Yin Yang Tattoo (23 page)

Resistance was not an option. My feet were off the floor, thighs locked between the cops' legs and the sharp, tiled edge of the tub. My hands, cuffed behind me, pointed to the ceiling, and two big mitts on the back of my neck held me firmly in place. Blue water bubbled with what little breath my lungs still held. Within seconds I was in trouble and forgot that resistance was futile. I tried kicking, tried to twist my shoulders and tried to wriggle my neck free from their grasp. Useless.

The blue receded and I was on my knees by the tub and heaving desperately for air, Kwok standing over me. He stepped back and his boys wrenched me to my feet. It occurred to me that this was time to pay attention. No problem, I was ready to listen. I was ready to talk, too. I could tell them things, maybe not what they wanted to hear, but right now I could talk for Scotland. Kwok stood in silence, took a breath as if to speak, and flicked his head towards the tub. An instant later I was swallowing water.

This time they held me down for longer. I tried to relax, to burn as little air as possible. I forced my thoughts elsewhere, away from the water and the questions and the video camera and the tape, but from there they jumped straight to Mr Cho. The trail that Kwok was following led directly to Mr Cho.

I could not let that happen. Korean courts take an understandably dim view of foreigners accused of murdering their women, and any evidence that Miss Hong and I had been together would surely be twisted to imply guilt. Slipping the camera and tape out of the hotel had been an act of pure self-preservation, but passing it to Mr Cho had been thoughtlessly selfish. Now, the buck had to stop with me, and not with Mr Cho. Not after everything he had done for me. Hands heaved me clear of the water and I sucked air into complaining lungs just in time to be plunged back beneath the chilled surface.

 

Korea in the late eighties was a very different place, one ruled by lightly polished military dictatorships who maintained illegitimate authority with a network of security forces as much set up to control the locals as anyone else. Favourite of all the bogeys regularly dragged out to keep South Koreans controlled by fear was the threat of infiltration from Communist North Korea, or its agents. However exaggerated it might have been, the propaganda was so pervasive that it coated an entire society with suspicion of the next man on the street. Any person who stuck out from the crowd stood the chance of being reported as a spy. Twenty-four-hour telephone hotlines made doing so as easy as picking up the phone and dialling 113. Reports could be anonymous and dialled in from any public telephone, making it a favourite revenge move among enemies settling personal scores unrelated to North Korea.

The powerful military department that dealt with such reports went by a variety of names over the decades, but was commonly referred to as the Korean CIA. The KCIA were the SS, the Stasi, the Ton Ton Macoute and the KGB rolled into one. Since the government had grown from the military, and since the KCIA's activities were regulated only by the military, they operated virtually free of restriction. With unfettered powers and immunity from legal process, the KCIA was a force with a bad name that was completely deserved.

The last thing
any
Korean wanted was the KCIA casting a shadow on his door, and back then Mr Cho dealt with just that on my account. I was living in his family's apartment for a few weeks while I trained at his
dojang
, the only foreigner in the entire middle-class neighbourhood. Since I went everywhere with a camera on my shoulder, it was perhaps inevitable that some would-be patriot fingered me for a spy.

Years passed before Mr Cho's wife told me about the gruff men in bad suits flashing dreaded ID cards at their apartment door, demanding to know everything about the suspicious foreigner who enjoyed sanctuary in their home. Only then did I hear that Mr Cho laughed them out of his home – and never once mentioned their visit to me.

I owed Mr Cho. He didn't need a billionaire on his back, and if I could help it, I wasn't going to give him one.

 

Three, maybe four slaps bounced my face from side to side until finally I cleared the airways in one instinctual explosion and retched the watery contents of my innards all over Big Cop. I sucked greedily at the air, still coughing, vision blurred. Kwok allowed me a few seconds.

‘Unless you cooperate this will get even more unpleasant. I ask you one more time: Where are the video camera and tape?'

I shook my head. Kwok shook his, and the grip on the back of my neck tightened once more.

‘London. The video camera is in London. The video camera is in London.'

I said it over and over to myself when my upper body was pushed hard underwater and, between ever-lengthening submersions, out loud, time and again. I had to outlast them, give them nothing but the one answer they didn't want to hear, and do it for long enough to plant the merest embryonic doubt in their minds. Never mind that I wasn't telling the truth. A good liar knows it is not about the lies you tell – it is how convincingly you tell them.

I might have been the one wearing handcuffs and close to death by drowning, but I still held a trump card. Kwok had messed up. The thrashing with the telephone books meant that I would be pissing blood for a week, but after the switch to the water treatment they gave away more than they learned and put me back in control. The flash of panic that crossed Kwok's face when his boys pulled me back from near-drowning was all I needed to know. I knew how far he was prepared to go, and that wasn't far enough. At least for now, the prisoner dying in custody was not an option, so I didn't have to endure anything worse than they had already done, and even that for just long enough to convince them that they might be barking up the wrong tree.

Not that I had any alternatives. I was boxed into a corner of my own devising. In the week since I got here, with every last move I had lost or thrown away almost everything that mattered. Being charged with Miss Hong's murder would be the end. The end of the assignment. The end of any hope of ever seeing a job fee that would delay the inevitable bankruptcy. Now that I had brought his family into the firing line, almost certainly the end of a valued friendship with Bobby; and the end of any tantalising hope that Jung-hwa and I might somehow survive this mess in one piece. Murder was a capital offence, so even if I struck lucky I could have life in Korean prisons to look forward to. Right now, not one thing I could tell Kwok would make the slightest bit of difference.

Face down in an oversized bathtub, ears roaring, arms contorted upwards, lungs folded in on themselves, I struggled to convince myself that the screw-ups had gone far enough. From now on I had to think of Mr Cho, and how I couldn't, I
wouldn't
bring any of this shit to bear on his family.

London. The video camera never left London.

I awoke to the concerned scrutiny of uniformed paramedics and the antiseptic coolness of bottled oxygen, and I knew that for now I had won the battle, if not the war. I lay on a hard vinyl sofa in the office of a senior cop whose photographs covered three walls. A saline drip fed a catheter buried deep in the crook of my left arm and a wire ran from a clothes-peg-like clip on my index finger to a digital read-out that beeped reassuringly in time to my pulse. The electronic life signal was steady, if slow.

When I opened my eyes again I was alone, and wondered for a moment if it had all been a nightmare, but a tiny disc of band aid inside my left elbow and a fading ridge on my forefinger confirmed the vision of paramedics. Bolts of pain arcing around my midriff told me the rest was real enough. As if he had been keeping a remote eye on me, Kwok came into the room. Chang followed, hands in pockets, grave expression on his face. He spoke first.

‘Detective Kwok still thinks you are involved in the murder of the prostitute.'

‘So?' I didn't sit up. I wasn't sure I could.

‘But he is prepared to let you go for the time being.'

‘That's big of him.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Apart from a free admission on my part that I slept with Miss Hong on two occasions there is nothing to connect me to anything that might have happened to her. Despite the torture he doesn't have a single reason for keeping me here.'

‘I think he might disagree,' said Chang.

‘Won't he speak unless you tell him to? Why don't you push his buttons and see if they still work?'

Kwok remained blank, but I knew that he must be raging. Chang gave him a tiny shake of the head.

‘Due to the importance of the situation affecting K-N Group, Detective Kwok will release you into my care. You would do well to remember that we hired you to do a job. One that remains of the utmost importance to my company, if not to the entire Korean economy. John Lee will pick you up at your hotel tomorrow at eight.' He started for the door.

‘Hold on a minute.'

Chang gave me a ‘what now' look.

‘I need money.'

‘Detective Kwok will see you back to the hotel.'

‘I don't mean a fucking taxi fare, I mean
real
cash money. I've been spending my own ever since I got this assignment, and now I've run out of petty cash to pay
your
costs. If this job is so important, how come you won't even meet my day-to-day expenses? The hotel is pushing me to settle a bill that
you
should have taken care of by now.'

Chang looked at me as if playing for time before he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a Chanel wallet that was fat, not with cash, but with bankers' cheques, or
supyo,
just as good as the real thing but not nearly so grubby. He flicked through the cheques until he found what he wanted. Brandishing it between fingertips like he was thinking about tipping a maître d', he let it fall to my chest.

‘John Lee will have a receipt for you to sign.' He turned on his heel again and left me holding the
supyo
for one million Korean
won
. Whoopy-doo. Just over five hundred pounds Sterling – and the bastard had again side-stepped the unpaid hotel bill.

Small Cop drew the short straw and had to drive me back to the Hyatt. I hobbled and winced my way out of the police station and into the back seat of the same beat-up Hyundai. We made the trip in silence, and at the other end I climbed out, leaving the car door wide, forcing him to get out and walk around to close it. That would teach the little bastard not to beat up on me with a telephone book.

At the front desk, after checking that Manager Mr Park was nowhere in sight, I changed the
supyo
for cash, ignored the stunned stares at my torn shirt and water-damaged trousers, and at the front desk picked up a telephone message, which simply read,
‘Call me. J.'

I exchanged a note for coins and called Jung-hwa's mobile from a public phone that nestled in a cleft between two potted palms, and hung up when the call was re-routed to a voicemail box. Anyone can listen in on voicemail messages and I was running out of friends to drop in the shit. That assumed Jung
was
a friend, but right now I was hanging onto every friendship I had, real or imaginary.

Getting back to a room that was not only empty but tidy came as a double surprise. Notch up one more gigantic debt to deluxe hotel housekeeping. For the first time in days, I had some money in my pocket, and since I wanted to keep it there, I called down to Room Service for French onion soup, a Korean omelette and fried rice, plus three litres of still mineral water and a bottle of painkillers. I ordered the water and the painkillers immediately, the rest to be brought up in an hour. Moving slowly around the room I disconnected three telephones, emptied the entire selection of bath salts and bubble mixture into the tub, jammed a hand towel in the overflow drainhole and ran the hot water full blast. A few minutes later the first of the Room Service orders arrived. Two bottles of water went into the mini-bar fridge and the last came with me into the bathroom, where I swallowed six painkillers, twice the recommended maximum dosage, and one more for good luck. If six or seven wasn't perfectly safe, no way the pharmaceutical giant's lawyers would dare advise you to take three.

I stripped in front of the bathroom mirrors, gingerly picking at my ragged shirt and slowly peeling still-damp trousers over bruised hips. The whole of my abdomen was angry and hot to the touch, skin taut with tissue damage, the first dark inflections of bruising working their way to the surface. I fingered every inch of ribcage that I could reach, breathing in as deeply as possible, holding the breaths until I could contain them no longer and exhaling in single explosive bursts of air. If any ribs were cracked I would be writhing on the floor, but as it was, I only felt as if I had been run over by a herd of cattle. My throat smarted from all the throwing up and my lungs were as bruised as the rest of me, but so long as the kidneys weren't too badly affected I would get over it before too long. I had come out of full-contact Tae Kwon-do tournaments feeling worse than this and recovered soon enough. Never mind that I was fifteen years younger and much fitter.