The Plotters

by Un-su Kim

  Reseng tried to lay her back on the bed, but she pushed his hands away and stretched out without his help. 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-coloured 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. Rumours 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 rumours 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 ageing bounty hunters accustomed to nothing more challenging than chasing down runaway prostitutes were no match for Chu—they never had been. But there was no way of knowing whether any of the rumours 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 rumours were true, because Chu could not be caught.

  About a year after he’d gone into hiding, 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 callgirl job. In fact, they were closer to amateurs—low-rate plotters hired by cheap contractors for one-time 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 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 benefitting 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 labour.

  ‘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 equality? Now that my office is wrecked, I’m really in a mess.’

  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 was unmistakable in Old Raccoon’s voice 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.’

  X

  Ironically, the overthrow of three decades of military dictatorship and the brisk advent of democratisation had led to a major boom in the assassination industry. Under dictatorship, assassinations were clandestine operations carried out in secret by a small number of plotters, hitmen expertly trained by the government or the military, and highly experienced and trustworthy contractors. In fact there weren’t even enough 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 the pains in the arse. 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 clean-up. 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, ga
ngsters, retired servicemen and former homicide detectives, 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 while 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 networks 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 come to the library, Hanja was attending university in the United States.

  The bounty was posted, but still Chu hadn’t been caught. More rumours 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—neither in his dreams nor 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 other 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 whisky.

  ‘Having a drink with you was next on my bucket list,’ Chu said.

  ‘Come on in.’

  Chu stepped through the door, dripping wet 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 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 to never 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 chuckled.

  ‘What an honour. 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 laughed. ‘You never did.’

  Chu looked disappointed. ‘But I paid for more meals than you.’

  ‘Did you? How come I don’t remember any of these meals?’

  ‘So unfair.’

  Reseng got ice cubes, whisky 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 Daniels, one 750-millilitre bottle 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 got drunk every day. Must get boring having to stay hidden.’

  Chu laughed. He filled a whisky glass with Jack Daniels 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 Daniels 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, he said.’

  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 whisky 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 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 chuckled.

  ‘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.’