Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Where we found Commander Ga was in his own room. While we were searching, he’d been replaced in his bed, head propped up on pillows. Someone had put him in his nightshirt. Here, he fixed the far wall with a quizzical stare. We took his vital signs and checked him for wounds, even though it was clear what had happened. On his forehead and scalp were pressure marks from the screws to the halo, a device that kept a subject from injuring his neck during the cranial administration of electricity.

We poured a paper cup of water and tried to give him a drink—it just dribbled out.

“Commander Ga,” we said. “Are you okay?”

He looked up, as if he’d only now noticed us, even though we’d just taken his pulse, temp, and BP. “This is my bed?” he asked us. Then his eyes floated around the room, landing on his bedside table. “That is my peaches?”

“Did you tell them,” we asked, “what happened to the actress?”

With a vague smile, he looked from each of us to the next, as if searching for the person who could translate the question into a language he understood.

We all shook our heads in disgust, then sat on the edges of Commander Ga’s bed for a smoke, passing the ashtray above his outline in the sheets. The Pubyok had gotten what they needed to know out of him, and now there’d be no biography, no relationship, no victory for the thinking man. Our second in command was a man I thought of as Leonardo because he was baby-faced like the actor in Titanic . I’d seen Leonardo’s real name in his file once, but I’ve never called him by either name. Leonardo set the ashtray on Commander Ga’s stomach and said, “I bet they’ll shoot him in front of the Grand People’s Study House.”

“No,” I said. “That’s too official. They’ll probably shoot him in the market under Yanggakdo Bridge—that’ll move the story by rumor.”

Leonardo said, “If it turns out he did the unthinkable to her, then he’ll just disappear. Nobody’ll find so much as a little toe.”

“If he’d been the real Commander Ga,” Jujack said, “a famous person, a yangban , they’d fill the soccer stadium for it.”

Commander Ga lay in the middle of us, sleepy as a rubella baby.

Q-Kee smoked like a singer, with the very tips of her fingers. Judging by the faraway look on her face, I figured she was warily pondering that unthinkable. Instead, she said, “I wonder what his question for us would have been?”

Jujack looked at Ga’s tattoo, ghosting through his nightshirt. “He must have loved her,” he said. “Nobody gets a tattoo like that unless it’s love.”

We weren’t crime detectives or anything, but we’d been in the game long enough to know the kind of mayhem that came from the fount of love.

I said, “The rumors are that he stripped Sun Moon naked before he killed her. Is that love?”

When Leonardo cast his eyes down to our subject, you could see his long eyelashes. “I just wanted to find out his real name,” he said.

I stubbed my cigarette out and rose. “I guess it’s time to congratulate our betters and find out the resting place of our national actress.”

The Pubyok lounge was two floors below us. When I knocked on the door, a rare silence followed. All those guys seemed to do was play table tennis, sing karaoke, and wing their throwing knives around. Finally, Sarge opened the door.

“It looks like you got your man,” I told him. “The halo never lies.”

Behind Sarge, a couple of Pubyok sat at a table, staring at their hands.

“Go ahead and gloat,” I said. “I’m just curious about the guy’s story. I just want to know his name.”

“He didn’t tell us,” Sarge said.

Sarge didn’t look so good. I understood he must have been under a lot of pressure with such a high-profile subject, and it was easy to forget that Sarge was in his seventies. But his color was off. It didn’t look like he’d been sleeping. “No worries,” I told him. “We’ll piece all the details together from the crime scene. With the actress in hand, we’ll know everything about this guy.”

“He wouldn’t talk,” Sarge said. “He didn’t give us anything.”

I stared at Sarge in disbelief.

“We put the halo on him,” Sarge said. “But he went to a place, some faraway place, we couldn’t reach.”

I nodded as it all sank in. Then I took a big breath.

“You understand that Ga’s ours now,” I told him. “You had your try.”

“I don’t think he’s anybody’s,” Sarge said.

“That shit he said about Duc Dan,” I said, “you know that’s just a subject lying to survive. Duc Dan’s building sandcastles in Wonsan right now.”

“He wouldn’t take it back,” Sarge said. “No matter how much juice we put in that asshole’s brain, he wouldn’t take it back.” Sarge looked up at me for the first time. “Why doesn’t Duc Dan ever write? All these years, not one of them has ever dropped a line to their old Pubyok unit.”

I lit a cigarette and handed it to Sarge. “Promise me that when you’re on the beach, you won’t ever think about this place again,” I told him. “And don’t ever let a subject get inside your head. You taught me that. Remember how green I was?”

Sarge half smiled. “Still are,” he said.

I clapped him on the back and mimed a punch to the metal doorframe.

Sarge shook his head and laughed.

“We’ll get this guy,” I said, and walked away.

You can’t believe how fast I can take a couple of staircases.

“Ga’s still in play,” I said when I burst through the door.

The team was only on its second cigarette. They all looked up.

“They didn’t get anything,” I told them. “He’s ours now.”

We looked at Commander Ga, mouth hanging open, as useful as a lychee nut.

Rations be damned, Leonardo lit a celebratory third cigarette. “We’ve got a few days till he gets his wits back,” he said. “Assuming there aren’t any memory-recovery issues. In the meantime, we should go out into the field, search the actress’s house, see what we can dig up.”

Q-Kee spoke up. “The subject responded to a mother figure in a captive environment. Is there any way we can get our hands on an older female interrogator, someone Mongnan’s age, someone that might get through to him?”

“Mongnan,” Ga echoed, staring straight ahead.

I shook my head no. There was no such animal.

It was true how much we were at a disadvantage for not having female interrogators. Vietnam was a pioneer in that department, and look at the great strides made by nations like Chechnya and Yemen. The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka used women exclusively for this purpose.

Jujack jumped in. “Why don’t we bring Mongnan down here, put an extra bed in this room, and just record them for a week? I bet it would all come out.”

Commander Ga seemed to notice us just then. “Mongnan’s dead,” he said.

“Nonsense,” we told him. “No need to worry. She’s probably just fine.”

“No,” he said. “I saw her name.”

“Where?” we asked.

“On the master computer.”

We were all seated around Commander Ga, like family. We weren’t supposed to tell him, but we did. “There’s no such thing as a master computer,” we said. “It’s a device, invented by us, to get people to reveal critical information. They’re told that the computer has the location of everybody in Korea, North and South, and that as a reward for telling their stories, they get to enter a list of people they want to find. Do you understand us, Commander Ga? The computer has no addresses in it. It just saves the names that are typed in, so that we know everybody the subject cares about and then we can arrest them.”

It kind of looked like some of that was sinking in, like Ga was coming around a little.