by Un-su Kim
‘I’ll ask you one last time. Did Hanja set a date?’
Minari’s shirt was turning red with blood. He stared half-dazed at the blood pouring out of his hand and looked up at Reseng, who plucked the cigarette from between the severed fingers and stubbed it out in the ashtray, before tilting his head to show Minari he was waiting for an answer.
‘What the fuck!’ Minari started to cry. ‘What’d you do that for? Fuck, can’t we just talk like civilized people? What’d you cut my fingers off for?’
Reseng picked up the knife again.
‘Hanja’s planning something big, that’s all I know, I swear,’ Minari babbled.
Reseng set the knife down and tapped the handle twice.
‘What’s he planning?’ he asked, one eyebrow raised again.
‘I’m not sure. I think it’s something with the government. The presidential election’s coming up, you know.’
Reseng frowned to show that wasn’t enough.
‘I took care of a few small chores for him, but that’s it. I’m not the only one. The others are all in on it. But I don’t know what it has to do with the library or if he’s planning to double-cross Old Raccoon. I swear. I’m telling you, all I did was take out a few old guys who would’ve died soon anyway.’
After rattling this off, Minari grabbed his right hand with his left and grimaced.
‘Am I on the list too?’ Reseng asked.
‘How would I know?’ Minari looked genuinely frustrated. ‘C’mon, think about it. Why would Hanja share that info with a jerk like me?’ His face turned tearful.
Reseng thought it over for a second and picked up the knife. Frightened, Minari scuttled back towards the wall. Reseng grabbed some tissues from the desk and wiped the blade clean. Then he slid the knife back into its leather sheath and put it in his jacket pocket. Minari kept a close eye on him before wrapping his hand in a handkerchief. He started to reach for the fingers lying on his desk but stopped and looked at Reseng, who stared at him for a moment and began to say something, but instead turned to leave. As he walked out the door, he heard Minari bustling around behind him and muttering to himself.
‘The fuck just happened? Jesus Christ, what the fuck just happened?’
Reseng was halfway down the wooden stairs when the older woman with the perm who’d run out earlier started coming up the stairs with Minari’s decoy. When she saw Reseng, she hurriedly covered her face and turned and ran back down. The accomplice watched her go with a look of irritation.
‘That phoney. She acts so innocent. As if she isn’t a total slut.’ She looked at Reseng. ‘Leaving already? You should stay. Hang out with me a little longer…’
‘I’ve enjoyed myself for long enough,’ Reseng said with a smile.
‘I can’t wait to work a job with you sometime, Reseng,’ she said, making eyes at him.
He nodded.
She glanced back at the bottom of the stairs and muttered, ‘Why isn’t that idiot coming back?’
When Reseng stepped outside, the older woman was standing with her face towards the wall. The bruise glowed on her cheekbone and scratchmarks around her throat showed where she’d been roughed up. Reseng lit a cigarette. The woman glanced over at the sound of his lighter. He exhaled a cloud of smoke and said, ‘Lady, you better consider it. Your husband’s never going to change.’
X
The next time Reseng went to The Doghouse, the librarian’s desk was still empty, but now the ‘On Holidays’ sign was gone. Also gone were the knitting basket that had always sat to her left, the nail polish bottles organised by colour, and the dainty mini-vanity. The soft toys—from Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh to the stuffed panda and the maneki-neko—had all been cleared away. The only thing still on her desk was the plastic organiser with the labelled drawers. For no particular reason, Reseng swept his hand across the surface of the desk.
He heard a book fall from the second floor and went upstairs to check it out. Old Raccoon was standing on a ladder dusting the shelves and tossing books to be discarded down to the first floor. It had been a long time since he’d seen Old Raccoon cleaning the library himself. Back when Reseng was very young, he had sometimes seen Old Raccoon at work, hobbling around the library with a bucket of water and a rag. He would climb a ladder and start at the very top of the shelves, wiping every corner with the damp rag, dusting every book before reshelving it. As he worked, his face, normally blank, would betray the faintest trace of joy. As if he’d returned to a time sixty years in the past, when he’d first started working there as a freshly minted librarian.
Reseng picked the books up from the floor and placed them on a cart. Old Raccoon glanced down at him.
‘Are you throwing all of these away?’ Reseng asked.
‘They didn’t stand the test of time.’
Reseng looked at the path between the shelves. There were piles of discarded books all over the place, far more than usual. The normally packed shelves now looked sparse.
Old Raccoon came down from the ladder. With his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the bucket of dirty water and a rag in his left hand, he looked happier and healthier than usual. But his body was leaning at a precarious angle under the weight of the bucket. Reseng reached for it, and Old Raccoon let him take it.
‘Seems like Hanja has chosen a date,’ Reseng said.
‘A date for what? Is he getting married?’ Old Raccoon joked.
‘We should get to him first.’
Old Raccoon turned to look at him and said nothing for a moment. Then he grinned. ‘We?’ He tried to give Reseng a look of pity, but his expression was closer to regret and melancholy.
‘If we kill Hanja, some other villain will take his place. Will it be you?’ Old Raccoon said with a faint smile.
He headed towards a round table and two chairs set between the bookshelves. After wiping down the table, he beckoned Reseng, who joined him and set the bucket on the floor. Old Raccoon offered him a cigarette. Reseng politely declined. Old Raccoon offered it to him again. Reseng hesitated before taking it. Old Raccoon lit Reseng’s cigarette first and then his own. He took his time smoking, gazing out the windows in silence.
Dust motes drifted leisurely in the beams of sunlight coming down through the slatted, second-floor windows. As a boy, Reseng used to sit in the western corner and watch the dust moving around in the striped light. Even the slightest noise would set the dust in motion. He would watch as the smoke from his cigarette rose to the ceiling like a cirrocumulus cloud, right past Old Raccoon’s ‘No Smoking’ sign, and mingled with the dust. He would close the book he was reading and spend hours watching the shapes created by the dust motes and cigarette smoke and light particles colliding with each other, and he’d murmur to himself, ‘Dust is the true master of this library.’
Old Raccoon’s eyes were still turned to the western bank of windows as he said, ‘The oldest human skull in existence has a hole in it from a spear. Prostitution is a much older profession than farming. The first son in the Bible was also a murderer. For thousands of years, human achievements were only possible through war—including civilisation, art, religion and even peace. Do you know what that means? About the human race? It means that from the very beginning human beings have been plotting to kill each other in order to live. Either by killing their opponents, or by sponging off the murderer. That’s how human beings survive. Humanity has always endured this apoptosis, this programmed cell death. It’s the true reality of our world. That’s how we began, and it’s how we’ve lived all this time. It’s probably how we’ll always live. Because no one knows how to stop it yet. And so, in the end, someone ends up playing the role of pimp, prostitute or hired killer. Funnily enough, that’s what has to happen to keep the wheels turning.’
Old Raccoon finished his speech and tossed his cigarette into the water bucket.
‘What does that have to do with killing Hanja?’ Reseng asked. ‘If his chair is empty, someone else will just take his place.’
&nbs
p; ‘The best scenario is for whoever is well suited to sit in the villain’s chair to sit in that chair. And Hanja is definitely a wiser villain than I am.’
Reseng’s eyes widened. ‘You’re just going to take it lying down?’
‘What’s one dead cripple whose luck ran out? Getting rid of Hanja won’t change anything.’
Old Raccoon picked up the dust rag and reached down for the water bucket next to Reseng’s feet. Reseng hurried to grab the bucket handle but Old Raccoon gently tapped the back of his hand. Reseng let go. Old Raccoon picked up the bucket and slowly hobbled towards the bathroom. From behind, he looked like he was wobbling along a tightrope.
MITO
She was working at a convenience store. After greeting customers with an overly loud ‘Welcome!’ she hit them with a bubbly ‘Help you find something?’ or butted in with a nosy ‘Ooh, I buy these biscuits too!’ Most customers ignored her. But she laughed anyway, indifferent, and kept tossing jokes at them while clacking away at the register, picking up items from the counter with an exaggerated sweep of her arm. When there were no customers, she chattered nonstop on the shop telephone, or cleaned the shelves and reorganised the already perfectly arranged items. Chatting or cleaning, cleaning or chatting. She looked like a child with an attention-deficit disorder.
‘You’re sure she made the bomb?’ Reseng asked in disbelief.
‘Three of the components were shipped to her,’ Jeongan the tracker said. ‘So that’s pretty much a definite. I mean, what’s she going to do? Buy explosives to put on her own fireworks show? And black market explosives at that?’
‘I wouldn’t put it past that woman.’
‘You got a point. She does look like she’d put on her own fireworks show.’
Reseng took out a pill bottle and swallowed an aspirin. He got headaches every time he was out in the city. The streetlight changed and a pizza delivery boy made an illegal U-turn. The left shoelace of the man in a suit reading a newspaper while waiting for the pedestrian lights to change was untied. That untied shoelace unnerved Reseng. The lights changed again, and a line of cars made a legal left turn. The pizza delivery guy drove his scooter down the middle of the crowded footpath like he was performing a circus trick and screeched to a stop. The lights changed again and the man looking at the newspaper started to cross, oblivious to the shoelace dragging behind him. These sorts of things grated at Reseng. He blamed his headaches on the overload of useless information. Survival required having long, sensitive feelers, but those sensitive feelers couldn’t distinguish between necessary and unnecessary input. Eventually his overly long feelers, and the anxiety quivering at the tips of them, would be the end of him.
‘What’s her deal? Is she a device-maker?’ Reseng asked.
‘It’s hard to tell. That doesn’t seem to be her specialty, and based on her build and the way she moves, she’s not an assassin. But she couldn’t possibly be a plotter. I don’t have a handle on her yet.’
‘Then what do you know?’
‘Hey, don’t get bitchy at me,’ Jeongan grumbled. ‘I’ve been searching everywhere and getting zero sleep trying to find out who she is. Fact is, I’m the only reason we know this much. No one else would’ve got this far.’
He held out a thick manila envelope.
‘She is one disturbingly complex woman,’ Jeongan added. ‘I can’t figure her out, but maybe you can.’
Reseng opened the envelope. Inside were hundreds of photos and a file on the woman. He flipped through the photos. In front of her house, in a lane, on the bus, in a library, at a nightclub, at the pool, in a bakery, at a department store, in a café, at a fish market… The photos contained a perfect record of her movements over the past week. Reseng pulled one out and showed it to Jeongan.
‘What’s this?’
The woman was standing in a public square, holding a picket sign that said, ‘Save the Koalas!’
Jeongan glanced at it and chuckled.
‘Well?’
‘There was an international conference on protecting koalas a while back, in front of the National Assembly Building.’
‘And?’
‘That’s a picture of her demonstrating. You know, “Hey, fuckers, lay off the CO2 already.” Something about how when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, the nutritional value of eucalyptus leaves, which koalas like to eat, gets destroyed. She was so red in the face from screaming, I was worried she’d drop dead before the koalas do.’
Reseng stared at Jeongan, incredulous.
‘What a load of bullshit,’ he said. ‘She sticks bombs in other people’s toilets but doesn’t want some stupid koalas to die? What am I? Worth less than a koala?’
‘You think you’re worth more than a koala?’ Jeongan was unperturbed. ‘So now what? You going to kidnap her?’
Reseng took the kitchen knife in its leather sheath out of his pocket. He unsheathed it, examined the blade and resheathed it.
Jeongan’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re going to stab her? In broad daylight? I don’t care how freaked out you are, you can’t do that.’
‘What’m I? A goon?’
‘Then why the knife?’
‘You know the saying: “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”’
‘Who said that?’
‘Al Capone.’
‘I guess a kind word and a knife will also get you far.’
‘She started the conversation by planting a bomb in my toilet. I’m just responding in kind.’
Reseng lit a cigarette. The woman was still on the phone. When a customer came in, she hurriedly hung up; when they left, she got right back on the phone. Who on earth could she be talking to? Reseng suddenly envied her for having someone who was willing to listen to her chatter for so long.
‘What time does she finish?’ Reseng asked.
‘Three. An hour to go.’
Reseng looked at his watch. He took a red ballpoint pen from his pocket and started going over the woman’s file. Clearly bored, Jeongan tapped on his saucer with a spoon. Reseng furrowed his brow and stared at the spoon as it struck the saucer and rattled the coffee cup.
‘Knock it off, would you.’
‘Jeez, so sensitive…That’s life, man, you can’t escape noise,’ Jeongan grumbled and threw his spoon onto the table. It clattered loudly against the saucer. Reseng glared at him. The waitress came out of the shop and over to where they were sitting on the terrace.
‘Did you need something?’
‘Why? You got something we can use?’ Jeongan sneered.
The waitress turned pink. She was wearing a black bartender-style vest with a white blouse underneath and a tight-fitting black skirt.
‘Would you like some more coffee?’ she asked, trying to hide her embarrassment.
‘That’d be great!’ Jeongan said, laughing nonsensically.
As she took their coffee cups and walked away, Jeongan turned to stare at her.
‘She’s pretty hot.’
‘Looks like you’re having a relapse of player-itis. What happened to that last girl?’
‘Who?’
‘The one who talked through her nose.’
Jeongan frowned in thought. ‘Oh! I remember. Yeah, she’s old news. You may as well be talking about the Stone Age.’
‘If three months ago was the Stone Age, then what era is this? The Neolithic? How come you never last more than a month with anyone?’
‘That one wasn’t my fault. When she kissed me, her nose ran. She got snot all over me.’ Jeongan made a face like he was genuinely aggrieved.
Reseng gave him a pitying look and went back to the woman’s file. ‘If you continue to treat nice girls like shit, you’ll end up alone.’ Reseng kept his eyes on the file as he spoke. ‘You’re not getting any younger. At some point you have to stop poking your stick around in the dirt and choose a spot to dig a well.’
‘Who cares where you poke as long as it’s wet? Besides,
what’s the point? What’m I, digging for oil?’
Reseng underlined a few significant items in red. As he flipped through the file, he shook his head, trying to piece it all together, occasionally glancing up at the woman behind the register. While Reseng silently marked up the file, Jeongan kept grumbling.
‘Who said a short relationship means it isn’t serious? I loved every woman I dated. I mean it. But fate is harsh, man. When I think about it, the path my love life has taken has been steep and treacherous. But how would you know how I feel? You’ve never sunk into the quagmire of love. You haven’t had your heart sliced in two by the razor-sharp blade of a break-up. You don’t know what I’ve been through! You don’t know the aching, hungry heart of a man condemned to search for new love to heal the wounds of old love, the painful memories that refuse to go away no matter how hard you drink or pound your chest or—’
‘Is she a doctor?’ Reseng interrupted.
‘Huh? How many times do I have to tell you? The girl I’m dating now is a nurse.’
Reseng gave him a dirty look and gestured towards the register with his chin. Jeongan turned to stare.
‘Oh, right. Yeah, she’s a doctor.’
‘She doesn’t look like one. But shouldn’t she be working in a hospital? What the hell is a doctor doing at a convenience store?’
‘She’s actually never worked in a hospital. She was at some sort of lab, but she left a while back.’
‘Why?’
‘I have no idea. How would I know what some messed-up chick is thinking?’
‘I heard a lot of plotters are doctors. Do you think she could be one?’
‘As far as I know, none of the plotters are that young. It’s mostly old guys. The youngest would be, like, in his late forties? Besides, I’ve never seen or heard of any female plotters.’
‘As far as you know? How do you know any of this?’
‘What, like you and I are the same? Our professional levels are very different. Mine is a high-level job dealing with information. You’re a hooligan who pokes at people with sashimi knives. If this were the Joseon Dynasty, a lowly butcher like you wouldn’t dare hold your head up straight and look me in the eye. If you did, your corpse would be wrapped in a straw mat and left for the vultures to dispose of. You should be eternally grateful and consider it an honour that I deign to be friends with the likes of you. But instead all you do is pick on me.’