27. Deep Underground
DEEP UNDERGROUND
Marina descended the stairs on Wednesday at lunchtime. She hadn’t seen Ri in two days, since she’d woken up late, and she was still late.
Miss Park and Miss Wu were in the chancery lobby, playing cards. They sat up when they spotted her, sweeping the cards together and dropping a few in the process.
Marina smiled. “Sorry to interrupt.”
“There's no interruption,” Miss Park said kindly. Miss Wu shot a look at the security guard — for spotting Marina on the cameras and not giving them warning.
“Hi, I know this is unscheduled…”
The word unscheduled made them both visibly tense.
“But I'd like to go to Tongil Market this weekend.”
“The seafood market is very nice,” Miss Park said. “Much closer.”
Marina smiled politely. The seafood market was no doubt delightful, if one happened to be shopping for fish. She wasn't. She wanted a large, bustling market.
“I'd rather go to Tongil. I don't need any seafood.”
Miss Park hesitated. “But it is across town…”
Marina tilted her head. “Is there a security issue on that side of the city I should know about?”
“Oh!” Miss Park laughed quickly. “No, no. It's perfectly safe.”
“Good.” Marina smiled. As an afterthought, she added: “Could we go to Yeokjeon Department Store on Friday?”
Miss Wu perked up. “That sounds lovely.”
Miss Park hesitated again. “I will ask if we can go, and get back to you.”
Marina bowed.
Aya and Giovanni finally dropped the shocker-to-none that they were dating.
Esmee suggested they have a date night. Since there was no going out unescorted in the DPRK, Esmee volunteered herself and Marina to go out so Aya and Giovanni could frolic at home.
Marina rolled her eyes, but that was how they didn't play a group drinking game on Friday night.
Instead, Marina, Esmee, Miss Park and Miss Wu spent a few hours and about fifty euros at the modern, curved building Yeokjeon Department Store building, across from the Pyongyang Main Train Station.
“Should we take photos?” Miss Park suggested.
Marina and Esmee stood in front of the department store while Miss Park took pictures of them with Esmee’s phone.
“I know! Let’s take a Pyongyang Station selfie,” Marina said, clapping her hands and then throwing an arm around Esmee, who cut her eyes to her. Marina locked her smile in place and hit the shutter button on her phone.
Esmee looked dour. Perfect.
“Culd you stop making station remarks,” Esmee whispered in French.
“Of course,” Marina lied, and handed Miss Park her phone.
“Say kimchi, ladies!” Miss Park called out, and took another photo.
They did so, dutifully. Big smiles. The soft pastel cityscape of painted concrete towers always took her off-guard. It looked so sweet. The choking grey smog enveloping the city helped her remember where she actually was.
Miss Park handed Esmee back her camera.
“Feels like I’m so close to Pyongyang Station,” Marina said loudly.
“Because you are!” Miss Wu replied kindly.
Esmee shot Marina a filthy look. Because station was intelligence parlance for a foreign base of espionage operations.
They passed the Koryo Hotel’s luxurious entrance. Marina hesitated.
“Do you think I could use the restroom before we go on the metro?” she asked.
Miss Park raised her eyebrows. “I think it is just for guests.”
A porter standing outside flagged them down. “You can use the restroom, m’am,” he said.
“Thank you,” Marina said, pressing five euros into his hand discreetly.
Because it was impossible for Marina to go anywhere alone, Miss Park had to go with her, which meant that Miss Wu did too, and of course they couldn’t leave Esmee on the street alone with dozens of people around in broad daylight.
Marina was much obliged when they got back out onto the street.
She racked her mind if this was a pregnancy symptom, but she could hardly search it up on a computer, as the DPRK probably logged her web usage.
They headed for Yonggwang Metro Station.
They went down before they went underground — that was the strange part, the way the city kept a second city beneath it and gave no warning on the surface.
A plain concrete stairwell, unmarked, tucked behind a screen of poplars a block off Embassy Row, and then the temperature dropped and the light changed and somewhere around the second landing the concrete gave way to marble.
Marina slowed despite herself.
The ceiling opened into a barrel vault painted the color of a held breath — pale blue shading to white, ringed with plaster wreaths and clusters of glass-globe chandeliers that dripped light down onto a mural at the far end of the hall: the Leader against a mountain landscape rendered in the same saturated, unshadowed gold that colored everything official here, sunbeams radiating outward from him like he was the weather.
Two women in green-trimmed uniforms stood at the base of it, hands folded, doing nothing that Marina could identify except being watched.
"This is Yonggwang," Miss Wu said, gesturing at the grand sweep of the station.
"It means glory," Miss Park added, pride creeping into the flat delivery she used for everything else.
Marina took it in the way she catalogued any unfamiliar building: exits, sightlines, chokepoints. There weren't many of the first. Ornamentation, she was learning, was its own kind of security feature — nobody built a ceiling like that and left it easy to leave.
A handful of commuters crossed the hall below the mural, unhurried, their reflections doubling faintly in the polished stone floor.
A man in a gray Mao-collared jacket read a folded newspaper without breaking stride.
Two schoolgirls in white blouses and red scarves passed a single earbud back and forth between them, sharing whatever crackled out of it.
Breathtaking chandeliers lit up the hall, but nobody looked up.
The escalator waited beyond an archway, and it went down farther than any escalator Marina had ridden before, the steel treads receding into a soft amber gloom lit by globe fixtures spaced along the shaft like something out of an old submarine film.
A hundred meters, she guessed. Maybe more.
Deep enough to double as a bomb shelter, which she suspected was closer to the point than prosperity.
Esmee leaned toward her, voice pitched for exactly the two of them. "Bit theatrical, no?"
"It's effective," Marina said, and meant it two ways.
The air changed as they descended — cooler, mineral, carrying a faint hum that she felt in her back teeth before she consciously heard it, some machinery working itself somewhere in the rock.
A recorded announcement rolled out in Korean, warm and maternal, the kind of voice that told children to hold the railing.
Miss Park stood one step above Marina and Miss Wu one step below, boxing her in without seeming to, the same soft custodial vigilance they applied to everything.
Marina looked forward to adulting back in Brussels, where she could hang off the front of a building.
A wave of guilt washed over her that she would return to Brussels and leave Ri behind, and how Miss Park, Miss Wu—all of them, really—could actually hang off the front of a building. Just in the literal sense.
She continued down the steps carefully. She was Miss Park and Miss Wu’s charge, after all, and she didn’t want any accident to happen that would endanger them more than it would her.
At the bottom, the platform opened out under another vaulted ceiling, this one done in reliefs of wheat sheaves and red banners, lit by a long row of fixtures that buzzed faintly at a pitch just under hearing.
The platform itself was busier than the hall above — men in dark jackets checking watches, a woman balancing a mesh bag of vegetables against one hip, a boy in a school uniform practicing what looked like times tables under his breath.
A yellow line was painted a full meter back from the platform edge, and everyone, without exception, stood behind it.
Marina noted that too. No one needed to be told twice, here, where the line was.
Somehow she missed the drunks who staggered around the Brussels metro.
Esmee was lingering by the Plexiglas display of the state-run newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun. People were gathered around it, hands clasped behind their backs, reading today’s news.
“Come on,” Marina muttered to herself, and blinked.
Some kind of feint, some kind of quick movement of a hand near Esmee; but Esmee was now smiling, walking back to them without looking back.
Had someone passed Esmee something?
Marina looked at Esmee’s neck. Wrist. Handbag—nowhere a trace of her signature knotted French design scarf. Gone.
Esmee had been wearing one when they came in that morning. Hadn’t she?
She made a mental note to check the security tapes when she got back to the chancery. This was the reality of a diplomatic mission overseas: watch each other for cracks.
Her eyes slid over to Miss Park and Miss Wu, who were doing the same thing with them and with each other in their own country.
Down the tunnel a light swelled before the sound of the train did, a Deutsche-Bahn-green railcar easing out of the dark with a hydraulic sigh, decades older than anything running in Berlin and better kept than half of it.
The doors opened. Miss Park gestured them forward with a small, proprietary flourish, as if she'd personally laid every rail.
Marina stepped on. Esmee followed a half-beat later, and Marina felt her go still beside her the way she always did on entering an enclosed space with strangers — counting exits of her own, no doubt, though God only knew what she counted them for.
The propaganda music was piped in the metro cars, too. An all-too-familiar patriotic warbling rolled out over the aged speakers, which distorted the music just enough to make the corner of Marina’s mouth curve.
Miss Park caught her half-smile and bowed.
Marina smiled in earnest now, and Esmee flashed her a curious look that Marina was smiling while listening to the strains of regime brainwashing.
Marina leaned over to Esmee: “Where’s your scarf?”
Esmee made a start, putting her hand at her neck, then looking at the handles of her handbag—Esmee insisted on calling it a sac à main even in English.
“I must have lost it somewhere,” she breathed, biting her lip.
“You must have,” Marina replied drily.
Esmee frowned. “You’re getting so suspicious these days.” Then she lowered her voice, and asked in French: “Is it a bit of local influence?”
Marina’s stomach dropped.
The last passenger got on.
The doors sealed and the train pulled them back into the dark.
Esmee caught Miss Wu’s attention. “Miss Wu, we really must take a row boat this evening on the Taedong.”
“Oh—what? I’m sorry, what did you say, ma’am?” Miss Wu replied.
Esmee stood in front of her, swaying slightly with the train racing down the tracks.
She lowered her voice but Marina was close enough and could hear her. “Do you remember that favor I did for you? Taedong River. Tonight. Boat.”
All of the air rushed out of Miss Wu, but she nodded. “Then we’re even?”
Esmee smiled. “Yes.”