The Korean Woman

by John Altman

  Then a plane arrowed in from the left side of the screen. For an instant, it seemed the plane would pass behind the towers. Instead, a tremendous fireball bloomed, boiling up, dissolving into another mass of oily black smoke.

  “Another one!” The anchor’s voice went ragged with adrenaline and horror. “Oh, my God! That was a plane? Now it’s obvious, I think, that … oh, my God! There’s a second plane that just crashed into the World Trade Center. Oh, God! Oh, God. Breaking news. Breaking … a second plane …”

  Benjamin Bach found his phone, tried a number. The connection clicked, nattered, echoed emptily. He hung up and headed for the elevators.

  Convention-goers filled the hallway. Some were crying. He pushed past them and stabbed the elevator’s call button. The door opened immediately. He rode up to his third-story room, jammed a few personal articles into a suitcase, closed the zipper with a single hard tug. Heading back down, he took the stairs two at a time. In the parking lot he found his car. Tossing his case onto the passenger seat, he turned the key.

  Fifty minutes later, blasting down I-84 toward Manhattan, he heard on the radio that the South Tower had collapsed. He dialed to another station, where a second announcer confirmed the news. But surely, they had gotten everybody out. How could they not have gotten everybody out?

  Right?

  Anyway, Dad was in the North Tower. And the North Tower was still standing.

  He felt something ominous building in the air, like the charge before a thunderbolt.

  Dad had once given him a private tour of the restaurant. Neat rows of tables, white tablecloths, red chairs. The best view in the history of great views, he had said proudly. Dad had grown up sharing a row house in Queens with a widowed mother and five younger brothers. He had worked his way up from fry cook at the local greasy spoon to kitchen manager at this restaurant with the best view in history. Of course he was proud.

  Twenty-nine minutes later, merging onto the Hutch, Benjamin Bach heard on the radio that the North Tower had fallen.

  He tried his phone again. This time, he got only a malevolent whoosh of white noise.

  He tuned up and down the band, seeking more news. Another plane had hit the Pentagon. Another had hit the White House. Another had hit the Eiffel Tower. Widespread looting was rampant in Chicago and DC. They had found bombs inside Buckingham Palace. They had found bombs inside the Taj Mahal. Forty jetliners had been hijacked. Animals in the Central Park Zoo were inexplicably dying. In case of nuclear attack, locate your nearest civil defense shelter. It was the end of the world.

  Nearing Manhattan, he spotted a column of smoke. It looked thick, greasy, ugly. Like the world’s biggest tire fire. He felt a movement of energy. Not quite panic. A focusing. Do-mode, his cross-country coach in high school had called it. You got into Do-mode and nothing else mattered. Fatigue, pain, victory, defeat—all receded. You refocused and you kept going.

  Traffic heading downtown was thin. Traffic coming the other way was murder: snarling, honking, gridlocked. Reaching Chelsea Piers, he found a barricade of yellow and black cross-ties blocking the West Side Highway. He parked in the North River lot. Leaving the car, he turned in helpless circles. He saw firemen, cops, civilians, National Guard, Humvees, dump trucks, Jeeps. Nobody seemed to be in charge.

  A guardsman was waving vehicles through another barricade. The man was wild-eyed with shock. His words made no sense. “We’re at the meat case,” he said, waving a sanitation sweeper ahead. “Hot food and a warm bed. Chocolate ice cream for dessert.”

  Bach showed his Columbia ID. He identified himself as a doctor. He left out that his still-unearned PhD would be in East Asian studies. The guardsman motioned him to join a police cruiser waiting at the barricade. The cops were silent. Beneath peaked caps, their eyes were glazed, floating.

  The cruiser turned east onto Fourteenth Street, then south again onto Broadway. Ghosts wandered aimlessly, covered in ash and silt and dust. Bach saw a child soaked in blood, wearing a shroud of gray, crying in its mother’s arms.

  The road was blocked by a shattered hook and ladder. The driver pulled over. The cops abandoned the cruiser and continued downtown on foot. Bach followed. The wind bore a toxic, evil smell: smoke and melting steel and combusted jet fuel and pulverized concrete and scorched flesh. People were wounded, sobbing. Or blank, staring. Makeshift Red Cross stations had been set up behind sawhorse barriers. Dusty gray garbage bags had been lumped on curbsides. Ash grew deeper with each step. He had lost the cops. He reached a cordon set up by the National Guard. No one was paying him any attention. He slipped through.

  Building facades had collapsed. Body parts lay strewn about. He climbed over rubble, through dust and smoke, past a ruined ambulance. Surreal. The word was so inadequate, it echoed hollowly, meaninglessly, in his skull. Even in his worst nightmares he had never imagined anything like this. The destruction was not of this civilized era. The destruction was medieval. Biblical. Pressing ahead, he understood that his father was almost certainly … He put the thought aside.

  Morgue trucks moved back and forth, phantoms in the fog. A backhoe labored with engine revving. The smell became ever fouler. Melting fingernails and bone and hair, pulverized Formica and asbestos and polystyrene foam. He could see fire ahead, burning beneath a hulking pile of debris. But mostly, he saw smoke and dust.

  People hauled wreckage in old-fashioned bucket brigades, like firemen in an old black-and-white movie. He got in the line, accepted a pair of heavy-duty work gloves and a five-gallon plastic bucket, and started lugging debris. From pile to flatbed truck. Repeat.

  The sun sank lower. Eventually, huge floodlights switched on. Search dogs appeared, led by men wearing NYPD windbreakers.

  At a Red Cross station, he smoked a cigarette for the first time since high school. He accepted a cup of bitter Starbucks coffee. Full dark now. His arms were numb. Resting, he watched anatomy, chunks on stretchers, coming off the pile. He watched a cherry picker floating, looking in vain for somewhere to be of use. He found the phone in his pocket. Dread churned in his belly as he dialed.

  No signal.

  He smoked another cigarette. His throat itched. He coughed, spat. The phlegm came out ash gray.

  He hauled more debris. Around midnight, a member of the Office of Emergency Management took him aside and gave him a gold security badge with a medical snake in the middle. Someone fitted him for a mask. It was an old two-canister type that snugged against the curve of his jaw.

  Not long after getting the mask, he heard that no one had escaped from Windows on the World, five stories above where the first plane hit.

  Something tried to swim up inside his mind. He dropped a steel door, sealing it off. Do-mode.

  He went back to work.

  Sometime later, golden sunlight slanted across the Statue of Liberty.

  * * *

  Awake.

  For a few moments, he had no idea where he was. He sat up slowly. Midmorning June sunshine made him wince.

  He was in his office at CIA Headquarters. Walls covered with commendations and awards. Credenza cluttered with souvenirs from his travels. Buchae fans from Yanji, soju liquor from Seoul, gzhel ceramics from Vladivostok. A single photograph of himself and his father. Standing together on the Brooklyn docks, Benjamin Bach somewhere in his late teens, Dad somewhere in his late forties. The background was shades of gray: gray water, a gray tug, a gray garbage scow. But an unseen boat off to the right was throwing spray. Lashes of water refracted sunlight. The camera had caught a slender rainbow, a moment of color amid all the grayness, frozen in time.

  He remembered: the operation unfolding in the conference room down the hall.

  This was it. At last.

  Do-mode.

  He checked his phone. No authorization from the White House yet.

  It would take some time. With these particular heavy guns, the powers that be erred
on the side of caution.

  He put his legs over the side of the couch and went back to work.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Manhattan, NY

  Mark was struggling with the buckles on the car seat when his phone rang. He straightened, perspiring freely in the humid confines of the parking garage. “Mark Abrahams.”

  Song watched his face. He had fallen immediately into his lawyer persona: calm, soothing, dispassionate. “Yes,” he said tonelessly. Mark Abrahams, Attorney at Law. Beneath the competence was something almost insolent: a master gunslinger wearing his gun belts low. “Did you try …? Yes. And …?”

  “daddy!” Jia screamed, apropos of nothing. Her nap had been cut short. She was cranky. Join the club.

  Song slung the diaper bag onto the passenger seat, then leaned over the gearshift to quiet her daughter. “Shh,” she said, “Daddy’s working.”

  Another car inside the garage turned sharply. Tires squealed, echoing. Mark covered his free ear, hunching over his phone. He listened. He spoke briefly and hung up. His eyes met Song’s, and he gestured with his chin. She disentangled herself from the Volvo’s interior and faced him, standing beside the car.

  “I’ve got to go in,” he said.

  Seat-belted on the booster beside Jia’s car seat, Dexter, wearing a navy blazer and clip-on tie, said, “Wah.”

  “Sorry, champ. I hate to miss it.” He put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Video it for me?”

  She covered his hand with hers. “You have to go?”

  “Got to put out a fire.” Dex was listening. He left it at that.

  “Call when you’re done. Maybe we can meet up.”

  He kissed her cheek, then her lips. Any coldness she had sensed was gone, if it had ever been there at all. “I love you,” he murmured.

  “I love you, too.”

  He seemed about to add something else, changed his mind, and leaned down to speak through the open passenger-side door. “Break a leg, kid.”

  “Break what?”

  “It means good luck. Knock ’em dead.”

  “Knock ’em what?”

  The recital hall was a repurposed dance studio on Forty-Third Street. Old sweat smells, wall mirrors patched with electrical tape, folding bridge chairs assembled before a gleaming upright piano. Before his turn came, Dexter clowned around with his fellow students. Song bounced Jia on her knee and chatted with mothers whose names she didn’t remember: about a new cat café downtown, about a new dramedy series on Netflix, about the wisdom of spouses keeping separate bank accounts. (Everyone agreed it was a good idea.)

  A text arrived from Dylan’s mother. A rain check was fine. She’d be in touch early next week. Song felt her spirits lift. She might just get through this.

  Two kids performed before Dexter. Jia listened civilly from Song’s lap: a small miracle. Walking to the piano, Dex in his miniature jacket and tie seemed preternaturally self-possessed. As he played, Song videoed with her phone.

  The feeling returned: If she turned around quickly enough, she would catch the audience, just beyond the footlights, gazing hungrily. Watching her as she watched her son … videoing her even as she videoed him?

  Her intuition stirred; her head cocked.

  Before she could follow the thought, Dexter was playing his last note. He let it ring. He dropped his hands into his lap in a graceful arc. He took his time standing, then faced the audience and gave an exaggerated bow. Insolent in his competence. You could see his father in him.

  She sent the video to Mark. After the performance, the stern Russian teacher took Song aside. Dexter had what it took to become a serious piano player if only he would apply himself. The reprimand, Song understood, applied mostly to her, for not cracking the whip harder.

  For a reward, she bought Dex ice cream just down the block from the studio. Before handing over the wafer cone, she made him take off his blazer. Jia watched alertly. “Ice cream. Mommy, ice cream.”

  Song shared spoonfuls of vanilla bean with her daughter. She drank a double espresso. “You sounded really good up there,” she told Dex. “Were you nervous?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not even a little?”

  “Those songs are easy. A baby could play them.”

  “Baby play them,” Jia repeated with satisfaction.

  They stopped at a playground. So far, coasting on adrenaline and sugar and caffeine, Song was staying ahead of things. But when she closed her eyes for a moment, fatigue tugged like a riptide, trying to drag her under.

  Her phone was ringing. Mark. She answered. “Hey. Did you get the vid—”

  “Bad news. I’m stuck here.”

  “Drat.”

  “How was it?”

  “He killed it. Got it all on video. I sent it.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “He’s on the monkey bars. Should I get him?”

  “No. Tell him I’m proud. I’ll try to make it for dinner, but don’t wait.”

  “Love you.” She looked at their children playing in the bright sunshine. Suddenly, she felt like crying. Or maybe laughing. Gales of semihysterical, tear-streaked laughter.

  “Love you, too.”

  She hung up, covered her eyes briefly with one hand. Then she hollered, “Kids! Two minutes!”

  Back home, she got chicken in the oven. She chopped potatoes and covered them in Lipton onion soup mix. Mark hated the stuff, said it caused cancer. But the kids loved it. Mark would never know.

  Another secret.

  She got the kids bathed and changed into pj’s. She installed them before their screens and went into the study. Listened for a moment to make sure Mark wasn’t getting home. What would her story be if he caught her? She didn’t need a story. It was her own study—half hers, anyway.

  Nevertheless, she could explain that she had to write a solicitation for the food drive and needed quiet to concentrate. But no, that would be overexplaining. That was how liars got tripped up. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

  Move quickly, and she wouldn’t be caught, anyway. She opened the desk drawer, sifted through junk, found the phone and the battery.

  Before clicking them together, she paused. Bureau 121 had designed this device to be secure, immune to hacking. But seven years had since passed—in computer security time, an eon.

  Nothing for it. She had to check the server. Without new instructions, she could not hand off the data to her contact and then move on with her life. And no matter how out-of-date, the RGB phone was surely more secure than her cell phone.

  She plugged in the battery, thumbed the power button. She entered her password, logged on to the site. No new message awaited.

  Her brow creased.

  All she could do was try again later.

  She dismantled the phone and hid it again in the drawer. Stripping off clothes, she went into the bathroom and showered. Needling hot spray gushed out hard enough to sting. She toweled off and checked on the kids. She cut up some fruit, gave them each a bowl to curb their appetites until dinner was ready, and asked if they needed the bathroom. Neither answered. Both stared at their screens, slack-jawed, folding strawberries mindlessly into their mouths. She felt a flicker of dark amusement. Her kids, for better or for worse—for better and for worse—were truly American.

  She went back into her bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, naked except for the towel. Goose bumps had sprung up on her forearms, the back of her neck.

  She could send a message, pressing for information about where and when the handoff would occur.

  During her first two years in America, she had sent several messages to Pyongyang, passing along as instructed anything she thought might be of interest. She had identified herself to her handlers using code phrases that indicated she had not been compromised and was sending the messages of her own free will. The
phrases had come from the laws of the camps. As an inmate, she had been forced to memorize and recite them frequently. Anyone caught trying to escape will be shot immediately. Any witness to an attempted escape who fails to report it will be shot immediately. Prisoners who neglect their work quota will be shot immediately. Should sexual contact occur without prior approval, the perpetrators will be shot immediately.

  At least once a week, she had searched her husband’s calfskin bag, his paperwork, and his phone and his laptop. She had relayed a few items concerning the finer points of the legal justification behind sanctions against Pyongyang. Then her reports home had slowed and finally stopped. Her rationalization had been that every time she contacted the RGB, she risked discovery. She would wait until something top-priority presented itself. But she also recognized that she had grown complacent. Well fed, well loved, with access to plenty of hot water. And learning ever more, of course, from her late-night sessions surfing the web …

  She could turn herself in.

  An illicit thrill rolled up her spine. She had never allowed the thought into the daylight.

  She could throw herself on the FBI’s mercy. She had been sent here as a spy, yes. But she was American now, goddamn it. Lipton onion soup, slack-jawed TV-watching children, and all. She had seen the light. Surely, that counted for something. Surely, it counted for a lot.

  But her brother would pay the price. She felt the guilt as a physical sensation, a twisting in her gut. The only times, back in the camps, that she had not been an animal were when she was when looking out for her brother. Sharing food and blankets, propping him up in front of the guards when he was too weak to stand. In saving him, she had saved her humanity—the only part of her worth saving. And now, fat and happy and spoiled in America, she considered throwing him to the wolves?

  It might be for naught, anyway. If the prevailing winds in Washington demanded a blood sacrifice, her fate would be sealed. Imagine the fallout at school. Your mom’s a traitor. You half-breed slant, go back where you came from. We don’t want your kind! No matter that both kids had been born right here at Lenox Hill. Americans didn’t care about things like that—not when their backs were to the wall.