Yin Yang Tattoo

by Ron McMillan

  ‘Thank you Mr Park for your help and for being so understanding. Goodbye, Miss Kim.’ They nodded, professional faces fixed in place. As I peeled around the door jamb I stopped.

  ‘Could you please do one more thing for me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Ask Room Service to send up a bottle of Stolichnaya and everything else I need to make Bloody Marys, will you?’ He knew how to make me squirm, but there were ways for me to return the compliment. Treating him like a room service waiter while I racked up my tab on imported liquor was one of them.

  ‘Certainly.’

  I left him reaching for the phone, his face an emotionless mask, only the eyes flickering with fury.

  I took the elevator up and walked the corridor towards my room, fishing for the keycard, ready to call room service and tell them to get a move on with the Stolichnaya. Vital supplies. Tonight I had my sights set on a familiar sanctuary. Oblivion. Again. So what if I had a hangover tomorrow. The bastard of a hangover I had today turned out to be the least of my worries.

  I was still looking for the keycard when I got to my room door. It lay ajar. I looked for a chambermaid’s trolley, but the corridor was deserted. I pushed the door wide with my foot and Detective Kwok looked at me from the seat in front of my desk. A cigarette burned in a saucer full of butts. Spread around the saucer were papers and documents that I had left locked in my room safe. One hand moved to his belt. Behind him the muted television flickered with Ssirum, Korean traditional wrestling, Sumo without the decorum or the beer-bellies. Kwok’s two side-kicks looked up from their work, and one of them pushed past me to block my exit. The room was trashed again. I looked at my watch. Three o’clock. Another nine hours until the day was over. Surely to Christ it couldn’t get any worse than this.

  Something gleamed in Kwok’s hand. ‘Alec Brodie, I arrest you on suspicion of murder.’ The handcuffs were open and waiting.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I nodded to nice Mr Park as we passed Reception in tight formation. He responded with a cold professional glance which transformed into a glowing smile the moment he saw the handcuffs behind my back. Maybe he wouldn’t beam so broadly when he remembered my unpaid bill.

  Seoul’s traffic was uncharacteristically light, and in minutes we were at the north end of the Namsan road tunnel that, day and night, floods the city centre with traffic. A few hundred yards downhill stood the capital’s most ritzy department stores and upmarket boutiques, but here we faced a two-storey 1970s eyesore painted a uniform flat grey. Windows thick with filth hid behind sturdy iron grilles fixed in place by chunky countersunk bolts that might have come straight from a shipyard.

  Two uniformed cops stood guard over an entranceway of battered aluminium double doors that rattled as Kwok’s men shouldered them wide, pulling me behind. Inside the plain grey hallway another cop sat behind a scarred desk with a wide plastic-bound logbook in front of him. Like the guards outside he snapped to attention and saluted Kwok as we walked past. He stared at me with unabashed curiosity, and it wasn’t lost on me that the logbook remained closed, his pen capped. I was never here.

  The two flunkies pushed and prodded me down a side corridor. A wrench at my hair pulled us up at a rusty blue door with a covered peephole. They threw back a deadbolt and launched me into the room so hard I stumbled and fell to the concrete floor. I pivoted on one knee and stood up to face the two men who a few minutes earlier had been rooting through my belongings for the second time in under a week. The door rang shut behind them.

  Next came the cupped hands to my ears and the blows to my solar plexus and the double-sided Velcro straps around my ankles and the telephone books to the kidneys.

  I awoke face down in my own vomit for the second time in a few hours. While out cold I had been moved from the chair to a recovery position on the floor, where I made the next in a long line of mistakes. I tried to get up. Having my wrists cuffed to a table leg and one ankle Velcroed to a chair proved troublesome, but the real problems lay everywhere else. Shooting pains dug their claws deep within my back and ripped through my abdomen and chest, spiralling around my innards until I emptied my lungs in one long, throat-searing scream that only set the pain sensors jangling some more.

  I lay still in the vain hope of refuge from blinding aftershocks, my breathing reduced to irregular, fit-like hiccups that fired yet more waves of pain.

  ‘Having fun?’

  I spoke without opening my eyes. ‘Sure, Chang. I enjoy a good beating.’

  The toe of a shoe probed gently into my right kidney. It might as well have been a stiletto blade. My eyes were screwed shut, but still tears found their way down my cheeks.

  ‘Kwok-Susa.’ Detective Kwok.

  ‘Nae.’Yes.

  Chang spoke a few rapid words of Korean. The sound of footsteps retreating towards the door was drowned out by the rasp of Velcro torn apart, and my leg flopped to the floor. Rubber-gloved hands took my wrists and a rattle of keys released the cuffs. I was lifted so high my toes dragged along the floor. My whole body shrieked in protest and I sang along until a rubber glove that smelled of fake strawberries fixed itself over my mouth. Only then did I manage to open one eye. Bright corridor lighting, doorways receding like parked cars in a slow-motion film clip, a clumsy scramble down two flights of stairs to an open door and an agonisingly-bright, white-tiled room. A deserted basement bath-house, rows of sinks and showers, deep plunge pools and steam and sauna rooms attached.

  The two cops threw me to the floor. I sat up gingerly, conscious of the stink that rose in waves from my body and clothes – and looked into the brass nozzles of two thick hoses. Icy jets tore the buttons from my shirt sending two halves flapping behind me, pausing only while a uniformed cop forcefully stripped me of what remained of my clothing. He backed away and the powerful blasts pummelled every square inch of my battered body. After the telephone books, the hoses might as well have been spitting bricks.

  They stopped when Kwok threw a tired-looking towel and a pair of faded boxer shorts to the wet floor in front of me.

  ‘Cover yourself up.’ Another cop appeared with two wooden chairs, which he set down, facing each other, in the middle of the bath-house floor. Kwok sat in one, and nodded to me to take the other. A pair of men in uniform stood guard over the only exit. It took me several agonising minutes to pull on the shorts. I sat down and gently explored my abdomen with the rough towel. Big Cop and Small Cop stood breathing down my damp neck.

  ‘Did you bring me here just to pound the shit out of me, or did you have something else in mind?’

  ‘You know exactly why we have you here.’

  ‘Even if you don’t.’

  He didn’t take the bait.

  ‘I am in the course of a murder investigation and I strongly suspect that you may have the answers I require.’

  ‘Shouldn’t that be the answers you were told to get?’

  Kwok’s head flickered to my right, Big Cop latched onto my shoulders – and little brother stepped forwards to repeat his right-hook-to-the-guts trick.

  I doubled over and retched, taking as long as I could to recover, and when I finally looked up, Kwok stared at me, his face devoid of emotion.

  ‘Start again?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What happened in your hotel room on the two nights you spent with the prostitute?’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell. On the first night I got back to the room and she was waiting for me. Chang must have sent her. We spent a few hours doing what she was paid to do. We drank a lot of whisky, and she left while I was asleep. A couple of nights later she surprised me in the lobby, and we went up to my room again. I didn’t plan for her to be in the hotel, she just turned up. When I woke up in the morning the second time, she was gone again. I never saw her – ’

  ‘Until an unidentifiable caller just happened to deliver her navel to your room.’

  ‘Exactly. Can I go now?’

  ‘Let’s talk about cameras.’

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sp; Here we go.

  ‘You took Polaroid photographs together, didn’t you?’

  ‘You know we did. You have the photographs. Souvenirs, nothing more.’

  ‘So tell me about the missing video camera.’

  ‘I have explained that a half-dozen times already. I left it in London because my baggage was overweight.’

  ‘And the video tape wrappings in your hotel room?’

  ‘Left over from a shoot I did in London last week.’

  Kwok shook his head like a schoolteacher disappointed at his student’s transparent fibs.

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  As I spoke, the brother cops moved in, expertly handcuffed my hands behind my back, and pulled me to my feet until I faced a broad plunge pool that came up to my waist. They lofted my wrists, forced my head forward and down, and two strong hands on the nape of my neck finished the move. Face-down underwater in two seconds flat. No time to snatch even a token breath.

  Resistance was not an option. My feet were off the floor, thighs locked between the cops’ legs and the sharp, tiled edge of the tub. My hands, cuffed behind me, pointed to the ceiling, and two big mitts on the back of my neck held me firmly in place. Blue water bubbled with what little breath my lungs still held. Within seconds I was in trouble and forgot that resistance was futile. I tried kicking, tried to twist my shoulders and tried to wriggle my neck free from their grasp. Useless.

  The blue receded and I was on my knees by the tub and heaving desperately for air, Kwok standing over me. He stepped back and his boys wrenched me to my feet. It occurred to me that this was time to pay attention. No problem, I was ready to listen. I was ready to talk, too. I could tell them things, maybe not what they wanted to hear, but right now I could talk for Scotland. Kwok stood in silence, took a breath as if to speak, and flicked his head towards the tub. An instant later I was swallowing water.

  This time they held me down for longer. I tried to relax, to burn as little air as possible. I forced my thoughts elsewhere, away from the water and the questions and the video camera and the tape, but from there they jumped straight to Mr Cho. The trail that Kwok was following led directly to Mr Cho.

  I could not let that happen. Korean courts take an understandably dim view of foreigners accused of murdering their women, and any evidence that Miss Hong and I had been together would surely be twisted to imply guilt. Slipping the camera and tape out of the hotel had been an act of pure self-preservation, but passing it to Mr Cho had been thoughtlessly selfish. Now, the buck had to stop with me, and not with Mr Cho. Not after everything he had done for me. Hands heaved me clear of the water and I sucked air into complaining lungs just in time to be plunged back beneath the chilled surface.

  Korea in the late eighties was a very different place, one ruled by lightly polished military dictatorships who maintained illegitimate authority with a network of security forces as much set up to control the locals as anyone else. Favourite of all the bogeys regularly dragged out to keep South Koreans controlled by fear was the threat of infiltration from Communist North Korea, or its agents. However exaggerated it might have been, the propaganda was so pervasive that it coated an entire society with suspicion of the next man on the street. Any person who stuck out from the crowd stood the chance of being reported as a spy. Twenty-four-hour telephone hotlines made doing so as easy as picking up the phone and dialling 113. Reports could be anonymous and dialled in from any public telephone, making it a favourite revenge move among enemies settling personal scores unrelated to North Korea.

  The powerful military department that dealt with such reports went by a variety of names over the decades, but was commonly referred to as the Korean CIA. The KCIA were the SS, the Stasi, the Ton Ton Macoute and the KGB rolled into one. Since the government had grown from the military, and since the KCIA’s activities were regulated only by the military, they operated virtually free of restriction. With unfettered powers and immunity from legal process, the KCIA was a force with a bad name that was completely deserved.

  The last thing any Korean wanted was the KCIA casting a shadow on his door, and back then Mr Cho dealt with just that on my account. I was living in his family’s apartment for a few weeks while I trained at his dojang, the only foreigner in the entire middle-class neighbourhood. Since I went everywhere with a camera on my shoulder, it was perhaps inevitable that some would-be patriot fingered me for a spy.

  Years passed before Mr Cho’s wife told me about the gruff men in bad suits flashing dreaded ID cards at their apartment door, demanding to know everything about the suspicious foreigner who enjoyed sanctuary in their home. Only then did I hear that Mr Cho laughed them out of his home – and never once mentioned their visit to me.

  I owed Mr Cho. He didn’t need a billionaire on his back, and if I could help it, I wasn’t going to give him one.

  Three, maybe four slaps bounced my face from side to side until finally I cleared the airways in one instinctual explosion and retched the watery contents of my innards all over Big Cop. I sucked greedily at the air, still coughing, vision blurred. Kwok allowed me a few seconds.

  ‘Unless you cooperate this will get even more unpleasant. I ask you one more time: Where are the video camera and tape?’

  I shook my head. Kwok shook his, and the grip on the back of my neck tightened once more.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  ‘London. The video camera is in London. The video camera is in London.’

  I said it over and over to myself when my upper body was pushed hard underwater and, between ever-lengthening submersions, out loud, time and again. I had to outlast them, give them nothing but the one answer they didn’t want to hear, and do it for long enough to plant the merest embryonic doubt in their minds. Never mind that I wasn’t telling the truth. A good liar knows it is not about the lies you tell – it is how convincingly you tell them.

  I might have been the one wearing handcuffs and close to death by drowning, but I still held a trump card. Kwok had messed up. The thrashing with the telephone books meant that I would be pissing blood for a week, but after the switch to the water treatment they gave away more than they learned and put me back in control. The flash of panic that crossed Kwok’s face when his boys pulled me back from near-drowning was all I needed to know. I knew how far he was prepared to go, and that wasn’t far enough. At least for now, the prisoner dying in custody was not an option, so I didn’t have to endure anything worse than they had already done, and even that for just long enough to convince them that they might be barking up the wrong tree.

  Not that I had any alternatives. I was boxed into a corner of my own devising. In the week since I got here, with every last move I had lost or thrown away almost everything that mattered. Being charged with Miss Hong’s murder would be the end. The end of the assignment. The end of any hope of ever seeing a job fee that would delay the inevitable bankruptcy. Now that I had brought his family into the firing line, almost certainly the end of a valued friendship with Bobby; and the end of any tantalising hope that Jung-hwa and I might somehow survive this mess in one piece. Murder was a capital offence, so even if I struck lucky I could have life in Korean prisons to look forward to. Right now, not one thing I could tell Kwok would make the slightest bit of difference.

  Face down in an oversized bathtub, ears roaring, arms contorted upwards, lungs folded in on themselves, I struggled to convince myself that the screw-ups had gone far enough. From now on I had to think of Mr Cho, and how I couldn’t, I wouldn’t bring any of this shit to bear on his family.

  London. The video camera never left London.

  I awoke to the concerned scrutiny of uniformed paramedics and the antiseptic coolness of bottled oxygen, and I knew that for now I had won the battle, if not the war. I lay on a hard vinyl sofa in the office of a senior cop whose photographs covered three walls. A saline drip fed a catheter buried deep in the crook of my left arm and a wire ran from a clothes-peg-like clip on my index finger to a digital read-out that beeped rea
ssuringly in time to my pulse. The electronic life signal was steady, if slow.

  When I opened my eyes again I was alone, and wondered for a moment if it had all been a nightmare, but a tiny disc of band aid inside my left elbow and a fading ridge on my forefinger confirmed the vision of paramedics. Bolts of pain arcing around my midriff told me the rest was real enough. As if he had been keeping a remote eye on me, Kwok came into the room. Chang followed, hands in pockets, grave expression on his face. He spoke first.

  ‘Detective Kwok still thinks you are involved in the murder of the prostitute.’

  ‘So?’ I didn’t sit up. I wasn’t sure I could.

  ‘But he is prepared to let you go for the time being.’

  ‘That’s big of him.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Apart from a free admission on my part that I slept with Miss Hong on two occasions there is nothing to connect me to anything that might have happened to her. Despite the torture he doesn’t have a single reason for keeping me here.’

  ‘I think he might disagree,’ said Chang.

  ‘Won’t he speak unless you tell him to? Why don’t you push his buttons and see if they still work?’

  Kwok remained blank, but I knew that he must be raging. Chang gave him a tiny shake of the head.

  ‘Due to the importance of the situation affecting K-N Group, Detective Kwok will release you into my care. You would do well to remember that we hired you to do a job. One that remains of the utmost importance to my company, if not to the entire Korean economy. John Lee will pick you up at your hotel tomorrow at eight.’ He started for the door.

  ‘Hold on a minute.’

  Chang gave me a ‘what now’ look.

  ‘I need money.’

  ‘Detective Kwok will see you back to the hotel.’

  ‘I don’t mean a fucking taxi fare, I mean real cash money. I’ve been spending my own ever since I got this assignment, and now I’ve run out of petty cash to pay your costs. If this job is so important, how come you won’t even meet my day-to-day expenses? The hotel is pushing me to settle a bill that you should have taken care of by now.’