by Ron McMillan
‘Everything OK?’ It was Schwartz, standing right beside me.
‘Exactly what am I doing here?’
‘Your job.’
‘Since when was major-league fraud in the job description? I don’t need this.’
‘We both know exactly how badly you need the money.’
What did he know about my finances?
‘I’ve still got a return ticket to London, and right now I’m inclined to use it.’
The electronic trill of a mobile phone made him turn away and dip into his jacket pocket.
‘Yoboseyo.’ Pause. ‘Yessir, everything’s going fine, on schedule and we just finished the last shot.’ ‘We’. I liked that. He looked at me and turned his back again, moving away a few paces, lowering his voice. It had to be Chang on the other end. He must have spoken to Schwartz in English, making replying in Korean an unthinkable insult. I caught snippets of Schwartz describing in impressive detail each of the shots I had set up. Like every PR person I ever worked with, he shamelessly implied that everything achieved so far was only thanks to his personal creativity and deep understanding of the job at hand. He raised his voice to counter the din of yet another passing jet.
‘Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Yes, the Due Diligence team arrives on Friday. They’ll be too late to go to the office, and we have their weekend pretty much covered.
‘Yessir, the shots from here will be ready in plenty of time. We’ll have prints and digital files made for distribution, and leak a few to the newspapers before the London guys land.’ After a few more ‘yessirs’, he rang off, and turned back to me.
‘A Due Diligence team arrives in a few days, so if you even think about messing us around, you’ll never see a dollar of your money. I’ll make sure of that.’
He walked away, punching a number into his mobile as he went.
Between fitful snoozes on the long drive back to Seoul I saw only one inter-city bus in a rice field, tyres in the air, windows blown out, completely ignored by passing traffic. An everyday episode of carnage already a few hours old, it might merit a column inch and a postage-stamp photograph buried on an inside page of tomorrow’s newspapers.
As traffic flowed through the notch in the line of hills that marked the beginning of the Seoul plain, a curtain of brown smog rose up against the grey-blue sky.
Lee left me at the hotel with instructions to be ready at eight o’clock the next morning. If he knew what or where we were to be shooting, he saw no need to share that information with me, and I wasn’t about to ask.
By the time I walked into JJ’s, I was freshly showered and fed, and feeling at least the physical benefits of forty-five minutes in the hotel gym.
The bar in the Hyatt basement heaved with singles of all ages. Groups of Korean men hunkered around tables shrouded in blue smoke. Lone Western businessmen sipped selfconsciously at bottles of Bud or Heineken and warily scanned the abundant supply of overdressed women. Scoring in a joint like JJ’s was easy. The real challenge was scoring sex that didn’t break the expense account budget, as the bar attracted some of the most expensive whores in Korea.
On a small stage of chrome and mirrors a four-piece Filipino band, fronted by a curvaceous Filipina, belted out cover versions of Top-20 hits through the ages. Like every Filipino cover band I ever heard – and they pop up in hotel bars and lobbies all over Asia – they were tightly rehearsed, note-perfect, and with the exception of the singer’s curves, eminently forgettable.
Bobby Purves stood alone, tie loosened, one polished brogue on the brass rail, a half-empty litre of draft on the bar in front of him. I saw him make a signal for two more of what might be the most expensive beers in all of Korea.
‘I can’t afford this place, Bobby. I’m tight for cash until K-N comes up with an advance.’
He shook his head even as he slurped at the fresh glass. ‘We’ll grab a couple here, then move someplace where the eye-candy’s better.’
‘Remember I wanted to ask you something?’
‘Cutting straight to business?’
‘Tell me about Due Diligence.’
‘Back to K-N again?’
I nodded and he thought about it for a moment.
‘Due Diligence is mostly a formality, but it has to be done before every major company merger or stock flotation or bond issue – like the Global Depository Receipt that K-N is planning now. It’s usually carried out by a team of young accountants and investment bankers working out of the big financial centres – London or New York or Tokyo.’
‘I hear a team comes here later in the week.’
‘That would be about right. They have to pore over the accounts, inspect plants, and check that everything is the way the company says it is, in case there are any surprises.’
‘Like?’
‘A few years ago one of the big Korean car makers ended up with egg all over its face. Inspectors worked out that actual corporate debt was something like ten times what the company had on the books and a planned take-over by an American car giant was called off like THAT.’ He snapped his fingers loudly enough to jolt two barmen to attention. Bobby didn’t notice until they both arrived, seeking instructions. He waggled a meaty finger at our glasses.
I thought about what he just said. ‘So K-N might be shitting themselves?’
‘That depends on how many lies they’ve been telling. Same as anywhere else in the world, no set of corporate accounts here tells the complete truth.’ He lifted his glass halfway to his mouth and stopped. ‘Have you heard something I should know about?’
‘Schwartz talking about Due Diligence today. I wanted to understand it.’
‘Remember who you’re talking to here.’
‘I’m not hiding anything.’ Apart from a fake North Korean manufacturing plant in the rice fields of Cholla province. Bobby had already surprised me by not bringing up the Cholla factory that only last night he had been adamant could not exist. Maybe at the reception he was more plastered than I thought.
I steered the subject away from K-N Group and for a while resisted any notion of drawing it back there. Bobby kept hosing himself down with beer, and I did my best to keep him company.
We decided to move on and when I came back from a visit to the Gents, I found Bobby in earnest discussion with a tall Westerner I had seen before. His was an easy face to remember and at the GDR reception, I noticed him hanging around close to Chang and Schwartz. In his late forties, he had the big build of a sportsman gone to seed – and he wore the worst hairpiece I ever saw, a monstrosity of an avian crash-landing. He was prodding Bobby in the chest with a meaty finger, their faces only inches apart. Bobby pitched further forward until their noses almost touched, and I didn’t have to be a lip reader to understand what he said next. Fuck you. Bobby pushed past him and joined me at the exit.
‘What was that about?’
‘Typical Geoff Martinmass. He’s a Brit, a banker – you’ll get to know him in the next few days, since he is up to his idiotic rug in the GDR.’
‘What was he so pissed off about?’
‘Me talking to you. If you and I are up to no good, he says, he’ll see me ruined. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.’
When this job came out of nowhere, I worried that it seemed too good to be true, and now it looked like I might be right. Ignoring Bobby’s pleas to accompany him out of the hotel for more drinks, I pled exhaustion, saw him into a taxi, and headed for my room.
I was half-way across the lobby when a small hand slipped under my arm. Even before I looked sideways I recognised the perfume. Miss Hong.
‘Hello Alec.’
She played it as if bumping into me at midnight in my hotel was an everyday occurrence. Maybe she was in the neighbourhood. She nuzzled closer and spoke in Korean:
‘Would you like me come to your room?’
Did I want to spend another night in bed with the delectable young woman with the tattooed midriff? I led her to the elevators.
In my room she slipped of
f to shower, modestly pulling the bathroom door closed behind her. Perfect. I flicked back the latches on one of my equipment cases, peeled back a foam insert and took out a small video camera. If I was quick, I would have time. The tired face that looked back at me from the desk mirror broadened in the first smile of a long day.
Chapter Nine
When John Lee hurried into the Hyatt lobby at eight o’clock sharp I was rooted to an armchair, trying and no doubt failing to look better than I felt. Another night cavorting with Miss Hong had been fun, but right now I would trade some of that frivolity for a little more in the way of sleep.
I levered my way out of the chair and he changed course, the soles of his gleaming shoes mouse-squeaking across the polished lobby floor. I flipped one of the trolleys onto its wheels, stuck it in his outstretched hand and let him follow me to the door.
Lee stood aside and watched as I stripped the two trolleys and filled first the boot, followed by the front seat of his small grey Hyundai. Treating him like a chauffeur was just too tempting a response to the way he lorded over me during the last couple of days, so I stretched out across the back seat and watched him settle, grim-faced, behind the wheel.
While he jousted with the traffic I tried to work out what the hell I was going to do. The implications of photographing a fake factory central to a stock issue worth hundreds of millions of dollars had me spooked. A big part of me argued that I should walk away right now, but the immediate price of doing that was bankruptcy. We both know exactly how badly you need the money, Schwartz told me with obvious relish, and the bastard was right.
I could write the whole job off and head towards a queue of creditors in London, or stick it out to see if I could score as much as possible of the promised fee and somehow steer clear of any fall-out over the GDR. It wasn’t much of a choice, and in any case, my threat to leave town had been nothing more than that, since if I went home without the assignment money I was ruined.
We reached Youido in a little under thirty minutes. As the car skirted the broad plaza, Lee pointed across the traffic at the newest of the skyscrapers.
‘K-N Towers.’ Despite the name, Group HQ was made up of only one building. Sixty floors of oval-sectioned pink curtain wall with a rounded glass-domed atrium, it was unbelievably phallic. Ugly and extravagant and visually gauche, every feature contrived with an unerring eye for bad taste, it was a true slice of corporate conceit. In the 1980s a pre-Olympics ordinance decreed that all new tower buildings must come complete with statuary, and Seoul’s broad avenues quickly transformed into open-air art displays. Some were truly inspired, while others exhibited varying degrees of awfulness. In front of K-N Towers stood what looked like dozens of fifty-gallon drums welded together, blown open by explosives, and dipped in chrome.
The appearance of the Hyundai rolling down the steep ramp made a man in uniform leap out of his glass cabin to salute as we careened beneath a rising barrier, spiralled into a dimly-lit underground car park, and took up a free space in a corner filled with a mini-forest of metal piping.
Lee helped unload the car, and after I spread the equipment between the two trolleys he took control of one and led me to a freight elevator. Its battered doors rattled open to reveal inner walls protected by splintered plywood and a worn-out old man in a uniform shiny from long use. His unhealthy pallor and stooped frame made me wonder what came first, the job or the infirmity. The musty interior reeked of cigarette smoke and garlic. The lift operator asked Lee where we were going and Lee told him, very abruptly. The sworn ethic central to Korea’s Confucian value system dictates eternal respect for one’s elders, except when you can pull rank on strangers, in which case you treat them like shit.
The elevator disgorged us in an unfinished corridor with cigarette ends half-buried in cement dust along its grimy edges, but where one set of fire doors was all that separated us from the ostentatious designer chic of an upper management suite. The abruptness of the change made me think of deluxe hotels, of the instant shift from the grease and grunge of inner-warren worker trails to the glowing luxury that is ‘front of house’. Lee looked uncomfortable hauling my heavy trolley past colleagues bearing box files and attaché cases and he stepped up the pace, turning through a set of double doors. I followed him into a swank boardroom, parked my trolley, and leaned one hand on the end of the vast central table. Designed to impress but built down to a cost, it sagged under my weight.
‘Mr Schwartz wants to photograph Mr Chang and Mr Martinmass in here, with this,’ he waved an open hand at a huge piece of calligraphy, ‘as a background.’
Goody for Schwartz. It was a typical PR hack’s portrait location, selected without any practical consideration for composition, lighting, or any of another half-dozen of my immediate concerns. The setting was too crowded, the table oversized and too close to the calligraphy – which was covered in reflective glass – and the low ceiling seriously cramped my lighting options. I turned to Lee.
‘I will have to take a look around, to see if I can find a better place.’
‘Mr Schwartz said – ’
‘If I have to I’ll do the shot here. But first I am going to see if there is anywhere better.’
I was wasting my time and I knew it, since even at his most co-operative, Lee would never second-guess his superiors, but a last vestige of professional pride made me go through the motions.
In ten minutes we were back in the boardroom, Lee looking pleased with himself. His smirk faded when I produced a roll of tools and attacked the underside of the table. When he leaned down to see what I was doing, I handed him a screwdriver.
‘I need space to work so we have to get rid of at least half of this table.’ Instead of joining me he walked out of the room, and I stifled a stream of curses, some of them addressed at my own folly. Butting heads with Lee was only going to give me a headache and after too much to drink and next to no sleep, I already had one of those.
A few minutes later I was still wrestling with the first oversized screw when Lee returned with two men in boiler suits and tool belts who good-naturedly shooed me from under the table and set about tearing it apart. In the time it took me to ready a tripod and a couple of strobe lights they had two-thirds of the table broken down to component pieces and spirited from the room. At last I could get on with the bit I was good at.
I positioned chairs where Chang and Martinmass would sit and took a good look at them through the camera lens; eye to viewfinder, I moved the tripod around to improve the framing. Of the picture I planned only the bare bones were on view, so in my mind’s eye I put meat to them. The task was to set up my strobes in such a way that, in a synchronised flash lasting less than one thousandth of a second, they painted the entire scene with sculpted light that contrived to look natural. There is an industry obsession with the ‘art’ of commercial photography, but what I do is more about craft. Lights, cameras and everything else I drag to a shoot are no more than tools, and if I can lay any claim to craftsmanship it is only because I am so familiar with the contents of my toolbox.
I felt almost relaxed until Ben Schwartz appeared. He glanced at me standing behind my camera and loitered in front of the tripod while he surveyed the set-up. At length he turned around.
‘Mr Chang and Mr Martinmass will be here in five minutes. You will have ten minutes to take the shot, and after that they have an important meeting to attend.’ He swept back out the door, leaving me to do forty-five minutes’ work in a tenth of that time. Added to this, today I was using medium format film cameras in search of a crisp, corporate look to the images; working with film required far greater care and more time than digital, and now time was short. I reached for the Polaroid camera and waved at the two guys in boiler suits.
Chang and Martinmass arrived, hands in pockets, chatting like old friends. If the English banker remembered me from the night before he gave no sign. I got straight to work. Chang chose the chair on the camera’s left and I showed him the latest Polaroid. He looked at it closel
y while Martinmass peered over his shoulder.
In the Polaroid, two boiler-suited men, eyes glinting, sat in stiff parody of executives in two-thousand-dollar business suits. Chang handed the print back to me, leaving Martinmass pawing at thin air.
‘I’ll just shoot one or maybe two more test shots to fine-tune the lighting.’
‘Do you have to?’ Martinmass looked uncomfortable already. He was probably camera shy, which was hardly surprising. If I wore what looked like a dead bird on my head, I too would avoid cameras. Without replying, I floated around the set with my flash meter checking exposures before I moved to behind the tripod.
‘OK, since I am shooting transparency film, the first thing I do is take another Polaroid.’ The flashes fired in sync. ‘One more.’ Again. One eye on the clock, I switched to the working camera and double-checked its settings. Peeling the back off the first Polaroid, I stood under one of my lights to view it through a magnifying loupe that lived on a string around my neck.
‘That looks fine.’ At this point, if there was time, I usually showed the Polaroid to the subjects, but today I was in a hurry.
‘Let me see.’ It was Martinmass again. Schwartz was already looking at his watch. I passed the Polaroid to Chang, who looked at it, nodded, and handed it on as I peeled the backing from the second preview shot. Martinmass waved at me like I was a waiter who had brought him the wrong order.
‘Give me that magnifying thing.’
Since you asked so nicely.
‘What’s that?’ He poked a chewed fingernail at his head in the Polaroid.
He meant a faint shadow on the calligraphy frame behind him, and that I had already spotted.
‘I’ll take that out by lengthening the exposure. The Polaroid camera doesn’t let me do that,’ I lied. I had set it wrongly, but it was an easy mistake to rectify.
‘I’m not sure that I like the look of it.’