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  Back in the bedroom, Jung-hwa looked unfazed by her husband’s call. Her arrival had been so unexpected, so violent even, that I hadn’t given it any thought – and Schwartz was suspicious that I might not be alone. Did he have any reason to suspect Jung-hwa was here? Had he told her anything about the GDR, did her husband have anything to do with whatever happened to Miss Hong? If he did, what about Jung-hwa?

  The object of my thoughts lay naked on my bed only partly covered by a crumpled sheet – and I had never felt more alone in my life. I wanted to confide in her, but there was a torrent of shit bearing down on me, and maybe she knew more about it than I did.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  I walked to the bed and leaned forward to kiss her. The sheet that hung lightly on her body peeled back to reveal the ice cube that she was absently applying to an erect nipple. One kiss became an embrace, and before another word was said we were making love again, this time gently, conciliation after the borderline violence of before. Afterwards, we stretched out together, her head resting in the crook of my neck like it always used to.

  When I awoke, I walked around the room and checked the bathroom before I would admit to myself that she was gone. On the bedside cabinet, a handwritten note sat propped against the lamp:

  Maybe I will call you soon. Jung

  Maybe. As she used to do so often, she left more questions unanswered than resolved – and left me to a confused mix of joy and regret.

  Considering the way I let the curtain fall on our relationship, her re-appearance, never mind that it was the stuff of recurring dreams, was more shock than pleasant surprise. Maybe it was my turn to be left to dangle.

  There was something inevitable about how we fell apart back then. Inevitable considering my own abject fear of commitment and Jung-hwa’s sociologically driven dread of abandonment. In the end her source of terror became self-fulfilling.

  In our last year together she began to cast a jealous eye on other Westerners willing to follow their hearts and marry their Korean girlfriends. A transition from sparkly-eyed cultural maverick to a figure overtaken by mawkish broodiness presented itself with a finality that shocked and frightened me. My prevarication became a personal insult and a festering sore of anger. If my friends were able to marry women younger than Jung-hwa, what was she to do with a man unable to consider any sort of commitment? When plain talk failed, she reached for the sensuality card and tried to fuck me into submission. She never knew how close that came to working. The sex was out of this world and I revelled in the erotic attention until she pulled the plug and delivered a stern ultimatum. Marry me or lose me.

  A week later I gave the entire contents of my flat to a family of yon-tan coal briquette vendors who lived in a dust-engrained shack, and slipped out of town. I said no goodbyes and took with me only regrets that continued to fester even now.

  Chapter Eighteen

  John Lee walked into the lobby at exactly 08:30 and, as he gave my black eye a look of curiosity, handed over a sheet of K-N notepaper with one line of computer printing. ‘Photography at K-N Towers,’ it said. Lee took one trolley, and I followed him out the door with the other. In the car to headquarters he evaded all efforts at initiating a conversation, except to tell me that I would be photographing managers.

  That is what I did, photograph managers, with another mini-production line in the boardroom, the lighting arranged to match the portraits I had shot in the same setting.

  At least these guys had a saving grace for me to grasp at. They were yet to cross the vanity threshold that comes with promotion to the ranks of upper management. The more senior the subjects, the greater the self-importance and the more predictable their my-time-is-too-precious-for-this bluster. In front of my camera sat people who were still looking up the promotion ladder, and who were happy to go along with anything that might give them a boost. Amiable subjects make portraiture a pleasure.

  Predictably, every person paraded through my production line was male. In corporate Korea a woman’s responsibilities are routinely restricted to delivering hot drinks at a moment’s notice and fluttering mascara-laden eyelashes for hours on end. Even this she can only get away with until a woman’s true duty calls and she resigns to take care of her ‘salary man’ husband and to gird herself for the earliest possible production of male offspring, males born to look down on female colleagues in the Korean offices of the future.

  I introduced Lee to the alien concept that K-N’s brochures could look a little more first-world if they included one or two females on their pages. After initial confusion he presented me with a trio of pretty women, two executive secretaries and a Human Resources manager. I readily killed a couple of hours photographing them in three different settings. All the while I failed miserably to block out thoughts of Miss Hong, of the impossibility of the situation Chang and his cohorts had put me in – and of Jung-hwa’s surprise re-appearance.

  My thoughts moved on to Ben Schwartz and the look of delight on his face when he, Chang and Martinmass presented me with the printed prospectus. With that task already taken care of, why was I being kept around? The corollary to that mystery scared the shit out of me. What would happen when I became surplus to their needs?

  I asked Lee if Schwartz and Chang were likely to be around today, but he told me they were ‘busy’.

  By the time I wrapped up the last portrait of the women, Lee had seen enough.

  ‘We are finished.’

  I tried to hide my relief.

  ‘The dinner is at seven o’clock.’

  ‘Dinner?’

  ‘To welcome the Due Diligence team from London. Mr Chang wants you to attend.’ A partial answer to one of my questions, I thought. Maybe Chang still needed me.

  ‘Why? Does he want photographs?’ I hoped not.

  ‘No photographs.’ He told me the name of the restaurant, a famously expensive establishment in parkland near the presidential palace.

  ‘I will arrange a car to take you to your hotel.’ He walked from the room. If I had anything to say on the matter, he didn’t want to hear it. The transition from honour-bound respect to barely-concealed contempt was complete.

  The taxi pulled up by the formidable front gate of the Dae Ji Restaurant complex at a few minutes before seven. I kept telling myself that I had to find some way to stand up to these bastards yet here I was, not just on time but early. Maybe I could confuse them with my unflinching courtesy and respect.

  The Dae Ji was in Samchong dong and only a few hundred metres from the Blue House, the Presidential palace on the north edge of downtown. For decades after the end of the Second World War a succession of dictators had to ring the Blue House with a high-profile security cordon to protect themselves, not only from North Korean hit squads (in 1968 one guerrilla unit made it to within a few hundred metres of the palace), but also from their own citizens and ambitious junior army officers with their eyes on power. A half-century after the end of their own fratricidal war, the continued existence of machine-gun nests and plain clothes patrolmen and the near-impossibility of planning permission for Samchong dong made it a peaceful green dot on the downtown fringe of the big grey city.

  Long before it became one of Seoul’s best restaurants, Dae Ji was a Gisaeng house, Korea’s spin on the Japanese Geisha establishment. Like its Japanese cousin the Gisaeng house was an upmarket recreational club for society’s elite males, one that hid behind a smokescreen of cultural gentility. Despite the placid woodland setting and grand sculpted grounds, it amounted to little more than a whorehouse for the super-rich.

  By the time I first knew it in the late eighties, Dae Ji had already transformed itself into a restaurant styled as a nineteenth century rural village and, in the decade or so since I last visited, it had clung to its charms. Heavily wooded grounds were ribboned with footpaths that ran between traditional Korean cottage buildings so cute they had the whiff of Disney about them, private dining rooms where guests sat cross-legged on heated floors and dined from low lacque
red tables overflowing with expensive dishes. Some buildings were spacious enough to host full wedding banquets, while others could turn a dinner for two into something very intimate.

  As I walked through the grounds, I spotted movement in a cottage doorway. Ben Schwartz waving impatiently. I altered course and followed him into the small building. Sitting on the floor were Chang and Martinmass, tall earthenware mugs of steaming barley tea on the table in front of them.

  ‘Aah, Brodie,’ said Chang. No more ‘Alec’, I thought.

  ‘Good afternoon.’ It hurt to be so civil. I spoke to Schwartz:

  ‘I thought we were meeting your London visitors?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  I looked around the small room, and Schwartz answered the unspoken enquiry.

  ‘Dinner is at seven-thirty. John Lee is bringing the guests, and we will be dining in one of the larger suites.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Mr Chang wants to talk to you.’

  ‘What makes you think we owe you any explanations?’ It was Martinmass. ‘How about you just sit your Scotch arse down and listen.’

  Tie loosened and jacket rumpled, he looked like he had been drinking, so I made a point of ignoring him. With one stockinged toe I dragged a flat cushion from a pile in the corner. As I sat down, there was a soft knock and the paper door slid sideways to reveal a young waitress in traditional attire, long hair gathered high in a tight bun and held in place with a lacquered wooden post like a fat chopstick. She asked me if I would like a drink. Schwartz answered for me.

  ‘Just barley tea.’

  I spoke up. ‘Jam-kan-man.’ Just a moment. After I changed the order the waitress bowed and scuttled off backwards. Shouting up a beer when my hosts were drinking tea was offensively rude, but where I stood, the odd insult was not going to make a lot of difference. Anyway, I needed that beer.

  Barely a minute later, another gentle knock announced the waitress’s return. She gathered up her bulky dress and kneeled to pour my drink from a tall bottle that dripped with condensation and that Martinmass eyed with visible longing. I raised the glass to him in mock salute and took a long swallow at the chilled lager. There was nothing mock about the intense chemical joy of the hit from the first drink of the day. I took another pull at it before I put the glass down. The waitress darted forward to re-fill it but Schwartz told her to leave us. Eyes down, she bowed her way out the room and Chang spoke:

  ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this meeting with the Due Diligence people is very important.’

  Important. Always ‘important’.

  ‘Why am I here if it is so important?’

  Martinmass slammed his mug down; tea flew from it, splashing the front of his shirt.

  ‘If you’d shut your mouth for one fucking minute – ’

  A sidelong look from Chang silenced him in mid-sentence.

  ‘The situation is this. Hosting the Due Diligence team is our opportunity to make a sales pitch upon which the future success of the Group depends. We must get this right.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘However reluctant you may be, we are a team. For now the team’s goal is to sell the North Korean project to the investigators. However, we’ – he indicated himself, Schwartz and Martinmass – ‘We have never been there, and the Due Diligence investigators cannot go there. You, on the other hand, have been to North Korea on several occasions and have more than enough photographic evidence to lend yourself and the Group’s plans vital credibility.’

  Now I understood. Due Diligence was the final hurdle that stood before the successful launch of the GDR, and my near-imaginary role in the sales pitch to the visitors from London remained significant. Schwartz interrupted my thoughts:

  ‘What Mr Chang is saying is that if you play your part here you will get your job fee – ’

  ‘What about the murder investigation?’

  Schwartz looked to Chang.

  ‘It is in our best interests that the investigation is brought to a close as quietly as possible. I have powerful friends who will listen to me, but only if you play your part to our satisfaction.’

  However much it pained me, playing along was the only option that made any sense. Whatever fraud was involved in the GDR was not of my doing, nor was I to blame for what had surely happened to Miss Hong. If the success of the flotation meant I got my money and Chang saw to it that the Miss Hong thing went away, what did I have to lose? More importantly, what choice did I have?

  Three faces, three entirely different smiles. Chang’s was seemingly benign, that of a consummate businessman savouring the pleasure of negotiations that were going his way. Martinmass’s cat-like grin reeked of pure greed. Only the knowing sneer on Schwartz’s face smacked of greater complexity, of deeper satisfaction whose roots continued to confuse me.

  Chapter Nineteen

  They thought they were the cat’s pyjamas, but with preppy arses fidgeting on the lacquered floor and knees pointing at the ceiling, they looked more like fish out of water or kids cross-legged in a splintery Boy Scout hall; angled caps, cloying camaraderie, left-hand handshakes and Bingo Was His Name-Oh.

  Six thousand miles out of London they might as well be on a different planet. They had just arrived from the city I called home, but here in the middle of Korea, the Due Diligence team were the foreigners.

  Leader of the pack was a tall Londoner, slightly older than his colleagues, lean and knotted and tanned like a cricketer, with thick blond hair that lapped at the tops of his ears. At regular intervals, a runaway fringe crept down over his eyeline, to be met by a reflexive sweep of his right hand, the long nail of his little finger slipping under the hair, flicking it upward with polished flamboyance that surely spoke of years in the making.

  There were six of them, all but the leader in their twenties, all in pressed chinos and polo shirts embroidered with the insignia of stockbroker-belt sports clubs, and at least half of them boasted the one-handed tan of the regular golfer. A variety of regional accents pointed to roots in different parts of England, but the job and its prestige and money and the clubbiness of their outfits brought them together.

  The odd one out was a quiet Irishman they called Paddy, who spent a lot of time looking around him as if committing the contents of the room to memory. He examined at length the crockery and cutlery and took bird-like pecks at the appetisers with chopsticks gripped tight between pink office-dweller’s fingers. At least he made the effort. His colleagues tittered with relief when serving staff, hiding their amusement at the clumsy attempts to engage chopsticks, offered up heavy silver-plated cutlery, fresh from the box.

  Their team leader introduced himself with a beat-you-to-it handshake that ground sinew between my knuckles, and a pewter-plated sincerity stare straight from an MBA training manual.

  ‘Nethers. Nethers Hollands. Team leader. Birt, Matthews and Lumberg, Merchant Bankers. London.’

  Nethers?

  ‘Alec. Alec Brodie. Proprietor. Alec Brodie. And Associate. Photography. Islington.’

  A glint of what might have been anger flashed across the blue eyes. Schwartz’s glare warmed the side of my neck.

  ‘Saw the prospectus,’ said Hollands. Thumb and forefingers grouped, he tap-tapped at a manila folder like an auctioneer punctuating a sales pitch. ‘Very impressive. You and me have to sit down. Have a long talk.’

  ‘I look forward to it, Nethers.’

  ‘Nickname. Had it for years. Real name’s Bernard.’ Emphasis on the second syllable. Bernahrd.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Actually it’s rather clever. Hollands, Netherlands – Nethers. Nowadays even Father calls me Nethers.’ He spoke as if I ought to know Father, never mind that I obviously went to the wrong schools.

  ‘Very clever.’

  The condescending look suggested that bosom buddy status was out of the question.

  There were a dozen of us around the long low table that held the middle of a room lined with classical watercolours of sparsel
y-wooded rocky mountaintops. Chang presided over one end of the table, and I sat around the corner from him with the Irishman by my side and Nethers facing me. The rest of the Due Diligence team were broken up by Korean directors and Schwartz and Martinmass. A gregarious Korean called Yu helped Paddy with his chopstick technique. Schwartz chatted with a couple of wide-eyed boys, hinting broadly at how much they were going to enjoy their first taste of Korea and, no, he wasn’t just talking about the meal. Knowing grins were exchanged.

  Martinmass sat next to a heavyset man called Joss who matched him beer for beer. They talked in a rude private murmur punctuated with explosive cackles.

  Schwartz rang a metal chopstick on the side of a beer glass. Conversation dwindled, and after a few more seconds even Joss and Martinmass put a stop to their murmuring.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Schwartz, ‘Don’t worry, I am not going to bore you with a speech – ’

  ‘Because that’s my job,’ said Chang, earning a round of laughter. The timing was so perfect that I wondered if it was a regular gag of theirs. Schwartz smiled while he waited for silence.

  ‘As ever, Mr Chang is ahead of us. I would like to wish you all a warm welcome to Korea before I hand you over to Mr Peter Chang, President of K-N Group. I am sure that Mr Chang’s reputation in the commercial world means he requires no introduction – ’

  ‘But you won’t let that stop you,’ said Martinmass. More laughter, this time polite and a little hesitant. Schwartz shot Martinmass a cold glare before re-attaching his smile and taking up where he left off.

  ‘Mr Chang is not only the President of K-N Group; without him, there would be no K-N Group. Nearly forty years ago, armed with only a small inheritance and a duty to help support four younger brothers and sisters, Mr Chang founded the company. He started out trading textiles at a time when the economy here was only just beginning to recover from the Korean War.

  ‘Today, as I am sure you know, K-N group is one of the most progressively-expanding Chaebol, or conglomerates, in Korea, with dozens of member companies employing tens of thousands of workers here in the domestic economy and in multiple overseas markets. Group turnover for the last financial year exceeded twenty-seven billion pounds Sterling.’