Don't Test Me
"Before I met her... your wife was in what I'd call a... precarious situation. But I loved her — I loved Ji Hye-in so much that I did everything in my power to pull her out of that life. I thought I had saved her. Apparently, I was wrong."
"The hell are you talking about? Saved her from what? Who fell where? She fall in a hole or something?"
"Your wife was living as a sub. She was sinking deeper and deeper into it. So I pulled her out."
Yoo Kang-soo's face went blank. Then he opened his mouth.
"Living as a sub? What the hell is that?"
He'd been the one to bring it up, but now that Yoo Kang-soo was asking him point-blank, Yeom Seong-bong couldn't give a straight answer. He hemmed and hawed.
"I asked you what 'living as a sub' means. And what exactly did you save her from?"
"I'm sorry. That's... difficult for me to say out loud. It would be better if you heard it from your wife directly. The Ji Hye-in you know — your wife — she has another side to her. One that's very different from the woman you think you know."
Yoo Kang-soo let out a long, slow breath.
"Did you call me out here to play twenty questions? I'm a busy man. You dragged me out here to spew this horseshit?"
Yoo Kang-soo had always believed that losing your temper meant you'd already lost. But in a situation like this, it was hard not to feel the heat rising.
"Absolutely not. I just... I can't give up on Ji Hye-in like this. That's why I came. You and Ji Hye-in don't belong together. I think a divorce is the right thing to do."
"Unbelievable..."
Yoo Kang-soo clicked his tongue, at a loss for words.
"They say the guilty party always shouts the loudest. This is unbelievable. Adultery isn't even a crime anymore, so you can fuck a married woman and then sit here talking like this without a shred of shame."
He could feel himself getting too worked up, and made a conscious effort to cool down. He'd started taking blood pressure medication the year before, so he tried to steer clear of anything that would get his blood boiling. He worked out hard and figured he managed his health reasonably well, but the honest truth was that the older he got, the more the weight piled on and the more his gut stuck out. There was no fighting it. On top of that, he had a touch of hypertension that ran in the family, so after talking it over with his doctor, he'd gone on blood pressure pills starting last year.
"Whether I get a divorce or not is none of your damn business. Let me tell you an old story. Hmm... let's see..."
Yoo Kang-soo counted on his fingers, then opened his mouth again.
"Exactly eleven years ago. I was thirty-six at the time."
"A murder took place in the basement of an apartment building used as officers' quarters. An army captain and another captain's wife were brutally killed. The captain was hacked with a military sword and bled out. The other captain's wife was killed the same way. But you know who did it? Or rather, why? It was the captain's Korea Military Academy classmate. His closest friend. They lived in the same officers' housing. Both of them had families — a married man and a married woman."
"Simply put, he was sleeping with his best friend's wife. When the woman's husband found out, he took a knife and butchered his own friend — the one who'd been with his wife — and his own wife along with him."
"But here's the thing. If that's all there was to it, it'd be a dime-a-dozen case. A crime of passion. Those are everywhere. But that wasn't the whole story. When I was a military police investigator, I saw dozens of murder scenes. I even worked crime scene investigations. And of all the murders I ever saw, this one was the most horrific. I don't think I've ever seen anything more brutal."
"Think about it. Who even goes into the basement of an officers' apartment building? The superintendent, maybe. Otherwise, almost nobody has any reason to go down there. The person who reported the crime was the young captain himself — the one who'd killed his old classmate and friend, and the wife who'd been sleeping with that friend. He committed the crime and then turned himself in. At the time, the military brass hushed the whole thing up. It never made it into the press at all."
"You know what that crime scene looked like? When the military police arrived after the confession call, the woman was still breathing, and the man hadn't been dead long — his blood was still warm. The floor around both of them was a sea of bright red blood."
"With a military sword, he'd cut off every single finger and toe from both the man and the woman. Not one left. No — wait. Before he cut off the fingers and toes, he ripped out all the fingernails and toenails first. Then he cut off the fingers and toes. And he sliced off both the man's and the woman's nipples with the blade. Cut off their ears. Cut off their noses."
"He never touched the eyes, though. That officer who'd laid his hands on his best friend's wife, and that wife who'd been cheating with her husband's closest friend — they'd been meeting in secret for two whole years, apparently. That came out later. The officer who did it had prepared everything meticulously. He kidnapped them one at a time, took them down to the apartment basement, tied their hands and feet, gagged them, and then tortured them in the most sadistic ways imaginable, killing those two adulterers slowly. Painfully."
"Nails ripped out. Fingers and toes all severed. Nipples sliced off. Noses cut off. Ears cut off. And there were small wounds all over their bodies. He'd carved the flesh away little by little, careful not to let them bleed out too fast. He really did it just enough that they wouldn't die instantly — carving away the flesh bit by bit, making them die in agony."
"The man was determined to have died just before the military police arrived. The woman died the moment they got her to the military hospital ER. One of the female nursing officers at the hospital took one look at the woman's body and went into shock. She actually fainted."
Yoo Kang-soo continued in a voice that was utterly calm.
"You know why I'm telling you this story? It's because I finally understand how that young captain felt. She was the mother of his children. Back then, I couldn't understand it. I thought, why not just kill them with a single stroke? What was the point of putting them through hours of extreme agony like that? That's what I thought in my thirties. But now I get it. I understand how that captain felt. Why he took that knife and carved them up piece by piece. I think I finally understand."
"........"
At Yoo Kang-soo's words, Yeom Seong-bong lowered his head and couldn't offer a single reply.
The very next day, Yoo Kang-soo left his wife Ji Hye-in behind as she saw him off, and set out on a two-day business trip to the provinces.
One of the most maddening parts of the job was watching those seemingly simple, honest old folks out in the countryside pull insurance fraud. And it happened more often than anyone would guess. In the end, though, almost all of them got dragged into civil court and had to pay back every last bit of the money they'd collected under false pretenses. Only then would they wail and grovel, begging for forgiveness — but those tears were crocodile tears, every last one. Yoo Kang-soo had spent the last four years watching that same performance until he was sick of it.
After wrapping up the first day's work, Yoo Kang-soo stepped into a small raw-fish restaurant near the motel where he was staying and started in on the soju. Drinking quietly by himself, he pulled out his phone and began searching for what Yeom Seong-bong had meant by living as a sub.
The affair had already happened. That was a fact. So rushing wouldn't change a damn thing. Yoo Kang-soo decided to take it slow.
He'd told Yeom Seong-bong about that brutal murder from a decade ago, but the truth was, Yoo Kang-soo had no intention of actually doing anything like that. Because there was more to the story.
The captain who'd butchered those two people with a knife was sentenced to life in prison at a military tribunal, but in the end, he went insane behind bars. Yoo Kang-soo had heard he'd developed a psychiatric disorder and been transferred to a mental hospital. He'd tried to kill himself constantly until his mind finally broke, and he became a complete wreck. That was the rumor. An elite officer from the Korea Military Academy — and that was how his life had ended. In ruin.
The children left behind still hadn't started school. Those bright, sharp little faces... the truth was, Yoo Kang-soo still couldn't forget them. How far gone must a man have been, to leave his own kids behind and commit a murder like that? Back then, he honestly hadn't understood it. But now... he thought he understood, at least a little.