The Plotters

Old Raccoon had summoned Reseng as soon as the plotter’s file arrived. Reseng found him sitting at his desk in his study, leafing through the document. He assumed it contained the woman’s photo, her address, her hobbies, her weight, her movements, and the names of all the people related to or involved with her in any way—in other words, all the information needed to kill her. It would also state the designated manner of her death and the method of disposal of the body.

“I don’t know why they’re wasting money on this. Says she’s only thirty-eight kilos. Break her neck. It’ll be as easy as stepping on a frog.”

Old Raccoon thrust the file at Reseng without looking at him. Reseng raised an eyebrow. Was stepping on a frog that easy? Old Raccoon had a habit of making cynical jokes to hide his discomfort. But Reseng wasn’t sure whether what bothered Old Raccoon was having to kill a twenty-one-year-old girl—and one who weighed only thirty-eight kilos, at that—or if his pride was hurt at having to accept a low-paying contract, though he knew full well the library needed the business.

Reseng flipped through the file. The woman in the picture looked like a Japanese pop star. It said she was twenty-one, but she didn’t look a day over fifteen. Reseng had never killed a woman before. It wasn’t that he had some special rule against killing women and children; it was simply that his turn hadn’t come around yet. Reseng had no rules. Not having rules was his only rule.

“What do I do with the body?” Reseng asked.

“Take it to Bear’s, of course,” Old Raccoon said irritably. “What else would you do? String her up at the Gwanghwamun intersection?”

“It’s a long way from where she is to Bear’s place. What if I get pulled over while she’s in the trunk?”

“So lay off the booze and drive like a kitten. It’s not like the cops are going to force you to pull over and claim you shot at them. They’ve got better things to do.”

His voice dripped with sarcasm. That was also his way of disguising anger. Reseng just stood there, not saying a word. Old Raccoon flicked his wrist to tell him to get lost, then got up, pulled a volume of his first-edition Brockhaus Enzyklopädie from the shelf, set it on a book stand, and began reading out loud, mumbling the words under his breath, completely indifferent to Reseng, who was still standing in front of him. He had been rereading it recently. When he finished, he would reread the English edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Old Raccoon’s awkward, self-taught German filled the room. As Reseng opened the door and stepped out, he muttered, “No real German would understand a word of that.”

Old Raccoon had long ago stopped stocking his personal shelves with anything that wasn’t a dictionary or an encyclopedia. As far as Reseng could remember, he’d refused to read anything else for the last ten years. “Dictionaries are great,” he’d explained. “No mushiness, no bitching, no preachiness, and, best of all, none of that high-and-mighty crap that writers try to pull.”

The port city where the woman was hiding looked as run-down as a diseased chicken. The once-bustling city that had kept the Japanese imperial forces supplied with war munitions had been in decline ever since liberation. Now it seemed nothing could turn it around. Reseng got off the express bus and headed for the parking lot, where he looked for a license plate ending in 2847. At the very end of the lot was an old Musso SUV. He took the keys out of his pocket, opened the door, and got in. As soon as he started the ignition, the low fuel warning light blinked on.

“Son of a bitch left the tank empty,” Reseng muttered in irritation at the stupid plotter, wherever and whoever he was.

He parked in the motel’s underground parking garage. The plotter had instructed him to use the third space away from the emergency stairs, but a big luxury sedan was already parked there. Reseng checked his watch: 1:20 p.m. The owner of the sedan had either arrived the night before and hadn’t left yet or he was treating himself to a leisurely lunch with his mistress. Reseng had no choice but to park next to the wall. He got out and checked the walls and ceiling. The motel was too old and shabby to have security cameras. Reseng opened the trunk and took out the oversize duffel bag and body bag that had been left there for him.

As indicated in the file, the motel counter was unstaffed. The clock on the wall pointed to 1:28. Reseng took the key for room 303 from its pigeonhole and went up the stairs. Before opening the door, he pulled on a pair of black leather gloves.

The motel room had seen better days. On the bed was a dirty quilt that he could tell at once hadn’t been washed in years, and on a shelf was half a roll of toilet paper, a metal ashtray, and an old eight-sided box of safety matches. The wallpaper was so faded that he couldn’t tell what color it had once been, and sticking out of the window was an air conditioner shaped like a German tube radio that had to be at least thirty years old; it looked like something awful would spew out of it if he were to turn it on. Glued to a discarded semen-encrusted condom stuck between the mattress and the bed frame was a single pubic hair that could have belonged to either a man or a woman. The glow of the overhead fluorescent was dimmed by a thick layer of dust and long-dead insects trapped inside the light cover. The room looked like a scene from a black-and-white movie in the 1930s.

“How depressing,” Reseng muttered as he set the duffel bag and the black Samsonite attaché case he’d brought with him from Seoul in the corner and sat on the edge of the bed. It was so filthy, he could practically hear the cheers of a billion germs thinking they had just gone to heaven. He put a cigarette in his mouth and took a match from the eight-sided box. They still make these? he thought as he struck the match against the side.

At exactly two o’clock, Reseng called the phone number in the file.

“I’m inside. Room three oh three.”

The man on the other end said nothing for several long seconds. All Reseng heard was the unpleasant sound of the man breathing into the phone, then the dial tone. Reseng stared at the receiver. “Prick,” he muttered. He opened the window, looked out at the narrow alleys winding behind the train station, and lit another cigarette. The red-light district was a quiet place at two in the afternoon.

It took the woman over two hours to show up. As soon as she entered, she glanced indifferently at Reseng and said hello. She had the careless, conceited air typical of women who knew they were beautiful, along with a baby face, a tight little body, the kind of looks that would turn any man’s head, and something in her expression that was hard to pin down, like a faint, gloomy shadow hanging over her, which brought to his mind a picture on a calendar of a fallen ginkgo leaf.

“Take your clothes off,” she said.

She took off hers. It took her less than five seconds to strip off her dress, bra, and panties and stand naked in front of Reseng. He gawked at her. Her unusually large breasts on such a bony torso reminded him of the girls in Japanese porn comics. Her skin looked baby-soft.

He had no idea what had gone down inside the assemblyman’s room. But he couldn’t imagine that she’d actually had anything to do with his death. Her only crime was sucking the clammy, flaccid dicks of aging tycoons with a thing for underage girls. And there was no way she’d made much money from it. The old men would have shelled out a ton of cash to bed her, but the lion’s share would’ve gone to her pimp. She simply had bad luck. But in the end, even bad luck is just another part of life.

“Aren’t you going to get undressed?” she asked.

Reseng kept staring, saying nothing.

“Hurry up already. I’ve got places to be,” she said, clearly irritated.

She looked as arrogant as ever, despite her whiny voice. Without taking his eyes off of her, Reseng slowly slipped his hand inside his leather jacket. Which should he choose, the gun or the knife? Which one was less likely to startle her and make her scream or fly into a panic? When asked, most people said they were more afraid of knives than guns, which made no sense to him. But then, fear is never rational. Reseng chose the gun. Before he could pull it out, the woman’s face stiffened.

“May I put my clothes back on?” Her voice trembled.

“Why?”

“I don’t want to die naked.”

Her eyes met his. They held no trace of anger or hatred. Her weary eyes simply said that she’d learned too much about the world in too short a time; her vacant pupils said she was tired of feeling afraid and didn’t want to see anything anymore.

“You’re not going to die naked,” Reseng said.

But the woman didn’t move.

Reseng softened his tone. “Get dressed, please.”

She picked up her clothes from the floor, her hands shaking as she pulled up her dainty Mickey Mouse panties. When she was dressed, Reseng guided her to the bed by her shoulder and locked the door. The woman took a pack of Virginia Slims from her bag and tried to light one, but her hands shook so hard that she couldn’t get the lighter to work. Reseng pulled his Zippo from his pocket and lit it for her. She gave him a slight nod of thanks and took a deep drag, then turned her head and exhaled a plume of smoke in what seemed like an infinitely long sigh. He could tell she was making an effort to stay calm, as if she’d been practicing for this moment, but her thin shoulders were already trembling.

“I hate having marks on my body. Could you avoid leaving any?” she asked quietly.

She wasn’t begging for mercy. All she wanted was to die without any cuts or bruises. He suddenly wondered about Chu. What was it about this woman that had stopped Chu’s clock? Had her frail body filled him with sympathy? Had she reminded him too much of a girl in a Japanese porn video? Had the mysterious melancholy clouding her features aroused in him a misplaced sense of guilt? No. That’d be ridiculous. Chu wasn’t the kind of guy who would fuck up his life because of some cheap romantic notion.

“You hate having marks …”

Reseng slowly echoed her. The woman’s eyes flickered nervously. He found it hard to believe that she was more afraid of having marks on her body than of dying. Reseng gazed down at the floor for a moment before raising his head.

“You won’t have any marks.” He tried to keep his voice as level as possible.

A startled look came over her face. She seemed to have just figured out what the oversize bag in the corner was for. She must have pictured it, because her entire body began to shake.

“Are you putting me in that?”

Her voice had a nervous tremor, but she managed not to stutter.

Reseng nodded.

“Where will you take me? Are you going to leave my body at a garbage dump or in the forest?”

For a moment, Reseng wondered if he really had to tell her. He didn’t. But whether he did or not, it changed nothing.

“You won’t be buried in the forest or dumped in a landfill. You’ll be cremated at a facility. Though not, strictly speaking, legally.”

“Then no one will know I’m dead. There won’t be a funeral.”

Reseng nodded again. She’d toughed everything else out, but for some reason that made her burst into tears. Why make such a fuss about what’ll happen to your corpse when you’re facing imminent death? She seemed more worried about what she would look like after death than about the death itself. What a thing for someone her age to worry herself over.

She gritted her teeth and wiped her eyes with her palm. Then she fixed Reseng with a look that said she was not going to beg for her life or waste any more tears on someone like him.

“How are you going to kill me?”

Reseng was taken aback. Fifteen years as an assassin, and he had never once been asked that.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes,” she said flatly.

As per the plotter’s orders, he was going to break her neck. Snapping the slender neck of a woman who weighed no more than thirty-eight kilos would be a piece of cake. As long as she didn’t put up a fight, it would be quicker and less painful than might be imagined. But if she did struggle, she could end up with a broken vertebra jutting through the skin. Or writhing in agony for several long minutes until she finally suffocated from a blocked airway, fully conscious the whole time.

“How would you like to die?”

As soon as the question was out, Reseng felt like an ass. What kind of question was that? How would you like to die? It sounded like he was a waiter asking how she’d like her steak cooked. She lowered her head in thought. He could tell she wasn’t actually choosing right then and there, but was instead confirming a decision she had already made for herself.

“I have poison,” she said.

Reseng didn’t get it at first, and he repeated the words to himself: I. Have. Poison. So she’d already thought about suicide. And she’d chosen poison as her way out. He wasn’t surprised. Statistically, men usually chose guns or jumping to their deaths, whereas women preferred pills or hanging. Women tended to prefer a means of death that left their bodies undamaged. But, contrary to what they imagined, the kinds of poisons that were easy to purchase, like pesticides or hydrochloric acid, resulted in very long, very painful deaths, and had high rates of failure.

“It’s the least you could do,” she said, her eyes pleading.

Reseng avoided the woman’s gaze. Break her neck, stuff her in the bag, and get to Bear’s. That was his job. Plotters hated it when lowly assassins took it upon themselves to change the plot. It wasn’t about pride. The problem was that if the plot changed, then the people waiting at their various posts would need new cues, and everyone’s roles would get out of sync. If incriminating evidence got left behind or if things went sour, then someone else would have to die in order to cover it up. And sometimes that someone was you. Changing the assigned plot was not just a headache but a potential death sentence.

Reseng looked at the woman. She was still gazing at him, pleading—not for her life, but for this one last thing. Could he grant it to her? Should he? Reseng furrowed his brow.

If she took poison, it would remain in the ashes even after cremation. And if traces of her DNA were found in his car or on his clothes and poison was detected in a sample of her ashes, there would be compelling evidence of foul play. But that sort of thing happened only in the movies, and was rare in real life. Plotters weren’t perfectionists, they were just pricks. Poison, broken neck—it made no difference. The woman would be cremated either way, and her ashes would sink quietly to the bottom of a river.

“What kind of poison?” Reseng asked.

She took a packet from her purse. He held out his hand. She hesitated before giving it to him. He gave the cellophane packet a gentle shake and held it up to the light. There was a loose white powder inside.

“Cyanide?”

She nodded, her eyes never once leaving his.

“How much do you know about cyanide?”

She tipped her head to one side, as if she didn’t understand the question.

“I know you die if you swallow it.” Her voice sounded half daring and half annoyed. “What else is there to know?”

“Where’d you get it?”

“I stole it from a friend of mine who was planning to kill herself.”

Reseng smiled. To her, it probably looked like a smirk, but in truth it was closer to pity. His lips tended to curl whenever he didn’t know quite what to say.

“If this friend of yours bought it off the Internet or from a drug dealer, then there’s a good chance it’s fake. And if it is, you could have a real problem on your hands. But even if it is real, death by cyanide is not the romantic death you think it is. Nor will you die in seconds. I’m guessing you think this is one of those suicide pills that spies take to die instantly, but those contain liquid cyanide, not this solid stuff.”

Reseng flicked the cellophane packet onto the floor like a cigarette butt. She scrambled for it, panicked, as if it were precious to her, then looked up at him dubiously.

“It won’t kill me?”

“Two hundred and fifty milligrams is enough to kill most people. But it’s extremely painful. Your muscles get paralyzed, your tongue and throat burn, your organs melt, and it can take anywhere from minutes to hours until you eventually die of asphyxiation. Some people take longer, and some actually survive. Not only that, you don’t leave a very pretty corpse behind.”

The woman’s shoulders slumped. Her face filled with despair. She turned to the window; she’d stopped crying or even shaking. She just stared blankly at the sky, her eyes unfocused. Reseng checked his watch: 4:30. He had to get out of there before it got dark. Once the sun went down, the alleys would be crawling with prostitutes, their faces freshly painted, and johns drunk on booze and lust.

“Lucky for you, I have the perfect thing.”

Reseng gestured at the attaché case. The woman turned to look.

“Barbituric acid. Peaceful way to go. Doesn’t hurt like cyanide or rat poison, and won’t leave you looking messed up or ugly. It’ll be just like falling asleep. A scientist back in the mid-nineteenth century, Adolf von Baeyer, came up with barbiturates while working on sedatives and sleeping pills. He named it after his friend Barbara. It’s still used as a sedative. It’s also been used for hypnosis, as a tranquilizer, and even has hallucinogenic properties. Other drugs, like barbital and ruminol, were based on it. It’s used for euthanasia all over the world.”

The woman made a face at his long-winded explanation, but she nodded.

“I’ll give it to you if you answer something for me,” Reseng added. “Then you’ll get the peaceful death you want.”

She nodded again.

“Do you remember a tall man who was hired to kill you?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he let you live?”

She shifted her weight from side to side and pressed her hand to her forehead. As she recalled the events of that day, her expression kept changing from wonder to horror and back again.

“I honestly don’t know. He stared at me for almost half an hour and then left.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes. He just sat there quietly and looked at me.”

“He didn’t say anything?”

“He said, ‘Stay away from your regular places. Don’t go back. If you’re really lucky, you might just survive.’ That’s what he told me.”

Reseng nodded.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

“He’s still alive, but probably not for long. Once you’re on the list, your chances are shot.”

“Is he going to die because of me?”

“Maybe. But not only because of you.”

Reseng checked his watch again. He gave the woman a look to indicate that time was up. She didn’t react. He opened the briefcase and took out a pill bottle and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

She watched him silently, then asked, “If you cremate me in secret, no one will know I’m dead, right? My mother will spend the rest of her life waiting for me to come home.”

Reseng paused in the middle of taking the pills out of the bottle. The woman started crying. He was relieved she wasn’t crying loudly. He waited for her tears to stop. Was it her quiet weeping that had stopped Chu’s clock? After five minutes, he rested his hand on the woman’s shoulder to tell her they couldn’t delay any longer. She brushed his hand away in irritation.

“Can I write my mother a letter?”

Reseng gave her a pained look.

She added, “It doesn’t matter if she never gets it.”

Her eyes were still brimming with tears. Reseng checked his watch again and nodded. She took a pen and a small appointment book out of her bag and began to write on one of the pages.

Dear Mom,

I’m sorry. I’m sorry to Dad in heaven, too. I meant to save up money and go to school and get married, but it didn’t work out. I’m sorry I died before you. Don’t worry about me. Dying this way isn’t so bad. The world’s a rotten place anyway.

A tear fell on the word heaven, blurring the ink. She signed it, then tore the page out and handed it to Reseng.

“Pretty handwriting,” he said.

What a dumb thing to say. Reseng had no idea why he’d said it. The woman put the appointment book back into her bag. He assumed she was reaching for a handkerchief next to wipe away her tears, but to his surprise she took out a makeup pouch. She gave him another look to indicate that she needed a little more time. He raised his hand to tell her to go ahead. During the more than ten minutes she spent carefully reapplying her makeup, Reseng stood and stared, one eyebrow raised. What sort of vanity was this? She finished touching up her face and put her makeup away. The click of the bag closing sounded unusually loud.

“Will you stay with me until I’m gone? I’m a little scared,” she said with a smile.

Reseng nodded and offered her the pills. She stared at them for several seconds before taking them from his palm and swallowing them with the glass of whiskey he poured for her.

Reseng tried to help her to lie down, but she pushed him away and stretched out on the bed by herself. She rested her hands on her chest and stared up at the ceiling. It didn’t take long for the hallucinations to start.

“I see a red wind. And a blue lion. Right next to it is a cute rainbow-colored polar bear. Is that heaven?”

“Yeah, sure, that’s heaven. You’re on your way there now.”

“Thanks for saying that. You’re going to hell.”

“Then I guess we won’t be seeing each other again. Because you’re definitely going to heaven, and I’m definitely going to hell.”

She let out a small laugh. A single tear spilled from her smiling eyes.

Chu held out another two years after the woman died.

Like the sly jackal that he was, like the insane thorn in the side of the plotters that he was, Chu stayed one step ahead of the frenzied, persistent hunt. Rumors spread about trackers and assassins falling prey to Chu, too blinded by the promise of reward money to watch their own tails while tailing him, and those same rumors got twisted up and blown out of proportion and kept the denizens of the meat market entertained for some time. Reseng wasn’t surprised. Those third-rate hired guns and aging bounty hunters accustomed to nothing more challenging than chasing down runaway prostitutes were no match for Chu and never had been. But there was no way of knowing whether any of the rumors floating like wayward soap bubbles around the meat market were true. Most deaths in their world, of trackers and assassins alike, never surfaced. At any rate, maybe the rumors were true, because Chu could not be caught.

About a year after he’d gone underground, Chu went on the offensive. He hunted down several plotters and killed them, along with several contractors and brokers. At one point, he sauntered right into the midst of the meat market and smashed up a contractor’s office. But the plotters he targeted had nothing to do with the botched call girl job. In fact, they were closer to amateurs—low-rate plotters hired by cheap contractors for onetime gigs. No one understood why Chu picked them, other than the fact that he stood no chance of getting anywhere near the people who actually operated the gears of the plotting world.

After Chu trashed the office and stole a ledger that he couldn’t possibly have had any use for, a group of men turned up in Old Raccoon’s library. One of the men was Hanja. Though he looked like any other boss of a security company, he ran a corporate-style contracting firm, making money not only from government agencies and corporations but also from whatever he could gain from the black market. The meat-market dealers were nothing but small-time hoodlums to Hanja, so the fact that they were at the same meeting showed just how rattled and pissed off Chu had made everyone. Hanja sat on the couch, looking like he’d just taken a bite out of a giant turd.

When Old Raccoon took his seat, the meat-market dealers all started talking at once.