Yin Yang Tattoo (34 page)

One of our team, the young one who'd done the airport stunt with the golf balls, was down, eyes open and unblinking, a thin line of blood running from forehead gash to floor.

Mr Cho held a plot of ground that he had made his own, four broken bodies lying around him like litter. A writhing tangle crossed between us: Mr Cheung going hand-to-bat with two opponents. Before I could react Mr Cho picked one of them out with an axe kick to the face and battered the other in the kidneys with an elbow strike. The goon twisted in agony, and Mr Cheung put him down with a straight-arm to the throat.

Fast movement. Two men ran for the office door that four guys had come out of just minutes before.

‘Mr Cho,' I pointed as I broke into a hobbling run, trying to ignore loud screams from various points in my body.

One guy fiddled with the door handle. The other faced up to me, bat high and ready. Naz had to be beyond that door, so there was no way these two were getting through it before I did. I was so pissed off that all I could see was the door. Mistake. A full swing of the bat took me high on the upper arm and bounced me sideways.

Numbing pain froze the arm long enough for me to fear for what came next, until Mr Cho arrived in mid-air with a flying front kick that caught the goon in the sternum. He fell straight back and his head rapped concrete with an eggshell crack. The second thug, face wide with panic, still struggled with the door. My friend and mentor flew at him, the thug side-stepped, and as Mr Cho blew the door open with both feet, he clothes-lined the other guy with a forearm to the side of the head. I followed Mr Cho in.

Naz leaned forward in a padded armchair, wrists and fingers bound with heavy tape, ankles taped tight on either side of a solid concrete block.

‘Hi, Mr Cho.'

After a strained attempt at a smile, she turned to me and her gaze cooled.

‘You took your fucking time, Brodie.'

We were an hour into the trip to Seoul before Naz even looked at me.

‘Schwartz left about an hour before you showed up. He said that whether or not he saw me again was up to you. I don't know what he was on about.'

I was getting good at summarising the huge GDR con game, how it was vital to the survival of the debt-ridden K-N Group, and how my threat to bail out of the scam cost Miss Hong her life.

‘Schwartz gave me until midnight to hand myself in to the police and keep quiet about the GDR, or you were dead. Not in as many words, but that was the message.'

‘How did you find me?'

‘I was there a few days ago, shooting pictures of the fake factory. We could hardly hear ourselves think for the noise of fighter jets flying overhead. When I spoke to him tonight on the phone, the background noise was enough to tell me where you were.' I didn't tell her that I remained uncertain until the moment I set eyes on her, but typical Naz, she read it somewhere in my body language.

‘Enough to take a chance on not handing yourself in before the deadline?'

‘We did alright, didn't we?'

‘Mr Cho and his friends did.'

Mr Cho was in the seat beside the driver, eyes front, face intermittently bleached white by lights from oncoming vehicles. His expression gave nothing away.

The rear of the van was unfurnished. Six of us lay spread over the ribbed floor, backs to thin metal walls that buckled and flexed with the roar and rumble of passing traffic.

The warehouse gamble had been kind to us. Mr Cho of course looked unscathed, while the rest of us wore only a variety of scrapes and bruises. The young guy who was knocked out sat in the corner. He had a cut on his forehead and one eye swollen shut, but his moody silence spoke loudly of a dented pride hurting worst of all. He had put everything on the line the same as his friends had done, and I felt for him.

The Doppler-effect wail of a truck horn scared me from a shallow sleep busy with confused thoughts. I ached all over, especially around the shoulder that the last thug had caught with his bat, the same shoulder Naz was now using as a pillow. I tried to move my legs, but they stayed where they were, knees drawn up in front of me as if all lines of communication between brain and limbs were cut. I pushed at my thighs with the palms of my hands and waited for the agony of circulation regained. While excruciating pain tore through my leg muscles, I tried to recall the final sliver of the dream sequence that was interrupted by the wailing truck horn. Something to do with last night and how and why it happened. I had fallen asleep thinking how fortunate we were, which sparked another line of thought. Were we clever and lucky – or just plain lucky?

The threat to Naz – and to the rest of us when we got to her – was real enough, but the way things worked out owed more to the presence of Mr Cho and his men than even I had previously thought, because the set of circumstances that led us to Cholla Province left too many questions unanswered.

Why was Naz held so far out of town – and why was it so easy for me to work out her location? Schwartz had played me like a grifter, setting me up with sufficient clues to convince me I was being clever, when in truth he led me by the nose all the way to the warehouse. Even the timing of his call was probably calculated to let me hear military jets roaring overhead. I was duped.

The misplaced conviction that I had discovered something vital nullified my immediate threat to the GDR and forced me out of my unknown place of sanctuary and into a zone where Schwartz held control.

He even gave me enough time by throwing in an arbitrary midnight deadline. Why give me hours, when I could walk out of any building anywhere in Korea and inside five minutes turn myself over to the nearest policeman?

The unanswered questions did not end there. Why surround one small woman with a hardened squad of mercenaries? The conclusion was shockingly obvious. Naz was the bait and I was the target. I was
meant
to find Naz – and the goons were there to make sure we both disappeared. Mr Cho and his men were not the only reason we were safe. They were they only reason we were still
alive
.

There was mumbling in my ear, and Naz sat up and rubbed at her face. The pain surges in my legs at last receded to a dull ache, and I stretched them into a narrow gap between two prone track-suited figures.

‘You alright?'

‘Yeah. Sorry I was such a grouch.'

‘I deserved it.'

‘I know you did.' In the gloom, I saw her face rise in a half-smile.

I remembered.
The videotape.

‘Did Mr Cho get a videotape to you before Schwartz's boys picked you up?'

‘Yes, but I didn't even get to see it because the camera battery was dead. Schwartz was delighted to get his hands on it.'

‘I really messed up there. It was the tape that put you in danger, but I thought you could work out why it was so important.' I explained about fixing a video camera in my hotel room to film the fun with Miss Hong. Naz shook her head like a disbelieving mother.

‘Boys and their toys.'

‘I know. But this one could have been important, and I was banking on it helping me somehow.'

Mr Cho turned around to lean over the seat back. ‘We can see it when we get back to Seoul.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I knew it was important, so I copied the tape to DVD before I gave it to Naz.'

If I had the strength to raise my arms, I could have hugged him. ‘Why didn't you tell me?'

He fired me a look of reproach. ‘What was the purpose of the trip to Cholla?'

I thought about that for a second. He was right, of course. ‘To protect Naz.'

The tape was important, but our priority was to make sure that Naz was safe. And now, thanks to Mr Cho and his friends, both were safe and well. I lifted the aching arm and wrapped it around her shoulders. She didn't resist.

 

It was gone four o'clock in the morning when the driver pulled into a quiet lane that backed onto a line of houses hiding behind high walls topped with broken glass. Mr Cho murmured to the driver who sounded the horn, three short beeps, irregularly spaced. The neighbours must have loved these visits. I followed his gaze to a video camera high on a post next to a heavy metal gate hung with gleaming tiaras of razor wire. The camera pivoted and swept the alley in both directions before the gate pulled aside with a low electronic hum.

I shook hands with the rest of the crew and thanked them as profusely as my language skills allowed. They waved me away as if I was making a fuss over nothing. Mr Cho spoke quietly to his friends before the van drove off and left the three of us facing the open gates.

A door at the other side of a tidy courtyard opened. Mr Cho led us forward and shook the hand of a small man of about sixty. He wore an immaculately pressed yellow satin shirt and navy trousers with a beltline so swollen it looked in danger of letting go at any moment. Mr Cho made the introductions.

‘Alec, Naz, this is Mr Ryu. Mr Ryu is my good friend. We are safe here.' Behind us, the gate hummed shut.

The house was decorated with no expense spared and zero taste applied. Gilded mirrors and reproduction European landscapes competed for space on flocked floral walls. Eye-wateringly ugly carpets changed from room to room, and a stuffed deer stood sentry in the hallway, red glass eyes sparkling in the flickering light from fake candles sprouting from candelabras that would have made Liberace blush.

All I wanted was to view the video. Mr Cho had another word with his friend, who led the way to a living room with the biggest home TV screen I ever saw.

I wanted to watch it alone but instead found myself with friends who had put everything on the line for me, and a stranger who had opened his home to the nation's most wanted man. Under the circumstances, it might have been churlish to ask them to leave the room. Mr Ryu pointed to a DVD player, and pushed a drinks trolley shaped like an antique globe to a strategic point within our reach. I poured a large single malt and hit the play button, deeply unsure about all this. Naz was bemused.

‘All the way to Korea for my first ever bachelor porno party.'

What played out in front of us took place only days before yet might as well have been in another lifetime. On the second night Miss Hong came to my room, while she showered, I had set the little camera to record and clipped it to a curtain rod. The wide angle lens took in almost the entire room. In the bottom right the television flickered, mute. A king-sized bed dominated the left side of the frame and beyond that was the bathroom and the door to the corridor, safety chain engaged. Onscreen, I paced the floor until backlit steam followed Miss Hong from the bathroom. Her hair was clipped high and she wore only a thick white towel tied above her small breasts. She looked stunning.

Even played at double speed what happened next made for sordid viewing. In the past I had made these tapes for innocent fun, to be viewed with a partner by my side, inspiration for more of the same. Now I watched myself as I cavorted and giggled and had sex with an attractive young woman, and all I could think of was that beautiful body, mutilated and bloated, snagged on debris in the frigid waters of the Han River.

Naz sucked on a chilled white wine, face blank. Mr Cho and Mr Ryu said nothing, the clink of bottle neck on crystal the only intrusion in the silent porno flick that played out in front of us at double speed.

A welcome break appeared in the onscreen action. After a long session of sex broken up by periods spent lapping Scotch out of Miss Hong's belly button, I got up, visibly pissed, and weaved an unsteady path to the bathroom where I automatically closed the door behind me.

I thumbed the button that slowed the recording back to real time.

Miss Hong took two tall glasses from above the mini bar. She poured generous measures of whisky over ice and filled the glasses with Coca-Cola while her free hand rummaged in her clasp bag. In full view of the camera she cracked two capsules and quickly stirred their powdery contents into one of the drinks.

When I came out of the bathroom she was waiting, a drink to her lips, the other held out to me. The camera's microphone picked up the dialogue but I wasn't listening. I didn't have to. The memory of what happened next was sharpened by equal measures of regret and disbelief.

‘What is this?'

‘Whisky-coke.' She leaned forward and with one hand she clinked glasses. Her other hand dipped gently between my legs. How well I remembered soft fingertips cooled by chilled glass.

‘Cheers.' She moved in to kiss me. I smelled the sex on her breath and the fine sheen of soap and sweat that coated her powdery-smooth skin. She ran her hot tongue around my mouth before pulling away and knocking back her drink. After waiting while I did the same she led me back to bed.

In the discomfort of Mr Ryu's ugly armchair, I leaned my head back and stared at the ceiling. The soundtrack led me through my last few minutes with Miss Hong, and which came back to me with shocking clarity. We tumbled around the room with renewed vigour, changing positions frequently, until at last we pulled apart. Miss Hong leaned back on the pillows and plucked the whisky bottle from the bedside cabinet, free hand pointing theatrically at her stomach. Three sheets to the wind I did what I always do when I'm drunk. I reached for more drink. I took the bottle and leaned forward to fill the yin yang recess in the middle of her beautiful flat tummy. Miss Hong giggled while she lounged back, her hair, moist with sweat, fanning out over soft down pillows.