Thirteen Specimens (13 page)

     No...no...he reasoned that the attacker wouldn’t have lingered long enough to become captured. If he was crafty enough to enter the factory and sneak up on the girl, he was crafty enough to escape. He might even be a worker in the plant, and after hiding or disposing of the mask he would have blended back into seeming innocence.

     Finally, finishing off the last of the drinks he had taken from his mini-fridge during the night, but craving a coffee, he decided to shower and change his clothing before heading downstairs. He needed to try to get more money from an ATM today, in case he couldn’t use his debit card to pay for his new plane tickets, and because he knew he was going to run over the budget he had tried to enforce upon himself so as to have funds remaining in his bank account when he returned home.

     But he must still try to find out, in a way that didn’t attract attention to himself, what he had seen last night. He might broach a conversation with the inn keeper, who spoke fair English, or see if he could find a local English-language newspaper, if such existed. Maybe, he fantasized, it had only been a play put on for his entertainment, something arranged by the guest house for tourists, a bit of Horrorwood come to him.

6: Bedlam and Breakfast

     The very moment it turned 6 AM, Ford descended to the kitchen, there firing up one of the computers. Though he had been invited to make himself toast in the mornings, he was relieved that there was no one to watch him as he hastily built a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. While doing so, he noticed a swarm of tiny brownish-translucent insects scurrying in all directions across the black
formica of the table, and didn’t know if they were roaches or ants; he swept them away with a paper towel too quickly to observe them. Had they emerged from the opened bread bag, or had they already been there? He decided to be brave and eat the sandwich anyway, brought it and a black coffee to the computer. He wanted to check his bank’s available balance online, but the first thing he did was begin looking for an online Korean news source in English...though surely it was too soon for the attack to have been written up, only hours after the crime had occurred?

     And what if the body still hadn’t been discovered? What if that young woman had been the last one in the building, charged with closing up for the night? What if she still lay there on the floor even now, nude or partially disrobed, her eyelids – with their exotic “epicanthic fold” – half-closed over eyes dark as chocolates, blood matted in thick crusts and clots in her blue-black hair, her body cool but terrible triangular marks imprinted hotly into her soft golden flesh...here...and here...and here?

     Ford shook off the mental picture with a shudder, concentrated on the screen...though it wasn’t so much the image that stabbed at him, but the recurring guilt that he had not put his hand on that phone...

     He typed in some phrases as keywords – “English language Korean news” and things of that nature. He found a number of satisfactory results, such as at the web site
JooAng Daily
. Here, he typed “crime reports” into the search feature, but found nothing dated from the previous night. The closest he came to a related story was that a man named Yoo Yeong-cheol had been arrested back in July and was said to have murdered 26 people, 11 of them female masseuses. He had been planning to murder another masseuse when apprehended.

     Before he gave up the idea of learning anything online about what he’d witnessed, Ford read that between September of 1986 and April of 1991, someone had raped
and murdered 10 women in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi province. That killer had never been identified. Hmm...but how likely was it that this killer would still be free on the streets after 13 years, instead of dead or captured for some rape or murder the police had not linked to the other 10 victims?

     Despite the city seeming so safe to him, it had known its predators and monsters over the years, after all. But Ford supposed that violence inspired by issues of distorted self-esteem, disjointed sexuality, and insanity were both universal and timeless.

     He was oddly relieved to be able to call up his bank account, as if he’d been afraid that such a prosaic sight would not be accessible in this strange place. The day before leaving for his vacation he had deposited a large check (he was paid biweekly) and he wanted to make sure the money had cleared, and to see how much it may have been reduced by several automatic deductions. He was satisfied with the amount available to him – it would cover the replacement plane tickets he required.

     Why the mask? he asked himself, with his bank account information still projecting a pale light on his face. Why
that
mask, that he had just happened to see earlier in the day, only a matter of hours before? Was it so common, then? It couldn’t possibly be the very same one...

     He blinked, distractedly decided he should check to see if An had left him a new message, but then a young man who worked at the inn and whom he had seen before came into the kitchen area and Ford smiled up at him. Either the man was suffering conjunctivitis, or someone had punched him – one of his eyes was pink and swollen into a drooping slit that made Ford’s own eyes want to water in sympathy. Ford decided it had been a punch; again, so much for Seoul being free of crime and violence.

     “Is there someplace you want me to take you today?” the man offered, having poured himself a coffee. He was pretty adept with English. “I’ll be taking some other people in the van...”

     “Ah, no thanks...I think I’m just going to walk around again today.” As the man nodded and started to head around the corner to attend the front desk, Ford said, “Um, but tomorrow my new visa is supposed to be ready for me; the Vietnam Embassy is preparing it. Could you take me there tomorrow?”

     “Okay. Yes. Do you remember the name of the street it’s on?”

     “Mm, no, I don’t.”

     “Ahh, that’s okay – I’ll look on the computer.” And the man went up front with his coffee, presumably to find the information on the embassy right there and then.

     A message from An did indeed await him. Once more, he reassured her of his determination to reach her. As if to give himself fresh inspiration in his efforts, he called to mind the first photo of her he had seen, posted at the online, Asian-oriented dating service. It had been professionally taken, looked like a wannabe actress’s glamour shot. She had been crouching close to the ground, as if to squeeze her entire body into the frame, wearing tight blue jeans embroidered with flowers and a skimpy top that bared her back, the black hair sliding down that back looking silken to the touch, staring sulkily into the camera as if in imitation of a pouting model. He had been a little intimidated by the picture at first. Was she too young, too sexy to be interested in an older American man like himself? And if she claimed to be, could he really trust her to be sincere? Still, her solemn, mask-like face in that photo had seized him...had ever since floated before his eyes to lure him onward...

     Having sent his return message on its way (at least his words could enter her country freely), he decided to get up, stretch, and see if the man at the desk was in fact checking into the embassy’s location at this moment. Just on the other side of the kitchen wall was the doorway into the tiny reception office; Ford hung back in the threshold as he watched the man with the swollen eye tap at his own computer. The writing on screen was all in Korean.

     “Have you found it?” he asked.

     “Mm, yes,” the man muttered, and he scribbled some words onto a scrap of paper for his own reference. He turned in his chair. “So I can bring you there tomorrow.”

     “Thanks so much. I just pray the thing is really ready then.”

     “I have their number; we can call them first, before we go.”

     “Yeah, good idea...thanks again.”

     With something like a jolt of recognition, Ford saw two faces peering at him through the open reception desk area that the man sat in. From this spot Ford could see into the modest space that passed for a lobby, and in a recess in the wall were framed two brown masks of the type in the other two frames downstairs, except that this pair was full-sized. He asked himself why he had jumped; he hadn’t thought it was the man from last night, peeking through the opening at him, this time with a woman beside him – had he? One mask looked male, and rather like the rubber mask he had seen in the store. The other mask was of a woman with a circle of red on either cheek, and one on her forehead like an Indian bindi, or a bloody bullet wound.

     Irrationally, Ford found himself asking, “Was that here before?”

     A little puzzled, the man with the swollen eye looked through the counter’s opening at the masks, then up at Ford. “The masks?”

     Of course they had been there before; he just hadn’t had cause to notice them. Before, they had merely been another exotic detail his eyes had skated across. They had not held any significance to him until last night...

     Ford’s gaze shifted to the man at the desk. He wondered if one of those masks might fit on this man’s face. Could the mask he had seen on the figure last night have been wooden, not rubber after all? And wasn’t it just possible that when the attacker had lowered out of view with the iron in his hand, his victim – still alive – might have torn the mask off his face? Struck him in one of his eyes?

     “Sir?”

     Ford smiled tightly. “Nothing. Oh...ah, last night I thought I heard someone scream outside.” He watched the man’s face closely. “Did someone get hurt, do you know?”

     The man did indeed look fidgety all of a sudden; evasive. But he responded, “Well, yes sir, a woman was murdered across the street last night...”

     The words turned to full volume a white noise in Ford’s head. Somehow, he had not expected to hear confirmation of what he had witnessed, despite his work to locate some reference on the web. Somehow he had expected, or hoped, that it had only been a dream that he had experienced while he merely
thought
he was awake. But now...

     The man went on, “...but you shouldn’t worry. Seoul is a very safe city – none of our guests have ever been robbed or attacked. It may have been the woman’s lover, or someone she knew...”

     “How was she...killed?”

     “They say she was beaten. And...burned...with a...” At a loss for the correct word, the man made a forward and back motion with his fist above the desk top.
Ironing
.

     “God,” Ford whispered. It had been real. Why hadn’t he picked up that phone receiver...
why?

     “You mustn’t be concerned, sir.” The man looked worried that Ford might go upstairs, fetch his belongings, and check out right then.

     Ford’s suspicions about the man wilted, to hear him relate this news. His tone didn’t hint at hidden boasting. Somehow, the figure Ford had watched didn’t seem like it could be some simple inn worker, some everyday person – though of course, serial killers were invariably just that, outwardly. Ford had the strange thought that what he had seen had not been a man wearing a mask, but some kind of demon or apparition made corporeal. The mask not really a mask, at all – but the figure’s own flesh.

7: Asset 69

     Ford let his conversation with the inn worker dribble away, and turned toward the hallway opposite the kitchen area. He glided almost without willing it to the larger of the two displays of miniature masks mounted on the downstairs walls.

     The faces were not frightening, in themselves (though if these diminutive faces, with monkey-small bodies to match, had been ringing his bed in the night he would find them terrifying enough). On the square-shaped plaque, eight masks formed a circle around a central, important-looking character with a tall hat. A label printed on the background, in both Korean and English writing, identified him as “Yangban Tal”. At the top, a woman named “Gaksi Tal”. Clockwise, the next was a man, “Choraengi Tal”. Another man, “Seonbi Tal”, followed by another, younger woman. Ford recognized her as the same woman represented in the display of two life-sized masks hanging near the front office. She was “Bune Tal”. Following her, at the bottom, was the only half-mask, missing a bottom jaw: “Imae Tal”. Finally, ascending, three male masks: “Paekjong Tal”, “Halmi Tal”, “Jung Tal”. The word Tal, Ford decided, must mean mask.

     He shifted to the long, vertical display of even smaller masks on the kitchen partition, and saw there were nine of them as well, the same characters but with their English names spelled a bit differently here and there. After studying them a minute or so, he returned to the larger frame.