Uncomfortable History Part 2

He drank noisily, burped, and then said, "This is the kind of work that even long after I'm no longer an officer, I still lose a good amount of time for sleep. I sleep sporadically, one hour in the afternoon, half an hour at dusk, twenty minutes at night, like that. It's been like that since I met Lee Young."

"Who's Lee Young?" Min Gi inquired.

"Her real name was Kim Shin Hyeong, a pimp. I met her about six months ago, around the time when the cases of missing women started appearing. We police didn't immediately respond to the reports seriously. Not yet, at least not at that time. How should I say it? The missing girls at that time weren't the kind of girls that you immediately took notice of. I mean, like hookers, migrant workers—illegal and legal alike—tourists that happened to pass by Seoul, people like that. The cases only started to attract the Seoul police's attention around two months ago, when two school-age girls were missing when they were supposed to go home after school. And then it spread like an infection: office workers, college girls, even idol wannabes. It followed sort of a pattern: the missing ones were mostly young women aged no older than twenty-one years old. Lately, though, the kidnappers seem to get braver by taking younger girls away. The youngest was a girl of twelve, just hitting her puberty." Yeo Joon pinched his nose bridge, shaking his head as if he couldn't believe what he just said. "The curfew or restrictions that we're applying right now in this city has little to no effect to stop the young girls and women's abductions. In fact, the number gets higher, and it seems any woman or girl can disappear at any time of the day, regardless of where they are. Home is no longer the safest place for them, for the latest girl who was taken was already at home by curfew."

Min Gi and I were waiting patiently for what Yeo Joon would say next.

"As I was saying earlier, I met Lee Young, the pimp, some six months ago, when I investigated a homicide case, although this case was by then closed; the culprit still on the run, perhaps. Two old women found a young woman's body by the river, bathed in her own blood. It was too difficult to find out who she was because there was no ID card. No one in the area seemed to recognize the girl either, but the hooker I frequently met by that time told me there was someone who apparently just lost one of their girls. That dead girl could belong to that someone, and that's how I tracked Lee Young.

"Lee Young didn't trust me at first, especially once she knew I was an officer. But I was compelled to help her. I wanted to know who had such a heart to kill a young girl. Anyway, Lee Young obviously recognized the girl in blood as one of her girls. The girl wasn't from Seoul and was also underage, Lee Young reluctantly told me, just more reasons for her not to notify the police.

"In our conversation, Lee Young told me that a few days before her girl was missing—she refused to reveal the girl's original name—some new clients came. These clients were all foreigners—I mean they weren't only not from Seoul—they didn't even speak Korean. Maybe Chinese or Thai, Lee Young could only recognize some words. These clients wouldn't say anything about where they came from, anyway.

"She let them come any time they liked. They, too, seemed to enjoy their time with Lee Young's girls, and Lee Young was happy with the amount of money she received. But still, she felt uncomfortable every time these men asked for a blood sample from every girl."

"Wait, blood sample?" I interrupted. "For what?"

"That's what confused Lee Young," Yeo Joon said. "But she could do nothing. She was threatened not to interfere, not to ask and tell anyone about this. The men paid her more to zip her mouth on this, so she never dared to say anything, or protect her girls from being blood-sampled. At first, she thought it was, perhaps, some sort of fetish, the men drinking the girls' blood before they engaged with each other. To fuel their energy or lust, who knows? All the same, it was sickening, disgusting even, but what could Lee Young say? She was threatened."

"Some fetish they had," Min Gi muttered. "Were they vampires or something?"

"I can't be sure about it," Yeo Joon replied. "But Lee Young told me one thing: that she'd noticed odd things about these men. Like, for example, their tattoos. Very eye-catching," Yeo Joon whispered these words as if he was afraid the wind would bring this secret outside.

"What tattoos?" Min Gi asked sharply, and I perked my ears, too.

Yeo Joon inhaled deeply. "Hmm, how should I say it? She said the tattoos were all the same, only the location was different. This man had it on his left arm, the other one on his back, another on his bum. A tattoo of a dragon curling its body, with three white teeth in the middle of it. It was bewildering and Lee Young was afraid if the men were members of a crime syndicate like yakuza or something."

"Teeth?" I repeated, feeling sick suddenly.

"Teeth," Yeo Joon affirmed.

I looked at Min Gi. We recalled his story of the homeless guy at the bus station telling him about a man with a tattoo taking Min Gyeong away. That man could have the same tattoo as one Yeo Joon had described to us just now.

"By the way, that dead girl that was found by the river was the only girl that was ever found. She actually lost a few more girls—she never detailed it to me, though—but she had a theory that the girls were probably murdered, anyway. Or perhaps it was an ultimate conclusion. She was never brave enough to ask those tattooed men where her girls had gone because she kept being threatened." Yeo Joon drank his water again. "Also, at some point, the men just stopped coming, and she never lost girls anymore."

"What was the motive?" asked Min Gi. He was smoking by now, the smoke swirling around above our heads.

"She didn't know," Yeo Joon shook his head. "It was done for some reason, but to delve into it deeper would cost her life, so she dared not to venture to that area further. But she was curious, and so she decided to follow one of the men secretly. Turns out, the man she was following had a job as a salesperson, and—this is the most bewildering fact—that man, who never spoke Korean in front of Lee Young, spoke Korean fluently in front of his clients. In Gyeonggi dialect, as if he was born and raised in this very place."

"What—" I was speechless.

"Yeah. She recorded that man when he spoke to his clients and showed me the video. He dressed handsomely and talked articulately. But she couldn't find where exactly he worked, or at least the name of the office or company. It was as shady as his own identity. Even Lee Young herself wondered if she had been tailing the wrong person. But she saw him again one night, meeting a different hooker, and she glimpsed the same tattoo on his nape.

"Here's another thing: when he met his clients—which were all women—not only did he talk about whatever he was offering to them, he also offered them a role to be a model in some kind of a photo shoot or a movie."

I was taken aback; Min Gi's face, on the other hand, was grim and dark—he was smoking his second cigarette. We both didn't say anything.

"The man would say that he had a friend who wanted to direct a movie or who was a photographer, and they'd asked him to find them a model with certain looks. He'd proceed to tell his clients that they had exactly the features that his friend was looking for. It was sort of a bait for those poor women, I think."

"Did the women fall for his bait?" asked I.

"Not all of them, of course, but some really trusted him, and if they agreed, the man would send them an address of a location where those women were supposed to go. Lee Young wasn't sure where they went, it was too complicated to follow the women, but the point is that man could very well be the culprit behind the loss and death of her girls and more young women after them. Lee Young doubted that even if she could report him to the police, that man was too cunning. He was like a chameleon; he could change his appearance in a short time. Even after she followed him around for several weeks, she still thought that, sometimes, she was observing various people."

"And how does your story relate to the missing of my sister?" Min Gi demanded.

Yeo Joon inhaled deeply. "Well, we still communicated with each other until about two days ago. She now could follow the man's trail up to someplace near the mountain, far away from Seoul, in a village she was unfamiliar with. She sent me photos of the location, of an abandoned building surrounded by a thick forest. She insisted to follow them to their lair, but I told her to go home. After that, I lost contact with her."

"Well, where's she now, then?"

"Dead," Yeo Joon replied solemnly. "I followed her to her last location, almost seven hours from Seoul. Some places around Sangpan-ri, near the hiking trail to Myeongjisan. That's why you couldn't call or see me yesterday because I was looking for Lee Young. She was dead, body cold already, lying lifelessly behind the abandoned building that she told me about earlier. The oddest thing was that there were a suitcase and handbag, and the identity inside it was Min Gyeong. Unfortunately," he continued before we could interrupt, "the handbag was burned down, and most of its contents are just ashes by now. I was just lucky that, whoever burned Min Gyeong's handbag, was reckless enough not to re-check it that the ID card was actually still half intact. That's how I found out the handbag might belong to Min Gyeong."

My fork clattered noisily on the plate. Min Gi was choking and coughing so hard that he needed to gulp down several glasses of water.

"I know, I know," Yeo Joon held his hands to calm us down. "That means Min Gyeong might have been spirited away by the man that Lee Young had been following, or one of such men. Or else it's just a coincidence that her stuff turned out that far away from Seoul, but the latter clearly doesn't make sense. Why would she go so far up north if she was going to work here, in Seoul? If the suitcase and handbag were reliable clues, then Min Gyeong might be there, in Sangpan-ri."

"We should go there," I glanced at Min Gi, but he was shaking his head.

"What about the tattoo?" he inquired. "Tell us first about the tattoo."

Yeo Joon lifted his finger, asked us to wait a minute, and he went to the living room, fishing for something in his bag. He came back carrying a manila folder that he opened in front of us. It was a printout image of the tattoo Yeo Joon mentioned earlier, a dragon curling its body around three white teeth.

"I tried to research the tattoo Lee Young mentioned. She, fortunately, had an impressive memory, so she had drawn me the tattoo exactly just like the original one, and I researched it. The tattoo was actually a coat of arms."

"A coat of arms?" I looked at the picture uneasily.

"It was the symbol of House of Báthory, a noble family in the Kingdom of Hungary, back in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Long story short, the teeth symbolize the killing of a dangerous dragon by a warrior, who earned the name Báthory after that event. But the most famous—or should I say infamous—member of that family was Elizabeth Báthory, and the history around her life was always pictured as disturbing and brutal."

"Infamous for what?" Min Gi stared at the picture as if he tried to etch the image deep into his brain.

Yeo Joon cleared his throat. "For, um, torturing and killing young girls. She was said to use their blood for drinking and bathing to preserve her youth. She was even accused of cannibalism, but the history was unclear about this. The point is, Elizabeth Báthory was infamous because she kidnapped, tortured, and murdered many young girls. Maidens, more precisely."

We were silent after hearing Yeo Joon's tale. Yeo Joon offered us his French toast again, but we declined. I had no more appetite after listening to his awfully long narrative, especially the part about torturing young girls.

"Could this coat of arms from a Hungarian family have something to do with the men who abducted Min Gyeong, here in Korea?" I mumbled to no one in particular.

Yeo Joon shrugged; he wasn't sure how to answer me. But Min Gi put down the printout image and, biting his lip, said, "The only thing to find out the truth would be to go to Sangpan-ri," with a tone of finality. "That's our next move."