Mr. Kill (13 page)

We parked in front of a large wooden gate. Men were hoeing in plots on either side of the road. They immediately put down their tools and marched up to us, tilting their straw hats back and grinning broadly. One of them, a bald one, spoke English. “Hello,” he said. “Welcome.”

I showed him my badge and explained why we’d come.

“Pruchert?” he asked. “The American?”

“You have other foreigners?”

He shook his head rapidly. “No. He’s the only one.”

“Then may we talk to him, please?”

“That would not be possible.”

“Why not? It would only take a few minutes.”

The monk shook his bald head again. “I’m afraid he’s up there.” He pointed to the cliff looming above us. “In one of those caves.”

For the first time, I realized that the craggy cliff was dotted with ink-like splotches. The entrances to caves, dozens of them.

“When will he come down?”

“Impossible to say. He’s meditating, even as we speak, and it could take days.”

“Days? How long has he been up there?”

The monk looked to his comrades for the answer. They conversed among themselves. Finally, he turned back to me and said, “About a week. We take him water and a little food every day, leave it in front of his cave in case he needs it.”

“A week?” Ernie said. “Why in the hell is he doing that?”

For the first time, the monk studied Ernie. “To better himself,” the monk said.

That seemed to confuse Ernie. The monk smiled. “To become an initiate in our order, long periods of meditation are required.”

“He wants to enlist with you guys?”

“So it seems.” The monk smiled again.

“This is extremely important,” I said. “Have you heard about the Blue Train rapist?”

The monk shook his head. “We don’t read newspapers.”

“Nevertheless, I must talk to Corporal Pruchert,” I said. “He’s a soldier and I’m under military orders.”

The monk frowned, thought for a minute, and then turned and walked away. He went inside the temple. About twenty minutes later, he came out.

“If you insist,” he told me, “we will send someone up to fetch him.”

It took an hour. During that time, Ernie walked back into the orchard behind us to take a leak, and later I took my turn. I was starting to worry that we might not have time to make it back to the main supply route and drive north to Waegwan before the Country Western All Stars started their show.

Suddenly a young man in russet robes walked toward us. He was tall and gangly, his flesh white. On his protruding nose, he wore thick army-issue glasses. A few feet from us, he stopped.

“Cut yourself shaving?” Ernie asked.

Ernie was referring to a red slice along the side of the man’s head. The man was completely bald.

“I’m Pruchert,” he replied. “And I’m on leave. Officially signed out of my unit and everything. So what is it you want?”

“Just a few questions,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like, where were you on Thursday?”

“Where was I? You know the answer to that.”

Pruchert looked worn, very haggard, and thin. Dirt and straw had accumulated on the rear of his robe.

“We want to hear the answer from you,” Ernie said.

“I was right
here
,” Pruchert said, raising his voice. “Meditating. In another few days, I could reach
chunggun
, the middle rank, if I could just get in enough hours.”

“Sort of like merit badges,” Ernie said.

Pruchert swiveled on him. “It may be funny to you, but it’s not funny to me. If you don’t take steps toward enlightenment, you’re wasting your life. Throwing away a precious opportunity.”

He glared at Ernie, his implication clear. We were obstacles in his path to enlightenment.

Ernie leaned against the side of the sedan, his arms crossed. He asked, “When was the last time you had a woman, Pruchert?”

Blood flushed Pruchert’s face, spreading up through the raw scalp of his shaved head.

“You come
here
,” he said, pointing at the grounds of the temple, “to this holy place, and ask me a question like that?”

Ernie nodded.

I stepped between them. “When did you arrive here, Pruchert?”

Pruchert looked away. I repeated my question. Finally, he answered.

“Saturday, the day my leave started.”

“And have you left these grounds since then?”

“No.”

“When are you returning to your unit?”

“Next Friday.”

“Have you ever been on the Blue Train to Seoul?”

“Never.”

“Why not?” Ernie asked.

“Seoul’s an evil place,” Pruchert replied. “Full of evil people who have no sense of the crimes they’re committing against the universe.”

“Crimes against the universe?” Ernie asked.

“Yes. Creating evil karma. Causing people like you to come up here to this holy place.”

“Get bent, Pruchert.”

Pruchert started toward Ernie. Instead of stopping him, I stepped back and let him go. Ernie stood, uncrossing his arms.

Pruchert clenched a fist, his lips taut, his face turning even redder than it had been before. Finally, he threw his fist down to his side, swiveled on his leather sandals, and stormed off, mumbling—almost crying—to himself.

When he had disappeared to the far side of the temple, Ernie leaned toward me. “Frustrated guy,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

We took a different road down the mountain. A few splats of rain had made the gravel-and-dirt pathway slick, and when we lost traction, Ernie found himself skidding part of the way downhill. Expertly, he turned into the skids, maintaining control, and we somehow managed to avoid plunging off the edge of the rocky precipice. I held my breath all the way.

When we finally reached the bottom, I exhaled and said, “Thanks, pal.”

Ernie looked at me, puzzled. “For what?”

“For not getting us killed.”

“Oh, that,” he said, tossing his head back toward the mountain. “If we’d been in my jeep and I’d had a proper gearshift, you could have
meditated
all the way down.”

A village, large enough to be considered a small town, sat at the bottom of Chonhuang Mountain. We rolled slowly through the main street. The sun was setting now and someone had switched on a neon sign. I read it aloud: “Chonhuang Tabang.”

“Chonhuang Teahouse,” Ernie said. “That means teahouse girls. Maybe we should stop.”

“Two reasons we can’t,” I told him.

“The first is we have to get to Waegwan,” Ernie replied. “What’s the second?”

“It might interfere with your journey toward enlightenment.”

“Nothing,” Ernie said, “is going to interfere with my journey toward enlightenment.”

“Except for maybe Marnie Orville,” I added.

“Yeah,” Ernie agreed. “Except for maybe her.”

From in front of the teahouse, a kimchee cab suddenly pulled out into the road, making a U-turn without even looking. Ernie slammed on his brakes and honked his horn. Sheepishly, the driver grinned at us, waved, and kept going.

“Out here,” I said, “they don’t even think about traffic.”

“Much less worry about it.”

Ernie stepped on the gas, and in less than two hours we’d reached the city of Waegwan. A few minutes after that, we were pulling up to the front gate of the huge logistics storage area known as Camp Carroll.

“Ernie!” Marnie screeched.

She ran toward him, arms upraised, and grabbed him in a bear hug around his waist.

“Settle down, girl,” Ernie said. She tried to lift him but couldn’t, so he lifted her instead and carried her over to a straight-backed chair and sat her down. “Sit!” he said. “And behave yourself.”

Marnie stared up at him, her cowgirl hat tilted back and pinned to her blonde locks. “You can’t believe what we’ve been through since you and George walked out on us.” Then she pouted. “You didn’t even say good-bye.”

“Yes, I did,” Ernie replied.

“Not a
real
good-bye.” She smiled impishly and leaped back to her feet, the heels of her cowboy boots stomping on the wooden stage.

We were in the Camp Carroll NCO Club. The instruments were set up and Marnie and the rest of the girls were ready to start their performance. However, there was still no audience. The doors had been kept locked, by order of the base commander, because he didn’t want his troops leaving work early to claim a seat near the stage. Instead, he’d instructed the club manager to set up reserved seating by unit. The tables were pushed together in various-sized clumps, and in the center of each group of tables sat a unit banner or insignia. The Headquarters Company’s table was the largest, and the full-bird insignia of the base commander sat right at the head of the table, facing center stage. Rank has its privileges.

I grabbed a cup of coffee out of the kitchen. The Korean cooks studied me, some of them nodding, as did the waitresses, who were folding silverware into napkins. I greeted them all in Korean and they nodded and greeted me back. I carried an extra cup of coffee back to the stage for Ernie.

“Nothing for me?” Marnie pouted.

“You have to start work in a minute,” Ernie told her.

I sat down in a straight-backed chair near Marnie and asked her about these incidents that had been happening. The musicians of the Country Western All Star Review kept tuning their instruments.

“It’s been awful,” she said. “Just horrid. We never have any privacy and our equipment keeps disappearing, and then, of all things, Shelly has her underwear stolen. And those MPs they assigned to help us, dumb as bricks.”

Marnie’s face became serious. She lost her coquettishness and suddenly I could see the intelligent woman beneath the façade of gaiety: the woman who’d organized an all-female country-western band; the woman who’d landed a contract with the USO to travel overseas to the Republic of Korea; the woman who was scouring the world looking for the father of her child.

“But there’s something more important,” she said, lowering her voice. “Something I really need your help on.”

She reached out and touched Ernie with her left hand and grabbed my hand with her right.

“I haven’t told you everything,” she said.

“Somehow I thought not,” Ernie replied.

She pouted at him, the scamp, for just a second, and then she returned to her serious demeanor. She squeezed my hand.

“Casey’s father is not behind on his child support.”

“Casey?” Ernie asked. “Who’s Casey?”

“My daughter,” Marnie told him. “The one who’s with my mom right now.”

“So Casey’s father,” Ernie said, “is this guy you’re looking for. This Freddy Ray.”

“Yes. Captain Frederick Raymond Embry.”

She turned to me, as if hoping I’d jot the name down in my notebook. I didn’t.

“So if he’s not behind on his child support,” I asked, “why are you looking for him?”

“He never sees his daughter,” she said. “That’s not right. Children need their daddy, even if he’s a louse who walked out on us.”

“Sounds like you’re still carrying a torch for him,” Ernie said.

“No way. Not after what he did to me.
You’ve
already seen it,” she told Ernie. “He hasn’t.”

She stood up and pulled her silk cowgirl blouse out from beneath the leather belt of her tight blue jeans. Then she raised the blouse all the way up to her brassiere hook and turned to show me her back. It was a vicious scar, running from the left side of her rib cage to the center of her spine. She lowered her blouse, tucked it back in, and turned to face me.

“Thirteen stitches,” she said. “And if I hadn’t fought back, Freddy Ray would’ve killed me. I know he’s supposed to be an officer and a gentleman but, believe me, he’s no gentleman.”

“When this happened,” I said, pointing toward her back, “didn’t you file a complaint?”

“Of course I did. The cops arrested him and there was a trial, but he said that during the altercation I had attacked him, and when he’d pushed me away I’d tripped and fallen, and that’s how the wound had occurred.”

“
Did
you attack him?” I asked.

Marnie looked away. “Yes. I did.”

“So in Texas, him being an officer and a gentleman and you being partially responsible, they let him go.”

Marnie shook her head at the memory. “The judge said that since he was going to be serving his country overseas and since he’d ‘suffered enough,’ all charges would be dropped.”

“Okay,” Ernie said. “So Freddy Ray is an asshole. So why are you here? Do you just want to start up again?”

“No, it’s not about me. It’s about Casey.” She stared first at Ernie and then at me. “He says he hasn’t been seeing her because he doesn’t believe that she’s really his daughter.” She raised a finger and pointed it at Ernie’s nose. “And before you ask, the answer is none of your business. Whether Casey is Freddy Ray’s daughter or somebody else’s doesn’t make her any less precious to me.”

Ernie sat down and let the silence grow for a while. Finally he raised both his hands in supplication and said, “Okay. I understand. You want to confront Freddy Ray and persuade him to do the right thing by his daughter. Okay, fine. But what do you want
us
to do about it?”

“I want you to be there when I talk to him.”

“So you won’t get hurt,” I said.

“You got it,” she replied. “And I want you to set up the meeting.”

“Us?” Ernie asked.

She caressed his shoulder. “It would be so thoughtful of you.”

Ernie and I looked at each other. A commotion was starting at the front of the club. The door had been opened and the troops were flooding in. Some of them wore cowboy hats along with their fatigue uniforms, a dispensation that had been specially granted—today only—by the post commander. They started hooting as soon as they saw the female musicians on the stage.

Marnie jumped up, ordering the curtains to be closed, and we, along with all the girls of the Country Western All Star Review, scurried back into the wings. Marnie pulled me aside.

“You’re the only one who can help,” she said. “Your friend, that Staff Sergeant Riley in Seoul, he helped me find out where Freddy Ray is stationed. It’s Camp Henry, the place where we play tomorrow night. I just want you to find him for me so I can talk to him before the show.”