Suki Kim - The Interpreter

“Hello, Miss Park?”

A woman, with a Jersey accent.

“Hi, this is Rose Goldman. I’m not sure if I have the right number.”

Ms. Goldman. The English teacher subbing for Grace. Suzy reaches for the receiver.

“I hope I’m not calling at a bad time. I thought I’d just leave a message. I was sure you’d be gone for Thanksgiving.” She must realize that Suzy, like Grace, has no family. “Oh, Koreans don’t celebrate our Thanksgiving, please pardon me. I have so many Korean students, I should know.” Ms. Goldman seems embarrassed at having been caught alone on Thanksgiving, although she is the one who called.

“Have you… heard from Grace?” Suzy asks, unable to shake off the persistent fatigue.

“No, not yet. But with Thanksgiving and all, the school’s out until next week anyway.”

Suzy is not sure why she is relieved. No news must be good news. Or is it?

“But yesterday, I remembered something. It’s really nothing, but it bothered me. I don’t know why, just a silly little thing.”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember how I told you that I found it odd that her boyfriend was in the music business?” Rose Goldman sounds almost bubbly now, like a suburban housewife flipping through her copy of Redbook. “I finally remembered why. I remembered some kids saying that he was missing a finger on his right hand. And being a musician—although, now that I think about it, he could be a producer or something—but a musician with a missing finger is a bit strange, don’t you think?”

They once each cut off their little fingers to honor their brotherhood, copying that crazy Yakuza ritual.

Closing her eyes, Suzy counts to three before firing the question: “Was it the little finger he was missing?”

“How did you know? Yes, that’s what the kids said, like those famous gangsters in Hong Kong movies!”

DJ.

The last member of the Fearsome Four.

The one who split on his own after the gang’s breakup.

The one smuggled into the country through the KK’s adoption fraud.

An orphan, with no ties in the world but for Grace.

DJ was supposed to have been deported in November 1995, right around the time of her parents’ shooting. Perfect timing, being sent back to Korea right after the crime. But, then, how is it possible that an ex-gang member who’d been deported reappears five years later, flaunting his BMW, picking up Grace after school? Why would Grace disappear with him? Why did Grace call Detective Lester out of the blue?

What was it that Detective Lester had said? It’s got KK fingerprints all over it. The way they do away with their enemies. The exactness of the shooting.

But the gang claimed that they were set up. They said that her parents were already dead when they arrived at the scene. According to Kim Yong Su, the grocers had never ordered KK to kill. If neither the ones who hired the gang nor the gang themselves had murder on their minds, is it possible that the murder might have been committed by someone else, with an entirely different motive? Someone intimate with the gang, who knew about their mission on that morning in 1995, who was not afraid to frame them? Yet who would have been clever enough to come up with such a plan?

The brave one. Someone so righteous that eliminating them would’ve been a necessity .

Suzy recalls the other clever setup. Maria Sutpen and her daughter, Grace, and a doll, Suzie, a cozy family portrait in her parents’ final house. The little girl seemed happy, as neither Grace nor Suzy had ever been. It is an odd way for things to turn out. Their final house in America given away to a stranger. A half-blooded Korean woman, Dad would have balked. Since when do you care about their wishes? But what they had wanted was not Montauk, not Damian, not Michael, not mistress Suzy, not Christian Grace, definitely not a gang member with a missing finger.

Suzy begins pacing the floor. The cigarette smells of gasoline. She stubs it out instantly. She glances at the ashtray filled with barely smoked cigarettes. Then it comes back to her.

He won’t crawl back to her. Definitely a changed man.

Grabbing her bag from the kitchen table, she pulls out a thin volume of stapled sheets, 1.5 Generation, the student magazine from Fort Lee High School. She flips the pages and finds the photo of the car that belongs to the “dude rich enough for Miss Park,” BMW M5, the same kind she’d seen parked outside Santos Pizza this past Saturday. Running to the closet, she rifles through the coats on the rack. Which one did she wear on that rainy day? Then, in one of the pockets, her fingers close on a crumpled piece of paper. She beeps the number and waits by the phone. It takes no more than a few minutes. These women waste no time getting back to clients. Even on Thanksgiving Day, which means absolutely nothing to an aging Korean prostitute.

“Mina here, someone beep me?” Her voice sounds noticeably husky, which must be her professional tone.

“Hi, I met you the other day,” Suzy stammers.

“Hey,” the woman cajoles in a low whisper, “don’t be shy. We’ve got girls for all kinds of clients.”

“No, no, no, that’s not it.” Then, hesitantly, “This is… Maddog’s girl.”

“Who? Oh, I remember now.” Her voice sinks.

“Johnny…” Suzy says nervously. “When you said that he was a changed man, did he, by any chance, also change his name?”

“Jesus, is that why you beeped me?”

“Sorry, it’s important.”

“What does this have to do with you?” She sounds irritated, yawning loudly into the receiver before answering: “Of course Johnny’s not the real name, no one in this business uses a real name, you think ‘Maddog’ is real?”

The BMW. The gang connection. The room salon in Queens. She does not even have to ask the next question.

“Did he use to call himself DJ?”

“So why you bothering me if you know the answer?” She is about to hang up when Suzy jumps in.

“What did Johnny do to cross Maddog years ago?”

No response. Silence at the end.

“Did Johnny tip off the cops this time?”

Anything to provoke an answer.

“Where is he now? Did he run off with Mariana?”

“ Mariana with Johnny? ” The woman lunges. “She would never! That bitch treats him like a dog.” The woman is seething. She seems to have been holding back for years. Over a decade of unrequited love. “He wouldn’t dare go running off to her now. What more does he want? I give him the car, I give him his Armani suit. He’s a fucking fool. Always Mariana, Mariana, even after I packed him off to Korea to get him away from her. All he talks about is how she’s the victim, how she needs to be saved, how she’s all alone. But what about me? What does he think I’ve been doing all these years?”

Suzy stands motionless, feeling the blood suddenly draining from her face. She is still holding on to the receiver, long after the woman hangs up. It takes a while for her to walk to the futon and climb between the sheets, facing the wall.

DJ, or Johnny, whatever he calls himself.

Was it him? Was it all for Grace?

And Grace?

What did she know?

How much did she know?

Why did she run away with him?

“Fuck them,” her sister chortles from the top bunk, sucking on a Marlboro. She is terrified, watching the door through which Dad might storm in at any second. “They’ll never catch me, ’cause they don’t want to.” She wants to sneak one of her sister’s cigarettes too, but she is only fifteen, still the younger one, still the one who never breaks rules. “Do me a favor, empty this for me, would you?” Her sister pokes her head from above, carefully handing her the full ashtray. A black plastic ashtray, which, upon emptying, reveals a cluster of white dots on its bottom. Seven stars in a circle. A secret code. A girl by the name of Mariana.