High by Andrew Osmond
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jake Carver was beginning to discover the power of money. It had taken several days to make both the mental adjustment that was required upon the acquisition of vast wealth, and also to allow for the electronic transfer of funds between the bank account that Leyton Drisdale held in trust in New York and Carver’s own personal account in Pyongyang.
Since returning to New Korea, and with both the continued absence of his former lover Kim Dong-Moon and also a disquieting silence on the part of his would-be blackmailer, Carver had decided to instigate a few investigations on his own behalf. Recognising his own limitations in this department, chiefly as a result of his undisguisably Caucasian appearance and meagre local vocabulary, he had set about hiring the services of an independent private investigator - a service of which there was no shortage of individuals in Pyongyang, it being a favoured occupation for many of the redundant ex-military personnel previously employed by the old regime. In the absence of a personal recommendation, in the end it came down to whose advertisement looked the most inviting. Ultimately, there was little contest: only one listing in the local telephone directory was accompanied by an English translation. Carver had dialled the number and was very shortly employing the services of the succinctly named Kim Kon. It had been a phone conversation littered with misunderstandings and confusion, any of which should have given Carver some indication as to the integrity and investigative abilities of Kim Kon.
“Annyeong haseyo.”
“Hello. Do you speak English?”
“Annyeong haseyo.”
“English. Do you speak English?”
“Engliz? Yez.”
“You are a private investigator?”
“Yez. Verra good. Verra good P.I. You ‘mericans, you say dick, yez. Verra good. Verra funna. My name Kim Kon.”
“King Kong? I’m sorry. I think I may have the wrong number.”
“You want dick, yez?”
“Dick? No. I want to hire a private investigator.”
“Yez, yez. Kim Kon, verra good. Verra cheap. Best dick in shitty.”
“I don’t think...”
“Mizzin person, yez?”
“Uh, yes.”
“In New Korea, it always mizzin person.”
Kim Kon had proceeded to take down the details, as far as Carver knew them, of Kim Dong-Moon’s disappearance, Carver describing his own association with Kim Dong-Moon, as a “work colleague”. Kim Kon had hung up with a promise to ring Carver in a couple of days’ time when he had some more information. This he had duly done, and had given Carver the shocking news that as far as he had been able to ascertain Kim Dong-Moon had been secretly detained by the New Korean authorities and had been transferred to a labour camp in the north of the country. What Kim neglected to add was that this was exactly the same information that he gave to every one of his other clients in which a missing person enquiry was involved. After all, more often than not it was an accurate account of the fate of their loved one: what was the point in chasing around after elusive facts when convenient lies where so easily attainable?
Carver had been full of questions. Where was the camp? Why had he been detained? What was the likelihood of him being released? Hadn’t these kind of detention camps all been disbanded under the constitution of the Great Reawakening? Kim had laughed at Carver’s naivety, but had not been unsympathetic to the note of anxiety he recognised in the other man’s voice. In truth, Kim was actually not an unaccomplished investigator and indeed prided himself on his powers of detection, learned, he would proudly reveal from the illicit reading, during the Communist period when such books were banned in North Korea, of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and the cases of the master sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. What Kim detested, though, was the waste of his time and effort involved in so many cases, when the explanations were only too apparent: for the solution to most crimes in New Korea you did not have to look much further than the government’s door, but as to the chances of securing a conviction... wasted time and effort, like he said. When asked by Carver if he would be prepared to travel to this isolated enclave, close to the Sino-Russian border, and one which was still being used as a detention centre, in order to make further enquiries concerning Kim Dong-Moon’s welfare, Kim Kon had replied that it was outside of his remit - the city limits were the extent of his territory - besides such an investigation would be pointless: few people ever returned from the camps; “even the remains seldom get returned”, he had joked, with a breathtaking lack of empathy with his client's likely emotions. He had proceeded to relate to Carver some of the atrocities that he had heard - “rumour only” he had conceded - carried out in the camps and the conditions under which inmates were confined. He had concluded by saying, in automatic and uncharacteristically patriotic defence of his homeland, “it is no worse than what occurs in your own regime - I have heard something of what happens on Diego Garcia”. The name of the small British Indian Ocean Territory, currently leased to the US, meant nothing to Carver, neither did the names of the New Korean camps that Kim had mentioned - camp 14, political prisoners; the notorious camp 22 - for the civil engineer they were as far removed from his everyday reality as the concentration camps of Nazi Germany: Kim might as well have told him that Kim Dong-Moon was detained at Auschwitz or Dachau. It was with an entrepreneur’s nose for continued business, though, that Kim Kon had sensed that there were still rich pickings to be had from this sentimental Westerner, and suggested that for a small retainer he might be prepared to instigate further enquiries - “ways and means”, he had proposed, vaguely. Carver had agreed readily.
It was a further five days before Carver received his next telephone call from Kim’s detection agency, and an ensuing conversation every bit as tortuous in its lack of clarity as the first one he had had with the agency’s proprietor. Carver lay down the cheap thriller that he had been skim reading in a futile attempt to distract his mind from endlessly racing through the myriad imagined predicaments in which he pictured Kim Dong-Moon currently residing, his world seemingly crumbling around him into a handful of dust, and answered his mobile phone’s insistent entreaty. The voice on the other end of the receiver sounded as though it belonged to a young Korean woman, albeit speaking immaculately annunciated American-English.
“Mr. Carver?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“You do not know me. My name is Pak Min. I have news of Kim for you.”
“You do?” Carver’s voice sounded unnaturally high; his desperate desire to hear good news projected into a falsely optimistic, wilful tone.
“Mr. Carver. Kim is dead.”
“Dead.” Jake Carver repeated the statement, unwilling to believe the words he was hearing. “Kim Dong-Moon is dead?”
“Kim Dong-Moon?” The woman’s voice sounded puzzled. "”No. I am talking about Kim Kon. Kim Kon is dead.”
“Oh, thank God.” Carver could not hide his relief, before recovering, “I mean... I’m sorry. How? I mean... how?”
“He was hit by a bus this morning on his way to the office. I am his assistant. I got your telephone number from his client’s files. I hope that you do not mind my ringing?”
“No, no, of course not. How terrible.”
There was a pause before Pak Min spoke again, “You thought that I was talking about another man before?”
Carver was apologetic, “I’m sorry. It was someone that Kim Kon was attempting to locate on my behalf.”
“You said Kim...?”
“Dong-Moon.”
“Kim Dong-Moon. That is what I thought. You have not heard then?”
“What?”
“He is dead. It is the front page story of today’s newspaper.”
Part Three: The Internal Battle Between Good and Evil