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.
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