The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [158]
“Did someone try to hurt you?” I asked her.
“What makes you think it wasn’t love?”
I laughed. “That would be a new way to show affection.”
Q-Kee cocked her head and regarded me in the mirror.
She lifted a single glass from the sink ledge and held it to the light.
“They shared a rinse cup,” she said. “That’s love. There are many proofs.”
“Is it proof?” I asked her. I shared a rinse cup with my parents.
In the bedroom, Q-Kee surveyed things. “Sun Moon would sleep on this side of the bed,” she said. “It is closer to the toilet.” Then Q-Kee went to the little table on that side of the bed. She opened and closed its drawer, knocked on the wood. “A smart woman,” Q-Kee said, “would keep her condoms taped to the underside of this table. They wouldn’t be visible to her husband, but when she needed one, all she had to do was reach.”
“Condoms,” I repeated. All forms of birth control were strictly illegal.
“You can get them at any night market,” she said. “The Chinese make them in every color.”
She turned over Sun Moon’s bedside table, but there was nothing underneath.
I turned over Commander Ga’s bedside table as well—nothing.
“Trust me,” Q-Kee said. “The Commander had no need for birth control.”
Together, we pulled the sheets from the bed and got down on our knees to identify hairs on the pillows. “They both slept here,” I declared, and then we ran our fingertips across each centimeter of the mattress, sniffing and eyeballing everything for even the smallest sign of spoor. It was about halfway down the mattress that I came across a scent the likes of which I’d never encountered. I felt something primal in my nostrils, and then a bright light flashed in my mind. The scent was so sudden, so foreign, that I couldn’t find the words, I couldn’t have alerted Q-Kee even if I’d wanted to.
At the foot of the bed, we both stood.
Q-Kee crossed her arms in disbelief. “They slept together, but no fucky-fucky.”
“No what?”
“It’s English for ‘sex,’ ” she said. “Don’t you watch movies?”
“Not those kinds of movies,” I said, but the truth was I hadn’t seen any.
Opening the wardrobe, Q-Kee ran a finger across Sun Moon’s choson-ots until it came to rest at an empty dowel. “This is the one she took,” Q-Kee said. “It must have been spectacular, if these are the ones she left behind. So Sun Moon wasn’t planning on being gone long, yet she wanted to look her best.” She gazed at the lustrous fabrics before her. “I know every dress she wore in every movie,” she said. “If I stood here long enough, I’d figure out the missing dress.”
“But harvesting the garden,” I said. “That suggests they were planning on being gone a long time.”
“Or maybe it was a last meal, in her best dress.”
I said, “But that only makes sense if—”
“—if Sun Moon knew what was going to happen to her,” Q-Kee added.
“But if Sun Moon knew Ga meant to kill her, why dress up, why go along?”
Q-Kee considered the question as her touch lingered on all those beautiful dresses.
“Perhaps we should impound them as evidence,” I told her, “so that you could more closely inspect them at your leisure.”
“They are beautiful,” she said. “Like my mother’s dresses. But I clothe myself. Plus, dressing like a tour guide at the International Friendship Museum, that isn’t my style.”
Leonardo and Jujack returned from Comrade Buc’s.
“Nothing much to report,” Leonardo said.
“We found a hidden compartment in the kitchen wall,” Jujack added. “But inside were only these.”
He held up five miniature Bibles.
The light changed as the sun flashed off the steel of the distant May Day Stadium, and for a moment, we were newly stunned to be in such a residence, one without common walls or shared faucets, without cots that folded up and rolled into the corner, without a twenty-story trot down to a communal washtub.
Behind the security of Pubyok crime-scene tape, we began divvying up all of Commander Ga’s rice and movies. Titanic, our interns agreed, was the best movie ever made. I told Jujack to throw the Bibles off