheekbones. He blinked, and though it seemed like a second, he must have slept because when he opened his eyes again, the boy and the girl were gone.
In the kitchen he found the chair balanced against the counter, and here they were, up high, staring into the open door of the top cabinet.
He lit the burner under a carbon steel skillet, then quartered an onion and spooned in some oil.
“How many guns are in there?” he asked them.
The boy and the girl shared a look. The girl held up three fingers.
“Has anyone shown you how to handle a pistol?”
They shook their heads no.
“Then you know not to touch them, right?”
They nodded.
The smell of cooking brought barking from the dog on the balcony.
“Come, you two,” he said. “We need to find where your father keeps your mother’s cigarettes before she wakes mad as a dog in the zoo.”
With Brando, Commander Ga scoured the house, toe-tapping the baseboards and inspecting the undersides of furniture. Brando sniffed and barked at everything he touched, while the children hung back, wary but curious. Ga didn’t know what he was looking for. He moved slowly from room to room, noticing a patched-over flue hole where an old heating stove had been. He observed a patch of swollen plaster, perhaps from a roof leak. Near the front door, he saw marks in the hardwood floor. He ran his toes over the scratches, then looked up.
He fetched a chair, stood upon it, discovered a section of molding that was loose. He reached behind it, into the wall, and removed a carton of cigarettes.
“Oh,” the boy said. “I understand now. You were looking for hiding places.”
It was the first time the child had spoken to him.
“That’s right,” he told the boy.
“There’s another one,” the boy said. He pointed toward the portrait of Kim Jong Il.
“I’m sending you on a secret mission,” Ga told them and handed over a pack of cigarettes. “You must get these cigarettes under your mother’s pillow, and she must not wake.”
The girl’s expressions, in contrast to her mother’s, were subtle and easily missed. With a quick lip flare, she suggested this was much beneath her spying