The Plotters Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  BEHIND THE ASSASSINATIONS that change history are the plotters, the masterminds working in the shadows. Raised by Old Raccoon in the Library of Dogs, Reseng has always been surrounded by plots to kill—and by books that no one ever reads. In Seoul’s corrupt underworld, he was destined to be an assassin.

  Until he breaks the rules.

  Is he now on the kill list? Who will look after his cats, Desk and Lampshade? Who planted the bomb in his toilet? He meets a trio of young women—a convenience-store worker, her wheelchair-bound sister and a cross-eyed obsessive knitter—with an extraordinary plot of their own.

  The Plotters is a revelation, a cracking noir thriller full of soul and wit.

  ‘An incredible cast of characters…a first-rate thriller.’ Le Monde

  ‘With sharp humour and sparkling prose, Un-su Kim stylishly spins the tale of the extraordinary life of an ordinary assassin.’ J. M. Lee, author of The Investigation

  ‘A rich, funny, cynical Korean roman noir…A delicious surprise.’ La Croix

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  ON HOSPITALITY

  ACHILLES’ HEEL

  BEAR’S PET CREMATORIUM

  THE DOGHOUSE LIBRARY

  BEER WEEK

  THE MEAT MARKET

  MITO

  KNITTING

  FROG EAT FROG

  THE BARBER AND HIS WIFE

  THE DOOR TO THE LEFT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  PRAISE FOR THE PLOTTERS

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  ON HOSPITALITY

  The old man came out to the garden.

  Reseng tightened the focus on the telescopic sight and pulled back the charging handle. The bullet clicked loudly into the chamber. He glanced around. Other than the tall fir trees reaching for the sky, nothing moved. The forest was silent. No birds took flight, no bugs chirred. Given how still it was out here, the noise of a gunshot would travel a long way. And if people heard it and rushed over? He brushed aside the thought. No point in worrying about that. Gunshots were common out here. They would assume it was poachers hunting wild boar. Who would waste their time hiking this deep into the forest just to investigate a single gunshot? Reseng studied the mountain to the west. The sun was one hand above the ridgeline. He still had time.

  The old man started watering the flowers. Some received a gulp, some just a sip. He tipped the watering can with great ceremony, as if he were serving them tea. Now and then he did a little shoulder shimmy, like he was dancing, and gave a petal a brief caress. He gestured at one of the flowers and chuckled. He looked like he was making conversation with it. Reseng adjusted the focus again and studied the flower the old man was talking to. It looked familiar; he must have seen it before, but he couldn’t remember what it was called. He tried to recall which flower bloomed in October—cosmos? zinnia? chrysanthemum?—but none of the names matched the one he was looking at. Why couldn’t he remember? He furrowed his brow and struggled to come up with the name but soon brushed aside that thought, too. It was just a flower—what did it matter?

  A huge black dog strolled over from the other end of the garden and rubbed its head against the old man’s thigh. A mastiff, purebred. The same beast Julius Caesar had brought back from his conquest of Britain. The dog the ancient Romans had used to hunt lions and round up mustangs. As the old man gave the dog a pat, it wagged its tail and wound around his legs, getting in his way as he tried to continue his watering. He threw a deflated soccer ball across the garden, and the dog raced after it, tail wagging, while the old man returned to his flowers. Just as before, he gestured at them, greeted them, talked to them. The dog came back straightaway, the flattened soccer ball between its teeth. The old man threw the ball further this time, and the dog raced after it again. The ferocious mastiff that had once hunted lions had been reduced to a clown. And yet the old man and the dog seemed well suited to each other. They repeated the game over and over. Far from getting bored, they looked like they were enjoying it.

  The old man finished his watering and stood up straight, stretching and smiling with satisfaction. Then he turned and looked halfway up the mountain, as if he knew Reseng was there. The old man’s smiling face entered Reseng’s crosshairs. Did he know the sun was less than a hand above the horizon now? Did he know he would be dead before it dipped below the mountain? Was that why he was smiling? Or maybe he wasn’t actually smiling. The old man’s face seemed fixed in a permanent grin, like a carved wooden Hahoe mask. Some people just had faces like that. People whose inner feelings you could never guess at, who smiled constantly, even when they were sad or angry.

  Should he pull the trigger now? If he pulled it, he could be back in the city before midnight. He’d take a hot bath, down a few beers until he was good and drunk, or put an old Beatles record on the turntable and think about the fun he’d soon have with the money on its way into his bank account. Maybe, after this final job, he could change his life. He could open a pizza shop across from a high school, or sell fairy floss in the park. Reseng pictured himself handing armfuls of balloons and fairy floss to children and dozing off under the sun. He really could live that life, couldn’t he? The idea of it suddenly seemed so wonderful. But he had to save that thought for after he pulled the trigger. The old man was still alive, and the money was not yet in his account.

  The shadow of the mountain was descending fast. If he was going to pull the trigger, he had to do it now. The old man had finished watering and would be going back inside any second now. The job would get much harder then. Why complicate it? Pull the trigger. Pull it now and get out of here.

  The old man was smiling, and the black dog was running with the soccer ball in its mouth. The old man’s face was crystal clear in the crosshairs. He had three deep wrinkles across his forehead, a wart above his right eyebrow, and liver spots on his left cheek. Reseng gazed at where his heart would soon be pierced by a bullet. The old man’s jumper looked hand-knitted, not factory-made, and was about to be drenched in blood. All he had to do was squeeze the trigger just the tiniest bit, and the firing pin would strike the primer on the 7.62-mm calibre bullet cartridge, igniting the gunpowder inside the brass casing. The explosion would propel the bullet forward along the grooves inside the bore and send it spinning through the air, straight towards the old man’s heart. With the high speed and destructive force of the bullet, the old man’s mangled organs would explode out the exit wound in his lower back. Just the thought of it made the fine hairs all over Reseng’s body stand on end. Holding the life of another human being in the palm of his hand always left him with a funny feeling.

  Pull it.

  Pull it now.

  And yet for some reason Reseng did not pull the trigger and instead set the rifle down on the ground.

  ‘Now’s not the right time,’ he muttered.

  He wasn’t sure why it wasn’t the right time. Only that there was a right time for everything. A right time for eating ice cream. A right time for going in for a kiss. And maybe it sounded stupid, but there was also a right time for pulling a trigger and a right time for a bullet to the heart. Why wouldn’t there be? And if Reseng’s bullet happened to be sailing straight through the air towards the old man’s heart just as the right moment fortuitously presented itself to him? That would be magnificent. Not that he was waiting for the best possible moment, of course. That auspicious moment might never come. Or it could pass by right under his nose. It occurred to him that he simply didn’t want to pull the trigger yet. He didn’t know why, he just didn’t. He lit a cigarette. The shadow of the mountain was creeping past the old man’s cottage.

  When
it turned dark, the old man took the dog inside. The cottage must not have had electricity, because it looked even darker in there. A single candle glowed in the living room, but Reseng couldn’t make out the interior well enough through the scope. The shadows of the man and his dog loomed large against a brick wall and disappeared. Now the only way Reseng could kill him from his current position was if the old man happened to stand directly in the window with the candle in his hand.

  As the sun sank below the ridge, darkness descended on the forest. There was no moon; even objects close at hand were hard to make out. There was only the glimmer of candlelight from the old man’s cottage. The darkness was so dense that it made the air seem damp and heavy. Why didn’t Reseng just leave, why linger there in the dark? He wasn’t sure. Wait for daybreak, he decided. Once the sun came up, he’d fire off a single round—no different from firing at the wooden target he’d practised with for years—and then go home. He put his cigarette butt in his pocket and crawled into the tent. Since there was nothing else to do to pass the time, he ate a biscuit and fell asleep wrapped up in his sleeping bag.

  Reseng was woken abruptly about two hours later by heavy footsteps in the grass. They were coming straight towards his tent. Three or four irregular thuds. A torso sweeping through tall grass. He couldn’t decipher what was coming his way. Could be a wild boar. Or a wildcat. Reseng disengaged the safety and pointed his rifle at the darkness, towards the approaching sound. He couldn’t pull the trigger yet. Mercenaries lying in wait had been known to fire into the dark out of fear, without checking their targets, only to discover that they’d hit a deer or a police dog or, worse, one of their fellow soldiers, lost in the forest while out scouting. They would sob next to the corpse of their brother-in-arms, felled by friendly fire, their beefy, tattooed bodies shaking like a little girl’s as they told their commanding officers, I didn’t mean to kill him, I swear. And maybe they really didn’t mean to. Since they’d never before had to face their fear of things going bump in the night, the only thing someone with muscles for brains knew how to do was point and shoot into the dark. Reseng waited calmly for whatever was out there to reveal itself. To his surprise, what emerged was the old man and his dog.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ the old man asked.

  Now, this was funny. As funny as if the bullseye at the firing range had walked right up to him and said, Why haven’t you shot me yet?

  ‘What’re you doing out here? I could’ve shot you,’ Reseng said, his voice trembling.

  ‘Shot me? How’s that for turning the tables?’ the old man said with a smile. ‘This is my land. You’re the one who doesn’t belong, crashing on someone else’s property.’ He looked relaxed. The situation was unusual, to say the least, and yet he didn’t seem at all taken aback. Instead, the one taken aback was Reseng.

  ‘You startled me. I thought you were a wild animal.’

  ‘You’re a hunter?’ the old man asked, looking pointedly at Reseng’s rifle.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a Dragunov. You only see those in museums. So poachers these days hunt with Vietnam War rifles?’

  ‘I don’t care how old the gun is as long as it can take down a boar.’ Reseng tried to sound nonchalant.

  ‘True. If it stops a boar, then it doesn’t matter what gun you use. Hell, if you can stop a boar with chopsticks—or a toothpick, for that matter—you can skip the gun altogether.’

  The old man laughed. The dog waited patiently at his side. It was much bigger than it had looked through the scope. And much more intimidating than when it was chasing after a deflated soccer ball.

  ‘That’s a nice dog,’ Reseng said. The old man looked down at the dog and stroked its head.

  ‘He is a nice dog. He’s the one who sniffed you out. But he’s old now.’

  The dog never took its eyes off of Reseng. It didn’t growl or bare its teeth, but it wasn’t exactly friendly either. The old man gave the dog’s head another pat.

  ‘Since you insist on staying the night, don’t catch cold out here. Come to the house.’

  ‘Thank you for the offer, but I wouldn’t want to trouble you.’

  ‘It’s no trouble.’

  The old man turned and strode back down the slope, the dog at his heels. He didn’t have a torch, but he seemed to have no trouble finding his way through the dark. Reseng’s mind was in a whirl. His rifle was charged and ready, and his target was only five metres away. He watched the old man disappear into the darkness. A second later, he shouldered the rifle and headed down after him.

  The cottage was warm. A fire blazed in the red-brick fireplace. There were no furnishings or decorations, save for a threadbare rug and small table in front of the fire and a few photos on the mantelpiece. The photos were all of the old man, sitting or standing with others, always at the centre of the group, the people at his sides smiling stiffly, as if honoured to be photographed with him. None of the photos seemed to be of family.

  ‘Kind of early in the year for a fire,’ Reseng said.

  ‘The older you get, the more you feel the cold. And I’m feeling it more than ever this year.’

  The old man stuffed a few pieces of dry wood into the fire, the flames baulking briefly at the new addition. Reseng unslung his rifle from his shoulder and leaned it against the doorjamb. The old man stole a glance at the gun.

  ‘Isn’t October a closed season for hunting?’

  There was a twinkle in his eye. He’d been using the informal register, as if he and Reseng were old friends, but it didn’t bother Reseng.

  ‘A man could starve to death trying to follow every law.’

  ‘True, not all laws need to be followed,’ the old man murmured. ‘You’d be stupid to try.’

  As he stirred the logs with a metal poker, the flames rose and licked at a piece of wood that had not yet caught fire.

  ‘Well, I’ve got booze and I’ve got tea, so pick your poison.’

  ‘Tea sounds good.’

  ‘You don’t want something stronger? You must’ve been freezing.’

  ‘I don’t usually drink when I’m hunting. Besides, it’s dangerous to drink if you’re going to sleep outdoors.’

  ‘Then indulge tonight,’ the old man said with a smile. ‘Not much chance of freezing to death in here.’

  He went to the kitchen and returned with two tin cups and a bottle of whisky, then used a pair of tongs to carefully retrieve a kettle of black tea from inside the fireplace. He poured tea into one of the cups. His movements were smooth and measured. He handed the cup to Reseng and filled his own, then surprised Reseng by topping it off with whisky.

  ‘If you’re not warmed up yet, a touch of whisky’ll get you the rest of the way. You can’t go hunting until daybreak anyway.’

  ‘Does tea go with whisky?’ Reseng asked.

  ‘Why not? It’s all the same going down.’

  The old man wrinkled his eyes at him. He had a handsome face. He looked like he would have received a lot of compliments in his younger days. His chiselled features made him seem somehow tough and warm at the same time. As if the years had gently filed down his rough edges and softened him. Reseng held out his cup as the old man tipped a little whisky into it. The scent of alcohol wafted up from the warm tea. It smelled good. The dog sauntered over from the other end of the living room and lay down next to Reseng.

  ‘You’re a good person.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Santa likes you,’ the old man said, gesturing at the dog. ‘Dogs know good people from bad right away.’

  Up close, the dog’s eyes were surprisingly gentle.

  ‘Maybe it’s just stupid,’ Reseng said.

  ‘Drink your tea.’

  The old man smiled. He took a sip of his spiked tea, and Reseng followed suit.

  ‘Not bad,’ Reseng said.

  ‘Surprising, huh? Tastes good in coffee, too, but black tea is better. Warms your stomach and your heart. Like wrapping your arms around a good woman,’ he added w
ith a childish giggle.

  ‘If you’ve got a good woman, why stop at hugging?’ Reseng scoffed. ‘A good woman is always better than some boozy tea.’

  The old man nodded. ‘I suppose you’re right. No tea compares to a good woman.’

  ‘But the taste is memorable, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘Black tea is steeped in imperialism. That’s what gives it its flavour. Anything this flavourful has to be hiding an incredible amount of carnage.’

  ‘Interesting theory.’

  ‘I’ve got some pork and potatoes. Care for some?’

  ‘Sure.’

  The old man went outside and came back with a blackened lump of meat and a handful of potatoes. The meat looked awful. It was covered in dirt and dust and still had patches of hair, but even worse was the rancid smell. He shoved the pork into the hot ash at the bottom of the fireplace until it was completely coated, then skewered it on an iron spit and propped it over the fire. He stirred the flames with the poker and tucked the potatoes into the ash.

  ‘I can’t say that looks all that appetising,’ Reseng said.

  ‘I lived in Peru for a while. Learned this method from the Indians. Doesn’t look clean but tastes great.’

  ‘Frankly, it looks pretty terrible, but if it’s a secret native recipe then I guess there must be something to it.’

  The old man grinned at Reseng.

  ‘Just a few days ago I discovered something else I have in common with the native Peruvians.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘No refrigerator.’

  The old man turned the meat. His face looked earnest in the glow of the fire. As he pricked the potatoes with a skewer, he murmured at them, ‘You’d better make yourselves delicious for our important guest.’ While the meat cooked, the old man finished off his spiked tea and refilled his cup with just whisky, then offered more to Reseng.

  Reseng held out his cup. He liked how the whisky burned on its way down his throat and radiated smoothly up from his empty stomach. The alcohol spread pleasantly through his body. For a moment everything felt unreal. He would never have imagined it: a sniper and his target sitting in front of a roaring fire, pretending to be best friends…Each time the old man turned the meat, a delicious aroma wafted towards him. The dog moved closer to the fireplace to sniff at the meat, but hung back at the last moment and grumbled instead, as if afraid of the fire.