11. Three, Six, Nine
THREE, SIX, NINE
She heard footsteps.
Marina looked up from her computer.
Outside, the light was going long and amber over Minsu-dong, the kind of late-Friday sun that made even a Soviet-era chancery look almost forgiving.
Most of the building had already gone dark — the old East German bureaucrats who'd built it had apparently never planned for anyone to work past five, and the DPRK hadn't seen fit to improve on their wiring since.
Somewhere down the hall a single fluorescent tube buzzed on a timer no one had ever located, the only light left burning outside their own cube cluster.
Giovanni appeared in the doorway carrying a green glass bottle.
“What’s that?” Marina asked.
“Soju.”
“I know what soju is.”
“No,” he corrected. “It’s diplomacy.”
Aya clapped once. “Exactly.”
Marina looked back at her monitor. “I’m writing a report.”
“Every embassy has a ritual,” Giovanni explained. “The Americans barbecue. The British complain. The French pretend not to enjoy themselves.”
"The French actually enjoy themselves," Esmee corrected, half-shouting over the cube wall, her voice carrying oddly in the empty building — the whole floor had the hollow acoustics of a place built for three times as many people as currently occupied it.
“And we,” Aya declared, taking the bottle from him, “play a drinking game.”
Marina looked from one face to the next. “I’m busy filing a report.”
Aya looked at her. “You’re writing a report at this hour? What’s the report about?”
Marina frowned. “Top secret.”
Esmee leaned out of her cube. “You, RSO, should know better than anyone else that we can't handle TS material here. This site is not certified to handle classified?—”
Marina huffed, holding up her hands. “Never mind. I was just kidding.”
“Ha, ha, not funny,” Esmee deadpanned.
“We should have a ritual,” Aya insisted.
“A ritual to… just go home?”
Aya frowned. “You are no fun.”
Esmee stood up, grabbing her jacket and throwing it over her shoulders. “Tell me about it.”
“You people are unbelievable.”
“No,” Giovanni said. “We're underpaid.”
That, unfortunately, was true.
Five minutes later they had pushed two desks together, the metal legs shrieking against linoleum that hadn't been waxed since Germany reunified, by the look of it.
Someone had left the blinds half-raised on the west-facing window, and the last of the sun came in low and orange, laying stripes across the desks and catching the dust that never quite settled in old buildings like this one.
Aya produced four tiny shot glasses from somewhere that Marina suspected violated procurement regulations.
“Where did those come from?”
“I have connections.”
“You stole them from the residence.”
“I liberated them,” she whispered. Because no one really trusted that the walls weren’t bugged while the building was not certified.
Giovanni filled each glass. “To the European Union.”
“To surviving Pyongyang,” Aya amended.
“To functioning electricity,” Esmee added.
Marina sighed and lifted her glass. The soju wavered slightly, catching the dying light like something more expensive than it was.
“To hazard pay.”
They drank.
The soju burned far less than she'd expected.
Aya rubbed her hands together. “Excellent.”
Marina narrowed her eyes. “That smile means trouble.”
“It means Three, Six, Nine.”
“I don't know Three, Six, Nine.”
“You'll learn.”
Aya pointed around the table. “We count upward. Every multiple of three—or every number containing a three, six, or nine—you clap instead of saying the number.”
Marina frowned. “That sounds unnecessarily complicated.”
“Exactly.”
Giovanni started: “One.”
Aya said: “Two.”
Esmee clapped, and smiled at her own understanding of the game.
Marina reluctantly said “four.”
They kept going. Aya clapped at number six, and Giovanni clapped at number nine, his voice bouncing off the empty cubes around them like the building itself was listening in — which, Marina reminded herself, it probably was.
“So far,” Marina observed, “this is suspiciously easy.”
“Wait.”
They continued: Ten. Eleven. Clapping at twelve.
“Thirteen—”
“No!” Aya burst out laughing, the sound too loud for the empty hallways beyond the cube wall.
“I didn’t clap!”
“You said thirteen!”
“Thirteen is not a multiple of three.”
“In Korean, it’s yeol-set, and set means three.”
“We were counting in English…” Marina trailed off.
“Stop being a sore loser and drink up,” Esmee purred.
Giovanni poured Marina a shot.
Marina stared at the tiny glass, the last of the sun sliding off the desk and up the wall as the sun dropped below the rooftops outside. "This is entrapment."
“Correct.”
She tossed it back. “Henceforth we play the game counting in Korean. Three-six-nine rules, and you drink if you make a mistake—or hesitate.”
Esmee lifted her glass: “Yeol-net.”
Giovanni picked up his: “Yeol-daseot.”
Marina grinned. “Not so fast, fifteen is a multiple of three.”
“But I said fifteen, which has no three, six or nine in it.”
Esmee looked up at the ceiling. “Technically right, but I like the rules to clap when it’s a multiple of three, too.”
He opened his mouth in mock protest, but Aya lifted the glass to his lips.
Aya laughed as he drank it down. “We are going to get so drunk.” Then she realized it was her turn next, and clapped instead of saying number sixteen.
“Aya, you’re going to be our designated driver,” Marina said.
Aya hiccuped. “We’d better walk.”
They didn't walk, not right away.
Giovanni refilled the glasses before anyone could object, and the game kept going past the point where anyone was still counting correctly.
The coal-burning smog around Pyongyang rendered the sunset in orange to a deep bruised violet.
Someone had switched on the desk lamp rather than reach for the overhead switch across the room — an unspoken agreement, it seemed, that the harsh fluorescent tubes could wait.
Esmee's Korean was better than she let on. She barely missed a beat past twenty. Marina wondered, not for the first time, exactly how many languages Esmee had "picked up" and where.
"Twenty-three," Aya slurred, then caught herself. "Wait?—"
"Too late." Giovanni was already pouring.
Marina laughed — really laughed, the kind that came from somewhere she'd forgotten she still had — and for one unguarded second, mid-laugh, her mind supplied Ri's face instead of the numbers. She shut the thought down hard enough that she missed her own turn.
"Marina!" Aya crowed. "You clapped on twenty-two!"
"I did not."
"You absolutely did."
She hadn't clapped. She'd just gone somewhere else for half a second, and the half second had cost her.
She drank.
Esmee was watching her over the rim of her glass, not laughing, her expression doing the thing it did when she was committing to memory something for later.
"What?" Marina said.
"Nothing," Esmee said. "You looked happy for a moment."
It wasn't an accusation. It was worse — it was an observation, filed away, the way Marina herself filed things away.
Marina understood, with the soju-warm clarity of the evening, that she was going to have to be more careful than this.
Esmee collected people's tells the way other people collected stamps.
"I'm always happy," Marina said. "I'm delightful."
"Mm," Esmee said, and drank her own shot without missing a number.
By the time Giovanni called it — "Before we run out of soju or curfew finds us, whichever comes first" — the desks were a wreck of empty glasses and someone's abandoned report, and the building around them had gone fully quiet.
They gathered jackets. Aya hunted for her shoes under the desk.
Marina caught her own reflection, faint, in the black window glass — four shapes in lamplight, and behind them, nothing: no city glow, no passing headlights, just the shape of Minsu-dong dissolving into a darkness that didn't do anything by accident.
When they finally ambled out of the chancery, the guard breathed a sigh of relief as they passed by the concierge desk. Marina was loose, walking too fast, bandy-legged. She pushed open the door and the cool night air seeped in.