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The Plotters
Un-su Kim
A thriller like you’ve never read one before, from the hottest new voice in Korean fiction‘A work of literary genius’ Karen Dionne, internationally bestselling author of Home‘I loved it!’ M. W. Craven, author of The Puppet Show‘You’ll be laughing out loud every five minutes’ You-jeong Jeong, author of The Good Son‘A mash-up of Tarantino and Camus set in contemporary Seoul’ Louisa Luna, author of Two Girls Down‘An incredible cast of characters’ Le monde‘Smart but lightning fast’ Brian Evenson, author of Last DaysPlotters are just pawns like us. A request comes in and they draw up the plans. There’s someone above them who tells them what to do. And above that person is another plotter telling them what to do. You think that if you go up there with a knife and stab the person at the very top, that’ll fix everything. But no-one’s there. It’s just an empty chair.Reseng was raised by cantankerous Old Raccoon in the Library of Dogs. To anyone asking, it’s just an ordinary library. To anyone in the know, it’s a hub for Seoul’s organised crime, and a place where contract killings are plotted and planned. So it’s no surprise that Reseng has grown up to become one of the best hitmen in Seoul. He takes orders from the plotters, carries out his grim duties, and comforts himself afterwards with copious quantities of beer and his two cats, Desk and Lampshade.But after he takes pity on a target and lets her die how she chooses, he finds his every move is being watched. Is he finally about to fall victim to his own game? And why does that new female librarian at the library act so strangely? Is he looking for his enemies in all the wrong places? Could he be at the centre of a plot bigger than anything he’s ever known?







Copyright (#uc0517b04-3f0a-5260-9af5-51ca19463d72)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Un-Su Kim 2010
English translation copyright © Sora Kim-Russell 2018, 2019
Cover design by Jack Smyth
Cover photograph © Plainpicture / Phillippe Lesprit
Un-Su Kim asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work; Sora Kim-Russell asserts the moral right to be identified as the translator of this work
This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)
This translation originally published in Australia, in slightly different form, by The Text Publishing Company
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008315771
Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008315795
Version: 2018-12-12
Contents
Cover (#u2c6218b7-7cae-5fff-9101-7ebd7853358d)
Title Page (#uc7d0ed7d-4020-5d6f-a6a5-1ddbd4b16e9b)
Copyright
On Hospitality (#ud6aa2252-e4fa-54f9-bc49-82a00cd8f228)
Achilles’ Heel (#uf47d864a-e506-5a8c-baf4-d769cca2c3ab)
Bear’s Pet Crematorium (#u63c80a39-8143-58aa-9340-66422ca6f38f)
The Doghouse Library (#litres_trial_promo)
Beer Week (#litres_trial_promo)
The Meat Market (#litres_trial_promo)
Mito (#litres_trial_promo)
Knitting (#litres_trial_promo)
Frog Eat Frog (#litres_trial_promo)
The Barber and His Wife (#litres_trial_promo)
The Door to the Left (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

ON HOSPITALITY (#ulink_cafcbab5-b419-513f-8eb5-ad0c061ab508)
The old man came out to the garden.
Reseng tightened the focus on the telescopic sight and pulled back the charging handle. The bullet clicked loudly into the chamber. He glanced around. Other than the tall fir trees reaching for the sky, nothing moved. The forest was silent. No birds took flight, no bugs chirred. Given how still it was out here, the noise of a gunshot would travel a long way. And if people heard it and rushed over? He brushed aside the thought. No point in worrying about that. Gunshots were common out here. They would assume it was poachers hunting wild boar. Who would waste their time hiking this deep into the forest just to investigate a single gunshot? Reseng studied the mountain to the west. The sun was one hand above the ridgeline. He still had time.
The old man started watering the flowers. Some received a gulp, some just a sip. He tipped the watering can with great ceremony, as if he were serving them tea. Now and then he did a little shoulder shimmy, as if dancing, and gave a petal a brief caress. He gestured at one of the flowers and chuckled. It looked like they were having a conversation. Reseng adjusted the focus again and studied the flower the old man was talking to. It looked familiar. He must have seen it before, but he couldn’t remember what it was called. He tried to recall which flower bloomed in October—cosmos? zinnia? chrysanthemum?—but none of the names matched the one he was looking at. Why couldn’t he remember? He furrowed his brow and struggled to come up with the name but soon brushed aside that thought, too. It was just a flower—what did it matter?
A huge black dog strolled over from the other end of the garden and rubbed its head against the old man’s thigh. A mastiff, purebred. The same beast Julius Caesar had brought back from his conquest of Britain. The dog the ancient Romans had used to hunt lions and round up wild horses. As the old man gave the dog a pat, it wagged its tail and wound around his legs, getting in his way as he tried to continue his watering. He threw a deflated soccer ball across the garden, and the dog raced after it, tail wagging, while the old man returned to his flowers. Just as before, he gestured at them, greeted them, talked to them. The dog came back immediately, the flattened soccer ball between its teeth. The old man threw the ball farther this time, and the dog raced after it again. The ferocious mastiff that had once hunted lions had been reduced to a clown. And yet the old man and the dog seemed well suited to each other. They repeated the game over and over. Far from getting bored, they looked like they were enjoying it.
The old man finished his watering and stood up straight, stretching and smiling with satisfaction. Then he turned and looked halfway up the mountain, as if he knew Reseng was there. The old man’s smiling face entered Reseng’s crosshairs. Did he know the sun was less than a hand above the horizon now? Did he know he would be dead before it dipped below the mountain? Was that why he was smiling? Or maybe he wasn’t actually smiling. The old man’s face seemed fixed in a permanent grin, like a carved wooden Hahoe mask. Some people just had faces like that—people whose inner feelings you could never guess at, who smiled constantly, even when they were sad or angry.
Should he pull the trigger now? If he pulled it, he could be back in the city before midnight. He’d take a hot bath, down a few beers until he was good and drunk, or put an old Beatles record on the turntable and think about the fun he’d soon have with the money on its way into his bank account. Maybe, after this final job, he could change his life. He could open a pizza shop across from a high school, or sell cotton candy in the park. Reseng pictured himself handing armfuls of balloons and cotton candy to children and dozing off under the sun. He really could live that life, couldn’t he? The idea of it suddenly seemed so wonderful. But he had to save that thought for after he pulled the trigger. The old man was still alive, and the money was not yet in his account.
The mountain was swiftly casting its shadow over the old man and his cabin. If Reseng was going to pull the trigger, he had to do it now. The old man had finished watering and would be going back inside any second. The job would get much harder then. Why complicate it? Pull the trigger. Pull it now and get out of here.
The old man was smiling, and the black dog was running with the soccer ball in its mouth. The old man’s face was crystal clear in the crosshairs. He had three deep wrinkles across his forehead, a wart above his right eyebrow, and liver spots on his left cheek. Reseng gazed at where his heart would soon be pierced by a bullet. The old man’s sweater looked hand-knit, not factory-made, and was about to be drenched in blood. All he had to do was squeeze the trigger just the tiniest bit, and the firing pin would strike the primer on the 7.62 mm cartridge, igniting the gunpowder inside the brass casing. The explosion would propel the bullet forward along the grooves inside the bore and send it spinning through the air, straight toward the old man’s heart. With the high speed and destructive force of the bullet, the old man’s mangled organs would explode out the exit wound in his lower back. Just the thought of it made the fine hairs all over Reseng’s body stand on end. Holding the life of another human being in the palm of his hand always left him with a funny feeling.
Pull it.
Pull it now.
And yet for some reason, Reseng did not pull the trigger and instead set the rifle down on the ground.
“Now’s not the right time,” he muttered.
He wasn’t sure why it wasn’t the right time. Only that there was a right time for everything. A right time for eating ice cream. A right time for going in for a kiss. And maybe it sounded stupid, but there was also a right time for pulling a trigger and a right time for a bullet to the heart. Why wouldn’t there be? And if Reseng’s bullet happened to be sailing straight through the air toward the old man’s heart just as the right moment fortuitously presented itself to him? That would be magnificent. Not that he was waiting for the best possible moment, of course. That auspicious moment might never come. Or it could pass by right under his nose. It occurred to him that he simply didn’t want to pull the trigger yet. He didn’t know why, but he just didn’t. He lit a cigarette. The shadow of the mountain was creeping past the old man’s cottage.
When it turned dark, the old man took the dog inside. The cottage must not have had electricity, because it looked even darker in there. A single candle glowed in the living room, but Reseng couldn’t make out the interior well enough through the scope. The shadows of the man and his dog loomed large against a brick wall and disappeared. Now the only way Reseng could kill him from his current position would be if the old man happened to stand directly in the window with the candle in his hand.
As the sun sank below the ridge, darkness descended on the forest. There was no moon; even objects close at hand were hard to make out. There was only the glimmer of candlelight from the old man’s cottage. The darkness was so dense that it made the air seem damp and heavy. Why didn’t Reseng just leave? Why linger there in the dark? He wasn’t sure. Wait for daybreak, he decided. Once the sun came up, he’d fire off a single round—no different from firing at the wooden target he’d practiced with for years—and then go home. He put his cigarette butt in his pocket and crawled into the tent. Since there was nothing else to do to pass the time, he ate a packet of army crackers and fell asleep wrapped up in his sleeping bag.
Reseng was awakened abruptly about two hours later by heavy footsteps in the grass. They were coming straight toward his tent. Three or four irregular thuds. A torso sweeping through tall grass. He couldn’t decipher what was coming his way. Could be a wild boar. Or a wildcat. Reseng disengaged the safety and pointed his rifle at the darkness, toward the approaching sound. He couldn’t pull the trigger yet. Mercenaries lying in wait had been known to fire into the dark out of fear, without checking their targets, only to discover that they’d hit a deer or a police dog or, worse, one of their fellow soldiers lost in the forest while out scouting. They would sob next to the corpse of a brother in arms felled by friendly fire, their beefy, tattooed bodies shaking like a little girl’s as they told their commanding officers, “I didn’t mean to kill him, I swear.” And maybe they really hadn’t meant to. Since they’d never before had to face their fear of things going bump in the night, the only thing someone with muscles for brains knew how to do was point and shoot into the dark. Reseng waited calmly for whatever was out there to reveal itself. To his surprise, what emerged was the old man and his dog.
“What are you doing out here?” the old man asked.
Now, this was funny. As funny as if the bull’s-eye at the firing range had walked right up to him and said, Why haven’t you shot me yet?
“What’re you doing out here? I could’ve shot you,” Reseng said, his voice trembling.
“Shot me? How’s that for turning the tables?” the old man said with a smile. “This is my land. You’re the one who doesn’t belong, crashing on someone else’s property.” He looked relaxed. The situation was unusual, to say the least, and yet he didn’t seem at all taken aback. Instead, the one taken aback was Reseng.
“You startled me. I thought you were a wild animal.”
“You’re a hunter?” the old man asked, looking pointedly at Reseng’s rifle.
“Yes.”
“That’s a Dragunov. You only see those in museums. So poachers these days hunt with Vietnam War rifles?”
“I don’t care how old the gun is as long as it can take down a boar.” Reseng tried to sound nonchalant.
“True. If it stops a boar, then it doesn’t matter what gun you use. Hell, if you can stop a boar with chopsticks—or a toothpick, for that matter—you can skip the gun altogether.”
The old man laughed. The dog waited patiently at his side. It was much bigger than it had looked through the scope. And much more intimidating than when it was chasing after a deflated soccer ball.
“That’s a nice dog,” Reseng said. The old man looked down at the dog and stroked its head.
“He is a nice dog. He’s the one who sniffed you out. But he’s old now.”
The dog never took its eyes off of Reseng. It didn’t growl or bare its teeth, but it wasn’t exactly friendly, either. The old man gave the dog’s head another pat.
“Since you insist on staying the night, don’t catch cold out here. Come to the house.”
“Thank you for the offer, but I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”
“It’s no trouble.”
The old man turned and strode back down the slope, the dog at his heels. He didn’t have a flashlight, but he seemed to have no trouble finding his way through the dark. Reseng’s mind was in a whirl. His rifle was charged and ready, and his target was only five meters away. He watched the old man disappear into the darkness. A second later, he shouldered the rifle and headed down after him.
The cottage was warm. A fire blazed in the redbrick fireplace. There were no furnishings or decorations, save for a threadbare rug and small table in front of the fire and a few photos on the mantelpiece. The photos were all of the old man, sitting or standing with others, always at the center of the group, the people at his sides smiling stiffly, as if honored to be photographed with him. None of the photos seemed to be of family.
“Kind of early in the year for a fire,” Reseng said.
“The older you get, the more you feel the cold. And I’m feeling it more than ever this year.”
The old man stuffed a few pieces of dry wood into the fire, the flames balking briefly at the new addition. Reseng unslung his rifle from his shoulder and leaned it against the doorjamb. The old man stole a glance at the gun.
“Isn’t October closed season for hunting?”
There was a twinkle in his eye. He’d been using banmal, the familiar form of speech, as if he and Reseng were old friends, but it didn’t bother Reseng.
“A man could starve to death trying to follow every law.”
“True, not all laws need to be followed,” the old man murmured. “You’d be stupid to try.”
As he stirred the logs with a metal poker, the flames rose and licked at a piece of wood that had not yet caught fire.
“Well, I’ve got booze and I’ve got tea, so pick your poison.”
“Tea sounds good.”
“You don’t want something stronger? You must’ve been freezing.”
“I don’t usually drink when I’m hunting. Besides, it’s dangerous to drink if you’re going to sleep outdoors.”
“Then indulge tonight,” the old man said with a smile. “Not much chance of freezing to death in here.”
He went to the kitchen and returned with two tin cups and a bottle of whiskey, then used a pair of tongs to carefully retrieve a kettle of black tea from inside the fireplace. He poured tea into one of the cups. His movements were smooth and measured. He handed the cup to Reseng and filled his own, then surprised Reseng by topping it off with whiskey.
“If you’re not warmed up yet, a touch of whiskey’ll get you the rest of the way. You can’t go hunting until daybreak anyway.”
“Does tea go with whiskey?” Reseng asked.
“Why not? It’s all the same going down.”
The old man wrinkled his eyes at him. He had a handsome face. He looked like he would have received a lot of compliments in his younger days. His chiseled features made him seem somehow tough and warm at the same time. As if the years had gently filed down his rough edges and softened him. Reseng held out his cup as the old man tipped a little whiskey into it. The scent of alcohol wafted up from the warm tea. It smelled good. The dog sauntered over from the other end of the living room and lay down next to Reseng.
“You’re a good person.”
“Pardon?”
“Santa likes you,” the old man said, gesturing at the dog. “Dogs know good people from bad right away.”
Up close, the dog’s eyes were surprisingly gentle.
“Maybe it’s just stupid,” Reseng said.
“Drink your tea.”
The old man smiled. He took a sip of his spiked tea, and Reseng followed suit.
“Not bad,” Reseng said.
“Surprising, huh? Tastes good in coffee, too, but black tea is better. Warms your stomach and your heart. Like wrapping your arms around a good woman,” he added with a childish giggle.
“If you’ve got a good woman, why stop at hugging?” Reseng scoffed. “A good woman is always better than some boozy tea.”
The old man nodded. “I suppose you’re right. No tea compares to a good woman.”
“But the taste is memorable, I’ll give you that.”
“Black tea is steeped in imperialism. That’s what gives it its flavor. Anything this flavorful has to be hiding an incredible amount of carnage.”
“Interesting theory.”
“I’ve got some pork and potatoes. Care for some?”
“Sure.”
The old man went outside and came back with a blackened lump of meat and a handful of potatoes. The meat looked awful. It was covered in dirt and dust and still had patches of hair, but even worse was the rancid smell. He shoved the pork into the hot ash at the bottom of the fireplace until it was completely coated, then skewered it on an iron spit and propped it over the fire. He stirred the flames with the poker and tucked the potatoes into the ash.
“I can’t say that looks all that appetizing,” Reseng said.
“I lived in Peru for a while. Learned this method from the Indians. Doesn’t look clean but tastes great.”
“Frankly, it looks pretty terrible, but if it’s a secret native recipe, then I guess there must be something to it.”
The old man grinned at Reseng.
“Just a few days ago, I discovered something else I have in common with the native Peruvians.”
“What’s that?”
“No refrigerator.”
The old man turned the meat. His face looked earnest in the glow of the fire. As he pricked the potatoes with a skewer, he murmured at them, “You’d better make yourselves delicious for our important guest.” While the meat cooked, the old man finished off his spiked tea and refilled his cup with just whiskey, then offered more to Reseng.
Reseng held out his cup. He liked how the whiskey burned on its way down his throat and radiated smoothly up from his empty stomach. The alcohol spread pleasantly through his body. For a moment, everything felt unreal. He would never have imagined it: a sniper and his target sitting in front of a roaring fire, pretending to be best friends … Each time the old man turned the meat, a delicious aroma wafted toward him. The dog moved closer to the fireplace to sniff at the meat, but he hung back at the last moment and grumbled instead, as if afraid of the fire.
“There, there, Santa. Don’t worry,” the old man said, patting the dog. “You’ll get your share.”
“The dog’s name is Santa?”
“I met this fellow on Christmas Day. That day, he lost his owner and I lost my leg.”
The old man lifted the hem of his left pant leg to reveal a prosthesis.
“He saved me. Dragged me over nearly five kilometers of snow-covered road.”
“That’s a hell of a way to meet.”
“Best Christmas gift I ever got.”
The old man continued to stroke the dog’s head.
“He’s very gentle for his size.”
“Not exactly. I used to have to keep him leashed all the time. One glimpse of a stranger and he’d attack. But now that he’s old, he’s gone soft. It’s odd. I can’t get used to the idea of an animal being this friendly with people.”
The meat smelled cooked. The old man poked at it with the skewer and took it off the fire. Using a serrated knife, he carved the meat into thick slices. He gave a piece to Reseng, a piece to himself, and a piece to Santa. Reseng brushed off the ash and took a bite.
“What an unusual flavor. Doesn’t really taste like pork.”
“Good, yeah?”
“It is. But do you have any salt?”
“Nope.”
“No fridge, no salt—that’s quite a way to live. Do the native Peruvians also live without salt?”
“No, no,” the old man said sheepishly. “I ran out a few days ago.”
“Do you hunt?”
“Not anymore. About a month ago, I found a wild boar stuck in a poacher’s trap. Still alive. I watched it gasp for breath and thought to myself, Do I kill it now or wait for it to die? If I waited for it to die, then I could blame its death on the poacher who left that trap out, but if I killed it, then I’d be responsible for its death. What would you have done?”
The old man’s smile was inscrutable. Reseng gave the tin cup a swirl before polishing off the alcohol.
“Hard to say. I don’t think it really matters who killed the boar.”
The old man seemed to ponder this for a moment before responding.
“I guess you’re right. When you really think about it, it doesn’t matter who killed it. Either way, here we are enjoying some Peruvian-style roasted boar.”
The old man laughed loudly. Reseng laughed, too. It wasn’t much of a joke, but the old man kept laughing, and Reseng followed suit with a loud laugh of his own.
The old man was in high spirits. He filled Reseng’s cup with whiskey until it was nearly overflowing, then filled his own and raised it in a toast. They downed their drinks in one gulp. The old man picked up the skewer and fished a couple of potatoes from the hot ashes. After taking a bite of one, he pronounced it delicious and gave the other to Reseng. Reseng brushed off the ashes and took a bite. “That is delicious,” he said.
“There’s nothing better than a roasted potato on a cold winter’s day,” the old man said.
“Potatoes always remind me of someone …” Reseng started to babble. His face was red from the alcohol and the glow of the fire.
“I’m guessing this story doesn’t have a happy ending,” the old man said.
“It doesn’t.”
“Is that someone alive or dead?”
“Long dead. I was in Africa at the time, and we got an emergency call in the middle of the night. We jumped in a truck and headed off. It turned out that a rebel soldier who’d escaped camp had taken an old woman hostage. He was just a kid—still had his baby fat. Must’ve been fifteen, maybe even fourteen? From what I saw, he was worked up and scared out of his wits, but not an actual threat. The old woman kept saying something to him. Meanwhile, he was pointing an AK-47 at her head with one hand and cramming a potato into his mouth with the other. We all knew he wasn’t going to do anything, but then the order came over the walkie-talkie to take him out. Someone pulled the trigger. We ran over to take a closer look. Half of the kid’s head was blown away, and in his mouth was the mashed-up potato that he never got the chance to swallow.”
“The poor thing. He must’ve been starving.”
“It felt so strange to look into the mouth of a boy with half his head missing. What would’ve happened if we’d waited just ten more seconds? All I could think was, If we had waited, he would’ve been able to swallow the potato before he died.”
“Not like anything would’ve changed for that poor boy if he had swallowed it.”
“No, of course not.” Reseng’s voice wavered. “But it still felt weird to think about that chewed-up potato in his mouth.”
The old man finished the rest of his whiskey and poked around in the ashes with the skewer to see if there were any more potatoes. He found one in the corner and offered it to Reseng, who gazed blankly at it and politely declined. The old man looked at the potato; his face darkened and he tossed it back into the ashes.
“I’ve got another bottle of whiskey. What do you say?” the old man asked.
Reseng thought about it for a moment. “Your call,” he said.
The old man brought another bottle from the kitchen and poured some for him. They sipped in silence as they watched the flames dance in the fireplace. As Reseng grew tipsy, a feeling of profound unreality washed over him. The old man’s eyes never left the fire.
“Fire is so beautiful,” Reseng said.
“Ash is more beautiful once you get to know it.”
The old man slowly swirled his cup as he gazed into the flames. He smiled then, as if recalling something funny.
“My grandfather was a whaler. This was back before they outlawed whaling. He didn’t grow up anywhere near the ocean—he was actually from inland Hamgyong Province, but he went down south to Jangsaengpo harbor for work and ended up becoming the best harpooner in the country. During one of the whaling trips, he got dragged under by a sperm whale. Really deep under. What happened was, he threw the harpoon into the whale’s back, but the rope tangled around his foot and pulled him overboard. Those flimsy colonial-era whaling boats and shoddy harpoons were no match for an animal that big. A male sperm whale can grow up to eighteen meters long and weigh up to sixty tons. Think about it. That’s like fifteen adult African elephants. I don’t care if it were just a balloon animal—I would never want to mess with anything that big. No way, no how. But not my grandfather. He stuck his harpoon right in that giant whale.”
“What happened next?” Reseng asked.
“Utter havoc, of course. He said the shock of falling off the bow made him woozy, and he couldn’t tell if he was dreaming or hallucinating. Meanwhile, he was being dragged helplessly into the dark depths of the ocean by a very angry whale. He said the first thing he saw when he finally snapped out of his daze was a blue light coming off the sperm whale’s fins. As he stared at the light, he forgot all about the danger he was in. When he told me the story, he kept going on about how mysterious and tranquil and beautiful it was. An eighteen-meter-long behemoth coursing through the pitch-black ocean with glowing blue fins. I tried to break it to him gently—he was practically in tears just recalling it—that since whales are not bioluminescent, there was no way its fins could have glowed like that. He threw his chamber pot at my head. Ha! What a hothead! He told the story to everyone he met. I told him everyone thought he was lying because of the part about the fins. But all he said to that was, ‘Everything people say about whales is a lie. Because everything they say comes from a book. But whales don’t live in books, they live in the ocean.’ Anyway, after the whale dragged him under, he passed out.”
The old man refilled his cup halfway and took a sip.
“He said that when he came to, there was a big full moon hanging in the night sky, and waves were lapping at his ear. He thought luck was on his side and the waves had pushed him onto a reef. But it turned out he was on top of the whale’s head. Incredible, wouldn’t you say? There he was, lying across a whale, staring at a buoy, a growing pool of the whale’s slick red blood all around him, and the whale itself, propping him up out of the water with its head, that harpoon still sticking out of its back. Can you imagine anything stranger or more incomprehensible? I’ve heard of whales lifting an injured companion or a newborn calf out of the water so they can breathe. But this wasn’t a companion or a baby whale, or even a seal or a penguin. It was my grandfather, a human being, and the same person who’d shoved a harpoon in its back! I honestly don’t understand why the whale saved him.”
“No, it doesn’t make any sense,” Reseng said, taking a sip of whiskey. “You’d think that whale would have torn him apart.”
“He just lay there on the whale’s head for a long time, even after he’d regained consciousness. It was awkward, to say the least. What can you do when you’re stuck on top of a whale? There was nothing out there but the silvery moon, the dark waves, a sperm whale spilling buckets of blood, and him—well and truly up shit creek. My grandfather said the sight of all that blood in the moonlight made him apologize to the whale. It was the least he could do, you know? He wanted to pull out the harpoon, too, but easier said than done. Throwing a harpoon is like making a bad life decision: so easy to do, but so impossible to take back once the damage is done. Instead, he cut the line with the knife he kept on his belt. The moment he cut it, the whale dove and resurfaced some distance away, then headed straight back to where my grandfather was clinging to the buoy, struggling to stay afloat. He said it watched as he flailed pathetically, filled with shame, all tangled up in the line from the harpoon he himself had thrown. According to my grandfather, the beast came right up and gazed at him with one enormous dark eye, a look of innocent curiosity that seemed to say, How did such a little scaredy-cat like you manage to stick a harpoon in the likes of me? You’re braver than you look! Then, he said, it gave him a playful shove, as if to say, Hey, kid, that was pretty naughty. Better not pull another dangerous stunt like that! All the blood it had lost was turning the water murky, and yet it seemed to brush off the whole matter of my grandfather stabbing it in the back. Each time my grandfather got to this part of the story, he used to slap his knee and shout, ‘That monster’s heart was as big as its body! Completely different from us small-minded humans.’ He said the whale stayed by his side all night, until the whaleboat caught up to them. The other whalers had been tracking the buoys in search of my grandfather. As soon as the ship appeared in the distance, the whale swam in a circle around him, as if it were saying good-bye, and then dove again, even deeper than before, the harpoon with my grandfather’s name carved into it still quivering in its back. Incredible, huh?”
“Yeah, that’s quite a story,” Reseng said.
“I guess that after that narrow escape from a watery death, my grandfather had some serious second thoughts about whaling. He told my grandmother he didn’t want to go back. My grandmother was a very kind and patient woman. She hugged him and said if he hated catching whales that much, then he should stop. He said he sobbed like a baby in her arms and told her, ‘I felt so scared, so terribly scared!’ And then he really did keep his distance from whaling for a while. But those crybaby days of his didn’t last long. They were poor, there were too many mouths to feed, and whaling was the only trade he’d ever learned. He didn’t know how else to provide for all those hungry children squawking at him like baby sparrows. So he went back to work and launched his harpoon at every whale he saw in the East Sea until he retired at the age of seventy. But there was one more funny thing that happened: In 1959, he ran into the same sperm whale again. Exactly thirty years after his miraculous survival. His rusted old harpoon was still stuck in its back, but the whale was just swimming along, all gallant and free, as if that harpoon had always been there and were simply a part of its body. Actually, it’s not uncommon to hear about whales surviving long after a harpoon attack. They even say that once, in the nineteenth century, a whale was caught with an eighteenth-century harpoon still stuck in it. Anyway, the whale didn’t swim off when it saw the whaling ship; in fact, it cruised right up to my grandfather’s boat, the harpoon sticking straight up like a periscope, and slowly circled it. As if it were saying, Hey! Long time no see, old friend! But what’s this? Still hunting whales? You really don’t know when to quit, do you?” The old man laughed.
“Your grandfather must have felt pretty embarrassed,” Reseng said.
“You bet he did. The sailors said my grandfather took one look at that sperm whale and dropped to his knees. He threw himself on the deck and let out a howl. He wept and called out, “Whale, forgive me! I’m so sorry! How awful for you, swimming all those years with a harpoon stuck in your back! After we said good-bye, I wanted to stop, I swear. You probably don’t know this, since you live in the sea, but things have been really tough up on land. I’m still living in a rental, and my brats eat so much, you’d be shocked at what it costs to feed them. I had to come back because I could barely make ends meet. Forgive me! Let’s meet again and have a drink together. I’ll bring the booze if you catch us a giant squid to snack on. Ten crates of soju and one grilled giant squid should do it. I’m so sorry, Whale. I’m sorry I stabbed you in the back with a harpoon. I’m sorry I’m such a fool. Boo-hoo-hoo!’”
“Did he really yell all of that at the whale?” Reseng asked.
“They say he really did.”
“He was a funny guy, your grandfather.”
“He was indeed. Anyway, after that, he gave up whaling and left Jangsaengpo harbor for good. He came up to Seoul and spent all his time drinking. I imagine he felt pretty trapped, given that he couldn’t go out to sea anymore, and with barbed wire strung all across the thirty-eighth parallel, he couldn’t go back north to his hometown, either. So whenever he got drunk, he latched on to people and started up with that same boring old whale tale. He told it over and over, even though everyone had already heard it hundreds of times and no one wanted to hear it again. But he wasn’t doing it to brag about his adventures on the high seas. He believed that people should emulate whales. He said that people had grown as small and crafty as rats, and that the days of taking slow, huge, beautiful strides had vanished. The age of giants was over.”
The old man swigged his whiskey. Reseng refilled his cup and took a sip.
“Toward the end, he found out he was in the final stages of liver cancer. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. As a sailor, he’d been guzzling booze from the age of sixteen to the age of eighty-two. But I guess the news meant nothing at all to him, because no sooner did he return from seeing the doctor than he hit the bottle again. He gathered his kids together and told them, ‘I’m not going to any hospital. Whales accept it when their time comes.’ And he never did go back to the doctor. After about a month, my grandfather put on his best clothes and returned to Jangsaengpo harbor. According to the sailors there, he loaded a small boat up with ten crates of soju, just like he’d said he would, and rowed until he disappeared over the horizon. And he never came back. His body was never found. Maybe he really did row until he caught the scent of ambergris and tracked down his whale. If he did, then I’m sure he broke open all ten crates of soju that night as they caught up on the years they’d missed, and if he didn’t, then he probably drifted around the ocean, drinking alone, until he died. Or maybe he’s still out there somewhere.”
“That’s quite an ending.”
“It’s a dignified way to go. In my opinion, a man ought to be able to choose a death that gives his life a dignified ending. Only those who truly walk their own path can choose their own death. But not me. I’ve been a slug my whole life, so I don’t deserve a dignified death.”
The old man smiled bitterly. Reseng was at a loss for a response. The look on the old man’s face was so dark that Reseng felt compelled to say something comforting, but he really couldn’t think of what to say. The old man refilled his cup with whiskey and polished it off again. They sat there for a long time. Each time the flames died down, Reseng added more wood to the fire. While Reseng and the old man sipped whiskey in comfortable silence, each new piece caught fire, crackled and flared up hot and ferocious, then slowly burned down to glowing charcoal, and then to white ash.
“I really talked your ear off tonight. They say the older you get, the more you’re supposed to keep your purse strings open and your mouth shut.”
“Oh, no, I enjoyed it.”
The old man shook the whiskey bottle and eyed the bottom. There was only about a cup left.
“Mind if I finish this off?”
“Go right ahead,” Reseng said.
The old man poured the rest of the whiskey into his cup and downed it.
“We’d better call it a night. You must be exhausted. I should’ve let you sleep, but instead I kept talking.”
“No, it was a nice evening, thanks to you.”
The old man curled up on the floor to the right of the fireplace. Santa sauntered over and lay down next to him. Reseng lay down to the left of the fireplace. The shadows of the two men and the dog danced on the brick wall opposite them. Reseng looked at his rifle propped against the door.
“Have some breakfast before you leave tomorrow,” the old man said, rolling onto his side. “You don’t want to hunt on an empty stomach.”
Reseng hesitated before saying, “Of course, I’ll do that.”
The crackling fire and the dog’s steady breaths sounded unusually loud. The old man didn’t say another word. Reseng listened for a long time to the old man and the dog breathing in their sleep before he finally joined them. It was a peaceful sleep.
When he awoke, the old man was preparing breakfast. A simple meal of white rice, radish kimchi, and doenjang soup made with sliced potatoes. The old man didn’t say much. They ate in silence. After breakfast, Reseng hurried to leave. As he stepped out the door, the old man handed him six boiled potatoes wrapped in a cloth. Reseng took the bundle and bade him a polite farewell. The potatoes were warm.
By the time Reseng returned to his tent, the old man was watering the flowers again. Just as before, he tipped the watering can with care, as if pouring tea. Then, just as before, he spoke to the flowers and trees and gestured at them. Reseng made a minor adjustment to the scope. The familiar-looking flower grew sharp and distinct in the lens and blurred again. He still could not remember its name. He should have asked the old man.
It was a nice garden. Two persimmon trees stood nonchalantly in the courtyard, while the flowers in the garden beds waited patiently for their season to come. Santa went up to the man and rubbed his head against the man’s thigh. The old man gave the dog a pat. They suited each other. The old man threw the deflated soccer ball across the garden. While Santa ran to fetch it, the old man watered more flowers. What was he saying to them? On closer inspection, he did indeed have a slight limp. If only Reseng had asked him what had happened to his left leg. Not that it makes any difference, he thought. Santa came back with the ball. This time, the old man threw it farther. Santa seemed to be in a good mood, because he ran around in circles before racing off to the end of the garden to fetch the ball. The old man looked like he had finished watering. He put down the watering can and smiled brightly. Was he laughing? Was that carved wooden mask of a face really laughing?
Reseng fixed the crosshairs on the old man’s chest and pulled the trigger.

ACHILLES’ HEEL (#ulink_fedd6e2d-3046-53eb-acab-4981dd0addc7)
Reseng was found in a garbage can. Or, who knows, maybe he was born in that garbage can.
Old Raccoon, who had served as Reseng’s foster father for the last twenty-eight years, liked to tease Reseng about his origins whenever he got to drinking. “You were found in a garbage can in front of a nunnery. Or maybe that garbage can was your mother. Hard to say. Either way, it’s pretty pathetic. But look on the bright side. A garbage can used by nuns is bound to be the cleanest garbage can around.”
Reseng wasn’t bothered by Old Raccoon’s teasing. He decided that being born from a clean garbage can had to be better than being born to the type of parents who’d dump their baby in the garbage.
Reseng lived in the orphanage run by the convent until he was four, after which he was adopted by Old Raccoon and lived in his library. Had Reseng continued to grow up in the orphanage, where divine blessings showered down like spring sunshine and kindly nuns devoted themselves to the careful raising of orphans, his life might have turned out very differently. Instead, he grew up in a library crawling with assassins, hired guns, and bounty hunters. Just as a plant grows wherever it sets down roots, so all your life’s tragedies spring from wherever you first set your feet. And Reseng was far too young to leave the place where he’d set down roots.
The day he turned nine, Reseng was snuggled up in Old Raccoon’s rattan rocking chair, reading The Tales of Homer. Paris, the idiot prince of Troy, was right in the middle of pulling back his bowstring to sink an arrow into the heel of Achilles, the hero whom Reseng had come to love over the course of the book. As everyone knows, this was a very tense moment, and so Reseng was completely unaware that Old Raccoon had been standing behind him for a while, watching him read. Old Raccoon looked angry.
“Who taught you to read?”
Old Raccoon had never sent Reseng to school. Whenever Reseng asked, “How come I don’t go to school like the other kids?” Old Raccoon had retorted, “Because school doesn’t teach you anything about life.” Old Raccoon was right on that point. Reseng never attended school, and yet in all of his thirty-two years, it had not once caused him any problems. Problems? Ha! What kind of problems would he have had anyway? And so Old Raccoon looked gobsmacked to discover Reseng, who hadn’t spent a single day in school, reading a book. Worse, the look on his face said he felt betrayed to learn that Reseng knew how to read.
As Reseng stared up at him without answering, Old Raccoon switched to the low, deep voice he used to intimidate people.
“I said, Who. Taught. You. To. Read?”
His voice was menacing, as if he was going to catch the person who had taught Reseng how to read and do something to them right then and there. In a small, quavering voice, Reseng said that no one had taught him. Old Raccoon still had his scary face on; it was clear he didn’t believe a word of it, and so Reseng explained that he’d taught himself how to read from picture books. Old Raccoon smacked Reseng hard across the face.
As Reseng struggled to stifle his sobs, he swore that he really had learned to read from picture books. It was true. After he’d managed to dig through the 200,000 books crammed on the shelves of Old Raccoon’s gloomy, labyrinthine library to find the few books worth looking at (a comic book adaptation about American slavery, a cheap adult magazine, and a dog-eared picture book filled with giraffes and rhinoceroses), he’d deciphered how the Korean alphabet worked by matching pictures to words. Reseng pointed to his stash of picture books in the corner of the study. Old Raccoon hobbled over on his lame leg and examined each one. He looked dumbfounded; he was clearly wondering how on earth those shoddy books had found their way into his library. Hobbling back, he stared hard at Reseng, his eyes still filled with suspicion, and yanked the hardback copy of The Tales of Homer from his hands. He looked back and forth between the book and Reseng for the longest time.
“Reading books will doom you to a life of fear and shame. So, do you still feel like reading?”
Reseng stared blankly at him—staring blankly was all he could do, as he had no idea what Old Raccoon was talking about. Fear and shame? As if a mere nine-year-old could comprehend such a life! The only life a boy who’d just turned nine could imagine was complaining about a dinner that someone else had prepared. A life in which random events just kept happening to you, as impossible to stop as a piece of onion that keeps slipping out of your sandwich. What Old Raccoon said sounded less like a choice and more like a threat, or a curse being put on him. It was like God saying to Adam and Eve, “If you eat this fruit, you’ll be cast out of Paradise, so do you still want to eat it?” Reseng was afraid. He had no idea what this choice meant. But Old Raccoon was staring him down and waiting for an answer. Would he eat the apple or not?
At last, Reseng stiffly raised his head and composed himself, fists clenched, his face a picture of determination, and said, “I will read. Now, give me back my book.” Old Raccoon gazed down at the boy, who was gritting his teeth, barely containing his tears, and handed back The Tales of Homer.
Reseng’s demand to retrieve his book did not come from an actual desire to read or to defy Old Raccoon. It was because he was clueless about this whole “life of fear and shame” thing.
After Old Raccoon left the room, Reseng wiped away the tears that had only then begun to spill, and curled up into a ball on the rattan rocker. He looked around at Old Raccoon’s dim study, which grew dark early because the windows faced northwest, at the books stacked to the ceiling in some complex and incomprehensible order, at the maze of shelves quietly staked out by dust, and wondered why Old Raccoon was so upset about him reading. Even now, at the age of thirty-two, whenever he pictured Old Raccoon, who had spent most of his life sitting in the corner of the library with a book in his hands, he couldn’t wrap his head around it. For that nine-year-old, the whole incident had felt as awful as if one of his buddies with a pocketful of sweets had stolen Reseng’s single sweet from his mouth.
“Stupid old fart, I hope you get the shits!”
Reseng put his curse on Old Raccoon and wiped the last of his tears with the back of his hand. Then he reopened the book. How could he not? Reading was no longer just some simple way to pass the time. It was now this boy’s Great and Inherent Right, a right won with much difficulty, even if it meant being hit and cursed to live a Life of Fear and Shame. Reseng returned to the scene in The Tales of Homer where the idiot prince of Troy pulls back his bowstring. The scene where the arrow leaves the string and hurtles toward his hero, Achilles. The scene where that cursed arrow pierces Achilles’ heel.
Reseng trembled as Achilles bled to death at the top of Hisarlik Hill. He had been certain his hero would easily pluck that damn arrow from his heel and immediately run his spear through Paris’s heart. But the unthinkable had happened. What had gone wrong? How could the son of a god die? How could a hero with an immortal body, unfellable by any arrow, unpierceable by any spear, be undone by an imbecile like Paris, and, worse, die like an imbecile because he hadn’t protected his one, tiny, no-bigger-than-the-palm-of-his-hand weak spot? Reseng reread Achilles’ death scene over and over. But he could not find a line about Achilles’ coming back to life.
Oh, no! That stupid Paris really did kill Achilles!
Reseng sat lost in thought until Old Raccoon’s study was pitch-black. He couldn’t yell, he couldn’t move. Now and then the rocking chair creaked. The books were submerged in darkness, and the pages rustled like dry leaves. All he had to do was stick his hand out to reach the light switch, but it didn’t occur to Reseng to turn on the light. He trembled in the dark like a child trapped in a cave teeming with insects. Life made no sense. Why had Achilles bothered to cover his torso in armor, when he should have protected his left heel, his one and only mortal weakness? Stupid idiot, even nine-year-olds knew better. It burned Reseng up to think that Achilles had failed to protect his fatal weak spot. He couldn’t forgive his hero for dying like that.
Reseng wept in the dark. On every page of the sea of library books that he was either itching to read or would eventually get bored enough to read, heroes and beautiful, charming women, countless people struggling to overcome hardship and frustration and achieve their goals, all died at the arrows of idiots because they failed to protect their one tiny weakness. Reseng was shocked at how treacherous life was. It didn’t matter how high you rose, how invincible your body was, or how firmly you clung to greatness, because all of it could vanish with a tiny, split-second mistake.
An overwhelming distrust in life overcame him. He might fall at any moment into any number of traps lying in wait. His tender life could one day be struck by luck so bad, it would leave him in utter turmoil; he would be gripped by terror he couldn’t shake off no matter how hard he fought. Reseng was possessed by the strange and unfamiliar conviction that everything he held dear would one day crumble in an instant. He felt empty, sad, and completely alone.
That night, Reseng sat in Old Raccoon’s library for a very long time. The tears kept falling, and he cried himself to sleep on Old Raccoon’s rocking chair.

BEAR’S PET CREMATORIUM (#ulink_9b6fe5fa-94b2-5382-8958-1791d8174aa8)
“If things don’t pick up, I’m in deep shit. Business has been so slow, I’m stuck cremating dogs all day.”
Bear flicked his cigarette to the ground. He was squatting down, and the seat of his pants threatened to rip open under his hundred-plus-kilogram frame. Reseng wordlessly pulled on a pair of cotton work gloves. Bear heaved himself up, brushing off his backside.
“Do you know some people are such morons, they’re actually dumping bodies in the forest? Your job doesn’t end when the target’s dead; you also have to clean up after yourself. I mean, what day and age is this? Dumping bodies in the forest? You wouldn’t even bury a dog out there. Nowadays, if you so much as tap a mountain with a bulldozer, bodies come pouring out. No one takes their job seriously anymore, I swear. No integrity! Stabbing someone in the gut and walking away? That’s for hired goons, not professional assassins! And anyway, it’s not like it’s easy to bury a body in the woods. A bunch of idiots from Incheon got caught dragging a huge suitcase up a mountain a few days ago.”
“They were arrested?” Reseng asked.
“Of course. It was pretty obvious. Three big guys carrying shovels and dragging a giant suitcase into the forest. You think people living nearby saw them and thought, Ah, they’re taking a trip, in the dead of night, to the other side of the mountain? Stupid! So my point is, instead of dumping bodies in the mountains, why not cremate them here? It’s safe, it’s clean, and it’s better for the environment. Business is so slow, I’m dying!”
Bear pulled on work gloves as he grumbled. He always grumbled. And yet this grumbling, orangutan-size man seemed as harmless as Winnie-the-Pooh. That might have been because he looked like Winnie-the-Pooh. Or maybe Pooh looked like Bear. Bear provided a corpse-disposal service, albeit an illegal one. Pets, of course, were legal. He was licensed to cremate cats and dogs. The human bodies were done on the sly. He was surprisingly cuddly-looking for someone who burned corpses for a living.
“I swear, you wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. Not long ago, this couple came in with an iguana. Had a name like Andrew or André. What kind of a name is that for an iguana? Why not something simpler, something that rolls off the tongue, like Iggy or Spiny? Anyway, it’s ridiculous the names people come up with. So this stupid iguana died, and this young couple kept hugging each other and crying and carrying on: ‘We’re so sorry, Andrew, we should have fed you on time, it’s all our fault, Andrew.’ I was dying of embarrassment for them.”
Bear was on a roll. Reseng opened the warehouse door, half-listening to his rant.
“Which cart?” he asked.
Bear took a look inside and pointed to a hand cart.
“Is it big enough?” Reseng asked.
Bear sized it up and nodded.
“You’re not moving a cow. Where’d you park?”
“Behind the building.”
“Why so far away? And it’s uphill.”
Bear manned the cart. He had an easy, optimistic stride that belied his penchant for grumbling. Reseng envied him. Bear didn’t have a greedy bone in his body. He wasn’t one to run himself into the ground trying to drum up more business. He got by on what he made from his small pet crematorium and had even raised two daughters by himself. His eldest was now at college. “I stick to light meals,” he liked to claim. “To stretch my food bill. I just have to hold out for a few more years, until my girls are on their own.” Bear spooked easily. He never took on anything suspicious, even if he needed the money. And so, in a business where the average life span was ridiculously short, Bear had lasted a long, long time.
Reseng popped open the trunk. Bear tilted his head quizzically at the two black body bags inside.
“Two? Old Raccoon said there’d be only one package.”
“One man, one dog,” Reseng said.
“Is that the dog?” Bear asked, pointing at the smaller of the bags.
“That’s the man. The big one’s the dog.”
“What kind of dog is bigger than a man?”
Bear opened the bag in disbelief. Inside was Santa. His long tongue flopped out of the open zipper.
“Holy shit! Now I’ve seen it all. Why’d you kill the dog? What’d it do, bite your balls?”
“I just thought it was too old to get used to a new master.”
“Well, look at you, meddling with the instructions you were given,” Bear said with a snigger. “You need to watch your step. Don’t get tripped up worrying over some dog.”
Reseng zipped the bag back up and paused. Why had he killed the dog? When he’d gone back to collect the old man’s body, the dog had been quietly standing watch. With his back to the sun, Reseng had looked down at the sunlight spilling into the dog’s cloudy brown eyes. The dog hadn’t growled. It was probably wondering why its master wasn’t moving. Reseng had stared at the dog, which was now too old to learn any new tricks. No one’s left in this quiet, beautiful forest to feed you, he thought. And you’re too old to go bounding through the forest in search of food. Do you understand what I’m saying? The late autumn sun cast its weak rays over the crown of the dog’s head. It had gazed up at him with those cloudy brown eyes as Reseng stroked its neck. Then he had raised his rifle and shot the dog in the head.
“Pretty heavy for an old man,” Bear said as he grabbed one end of the body bag.
“I told you, this one’s the dog,” Reseng grumbled. “That one’s the old man.”
Bear looked back and forth at the bags in confusion.
“This damn dog is heavy.”
After loading the bodies onto the cart, Bear looked around. The pet crematorium was a quiet place at two in the morning. Of course it was. No one would be coming to cremate a pet at this hour.
Bear opened up the gas valve and lit the furnace. The flames rose, peeling the black vinyl bag away from the two bodies like snakeskin being shed. The old man was stretched out flat, with the dog’s head resting on his stomach. As the furnace filled with heat, their sinews tightened and shrank, and the old man’s body began to squirm. It was a sad sight, as if he were still clinging to the world of the living. Was there even anything left for him to cling to? It didn’t matter. It was over. In two hours, he’d be nothing but dust. You can’t cling to anything when you’re dust.
Reseng stared at the contorted body. The old man had been a general. Throughout the three long decades of military rule in South Korea, he had been working behind the scenes, in the shadow of the dictator, drawing up lists of targets and orchestrating their assassinations. How had he pulled it off? It wasn’t easy back then for former members of the North Korean army to succeed in the South Korean army and harder still to earn a spot in the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. But he’d survived. He’d made it through the first dictator’s twenty years of ironfisted rule, the toppling of the regime, the coup d’etat that followed, and the next ten years under a new military regime. He’d survived the political monkey business and the unrelenting suspicion directed at former North Korean soldiers, and became a general. Whenever someone fell into disfavor with the dictator, this general with two shiny stars on his cap would seek out Old Raccoon’s library. He’d hand over the list with the target’s name on it and, most brazenly of all, use the people’s tax money to settle the bill.
But in the end, his own name had made it onto the list. That’s how it went. The good times came to an end sooner or later and, in order to survive, those who found themselves dethroned had to sort out what they’d done and sweep up the scraps. As always, time had a way of circling around and biting you on the ass.
Once, when Reseng was twelve, the old man had come to the library dressed in uniform. It was a fine uniform. The old man came right up to Reseng.
“What’re you reading, boy?”
“Sophocles.”
“Is it fun?”
“I don’t have a dad, so I can’t really understand it.”
“Where’s your dad?”
“In the garbage can in front of the nunnery.”
The general grinned, stars sparkling, and ruffled Reseng’s hair. That was twenty years ago. The little boy remembered that moment, but the old man had probably forgotten.
Reseng took out a cigarette. Bear lit it for him, took out one of his own, and started whistling birdcalls through a cloud of smoke. On his way out, Bear checked their surroundings again, as if expecting someone to appear suddenly. Reseng watched the bodies of the old man and the dog meld together in the heat.
A surprising number of idiots mistakenly thought they could pull off a perfect crime only if they personally disposed of the evidence. They would lug a can of gasoline to a deserted field and try to burn the body themselves. But cremation was never as easy as people thought. After messing around with trying to set the body on fire, they ended up with a huge, steaming lump of foul-smelling meat. Joke was on them. Any decent forensic scientist could take one look at that barbecue gone wrong and figure out the corpse’s age, sex, height, face, shape, and dentition. A body had to burn for at least two hours at temperatures well above thirteen hundred degrees inside a closed oven in order to be completely incinerated. Other than crematoriums, pottery or charcoal kilns, or a blast furnace in a smelting factory, it was very difficult to produce that kind of heat. That was why Bear’s Pet Crematorium stayed in business. The next important step was to grind the bones. Forensic scientists can determine age, sex, height, and cause of death from just three fragments of a pelvis. So any remaining bone or teeth had to be completely destroyed. Even the most finely ground bones still hold clues, and teeth maintain their original shape even under extreme conditions, including fire. So the teeth had to be pulverized with a hammer and the bone ash safely scattered. It was the only way to disappear your victim.
Reseng took out another cigarette and checked the time. Ten past two. Once the sun came up, he’d be able to finish work and head home. Sudden fatigue settled over his neck and shoulders. One night on the road, one night at the old man’s place, and now one night at Bear’s Pet Crematorium. He’d been away from home for three nights. His cats had probably run out of food … Reseng pictured his darkened apartment, the two Siamese yowling in hunger. Desk and Lampshade. Crazily enough, they were starting to take after their names. Desk liked to hunch over into a square, like a slice of bread, and stare quietly at a scrap of paper on the floor, while Lampshade liked to crane her neck and stare out the window.
Bear brought out a basket of boiled potatoes and offered one to Reseng. Just his luck—more potatoes. The six the old man had given him that morning were still in the car. Reseng was hungry, but he shook his head. “Why aren’t you eating? Don’t you know how tasty Gangwon Province potatoes are?” Bear looked puzzled. Why would anyone refuse something so delicious? He shoved an entire potato into his mouth and swigged a good half of the bottle of soju he’d brought out, as well.
“I cremated Mr. Kim here a while back,” Bear said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Mr. Kim from the meat market?”
“Yup.”
“Who took him out?”
“I think Duho hired some young Vietnamese guys. That’s who’s taking all the jobs these days. They work for peanuts. Everywhere you look, it’s nothing but Vietnamese. Well, of course, there are also some Chinese, some defectors from the North Korean special forces, and even a few Filipinos. I swear, there are guys who’ll take someone out for a measly five hundred thousand won. Nowadays, assassinations cost practically nothing. That’s why they’re all at each other’s throats. Once Mr. Kim’s name made the list, he didn’t stand a chance.”
Reseng exhaled a long plume of smoke. Bear had no reason to lament the plummeting cost of assassinations. The more bodies there were, the better Bear fared, regardless of who carried out the killings. He was just humoring Reseng. Bear took another bite of potato and another swig of soju. Then he seemed to remember something.
“By the way, the strangest thing happened. After I had finished cremating Mr. Kim, I found these shiny pearl-like objects in his ashes. I picked them up to take a closer look, and what do you know? Śarīra. Thirteen of them, each no bigger than a bean. Crazy!”
“What are you talking about?” Reseng said in shock. “Those are only supposed to come out of the ashes of Buddhist masters. How could they come out of Mr. Kim?”
“It’s true, I swear. Want me to show you?”
“Forget it.” Reseng waved his hand in annoyance.
“I’m telling you, they’re real. I didn’t believe it at first, either. Mr. Kim—what’d everyone call him again? ‘The Lech’? Because he’d guzzle all those health tonics and stuff to increase his virility, then bang anything that moved? That’s what killed him, you know. Anyway, how could something as precious as śarīra come out of someone as rotten as he was? And thirteen, no less! They’re supposed to mean you’ve achieved enlightenment, but from what I see, it’s got nothing to do with meditating all the time, or avoiding sex, or practicing moderation. It’s more like dumb luck.”
“You’re sure they’re real?” Reseng still wasn’t convinced.
“They’re real!” Bear punctuated his words with an exaggerated shrug. “I showed them to Hyecho, up at Weoljeongam Temple. He stared at them for the longest time, with his hands clasped behind his back like this, and then he slowly licked his lips and told me to sell them to him.”
“What would Hyecho want with Mr. Kim’s śarīra?”
“You know he’s always chasing skirt, gambling and boozing it up. But that dirty monk’s got an itchy palm. He’s secretly worried what people will say about him if they don’t find śarīra among his ashes when he’s cremated. That’s why he’s got his eye on Mr. Kim’s. If he swallows them right before he dies, then it’s guaranteed they’ll find at least thirteen, right?”
Reseng chuckled. Bear shoved another potato in his mouth. He took a swig of soju and then offered Reseng a potato, as if embarrassed to be eating them all himself. Reseng looked at the potato in Bear’s paw and suddenly pictured the way the old man had talked to the dog, to the pork roasting over the fire, even to the potatoes buried under the ashes. You’d better make yourselves delicious for our important guest. That low, hypnotic voice. It struck him then that the old man must have been lonely. As lonely as a tree in winter, every last leaf shed, nothing but bare branches snaking against the sky like veins. Bear was still holding out the potato. Reseng was suddenly famished. He accepted the potato and took a bite. As he chewed, he stared quietly at the flames inside the furnace. Between the fire and the smoke, he could no longer tell what was old man and what was dog.
“Tasty, huh?” Bear asked.
“Tasty,” Reseng said.
“Not to change the subject, but why the hell is tuition so expensive now? My older daughter just started university. I’ll need to burn at least five more bodies to afford her tuition and rent. But where am I going to find five bodies in this climate? I don’t know if it’s just that the economy’s bad or if the world’s become a more wholesome place, but it’s definitely not like the old days. How am I supposed to get by now?”
Bear frowned, as if he couldn’t stand the thought of a wholesome world.
“Maybe you should think about those pretty daughters of yours and go straight,” Reseng said. “Stick to cremating cats and dogs instead, you know, more wholesome like.”
“Are you kidding? Cats and dogs would have to get a lot more profitable first. I charge by the kilo for cremating pets, and nowadays everyone’s into those tiny ratlike dogs. Don’t get me started. After I pay my gas, electricity, taxes, and this, that, and everything else, what’s left? If only people would start keeping giraffes or elephants as pets. Then maybe Bear would be rich.”
Bear shook the soju bottle and emptied what was left into his mouth. He stretched. He looked worn-out. “So should I sell them?” he asked abruptly.
“Sell what?”
“C’mon, I already told you! Mr. Kim’s śarīra.”
“May as well,” Reseng said irritably. “What’s the point of holding on to them?”
“That so-called monk offered me three hundred thousand won for them, but I feel like I’m getting ripped off. Even if they did come out of Mr. Kim’s garbage can of a body, they’re still bona fide śarīras.”
“Listen to you,” Reseng said. “Going on as if they’re actually sacred.”
“Should I ask him to bump it up to five hundred thousand?”
Reseng didn’t respond. He was tired, and he wasn’t in the mood to joke anymore. He stared wordlessly into the fire until Bear got the hint. Bear gave his empty soju bottle another shake, then went to get a fresh one.
White smoke spewed out of the chimney. Every time he dropped off a body for cremation, Reseng got the ridiculous notion that the souls of those once-hectic lives were exiting through the chimney. A great many assassins had been cremated there. It was the final resting place for discarded hit men. Hit men who’d messed up, hit men tracked down by cops, hit men who ended up on the death list for reasons no one knew, and assassins who’d grown too old—they were all cremated in that furnace.
To the plotters, mercenaries and assassins were like disposable batteries. After all, what use would they have for old assassins? An old assassin was like an annoying blister bursting with incriminating information and evidence. The more you thought about it, the more sense it made. Why would anyone hold on to a used-up battery?
Reseng’s old friend, Chu, had been cremated in this same furnace. Chu was eight years older, but the two of them had been like family. With Chu’s death, Reseng had sensed that his life had begun to change. Familiar things suddenly became unfamiliar. A certain strangeness came between him and his table, his flower vase, his car, his fake driver’s license. The timing of it all was uncanny. He had once looked up the man whose name was on his stolen driver’s licence. A devoted father of three and a hardworking and talented welder, according to everyone who knew him, the man had been missing for eight years. Maybe he had ended up on a hit list. His body might have been buried in the forest or sealed inside a barrel at the bottom of the ocean. Or maybe he had even been cremated right here in Bear’s furnace. Eight years on, the family was still waiting for him to come home. Every time he drove, Reseng joked to himself: This car is being driven by a dead man. He felt that he lived like a dead man, a zombie. It only made sense that he was a stranger in his own life.
Two years had passed since Chu’s death. He’d been an assassin, like Reseng. But unlike Reseng, Chu hadn’t belonged to any particular outfit; instead, he’d drifted from place to place, taking on short gigs. The Mafia had a saying: The most dangerous adversary was a pazzo, a madman. A person who thought they had nothing to lose, who wanted nothing from others and asked nothing of him- or herself, who behaved in ways that defied common sense, who quietly followed her or his own strange principles and stubborn convictions, which were both inconceivable and unbelievable. A person like that would not be cowed by any formidable power. Chu had been that kind of person.
On the other hand, it was easy to deal with adversaries who were backed into a corner and desperate not to lose what they had. They were the plotters’ favorite prey. It was obvious where they were headed. They ended up dead because they refused to acknowledge, right up to the very end, that they could not hold on to whatever it was they were trying to hold on to. But not Chu. Chu had been out to prove that this ferocious world with its boundless power could not stop him as long as he desired nothing.
Chu had been prickly, but his work was so clean and immaculate that Old Raccoon had usually given him the difficult assignments. He’d wanted to make Chu an official member of the library and had warned him, “Even a lion becomes a target for wild dogs when it’s away from its pride.” Each time, Chu had sneered and said, “I don’t plan on living long enough to turn into a cripple like you.”
Despite not belonging to any one outfit, Chu had lasted for twenty years as an assassin. He’d done all sorts of dirty work, taken government jobs, corporate jobs, jobs from third-tier meat-market contractors, no questions asked. Twenty years—it was an impressive run for an assassin.
But then one day four years ago, Chu’s clock had stopped. No one knew why. Even Chu had confessed to Reseng that he didn’t understand why it had happened, why his clock had suddenly stopped after running so faithfully for twenty years. What led up to it was that Chu decided to let one of his targets go. She was no one special, just another twenty-one-year-old high-priced escort. Shortly after, a news story came out about a certain national assemblyman who had leaped to his death. He’d been hounded by accusations of bribery, corruption, and a sex scandal involving a middle schooler. There was no way that a lowlife like him who enjoyed sex with middle school girls had committed suicide to preserve his honor, which he’d long since done a great job of destroying on his own. Every plotter who saw the news must have instantly thought of Chu. And Chu didn’t stop there. He also went after the plotter who’d put out the contract on the escort. But he failed to track the plotter down. Not even the great Chu could pull that off. By then, Chu was a wanted man. It has to be said that plotters spend more time on finding safe hideouts for themselves and ensuring their own quick exits than on planning hits.
The plotters’ world was one big cartel. They had to take out Chu, but not for anything as flimsy as pride. There was no such thing as pride in this business. They had to take him out so as not to lose customers. Like any other society, their world had its own strict rules and order. Those rules and order formed the foundation on which the market took shape, and then in streamed the customers. If order fell, the market fell, and if the market fell, bye-bye customers. Chu had to have known that. The moment he made up his mind to save the woman, he signed his own death warrant. Chu risked everything to save one unlucky prostitute.
It took the meat market’s trackers less than two months to find her. She was hiding in a small port city. The high-class call girl who’d once entertained only VIP clients in four-star hotels was now selling herself to sailors in musty flophouses. If she’d holed up quietly in a factory instead of going to the red-light district, she might have dodged the trackers a little longer. But she’d ended up on the stinking, filthy streets instead. Maybe she’d run out of money. Since she’d had to leave Seoul in a hurry, she would’ve had no change of clothes and nowhere to sleep. Plus, it was winter. Cold and hunger have a way of numbing people to abstract fears. She might have thought she was going to die anyway, and so what difference did it make? It’s hard to say whether it was stupid of her to think like that. She couldn’t possibly have enjoyed whoring herself out in a port city on the outskirts of civilization, sucking drunk sailor dick for a pittance. But she would’ve felt she had no other choice. All you had to do was look at her hands to understand why. She had slender, lovely hands. Hands that had never once imagined a life spent standing in front of a conveyer belt tightening screws for ten hours a day, or picking seaweed or oysters from the sea in the dead of winter. Had she been born to a good family, those hands would have belonged to a pianist. But her family wasn’t all that good, and so she’d been whoring herself out since the age of fifteen.
She must have known that returning to the red-light district meant she wouldn’t last long. But she went back anyway. In the end, none of us can leave the place we know best, no matter how dirty and disgusting it is. Having no money and no other means of survival is part of the reason, but it’s never the whole reason. We go back to our own filthy origins because it’s a filth we know. Putting up with that filth is easier than facing the fear of being tossed into the wider world, and the loneliness that is as deep and wide as that fear.
Old Raccoon had summoned Reseng as soon as the plotter’s file arrived. Reseng found him sitting at his desk in his study, leafing through the document. He assumed it contained the woman’s photo, her address, her hobbies, her weight, her movements, and the names of all the people related to or involved with her in any way—in other words, all the information needed to kill her. It would also state the designated manner of her death and the method of disposal of the body.
“I don’t know why they’re wasting money on this. Says she’s only thirty-eight kilos. Break her neck. It’ll be as easy as stepping on a frog.”
Old Raccoon thrust the file at Reseng without looking at him. Reseng raised an eyebrow. Was stepping on a frog that easy? Old Raccoon had a habit of making cynical jokes to hide his discomfort. But Reseng wasn’t sure whether what bothered Old Raccoon was having to kill a twenty-one-year-old girl—and one who weighed only thirty-eight kilos, at that—or if his pride was hurt at having to accept a low-paying contract, though he knew full well the library needed the business.
Reseng flipped through the file. The woman in the picture looked like a Japanese pop star. It said she was twenty-one, but she didn’t look a day over fifteen. Reseng had never killed a woman before. It wasn’t that he had some special rule against killing women and children; it was simply that his turn hadn’t come around yet. Reseng had no rules. Not having rules was his only rule.
“What do I do with the body?” Reseng asked.
“Take it to Bear’s, of course,” Old Raccoon said irritably. “What else would you do? String her up at the Gwanghwamun intersection?”
“It’s a long way from where she is to Bear’s place. What if I get pulled over while she’s in the trunk?”
“So lay off the booze and drive like a kitten. It’s not like the cops are going to force you to pull over and claim you shot at them. They’ve got better things to do.”
His voice dripped with sarcasm. That was also his way of disguising anger. Reseng just stood there, not saying a word. Old Raccoon flicked his wrist to tell him to get lost, then got up, pulled a volume of his first-edition Brockhaus Enzyklopädie from the shelf, set it on a book stand, and began reading out loud, mumbling the words under his breath, completely indifferent to Reseng, who was still standing in front of him. He had been rereading it recently. When he finished, he would reread the English edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Old Raccoon’s awkward, self-taught German filled the room. As Reseng opened the door and stepped out, he muttered, “No real German would understand a word of that.”
Old Raccoon had long ago stopped stocking his personal shelves with anything that wasn’t a dictionary or an encyclopedia. As far as Reseng could remember, he’d refused to read anything else for the last ten years. “Dictionaries are great,” he’d explained. “No mushiness, no bitching, no preachiness, and, best of all, none of that high-and-mighty crap that writers try to pull.”
The port city where the woman was hiding looked as run-down as a diseased chicken. The once-bustling city that had kept the Japanese imperial forces supplied with war munitions had been in decline ever since liberation. Now it seemed nothing could turn it around. Reseng got off the express bus and headed for the parking lot, where he looked for a license plate ending in 2847. At the very end of the lot was an old Musso SUV. He took the keys out of his pocket, opened the door, and got in. As soon as he started the ignition, the low fuel warning light blinked on.
“Son of a bitch left the tank empty,” Reseng muttered in irritation at the stupid plotter, wherever and whoever he was.
He parked in the motel’s underground parking garage. The plotter had instructed him to use the third space away from the emergency stairs, but a big luxury sedan was already parked there. Reseng checked his watch: 1:20 p.m. The owner of the sedan had either arrived the night before and hadn’t left yet or he was treating himself to a leisurely lunch with his mistress. Reseng had no choice but to park next to the wall. He got out and checked the walls and ceiling. The motel was too old and shabby to have security cameras. Reseng opened the trunk and took out the oversize duffel bag and body bag that had been left there for him.
As indicated in the file, the motel counter was unstaffed. The clock on the wall pointed to 1:28. Reseng took the key for room 303 from its pigeonhole and went up the stairs. Before opening the door, he pulled on a pair of black leather gloves.
The motel room had seen better days. On the bed was a dirty quilt that he could tell at once hadn’t been washed in years, and on a shelf was half a roll of toilet paper, a metal ashtray, and an old eight-sided box of safety matches. The wallpaper was so faded that he couldn’t tell what color it had once been, and sticking out of the window was an air conditioner shaped like a German tube radio that had to be at least thirty years old; it looked like something awful would spew out of it if he were to turn it on. Glued to a discarded semen-encrusted condom stuck between the mattress and the bed frame was a single pubic hair that could have belonged to either a man or a woman. The glow of the overhead fluorescent was dimmed by a thick layer of dust and long-dead insects trapped inside the light cover. The room looked like a scene from a black-and-white movie in the 1930s.
“How depressing,” Reseng muttered as he set the duffel bag and the black Samsonite attaché case he’d brought with him from Seoul in the corner and sat on the edge of the bed. It was so filthy, he could practically hear the cheers of a billion germs thinking they had just gone to heaven. He put a cigarette in his mouth and took a match from the eight-sided box. They still make these? he thought as he struck the match against the side.
At exactly two o’clock, Reseng called the phone number in the file.
“I’m inside. Room three oh three.”
The man on the other end said nothing for several long seconds. All Reseng heard was the unpleasant sound of the man breathing into the phone, then the dial tone. Reseng stared at the receiver. “Prick,” he muttered. He opened the window, looked out at the narrow alleys winding behind the train station, and lit another cigarette. The red-light district was a quiet place at two in the afternoon.
It took the woman over two hours to show up. As soon as she entered, she glanced indifferently at Reseng and said hello. She had the careless, conceited air typical of women who knew they were beautiful, along with a baby face, a tight little body, the kind of looks that would turn any man’s head, and something in her expression that was hard to pin down, like a faint, gloomy shadow hanging over her, which brought to his mind a picture on a calendar of a fallen ginkgo leaf.
“Take your clothes off,” she said.
She took off hers. It took her less than five seconds to strip off her dress, bra, and panties and stand naked in front of Reseng. He gawked at her. Her unusually large breasts on such a bony torso reminded him of the girls in Japanese porn comics. Her skin looked baby-soft.
He had no idea what had gone down inside the assemblyman’s room. But he couldn’t imagine that she’d actually had anything to do with his death. Her only crime was sucking the clammy, flaccid dicks of aging tycoons with a thing for underage girls. And there was no way she’d made much money from it. The old men would have shelled out a ton of cash to bed her, but the lion’s share would’ve gone to her pimp. She simply had bad luck. But in the end, even bad luck is just another part of life.
“Aren’t you going to get undressed?” she asked.
Reseng kept staring, saying nothing.
“Hurry up already. I’ve got places to be,” she said, clearly irritated.
She looked as arrogant as ever, despite her whiny voice. Without taking his eyes off of her, Reseng slowly slipped his hand inside his leather jacket. Which should he choose, the gun or the knife? Which one was less likely to startle her and make her scream or fly into a panic? When asked, most people said they were more afraid of knives than guns, which made no sense to him. But then, fear is never rational. Reseng chose the gun. Before he could pull it out, the woman’s face stiffened.
“May I put my clothes back on?” Her voice trembled.
“Why?”
“I don’t want to die naked.”
Her eyes met his. They held no trace of anger or hatred. Her weary eyes simply said that she’d learned too much about the world in too short a time; her vacant pupils said she was tired of feeling afraid and didn’t want to see anything anymore.
“You’re not going to die naked,” Reseng said.
But the woman didn’t move.
Reseng softened his tone. “Get dressed, please.”
She picked up her clothes from the floor, her hands shaking as she pulled up her dainty Mickey Mouse panties. When she was dressed, Reseng guided her to the bed by her shoulder and locked the door. The woman took a pack of Virginia Slims from her bag and tried to light one, but her hands shook so hard that she couldn’t get the lighter to work. Reseng pulled his Zippo from his pocket and lit it for her. She gave him a slight nod of thanks and took a deep drag, then turned her head and exhaled a plume of smoke in what seemed like an infinitely long sigh. He could tell she was making an effort to stay calm, as if she’d been practicing for this moment, but her thin shoulders were already trembling.
“I hate having marks on my body. Could you avoid leaving any?” she asked quietly.
She wasn’t begging for mercy. All she wanted was to die without any cuts or bruises. He suddenly wondered about Chu. What was it about this woman that had stopped Chu’s clock? Had her frail body filled him with sympathy? Had she reminded him too much of a girl in a Japanese porn video? Had the mysterious melancholy clouding her features aroused in him a misplaced sense of guilt? No. That’d be ridiculous. Chu wasn’t the kind of guy who would fuck up his life because of some cheap romantic notion.
“You hate having marks …”
Reseng slowly echoed her. The woman’s eyes flickered nervously. He found it hard to believe that she was more afraid of having marks on her body than of dying. Reseng gazed down at the floor for a moment before raising his head.
“You won’t have any marks.” He tried to keep his voice as level as possible.
A startled look came over her face. She seemed to have just figured out what the oversize bag in the corner was for. She must have pictured it, because her entire body began to shake.
“Are you putting me in that?”
Her voice had a nervous tremor, but she managed not to stutter.
Reseng nodded.
“Where will you take me? Are you going to leave my body at a garbage dump or in the forest?”
For a moment, Reseng wondered if he really had to tell her. He didn’t. But whether he did or not, it changed nothing.
“You won’t be buried in the forest or dumped in a landfill. You’ll be cremated at a facility. Though not, strictly speaking, legally.”
“Then no one will know I’m dead. There won’t be a funeral.”
Reseng nodded again. She’d toughed everything else out, but for some reason that made her burst into tears. Why make such a fuss about what’ll happen to your corpse when you’re facing imminent death? She seemed more worried about what she would look like after death than about the death itself. What a thing for someone her age to worry herself over.
She gritted her teeth and wiped her eyes with her palm. Then she fixed Reseng with a look that said she was not going to beg for her life or waste any more tears on someone like him.
“How are you going to kill me?”
Reseng was taken aback. Fifteen years as an assassin, and he had never once been asked that.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes,” she said flatly.
As per the plotter’s orders, he was going to break her neck. Snapping the slender neck of a woman who weighed no more than thirty-eight kilos would be a piece of cake. As long as she didn’t put up a fight, it would be quicker and less painful than might be imagined. But if she did struggle, she could end up with a broken vertebra jutting through the skin. Or writhing in agony for several long minutes until she finally suffocated from a blocked airway, fully conscious the whole time.
“How would you like to die?”
As soon as the question was out, Reseng felt like an ass. What kind of question was that? How would you like to die? It sounded like he was a waiter asking how she’d like her steak cooked. She lowered her head in thought. He could tell she wasn’t actually choosing right then and there, but was instead confirming a decision she had already made for herself.
“I have poison,” she said.
Reseng didn’t get it at first, and he repeated the words to himself: I. Have. Poison. So she’d already thought about suicide. And she’d chosen poison as her way out. He wasn’t surprised. Statistically, men usually chose guns or jumping to their deaths, whereas women preferred pills or hanging. Women tended to prefer a means of death that left their bodies undamaged. But, contrary to what they imagined, the kinds of poisons that were easy to purchase, like pesticides or hydrochloric acid, resulted in very long, very painful deaths, and had high rates of failure.
“It’s the least you could do,” she said, her eyes pleading.
Reseng avoided the woman’s gaze. Break her neck, stuff her in the bag, and get to Bear’s. That was his job. Plotters hated it when lowly assassins took it upon themselves to change the plot. It wasn’t about pride. The problem was that if the plot changed, then the people waiting at their various posts would need new cues, and everyone’s roles would get out of sync. If incriminating evidence got left behind or if things went sour, then someone else would have to die in order to cover it up. And sometimes that someone was you. Changing the assigned plot was not just a headache but a potential death sentence.
Reseng looked at the woman. She was still gazing at him, pleading—not for her life, but for this one last thing. Could he grant it to her? Should he? Reseng furrowed his brow.
If she took poison, it would remain in the ashes even after cremation. And if traces of her DNA were found in his car or on his clothes and poison was detected in a sample of her ashes, there would be compelling evidence of foul play. But that sort of thing happened only in the movies, and was rare in real life. Plotters weren’t perfectionists, they were just pricks. Poison, broken neck—it made no difference. The woman would be cremated either way, and her ashes would sink quietly to the bottom of a river.
“What kind of poison?” Reseng asked.
She took a packet from her purse. He held out his hand. She hesitated before giving it to him. He gave the cellophane packet a gentle shake and held it up to the light. There was a loose white powder inside.
“Cyanide?”
She nodded, her eyes never once leaving his.
“How much do you know about cyanide?”
She tipped her head to one side, as if she didn’t understand the question.
“I know you die if you swallow it.” Her voice sounded half daring and half annoyed. “What else is there to know?”
“Where’d you get it?”
“I stole it from a friend of mine who was planning to kill herself.”
Reseng smiled. To her, it probably looked like a smirk, but in truth it was closer to pity. His lips tended to curl whenever he didn’t know quite what to say.
“If this friend of yours bought it off the Internet or from a drug dealer, then there’s a good chance it’s fake. And if it is, you could have a real problem on your hands. But even if it is real, death by cyanide is not the romantic death you think it is. Nor will you die in seconds. I’m guessing you think this is one of those suicide pills that spies take to die instantly, but those contain liquid cyanide, not this solid stuff.”
Reseng flicked the cellophane packet onto the floor like a cigarette butt. She scrambled for it, panicked, as if it were precious to her, then looked up at him dubiously.
“It won’t kill me?”
“Two hundred and fifty milligrams is enough to kill most people. But it’s extremely painful. Your muscles get paralyzed, your tongue and throat burn, your organs melt, and it can take anywhere from minutes to hours until you eventually die of asphyxiation. Some people take longer, and some actually survive. Not only that, you don’t leave a very pretty corpse behind.”
The woman’s shoulders slumped. Her face filled with despair. She turned to the window; she’d stopped crying or even shaking. She just stared blankly at the sky, her eyes unfocused. Reseng checked his watch: 4:30. He had to get out of there before it got dark. Once the sun went down, the alleys would be crawling with prostitutes, their faces freshly painted, and johns drunk on booze and lust.
“Lucky for you, I have the perfect thing.”
Reseng gestured at the attaché case. The woman turned to look.
“Barbituric acid. Peaceful way to go. Doesn’t hurt like cyanide or rat poison, and won’t leave you looking messed up or ugly. It’ll be just like falling asleep. A scientist back in the mid-nineteenth century, Adolf von Baeyer, came up with barbiturates while working on sedatives and sleeping pills. He named it after his friend Barbara. It’s still used as a sedative. It’s also been used for hypnosis, as a tranquilizer, and even has hallucinogenic properties. Other drugs, like barbital and ruminol, were based on it. It’s used for euthanasia all over the world.”
The woman made a face at his long-winded explanation, but she nodded.
“I’ll give it to you if you answer something for me,” Reseng added. “Then you’ll get the peaceful death you want.”
She nodded again.
“Do you remember a tall man who was hired to kill you?”
“Yes.”
“Why did he let you live?”
She shifted her weight from side to side and pressed her hand to her forehead. As she recalled the events of that day, her expression kept changing from wonder to horror and back again.
“I honestly don’t know. He stared at me for almost half an hour and then left.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes. He just sat there quietly and looked at me.”
“He didn’t say anything?”
“He said, ‘Stay away from your regular places. Don’t go back. If you’re really lucky, you might just survive.’ That’s what he told me.”
Reseng nodded.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“He’s still alive, but probably not for long. Once you’re on the list, your chances are shot.”
“Is he going to die because of me?”
“Maybe. But not only because of you.”
Reseng checked his watch again. He gave the woman a look to indicate that time was up. She didn’t react. He opened the briefcase and took out a pill bottle and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
She watched him silently, then asked, “If you cremate me in secret, no one will know I’m dead, right? My mother will spend the rest of her life waiting for me to come home.”
Reseng paused in the middle of taking the pills out of the bottle. The woman started crying. He was relieved she wasn’t crying loudly. He waited for her tears to stop. Was it her quiet weeping that had stopped Chu’s clock? After five minutes, he rested his hand on the woman’s shoulder to tell her they couldn’t delay any longer. She brushed his hand away in irritation.
“Can I write my mother a letter?”
Reseng gave her a pained look.
She added, “It doesn’t matter if she never gets it.”
Her eyes were still brimming with tears. Reseng checked his watch again and nodded. She took a pen and a small appointment book out of her bag and began to write on one of the pages.
Dear Mom,
I’m sorry. I’m sorry to Dad in heaven, too. I meant to save up money and go to school and get married, but it didn’t work out. I’m sorry I died before you. Don’t worry about me. Dying this way isn’t so bad. The world’s a rotten place anyway.
A tear fell on the word heaven, blurring the ink. She signed it, then tore the page out and handed it to Reseng.
“Pretty handwriting,” he said.
What a dumb thing to say. Reseng had no idea why he’d said it. The woman put the appointment book back into her bag. He assumed she was reaching for a handkerchief next to wipe away her tears, but to his surprise she took out a makeup pouch. She gave him another look to indicate that she needed a little more time. He raised his hand to tell her to go ahead. During the more than ten minutes she spent carefully reapplying her makeup, Reseng stood and stared, one eyebrow raised. What sort of vanity was this? She finished touching up her face and put her makeup away. The click of the bag closing sounded unusually loud.
“Will you stay with me until I’m gone? I’m a little scared,” she said with a smile.
Reseng nodded and offered her the pills. She stared at them for several seconds before taking them from his palm and swallowing them with the glass of whiskey he poured for her.
Reseng tried to help her to lie down, but she pushed him away and stretched out on the bed by herself. She rested her hands on her chest and stared up at the ceiling. It didn’t take long for the hallucinations to start.
“I see a red wind. And a blue lion. Right next to it is a cute rainbow-colored polar bear. Is that heaven?”
“Yeah, sure, that’s heaven. You’re on your way there now.”
“Thanks for saying that. You’re going to hell.”
“Then I guess we won’t be seeing each other again. Because you’re definitely going to heaven, and I’m definitely going to hell.”
She let out a small laugh. A single tear spilled from her smiling eyes.
Chu held out another two years after the woman died.
Like the sly jackal that he was, like the insane thorn in the side of the plotters that he was, Chu stayed one step ahead of the frenzied, persistent hunt. Rumors spread about trackers and assassins falling prey to Chu, too blinded by the promise of reward money to watch their own tails while tailing him, and those same rumors got twisted up and blown out of proportion and kept the denizens of the meat market entertained for some time. Reseng wasn’t surprised. Those third-rate hired guns and aging bounty hunters accustomed to nothing more challenging than chasing down runaway prostitutes were no match for Chu and never had been. But there was no way of knowing whether any of the rumors floating like wayward soap bubbles around the meat market were true. Most deaths in their world, of trackers and assassins alike, never surfaced. At any rate, maybe the rumors were true, because Chu could not be caught.
About a year after he’d gone underground, Chu went on the offensive. He hunted down several plotters and killed them, along with several contractors and brokers. At one point, he sauntered right into the midst of the meat market and smashed up a contractor’s office. But the plotters he targeted had nothing to do with the botched call girl job. In fact, they were closer to amateurs—low-rate plotters hired by cheap contractors for onetime gigs. No one understood why Chu picked them, other than the fact that he stood no chance of getting anywhere near the people who actually operated the gears of the plotting world.
After Chu trashed the office and stole a ledger that he couldn’t possibly have had any use for, a group of men turned up in Old Raccoon’s library. One of the men was Hanja. Though he looked like any other boss of a security company, he ran a corporate-style contracting firm, making money not only from government agencies and corporations but also from whatever he could gain from the black market. The meat-market dealers were nothing but small-time hoodlums to Hanja, so the fact that they were at the same meeting showed just how rattled and pissed off Chu had made everyone. Hanja sat on the couch, looking like he’d just taken a bite out of a giant turd.
When Old Raccoon took his seat, the meat-market dealers all started talking at once.
“I’m losing it, I tell you. What the fuck does Chu want anyway? We have to know what he wants if we’re going to sweet-talk him, or trick him out into the open. Either way, let’s do something, dammit.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying. Why isn’t that lunatic talking? Someone cut out his tongue or what? If it’s cash he wants, he should say he wants cash. If his feelings got hurt, he should say so. If he’s angry, he should say he’s angry. But he’s gotta say something. He can’t just bust in, smash everything to shit, and leave.”
“I swear, he’s cost me an arm and a leg. He’s killed three of my guys already. And it doesn’t stop there! I had to pay to get rid of their bodies, as well. Fuck, man. Bear’s the only one benefiting from this. But why is Chu only going after my guys? There are way worse guys here than me.”
“Look in a mirror lately? Who here is worse than you?”
“Hey, did any of you write him an IOU? You have to pay cash. Cash! Chu hates IOUs!”
Old Raccoon sat in the middle, looking amused. Why? Especially considering that Chu could walk in at any moment and shove a knife in his stomach.
“The scholars of the Joseon dynasty had a saying,” Old Raccoon said with a smile. “‘There’s no telling which way a frog or King Heungseon will leap.’ They could just as easily have been speaking of our predicament.”
“What do you think Chu is up to?” Choi the Butcher asked. Choi hired out illegal Chinese immigrants of Korean descent as cheap labor.
“How would I know what that lunatic is thinking? Maybe he wants to slit my throat. Or yours.”
“Let’s offer a reward.” Hanja, who’d been sitting quietly in the corner, finally spoke up. “To whoever provides information to help us find him. That’ll get people moving. Detectives will want a piece of the action, too.”
“Money? Are we all pitching in equally?” Choi asked.
“Fuck no.” Minari Pak, whose office had been trashed by Chu, gave Hanja a sidelong glance and grumbled. “Some people in this room do a hell of a lot more business than the rest, so what’s this crap about equal? Don’t you know how much damage he did to my place.”
Hanja silenced them with two words.
“I’ll pay.”
He wasn’t showing off. He just wanted to put an end to the meeting. The other men looked annoyed at Hanja’s cockiness, but it was obvious they were relieved.
“The saying goes that kindness starts with having a full larder, and that must certainly be true of our generous and wealthy friend here.” The sarcasm in Old Raccoon’s voice was unmistakable as he looked at Hanja.
Hanja smiled broadly at Old Raccoon and said, “What can I say? Unlike you, I’m not picky. If you ask me to do a job, I do it. I work hard. In earnest. And in silence.”
Ironically, the overthrow of three decades of military dictatorship, a return to democratically elected civilian presidencies, and the brisk advent of democratization led to a major boom in the assassination industry. During the era of dictatorship, assassinations were clandestine operations carried out by a small number of plotters, hit men expertly trained by the government or the military, and highly experienced and trustworthy contractors. In fact, there wasn’t even enough action to call it an industry. Those who knew about the plotting world or were involved in it were few, and there was never that much work. The military, for the most part, had no interest in plotters. Those were untroubled and unenlightened times when you could pack a troublemaker into your jeep with their whole family watching, lock them away in the basement of a building on Namsan Mountain, beat them until they were half-crippled, and send them back home, without hearing a peep out of anyone. Why bother with a highly skilled plotter?
What sped up the assassination industry was the new regime of democratically elected civilian administrations that sought the trappings of morality. Maybe they thought that by stamping their foreheads with the words It’s okay, we’re not the military, they could fool the people. But power is all the same deep down, no matter what it looks like. As Deng Xiaoping once said, “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is white or black as long as it catches mice.” The problem was that the newly democratic government couldn’t use that basement on Namsan to beat the crap out of loudmouthed pains in the ass. And so, in order to avoid the eyes of the people and the press, to avoid generating evidence of their own complex chain of command and execution, and to avoid any future responsibility, they started doing business on the sly with contractors. And thus began the age of outsourcing. It was cheaper and simpler than taking care of it themselves, but best of all, there was less cleanup. On the rare occasion that the shit did hit the fan, the government was safe and clear of it. While contractors were being hauled off to jail, all they had to do was look shocked and appalled in front of the news cameras and say things like “What a terrible and unfortunate tragedy!”
The boom really took off when corporations followed the state’s lead in outsourcing to plotters. Corporations generated far more work than the state, and the contractors’ primary clientele shifted from public to private. As the jobs increased, small, lesser-known start-ups began to crowd in, and washed-up assassins, gangsters, retired servicemen, and former homicide detectives, who were tired of working for peanuts, swarmed to the meat market. And, like an alligator, Hanja waited just below the surface, eyeing the scene closely and observing the changes, biding his time. While Old Raccoon faded out of relevance, unable to perceive the shifting tides, this dandy with a Stanford MBA secretly cultivated his own team of plotters and mercenaries under the cover of a perfectly legal security company.
The principles of the market hadn’t changed since it first sprang into being. Whoever provided a better service at a lower price was the winner. Hanja knew that. While Old Raccoon was cooped up in his library, reading encyclopedias and reminiscing about all the goodies that had fallen into his lap back in the days of dictatorship, and the meat market’s third-rate contractors were too blind with greed over the scraps to do their work properly and were being hauled off to prison, Hanja was building his modern network of businessmen and officials, recruiting experts from every field, and employing high-quality plotters. He transformed the once-messy, free-for-all plotting world into a clean, convenient supermarket. You half-expected to be beckoned inside by beautiful models hired to wave and smile and say “Right this way!” and “Who can we kill for you today?” So, no matter how big a stink the meat-market dealers made, Hanja now ruled this world.
The long, boring meeting ground on with no decisions made other than to offer a bounty. It was less a meeting than a gripe session about Chu. Reseng stepped outside to have a smoke. As he was taking a deep drag, Hanja joined him.
Reseng offered him a cigarette.
“I quit. I can’t stand things that stink anymore.”
Reseng raised an eyebrow in amusement.
Hanja took a gold-plated case out of his suit pocket and offered him a business card.
“Call me. Let’s have dinner sometime. We’re family, after all.”
Reseng stared at Hanja’s long, pale fingers before taking the card. Hanja left without rejoining the meeting. Why did Hanja say they were family, when they didn’t share a single drop of blood between them? There was just the fact that they’d both grown up in Old Raccoon’s library. But they’d never lived there at the same time. By the time Reseng had arrived at the library, Hanja was attending university in the United States.
The bounty was posted, but still Chu hadn’t been caught. More rumors sprang up, swirling through the air like falling leaves and disappearing underfoot. Old Raccoon refused to join the hunt. He stayed in his study all day, reading his encyclopedias. So Reseng did nothing, either. The thought of going up against a man like Chu was too much. He had recurring nightmares of running into him. It was always a narrow dead-end street, Reseng trembling at one end and Chu, the brutal assassin, blocking his escape at the other. Reseng knew he was no match for Chu—not in his dreams or in his waking life. The only way someone like him could ever defeat Chu would be by chucking a dagger at him from behind, like the idiot prince Paris.
That summer the rain was incessant. People joked that the monsoonal front had hunkered down right in the middle of the peninsula and was going on a bender. As with any slack season, Reseng passed the time by starting his mornings with a can of beer, listening to music, staring out the window, and playing with Desk and Lampshade. When the cats fell asleep, their heads resting on each other’s bodies, Reseng lay down in bed to read. Books about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, books about the once-powerful descendants of Genghis Khan who’d roamed freely over the steppes but went into a sudden rapid decline when they settled behind fortress walls, and books about the history of coffee, syphilis, typewriters. When he grew bored of thumbing through pages dampened by the humid air, he tossed the book to the other side of the bed, knocked back another can of beer, and fell asleep. Just another ordinary summer.
On the last day of September, during a heavy rainfall, there was a knock on Reseng’s door. When he opened it, Chu was standing there, drenched. He was so tall that the beads of water dripping off the brim of his cap seemed to hang in the air for a long time. He had a large camping backpack, a rolled-up sleeping bag, and a shopping bag filled with beer and whiskey.
“Having a drink with you was next on my bucket list,” Chu said.
“Come on in.”
Chu stepped through the door, shedding drops of rain and startling Desk and Lampshade, who scrambled to the very top of their cat tower and huddled inside. Chu had lost a lot of weight. Lanky to begin with, he was now just skin and bone.
Reseng offered him two hand towels. Chu took off his cap and set his backpack on the floor. He dried his face and hair and brushed the water from his leather jacket.
“No money for an umbrella?” Reseng asked.
“Accidentally left mine on the subway. Didn’t want to waste money on another.”
“Since when do dead men worry about money?”
“Good point,” Chu said with a light laugh. “Dead man or not, I still don’t want to waste money on an umbrella.”
“You want a change of clothes?”
“No, I’m fine. I’ll dry off soon enough. Besides, I doubt your clothes would fit me. You’re too short.”
“I’m average. You’re just tall.”
Reseng took out a space heater and put on a pot of coffee. Chu turned on the heater and warmed his hands over it. The cats, unable to resist their curiosity, poked their heads out to inspect Chu. He wiggled his fingers at them. The cats seemed intrigued but didn’t leave the tower.
“They won’t play with me.” Chu looked disappointed.
“I told them never to play with bad guys.”
Reseng handed Chu a cup of coffee. Chu gulped it down. Then he put the damp towels on the floor and shivered. Reseng refilled the cup.
“How much is my bounty?” Chu asked.
“Hundred million.”
“You could buy a Benz with that. Hey, I’m gifting you a Benz.”
Reseng snorted. “What an honor. If I kill you, I get cash and glory. For taking down the world’s greatest assassin.”
“Who cares about glory? Cash is all that matters.”
“Why not die quietly on your own terms?”
Chu paused briefly in the middle of emptying the shopping bag. “What’s the point? It’s easy money; you should take it. Besides, I never did anything nice for you.”
“That’s true,” Reseng said. “You never did.”
Chu looked disappointed. “But I paid for more meals than you.”
“Did you? How come I don’t remember any of those meals?”
“So unfair.”
Reseng got ice cubes, whiskey glasses, and some beef jerky from the kitchen while Chu placed the bottles on the table. There were two six-packs of Heineken, two bottles of Jack Daniel’s, a fifth of Johnnie Walker Blue, and five bottles of soju.
“That’s an odd combo. You drinking all of that?”
“It’s my first drink since going on the run.”
Chu lined the cans and bottles up neatly.
“If I were you, I would’ve gotten drunk every day. Must get boring having to stay hidden.”
Chu smiled. He filled a whiskey glass with Jack Daniel’s and knocked it back. His large Adam’s apple bobbed up and down with each swallow.
“Oh yeah, it’s been too long,” he said, wiping his lips. He looked like he had just reunited with an old friend.
He added two ice cubes to his glass and filled it halfway, then stared at the ice for the longest time before smiling mysteriously.
“I was too scared to drink,” he said, his thick eyebrows quivering.
“I didn’t know guys like you got scared,” Reseng said as he opened a Heineken.
“It’s a dumb move to get drunk without someone to watch your back.”
Chu emptied the glass and chewed on an ice cube. The sound of the ice grinding and cracking between his teeth put Reseng’s nerves on edge. Suddenly, Chu shoved the glass into Reseng’s hand. Reseng hurriedly set down his Heineken. Chu filled the glass two-thirds full with Jack Daniel’s and added two more ice cubes. The alcohol sloshed as he tossed the ice in.
“Drink up,” Chu said, gazing at him. “Jack is a real man’s drink.”
Chu’s commanding tone got on Reseng’s nerves.
“Alcohol companies made that up to sell alcohol to fake men like you.”
Chu didn’t laugh at the joke. Instead, he kept staring at Reseng as if he wanted him to hurry up and drink. Reseng stared down at the glass. It was a lot of alcohol to swallow in one shot. He fished the ice cubes out and dumped them on the tray. Then he gulped the whiskey down.
Chu looked satisfied. He stood up, looked around the room, and went over to the cat tower. Timid Lampshade went back inside and refused to come out, but curious Desk tiptoed closer to Chu and sniffed at his hand. Chu gave the cat a scratch behind the ears. Desk seemed to like it; she lowered her head and purred.
Chu played with the cat for a while before coming back to the table, picking up his glass, and sitting on the edge of the bed. He flipped through the books strewn around on the bedspread.
“Did you know I didn’t like you at first? Every time I went to Old Raccoon’s library, you were reading. That annoyed me. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was jealous. You seemed different from the rest of us.”
“I never read. I was only pretending to when you were there. So I’d look different.”
“Well, you did. You looked—how should I put it? Kind of soft.”
“You were in the library a lot, too. I bet you read as much as I did.”
“I hated reading. But I bet even I could handle this one.”
Chu was holding The History of Syphilis.
“That’s not what you think.”
Chu flipped through a few pages and laughed. “You’re right. It’s not my speed. Why are there no damn pictures?” He tossed it back on the bed and picked up the one next to it, called The Blue Wolves. “Wolves? You planning to quit and raise wolves instead?”
Reseng smirked. “It’s the story of eight of Genghis Khan’s warriors. Plenty of animals like you in that book. It took the Blue Wolves just ten years to build the largest empire in the world.”
“What happened to them after?”
“They moved into a fortress and turned into dogs.”
Chu looked intrigued as he flipped through a few pages of The Blue Wolves, but he seemed to struggle to understand the sentences and soon lost interest. The Blue Wolves landed with a thunk on top of The History of Syphilis.
“So what’s this I hear about you killing the girl?” Chu asked.
Reseng’s earlobes turned hot, and he didn’t respond. Instead, he picked up the bottle and filled a glass a third of the way with Jack Daniel’s. Chu’s eyes followed him closely. Reseng gazed at the glass for a moment before drinking. It tasted sweeter than the first glass.
“Where’d you hear that?” Reseng asked. His voice was calm.
“Here and there.”
“If you heard it while on the run, then I guess that means everyone knows.”
“Lot of crazy rumors in this business.” Chu raised an eyebrow, as if to ask why it mattered where he’d heard it.
Reseng looked Chu straight in the eye. “Did Bear tell you?”
“Bear is a lot quieter than he looks.”
Chu was taking care to defend Bear, which almost definitely meant that Bear was the one who’d told. There were plenty of places where word could’ve gotten out, but Bear had no reason to take risks for Reseng’s sake. Around here, no one took foolish risks or went out of their way when it came to Chu. Least of all Bear, with his two daughters, whom he’d struggled to raise on his own. Reseng understood. Had it been a detective sniffing around, Bear would have taken it to the grave. All the same, he couldn’t help feeling annoyed. When word leaks out, it doesn’t have to travel far before you end up in a plotter’s crosshairs.
“Did you really think you could save her?” Reseng asked, not backing down.
“No, of course not. I’m not the type to save anyone. I’m too busy trying to keep myself alive.”
“So there’s nothing strange about what I did. You’re the strange one.”
“You’re right. I’m the strange one. You did what was expected of you.”
What was expected … Those words made Reseng feel both relieved and insulted. Chu moved over to the table and poured more alcohol. The bottle was already almost empty. Chu emptied his glass again, opened the second bottle, and poured himself another glass. He gulped that one down, as well.
“I wanted to ask you something,” Reseng said. “Did you ever go back to see her?”
“Nope.”
“Then why let her live? Did you think the plotters would pat you on the shoulder and say ‘It happens to all of us’?”
“To be honest, I have no idea.”
Chu drank another glass of whiskey. For someone who had gone without any alcohol for two years, he was having no trouble consuming an entire bottle all by himself in less than twenty minutes. His face was turning red. Did he really think he was safe in Reseng’s apartment?
Chu asked, “Have you ever met any of the plotters who’ve given you orders?”
“Not once in fifteen years.”
“Don’t you wonder?” Chu asked. “Who’s telling you what to do, I mean. Who decides when you use the turn signal, when you step on the brake, when you step on the gas, when to turn left, when to turn right, when to shut up and when to speak.”
“Why are you wondering that all of a sudden?”
“I was standing there, looking at this girl who was just skin and bones, and I suddenly wondered who these plotters were anyway. I could have killed her with one finger. She was so scared, she just sat there frozen. When I saw how hard she was shaking, I wanted to find out exactly who was sitting at their desk, twirling their pen, and coming up with this bullshit plan.”
“I would never have guessed you were such a romantic.”
“It’s not about romance or curiosity or anything like that. I mean that I didn’t realize until then just what a cowardly prick I’d been.” Chu sounded on edge.
“Plotters are just pawns like us,” Reseng said. “A request comes in, and they draw up the plans. There’s someone above them who tells them what to do. And above that person is another plotter telling them what to do. You know what’s there if you keep going all the way to the top? Nothing. Just an empty chair.”
“There has to be someone in the chair.”
“Nope, it’s empty. To put it another way, it’s only a chair. Anyone can sit in it. And that chair, which anyone can sit in, decides everything.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s a system. You think that if you go up there with a knife and stab the person at the very top, that’ll fix everything. But no one’s there. It’s just an empty chair.”
“I’ve been in this business for twenty years. I’ve killed countless guys, including friends of mine. I even killed my protégé. I gave him baby clothes at his daughter’s first birthday party. But if what you say is true, then I’ve been taking orders from a chair all this time. And you broke a defenseless woman’s neck because a chair told you to.”
Chu downed another glass. As he caught his breath, he poured more whiskey for Reseng. Reseng ignored it and took a sip of his Heineken. He was tempted to blurt out that he hadn’t broken her neck, but he swallowed the words back down with a mouthful of beer.
Instead, Reseng said, “You can’t shit in your pants just because the toilet is dirty.”
Chu sneered.
“You’re sounding more and more like Old Raccoon every day,” he said. “That’s not good. Smooth talkers will stab a guy in the back every time.”
“Whereas you sound more and more like a whiny brat. Do you really think this tantrum you’re throwing makes you look cool? It doesn’t. No matter what you do, you won’t change a thing. Just like you changed nothing for that girl.”
Chu unzipped the top of his jacket to reveal the leather gun holster under his arm that had been refashioned into a knife holster. He took out the knife and set it on the table. His movements were calm, not the slightest bit menacing.
“I could kill you very painfully with this knife. Make you shiver in agony for hours, blood gushing, steel scraping against bone, until your guts spill out of your body and hang down to the floor. Do you think you’ll still be mouthing off about empty chairs and systems and claiming that nothing has changed? Of course not. Because you’re full of shit. Anyone who thinks he’s safe is full of shit.”
Reseng stared at the knife. It was an ordinary kitchen knife, a German brand, Henckels. The blade was razor-sharp, as if it had just come off the whetstone. The top of the handle was wound tightly with a handkerchief. Chu preferred that brand because it was sturdy, the blade didn’t rust easily, and you could buy it anywhere. Other knife men looked down on the brand as a lady’s knife that was good only for cooking at home, but in fact it was a good knife. It didn’t chip or break easily the way sushi knives did.
Reseng peeled his eyes away from the knife and looked at Chu. Chu was angry. But his eyes lacked their usual venomous glint. The whiskey he’d guzzled must have gotten to him. Reseng thought about his own knife in the drawer. He tried to recall the last time he’d stabbed someone. Had it been six years? Seven? He couldn’t remember. Could he even get the knife out fast enough? If he made a move for it, Chu might grab his, too. And if he did manage to get the knife out of the drawer in time, could he hold his own against Chu? Did he have any chance at all of being the victor?
Unlikely. Reseng took out a cigarette and started smoking. Chu held out his hand. Reseng took out another cigarette, lit it, and passed it over to Chu, who inhaled deeply and leaned his head way back to stare at the ceiling. He held the pose for a long time, as if to say, If you’re going to stab me, do it now.
When the cigarette had burned halfway down, Chu straightened up and looked at Reseng.
“The whole thing’s fucked-up, isn’t it? I’ve got all these goons coming after me, hoping to get a taste of that reward money, and meanwhile I have no idea who to kill or what to do. To be honest, I don’t even care if there is anything at the top. It could be an empty chair, like you say, or there could be some prick sitting in it. Won’t make any difference either way to a knucklehead like me. I could die and come back in another form and I still wouldn’t understand how any of this works.”
“Will you go to Hanja?”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t.”
“Then where am I supposed to go instead?”
“Leave the country. Go to Mexico, the United States, France, maybe somewhere in Africa … Lots of places you could go. You can find work in a private military company. They’ll protect you.”
Chu gave a furtive smile.
“You’re giving me the same advice I gave that girl. Am I supposed to thank you now?”
Chu downed his whiskey, refilled it, downed it again, then emptied the rest of the second bottle into his glass.
“Aren’t you going to drink with me? It’s lonely drinking by myself.”
Chu wasn’t joking. He really did look lonely sitting there at the table. Reseng drank the glass of whiskey Chu had poured for him. Chu opened the Johnnie Walker Blue and poured Reseng another shot. Then he raised his glass in a toast. Reseng clinked his glass against Chu’s.
“Oh, that’s much better,” Reseng said, sounding impressed. “I like this Johnnie Walker Blue stuff better than that ‘real man’s,’ or whatever, Jack Daniel’s.”
Chu seemed genuinely amused. He didn’t say much as they worked on the rest of the bottle. Reseng didn’t have anything to say, either, so they drank in silence. Chu drank far more than Reseng. When the bottle was empty, Chu stumbled into the bathroom. Reseng heard the sound of pissing, then vomiting, then the toilet flushing several times. Twenty minutes passed and still he did not come out of the bathroom. All Reseng heard was the tap running. His eyes never left Chu’s knife where it sat in the middle of the table.
When Chu still hadn’t come out after thirty minutes, Reseng knocked on the door. It was locked and there was no answer from inside. He got a flat-head screwdriver to pry it open. Chu was asleep on the toilet, hunched over like an old bear, and the bathtub was overflowing onto the floor. Reseng turned off the water and helped him to the bed.
Once he was stretched out flat, Chu started to snore, as if he were getting the first good sleep of his life. His snoring was as loud as he was tall. It was so loud that even Lampshade timidly poked her head out from inside the cat tower, crept down to the bed, and started sniffing at Chu’s face and hair. Reseng sat on the couch and drank several more cans of beer, then fell asleep watching Desk and Lampshade enjoying their new game of swatting at Chu’s hair and walking across his chest and stomach.
When Reseng awoke in the morning, Chu was gone. His big backpack was gone, too. All that was left was his kitchen knife with the handkerchief wrapped around the handle, lying in the middle of the table like a present.
A week later, Chu’s body arrived at Bear’s Pet Crematorium.
By the time Old Raccoon and Reseng got there, it was raining hard, just like on the day of Chu’s visit. Bear held an umbrella over Old Raccoon as he got out of the car.
“Is it done?” Old Raccoon asked.
Bear looked surprised at the question. “I haven’t started yet.”
Chu’s body was in a toolshed. Bear had refrigerators for storing bodies, but they were small, meant for cats and dogs. He didn’t have anything big enough to fit all six foot three of Chu. Old Raccoon unzipped the body bag. Chu’s eyes were closed.
“I counted twenty-seven stab wounds,” Bear said with a shiver.
Old Raccoon unbuttoned Chu’s tattered shirt and counted the stab marks himself. Other than the one that had entered at the solar plexus and pierced a lung, most of the wounds hadn’t proved fatal. The assassin could have killed him easily, but instead he’d taken his sweet time, dancing around the vital spots, playing with Chu like a lion cub toying with an injured squirrel. Chu’s right elbow was broken, the bone jutting through the skin, and his left hand was still locked tight around a knife. It was the same style and brand as the kitchen knife he had left on Reseng’s table. Reseng tried to remove the knife from Chu’s grip.

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