by Ron McMillan
‘And ruining me in the process was part of the attraction.’
The manic grin regained its strength, and he glanced at Jung-hwa before answering.
‘Let’s call that our little bonus.’
‘Our’. Surely not.
‘Isn’t that right, Jung?’ he said.
Silence.
I looked at her. ‘You were a part of this?’
‘Not all of it,’ said Jung-hwa, no shame in her lovely eyes as she stared me down.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I wanted you to come back to Korea. I wanted to hurt you for what you did to me. Ben’s plan helped me do that.’
I stared in disbelief. She went on:
‘You never understood, did you? Ten years ago I was almost thirty years old, and suddenly after five years my foreigner boyfriend was gone. In Korea that left me with no chance to marry. Too old, and after years with a foreigner – ’
Anger gave me my voice back.
‘So you decided to set me up for murder.’
Jung-hwa shook her head.
‘I didn’t know about Miss Hong. And don’t you remember? I helped you, I told you to get out of Seoul. The rest was up to him.’ She flicked a hand at her husband. The smug look on his face faltered.
‘You see my situation ten years ago? I had to get married before it was too late, and look,’ Her thumb jerked sideways. ‘I married this asshole. You wonder why I am angry?’ She pushed her small handbag under one arm and stood. Schwartz looked confused, but his grip on Naz held, the knife edge hard against her side.
‘What about us?’ I looked Jung-hwa in the eyes. ‘What was that all about? Why did you come to my room in the middle of the night?’
A glimmer of what might have been joy crossed her face, and then it was gone. Schwartz was nailed to the edge of Naz’s chair, hanging on every word.
‘For a while I forgot I hated you. I wanted you again.’
‘And you got me.’ I forced a triumphal leer at Schwartz. He recoiled like he’d been slapped. I pressed on:
‘It’s true, Ben. I was only in town a couple of days before we were fucking like rabbits.’ A lone bead of sweat swelled from under the sunglasses on the top of his head and ran, un-noticed, into one eye. He didn’t blink, said nothing, but remained seated, trembling. Beside him, Naz looked fit to explode, knife or no knife.
‘Just like old times, wasn’t it, Alec?’ said Jung-hwa. ‘Did you think it was so wonderful, maybe I could forgive you for leaving me?’
The look on my face gave me away. I had hoped for precisely that.
Schwartz shook his head and spluttered aloud. She ignored him.
‘Even after I helped you get out of Seoul, what happened next? Nothing. Not a word from you. And tonight, you invite me out, and I find you drinking with your friends. But why should I be surprised, Alec? What were you going to say to me tonight? Thanks for the great sex, but it’s time for me to disappear again?
‘Or maybe you hadn’t made up your mind. Were you still thinking about taking me with you?’
She read me like a book. Even now, I didn’t have a clue.
‘I know it’s too late, but really, I’m so – ’
‘Shut up.’ Her face was an expressionless mask. ‘You’re not in control any more. You haven’t been in control since you came back to Korea. I didn’t come here tonight to make you happy.’ She patted the clasp bag under one arm and glanced at Schwartz, still forcibly sharing Naz’s chair, knife slicing a gash in her blouse.
Jung-hwa’s gaze flickered back and forth between us, lover and husband, husband and lover.
‘Fuck you. Fuck both of you.’ She turned on her heel, then stopped, turned back, and looked at me through tear-smudged eyes:
‘When you ran away, I was pregnant.’ She swivelled and marched towards the exit, shouldering aside people twice her size. I felt like throwing up. Pregnant? How could I not have known?
‘JUNG!’
Schwartz’s scream coincided precisely with an abrupt break in the booming music. Heads all around us turned, but not Jung-hwa’s. She held course for the exit, no falter in her stride. Tears already running down his cheeks, Schwartz raised both hands in the air, one still gripping the knife. This was Bobby’s cue. He up-ended the table, drinks and all, and threw it at him.
Schwartz fell flat on his back taking Naz with him. He writhed and swung the knife in deadly, random slashes, any one of which could kill Naz. I plucked a spinning bottle from the floor and launched it at his head. It exploded next to his face, drawing blood, but still the knife swung in lethal arcs. Bobby reached down, gripped Naz by both wrists, and heaved her out of range of the slashing blade. Still on his back, squinting through a mask of streaming blood, Schwartz slashed out. I watched the tip of the blade slice through my trouser leg like a razor through paper.
All around us was the cacophony of mass panic as people scrambled away before, almost as one, they turned back to form a chaotic human ringside, still squealing with fear yet barely out of range of the flashing knife. A drunk westerner tumbled to the ground and through an upturned table leg, snapping it clean off. With one hand I heaved him up by the trouser belt and threw him aside with strength fed only by adrenalin. With the other hand, I picked up the broken table leg.
Schwartz kicked himself out from under the table and sprang to his feet, eyes burning like spotlights. With a full, two-handed blow I brought the table leg down on the arm that held the knife. Schwartz’s forearm snapped like a breadstick, and with a dull thud the fat blade quivered in the underside of the upturned table. Above it, his arm hung like a bird’s broken wing, yet his expression revealed no pain. Instead his eyes darted back and forth between me and the knife, measuring the distances and the options. He lunged downwards with his good hand.
In my mind’s eye I watched basement beatings and near-drownings and thugs manhandling Naz and a tearful Min-tae with ugly red letters scrawled on his puffy little chest. And newspaper headlines and frenzied press conferences and wanted posters and Jung-hwa striding towards the King Club door. And Miss Hong, mutilated and naked, sightless almond eyes open to the chilled murk of the Han River.
I swung the table leg into his face hard enough to knock him off his feet. A red mist of blood and tooth shards sprayed from his mouth, spraying rainbows in the club lights and making the front row of rubber-neckers recoil. Then three hundred pounds of Sumo-man the bouncer hit Schwartz in a belly-flop dive that squashed him flat as a fossil.
I held the table leg in a grip that tied knots in my arms. Club lights gleamed in the dark pool of blood that grew around my foot. I twisted and craned my neck to look over the crowd, searching. There. Still with her back to us, Jung-hwa paused at the exit. I raised a hand and silently begged her to look around. Her shoulders swivelled and my heart stuttered. A chorus of oohs announced the arrival of four American Military Policemen barrelling through the doorway, batons drawn, eyes wide, scouring the crowd for the ‘GI’ with the knife.
Beyond them Jung-hwa’s slim frame merged into the neon-tinged night. She didn’t look back.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Schwartz lay in a foetal curl, hands cuffed tight behind him, spectacularly broken wrist and all. So much blood frothed from his nose and mouth that he looked like he had stopped a runaway motorcycle with his face, yet he and I were the only victims of a few seconds of flailing violence that could have turned out so much worse. Blood from the neat slice in my calf flowed through slashed trouser fabric and seeped into my shoe so steadily that it squelched with every shift of weight.
As Myong-hee whispered urgently in my ear, paramedics sat me down and bandaged my leg painfully tight before trying to usher me towards a waiting ambulance. I knew the wound would never close without stitches, but I had been the centre of attention for long enough. When I raised my chin in the direction of the Gents’ toilet, the nearest Military Policeman shrugged and I hobbled out of the limelight, one shoe laying a sticky red trail behind me.
I used to joke about spending so much money in the King Club that I should have shares in it, but right now the only proprietary interest I could draw upon was the insider knowledge born of a long-term drunk. One night I got so plastered that while searching for toilets visited a hundred times before, I staggered through an unmarked door and down a long corridor to a musty stairwell that spat me into a grotty alley adjoining Hooker Hill. Now, with a limp instead of a stagger, the same route took me onto a hillside full of milling clubbers and predatory hookers touting their services with only a hint more circumspection than I recalled from all those years ago.
I hoped that the relative darkness of the street would hide the bloody trouser leg, but failed to take into account shimmering neon and beaming bar façades that lit up the street almost as bright as day and drew me curious stares and pantomime elbow nudges. At the corner of Hooker Hill where Bobby and I once met a would-be Cavalryman with a felt hat clasped gently to his chest and a roadmap of childhood scars on his close-cropped head, the same pharmacy remained open, its utilitarian decor virtually unchanged. Someone had made a lot of money from all those years of late-night sales of rubbers and antibiotics to generations of hookers and their johns.
Across from the pharmacy, temporary food stalls stood in spots occupied nightly for decades, still dealing up the same local favourites as when I first spotted Jung-hwa attacking a bowl of fat noodles. A few metres uphill, an ugly four-storey structure clad in pink tiles stood where the ramshackle Cowboy Club used to buzz to records spun by Bobby’s future wife Myong-hee.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I needed a drink, preferably somewhere not too peaceful.
The Blues Room was only about one-third full, but Junior Kim and his band played to the sparse crowd as if in front of a packed Hollywood Bowl. As I walked past mostly empty tables and chairs to the same alcove I occupied with Jung-hwa only a few days before, they wrapped up Honky Tonk Woman with a jangling percussive bang before taking it w-a-y down to segue neatly into the 1920s classic I’m Sitting on Top of the World.
A blues anthem exists to suit every emotional condition, I thought – and this wasn’t it.
I flopped into the alcove seat and sent a waitress scurrying for beer. When she returned I rebuffed her friendly offer to pour it for me. Only after she left did I regret being so abrupt with her. It wasn’t her fault that I had fucked up again.
Jung-hwa was pregnant when I left Korea ten years ago, something I never heard even a murmur of until tonight. Would knowing then have changed anything? No matter what the answer to that might be, the time for such thoughts was long gone. Myong-hee’s urgent whispers in the King Club had made that clear.
‘You didn’t know she was pregnant?’
‘Of course I fucking didn’t.’
‘We didn’t see her again for a long time after you went away.’
That did not surprise me. Never mind that by local standards Jung-hwa was rebellious in the extreme, Korea’s conservative family traditions run deep, and the desire – even the need to marry and have children is a given. When I bailed out on her she was nearly thirty, almost an old maid by local standards. I remembered now that her parents were forcing her to attend ‘introductions’ – uncomfortable, contrived coffee shop sit-downs with suitors, two sets of parents hovering in the background assessing every aspect of their kids’ suitability in what was a brutally practical exercise. Before they reached the meeting stage, candidates on both sides of the table were vetted according to family social standing, education, job and income; only after that were they brought together at a coffee shop to see if they ‘clicked’. This callously pragmatic match-making system was alien to me back then, yet I knew it still went on.
Even then, a regimented society’s old-fashioned customs led to crises that called for modern solutions. Every man’s right to a virgin bride was so fundamental that surgical procedures to repair long-gone hymens were commonplace, and stories were legion of sexually experienced brides having to fake wedding night trepidation in the clutches of fumbling virgin grooms.
I felt for the Korean men who turned up to coffee shop meetings in search of a chaste, virginal bride-to-be, eyes downcast, and found themselves across a table from Jung-hwa. We laughed about it later, but I remember being more sorry for the would-be grooms, and hardly giving any thought to the feelings of Jung-hwa.
Back in the King Club, I had asked Myong-hee the big question:
‘What about the baby?’
She answered with the familiar hand-flapping motion that swept downwards from below her waistline. My heart sank.
‘She had an abortion?’
‘That’s what I heard. She got very sick afterwards, then not much later she started going out with Ben and they got married very quickly. But she couldn’t get pregnant, and I heard that Ben was angry about that.’
I thought I could now see how I ended up here and how Miss Hong ended up dead. Jung-hwa’s words and actions – oh christ, the actions – flagged a miserable marriage, and Schwartz’s hatred of me from day one was obvious. ‘You’ll do anything for money,’ he told me, and how right he was. The GDR gave him the chance to inflict upon me not only embarrassment but bankruptcy by luring me all the way from London for an illusory dream assignment.
He played me like a drum, right up until I bucked a lifelong trend and stood up for myself. I threatened to expose their fraud, and that was enough to cost Miss Hong her life. Never mind that the threat was empty, the danger it posed to the GDR was so real and the stakes so high that they forced Schwartz’s hand. Now I had to live with the consequences.
I finished the beer and waved for a fresh one. The thought that this could be another long night flashed through my mind just as the door to the club flew open and two drunk Westerners stumbled through, laughing uncontrollably. In front of them came a startled Jung-hwa, in mid-leap from the glee that followed her. One or both of the bookish-looking drunks had groped her from behind.
I left the alcove at a hobbling run, except the straight line between me and the cluster at the door went by way of several tables and a couple of dozen chairs, some of them occupied. Empty chairs bounced aside, tables tipped and drinks spilled, customers yelped, their attention divided between the drama at the door and the new one that involved them and the lumbering idiot with one trouser leg soaked in blood. My mind was reeling. Did I misread Jung-hwa’s anger at the bloody fracas that unfolded in front of her at the King Club and was she really here looking for me?
As if in a silent movie played to the band’s spirited version of Sweet Home Alabama, Jung-hwa squared up to the two men, who waved contempt at her, much too drunk to be wary, too fired up on alcohol and testosterone to understand how far over the mark they had stepped. Such thoughts would normally be reserved for after the onset of tomorrow’s hangover, but right now Jung-hwa had other ideas. She back-handed the leading drunk across the face, opening a gash on his cheekbone from the chunky ring she wore on her index finger. The fool tapped at the gash, looked at fingertips freshly smeared with his own blood, and raised the hand to slap her. Before it moved, the slim figure of The World’s Most Low-Key Bouncer morphed from the shadows of his doorside lair and in a single fluid motion took the hand in a martial arts grip, spun the drunk around until he barged face-first into his friend – and fired them back out they way they had just arrived. Through intermittent gaps between wildly swinging doors, flickering violence played out like freeze frame snapshots as the two drunks’ evening came to a painful close. This all played out to the tune of Junior Kim and the band drawing their song to a close.
Jung-hwa turned around to see me frozen in place, fists raised in the Tae Kwon-do ready stance, leading leg soaked in blood. One glance told me everything I needed to know, answered every question buzzing through my mind. It was a look filled with a rank mixture of surprise and rank derision. Whatever she was doing here, she certainly hadn’t come looking for me.
For the seco
nd time in the space of an hour, she spun away from me and headed for the exit, leaving me speechless.
Onstage, Junior Kim peeled off a wailing pentatonic progression on his Fender before his band launched into the opening lines from the great Bobby Bland hit from the sixties, I Pity the Fool.
My waitress took me into her care, and like a kindly nurse leading a geriatric patient across the wide ward, sat me back down in the blood-smeared alcove. This time I let her pour my beer.