Yin Yang Tattoo

by Ron McMillan

  ‘I know. Eric Bridgewater called my superiors. There is to be a press conference tomorrow at noon in the British Council Building.’

  ‘Nice of him to tell me.’ I wasn’t thinking straight. Bridgewater had no way of contacting me. ‘And Rose Daly?’

  ‘Her involvement in this matter is over. We no longer wish to talk to her.’

  Kwok took a final long drag at his cigarette before grinding it to shreds in the ashtray.

  ‘Before you ask,’ he said, smoke trailing from the corners of his mouth, ‘According to his office, President Chang is in South America seeking urgent medical attention. My friends at Immigration believe he is presently in Tokyo and in perfect health. It is not unusual in this kind of situation.’

  I understood. Chang wasn’t the first business leader to disappear overseas pleading a mystery illness that coincided with his company hitting the skids.

  ‘Any word on Schwartz?’

  ‘We are doing our best, but it is difficult. We discovered that he has a second passport, an Irish one. A significant number of Americans do, it seems.’

  Kwok sipped at the tea, his dark eyes wandering the room. Primary-coloured embroideries and monotone watercolours fought for crowded wallspace. Next to the entrance, an ajimah in acrylic pink hovered cross-legged behind a cash desk, proprietorial antennae on high alert. The old dame could spot a cop the second he crossed her threshold, and the possibility of any kind of ruckus had her visibly on edge.

  ‘Immigration are watching for him and searching their records but, so far, nothing. Where are you staying?’ Another abrupt change of tack. He pulled a fresh cigarette from his top pocket and lit it.

  ‘With a friend.’

  ‘Not at the Hyatt?’

  ‘You know the answer to that. Thanks to Schwartz and company, I owe the Hyatt too much money already.’

  ‘I need an address. For my superiors.’

  ‘Do what I would do.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Make one up.’

  I left him staring into space through a cloud of cigarette smoke. One thing continued to bug me. I still had no idea why Schwartz had chosen to involve me in all this.

  Talk about running the gauntlet. To get to the British Embassy I first had to get past the British Council Building where the press conference was to be held at noon. The narrow pavement was crowded with journalists and camera crews. I directed my taxi driver to go past them, all the way to the heavy Embassy gates. The moment the cab stopped I threw money at the driver and jumped out and spoke urgently at the Korean security man in the Embassy gatehouse:

  ‘My name is Brodie and I have an appointment with the ambassador.’ I looked over my shoulder to see a mob of TV cameramen, soundmen with boom mikes and journalists with tape recorders swarm towards me. Not so much a well-oiled Press machine as a careering cloud of hornets.

  ‘These people are going to block your entrance.’

  The gatehouse guard raised one eye from the papers in front of him, shifted his gaze to take in the approaching horde, and triggered the electronic lock release. I slid around the gate, slammed it shut behind me and set off up the short driveway. The pack wailed through the gates, desperate for an image or a sound bite before the press conference got under way. If these were only the journalists covering the street, the main event was going to be a three-ring circus.

  The heavy glass door hissed closed behind me and a figure from the wings leapt out with one arm extended.

  ‘So glad that you are able to be here. We are very eager to put your case to the media, to do everything we can to clear your name.’

  Eric Bridgewater, cool as you like. I surprised him with an enthusiastic embrace of his dead-fish handshake.

  ‘I do hope you’ve changed your underwear, Eric.’

  ‘Derek Howell, Ambassador,’ said a tall red-headed man in an expensive suit. He had a moustache that looked like caterpillars kissing, his handshake was businesslike, and his eyes looked through me as if I was not there.

  ‘So glad that justice is being done, at last. Been doing everything we can here, you know. From day one my people have exerted every available channel of influence.’

  I wondered how many bare-faced lies the man could build into one short statement. We both knew my letters and the DVD had put a ferret down his trousers, and that this was all about damage control. He went on:

  ‘Sorry to say that I am unable to attend the press conference, but Eric will take the chair on the Embassy’s behalf. If there’s anything you need, simply ask.’ He shook my hand again and disappeared. The grubby world of sex industry murder victims and corporate crime involving friends of the Embassy were not within the chosen domain of Her Majesty’s envoy to Seoul.

  Detective Kwok and four uniformed cops joined us as Bridgewater ushered me out the door.

  ‘It would be better to say nothing to this lot.’ As he spoke, the compound gate swung wide and the media swarm fell into step in front of us, slowing our progress, shouting all at once.

  I blocked out their questions and smiled towards TV camera lenses, looking every viewer in the eye. Nothing to hide, was my message. A stills photographer got under the heels of a TV cameraman and they tumbled backwards, expensive equipment crashing to the ground. Our escorts swerved us around them like sheep around a gatepost, and I glanced down to see the cameraman trying to film us while lying on his back. Squashed on the ground below him the stills photographer looked indignant.

  Inside the building, Kwok leaned close to speak quietly in my ear.

  ‘I would like you to meet someone, a good friend, my alumni.’ I remembered alumni, the odd ‘Konglish’ term for a graduate of the same university. In Korea, ties between old university mates are unbelievably strong.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘She is the editor of TWIK! Magazine. Very powerful in my country.’ I knew the magazine, a splashy weekly that specialised in investigative reportage and controversial exposés. Gaudy but well put-together, it was hugely successful.

  ‘She has an offer for you.’ He looked pleased with himself and pulled me into a side room. A Korean woman of about thirty-five with spiky grey hair and wearing a blue-black pinstripe suit slouched against one wall, an unlit cigarette dangling precariously from a bright red slash of a mouth. Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Several copies of TWIK! sat on the table in front of her. Kwok cut in:

  ‘Hurry, we have very little time. This is Miss Choy of This Week Inside Korea! Magazine. She wants to buy your story.’

  This was so Korean. The lead investigator in a murder case helping the former prime suspect peddle his story to a rag edited by his alumni. Not long after I first arrived in Seoul, I was busted for teaching English while on a tourist visa. Before I left the Immigration office with a deportation order in my passport, the official who put it there fixed me up with a new job to come back to. At the language school of his alumni.

  It took me three minutes to cut a deal with Miss Choy. All Hyatt expenses for myself and Naz for as long as we remained in Korea, plus twenty million won in cash. About twelve thousand pounds. Miss Choy shook on the deal without bothering to take the unlit cigarette from her mouth. She hardly spoke a word. My kind of journalist.

  Kwok opened the door for Miss Choy. I closed it behind her.

  ‘Thank you for this, Detective.’

  ‘The situation was unfortunate, and I knew Miss Choy could help.’

  ‘Thank you anyway.’

  He nodded in understanding as we shook hands. In another life, perhaps we could have been friends.

  I didn’t enjoy the press conference, twenty minutes of probing direct questions met by circuitous half-truths for responses.

  Bridgewater used it to make up lies about how concerned the Embassy was for the good name of one of its citizens and its deep sadness at the tragic death of Miss Hong, a young lady in the prime of her life.

  Kwok used it to deflect attention from his department’s inability to conduct an effective inv
estigation without direct assistance from its primary suspect.

  I used it to stare intently into cameras and announce that I bore no grudges, and to assure Koreans that this was an international problem, with heavy foreign involvement, and that much of the assistance I received had come from Koreans whom I was very proud to call my friends. Next, I made certain that every television station in the land broadcast the fact that Rosemary Daly’s reported involvement was a police error, and that she was no longer wanted for questioning. Eyes glinting at having been set up on nationwide television, Kwok graciously confirmed that Rose was in the clear.

  As Bridgewater curtly brought the conference to a close, a pretty girl waving the microphone of a local radio station broke with a question:

  ‘What will you do now?’

  I looked straight into the phalanx of cameras:

  ‘I think I will go out for a quiet drink. With a good friend of mine.’

  As Kwok’s uniforms led us out of the hall, I cadged Bridgewater’s mobile phone, dipped into the room where earlier I had met Miss Choy – and dialled Jung-hwa’s mobile.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Were you watching television?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What about a drink?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Nine o’clock, King Club?’

  ‘Alright.’ A dial tone buzzed in my ear.

  At least she was still talking to me.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  The alcohol-fuelled sex bazaar that was Itaewon fifteen years ago might be mostly a thing of the past, but at least the King Club still clung doggedly on, its darkened barn buzzing with beautiful women tipping back cocktails, defiantly smoking cigarettes and jiggling animatedly on the crowded dance floor.

  If Seoul’s deluxe hotel nightclubs were the capital’s Penthouse pick-up joints, crawling with high-end whores and their expense-account clientele, the King Club was the city’s sub-basement fuckjoint. Teeming with local girls, underpaid American GIs and the usual collection of sundry foreigners.

  Not much had changed since I last savoured its appeal. Pillars remained topped with ghastly fake bronze mouldings that always made me think of the Third Reich. The sixty-foot bar that stretched the length of one wall was lined with Western men. One loner in a Harley t-shirt, Stars & Stripes headscarf and wrap-around mirror sunglasses picked his way through knots of drinkers to an empty stool and waved to catch a barman’s attention. Atop his perch he sucked a beer straight from the bottle, and watched the moving scene in mirrors behind the serving staff. Or maybe he was checking out his new t-shirt and watching himself drink beer. Whatever was going through his little mind the sunglasses that hid half of his face never left the mirror. There was always one.

  Less than thirty yards from where we sat, a four-storey building occupied the site of the Cowboy Club into which, in another lifetime, I pursued Jung-hwa, and Bobby Purves spent months hanging around Myong-hee’s DJ booth until at last she agreed to go out with him. I thought of tangled threads and how, all these years later, here we were again, threads stubbornly intertwined.

  Bobby sat bunched up against the table, one big paw enveloping his wife’s tiny hand. With her other hand Myong-hee traced patterns in the hairs of Bobby’s forearm. Maybe if things had been different, I thought. Jung-hwa had yet to arrive but my arm lay draped over the back of the chair next to me, holding a place for her. Even after everything that had happened in the past few hours, I remained stiff with tension, as scared as I was excited by the thought of seeing her again. Thanks to me, her husband was ruined and on the run, but what now for us? The re-ignition of past joys was a revelation to me, and I had to wonder, did Jung-hwa feel the same way? Could there be more to the attraction than the purely physical? I was as confused as ever. I rubbed fatigue from my face and looked around the busy club.

  Through narrow aisles between packed tables, gum-clacking waitresses in handkerchief-sized skirts and broad-brush make-up strutted, loaded trays pointed at the nicotine-burnished ceiling. Only a fool crossed a King Club waitress, and no fool was big enough to ever do it twice. I remembered watching one of them, five feet nothing in her high heels and a hundred pounds soaking wet, reduce a table and chairs to rubble in a forty-five-second frenzy of violence. It took the club’s Sumo-sized bouncer to snatch her out of the mayhem and away from three bloodied male victims. She dusted herself down, picked up her tray and went back to work, revelling in respectful smiles beamed her way by colleagues.

  At the far end of the club, the small dance floor swarmed with pretty things in revealing outfits and gangly army boys in tight jeans and t-shirts with the sleeves cut back to show off their tattoos. Death Before Dishonor and bleeding daggers protruding from skull eye sockets were as popular as ever. Perhaps bad taste was congenital.

  Tina Turner roared Simply the Best through wardrobe-sized speakers, and, occupying a corner of the dance floor, Naz gyrated in a space of her own making.

  Ballsy Tina gave way to syrupy Elton John, and Naz picked her way through the throng until she stood beside us. She wiped beaded sweat from her brow with both hands, drew them across the ass of her jeans, and flopped into her seat.

  Across the room Jung-hwa walked in, head high, scanning the tables. I stood and raised a hand in welcome, catching her attention almost immediately. A glow came to life in her eyes, but a second later it was gone, lancing my shaky confidence in an instant of dawning realisation. I had done it again.

  What a fucking fool. When I called her after the press conference, we hardly exchanged ten words. I asked her to join me, and she naturally thought I meant just the two of us. The King Club was no cosy romantic rendezvous, but it was our kind of place and we could kick back and celebrate, together but alone. Or so she thought. Now she knew differently.

  Damage control time. I ushered her into the seat but before I could say a word, another figure forced a space where there was none, between Jung-hwa and Naz. The loner I had seen at the bar, the Stars & Stripes headscarf gone, sunglasses pushed to the top of his head.

  ‘Alright if I join you?’ It was not like we had a choice.

  A few simple changes had swept away the preppy MBA look. His thick dark hair was reduced to a shadowy military outline, and he wore jeans and a black Harley-Davidson t-shirt. In this part of town and at this time of night, even without the headscarf, he was just another military face in a crowd full of foreigners.

  Jung-hwa looked at her husband in disbelief.

  ‘Why are you here, Ben?’

  ‘Brodie destroyed the biggest deal of my life, but no way he’s taking you, too.’ His hand closed over Jung-hwa’s elbow. She flinched but the hand remained, fingertips pushing white petals in her arm.

  ‘Good idea, Ben,’ I said. ‘Kidnap her. That will win her back. You might want to try some violence, too, prove how much you love her.’

  ‘Save it for someone who gives a shit what you think. We belong together.’

  ‘Sure you do. That’s why you had to follow me to find her.’

  He let go of Jung-hwa, and spun to grab hold of Naz. Something glinted in the club lights and in that instant I knew we were in real trouble. A wicked clasp knife, its fat stainless blade, four inches long, curving to a tip as threatening as any surgeon’s scalpel.

  ‘Since when were you a knife man?’ I stopped. Since Miss Hong. Probably with the same blade. He raised his eyebrows at me, amused. Jung-hwa looked back at him, repulsed.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘He knows I couldn’t hurt you.’ He wrenched at Naz’s arm. ‘But this bitch?’

  I had to divert his attention before he did something we would all regret.

  ‘Did killing Miss Hong give you a taste for this?’

  His face twisted in what looked like delight.

  ‘What do you expect – a public confession?’

  ‘Ben?’ Jung-hwa again. ‘What is he talking about?’

  ‘Forget it. It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘Di
d you kill the prostitute?’ Under the flickering club lights, her face was deathly pale. Talk about denial. The media was full of reports about Schwartz being wanted for questioning over Miss Hong’s death, and still she wouldn’t connect the dots. Schwartz spoke to me:

  ‘You should have got what happened to Miss Hong, the moment we were finished with you.’

  ‘It was a set-up from day one, wasn’t it?’ I tried to gauge my chances of getting to him before he could use the knife. Slim to none. ‘Right from when I got the call in London, come to Seoul, Alec, President Chang wants you.’

  He snorted. ‘I told them how easy it would be. You were the perfect patsy, and we played you like a goddamn drum.’ Head flashing sideways, he glared at Bobby, and snatched hard at Naz, pulling her closer, digging the curve of the knife into the folds of her blouse.

  ‘Move another inch and you get to see exactly how sharp this blade is.’ Sharp enough to dismember poor Miss Hong. I understood completely, and hoped that Bobby would, too.

  Bobby moved back in his chair, one big arm extended in front of Myong-hee. Not a soul looked our way. Just another busy cluster in a bustling club full of crowded tables. Any attempt to move on Schwartz could be deadly for Naz, and any effort to draw attention to him would surely have the same effect.

  His face had a manic sheen to it, like he hadn’t slept for days and was running on something a lot stronger than caffeine. His eyeballs glinted like polished ceramic, the pupils dilated. The bastard was high on speed.

  Myong-hee looked terrified. Bobby and Naz shared a look of pure fury that mirrored my own. Jung-hwa’s momentary smile from only seconds ago was no more than a memory. I spoke quickly:

  ‘Congratulations, I was your patsy. But you didn’t need to bring me all the way from England. Anyone could have done my job.’

  ‘You were perfect. You’re not only bankrupt, you’re a moral bankrupt – you’ll do anything for money. We needed new pictures, we wanted your North Korea photographs to sucker the Due Diligence clowns. We stood to make tens of millions, until you fucked it all up.’

  What hurt most was that he was right.