The Plotters

by Un-su Kim

  A surprising number of idiots mistakenly thought they could only pull off a perfect crime 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 pelvic bone. 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 pulverised 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 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 humouring 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? S´ arı ¯ra. 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 s´arı¯ra come out of someone as rotten as him? 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 practising 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 Rev Hyecho, the head monk up at Weoljeong 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 Rev Hyecho want with Mr Kim’s s´arı ¯ra?’

  ‘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 s´arı ¯ra 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 rat-like 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 s´arı ¯ra.’

  ‘May as well,’ Reseng said irritably. ‘What’s the point of holding onto 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 s´arı ¯ras.’ ‘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, and 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-busy lives were exiting through the chimney. A great many assassins had been cremated there. It was the final resting place for discarded hitmen. Hitmen who’d messed up, hitmen tracked down by cops, hitmen who ended up on the death list for reasons no one knew, and assassins who’d been superannuated. 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 best friend, Chu, had been cremated in this same furnace. Chu was eight years older, but the two of them had been very close. 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 licence. The timing of it all was uncanny. He had once looked up the man in his fake 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. A dead man, a zombie—he felt like 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 didn’t belong to any particular outfit; instead he 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 that were both inconceivable and unbelievable. A person like that would not be cowed by any formidable power. Chu was 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 was out to prove that this ferocious world with its boundless power could not stop him as long as he desired nothing.

  Chu was prickly, but his work was so clean and immaculate that Old Raccoon usually gave him the difficult assignments. He 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 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 did all sorts of dirty work, took 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 stopped. No one knew why. Even Chu had confessed to Reseng that he didn’t understand why it 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 leapt 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 honour, 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 the woman Chu had let live. She was hiding in a small port city. The high-class callgirl 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 ran 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 civilisation, 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 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 round 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 boot?’

  ‘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 still in front of him. He had been rereading it recently. When he finished, he would reread the English edition of the Encylopædia 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 put over you.’