Silver picked out a number of fabrics and makeup, lightening his load considerably. When she finished, she turned to look at him.
“This is all great, but have you anything else?” she asked searchingly.
Though Chun and Baek were supposedly close relations, there was very little in the way of resemblance between the two men. Silver had known Baek for years; behind his frail frame and subservient demeanor concealed an immense physical strength that allowed him to make trips from the East Sea to PyongYang, then all the way to Uiju every year into his old age. In his younger years he had traveled to both Shanghai and Vladivostok, though he’d long given much of his former responsibilities to the younger men of his guild. By contrast, Chun’s tawny face with shrewd, almost reptilian eyes gave Silver no immediate impulse to trust.
The merchant pulled out a sheet of folded paper from inside his sleeve and offered it to her with two hands. Silver drew a sharp breath and broke open the seal.
As always happened when she saw the general’s writing, her hands holding the edges of the paper trembled lightly. She read the letter quickly, drinking his words with her eyes. He thanked her for the money she’d sent last summer and told of the victories and losses in the Siberian hills. His troops followed him into any battle, cold and unequipped as they were in contrast to their enemy. Some of them had brought their wives and children over to Vladivostok, and their happy reunions made him long to see her and Luna’s faces. “She must be beautiful if she takes after you. But I fear I’ll never see our daughter again before I die,” he wrote.
She carefully folded the letter and hid it inside a book on her table. She would reread it again, slowly, when alone and free to dwell on every character.
“Thank you, Master Chun. When I heard Master Baek was killed, I thought this letter would have been found and all would be lost . . . our own lives and those of our men in Vladivostok. I waited all the rest of winter, expecting the worst . . . I slept with a knife by my bed, prepared to end my own life if they came, and yet they didn’t.”
“Those bastards left his body without searching it—if they had, everything surely would have gone the way you feared,” Chun said. “My uncle was planning on luring them to our forces in the mountains, and killing a police chief and high-ranking officers would have been an immense victory . . . But either he truly lost his way in the snow, or our men weren’t at their meeting place.” Neither Chun nor Silver voiced what they both knew—that if the independence fighters didn’t take advantage of trapping a group of lost Japanese soldiers, they may well have been killed off themselves in another unrecorded battle.
“And your uncle’s body was untouched until you got to it?”
“No, Madame. I was myself ignorant of what had happened, as I was all the way South at the time. But there was a villager who picked up his body and prepared it for burial. A poor widower with three small children, on the brink of starving to death but an honest man nonetheless. He kept all my uncle’s belongings for me until I got there for the funeral, and nothing was missing or tampered with, even his coins.”
“What good fortune that was,” Silver muttered. She opened her vanity chest and took out two drawstring pouches—one white and the other red, both heavy with solid gold ingots.
“The white one is for your troubles,” she said, handing the pouches. “The red one is for the cause. Do you trust the man who will carry this across the border?”
“Madame, it will be no different than when my uncle was living,” Chun said. “We lowly merchants love gold as much as any others, but even we have honor.”
“I know that well, Master Chun. You should know too that what I give you now isn’t just from me, but from almost all PyongYang courtesans. It’s the money we made pouring drinks and lying with men, and the jewelry we’ve hoarded for our retirement.”
Master Chun bowed his head curtly in lieu of a response.
“How long will you stay in town? And when will you come back?” Silver asked.
“I will leave tomorrow at first light. I may be back by fall if I am lucky.”
“You should spend the night here, it will be far more comfortable than the inn.”
“Thank you, Madame, but that would attract undue attention. And there are my guild brothers waiting for me at the inn . . .” Chun said, already rising. “I should get going.”
“Wait, I almost forgot,” Silver said. “That poor man who recovered Master Baek’s body . . . If you pass by his village on your way out of the city, would you give him something from me?” Silver opened her chest again and picked up this or that trinket. She’d sold her best jewelry and turned them into gold, which the merchant had already tucked safely into his pack. Finally, she pulled off her silver ring and gave it to Chun, smiling wanly.