They commandeered a new fishing boat, made another crossing. Over the Tsushima Basin, they could hear the powerful clicks, like punches to the chest, of sperm whales hunting below, and nearing the island of Dogo, granite spires rose sudden from the sea, white up top from bird guano and orange below from great gatherings of starfish. Jun Do stared up toward the island’s north promontory, volcanic black, limned in dwarf spruce. This was a world wrought for its own sake, without message or point, a landscape that would make no testimony for one great leader over another.
There was a famous resort on this island, and Officer So thought they could catch a tourist alone on the beach. But when they reached the lee of the island, there was an empty boat on the water, a black Avon inflatable, six-man, with a fifty-horse Honda outboard. They took the skiff over to investigate. The Avon was abandoned, not a soul upon the waters. They climbed aboard, and Officer So started the Honda engine. He shut it down. He pulled the gas can out of the skiff, and together they rolled it in the water—it filled quickly, going down ass-first with the weight of the Vpresna.
“Now we’re a proper team,” Officer So said as they admired their new boat.
That’s when the diver surfaced.
Lifting his mask, the diver showed a look of uncertain wonder to discover three men in his boat. But he handed up a sack of abalone and took Gil’s hand to help him aboard. The diver was larger than them, muscular in a wetsuit.
Officer So spoke to Gil, “Tell him our boat was damaged, that it sank.”
Gil spoke to the diver, who gestured wildly and laughed.
“I know your boat sank,” Gil translated back. “It almost landed on my head.”
Then the diver noticed the fishing vessel in the distance. He cocked his head at it.
Gil clapped the diver on the back and said something to him. The diver stared hard into Gil’s eyes and then panicked. Abalone divers, it turned out, carried a special kind of knife on their ankles, and Jun Do was a long time in subduing him. Finally, Jun Do took the diver’s back and began to squeeze, the water wringing from his wetsuit as the scissors choke sank in.
When the knife was flying, Gil had jumped overboard.
“What the fuck did you say to him?” Jun Do demanded.
“The truth,” Gil said, treading water.
Officer So had caught a pretty good gash in the forearm. He closed his eyes at the pain of it. “More practice,” is all he could say.
They put the diver in the fishing boat’s hold and continued to the mainland. That night, offshore from the town of Fukura, they put the Avon in the water. Next to Fukura’s long fishing pier, a summer amusement park had set up, with lanterns strung and old people singing karaoke on a public stage. Here Jun Do and Gil and Officer So hovered beyond the beach break, waiting for the neon piping on the roller coaster to go dark, for the monkeyish organ music of the midway to fall silent. Finally, a solitary figure stood at the end of the pier. When they saw the red of a cigarette, they knew it was a man. Officer So started the engine.
They motored in on idle, the pier towering as they came astern it. Where its pilings entered the heavy surf, there was chaos, with some waves leaping straight up and others deflecting out perpendicular to shore.
“Use your Japanese,” Officer So told Gil. “Tell him you lost your puppy or something. Get close. Then—over the rail. It’s a long fall, and the water’s cold. When he comes up, he’ll be fighting to get in the boat.”
Gil stepped out when they reached the beach. “I’ve got it,” he said. “This one’s mine.”
“Oh, no,” Officer So said. “You both go.”
“Seriously,” Gil said. “I think I can handle it.”
“Out,” Officer So said to Jun Do. “And wear those damn glasses.”
The two of them crossed the tide line and came to a small square. Here were benches and a little plaza, a shuttered tea stand. There seemed to be no statue, and they could not tell what the square glorified. The trees were full with plums, so ripe the skins broke and juice ran in their hands. It seemed impossible, a thing not to be trusted. A grubby man was sleeping on a bench, and they marveled at it, a person sleeping any place he wished.
Gil stared at all the town houses around them. They looked traditional, with dark beams and ceramic roofs, but you could tell they were brand new.
“I want to open all these doors,” he said. “Sit in their chairs, listen to their music.”
Jun Do stared at him.
“You know,” Gil said. “Just to see.”
The tunnels always ended with a ladder leading up to a rabbit hole. Jun Do’s men would vie to be the ones to slip out and wander South Korea for a while. They’d come back with stories of machines that handed out money and people who picked up dog shit and put it in bags. Jun Do never looked. He knew the televisions were huge and there was all the rice you could eat. Yet he wanted no part of it—he was scared that if he saw it with his own eyes, his entire life would mean nothing. Stealing turnips from an old man who’d gone blind from hunger? That would have been for nothing. Sending another boy instead of himself to clean vats at the paint factory? For nothing.
Jun Do threw away his half-eaten plum. “I’ve had better,” he said.
On the pier, they walked planking stained from years of bait fishing. Ahead, at the end, they could see a face, lit from the blue glow of a mobile phone.
“Just get him over the rail,” Jun Do said.
Gil took a breath. “Over the rail,” he repeated.
There were empty bottles on the pier, cigarette butts. Jun Do was walking calmly forward, and he could feel Gil trying to copy this beside him. From below came the throaty bubble of an outboard idling. The figure ahead stopped speaking on the phone.
“Dare?” a voice called to them. “Dare nano?”
“Don’t answer,” Jun Do whispered.
“It’s a woman’s voice,” Gil said.
“Don’t answer,” Jun Do said.
The hood of a coat was pulled back to reveal a young woman’s face.
“I’m not made for this,”
Gil said. “Stick to the plan.”
Their footsteps seemed impossibly loud. It struck Jun Do that one day men had come for his mother like this, that he was now one of those men.
Then they were upon her. She was small under the coat. She opened her mouth, as if to scream, and Jun Do saw she had fine metal work all along her teeth. They gripped her arms and muscled her up on the rail.
“Zenzen oyogenai’n desu,” she said, and though Jun Do could speak no Japanese, he knew it was a raw, imploring confession, like “I’m a virgin.”
They threw her over the rail. She fell away silent, not a word or even the snatching of a breath. Jun Do saw something flash in her eyes, though—it wasn’t fear or the senselessness of it. He could tell she was thinking of her parents and how they’d never know what became of her.
From below came a splash and the gunning of an outboard.
Jun Do couldn’t shake that look in her eyes.
On the pier was her phone. He picked it up and put it to his ear. Gil tried to say something, but Jun Do silenced him. “Mayumi?” a woman’s voice asked. “Mayumi?” Jun Do pushed some buttons to make it stop. When he leaned over the rail, the boat was rising and falling in the swells.
“Where is she?” Jun Do asked.
Officer So was staring into the water. “She went down,” he said.
“What do you mean she went down?”
He lifted his hands. “She hit and then she was gone.”
Jun Do turned to Gil. “What did she say?”
Gil said, “She said, I can’t swim.”
“ ‘I can’t swim’?” Jun Do asked. “She said she couldn’t swim and you didn’t stop me?”
“Throwing her over, that was the plan. You said stick to it.”
Jun Do looked into the black water again, deep here at the end of the pier. She was down there, that big coat like a sail in the current, her body rolling along the sandy floor.
The phone rang. It glowed blue and vibrated in Jun Do’s hand. He and Gil stared at it. Gil took the phone and listened, eyes wide. Jun Do could tell, even from here, that it was a woman’s voice, a mother’s. “Throw it away,” Jun Do told him. “Just toss it.”
Gil’s eyes roamed as he listened. His hand was trembling. He nodded his head several times. When he said, “Hai,” Jun Do grabbed it. He jabbed his finger at the buttons. There, on its small screen, appeared a picture of a baby. He threw it into the sea.
Jun Do went to the rail. “How could you not keep count,” he yelled down to Officer So. “How could you not keep count?”