Yin Yang Tattoo

by Ron McMillan

  Only then did I notice the Korean flag tattooed around her navel, a fetching yin-yang roundel in blue and red, complete with black trigrams clean and rigid on her pale flat stomach.

  Before long she laughingly pointed out an obvious disparity in belly-button capacities, and soon I was supping three to her one. After every few rounds, she would pick a different part of the room, jiggle into position and, with the merest hesitation while she made sure I was still wearing protection, let me slide inside her. After who knows how many tattooed navels full of Scotch, I was a wreck.

  I came downstairs early, hoping to get some food and coffee down my neck before I had to face Schwartz, but as the waiter in butler-grey turned to scan for a suitable table, up popped Schwartz from a horse-shoe alcove against the right-hand wall. He waved imperiously to catch the waiter’s attention, and pointed at me with one finger. It was about as rude as you could get in Korea, and he knew it.

  ‘Your friend?’

  ‘Mi-guk kongdaeng-ee.’

  He stifled a grin and led me to where the ‘Yankee asshole’ stood with his hand outstretched. Ben Schwartz was a trim five-eight, olive-skinned, with thick black hair brushed back from a widow’s peak. Eyes the colour of burnished mahogany stared from expensively fashionable metal-framed spectacles. He forced me a beaming expression of welcome. I had forgotten how disarmingly, disgustingly handsome he was.

  ‘Nice to see you again. Please, take a seat.’ As if I was planning to stand and watch him eat.

  With a practised flick the waiter unrolled a starched napkin across my lap, and turned over my cup. I asked him for a large pot of coffee and a jug of iced water. With a shake of his head, Schwartz sent him on his way.

  ‘You look tired. Rough trip?’

  ‘Not rough, long. After that, I was out late with Mr Chang.’ The best lies are built on a kernel of truth, and I doubted that he spent many nights dining alone with the President. With a guy like Schwartz you scored points every chance you could.

  Schwartz laughed. ‘The man likes to tie it on, doesn’t he?’

  I said nothing, and he leaned forward as if to share a secret.

  ‘You smell like a brewery. Or maybe a distillery.’

  And you smell like the peel-and-sniff aftershave adverts in a tits and ass magazine.

  ‘Like I said, a long night.’ A long night sucking whisky from a whore’s brightly tattooed belly button.

  ‘Care to share the joke?’

  I had been smiling into space. ‘It is nice to be back. So what does the shooting schedule look like?’

  ‘Let’s get some food first.’

  He dropped his napkin on the table and headed for the buffet.

  I could have put money on what this New Yorker would choose from the vast spread. Sliced fresh fruit, muesli, low-fat yoghurt and tomato juice. My hangover demanded something else entirely. I filled a plate with fried rice, crispy bacon, two poached eggs and three fat sausages.

  I tucked in with much more vigour than I felt. ‘Do you have a shot list for me?’

  ‘I’m in charge of the production.’

  Like a schoolkid asserting supremacy in the playground.

  ‘What sort of shooting schedule do you have lined up?’

  ‘One or two things have to be sorted out. You’ll be kept informed.’

  At the money they were paying, I should be hitting the ground running.

  ‘When do I get to see some of the sites, scope out the locations?’

  ‘John Lee will be here later.’

  This was getting me nowhere.

  ‘Who do I talk to about money?’

  ‘That’s not my department. K-N has hired you directly on this one.’ No wonder he looked pissed off. As a go-between, he would have been able to charge K-N a standard PR mark-up of nearly twenty percent on top of my fee.

  ‘I was a bit surprised to hear from K-N’s London office.’

  ‘Surprised?’

  ‘Apart from the Global Trade assignment last year I have had nothing to do with K-N Group.’

  ‘You know what the Koreans are like. They know you from one successful job, and when they take a shine to someone, nobody else will do.’

  He reached down to a briefcase at his feet, pulled out a fat envelope and threw it down next to my coffee cup. Hot coffee swilled into the saucer.

  ‘Some background material for you to read up on. Company profiles, descriptions of Group activities, plants, factories, key projects, all possible areas that you might be photographing.’

  ‘Possible areas?’

  ‘Is that too complicated?’

  I suppressed the urge to slap him with a handful of his own muesli.

  ‘I expected to get started on a shot list right away.’

  ‘Until the tentative shot list gets approved by the right people, nothing gets done.’

  ‘I don’t even get to see this tentative list?’

  ‘Correct.’ Looking smug, he stood up and strode towards the buffet.

  I endured another half hour of evasions and small talk. Schwartz wasn’t going to get pinned down on anything to do with the assignment, and when I asked who else in the Group I would be dealing with, he stone-walled me. I already knew my two contacts, he said, himself and John Lee. Great. One an arsehole, the other unable to find his arse with both hands. He stood up, brushing imaginary crumbs from his lap, and a waiter came running with his jacket.

  ‘John Lee will be here soon. Great to be working with you again.’

  He left me to sign for two expensive breakfasts.

  I drained the coffee pot and sucked ice cubes while I scanned the Herald. Despite tiny English readership numbers, Korea had two competing English dailies, each as bad as the other. When I first got to Korea, they kissed government arse incessantly, reserving the top left-hand corner of the front page for a photo of the latest ex-army General President. Every other day he would be presenting the Kangwha Medal for Diplomatic Merit to a visiting third-world Deputy Under-Secretary for Torture.

  I cut through the lobby, wondering how John Lee was meant to locate me. I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  I hadn’t seen Bobby Purves in over two years, but as he passed through a tall door held open by a statuesque bellboy, I was reminded that he hadn’t changed much from the Bobby who helped me drink my way through many a sunrise. Back then he was doing nine hours a day teaching conversational English in a hovel of a downtown language institute, a regime he suffered for years. I often chuckled at the notion of thousands of middle-aged Koreans with the slowed, flattened vowels of Yorkshire hill-country. His was an accent that the southern English often confused with dullness, but in the ten years since he took a job as a copy writer for a busy Seoul securities house, Bobby acquired an insider’s understanding of the murky world of Korean big business. He now held a senior managerial position with a leading Korean brokerage.

  I had called Bobby not long after I finished breakfast, when I was paged to a lobby telephone for the surprise news from John Lee that I had most of the day off.

  His hair was a little greyer and the waistline a touch more rounded, but he was still the friend I valued so much.

  We settled into padded armchairs in the lobby and ordered large draft beers from the dark-suited waiter, who tried his best not to look disgusted. The Hyatt’s sumptuous lobby lounge and draft beer went together like a tiara and dungarees.

  ‘What brings you here? It must be something plum if it’s paying for this.’ He waved a huge hand at the lobby. All around us, the heads of serving staff popped to attention.

  While he slurped hungrily at his beer, I explained about K-N Group needing photography to support upcoming share issues, details of which were a mystery to me. I told him the story of my evening with President Chang, by the end of which my beer was almost untouched and Bobby’s was near-empty. I signalled for one more.

  ‘Sounds odd to me.’ He held his glass an inch from his lips.

  ‘What do you mean?’

&nb
sp; ‘How come they bring you all the way from London? There must be decent enough photographers here, or Tokyo or Hong Kong – or are you in a class of your own?’

  Hardly. Asia was crawling with shooters easily capable of performing this assignment, many of them charging fees considerably lower than the inflated day-rate that Rhee accepted without blinking. All of which threw up questions that had been gnawing at me.

  ‘You know how Koreans are. They take a shine to someone and no-one else will do.’ I regurgitated Schwartz’s line. ‘And their London guy told me President Chang loved Global Trade magazine’s K-N cover story I shot last year.’

  Bobby didn’t look convinced.

  ‘Do you have any idea what kind of trouble K-N Group is in?’

  ‘Don’t tell me.’

  ‘This cocktail reception they’re holding tonight.’

  ‘I have to be there, to take pictures.’ That was the other thing John Lee called to tell me earlier.

  ‘It’s been brought forward a few days at zero notice.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, when an outfit as big as K-N Group re-schedules important events in a hurry, tiny alarm bells go off all around the markets.’

  ‘I was told that tonight is about something called a GDR.’

  ‘Right, a Global Depository Receipt. It has been whispered about for months, and now it’s being rushed into place.’

  ‘OK, but what is it?’

  ‘A mechanism set up to attract huge amounts of inward investment that the group badly needs to service a debt situation that’s been out of hand for years.’

  He downed the rest of his beer and waved the empty glass in the air until a waiter cantered off towards the bar. This was a quiet lunch by Bobby’s standards.

  ‘You know that none of the Chaebol could have survived until now without successive governments bailing them out time after time? For decades, so long as exports and turnover continued to rise, they were allowed to expand into whatever businesses took their fancy.’

  ‘K-N Group being a case in point.’

  ‘Of course it is. And like all the other Chaebol, for decades K-N Group funded its growth with huge loans that the government forced Korean banks to extend, never mind that the groups routinely defaulted.’

  ‘I’ve got a hangover, Bobby.’

  ‘Bottom line. The Group’s near broke. There are tales of K-N managers flying in from London and Lagos and all points in between with suitcases full of US dollars and Euros, off-the-books cash being used in desperation, not even to repay loans, but to see off part of the outstanding interest. Otherwise the banks will start foreclosing, and that could start a run on K-N liquidity that would sink the entire group. Even if the Korean banks don’t close them down, K-N Group owes billions to banks in Europe, Japan and America. Chang and his boys bet the farm on a list of overseas projects that tanked. Car plants in Central Asia, oil exploration in Africa, power stations in former states of the old Soviet Union – and they’re only the fuck-ups that the Press know about. Their debts are so out of hand that rumour has it even the government was ready to let them go down, as an example to the other Chaebol.’

  ‘So what’s with the GDR? Why would anyone invest in K-N with all these rumours that they are about to go belly up? And hold on. Back up a bit. What do you mean the government was ready to let them go down? What has changed?’

  ‘In two words? North Korea.’

  The northern half of the peninsula was still technically at war with the South, and for over half a century had been completely cut off from its brother neighbour. North and South remained separated by the world’s most heavily fortified frontier, one that nobody – bar a handful of very senior politicians and a few big noises in UN colours – had passed through for more than fifty years.

  North Korea would be ridiculous if it was not so bloody ruthless. Communism the world over is dead or dying, with even China soaking up investment from any capitalist quarter, South Korea included. This made the Korean Peninsula the only place on the planet still divided by the Cold War, which was a source of undying shame to the forty-odd million South Koreans, because they knew enough to understand. Their poor cousins in the North wouldn’t know what day it was if their government didn’t tell them.

  For the first time in decades, and despite the Northern half of the peninsula being tagged in Washington as an ‘axis of evil’, recent political moves in Seoul and Pyongyang had created a faint possibility of detente.

  ‘So this is all to do with the South being open to anything that will bring the two halves of the peninsula a bit closer?’

  ‘Correct. K-N Group aims to be the first South Korean Chaebol to get a proper manufacturing foothold in the North.’

  ‘What about the manufacturing zone up there that’s all over the Press?’

  ‘The one in Kaesong. That is completely cut off from the rest of the country, and the scuttlebutt says propaganda from both sides is grossly exaggerating its success, because neither of them can be seen to fail. K-N wants to go one giant step further, to be the first South Korean company to set up factories in North Korea proper.’

  I was beginning to get it. ‘Hefty investment in the real North by a Chaebol means South Korea scores points all-round. It could be the biggest PR coup in decades.’

  ‘And?’ Bobby smiled his thanks as the waiter delivered yet another litre of foamy draft beer.

  I thought about it. ‘And it’ll give jobs to lots of North Korean cousins and aunties and uncles?’

  ‘Exactly. In the process, forcing a complete about-face by the Seoul government so far as K-N goes. The Group instantly becomes the benevolent face of all-powerful Southern capitalism, the visible proof that the way of the South is the righteous one – and safe from any threats of being closed down.’

  ‘All of which begs a question.’

  ‘You mean, ‘What the hell are they doing bringing you all the way from London if they’re so broke?’’

  That was exactly what I meant, and there was no answer to it. I reached for my beer and Bobby did the same.

  Chapter Six

  Deep sleep peeled away in layers by the insistent trilling of a strange telephone. I fumbled for the handset, guided by the green light blinking bright in the near darkness of a hotel room with the drapes pulled closed.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Brodie, this is your wake up call.’ A young man’s voice dripped with fake warmth.

  I was instantly filled with dread that I should be elsewhere. I had an idea I was in Seoul but no clue what day it was, nor even what time of day. Long seconds passed before I noticed the afternoon glare leaking through the crack in the heavy curtains. It wasn’t morning, and I hadn’t screwed up. Not yet, anyway. A guilty conscience is a terrible thing.

  Ten minutes in the shower and a routine check of the camera bag later, I was in the taxi line in front of the hotel, ignoring attempts by Deluxe Taxi drivers to draw me their way. At the regular taxi rank I waited while the short line was whittled away by arrivals of ‘normal’ cabs. When I managed to prise some expenses money out of Lee I would happily leave the regular cabs behind, but right now the costly privilege of overstuffed seat covers and sickly air fresheners could wait.

  In light traffic the Shilla Hotel was only ten minutes away, but Seoul’s hellish three-hour rush hour was well under way, and my taxi driver edged impatiently through a rolling nose-to-tail jam. Threading through this were motorcycles laden with gigantic cargos, some of them terrifying, like three large household LPG tanks held crosswise on the rear seat with springy cables made from strips of car tyre. Even with loads so heavy they made the bikes’ front wheels skim the tarmac, they wove embroidery trails through the traffic fabric, drawing horn blasts and verbal outbursts as they progressed. Compared to Seoul traffic, the manic motorists of Rome are positively meek.

  The road skirted south of Nam San, two thousand feet of rock and flora that leaned over downtown Seoul, its dash of natural greens and browns a welcome relief from the city�
��s man made landscape of concrete and glaring glass.

  I hardly put money in the taxi driver’s hand before John Lee locked onto my forearm and hauled me towards the hotel.

  ‘Hurry – the reception is starting.’

  I squinted through the lobby crowds at the bank of clocks above the front desk. New York, London, New Delhi, Singapore – Seoul.

  ‘You said 6:30. It’s only 6:15.’

  ‘Mr Schwartz is looking for you.’ It was delivered thick with reproach. Typical. I arrive fifteen minutes early, and because the PR flunky has his knickers in a knot, it’s my fault.

  While we weaved through a moving forest of dark suits, red ties and highly-polished slip-ons, I slung one camera around my neck and another on my shoulder, zoom lenses already attached. Ahead of us burnished steel doors swept open almost on cue, and along with half-a-dozen businessmen we swept into the elevator. It was decked out in the standard deluxe hotel interior of stainless steel and badly-lit photographs of Mr and Mrs Stylish suffused with joy at the delights laid on by various hotel outlets. I had just enough room to attach flashguns to cameras. At least I didn’t have the worry of what film to use. On a job like this, shooting digital was the only sensible option.

  The doors slid open and Lee bowed his apologies to the six silent Koreans as we pushed on towards the function suite.

  A herd of Press photographers and television cameramen stood to one side of the wide entranceway, corralled behind thick red ornamental ropes. Some of them trained cameras towards the guest arrivals, impatience all over their faces. Lee led me straight past them, and twenty pissed-off stares followed me.

  Eyes still on the media pack, I ran chest-first into a brick wall. A Korean brick wall in a cheap blue suit, who didn’t move a millimetre when I hit his outstretched hand at full chat. Built like a rhino and twice as ugly, he wore the miniature radio earpiece beloved of security forces and pub door hardmen the world over.

  ‘Where’s the Yankee bastard going?’ he growled in Korean, painting grins on every last face in the Press corral.