The Plotters

That night, Reseng sat in Old Raccoon’s library for a very long time. The tears kept falling, and he cried himself to sleep on Old Raccoon’s rocking chair.

BEAR’S PET CREMATORIUM

“If things don’t pick up, I’m in deep shit. Business has been so slow, I’m stuck cremating dogs all day.”

Bear flicked his cigarette to the ground. He was squatting down, and the seat of his pants threatened to rip open under his hundred-plus-kilogram frame. Reseng wordlessly pulled on a pair of cotton work gloves. Bear heaved himself up, brushing off his backside.

“Do you know some people are such morons, they’re actually dumping bodies in the forest? Your job doesn’t end when the target’s dead; you also have to clean up after yourself. I mean, what day and age is this? Dumping bodies in the forest? You wouldn’t even bury a dog out there. Nowadays, if you so much as tap a mountain with a bulldozer, bodies come pouring out. No one takes their job seriously anymore, I swear. No integrity! Stabbing someone in the gut and walking away? That’s for hired goons, not professional assassins! And anyway, it’s not like it’s easy to bury a body in the woods. A bunch of idiots from Incheon got caught dragging a huge suitcase up a mountain a few days ago.”

“They were arrested?” Reseng asked.

“Of course. It was pretty obvious. Three big guys carrying shovels and dragging a giant suitcase into the forest. You think people living nearby saw them and thought, Ah, they’re taking a trip, in the dead of night, to the other side of the mountain? Stupid! So my point is, instead of dumping bodies in the mountains, why not cremate them here? It’s safe, it’s clean, and it’s better for the environment. Business is so slow, I’m dying!”

Bear pulled on work gloves as he grumbled. He always grumbled. And yet this grumbling, orangutan-size man seemed as harmless as Winnie-the-Pooh. That might have been because he looked like Winnie-the-Pooh. Or maybe Pooh looked like Bear. Bear provided a corpse-disposal service, albeit an illegal one. Pets, of course, were legal. He was licensed to cremate cats and dogs. The human bodies were done on the sly. He was surprisingly cuddly-looking for someone who burned corpses for a living.

“I swear, you wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. Not long ago, this couple came in with an iguana. Had a name like Andrew or André. What kind of a name is that for an iguana? Why not something simpler, something that rolls off the tongue, like Iggy or Spiny? Anyway, it’s ridiculous the names people come up with. So this stupid iguana died, and this young couple kept hugging each other and crying and carrying on: ‘We’re so sorry, Andrew, we should have fed you on time, it’s all our fault, Andrew.’ I was dying of embarrassment for them.”

Bear was on a roll. Reseng opened the warehouse door, half-listening to his rant.

“Which cart?” he asked.

Bear took a look inside and pointed to a hand cart.

“Is it big enough?” Reseng asked.

Bear sized it up and nodded.

“You’re not moving a cow. Where’d you park?”

“Behind the building.”

“Why so far away? And it’s uphill.”

Bear manned the cart. He had an easy, optimistic stride that belied his penchant for grumbling. Reseng envied him. Bear didn’t have a greedy bone in his body. He wasn’t one to run himself into the ground trying to drum up more business. He got by on what he made from his small pet crematorium and had even raised two daughters by himself. His eldest was now at college. “I stick to light meals,” he liked to claim. “To stretch my food bill. I just have to hold out for a few more years, until my girls are on their own.” Bear spooked easily. He never took on anything suspicious, even if he needed the money. And so, in a business where the average life span was ridiculously short, Bear had lasted a long, long time.

Reseng popped open the trunk. Bear tilted his head quizzically at the two black body bags inside.

“Two? Old Raccoon said there’d be only one package.”

“One man, one dog,” Reseng said.

“Is that the dog?” Bear asked, pointing at the smaller of the bags.

“That’s the man. The big one’s the dog.”

“What kind of dog is bigger than a man?”

Bear opened the bag in disbelief. Inside was Santa. His long tongue flopped out of the open zipper.

“Holy shit! Now I’ve seen it all. Why’d you kill the dog? What’d it do, bite your balls?”

“I just thought it was too old to get used to a new master.”

“Well, look at you, meddling with the instructions you were given,” Bear said with a snigger. “You need to watch your step. Don’t get tripped up worrying over some dog.”

Reseng zipped the bag back up and paused. Why had he killed the dog? When he’d gone back to collect the old man’s body, the dog had been quietly standing watch. With his back to the sun, Reseng had looked down at the sunlight spilling into the dog’s cloudy brown eyes. The dog hadn’t growled. It was probably wondering why its master wasn’t moving. Reseng had stared at the dog, which was now too old to learn any new tricks. No one’s left in this quiet, beautiful forest to feed you, he thought. And you’re too old to go bounding through the forest in search of food. Do you understand what I’m saying? The late autumn sun cast its weak rays over the crown of the dog’s head. It had gazed up at him with those cloudy brown eyes as Reseng stroked its neck. Then he had raised his rifle and shot the dog in the head.

“Pretty heavy for an old man,” Bear said as he grabbed one end of the body bag.

“I told you, this one’s the dog,” Reseng grumbled. “That one’s the old man.”

Bear looked back and forth at the bags in confusion.

“This damn dog is heavy.”

After loading the bodies onto the cart, Bear looked around. The pet crematorium was a quiet place at two in the morning. Of course it was. No one would be coming to cremate a pet at this hour.

Bear opened up the gas valve and lit the furnace. The flames rose, peeling the black vinyl bag away from the two bodies like snakeskin being shed. The old man was stretched out flat, with the dog’s head resting on his stomach. As the furnace filled with heat, their sinews tightened and shrank, and the old man’s body began to squirm. It was a sad sight, as if he were still clinging to the world of the living. Was there even anything left for him to cling to? It didn’t matter. It was over. In two hours, he’d be nothing but dust. You can’t cling to anything when you’re dust.

Reseng stared at the contorted body. The old man had been a general. Throughout the three long decades of military rule in South Korea, he had been working behind the scenes, in the shadow of the dictator, drawing up lists of targets and orchestrating their assassinations. How had he pulled it off? It wasn’t easy back then for former members of the North Korean army to succeed in the South Korean army and harder still to earn a spot in the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. But he’d survived. He’d made it through the first dictator’s twenty years of ironfisted rule, the toppling of the regime, the coup d’etat that followed, and the next ten years under a new military regime. He’d survived the political monkey business and the unrelenting suspicion directed at former North Korean soldiers, and became a general. Whenever someone fell into disfavor with the dictator, this general with two shiny stars on his cap would seek out Old Raccoon’s library. He’d hand over the list with the target’s name on it and, most brazenly of all, use the people’s tax money to settle the bill.

But in the end, his own name had made it onto the list. That’s how it went. The good times came to an end sooner or later and, in order to survive, those who found themselves dethroned had to sort out what they’d done and sweep up the scraps. As always, time had a way of circling around and biting you on the ass.

Once, when Reseng was twelve, the old man had come to the library dressed in uniform. It was a fine uniform. The old man came right up to Reseng.

“What’re you reading, boy?”

“Sophocles.”

“Is it fun?”

“I don’t have a dad, so I can’t really understand it.”

“Where’s your dad?”

“In the garbage can in front of the nunnery.”

The general grinned, stars sparkling, and ruffled Reseng’s hair. That was twenty years ago. The little boy remembered that moment, but the old man had probably forgotten.

Reseng took out a cigarette. Bear lit it for him, took out one of his own, and started whistling birdcalls through a cloud of smoke. On his way out, Bear checked their surroundings again, as if expecting someone to appear suddenly. Reseng watched the bodies of the old man and the dog meld together in the heat.

A surprising number of idiots mistakenly thought they could pull off a perfect crime only if they personally disposed of the evidence. They would lug a can of gasoline to a deserted field and try to burn the body themselves. But cremation was never as easy as people thought. After messing around with trying to set the body on fire, they ended up with a huge, steaming lump of foul-smelling meat. Joke was on them. Any decent forensic scientist could take one look at that barbecue gone wrong and figure out the corpse’s age, sex, height, face, shape, and dentition. A body had to burn for at least two hours at temperatures well above thirteen hundred degrees inside a closed oven in order to be completely incinerated. Other than crematoriums, pottery or charcoal kilns, or a blast furnace in a smelting factory, it was very difficult to produce that kind of heat. That was why Bear’s Pet Crematorium stayed in business. The next important step was to grind the bones. Forensic scientists can determine age, sex, height, and cause of death from just three fragments of a pelvis. So any remaining bone or teeth had to be completely destroyed. Even the most finely ground bones still hold clues, and teeth maintain their original shape even under extreme conditions, including fire. So the teeth had to be pulverized with a hammer and the bone ash safely scattered. It was the only way to disappear your victim.

Reseng took out another cigarette and checked the time. Ten past two. Once the sun came up, he’d be able to finish work and head home. Sudden fatigue settled over his neck and shoulders. One night on the road, one night at the old man’s place, and now one night at Bear’s Pet Crematorium. He’d been away from home for three nights. His cats had probably run out of food … Reseng pictured his darkened apartment, the two Siamese yowling in hunger. Desk and Lampshade. Crazily enough, they were starting to take after their names. Desk liked to hunch over into a square, like a slice of bread, and stare quietly at a scrap of paper on the floor, while Lampshade liked to crane her neck and stare out the window.

Bear brought out a basket of boiled potatoes and offered one to Reseng. Just his luck—more potatoes. The six the old man had given him that morning were still in the car. Reseng was hungry, but he shook his head. “Why aren’t you eating? Don’t you know how tasty Gangwon Province potatoes are?” Bear looked puzzled. Why would anyone refuse something so delicious? He shoved an entire potato into his mouth and swigged a good half of the bottle of soju he’d brought out, as well.

“I cremated Mr. Kim here a while back,” Bear said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Mr. Kim from the meat market?”

“Yup.”

“Who took him out?”

“I think Duho hired some young Vietnamese guys. That’s who’s taking all the jobs these days. They work for peanuts. Everywhere you look, it’s nothing but Vietnamese. Well, of course, there are also some Chinese, some defectors from the North Korean special forces, and even a few Filipinos. I swear, there are guys who’ll take someone out for a measly five hundred thousand won. Nowadays, assassinations cost practically nothing. That’s why they’re all at each other’s throats. Once Mr. Kim’s name made the list, he didn’t stand a chance.”

Reseng exhaled a long plume of smoke. Bear had no reason to lament the plummeting cost of assassinations. The more bodies there were, the better Bear fared, regardless of who carried out the killings. He was just humoring Reseng. Bear took another bite of potato and another swig of soju. Then he seemed to remember something.

“By the way, the strangest thing happened. After I had finished cremating Mr. Kim, I found these shiny pearl-like objects in his ashes. I picked them up to take a closer look, and what do you know? Śarīra. Thirteen of them, each no bigger than a bean. Crazy!”

“What are you talking about?” Reseng said in shock. “Those are only supposed to come out of the ashes of Buddhist masters. How could they come out of Mr. Kim?”

“It’s true, I swear. Want me to show you?”

“Forget it.” Reseng waved his hand in annoyance.

“I’m telling you, they’re real. I didn’t believe it at first, either. Mr. Kim—what’d everyone call him again? ‘The Lech’? Because he’d guzzle all those health tonics and stuff to increase his virility, then bang anything that moved? That’s what killed him, you know. Anyway, how could something as precious as śarīra come out of someone as rotten as he was? And thirteen, no less! They’re supposed to mean you’ve achieved enlightenment, but from what I see, it’s got nothing to do with meditating all the time, or avoiding sex, or practicing moderation. It’s more like dumb luck.”

“You’re sure they’re real?” Reseng still wasn’t convinced.

“They’re real!” Bear punctuated his words with an exaggerated shrug. “I showed them to Hyecho, up at Weoljeongam Temple. He stared at them for the longest time, with his hands clasped behind his back like this, and then he slowly licked his lips and told me to sell them to him.”

“What would Hyecho want with Mr. Kim’s śarīra?”

“You know he’s always chasing skirt, gambling and boozing it up. But that dirty monk’s got an itchy palm. He’s secretly worried what people will say about him if they don’t find śarīra among his ashes when he’s cremated. That’s why he’s got his eye on Mr. Kim’s. If he swallows them right before he dies, then it’s guaranteed they’ll find at least thirteen, right?”

Reseng chuckled. Bear shoved another potato in his mouth. He took a swig of soju and then offered Reseng a potato, as if embarrassed to be eating them all himself. Reseng looked at the potato in Bear’s paw and suddenly pictured the way the old man had talked to the dog, to the pork roasting over the fire, even to the potatoes buried under the ashes. You’d better make yourselves delicious for our important guest. That low, hypnotic voice. It struck him then that the old man must have been lonely. As lonely as a tree in winter, every last leaf shed, nothing but bare branches snaking against the sky like veins. Bear was still holding out the potato. Reseng was suddenly famished. He accepted the potato and took a bite. As he chewed, he stared quietly at the flames inside the furnace. Between the fire and the smoke, he could no longer tell what was old man and what was dog.

“Tasty, huh?” Bear asked.

“Tasty,” Reseng said.

“Not to change the subject, but why the hell is tuition so expensive now? My older daughter just started university. I’ll need to burn at least five more bodies to afford her tuition and rent. But where am I going to find five bodies in this climate? I don’t know if it’s just that the economy’s bad or if the world’s become a more wholesome place, but it’s definitely not like the old days. How am I supposed to get by now?”

Bear frowned, as if he couldn’t stand the thought of a wholesome world.

“Maybe you should think about those pretty daughters of yours and go straight,” Reseng said. “Stick to cremating cats and dogs instead, you know, more wholesome like.”

“Are you kidding? Cats and dogs would have to get a lot more profitable first. I charge by the kilo for cremating pets, and nowadays everyone’s into those tiny ratlike dogs. Don’t get me started. After I pay my gas, electricity, taxes, and this, that, and everything else, what’s left? If only people would start keeping giraffes or elephants as pets. Then maybe Bear would be rich.”

Bear shook the soju bottle and emptied what was left into his mouth. He stretched. He looked worn-out. “So should I sell them?” he asked abruptly.

“Sell what?”

“C’mon, I already told you! Mr. Kim’s śarīra.”

“May as well,” Reseng said irritably. “What’s the point of holding on to them?”

“That so-called monk offered me three hundred thousand won for them, but I feel like I’m getting ripped off. Even if they did come out of Mr. Kim’s garbage can of a body, they’re still bona fide śarīras.”

“Listen to you,” Reseng said. “Going on as if they’re actually sacred.”

“Should I ask him to bump it up to five hundred thousand?”

Reseng didn’t respond. He was tired, and he wasn’t in the mood to joke anymore. He stared wordlessly into the fire until Bear got the hint. Bear gave his empty soju bottle another shake, then went to get a fresh one.

White smoke spewed out of the chimney. Every time he dropped off a body for cremation, Reseng got the ridiculous notion that the souls of those once-hectic lives were exiting through the chimney. A great many assassins had been cremated there. It was the final resting place for discarded hit men. Hit men who’d messed up, hit men tracked down by cops, hit men who ended up on the death list for reasons no one knew, and assassins who’d grown too old—they were all cremated in that furnace.

To the plotters, mercenaries and assassins were like disposable batteries. After all, what use would they have for old assassins? An old assassin was like an annoying blister bursting with incriminating information and evidence. The more you thought about it, the more sense it made. Why would anyone hold on to a used-up battery?

Reseng’s old friend, Chu, had been cremated in this same furnace. Chu was eight years older, but the two of them had been like family. With Chu’s death, Reseng had sensed that his life had begun to change. Familiar things suddenly became unfamiliar. A certain strangeness came between him and his table, his flower vase, his car, his fake driver’s license. The timing of it all was uncanny. He had once looked up the man whose name was on his stolen driver’s licence. A devoted father of three and a hardworking and talented welder, according to everyone who knew him, the man had been missing for eight years. Maybe he had ended up on a hit list. His body might have been buried in the forest or sealed inside a barrel at the bottom of the ocean. Or maybe he had even been cremated right here in Bear’s furnace. Eight years on, the family was still waiting for him to come home. Every time he drove, Reseng joked to himself: This car is being driven by a dead man. He felt that he lived like a dead man, a zombie. It only made sense that he was a stranger in his own life.

Two years had passed since Chu’s death. He’d been an assassin, like Reseng. But unlike Reseng, Chu hadn’t belonged to any particular outfit; instead, he’d drifted from place to place, taking on short gigs. The Mafia had a saying: The most dangerous adversary was a pazzo, a madman. A person who thought they had nothing to lose, who wanted nothing from others and asked nothing of him- or herself, who behaved in ways that defied common sense, who quietly followed her or his own strange principles and stubborn convictions, which were both inconceivable and unbelievable. A person like that would not be cowed by any formidable power. Chu had been that kind of person.

On the other hand, it was easy to deal with adversaries who were backed into a corner and desperate not to lose what they had. They were the plotters’ favorite prey. It was obvious where they were headed. They ended up dead because they refused to acknowledge, right up to the very end, that they could not hold on to whatever it was they were trying to hold on to. But not Chu. Chu had been out to prove that this ferocious world with its boundless power could not stop him as long as he desired nothing.

Chu had been prickly, but his work was so clean and immaculate that Old Raccoon had usually given him the difficult assignments. He’d wanted to make Chu an official member of the library and had warned him, “Even a lion becomes a target for wild dogs when it’s away from its pride.” Each time, Chu had sneered and said, “I don’t plan on living long enough to turn into a cripple like you.”

Despite not belonging to any one outfit, Chu had lasted for twenty years as an assassin. He’d done all sorts of dirty work, taken government jobs, corporate jobs, jobs from third-tier meat-market contractors, no questions asked. Twenty years—it was an impressive run for an assassin.

But then one day four years ago, Chu’s clock had stopped. No one knew why. Even Chu had confessed to Reseng that he didn’t understand why it had happened, why his clock had suddenly stopped after running so faithfully for twenty years. What led up to it was that Chu decided to let one of his targets go. She was no one special, just another twenty-one-year-old high-priced escort. Shortly after, a news story came out about a certain national assemblyman who had leaped to his death. He’d been hounded by accusations of bribery, corruption, and a sex scandal involving a middle schooler. There was no way that a lowlife like him who enjoyed sex with middle school girls had committed suicide to preserve his honor, which he’d long since done a great job of destroying on his own. Every plotter who saw the news must have instantly thought of Chu. And Chu didn’t stop there. He also went after the plotter who’d put out the contract on the escort. But he failed to track the plotter down. Not even the great Chu could pull that off. By then, Chu was a wanted man. It has to be said that plotters spend more time on finding safe hideouts for themselves and ensuring their own quick exits than on planning hits.

The plotters’ world was one big cartel. They had to take out Chu, but not for anything as flimsy as pride. There was no such thing as pride in this business. They had to take him out so as not to lose customers. Like any other society, their world had its own strict rules and order. Those rules and order formed the foundation on which the market took shape, and then in streamed the customers. If order fell, the market fell, and if the market fell, bye-bye customers. Chu had to have known that. The moment he made up his mind to save the woman, he signed his own death warrant. Chu risked everything to save one unlucky prostitute.

It took the meat market’s trackers less than two months to find her. She was hiding in a small port city. The high-class call girl who’d once entertained only VIP clients in four-star hotels was now selling herself to sailors in musty flophouses. If she’d holed up quietly in a factory instead of going to the red-light district, she might have dodged the trackers a little longer. But she’d ended up on the stinking, filthy streets instead. Maybe she’d run out of money. Since she’d had to leave Seoul in a hurry, she would’ve had no change of clothes and nowhere to sleep. Plus, it was winter. Cold and hunger have a way of numbing people to abstract fears. She might have thought she was going to die anyway, and so what difference did it make? It’s hard to say whether it was stupid of her to think like that. She couldn’t possibly have enjoyed whoring herself out in a port city on the outskirts of civilization, sucking drunk sailor dick for a pittance. But she would’ve felt she had no other choice. All you had to do was look at her hands to understand why. She had slender, lovely hands. Hands that had never once imagined a life spent standing in front of a conveyer belt tightening screws for ten hours a day, or picking seaweed or oysters from the sea in the dead of winter. Had she been born to a good family, those hands would have belonged to a pianist. But her family wasn’t all that good, and so she’d been whoring herself out since the age of fifteen.

She must have known that returning to the red-light district meant she wouldn’t last long. But she went back anyway. In the end, none of us can leave the place we know best, no matter how dirty and disgusting it is. Having no money and no other means of survival is part of the reason, but it’s never the whole reason. We go back to our own filthy origins because it’s a filth we know. Putting up with that filth is easier than facing the fear of being tossed into the wider world, and the loneliness that is as deep and wide as that fear.