A Bad Man, a Pitiful Man
It had been a while since I last set foot in Korea.
This time I hadn't come alone. Maximus was with me, and so was IS-1.
Maximus had already had a Turkish passport made while we were in Türkiye. To settle the visa problem for both of them, I registered the pair as employees of Sahara Gold and had business visas issued in their names. I flew first class, Maximus took business, and IS-1 rode economy. We left Cairo and touched down at Incheon Airport.
The first thing I did in Korea was secure lodging. I'd brought the two of them along just in case, but I had no intention of hauling them around with me. IS-1 was unmistakably Arab, and Maximus, nearly two meters tall, turned every head in the street. I booked a business hotel in Myeongdong, right in the middle of Seoul, and left them there.
With that handled, I headed for the villa I'd just bought.
The new building in Junggae-dong, Nowon-gu, didn't look bad from the outside. Six stories: a large owner's unit on the top floor, and three households on each level from the second through the fifth. Thirteen units in all, counting the owner's.
My mother had taken the owner's unit at the very top. At roughly thirteen hundred square feet, it was more than enough for a person living alone, and because it sat on the top floor, a neatly kept terrace opened off both the living room and the master bedroom.
"Not a bad house."
"Crooks or not, they built the place properly. Your uncle says he never had a lick of trouble with the house while he lived here."
"The office is in Jongno anyway. Maybe I should sell the new-town apartment and move over here."
I'd tossed it out in passing. My mother bit.
"Would you?"
I'd only said it because I expected to be living overseas for a good while yet, and saw no point in buying a house I didn't need. One look at the hopeful face she made, and I knew I'd slipped. Thirty-five, and already a man who'd been married and divorced once—I had no desire to live under my mother's nagging on top of that.
"No. I misspoke. Forget I said it."
"Oh, don't be like that. Why leave a perfectly good house sitting empty? Just move in. Stop throwing money away for nothing."
"Ah—no. I'll handle that myself. Oh, look at the time. I've got somewhere to be. I'll head out."
"What? Where are you going all of a sudden?"
"Friends. Old classmates. Don't wait up. Go to bed. I'll let myself in."
I got out of there fast. Cold sweat crept down my back. Magic let me shrug off most threats these days, but I still hadn't picked up a spell for immunity to nagging.
I let out a sigh of relief, got behind the wheel, and drove toward the meeting place.
Inspector Choi's desk, Seoul Metropolitan Investigation Unit.
He was asleep with his chair tipped back when Detective Han So-hee came up and dropped a notebook onto the desk in front of him.
Thud.
"What!"
Inspector Choi jerked upright, startled. Han So-hee looked down at him, smiling.
"Taking it a little too easy, aren't you, senior?"
"What? What is it now?"
"Nothing much. The man you've been dying to meet walked into the country on his own two feet, and you're about to sleep right through it."
"Dying to meet him? Who?"
Han So-hee set a single fax sheet on the desk, as if someone had just handed it to her.
"Kang Chung-sik. He flew in the day before yesterday."
"What? Kang Chung-sik? Where is he now?"
"How would I know that much? We're not tailing him. His mother moved to Nowon-gu, so he's probably over that way."
"Is that right."
Inspector Choi sorted his thoughts for a moment, then pulled out his investigation notebook and opened it. On the page, names branched out from Kang Chung-sik at the center.
Spouse — Go Yumi — MISSING
Superior at the company — Park Dongseon — MISSING
Egyptian local hire + one friend — MISSING
Four missing persons, as far as anyone knew. Not one of them had been found. And Inspector Choi's gut pointed straight at Kang Chung-sik.
"Want to hear something else interesting?"
"What now?"
"The villa his mother's living in—his uncle used to rent it on a jeonse lease, that Korean system where you put down a huge lump-sum deposit instead of paying monthly rent. The landlord took the jeonse deposits for every unit in the building and ran off to America."
"That jeonse-scamming son of a bitch! Where is that bastard now!"
"Would you just shut up and listen."
Han So-hee settled the fuming inspector and went on.
"Anyway, they were about to lose the deposit when the whole villa went up for auction, and Kang Chung-sik bought the entire building."
"What? He was that rich?"
"Well, it was an auction loan, so eighty percent of the purchase price was bank money. Still, Kang Chung-sik isn't exactly a beggar. He's got an apartment sitting pretty in a Gyeonggi new town, right on top of a station."
"So why are you telling me how the bastard made his money?"
"That's not the point. The jeonse fraudster—I said he flew to America, right? A friend of mine at a broadcasting station went over to cover him. And the con man's whole family has vanished without a trace."
"Ran for it, I suppose."
"If only. The problem is, his other siblings have already filed a missing-person report. They want their family found. Or so it seems."
A chill slid down Inspector Choi's back. He dropped his eyes to the notebook again.
Not four.
"How many were in that fraudster's family?"
"My friend checked around. Up until two months ago—a month before the report was filed—he was living with his wife and his daughter. The three of them."
"Four and three. That's seven."
"No. Eight."
"Huh? Why one more?"
"The licensed realtor who handled the fraudster's business exclusively has also been reported missing. Around the same time. And in Korea."
The number of people missing in connection with Kang Chung-sik had grown to eight. The last one mattered most of all, because the disappearance had happened in Korea. The earlier cases had broken in Egypt and the United States, where a direct investigation was difficult. A disappearance on Korean soil, they could work themselves.
"Why are you only telling me this now!"
Han So-hee stared at the bellowing inspector as if she couldn't believe him.
"I bring you a tip this good and you yell at me? You ought to be buying me pork belly at the very least."
"Ah. I got worked up, that's all. Anyway, I'm stepping out. Dinner. We'll eat tonight."
"Stepping out where?"
"Where do you think? To the team leader. I've got a report to make."
With that, Inspector Choi bolted from the office.
The bar streets of Jongno.
I was out drinking with friends. One of them, a guy I hadn't seen in ages, asked the question.
"Heard you got divorced?"
"That's how it went."
"So you don't see her at all now?"
"Right. And even if I wanted to, I couldn't."
"Why? She go abroad or something?"
"Yeah. She went overseas, and then she disappeared. My wife."
"Disappeared? What do you mean, disappeared?"
I answered as if it were nothing.
"Explaining it would take a while. You sure you can handle the truth?"
"Cut the bullshit and spit it out."
I laid it out for the guys around the table. Not all of it, of course—only the pieces that were already known, fitted together. The kidnapping and the escape, and, slipped into the blank stretch of time before I made it back, my ex-wife's disappearance.
"Lucky thing the divorce hearing was basically finished. The ruling came down before anyone filed a missing-person report, or I would've been stuck legally married for three years. To a person who doesn't even exist."
"Whoa. That's one hell of a ride."
"Holy shit. What is this, a movie?"
"So your wife went to Egypt looking for you and just vanished?"
"How should I know. But it wasn't that. Not that, at least."
"Wasn't? You mean she didn't go looking for you."
"Yeah. That much I'm sure of."
They didn't press any further. Kidnapping was a heavy thing to drop into the middle of a night out, and for a moment the mood sank. Then one of them turned the talk somewhere else, easy as anything.
"So you're single now. Nothing stopping you from seeing women, right?"
From there the subject drifted naturally toward women, and then it looped without end—someone offering to set me up with a fellow divorcée, someone telling him to get lost, someone asking whether a divorced man really thought he was owed a virgin, calling him a thieving bastard, telling him to get lost again.
In the taxi on the way home, I took stock.
Legally, nothing was cleaned up. For all practical purposes I was unmarried, and settling it looked as if it would take a good long while. These days I was busy out of my mind, and I was having a fine time of it, no question. Even so, I was only thirty-five. Not exactly my prime, but sitting still like this felt like taking a loss.
I had pretty slaves waiting in the other world, so I didn't feel any real need to marry. At the same time, I had thousands of slaves and a cash balance that would put a conglomerate to shame. I didn't care to stand in front of friends and acquaintances looking like some old man living alone.
A bad man, fine. Being treated like a pitiful one—that I decline.
Right. What else is there to life? I'll take it as it comes.
Starting tomorrow, I wasn't a thirty-five-year-old divorced man. I was a man of means in his thirties.
And the next morning, that fresh resolve went straight to waste. The moment I opened my eyes I was met with a skull-splitting headache and a hangover. My mother set a pot of bean-sprout kimchi soup down in front of me—the old hangover cure—and I picked up the spoon. Hot broth slid down my throat and soaked into my stomach. A groan came out of me on its own.
"Mmm. That's good."
I could feel the weight in my gut coming loose as I kept pushing the broth down, and what followed it home was my mother's nagging.
"If you still had a wife, you'd be getting this from her. Now you don't even have one, so your old mother has to boil it. What else am I supposed to do. Aigoo."
The older you get, the clearer it is. Living apart is the right answer.