Yin Yang Tattoo

by Ron McMillan

  Last night’s terse voicemail message from John Lee was surely calculated to insult.

  ‘Tomorrow you will do photography of products in my company’s display centre at K-N Towers. Arrive before nine o’clock.’

  No more car and driver at your beck and call, Brodie. It’s you and the rest of Seoul in the morning scramble for a cab. A petty insult designed to put me in my place, it did me a big favour.

  I had only one trolley creaking under the weight of four bags. A pill-box-hatted youngster pulled the door wide to the fleeting pleasures of morning sunshine and a warm breeze. Such basic joys are denied within the cocoon of the air-conditioned hotel, windows built never to open and doors designed to spring hastily to a close lest anything from outside sully its antiseptic atmosphere.

  The line for regular cabs was long and agitated. Distressed heads peered towards the distant gate, perhaps hoping for a cavalry charge of empty cabs to crest the horizon and save the day.

  I waved to the man leaning on the front car of a short line of deluxe cabs. He jumped happily to attention. Together we stripped the trolley and transferred its load to the car’s boot.

  I told him to take me to K-N Towers and as we left the car park, Big Cop and Small Cop, making no attempt to hide, followed close behind in the beat-up Hyundai. A few minutes into the journey I broke the silence and, speaking Korean, asked the driver if he saw them. He glanced momentarily at the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Nae.’ Yes. Curious.

  Talking to the mirror, I spun a tale about how my Korean girlfriend’s father hired gang-pae, or street thugs, to beat me up, and now they followed me everywhere, waiting for their opportunity.

  Never mind that the story was plausible enough, it could easily backfire, since a lot of Korean men resented a foreigner having any sort of relationship with a local woman. I was also depending on this particular taxi driver being unable to recognise an unmarked cop car stuck to his rear bumper. I got lucky and the noises he made were an encouraging mix of sympathy and outrage. I explained what I wanted to do, and he responded with a series of conspiratorial nods. The hefty tip that I promised probably helped.

  I thought of last night. My body was battered and sore, but three hours of gentle love-making with Jung-hwa in an Itaewon inn had put some of my aches and pains in the shade. Her strong fingers had kneaded and probed and tended to tired and abused muscles in long periods of therapeutic massage that worked wonders. What came next didn’t do any harm, either.

  Afterwards we lay entangled, our breathing synchronised, and Jung-hwa was the first to speak.

  ‘You didn’t get married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So no children?’

  ‘None, thank goodness. Why?’

  She lay in silence for what felt like a long time.

  ‘Never mind.’ She turned away and I lay watching until at last her back rose and fell in time to the rhythmic susurrus of sleep.

  Lingering memories were interrupted by the driver speaking out over the traffic noise.

  At K-N Towers, we ignored the crescent of tarmac that kissed the busy main entrance, and took the side lane towards the underground car park.

  I hung out of the window, delighted to spot the same guard I had seen in recent days pop his head out of the security shack. I was betting that John Lee would have informed security that the big nose foreigner with the camera bags would be arriving by taxi before nine a.m., and my bet proved right. The barrier rose, and the taxi’s tyres grumbled downwards over corrugated concrete.

  We pulled up deep inside the basement car park, and while three long minutes slid by, I rolled myself in a ball behind the driver’s seat, hard against the offside door. When we drew off, the taxi kept tight against the kerb that ran past the security man’s window, meaning the only way the guard could spot me was if he levered himself from his chair and looked straight downwards. I held my breath as we paused at the brow of the ramp, and accelerated away. Heavy traffic closed around us for several minutes, until at last the driver spoke:

  ‘OK. Where to?’

  The cops would surely have noted his license number, so I directed him to a hotel south of the river, where I made a show of pushing through the main entrance while he drove away, his happy wave making me feel guilty. Today at the taxi drivers’ lunch stop, he would have a good story to share with his mates. Tomorrow, after Kwok’s boys put him under the spotlight, he would have a different story to tell.

  I was soon back on the street. At the next big intersection I flagged a cab and took it to a high-rise apartment complex in the southern suburbs. There I picked up another taxi, this time downtown to a back street behind a gigantic office building. Five minutes on foot got me inside Seoul’s main railway station, and two more minutes saw most of my gear safely stowed at the station’s left luggage counter. The huge digital clock above the archway that led to the platforms said 9:58 a.m. Not bad. With only one heavy camera bag on my shoulder and a hold-all I had pulled from the stand bag, I trotted downstairs into the subway system.

  When I first came to Seoul, its downtown flophouses crawled with cocky young Europeans and Americans, in town for one night only before flying off on the next leg of multi-city smuggling runs operated by moneyed cynics in Hong Kong and Taipei. For free air travel and a laughably small amount of hard cash, these naive fools criss-crossed Asia for a week, consumed with self-importance at the novelty of ‘free’ travel around the region – albeit at a price. With them went suitcases they had never seen before, into countries whose restricted markets meant there was money to be made on everything from hair dryers to ladies lingerie to jewelled watches to dried mushrooms – and where being caught with a suitcase-handle filled with miniature gold bars could land them in jail for years.

  A common cargo for the Seoul-bound petty smuggler was the brand-name foreign camera, top of the range stuff that satisfied local demand for a standard of equipment that was off-limits to importers rendered near-powerless by the same protectionism that helped make their capitalist customers rich. Even now, when import regulations were supposedly loosened, many of the high-end foreign cameras in Seoul shops were black market goods.

  When I popped up from the subway maze on the north side of Chong-ro I knew exactly where I was going, even if I was unsure that it was still there. To my relief the little foreign camera enclave was much as I remembered it, a half-dozen stores side by side, small windows crammed with the big names in Japanese and European photo„graphy.

  The shop I wanted was last in the line, and I pushed the door open to find the same fat little owner, cigarette burning in his mouth, one eye part-closed to the smoke running up his face. Since I saw him last, his hair had turned white, except for a boyish cow’s lick of a fringe, stained nicotine brown. He sat wedged behind a glass counter brimming with camera gear, some of it older than I was. In case he remembered me, I wore a baseball cap pulled low over dark glasses, but from the moment I walked through the door he paid me no attention. His greedy little eyes were glued to my large Domke camera bag.

  In the 1970s, American newspaper photographer Jim Domke despaired of the padded amateur-oriented monsters that dominated the camera bag market. At home in his Philadelphia kitchen he set about designing a lightweight bag that combined ease of access with premier-class durability. The resultant creation, crafted from heavy-grade canvas and military-style webbing, very soon had fellow-professionals clamouring for copies, and before long Domke was in the bag business. Thirty years later, working professionals the world over depended on Domkes, and decades-old bags with frayed flaps and colours long-ago washed out were touted like badges of respectability. Mr Nicotine-Fringe certainly knew this and, at the sight of my heavy bag, immediately perked up.

  Fifteen minutes of hard bargaining later I browsed the store’s shelves, my back to the owner while his assistant ran out to gather cash from who knows where. When I left I was no longer the owner of two expensive cameras and three lenses, and with a pocketful of hard cash in
large bills, more than I had paid for the equipment in London two years before. The rest of my gear was safe at Seoul station, where the left luggage counter would hold it for up to fourteen days. If I could not pick it up within two weeks I would not be needing it. The thought made me pine for a stiff drink that would have to wait.

  A jam-packed city bus got me back across the river to the inter-city bus terminal, where I scanned the departure boards and bought a one-way ticket to Taejon, a regional capital about a hundred miles to the south.

  They may be fraught with danger, but Korea’s inter-city buses run with astonishing frequency. Less than ten minutes after reaching the bus terminal, I sat near the back of a luxurious single-decker as it crabbed around a sweeping cloverleaf onto the main highway south.

  A video began to play on a television screen suspended from the cabin roof. The TV series Friends was never a favourite of mine, and badly dubbed into Korean and broadcast at distortion levels through cheap ceiling speakers, it soon had me wishing for earplugs. I was thankful that in the last ten years some sort of regulation had forced the screen well aft of the driver’s seat; in the bad old days the lone TV screen was usually just above the driver’s head, meaning passengers had to make do with watching him divide his concentration between the road ahead and painfully long spells spent peering upwards at the monitor, chuckling along with those of us not frozen to our seats in terror.

  A half-hour of cross-cultural torture later there was a long hiss of air brakes and a rattle as the doors clanged open. I looked up front to see a uniformed policeman mount the steps, salute the passengers, and proceed slowly down the centre aisle. The checkpoint by the roadside looked permanent, but that meant nothing. I saw fellow passengers produce their citizens’ identity cards, which the policeman scanned as he walked the aisle. Maybe this was just a routine search for potential North Korean spies, but since Kwok had my passport, I had zero proof of identity. As the blue uniform got closer, matte-black revolver dangling from a shiny holster high on one hip, I pretended to search my holdall for papers. Head low over my bag, I watched his gleaming boots approach and pause directly in front of me for long seconds before he spun on one heel and walked the other way. After another formal salute he was gone. I pulled my hat low and waited for the trembling to stop. It took a long time.

  Taejon is a forgettable provincial town with the trademark Korean architecture of bland, poured-concrete buildings with blue and red plastic signage lining its main streets. In its favour it was big enough and close enough to US military bases for me to slip through town without drawing a second glance. The oil and diesel-stained bus terminal was only a short walk from the railway station, and I stopped along the way only once, to buy a half-dozen cans of beer and some snacks. Pusan was still more than four hours away. From now on I needed to avoid drawing attention to myself, which meant no foraging from the train’s snack trolley.

  Boarding the correct carriage near the middle of the train, I sat in the assigned window seat and placed my bag next to me to discourage other passengers from sitting too close. The carriage never filled up so I sat alone, stiff and bruised but undisturbed, facing the window. Outside, the country scenery rolled past at speed, saw-tooth rocky mountain ridges, lower slopes lined with well-managed forestry, the fruits of a national campaign to re-clothe the naked landscape that was the southern half of the peninsula at the end of the Korean War. In the impoverished North, where electricity remained scarce, every spare scrap of timber still ended up in the fireplace, its mountains as denuded of basic vegetation as its people were deprived of much else that their southern cousins took for granted.

  Agriculture swept over every square inch of the odd-shaped plains that ran between mountain ranges. Painstakingly-maintained irrigation systems flooded rice paddy fields and watered swaying thickets of sweet corn. Giant complexes of makeshift greenhouses shaped like shrunken quonset huts enclosed large pockets of fecund ground. Thanks to these ‘be-neel’ (vinyl) houses formed from miles of piping and plastic sheeting, the supermarkets of South Korea stocked fresh-cut flowers and strawberries and grapes and fresh water melons, even in the depths of a long Siberian winter, when the daytime high regularly lingered well below freezing.

  I tried to keep my mind cluttered with thoughts of the land I was crossing and the route I still had to take, but inevitably the mess that I was fleeing crept up on me. Running away made no sense, but neither did staying in the capital to play a role of my very own in a massive financial fraud. The reward for that would be a one-way trip back to Kwok’s place of work, followed by prosecution for murder in a court system not noted for its objectivity in cases involving the death-by-mutilation of beautiful Korean women at the hands of foreigners. I needed time to re-group, to think things through and get on the telephone to anyone who might be able to help. Jung-hwa had tipped me off on the need to get out of town, yet I still didn’t know how much I could trust her. Running to the country could buy me some time and, more importantly, would protect Mr Cho and his family, at least for so long as I could elude the authorities.

  A loud Korean voice shouted in my face and two hands gripped my shoulders, dragging me up from the depths of beer-heavy sleep. I looked up at a dark uniform, coiled braid, polished badges and silver buttons. Palms to his chest, I surged to my feet and threw him across the aisle where he fell floundering on the opposite seat. The seat was empty. The whole carriage was empty. The train was at rest. I glanced out the window at the surging chaos of a mainline train station. Grabbing my bag I leapt towards the doors, but stopped before I took two steps. Putting the bag down, I turned to the shocked ticket collector and, offering my hand, spoke to him in Korean.

  ‘I’m so sorry. You gave me a fright.’

  He shook off the terrified expression, gripped my hand and pulled himself to his feet, apparently more embarrassed than offended.

  ‘This is Pusan Station. Please disembark now.’

  I backed out the train door still apologising profusely, cursing inwardly. So much for keeping a low profile.

  Pusan is a sprawling port city of nearly four million, and I emerged from the station straight into what seemed like half of them stuck in traffic. The ferry terminal I wanted was about a mile away, so I opted to walk along the waterfront, where foreigners from visiting ships commonly wandered. Even in the fading light of early evening, I felt as if the whole city was watching me, the weirdo hiding behind the baseball cap and sunglasses.

  I was three hundred yards shy of the terminal when the Angel Ferry slipped away from the dockside. I trudged onwards to discover that I had only just missed the last boat of the day. I bought a ticket for the next day’s nine-thirty boat to Tongyeong, and headed back out into the heaving city.

  Thinking safety in numbers, I ate at a crowded noodle bar before hitting the back streets, and quickly found a yogwan at the quiet end of a dead-end alley. Before settling in for the night I walked the streets for half an hour. Forever looking over my shoulder for I-didn’t-know-what, I bought stored-value public telephone cards from three different small shops.

  At the corner shop nearest the yogwan I picked up four bottles of chilled beer, two packs of biscuits and an apple and a pear. Nightcap and breakfast taken care of, I went back to my room and American Forces television. Sucking beer and munching on biscuits, I watched an entire American football game without properly understanding a single moment of it.

  I awoke the next morning to the vague feeling that something was out of place, and it took a while to guess what it was. This was my first morning in ten days without a hangover, and it occurred to me that maybe I should try it more often.

  I breakfasted on fruit and biscuits and, looking forward to a coffee on the way to the ferry terminal, took a long hot shower.

  Refreshed and almost cheerful I set off to walk to the terminal, with one welcome detour into a crowded McDonalds. Big styrofoam cup of steaming coffee in hand, I headed for the stairs in search of a window seat overlooking the harbour. At the
foot of the steps stood a newspaper rack, six or more titles suspended from un„wieldy alloy bars clipped to their spines. Without pausing I plucked the Korea Herald from the rack with my free hand, and made it up three steps before stopping dead. I clutched the styro cup so tightly that the lid prised itself open, spilling hot coffee all down my front, but still I didn’t move.

  Call Girl Murder: Nationwide Manhunt screamed the headline. Right there, above the fold, smiling calmly at the world, was me.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The next few hours played themselves out like the nightmare that refuses to go away, the one where the bogey man is closing down on you while your legs churn ever-decreasing circles in air thick as melted chocolate.

  Double toilet doors dampened the paper rustles and distressed plastic noises of a crowded McDonalds dealing up the usual fare of fats and sugars. Locked in a narrow cubicle I dabbed paper towels at blood-spatter coffee swooshes that covered my trouser legs. I sat on the pedestal and enjoyed a fleeting sense of sanctuary and a powerful temptation to surrender to the cubicle, to curl up in a ball and never leave, but I could think of better places to curl up, and to get there I first had to catch a ferry. Ear to the door, I checked the bathroom was empty before sliding back the lock.

  I had one immediate problem, and it stared at me from the mirror over the washbasins.

  The photo in the Herald and by now doubtless on every newspaper and television screen in the country, was the smiling portrait from my own portfolio. A three-quarter profile head-and-shoulders, it was beautifully lit and tack-sharp. As it should be, since I set it up and Naz shot it, a world away in our London studio. In the mirror, distinctive curly blond hair, a bit on the unkempt side, surrounded a face with pale-pink Celtic complexion and bright blue eyes. In a country of forty-four million people, every one of them with olive skin, arrow-straight jet black hair and dark brown eyes, I might as well have a flashing light and siren attached.