MITO

She was working at a convenience store. After greeting customers with an overly loud ‘Welcome!’ she hit them with a bubbly ‘Help you find something?’ or butted in with a nosy ‘Ooh, I buy these biscuits too!’ Most customers ignored her. But she laughed anyway, indifferent, and kept tossing jokes at them while clacking away at the register, picking up items from the counter with an exaggerated sweep of her arm. When there were no customers, she chattered nonstop on the shop telephone, or cleaned the shelves and reorganised the already perfectly arranged items. Chatting or cleaning, cleaning or chatting. She looked like a child with an attention-deficit disorder.

‘You’re sure she made the bomb?’ Reseng asked in disbelief.

‘Three of the components were shipped to her,’ Jeongan the tracker said. ‘So that’s pretty much a definite. I mean, what’s she going to do? Buy explosives to put on her own fireworks show? And black market explosives at that?’

‘I wouldn’t put it past that woman.’

‘You got a point. She does look like she’d put on her own fireworks show.’

Reseng took out a pill bottle and swallowed an aspirin. He got headaches every time he was out in the city. The streetlight changed and a pizza delivery boy made an illegal U-turn. The left shoelace of the man in a suit reading a newspaper while waiting for the pedestrian lights to change was untied. That untied shoelace unnerved Reseng. The lights changed again, and a line of cars made a legal left turn. The pizza delivery guy drove his scooter down the middle of the crowded footpath like he was performing a circus trick and screeched to a stop. The lights changed again and the man looking at the newspaper started to cross, oblivious to the shoelace dragging behind him. These sorts of things grated at Reseng. He blamed his headaches on the overload of useless information. Survival required having long, sensitive feelers, but those sensitive feelers couldn’t distinguish between necessary and unnecessary input. Eventually his overly long feelers, and the anxiety quivering at the tips of them, would be the end of him.

‘What’s her deal? Is she a device-maker?’ Reseng asked.

‘It’s hard to tell. That doesn’t seem to be her specialty, and based on her build and the way she moves, she’s not an assassin. But she couldn’t possibly be a plotter. I don’t have a handle on her yet.’

‘Then what do you know?’

‘Hey, don’t get bitchy at me,’ Jeongan grumbled. ‘I’ve been searching everywhere and getting zero sleep trying to find out who she is. Fact is, I’m the only reason we know this much. No one else would’ve got this far.’

He held out a thick manila envelope.

‘She is one disturbingly complex woman,’ Jeongan added. ‘I can’t figure her out, but maybe you can.’

Reseng opened the envelope. Inside were hundreds of photos and a file on the woman. He flipped through the photos. In front of her house, in a lane, on the bus, in a library, at a nightclub, at the pool, in a bakery, at a department store, in a café, at a fish market… The photos contained a perfect record of her movements over the past week. Reseng pulled one out and showed it to Jeongan.

‘What’s this?’

The woman was standing in a public square, holding a picket sign that said, ‘Save the Koalas!’

Jeongan glanced at it and chuckled.

‘Well?’

‘There was an international conference on protecting koalas a while back, in front of the National Assembly Building.’

‘And?’

‘That’s a picture of her demonstrating. You know, “Hey, fuckers, lay off the CO₂ already.” Something about how when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, the nutritional value of eucalyptus leaves, which koalas like to eat, gets destroyed. She was so red in the face from screaming, I was worried she’d drop dead before the koalas do.’

Reseng stared at Jeongan, incredulous.

‘What a load of bullshit,’ he said. ‘She sticks bombs in other people’s toilets but doesn’t want some stupid koalas to die? What am I? Worth less than a koala?’

‘You think you’re worth more than a koala?’ Jeongan was unperturbed. ‘So now what? You going to kidnap her?’

Reseng took the kitchen knife in its leather sheath out of his pocket. He unsheathed it, examined the blade and resheathed it.

Jeongan’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re going to stab her? In broad daylight? I don’t care how freaked out you are, you can’t do that.’

‘What’m I? A goon?’

‘Then why the knife?’

‘You know the saying: “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”’

‘Who said that?’

‘Al Capone.’

‘I guess a kind word and a knife will also get you far.’

‘She started the conversation by planting a bomb in my toilet. I’m just responding in kind.’

Reseng lit a cigarette. The woman was still on the phone. When a customer came in, she hurriedly hung up; when they left, she got right back on the phone. Who on earth could she be talking to? Reseng suddenly envied her for having someone who was willing to listen to her chatter for so long.

‘What time does she finish?’ Reseng asked.

‘Three. An hour to go.’

Reseng looked at his watch. He took a red ballpoint pen from his pocket and started going over the woman’s file. Clearly bored, Jeongan tapped on his saucer with a spoon. Reseng furrowed his brow and stared at the spoon as it struck the saucer and rattled the coffee cup.

‘Knock it off, would you.’

‘Jeez, so sensitive…That’s life, man, you can’t escape noise,’ Jeongan grumbled and threw his spoon onto the table. It clattered loudly against the saucer. Reseng glared at him. The waitress came out of the shop and over to where they were sitting on the terrace.

‘Did you need something?’

‘Why? You got something we can use?’ Jeongan sneered.

The waitress turned pink. She was wearing a black bartender-style vest with a white blouse underneath and a tight-fitting black skirt.

‘Would you like some more coffee?’ she asked, trying to hide her embarrassment.

‘That’d be great!’ Jeongan said, laughing nonsensically.

As she took their coffee cups and walked away, Jeongan turned to stare at her.

‘She’s pretty hot.’

‘Looks like you’re having a relapse of player-itis. What happened to that last girl?’

‘Who?’

‘The one who talked through her nose.’

Jeongan frowned in thought. ‘Oh! I remember. Yeah, she’s old news. You may as well be talking about the Stone Age.’

‘If three months ago was the Stone Age, then what era is this? The Neolithic? How come you never last more than a month with anyone?’

‘That one wasn’t my fault. When she kissed me, her nose ran. She got snot all over me.’ Jeongan made a face like he was genuinely aggrieved.

Reseng gave him a pitying look and went back to the woman’s file. ‘If you continue to treat nice girls like shit, you’ll end up alone.’ Reseng kept his eyes on the file as he spoke. ‘You’re not getting any younger. At some point you have to stop poking your stick around in the dirt and choose a spot to dig a well.’

‘Who cares where you poke as long as it’s wet? Besides, what’s the point? What’m I, digging for oil?’

Reseng underlined a few significant items in red. As he flipped through the file, he shook his head, trying to piece it all together, occasionally glancing up at the woman behind the register. While Reseng silently marked up the file, Jeongan kept grumbling.

‘Who said a short relationship means it isn’t serious? I loved every woman I dated. I mean it. But fate is harsh, man. When I think about it, the path my love life has taken has been steep and treacherous. But how would you know how I feel? You’ve never sunk into the quagmire of love. You haven’t had your heart sliced in two by the razor-sharp blade of a break-up. You don’t know what I’ve been through! You don’t know the aching, hungry heart of a man condemned to search for new love to heal the wounds of old love, the painful memories that refuse to go away no matter how hard you drink or pound your chest or—’

‘Is she a doctor?’ Reseng interrupted.

‘Huh? How many times do I have to tell you? The girl I’m dating now is a nurse.’

Reseng gave him a dirty look and gestured towards the register with his chin. Jeongan turned to stare.

‘Oh, right. Yeah, she’s a doctor.’

‘She doesn’t look like one. But shouldn’t she be working in a hospital? What the hell is a doctor doing at a convenience store?’

‘She’s actually never worked in a hospital. She was at some sort of lab, but she left a while back.’

‘Why?’

‘I have no idea. How would I know what some messed-up chick is thinking?’

‘I heard a lot of plotters are doctors. Do you think she could be one?’

‘As far as I know, none of the plotters are that young. It’s mostly old guys. The youngest would be, like, in his late forties? Besides, I’ve never seen or heard of any female plotters.’

‘As far as you know? How do you know any of this?’

‘What, like you and I are the same? Our professional levels are very different. Mine is a high-level job dealing with information. You’re a hooligan who pokes at people with sashimi knives. If this were the Joseon Dynasty, a lowly butcher like you wouldn’t dare hold your head up straight and look me in the eye. If you did, your corpse would be wrapped in a straw mat and left for the vultures to dispose of. You should be eternally grateful and consider it an honour that I deign to be friends with the likes of you. But instead all you do is pick on me.’

‘Thanks for being my friend,’ Reseng scoffed.

Jeongan preened as he lit a cigarette.

Jeongan’s father had been a tracker. Before that he was a career soldier. He’d come back from Vietnam as a much-decorated officer, but turned out to be pretty lousy at tracking. The funny thing, too, was that he only became a tracker after chasing his runaway wife all over the world. Jeongan’s mother had knocked his father out by giving him a beer laced with sleeping pills and run off with every last won he’d earned in exchange for risking his life in Vietnam.

‘Classy lady, my mother, huh? Abandoned her husband and son for true love. When you’re in love, you don’t count the cost. Love is all that matters to me—maybe I inherited it from my mother…’

Jeongan’s father swore that once he caught up with her, he would tear her and her lover limb from limb and then kill himself. He scoured every inch of the country and then searched abroad, chasing rumours, a packet of cyanide and a knife tucked into his shirt. After five years he finally found her. She was managing a successful dry-cleaning business in the Philippines with the man she’d run away with. But Jeongan’s father took one look at her and came home. He did not stab his wife or her lover. He didn’t so much as touch the knife that he’d carried next to his heart for five years. Nor did he commit suicide by swallowing cyanide, or even approach the woman he’d spent so long searching for. He did not say, ‘How could you do this to me?’ Jeongan’s father merely watched from a distance as Jeongan’s mother and her new man hung out washing. Then he returned home.

‘One day my old man got drunk and explained it to me. He said it was the first time he’d ever seen her look that happy.’

Of course there could have been a different reason. Even the most extreme hatred, vengefulness and anger will eventually, like everything else in the universe, dissolve and fade to nothing. Once, when Jeongan had gone to the Philippines for a job, Reseng asked if he’d met his mother there. Jeongan had given him a forlorn look.

‘What’s the point?’ he’d said. ‘After all the trouble she went to so she could be happy, why would I butt in and ruin it for her? Whoever we are, we all have to fight our own battles for happiness.’

Jeongan’s father was only a third-rate tracker, but Jeongan was among the best. He could find any target—anyone at all, assuming they were still alive somewhere on Earth and not on Mars—usually in less than two weeks. But as gifted as he was at finding people, Jeongan was even better at tailing them. In the plotting world, people like him were called shadows. They followed their targets without being spotted, took pictures, calculated their every movement and passed that information along to a plotter. Just as the name implied, Jeongan could follow right on his targets’ heels all day and never get caught. When Reseng asked him what his secret was, Jeongan replied, ‘Being ordinary. No one ever remembers ordinary things.’

According to Jeongan, what you needed to be an excellent shadow wasn’t agility, skill at camouflage and subterfuge, or fancy disguises. And it wasn’t just about being invisible. What really mattered was being someone whom others didn’t need to remember, or who had nothing about them worth remembering in the first place.

‘To do that, you first have to understand what ordinary means. You have to become the essence of ordinariness. People don’t pay attention to things that are ordinary, and even if they do, they quickly forget. But becoming someone unmemorable is really difficult. Blurring your presence. Moving as lightly and indistinctly as vapour until you gradually fade away. Letting people brush right past you, like you’re not even there, like you’re the air itself. Turning yourself into that person is extremely difficult.’

‘Hmm,’ Reseng had said with a nod. ‘That sounds impossible.’

‘When you think about it, becoming ordinary is just as difficult as becoming special. I’m constantly thinking about which things are ordinary. Is it being of average height? Having an average face? Behaving in an average way? Having an average personality or job? No, it’s not that simple. There is no such thing as an average life. Whether brilliant or mediocre, everyone’s unique. Which is why it’s so complicated to love in an ordinary way, be nice in an ordinary way, meet and leave people in an ordinary way. Plus, in that sort of life there is no love, no hate, no betrayal, no hurt and no memories. It’s dry and flavourless, colourless and odourless. But, guess what, I like that kind of life. I can’t stand things that are too serious. That’s why I’m learning how to keep people from remembering me. It’s tricky. It’s not in any book, and no one teaches it. Everyone wants to live a life that makes them special, that makes others remember them. The ordinariness that I’m after is a life that no one remembers. I want a forgotten life. That’s what I’m working towards.’

Reseng had liked the sound of that. It was why they’d become friends. Jeongan had grown up tagging along with his father, studying in spare moments, and had graduated from high school, gone to university and majored in geology. Not because his marks weren’t good enough to get him into law or economics—geology had been his first choice. He said he chose that major because, whenever he got bored while travelling with his father, he used to suck on small rocks like they were sweets, to learn their different flavours.

‘Rocks have flavours?’

‘Of course. Granite and gneiss are as different as plums and lemons.’

‘You mean you majored in geology so you could learn more about how rocks taste?’

‘In a manner of speaking, yes, but I probably should have studied gastronomy instead.’

Reseng couldn’t imagine basing a life decision on something like that. But Jeongan, the born optimist, didn’t seem to care. Jeongan had rolled with the punches in college, maintained perfect attendance and received his diploma. Though, in keeping with his particular set of skills, none of his classmates remembered him.

Jeongan always had a girlfriend. And his girlfriends changed very frequently. A love life like his would have been a full-time job for any normal person.

‘How is it that every girl likes you?’ Reseng asked.

‘It’s not that. They don’t actually like me. No girl can love a man who doesn’t exist.’

‘Yeah, right. Look how many girls you’ve dated.’

‘They’re just lonely. It’s a phase they’re in. And they need a man to keep them company during it. They could have picked a tree or a houseplant. You know that’s my specialty: being as quiet as a houseplant,’ Jeongan said with a smile.

Every time Reseng saw Jeongan, he thought about his pursuit of ordinariness. It was a very unusual ordinariness. Like a face you’d know anywhere and yet had never seen before. Jeongan’s face was reaching the level of ordinariness he was after: you’d be sure you’d met him somewhere, something about him was so familiar and approachable. And yet he was so ordinary that it was impossible to find the right words to describe him. Reseng imagined that the security and ease women sensed in Jeongan was of a piece with his ordinariness. Which might have been why Jeongan and the women who went for him found it so easy to date, and so easy to break up.

Reseng checked his watch: 2:40 p.m. The woman was still talking on the phone. He turned back to the file.

‘Is Mito her real name?’ Reseng asked.

‘Looks like it. Her younger sister’s name is Misa.’

‘Mito and Misa? As in Soil and Sand? Their father must have a weird sense of humour.’

Reseng held out a photocopy of a newspaper article to Jeongan. It was about a family who had been in a car accident. ‘What’s this doing here?’

Jeongan took the photocopy. ‘There was a car accident twenty years ago. Her parents were in the front seat. They died instantly. She and her younger sister were in the back. They survived, but her sister’s spine was badly injured and she ended up paralysed from the waist down. The father was driving—it says here the cause of the accident was speeding while under the influence. Based on the tyre marks, he was going over 150 kph.’

‘Drunk-driving, and at that speed, with his beloved daughters and wife in the car?’

Reseng scanned the article again. The car had been found scorched and totalled at the bottom of an eight-metre-high cliff, near a quiet country town, on a warm day in May. The family had been enjoying a rare day out. There was no reason for the father to be driving that fast while drunk. It definitely smacked of a plot. And a very hackneyed one, at that. Even worse, the whole thing was sloppy. Why go after the entire family? If the woman’s father was the target, they could have taken him out by himself, cleanly.

‘What did her father do?’

‘High-ranking government official. There’s something fishy about him, but I’ve been too busy chasing after her to look into it.’

‘Even if a plotter was behind the car accident, why the fuck is she coming after me? She was eleven when that happened. I was barely twelve!’ Reseng was suddenly annoyed.

‘What are you getting mad at me for? Just go over to her and calmly explain that you were twelve years old at the time. And keep your knife out, you know, to keep things amicable.’

Reseng checked the time again: 2:55 p.m. She would leave work any minute now. He put the photos and file back into the envelope, stood up and straightened his clothes. He could feel the weight of Chu’s knife in the inner pocket of his leather jacket. He retied and tightened his shoelaces so he’d be ready to follow her the moment she came out. He could see her laughing inside the shop.

But at the stroke of three, she was still behind the counter. Not only did she not clock out, she was still giggling and chattering into the damn phone ten minutes later. A young woman who looked like a part-timer went into the convenience store, but the woman behind the counter showed no signs of preparing to leave, even though it was already three-thirty by then. Reseng looked at Jeongan.

‘I thought you said she got off at three.’

‘She must’ve changed her work schedule,’ Jeongan said, scratching his head. ‘Every day for the past week, she’s left at exactly three. She’s just trying to make me look bad.’

Things get dicey whenever a target suddenly changes their pattern. It’s irritating and nerve-rattling. Because that’s when assassins make mistakes. Either the target changes their pattern, or the assassin changes his. Both scenarios end poorly. You make mistakes, you leave behind fatal evidence, the plot goes awry. And when plots go awry, assassins die. Why? When you retrace the events, it’s always something very minor. A wallet left at home, running out of shampoo that morning, walking down a laneway when a kid on a tricycle suddenly shoots out of nowhere.

The woman was still in the shop. No matter. There was no way Reseng was going to kill anyone today. But his heart was racing all the same. Anxiety was coursing through his nerve endings. She should have come out at three p.m. Reseng would have followed her. Jeongan would have slowly paced them in his car. A little way ahead was a quiet side street where there were no security cameras for two hundred metres. She always took that side street. Reseng would have tapped her on the shoulder. If Reseng were her target, she would recognise him at once. ‘Shall we go somewhere quiet to talk?’ If she agreed, that would be the end of it. No need for long explanations or threatening words, no need for his knife.

Reseng and Jeongan waited another thirty minutes in silence. At four p.m, Reseng put on his black sunglasses and stomped over to the shop.

‘Hey, wait!’ Jeongan yelled. ‘You can’t just storm into a convenience store with your knife out. Those places are full of security cameras!’

X

‘Welcome!’

The woman covered the phone with one hand and greeted Reseng loudly. Her voice was cheerful. Reseng stood just inside the door and stared at her. But she turned away, showing no sign of recognising him, and went right back to her phone call. Everyone in the shop could hear it.

‘Oh, you know that one song, Uh oh, I’m in love with my best friend’s girl, what do I do…Yeah, that one! He was singing it like he was about to cry! And he kept shaking the tambourine even though it’s a ballad! I almost died laughing…Shut up! As if I’d do a duet with that guy! But then he gets to the second part of the song and starts blubbering for real, like his friend’s girlfriend has been whacked in the head with a hammer. He’s a big guy, too…I swear… What could I do? I put my arm around him and patted him on the shoulder. I felt like I had to. He put his head on my chest and tried to act like he was still crying, but I saw the way he looked at my miniskirt. He actually thought that was going to get me in the mood. I was like, are you kidding me?…Well, you know, I couldn’t not kiss him. But that wasn’t enough for this guy…No, it’s not that I didn’t want to, I just didn’t want him to get the wrong idea about me. We’d just started dating. It’d be one thing if we’d gone back to a hotel. But at a karaoke bar? The guy was clueless…No, no, he’s not that bad. I mean, there’s something cute about him, and he seems alright… Exactly, it’s important to start off on the right foot. Once they get the wrong idea, there’s no going back.’

Reseng was still standing in front of the door, staring at her. She glanced over at him. He took off his sunglasses. ‘Hold on, don’t hang up.’ She covered the phone again and cocked her head at Reseng.

‘Sir, can I help you find something?’ she asked in a lilting voice.

Her face bore no hint of fear or suspicion. Plotters always knew their targets’ faces. Just as assassins will recognise their targets anywhere. As soon as the plot is issued, you can’t help staring at your target’s photo every free minute. It’s the nerves. The target’s face stays with you, and continues to float around inside your head for weeks, even after you’ve killed them. You see people on the street who look like them and you nearly jump out of your skin. You have recurring nightmares of running into them. This woman was no plotter. She was no assassin either. She was nothing. Who the hell was she? Had Jeongan made a mistake?

‘Sir, can I help you?’ she asked again.

‘What? Oh. Chocolate! Where can I find the chocolate?’ Reseng’s mouth moved of its own accord.

‘Chocolate? Over there to the left, second shelf from the top.’ Her voice was still friendly.

Why did he say chocolate? He didn’t even like chocolate. Reseng went to the shelf and grabbed two Snickers. He was thirsty, so he also grabbed a sports drink from the fridge. As he was closing the fridge door, he heard her say into the phone, ‘Hey, let me call you back. I’ll fill you in on the details in person.’ She’d been on the phone for hours—what details could she possibly have left out? It was crazy. He would never understand women. He placed the bars of chocolate and the sports drink next to the register.

‘Chocolate fan, huh?’ she asked.

Reseng gave her a curt nod; he was in no mood for chitchat.

‘I like chocolate too, but I see you’re buying two Snickers. Have you tried Hot Break?’

‘What?’ Reseng stared at her.

‘Hot Break. Snickers is made for the American palate, but Hot Break is made for ours, and it doesn’t stick to your teeth, either. It offers very high performance for its price, and it’s only half the cost of a Snickers, though, of course, they’ve had to keep shrinking it so they can keep the price the same as it was ten years ago, that’s the sad truth, but with everything else getting more and more expensive, I guess that’s not so bad. So what do you think? Would you like to exchange one of your Snickers for a Hot Break?’

The woman spoke so fast that Reseng wasn’t sure what she’d just said. He gathered that she’d told him she liked Hot Break better. But so what? Who gave a shit whether she liked Hot Break or not, or whether it was half the price of a Snickers or not? Just shut up and take his money.

‘How much is this?’ he asked, pointing at the Snickers.

‘A thousand won. Hot Break is only five hundred won.’ She held up five fingers.

She gave him a playful smile. Reseng put one of the Snickers back and grabbed a Hot Break. Eager to get it over with, he opened his wallet.

‘You won’t regret it.’ The woman held her fist up in the air. ‘Hot Break!’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘Ha ha! Ha ha! No thanks necessary! It’s important to share valuable information with your fellow countrymen.’ She laughed heartily, as if they’d just met in the middle of the Siberian wilderness.

When Reseng left the convenience store, Jeongan was parked in front with the engine running. He looked worried. Reseng opened the door and got in.

‘What happened?’ Jeongan asked impatiently.

Reseng threw the Hot Break at his face. It bounced off Jeongan’s forehead and fell in his lap.

‘What’s this?’

‘What’s it look like? It’s a bar of chocolate. It’ll fill you with brotherly love.’

Jeongan frowned and ripped open the wrapper.

‘You marched in there like you were going to take down a bull with a kitchen knife, but all you came back with was one bar of chocolate?’

‘Two, actually.’ Reseng opened the sports drink and took a swig. ‘She’s no plotter. Definitely not an assassin either. She didn’t recognise me.’

‘She didn’t?’ Jeongan looked incredulous.

Reseng nodded.

Jeongan took out the ceramic bomb casing and examined it.

‘We know this was made by an amateur, which means she can’t be an expert device-maker either. So who is she?’

‘Are you sure it was her?’ Reseng asked sceptically.

‘What’m I, a rookie? I told you, she definitely ordered three of the parts.’

Reseng stared at the convenience store. The woman was talking to the younger employee who’d come for the shift change. After a moment, the younger employee looked at her watch, bowed several times to the woman and left.

‘Looks like she’s taking that girl’s shift,’ Reseng said. ‘My god, she’s messing with everyone’s schedules today.’

‘Looks that way, doesn’t it? Typical. Why can’t people stick to what they’re supposed to do? Why do they have to mess up other people’s plans? That’s why our country’s so backwards! You need more than freeways and skyscrapers to be a developed country. You have to develop the right mindset first, dammit!’

‘What does any of this have to do with being a developed country?’ Reseng unwrapped his Snickers and took a bite.

Jeongan’s eyes widened. ‘Hey, how come your bar is different from mine?’

‘Mine was made in the USA, yours was made here. Mine was a thousand won. Yours was five hundred.’

‘Son of a…!’ Jeongan pouted. ‘Why’d you buy me the cheap one? You know I prefer American stuff.’

Reseng handed him his Snickers. Jeongan grinned like a child as they swapped.

‘Dig deeper into her background. Her job, her parents, her younger sister, the lab where she used to work, her bank transactions, anything and everything you can find.’

‘What? You expect me to do all that in exchange for one lousy bar of chocolate? And with what budget? My prices have gone up, man! There’s a little thing called market value, you know.’

‘Your mate’s in peril, and here you are crowing about market value…’

‘Fine. I’ll do it as long as you call me Elder Brother. Because I am far too humane to abandon a little brother in danger. And, let’s be real, I am two years older than you.’

Reseng glared at him. When he didn’t look away, Jeongan tapped him on the shoulder and gave him a look that said, Can’t you take a joke?

‘Please, Elder Brother,’ Reseng said, his voice flat.

Jeongan looked at him, feigning disgust.

‘Holy shit, where’s your pride? What a pushover! You really need to man up.’

X

By the time he’d finishing buying cat food and cat snacks at the pet shop and was on his way home, it was nearly dark. Reseng checked his mailbox in the lobby. Bills and junk mail. He turned to go upstairs, but someone was sitting on the bottom step, slumped forward and half-asleep. One hand was wrapped in bandages, the other was holding a department store gift bag. Reseng leaned down to look at the man’s face. It was Minari Pak. Reseng shook him by the shoulder. His eyes flew open and he looked around in bewilderment, then let out a big yawn and stood with a grunt.

‘What’re you doing here?’ Reseng asked.

‘I came to see you.’

‘You should’ve called first.’

‘I just figured I’d drop by.’

‘Let’s go inside.’

‘No, no, I’m fine here.’

Minari waved his bandaged hand and grimaced.

‘How are your fingers?’

‘They’re okay. Got ’em reattached. Medical technology these days! I didn’t think the doctors could do it, even though I ran straight to the hospital with my fingers, but what do you know, they stuck right back on. Like a lizard’s tail growing back. Yeah…a lizard’s tail.’

Minari murmured the words lizard’s tail again under his breath, evidently impressed by his own image. He turned his bandaged hand to show Reseng. Then he said, ‘Oh, yeah, this!’ as if he’d nearly forgotten something important, and handed Reseng the bag.

‘What is it?’

‘Jukbang anchovies. I know how much you like beer. And there’s no better snack for a cold beer than dried anchovies. I got them from the department store, just like the set I got Old Raccoon. From Namhae’s signature collection! Very expensive!’

Minari looked flustered. Reseng raised an eyebrow. Why had Minari come all this way to bring him a gift?

‘You’re giving me a present after I cut your fingers off? I didn’t even visit you in hospital. Now I feel really bad.’

‘Oh, no, no. Don’t feel like that. It’s the rest of us who should be feeling bad for how we treated Old Raccoon. That wasn’t right. In fact, he’s the reason we’re living as well as we are. I know how kind he’s been to me. But little guys like us don’t have it easy. Everyone’s been tightening their belts down to the first notch, but it’s still hard to make ends meet. We haven’t forgotten our place or anything, it’s just that life keeps closing in on us.’

Minari took out a cigarette but struggled to work the lighter with his left hand. Reseng took out his own lighter and lit the cigarette for him. Minari took a deep drag and looked Reseng up and down.

‘What did Old Raccoon say?’

‘About what? Me cutting off your fingers?’

‘No, not that. About us going to work for Hanja. I figured Old Raccoon must know about it by now. Of course, we’re all independent businessmen with our own gigs, so I can’t exactly say that we’re completely under Hanja’s wing. Even so, I still feel bad about it.’

‘That’s why you’re here? To test the winds?’

‘Not exactly,’ Minari said falteringly. ‘It’s only part of the reason.’

Minari stared out at the streetlight as he finished his cigarette. Every now and then, he looked like he was about to say something, but clammed up. After a long pause, he dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out under his shoe. There was something clownish about his stiffly ironed grey trousers and his shiny, polished red shoes. Minari glanced at Reseng and made a sad face.

‘Lately the guys have all been talking about a war brewing between Hanja and The Doghouse. A real war, like in the old days. That’ll get messy. Detectives and prosecutors will be crawling all over us and cracking down, while the plotters take out everyone just to save their own arses. Desperate assassins will be roaming around like wild dogs, picking fights with everyone for no reason. The few customers I have left will dry up. I’ll be out of business. In the end, only the little guys like us are fucked. Reseng, I am too old to get caught up in this fight. Old Raccoon and Hanja are tough, ambitious. They’ll do whatever they have to do to save their pride. But what about us in the middle? If we side with Hanja, we have to watch out for Old Raccoon. If we so much as gesture at the library, we have to watch out for Hanja. We’re between a rock and a hard place. And, I tell you, I’m too old for this! I’m scared! You know I’m not the ambitious type. I’m just trying to get by.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘Hanja wants to see you. Just meet with him once.’

Reseng narrowed his eyes. ‘And if I do?’

‘You know you can’t have two tigers on one mountain. Let’s be honest, the library doesn’t stand a chance against Hanja. It’s not like the old days. If war breaks out, we’re all dead. Old Raccoon? Definitely dead. You and me, too. And Hanja doesn’t stand to gain anything from it either. We did all the work to build our businesses, but because of this election someone else will get the credit.’

Reseng hurled the jukbang anchovy gift bag at Minari Pak’s feet.

‘You think a few lousy anchovies can make up for telling me to stab Old Raccoon in the back?’

Minari looked shocked as he scrambled to pick up the bag. ‘Don’t you know how expensive these are?’ he muttered. Pouting, he held the bag up to his ear and gave it a shake, stroking it like he was handling an antique vase. Then he made the same sad face as before. ‘I’m not telling you to sell out Old Raccoon. I’m just saying how things are. It’s been a long time since the library had work for us. Businessmen don’t wait around. You know that. There’s no such thing as loyalty in our line of work. Old times? Favours? That doesn’t go far. People always go where the money is. Old Raccoon is getting on a bit and he never leaves the library, so he doesn’t know how things are changing. If war breaks out, everyone will take Hanja’s side. That’s what it has come to. There won’t be a fight. That’s why you need to go and see Hanja. Because you’re Old Raccoon’s hands and feet. If the conversation goes well between you and Hanja, there’ll be no need for war. Old Raccoon can quietly retire to the countryside and live out the rest of his life in peace. And we’ll be able to grow our businesses in peace as well. Everybody wins.’

Reseng pictured the general in his mountain cottage, with his old dog, Santa. Someone must’ve said the same thing to him when he was stepping down: Move to a quiet place in the country and enjoy your remaining years. It’s a win-win all round. What did they mean by that? Growing flowers, planting potatoes, raising a dog and choosing your final resting place? Basking in the warm afternoon sun, your eyelids the only part of you still moving, like you’re some kind of ageing, ailing elephant? Or moving into a nursing home where the only thing to occupy your time is tedious chitchat with old people you have absolutely nothing in common with, or playing endless games of cards and stealing stones from the communal baduk board for your growing collection of useless things. Those days would repeat themselves ad nauseum until death finally came creeping into your room one night like an assassin.

Minari Pak was still holding out the anchovies. Reseng looked at the bag quivering awkwardly in his hand.

‘Just take it,’ Minari said. ‘Signature collection.’

‘Give them to your wife. Or to Hanja. I don’t care. What makes you think I could stomach those?’

‘If you insist on being this stubborn, Hanja will have no choice but to eliminate you.’

‘Is that a threat?’ Reseng glowered at Minari.

‘Please don’t make things difficult. This fight doesn’t have to happen. I’m telling you this as someone twice your age: kissing arse is better than being an arse.’

Minari set the anchovies at Reseng’s feet and slowly turned and walked out. Reseng stared down at the bag. All at once, he thought, Old Raccoon must be so lonely. The businessmen who used to bring gifts to the library every holiday had all turned their backs on him. This was Hanja’s world now. How much longer would Reseng live if he went to see him? Three years? Five? Maybe longer. Maybe he’d even live out his natural years if he got on his knees and started kissing arses like Minari Pak. Sure, nothing wrong with a little arse in your face. Not like honour and dignity had ever mattered to him.

Old Raccoon liked to joke that the only reason he’d brought Reseng home from the orphanage was so he’d have something to lean on when he walked. He said it to ruffle Reseng’s feathers, but when Reseng thought about it, there was a certain truth to it. He’d been Old Raccoon’s crutch ever since he was eleven. He fetched books from shelves, ran errands in the meat market, delivered letters from a faceless plotter who slipped him envelopes from behind a door. And after the death of Old Raccoon’s long-time assassin, Trainer, Reseng did all the assassination work as well. If Reseng were to turn his back on him now, Old Raccoon would be left to hobble along without a crutch.

‘I guess that’s not the worst thing that can happen to someone in this line of work,’ Reseng muttered.

When Trainer was killed, ten years ago, Old Raccoon did nothing. He kept quiet, despite the rumours that Hanja was behind it. Things were different then: Old Raccoon was still on top. And yet there was no retaliation, no punishment, no investigation. Old Raccoon didn’t even get angry, even though Trainer had stood by him for three decades. He’d simply washed Trainer’s body, with its multiple stab wounds from what had clearly been a vicious battle, and quietly cremated him in Bear’s incinerator. It was a gloomy funeral: Reseng was the only mourner with Old Raccoon, who had silently scattered Trainer’s ashes from the top of a windswept hill.

‘Aren’t you going to do something about it?’ Reseng had asked.

‘That’s how it is for assassins. You can’t knock over the chessboard just because you lost a pawn.’

That’s how it is. Those were Old Raccoon’s parting words for the man who’d stood by his side for thirty years.

Reseng had learned everything from Trainer. How to handle firearms, how to use a knife, how to build and defuse bombs, how to set up a booby trap, how to track and hunt prey, even how to throw a boomerang. After the Vietnam War, Trainer found work with a foreign company that employed mercenaries, and travelled to war zones all over the world. He had a gentle face that made it hard to believe his claim of having killed hundreds of people on the battlefield. And he loved housework. Despite his huge body, his hands were deceptively nimble. He made all his own equipment, everything he built was done with care and precision, and he was an excellent cook. He particularly enjoyed doing laundry. On sunny days, without fail, he would handwash all the sheets and curtains and hang them on the clothesline in the courtyard. With a cigarette dangling from his lips, his face a picture of contentment, he would watch the sheets billowing in the wind and say, ‘If only I could get my life that clean.’

If only he could have scrubbed his life clean. He could’ve married a nice girl, raised kids and led a peaceful family life doing the cooking, cleaning and laundering he so enjoyed. But unfortunately life is not a set of sheets. You cannot scrub away your past, your memories, your mistakes or your regrets. And so you die with them. Like Old Raccoon said, that’s how it was for assassins.

Reseng picked up the anchovy gift set and went upstairs. When he opened the door, Desk and Lampshade came running to greet him, rubbing against his calves. Reseng filled their dishes with the chicken soup he’d bought them at the pet shop. The cats purred as they lapped up the soup. He patted their heads.

‘Do you know how rough your alleycat sisters have it? If I toss you out, you scaredy-cats won’t last a week. It’s hell out there.’

X

The cat café was called Like Cats.

When Reseng sat down, Desk and Lampshade started meowing inside the cat carrier. He opened the latch. But they took one look at the dozens of other cats roaming around the café and refused to budge. The café owner brought him a cup of coffee.

‘Oh, look who’s come to visit! Is that Desk and Lampshade?’ she asked excitedly.

His cats were clearly happy to meet her: they purred and came right out of the carrier. All cats seemed to love this café owner instantly. What was her secret? After getting married, she’d started raising more than twenty cats at home. But as the number of cats increased, her husband couldn’t stand it and told her she had to choose: him or the cats. And just like that, she divorced him and moved out. At gatherings of the cat café members, she would laugh and tell the story again: ‘Can you believe he asked me to choose? Ha!’

‘You finally brought them, after all the times I’ve asked you to!’ the café owner exclaimed as she played with Reseng’s cats. ‘Is it a special occasion?’

Reseng took an envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. Looking at him quizzically, she took out two one-million-won bank cheques.

‘I’d be really grateful if you would look after them for me,’ Reseng said. ‘It might be for a little while, or a very long while. It’s also possible I might never come back to get them.’

‘Are you taking a trip somewhere far away? Are you going abroad?’

‘It’s not that far, but I’m not sure where this trip will end.’

She nodded as if she understood.

‘We all have our dark spells now and then,’ she said, handing the envelope back to him. ‘I understand what you’re going through, but this isn’t necessary. I’ll look after your cats anyway until you come back.’

‘Since you know what I’m going through, please take the money.’

He lowered his head in a gesture of pleading. The envelope sat between them in the middle of the table. She looked at it and, after a long pause, nodded.

‘When I was your age, I went very far away once, too. I went so far away, I didn’t think I’d be able to get back. But when you do finally come back, you realise you weren’t nearly as far away as you’d feared.’

Reseng patted Desk and Lampshade, who nipped playfully at his hands. They already seemed at home there. He stood and said goodbye to the café owner.

‘Good luck,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’

Reseng gave Desk and Lampshade one last pat and slowly walked out of Like Cats.

Reseng took a cab to the L. Life Insurance building in Gangnam. Hanja’s offices were on the seventh, eighth and ninth floors. Rumour had it that around seventeen different company addresses were registered there. As if it wasn’t ironic enough that the country’s top assassination provider was brazenly running his business in a building owned by an international life insurance company, the same assassination provider was also simultaneously managing a bodyguard firm and a security firm. But just as a beleaguered vaccine company will survive not by making the world’s greatest vaccine but rather the world’s worst virus, so bodyguard and security firms will prosper not by hiring the world’s greatest security experts but rather the world’s worst terriorists. That was capitalism. Hanja understood how the world could curl around and bite its own tail like the ouroboros serpent. And he knew how to translate that into business and extract the maximum revenue. There was no better business model than owning both the virus and the vaccine. With one hand you parcelled out fear and instability, and with the other you guaranteed safety and peace. A business like that would never go under.

Reseng took the lift to the seventh floor. Hanja’s office was on the ninth floor, but to reach it, you had to get off on the seventh floor and pass through the type of metal detector you’d expect to find in an airport. As Reseng walked through, an alarm shrieked. A female employee in a black suit came up to him with a handheld metal detector. She greeted him politely and asked him to raise his arms. He did as he was asked. As soon as the handheld detector came near him, it started beeping. He reached into his inner jacket pocket, pulled out Chu’s Henckels in its leather sheath and placed it in a basket. She looked at him in shock.

‘I was cooking just before I left. Must’ve forgotten to put it away first. I’m so damn absent-minded,’ he said with a smile.

The flustered employee glanced back, and a husky security guard came over, a taser and a tear-gas gun strapped to his belt.

‘What seems to be the problem?’

He narrowed his eyes and looked Reseng up and down. The way his uniform squeezed his rolls of fat reminded Reseng of a packet of hot dogs. He had the build of a nightclub bouncer and his shoulders were tensed. Reseng almost felt sorry for him as he handed over Hanja’s gold-embossed business card.

‘Do you have an appointment?’

‘No.’

‘Who shall I say is here?’

‘Tell him I’m from The Doghouse.’

After a brief wait, a woman came up to him and introduced herself as Hanja’s secretary. She had a polished, intellectual look about her. She guided him to a separate lift that served only the three floors leased to Hanja; they got off on the ninth floor and went into a room marked VIP Lounge.

As he sat down, the secretary asked in a businesslike voice, ‘Can I get you a drink? Tea, coffee, water? We also have alcohol if you prefer.’ ‘No, thank you. I had something right before I came here. Is this room non-smoking?’

He looked around. There were no ashtrays.

‘According to the rules, yes. The entire building is a no-smoking zone.’

Reseng frowned, and she smiled furtively. Her tone softened as she said, ‘Well, rules were made to be broken.’

‘In that case would you mind bringing me an ashtray?’

‘It’ll be about thirty minutes before the boss can join you. Do you mind waiting?’

‘No, that’s fine,’ he said with a nod.

When the ashtray arrived, Reseng lit a cigarette and took a long look around the spacious room. In keeping with Hanja’s preference for the immaculate, there were no decorations apart from a single picture on the wall. Reseng picked up the ashtray and moved to the window so he could look outside. All ten lanes of Teheran Boulevard were jammed with cars. It seemed strange to him: the luxurious digs of an assassination-provider bang in the heart of the Republic of Korea. The fact that Hanja’s office was on this street, with its sky-high rent, meant that the country’s economic hub was desperate for contract killers.

Reseng was on his third cigarette when Hanja finally came in.

‘Sorry about that. You really should call first. Then you wouldn’t have to wait.’

Hanja’s attempt at an expression of regret came off as more terrifying than apologetic. He took a seat on the couch as his secretary came back in.

‘Don’t you want anything? I’m having a drink. It’s not every day I receive such a special guest.’

Hanja sounded more buoyant than usual. His secretary looked at Reseng, who hesitated. This strange hospitality made him uncomfortable.

‘Do you have Jack Daniels?’ Reseng asked the secretary.

She nodded.

‘I’ll have the same,’ Hanja said. ‘On the rocks.’

After the secretary left, Hanja kept glancing nervously around the room, as if expecting someone else to be there. He was trying to pass it off as excitement from being in a good mood, but it wasn’t working. Considering that they were on his turf, where he called the shots, who or what could possibly have been after him? Reseng was suddenly dying to know. The two of them sat in awkward silence until the secretary came back with their drinks.

‘I’m really glad you’re here. I was worried you wouldn’t come.’

Hanja raised his glass in a toast, but Reseng didn’t reciprocate. Hanja looked at his lone glass held aloft and took an embarrassed sip.

‘What’re you after?’ Reseng asked bluntly. ‘The Doghouse? Old Raccoon’s life?’

Hanja leaned his head back and laughed.

‘What would I want with a musty library full of second-hand books, or some decrepit old man’s life for that matter?’

‘That’s what everyone’s saying.’

‘Damn those rumours.’

Hanja raised his glass and took a sip, then said, ‘You know, Old Raccoon was the one who taught me never to kill anyone unless I was paid fairly. That’s the sort of wisdom all contractors should carve into their brains. Honour, faith, friendship, loyalty, revenge, love, saving face—none of those reasons matter, because no decent contractor will kill someone unless there’s profit to be made. So what sort of profit would be coming to me if I killed Old Raccoon? I mean, sure, some good would come of it. Fewer headaches, for one. But on the whole, when you crunch the numbers, there’s nothing in it for me. Old Raccoon might wish that on me, but I’m not stupid.’

‘I don’t care about your number-crunching.’

‘You should care about it. Killing you would net me quite a profit. As would killing your mate Jeongan.’ Hanja drained his glass.

‘I had no idea I was so valuable,’ Reseng said as he took a sip. The distinctive aroma of Jack Daniels filled his sinuses.

Hanja sneered at him. ‘Don’t get the wrong idea. You’re not. You simply occupy a unique position.’

‘What about my position?’

‘The big money is in politics. But the old geezers who pull those strings refuse to trust anyone but Old Raccoon. They have some sort of nostalgia for the library. Or maybe they don’t trust anything that’s less than a hundred years old. Either way, it’s a joke. Since when does tradition matter to a contractor? But that’s how old men are. They’re suspicious and they hate change. It’s frustrating, but what can you do? That’s reality. So what I need is a dead Zhuge Liang.’

Reseng gave him a quizzical look.

‘In the Battle of Wuzhang Plains,’ Hanja explained. ‘After General Zhuge died, his army carved a wooden statue that looked just like him and used it to trick Sima Yi’s army into thinking he was still alive and scared them off. But a living Zhuge Liang is too much—there’s no telling what he’ll do. If Old Raccoon just stayed nice and quiet in that Doghouse of his, I wouldn’t have any complaints. Since you and I grew up in the library too, it makes sense for us to continue the old fart’s legacy. And it’s a nice little business. But the problem is that you’re not letting him rest in peace.’

‘Rest…in peace.’ Reseng slowly echoed Hanja’s choice of words.

‘You’re his hands and feet. And that drip Jeongan is his eyes and ears. Jeongan is always bringing the old man information—he’s like a mother sparrow feeding worms to a baby sparrow—while you run around wiping his bum for him. I’ll be honest. I was pretty annoyed with you for bringing the old general back in an urn.’

‘So?’ Reseng glowered.

‘So?’ Hanja sneered. ‘So, killing Old Raccoon won’t make for more business, but at the same time, I can’t not finish what I started. What to do? It’s really tragic but I have to axe something. Sometimes, to keep the body alive, you have to chop off part of it. Like a hand, or a foot…or an ear.’

‘Is that why you killed Trainer?’

Hanja’s face flushed. He was quiet for a moment, stroking his chin.

‘Seems you still don’t know the difference between what’s okay to talk about and what isn’t.’

Hanja was about to say something more but stopped himself. He picked up the phone and asked his secretary to bring him another glass of whisky. She came in, put down the new glass and took away the empty one. Hanja took a sip.

‘I know you have it in for me because of that. He was like a father to you and an older brother to me. I learned everything I know from Trainer too. But the world is much more complicated than you think. We have to do what we can to survive in this incomprehensible place.’

‘I don’t care what kind of world this is. What’s the benefit of killing family members? So you can afford a fancy office?’

Hanja glared at him.

‘Don’t tell me you think we’re actually family. Who’s related? You and Old Raccoon? Me and Old Raccoon? That’s a big fucking joke. You know as well as I do that we were just his crutches—to be used and then thrown away. You seem confused, so I’ll try to make things clear for you: if you were knifed right now and got carted off to Bear’s, Old Raccoon wouldn’t even blink an eye. He’d simply find himself a new crutch. I learned that twenty years ago. But you, boy wonder, still don’t get it.’

Hanja took another sip. Reseng scowled at him. Hanja turned to the window. He looked annoyed; the conversation was apparently not going the way he’d hoped it would. The phone buzzed.

‘Alright. Tell him I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

He hung up. Reseng lit a cigarette. Hanja checked his watch.

‘It’s B, from the National Assembly. His idiot son is constantly in trouble, but the kid got what he deserved this time. He trapped a girl in his hotel room, tried to force his dick into her mouth, but she bit it. Sunk her teeth in so hard, he said it was barely hanging on by the skin. Good for her.’ Hanja gave Reseng a mischievous look. ‘I’m guessing a dick is not as easy to reattach as fingers, huh? A few days ago B came to see me, crying about how his darling boy, the apple of his eye, the only son born to an only son of an only son, had his dick bitten off, and with it all hope of his carrying on the family name. He grabbed my hand and said I was the only one who could make things right. It was so embarrassing! Like you said, I built this fancy office right in the heart of Gangnam and I seem to be living well. But the truth is, what can I do? If I want to make ends meet, I have to help lick his wounds. If a National Assemblyman of the Republic of Korea can air his dirty laundry to me, then how dare a lowly contractor like myself say, ‘Oh, no, I could never stoop so low.’ I’d be too afraid! My life is no different from everyone else’s. That’s why you should put away your pride and join me. You’ll live, and your friend Jeongan will live, and thankfully I’ll live, too. I’m not asking you to do much. Just stay at the library, but give me a call whenever work comes in.’

Hanja’s eyes were fixed on Reseng’s. Reseng puffed on his cigarette and said nothing. Hanja’s smile slowly disappeared and his face hardened.

‘Election’s right around the corner,’ he said. ‘This is a sensitive time. Everyone’s running around trying to get their share. Lethal mistakes can happen. Did you know that the D Group has over twenty subsidiaries, but it took the government prosecutors less than six months to dismantle all of it? Their only crime was refusing to help fund a political party during the elections. So if people like us make a mistake, we’ll be dead and dismembered before we hit the ground. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. So don’t complicate things. I don’t want to kill you, but if you keep resisting me, I’ll have no choice.’

‘We still don’t know who’ll end up with a knife in their stomach,’ Reseng said weakly.

‘You’re right. We don’t. But you can’t be in this business if you’re not prepared to get knifed at some point. Are you prepared?’

The phone rang again. ‘Be right there,’ Hanja said, and hung up. ‘I have to go. Behave yourself. And tell your friend Jeongan what I said.’

‘Did you put a bomb in my toilet?’

Reseng asked the question as Hanja was walking away. Hanja turned, a confused look on his face. After a second, he caught on and assumed a look of wounded pride.

‘Do I look like I have time to be sticking my hand in your filthy toilet?’

Hanja shut the door behind him. Reseng sat down and finished his cigarette. His mind was filled with too many thoughts at once. He stubbed out the cigarette and took the lift back down to the seventh floor. The woman in the black suit took Chu’s Henckels out of its cubbyhole and gave it back to him. The packet of cocktail sausages stared at him and tried to look tough. As Reseng looked down at Chu’s knife, a sense of shame settled over his shoulders. He put the knife in his pocket. Then he took the lift the rest of the way down and rushed out of the building. He couldn’t get away fast enough.

X

Reseng returned home. But Desk and Lampshade were no longer there to rub against his leg as he came in. He stood in the doorway for a moment and stared blankly around at his apartment. The only things missing were the two cats and yet the whole place felt empty. He took off his shoes and went in. The empty cat dishes were sitting under the table. He stared at them for a moment and then opened the cabinet, took out the cat food and filled the bowls to the top.

He decided to run a hot bath. Though he hadn’t done much, he felt exhausted, and his body ached as if he’d been beaten with a hammer. As he watched steam rise from the tub, he felt helpless, useless. Like he was a cog that had been spat out of a clock, a cog that had once been an integral working part, only to find itself now staring at the complex inner mechanism that kept right on ticking without it.

Every time Reseng came home from a kill, he was filled with inertia. He had no idea why. It wasn’t guilt, nor was it displeasure or self-loathing, it was inertia pure and simple. An overpowering sense that he could no longer be responsible for anyone, let alone himself. Everything seemed too hard—chatting and laughing with others, meeting women and going on dates, having a hobby, building a model boat, even cooking dinner. The only life he could manage was one of drinking can after can of beer until he was drunk, staring out the window through unfocused eyes, or lying in bed staring at the patterns on the ceiling and wallpaper, until he couldn’t take the hunger anymore and grabbed whatever he found in the fridge, before falling back to sleep. It was only natural. What would be really strange, he thought, was if someone who earned their living by killing others felt revitalised by it.

As he lay in the hot bath and watched condensation form on the ceiling, Reseng pondered Hanja’s, Old Raccoon’s and Minari Pak’s maths. Everyone had their own particular way of keeping accounts. Even the small-time businessmen of the meat market, the disposables and the washed-up assassins who’d sunk as low as they could go all walked around doing their own private calculations. Whether they got the numbers right or wrong in the end, they based their ambitions, their movements, their fears and their kills on their own maths. As he picked up a handful of soap bubbles floating in the tub, Reseng wondered about Old Raccoon’s maths. It made no sense to him at all.

He dunked his head under the water. And started adding up the number of people he’d killed so far. As he did so, a sense of ruin wafted off him like a bad smell.

Jeongan showed up around midnight. The doorbell woke Reseng from a deep sleep. He opened the door with his eyes half-closed. Jeongan looked annoyed.

‘You’re sleeping? Must be nice. Meanwhile I’ve been hopping all over the place in the middle of the night like a frog in a frypan.’

He looked around as he stepped into the apartment.

‘Desk! Lampshade! Get out here with those stupid names of yours. I know you’ve been pining away to see Mr Handsome and now here I am!’

Jeongan looked inside the cat tower, under the couch and behind the curtains.

‘Where are those girls? Why are they so shy all of a sudden?’

‘I sent them away.’

‘Where?’

‘Somewhere better than here.’

‘What place could possibly be better than their master’s loving arms?’

‘If I get knifed in the street, they’ll starve to death.’

Jeongan stared at Reseng in shock, then laughed.

‘You idiot! No one’s going to…Don’t worry. Elder Brother just finished a very thorough investigation.’

He pulled a thick manila envelope from his bag and put it on the table.

‘You’ve heard of Dr Jigyeong Kang?’ Jeongan asked.

‘The forensic pathologist?’

‘Yeah, he worked at the National Forensic Service for a long time. Turns out, he was a plotter. I’d always wondered about him. Every time I saw his picture in the paper, I got this funny feeling.’

‘Why is that?’

‘That place had a disturbing history. Back when all those meat-head military guys were in power, they didn’t need any fancy plots, only signatures.’

‘Signatures?’

‘They didn’t hire any fancy plotters because they could just sweet-talk medical examiners into signing falsified death certificates for them. The Agency for National Security Planning could beat the shit out of people all they wanted, but as long as the medical examiner wrote that the cause of death was suicide, and signed it—case closed! They had it pretty sweet compared to plotters nowadays, who freak out about leaving even the slightest bit of evidence behind. Anyway, that’s how those guys got into the business. At first the medical examiners had no choice but to sign the paperwork, because they had their wives and children to think about, and the military had so much power. But once they got sucked into it, they sank deeper and deeper. You think the contractors would let them just walk away? You know what they’re like.’

‘But what’s the deal with this Dr Kang?’

‘Mito, that woman from the convenience store, was his lab assistant.’

Reseng nodded. ‘I get the idea.’

‘Just the idea? The answer’s right there. Who do you think a hotshot like Dr Kang would work with? Minari Pak? Yeah, right. He would work with Hanja or Old Raccoon. But now that Old Raccoon has practically retired, it’s very likely that he was Hanja’s plotter.’

Reseng lit a cigarette. He wasn’t convinced about Hanja or Old Raccoon. Besides, he and this Dr Kang had never crossed paths. And even if they had, why would a plotter of his stature bother to plant a bomb in the toilet of some lowly assassin?

‘What does Dr Kang do these days?’ Reseng asked.

‘He died recently.’

‘Died?’

‘Yeah, and they say it was suicide. Can you believe it? Someone who spent his whole life officially passing off murder as suicide turns around and commits suicide himself. Suspicious, right?’

‘How’d he die?’

‘Jumped off a roof. Or someone dropped him off a roof. He weighed over a hundred kilograms, so it had to be a pretty strong someone.’

Jeongan handed him a stack of photos taken at the scene of the recent accident. An overweight man was sprawled on the ground like a lump of wet clay. His skull was crushed, and his right shoulder and neck were broken so badly that his head was turned round backwards. The pool of blood around him was a dark cherry-red against the stark white of the lab coat he was still wearing when he died. Stranger still, lying on top of the dried blood was a single slipper.

‘He only fell five stories, but what a mess,’ Jeongan said. ‘The bigger they are, you know. He had a good appetite for someone who did autopsies all day. He’s not that tall, so he must’ve really been packing it in. He should’ve watched what he ate.’

‘Where’d you get these photos?’

‘Where do you think? From the cops. Cops nowadays are nice to people.’

‘He killed himself in his slippers.’ Reseng tilted his head. ‘The official cause of death was suicide?’

‘You know how cops are. They’ll do whatever it takes to lighten their case load. Also, he left a will, and there were no signs of homicide.’

‘What did the will say?’

Jeongan flipped through the papers and extracted a single photocopied sheet.

‘“I’m sorry for all the lives I ruined and the people I hurt. I am ashamed of myself,”’ he read.

‘A crisis of conscience?’ Reseng said.

‘Ha! That guy never had a conscience. The people at his funeral looked like they were celebrating. May as well have been a wedding.’

Reseng took a drag on his cigarette. Plotters sometimes became targets. They made mistakes too, just like assassins. They left clues, they got caught. But they were always eliminated quietly. Because, unlike assassins, who never had information to give no matter how far you dug, once a plotter surfaced, the past they’d buried surfaced right along with them. Plotters had to be killed more carefully, more covertly and more quietly than any other target. That was the unwritten law of this world.

‘Who killed him?’ Reseng asked.

‘I think it was her.’

Jeongan held up a photograph of Mito. Reseng laughed.

‘Oh, sure, that tiny chatterbox would have no problem killing a guy that size. Let me guess? She knocked him out with a Hot Break to the head then called up her gorilla of a boyfriend to toss him off the roof? Fine. Let’s say it was her. Why’d she do it?’

‘I don’t know, but there’s something very, very fishy about her. You and I both know plotters never use their own names. And they keep everything separate—the address where their mail goes, the secret hideout where they hatch their plots, their secret rendezvous with brokers—different places, so it won’t all blow up in their face at once. Plus, they use a different name in each place. But this woman ordered bomb parts in her own name.’

‘Maybe Dr Kang used her address?’

‘Why bother when there are more than enough fake names and registration numbers to go around?’

Reseng stared at the photograph of Mito, her face turned to the sky, smiling. She looked naïve, almost simple. The sort of girl who’d shriek at the sight of a cockroach. He couldn’t believe she was behind any of this. Even if Jeongan was right, none of it added up. Given Dr Kang’s life, he would’ve had plenty of enemies. Mito could have been one of them. And she might have killed him because of it. But what did that have to do with Reseng and her planting a bomb in his toilet? It made no sense.

‘I think you’ve just got the hots for her,’ Reseng said, tossing the photos on the table. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree.’

Jeongan looked exasperated.

‘You don’t know her. She’s scary. According to the people who work in the marketplace where she grew up, she worked nonstop—delivering milk, newspapers, doing odd jobs for everyone, from the fish shop to the greengrocer—in order to support her sister, who’s in a wheelchair, and put herself through school. All while maintaining top marks. Everyone I met kept praising her and saying she was sent from heaven. They said she was so smart and pretty and nice and honest and hardworking that they all chipped in a bit of money each month to help pay for her education. And even though she was up at dawn every morning to work at the market, she still graduated top of her class in medical school too. That is seriously scary!’

Jeongan looked positively enamoured.

‘Girls who come top of the class are scary?’

‘Oh, c’mon, that’s not what I mean. What I’m saying is, why work as a plotter’s assistant after all that? Her hard times were behind her. She got into Korea’s best medical school.’

‘Medical school’s expensive. And plotting is an easy way to make a good pile of cash.’

‘But this woman, Mito, isn’t that simple. I’ve shadowed hundreds of people. Dated dozens of women. I basically have a PhD in women. Why don’t you get me?’

‘Fine. Then why would such an honest, hard-working woman kill a doctor and plant a bomb in my toilet? That makes no sense.’

‘No, we don’t have the whole picture yet. But we will soon. I can feel it.’

Jeongan rummaged in his bag and pulled out a map. He handed it to Reseng.

‘What’s this?’

‘I’ve circled the most likely locations of Dr Kang’s and Mito’s secret hideouts. You should check them out.’

‘What about you?’

‘I have plans. I’ll be back in a week.’

‘What plans?’

‘It’s a secret.’ Jeongan grinned.

‘You’re going on vacation with some girl while your friend’s life hangs in the balance? Who is it this time?’

‘It’s no fun hanging out here now that your cats are gone. You know I get along better with females,’ Jeongan joked, as he packed up his bag and put on his shoes. The sneakers weren’t that old, but the backs were already worn down.

‘Are you doing a job for Old Raccoon?’ Reseng asked.

‘What if I am?’

‘I saw Hanja today. I don’t know if it’s the upcoming election, but he was an even bigger prick than usual. He said if we don’t stop, he would have to kill us. Something about how I’m Old Raccoon’s hands and feet and you’re his eyes and ears. What a joke. Anyway, after what happened with the old general, Hanja is pretty angry and wants us to lie low until the election is over.’

‘Aww, is our little Reseng scared? If you fall for every bluff in this line of work, how will you get by?’

‘It’s worse this time. He’ll cool off once the election’s over, so don’t do anything until then.’

‘You know how bored Old Raccoon gets when I don’t deliver his newspaper. Besides, that old fox Hanja isn’t going to start anything now. He’s bluffing. He just wants to scare you. So stop worrying and bring those kitties back. It’s not the same here without the ladies. I can’t believe the great Reseng evacuated his cats because of an ittybitty bomb in his toilet. Don’t you think you’re overreacting?’

Halfway out the door, Jeongan stopped and turned as if he’d just remembered something. He undid his belt and pulled his jeans down.

‘Hey, check this out. Scorpion-brand virility underwear! I got them for one hundred and seventy thousand won. See here—crystallised jade and yellow clay that emit infrared rays to maximise stamina. It’s like I’m wearing Superman’s underwear.’

Reseng watched dumbfounded, then said, ‘The guy who owns the corner shop wears those.’

‘Yeah? I bet he says they’re amazing, right?’

‘They worked so well, he had a stroke.’

Jeongan pouted as he pulled his jeans back up. ‘I don’t know why I expected to have a productive conversation with someone whose goal in life is to die a virgin. I’m out of here.’

Reseng grinned as he watched Jeongan walk away, wiggling his bum.