Memories of Murder
"Bro……."
"Again?"
"Just sell me the whole lot."
I handed over every cigarette I'd been carrying for trade. Clock-out Man burned through all of them without ever getting up.
"A magnificent fire spell. Throws away your money and your body both."
He didn't care what I said. He was too busy rooting through the discarded butts for anything still worth a drag.
"When are you heading out?"
"Gotta hear the rest."
"Story's over."
"Huh!? No way, man. That can't be it!"
Hearing what came right after wasn't going to leave anyone feeling clean. And that was how the slave years ended.
The promise was kept. After that, I still followed the boss's will. I attached myself to Dongdaemun, where Socrates was. I didn't even have to try. They took me in on their own.
It was widely known I'd been sold to Gwanghwamun as a slave, so no one suspected me of betraying the boss. If anything, they were busy sneering that the boss and the Gwanghwamun people had been too naive, trusting a kid that easily.
When I checked, Gwanghwamun had not a single survivor. Not even a missing person. Every body had been found. Annihilated.
I knew every face. I was the one who confirmed them, one by one.
It wasn't something I'd wanted to do. The army ordered it, to find out whether anyone had slipped away, and I volunteered readily. If a body never turned up, I meant to say that person had been driven out of Gwanghwamun long ago. Instead I looked on every dead face, not one of them missing.
The man who had joined just before the end, and the men under him, set off explosives. There was no dignified remote detonator, so they had to blow themselves up with the charge. They were new. No defensive posts assigned, no practice fighting together, and that was all they could do. Ironically, the ones with no pedigree at all—the ones who fought with nothing behind them—dealt the enemy the greatest damage.
And the one burning with revenge.
He was found lying over the older brother I'd put my blade through. They must have fought together to the very end. Beyond that, I know nothing. The whole time I was in Gwanghwamun, we avoided each other and never spoke.
That was the first real conversation we'd had in a long time, and the last.
The strategy I made back then—I recycled it later.
They gathered every body at the Gwanghwamun Hideout and burned the building whole. Not only Gwanghwamun's dead, but the Dongnimmun and Dongdaemun men killed in the fight as well. Every corpse was dragged over and thrown in. No special extra insult was reserved for Goyo-ran. Everyone was too tired to bother. I kept the gas-piston hairpin. I don't carry it, but it's still my property.
"You're not going to enjoy hearing it."
"I still gotta know what happened to those bastards later!"
"Which ones."
"Every last one of them! All of them!"
So it wasn't the immediate aftermath he wanted. It was further down the line.
"That part."
Dongnimmun and Dongdaemun were discarded even faster than Gwanghwamun, because the losses they'd taken fighting Gwanghwamun were too heavy. Out on the surface, crews like that live and die by organization, and when you lose that many heads at once you don't rebuild easily. Army support changes nothing. A backer can refill gear and supplies on the spot, but manpower takes time. You can't drill them like civil servants and drop them straight into the mix.
Well. Headquarters isn't all that systematic either. Still better than the surface.
A new member takes a long time to be fully absorbed, and if too many newcomers pour in at once, the organization itself can come apart.
"I mean, that's a good thing, but I wouldn't exactly call it justice. Even that was a real bastard doing it to line his own pockets."
Right. The rotten army dogs kept riding high for a good while after.
"But didn't you say Dongdaemun and Dongnimmun built settlements later?"
"The crews collapsed. I said it was the ones who carried the name on who built them."
The army didn't abandon them quietly. It was a lot like Gwanghwamun.
"If there were people later who kept the name alive, they weren't wiped out the way Gwanghwamun was."
"They'd learned a lesson."
The army's attitude shifted only a little, and both organizations saw the future coming fast. No one knew the truth of how Gwanghwamun had fallen overnight, but around then everyone grasped it by instinct. The feeling that settled on them was that Gwanghwamun hadn't been cut down for pulling some stunt. The army had pulled the stunt, and buried Gwanghwamun.
I don't know how it was for Dongnimmun, but I knew Dongdaemun's situation exactly. I was still inside it then, living quiet as a dead mouse. I wanted to bolt that very day, and I couldn't. If I didn't want anyone doubting that my betrayal of Gwanghwamun and my joining Dongdaemun had been sincere, I had to stay well-behaved for a while. Just as the boss had wanted.
"Dongdaemun caught on so fast because the one that got hit right before them happened to be Gwanghwamun."
"Ah?"
"When Gwanghwamun first got smashed, they were too happy to think. Eyes rolled all the way back. They realized it later. Would Goyo-ran, of all people, really have pulled a stunt like that?"
Goyo-ran, who never left an opening. Gwanghwamun, which lived on trust. Dongdaemun understood too late. And that realization kept Dongdaemun from being annihilated.
"Gwanghwamun tried to strike first too, but the army was much faster. Nothing to be done. Gwanghwamun was hit out of nowhere, and the army had been preparing for a long time. Their answer couldn't have come any sooner, and it still wasn't going to be enough."
Once they understood, Dongdaemun moved far faster than Gwanghwamun had. And unlike Gwanghwamun, most of them chose to run. The organization came apart, and a handful who fled with their boss carried the name forward and, in the end, managed to found a settlement. Dongnimmun was probably much the same.
"Still, they actually pulled off a settlement. That must've been insanely hard."
"From there, I don't really know."
When the organization fell apart, I slipped out with it. After that I cut ties with them.
"But I did speculate. They probably didn't repeat the mistake Gwanghwamun put on display."
"The mistake being…… getting in bed with the army?"
"With the army. And with everyone."
Clean work, and a trust you could count on. Believing that if you showed only those two things you could cooperate with any organization—that was Gwanghwamun's mistake. On this one point, they really had been naive. Dongnimmun and Dongdaemun probably built their settlements on their own strength from the first day to the last. Doing it alone is never easy, but they must have decided it was better than leaning on anyone. At least, that's what I think.
"Um……. This is kind of hard to ask, but—"
"Long windup. Just ask."
"So from the second one on, was it a lot easier than the first?"
Murder.
"Deeply satisfying."
"Satisfying……?"
The first person I ever killed was Goyo-ran. The gun was a P210. That same pistol stayed with me through every killing that followed.
"I made a list."
A list of human beings who had to die.
"The second one I killed was a merchant."
The merchant inside the settlement who had sold me. That exact man.
"Deeply satisfying."
"Good job."
From before the bullet passed through his head until after, and until the strength went completely out of his eyelids, I set my forehead against his and watched his eyes to the end. Having done it once, the second time was far too easy.
"The army dogs."
The Plan A I'd drawn up was recycled then.
"Every officer involved. Not one left out."
I dredged up every memory I could, and the names I absolutely couldn't recall, I investigated on their own. All of them went on the list.
"That's…… possible? Wiping out officers?"
"That's why they weren't third. Killing all of them took years."
Every officer I killed was a useful education. Assassinating a single army officer took combat ability, of course, but also a long time, money, and even the sort of connections I normally couldn't have cared less about.
"Bro, you've got an obsessive streak……."
"Gives a dull life some motivation. Not bad."
"……Somehow that sounds wholesome."
I didn't put a single Dongnimmun or Dongdaemun man on the list, bosses included. It wasn't that I'd grown fond of them living in Dongdaemun. They were the ones who had slaughtered Gwanghwamun with their own hands, but in the end they were only tools. No different from Gwanghwamun: creatures at the very bottom of the food chain.
"Lucky, really. Somehow every one of them stayed alive until I got around to killing them."
"Yeah……. So all of them with the P210?"
"When I killed the ones on the list, yes."
"You still have that gun?"
"Got rid of it."
"What?"
After I'd killed everyone on the list without exception, I sent the P210 away. If you think about it, that gun was where all of this started. A merchant who coveted it set an assassin on me, and everything followed from there. You could say the P210 bookended the beginning and the end.
"I handed it over on the spot, in some nothing black market, to a perfectly ordinary merchant, at the first price he named."
"Why……?"
"So it wouldn't become a meaningful gun."
Burying a piece that precious, throwing it into the sea, melting it down, smashing it to fragments—every one of those is a meaningful act too.
"If there's no butt left worth saving, how about we get up?"
"Okay……. We were here a long time."
The sun was going down again. I'd talked with this guy all day.
Clock-out Man had been walking in silence, and when he opened his mouth again—
"Bro."
So he was going to ask it after all.
"At the end, why didn't you call her noona?"
Right.
"Because she wasn't my noona. The boss knew it too. We weren't the kind who could mix."
"Tsk……. That's my point, though. She knew that, and it was still the last thing she asked. A dying person's wish, and you wouldn't grant it?"
"She got too weak at the last moment."
"Wow."
"What."
"Cold."
Goyo-ran. The boss had been a good ten years older than me. Now I'm older than she ever got to be.
"If she'd never met me, Goyo-ran might have lived."
"What the hell does that mean?"
In the end she showed a weak side. Was I her weakness? Whether the way she led the crew after meeting me was truly the same as before, there's no way to check now. Only, the Head Cook used to say it now and then. That Gwanghwamun seemed a little different after I arrived.
And Gwanghwamun was Goyo-ran herself.
"Hyung."
"Yeah."
Clock-out Man shakes his head.
"Don't carry the guilt. Why should you be the one suffering?"
Kid. Don't empathize.
It's a shame Clock-out Man is so much taller than me. I can't rest a hand on his head.
"Want to hear something arrogant?"
She was quiet in every hour but mealtime, and then she was nothing but noise. The still and the clamor, both, in the one name. She was no noona of mine. She was a good teacher.
"Yeah. Old stories really shouldn't be told this long. I'll hold back from here."
"You've still got more?"
That—
"Secret."
The destination is right in front of us. This is the time to live in the present.
"Ah!"
"What now."
"Socrates! What happened to that guy?"
"And here I thought there was nothing left."
"You said he took that name because he wanted to live a long time! So did he end up one of the people who built the settlement?"
Not even close.
This is why I keep saying a syllogism is common sense.
All humans die. Socrates is a human. Therefore—
"On the way back from burning the Gwanghwamun Hideout, a zombie fell out of the sky and bit his neck. Looked like it dropped off the roof of the building next door."
Socrates dies.