The Plotters

by Un-su Kim

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who shall I say is here?’

  ‘Tell him I’m from The Doghouse.’

  After a brief wait, a woman came up to him and introduced herself as Hanja’s secretary. She had a polished, intellectual look about her. She guided him to a separate lift that served only the three floors leased to Hanja; they got off on the ninth floor and went into a room marked VIP Lounge.

  As he sat down, the secretary asked in a businesslike voice, ‘Can I get you a drink? Tea, coffee, water? We also have alcohol if you prefer.’ ‘No, thank you. I had something right before I came here. Is this room non-smoking?’

  He looked around. There were no ashtrays.

  ‘According to the rules, yes. The entire building is a no-smoking zone.’

  Reseng frowned, and she smiled furtively. Her tone softened as she said, ‘Well, rules were made to be broken.’

  ‘In that case would you mind bringing me an ashtray?’

  ‘It’ll be about thirty minutes before the boss can join you. Do you mind waiting?’

  ‘No, that’s fine,’ he said with a nod.

  When the ashtray arrived, Reseng lit a cigarette and took a long look around the spacious room. In keeping with Hanja’s preference for the immaculate, there were no decorations apart from a single picture on the wall. Reseng picked up the ashtray and moved to the window so he could look outside. All ten lanes of Teheran Boulevard were jammed with cars. It seemed strange to him: the luxurious digs of an assassination-provider bang in the heart of the Republic of Korea. The fact that Hanja’s office was on this street, with its sky-high rent, meant that the country’s economic hub was desperate for contract killers.

  Reseng was on his third cigarette when Hanja finally came in.

  ‘Sorry about that. You really should call first. Then you wouldn’t have to wait.’

  Hanja’s attempt at an expression of regret came off as more terrifying than apologetic. He took a seat on the couch as his secretary came back in.

  ‘Don’t you want anything? I’m having a drink. It’s not every day I receive such a special guest.’

  Hanja sounded more buoyant than usual. His secretary looked at Reseng, who hesitated. This strange hospitality made him uncomfortable.

  ‘Do you have Jack Daniels?’ Reseng asked the secretary.

  She nodded.

  ‘I’ll have the same,’ Hanja said. ‘On the rocks.’

  After the secretary left, Hanja kept glancing nervously around the room, as if expecting someone else to be there. He was trying to pass it off as excitement from being in a good mood, but it wasn’t working. Considering that they were on his turf, where he called the shots, who or what could possibly have been after him? Reseng was suddenly dying to know. The two of them sat in awkward silence until the secretary came back with their drinks.

  ‘I’m really glad you’re here. I was worried you wouldn’t come.’

  Hanja raised his glass in a toast, but Reseng didn’t reciprocate. Hanja looked at his lone glass held aloft and took an embarrassed sip.

  ‘What’re you after?’ Reseng asked bluntly. ‘The Doghouse? Old Raccoon’s life?’

  Hanja leaned his head back and laughed.

  ‘What would I want with a musty library full of second-hand books, or some decrepit old man’s life for that matter?’

  ‘That’s what everyone’s saying.’

  ‘Damn those rumours.’

  Hanja raised his glass and took a sip, then said, ‘You know, Old Raccoon was the one who taught me never to kill anyone unless I was paid fairly. That’s the sort of wisdom all contractors should carve into their brains. Honour, faith, friendship, loyalty, revenge, love, saving face—none of those reasons matter, because no decent contractor will kill someone unless there’s profit to be made. So what sort of profit would be coming to me if I killed Old Raccoon? I mean, sure, some good would come of it. Fewer headaches, for one. But on the whole, when you crunch the numbers, there’s nothing in it for me. Old Raccoon might wish that on me, but I’m not stupid.’

  ‘I don’t care about your number-crunching.’

  ‘You should care about it. Killing you would net me quite a profit. As would killing your mate Jeongan.’ Hanja drained his glass.

  ‘I had no idea I was so valuable,’ Reseng said as he took a sip. The distinctive aroma of Jack Daniels filled his sinuses.

  Hanja sneered at him. ‘Don’t get the wrong idea. You’re not. You simply occupy a unique position.’

  ‘What about my position?’

  ‘The big money is in politics. But the old geezers who pull those strings refuse to trust anyone but Old Raccoon. They have some sort of nostalgia for the library. Or maybe they don’t trust anything that’s less than a hundred years old. Either way, it’s a joke. Since when does tradition matter to a contractor? But that’s how old men are. They’re suspicious and they hate change. It’s frustrating, but what can you do? That’s reality. So what I need is a dead Zhuge Liang.’

  Reseng gave him a quizzical look.

  ‘In the Battle of Wuzhang Plains,’ Hanja explained. ‘After General Zhuge died, his army carved a wooden statue that looked just like him and used it to trick Sima Yi’s army into thinking he was still alive and scared them off. But a living Zhuge Liang is too much—there’s no telling what he’ll do. If Old Raccoon just stayed nice and quiet in that Doghouse of his, I wouldn’t have any complaints. Since you and I grew up in the library too, it makes sense for us to continue the old fart’s legacy. And it’s a nice little business. But the problem is that you’re not letting him rest in peace.’

  ‘Rest…in peace.’ Reseng slowly echoed Hanja’s choice of words.

  ‘You’re his hands and feet. And that drip Jeongan is his eyes and ears. Jeongan is always bringing the old man information—he’s like a mother sparrow feeding worms to a baby sparrow—while you run around wiping his bum for him. I’ll be honest. I was pretty annoyed with you for bringing the old general back in an urn.’

  ‘So?’ Reseng glowered.

  ‘So?’ Hanja sneered. ‘So, killing Old Raccoon won’t make for more business, but at the same time, I can’t not finish what I started. What to do? It’s really tragic but I have to axe something. Sometimes, to keep the body alive, you have to chop off part of it. Like a hand, or a foot…or an ear.’

  ‘Is that why you killed Trainer?’

  Hanja’s face flushed. He was quiet for a moment, stroking his chin.

  ‘Seems you still don’t know the difference between what’s okay to talk about and what isn’t.’

  Hanja was about to say something more but stopped himself. He picked up the phone and asked his secretary to bring him another glass of whisky. She came in, put down the new glass and took away the empty one. Hanja took a sip.

  ‘I know you have it in for me because of that. He was like a father to you and an older brother to me. I learned everything I know from Trainer too. But the world is much more complicated than you think. We have to do what we can to survive in this incomprehensible place.’

  ‘I don’t care what kind of world this is. What’s the benefit of killing family members? So you can afford a fancy office?’

  Hanja glared at him.

  ‘Don’t tell me you think we’re actually family. Who’s related? You and Old Raccoon? Me and Old Raccoon? That’s a big fucking joke. You know as well as I do that we were just his crutches—to be used and then thrown away. You seem confused, so I’ll try to make things clear for you: if you were knifed right now and got carted off to Bear’s, Old Raccoon wouldn’t even blink an eye. He’d simply find himself a new crutch. I learned that twenty years ago. But you, boy wonder, still don’t get it.’

  Hanja took another sip. Reseng scowled at him. Hanja turned to the window. He looked annoyed; the conversation was apparently not going the way he’d hoped it would. The phone buzzed.

  ‘Alright. Tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

&n
bsp; He hung up. Reseng lit a cigarette. Hanja checked his watch.

  ‘It’s B, from the National Assembly. His idiot son is constantly in trouble, but the kid got what he deserved this time. He trapped a girl in his hotel room, tried to force his dick into her mouth, but she bit it. Sunk her teeth in so hard, he said it was barely hanging on by the skin. Good for her.’ Hanja gave Reseng a mischievous look. ‘I’m guessing a dick is not as easy to reattach as fingers, huh? A few days ago B came to see me, crying about how his darling boy, the apple of his eye, the only son born to an only son of an only son, had his dick bitten off, and with it all hope of his carrying on the family name. He grabbed my hand and said I was the only one who could make things right. It was so embarrassing! Like you said, I built this fancy office right in the heart of Gangnam and I seem to be living well. But the truth is, what can I do? If I want to make ends meet, I have to help lick his wounds. If a National Assemblyman of the Republic of Korea can air his dirty laundry to me, then how dare a lowly contractor like myself say, ‘Oh, no, I could never stoop so low.’ I’d be too afraid! My life is no different from everyone else’s. That’s why you should put away your pride and join me. You’ll live, and your friend Jeongan will live, and thankfully I’ll live, too. I’m not asking you to do much. Just stay at the library, but give me a call whenever work comes in.’

  Hanja’s eyes were fixed on Reseng’s. Reseng puffed on his cigarette and said nothing. Hanja’s smile slowly disappeared and his face hardened.

  ‘Election’s right around the corner,’ he said. ‘This is a sensitive time. Everyone’s running around trying to get their share. Lethal mistakes can happen. Did you know that the D Group has over twenty subsidiaries, but it took the government prosecutors less than six months to dismantle all of it? Their only crime was refusing to help fund a political party during the elections. So if people like us make a mistake, we’ll be dead and dismembered before we hit the ground. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. So don’t complicate things. I don’t want to kill you, but if you keep resisting me, I’ll have no choice.’

  ‘We still don’t know who’ll end up with a knife in their stomach,’ Reseng said weakly.

  ‘You’re right. We don’t. But you can’t be in this business if you’re not prepared to get knifed at some point. Are you prepared?’

  The phone rang again. ‘Be right there,’ Hanja said, and hung up. ‘I have to go. Behave yourself. And tell your friend Jeongan what I said.’

  ‘Did you put a bomb in my toilet?’

  Reseng asked the question as Hanja was walking away. Hanja turned, a confused look on his face. After a second, he caught on and assumed a look of wounded pride.

  ‘Do I look like I have time to be sticking my hand in your filthy toilet?’

  Hanja shut the door behind him. Reseng sat down and finished his cigarette. His mind was filled with too many thoughts at once. He stubbed out the cigarette and took the lift back down to the seventh floor. The woman in the black suit took Chu’s Henckels out of its cubbyhole and gave it back to him. The packet of cocktail sausages stared at him and tried to look tough. As Reseng looked down at Chu’s knife, a sense of shame settled over his shoulders. He put the knife in his pocket. Then he took the lift the rest of the way down and rushed out of the building. He couldn’t get away fast enough.

  X

  Reseng returned home. But Desk and Lampshade were no longer there to rub against his leg as he came in. He stood in the doorway for a moment and stared blankly around at his apartment. The only things missing were the two cats and yet the whole place felt empty. He took off his shoes and went in. The empty cat dishes were sitting under the table. He stared at them for a moment and then opened the cabinet, took out the cat food and filled the bowls to the top.

  He decided to run a hot bath. Though he hadn’t done much, he felt exhausted, and his body ached as if he’d been beaten with a hammer. As he watched steam rise from the tub, he felt helpless, useless. Like he was a cog that had been spat out of a clock, a cog that had once been an integral working part, only to find itself now staring at the complex inner mechanism that kept right on ticking without it.

  Every time Reseng came home from a kill, he was filled with inertia. He had no idea why. It wasn’t guilt, nor was it displeasure or self-loathing, it was inertia pure and simple. An overpowering sense that he could no longer be responsible for anyone, let alone himself. Everything seemed too hard—chatting and laughing with others, meeting women and going on dates, having a hobby, building a model boat, even cooking dinner. The only life he could manage was one of drinking can after can of beer until he was drunk, staring out the window through unfocused eyes, or lying in bed staring at the patterns on the ceiling and wallpaper, until he couldn’t take the hunger anymore and grabbed whatever he found in the fridge, before falling back to sleep. It was only natural. What would be really strange, he thought, was if someone who earned their living by killing others felt revitalised by it.

  As he lay in the hot bath and watched condensation form on the ceiling, Reseng pondered Hanja’s, Old Raccoon’s and Minari Pak’s maths. Everyone had their own particular way of keeping accounts. Even the small-time businessmen of the meat market, the disposables and the washed-up assassins who’d sunk as low as they could go all walked around doing their own private calculations. Whether they got the numbers right or wrong in the end, they based their ambitions, their movements, their fears and their kills on their own maths. As he picked up a handful of soap bubbles floating in the tub, Reseng wondered about Old Raccoon’s maths. It made no sense to him at all.

  He dunked his head under the water. And started adding up the number of people he’d killed so far. As he did so, a sense of ruin wafted off him like a bad smell.

  Jeongan showed up around midnight. The doorbell woke Reseng from a deep sleep. He opened the door with his eyes half-closed. Jeongan looked annoyed.

  ‘You’re sleeping? Must be nice. Meanwhile I’ve been hopping all over the place in the middle of the night like a frog in a frypan.’

  He looked around as he stepped into the apartment.

  ‘Desk! Lampshade! Get out here with those stupid names of yours. I know you’ve been pining away to see Mr Handsome and now here I am!’

  Jeongan looked inside the cat tower, under the couch and behind the curtains.

  ‘Where are those girls? Why are they so shy all of a sudden?’

  ‘I sent them away.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Somewhere better than here.’

  ‘What place could possibly be better than their master’s loving arms?’

  ‘If I get knifed in the street, they’ll starve to death.’

  Jeongan stared at Reseng in shock, then laughed.

  ‘You idiot! No one’s going to…Don’t worry. Elder Brother just finished a very thorough investigation.’

  He pulled a thick manila envelope from his bag and put it on the table.

  ‘You’ve heard of Dr Jigyeong Kang?’ Jeongan asked.

  ‘The forensic pathologist?’

  ‘Yeah, he worked at the National Forensic Service for a long time. Turns out, he was a plotter. I’d always wondered about him. Every time I saw his picture in the paper, I got this funny feeling.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘That place had a disturbing history. Back when all those meat-head military guys were in power, they didn’t need any fancy plots, only signatures.’

  ‘Signatures?’

  ‘They didn’t hire any fancy plotters because they could just sweet-talk medical examiners into signing falsified death certificates for them. The Agency for National Security Planning could beat the shit out of people all they wanted, but as long as the medical examiner wrote that the cause of death was suicide, and signed it—case closed! They had it pretty sweet compared to plotters nowadays, who freak out about leaving even the slightest bit of evidence behind. Anyway, that’s how those guys got into the business. At first the medical examiners had no choic
e but to sign the paperwork, because they had their wives and children to think about, and the military had so much power. But once they got sucked into it, they sank deeper and deeper. You think the contractors would let them just walk away? You know what they’re like.’

  ‘But what’s the deal with this Dr Kang?’

  ‘Mito, that woman from the convenience store, was his lab assistant.’

  Reseng nodded. ‘I get the idea.’

  ‘Just the idea? The answer’s right there. Who do you think a hotshot like Dr Kang would work with? Minari Pak? Yeah, right. He would work with Hanja or Old Raccoon. But now that Old Raccoon has practically retired, it’s very likely that he was Hanja’s plotter.’

  Reseng lit a cigarette. He wasn’t convinced about Hanja or Old Raccoon. Besides, he and this Dr Kang had never crossed paths. And even if they had, why would a plotter of his stature bother to plant a bomb in the toilet of some lowly assassin?

  ‘What does Dr Kang do these days?’ Reseng asked.

  ‘He died recently.’

  ‘Died?’

  ‘Yeah, and they say it was suicide. Can you believe it? Someone who spent his whole life officially passing off murder as suicide turns around and commits suicide himself. Suspicious, right?’

  ‘How’d he die?’

  ‘Jumped off a roof. Or someone dropped him off a roof. He weighed over a hundred kilograms, so it had to be a pretty strong someone.’

  Jeongan handed him a stack of photos taken at the scene of the recent accident. An overweight man was sprawled on the ground like a lump of wet clay. His skull was crushed, and his right shoulder and neck were broken so badly that his head was turned round backwards. The pool of blood around him was a dark cherry-red against the stark white of the lab coat he was still wearing when he died. Stranger still, lying on top of the dried blood was a single slipper.

  ‘He only fell five stories, but what a mess,’ Jeongan said. ‘The bigger they are, you know. He had a good appetite for someone who did autopsies all day. He’s not that tall, so he must’ve really been packing it in. He should’ve watched what he ate.’