Mr. Kill (21 page)

“She was naked,” Riley asked, “in her see-through nightgown?”

“Yeah,” Ernie replied, eyeing Riley. “Try to remain calm.”

“What happened then?”

“They handcuffed me and took me downstairs and threw me in a police van in the back along with Freddy Ray Embry and drove us over to the monkey house.”

“Did you and Freddy Ray get into it again?”

“What were we going to do? Butt heads? Our hands were cuffed behind our backs. He cussed me out and I gave him what-for, but mainly I was thinking about how freaking cold I was.”

“Was Freddy Ray hurt bad?”

“Hell, no. I think he cut himself on one of those flower vases on a stand. A lot of blood, and when the MPs arrived he was complaining like I was Jack the Ripper, but if it took even a half-dozen stitches I’d be surprised.”

“It took eight,” Riley replied.

“See?” Ernie said.

“Did he accuse you of having a knife?”

“He told the MPs he ‘wasn’t sure’ whether I had a knife. I’m sitting there in my jockey shorts and where am I going to hide a knife?”

They both stopped chattering when we pulled up to the big concertina-wire-covered front gate of Hialeah Compound. An MP stepped forward and examined our dispatch.

“There’s an order for you to leave the compound,” the MP said.

“We have to get our stuff at billeting,” Ernie replied.

The MP handed us our dispatch back and returned to the guard shack. After making a phone call, he returned.

“They say okay. But they want you to turn in the sedan at the motor pool while you’re at it.”

We didn’t respond.

The big gate was rolled back on squeaking wheels and we drove slowly onto Hialeah Compound.

In the morning, Ernie and I rose early and left Riley sleeping it off in billeting. We ate chow at the Hialeah Compound PX snack bar and then made our way to the MP station. I wanted to see a map.

They had a big one nailed to the wall of the MP briefing room. Almost six feet high with thumb-sized red tacks implanted at every compound, signal site, and supply depot in the 19th Support Group area, which included every army installation south of Seoul. Ernie pointed to a blue tack.

“K-2,” he said.

The Air Force base on the outskirts of Taegu. The only other blue tacks were the ones at Kunsan and Osan, both farther north.

“Our man could be a zoomie,” Ernie said.

“Maybe,” I said. “But Private Runnels, our only witness who’s actually spoken to the guy, thought he was Army.”

There’s a certain terminology that G.I.s use that’s different from the Air Force, the way they refer to unit designations and ranks and things like the BX, base exchange, rather than the PX, post exchange.

“He could’ve been wrong,” Ernie said. “Or our man could’ve been purposely trying to mislead him.”

“You’re right. I’ll have Riley make phone calls today up to Osan’s main personnel office, compile us a list.”

“Give him something to do, so maybe he’ll stay sober.”

“For a while, anyway. Still, I don’t think this guy is Air Force. He boarded the train in Pusan, according to Runnels. That would’ve been a long way to travel just to throw us off the track. And the way he climbed those barbed-wire fences in Anyang: this is a guy who’s used to accomplishing the physical.”

“Not as brainy as the zoomies.”

“Not that he’s stupid. It’s just that he throws his athletic ability in your face.”

“A guy like that doesn’t usually join the Air Force,” Ernie agreed.

“So what
does
he join?”

“The Marines,” Ernie replied.

Other than a small contingent at the embassy, there were no US Marines stationed in Korea.

“And if not the Marines?” I asked.

“The Special Forces.”

We looked at each other, and then we both returned to the map.

It was off the edge of the main part of the map, in its own little square: an oval-shaped island—about 50 miles south of mainland Korea and 175 miles southwest of Pusan—with a mountain smack-dab in the middle. Cheju-do. The Island of Cheju. We studied the map for a moment. Hallasan was the name of the mountain, a still-smoking volcano. At the base of the mountain was a small red pin. A training area. Run by a contingent of the United States Army Special Forces, more commonly known as the Green Berets.

Marnie stepped out from behind her electric keyboard, grabbed a G.I. from the front row, and started shimmying in her tight blue jeans and even tighter cowgirl blouse. A heartfelt somebody-done-somebody-wrong song was being belted out by the Country Western All Star Review behind her. The G.I.s of Hialeah Compound howled their mad delight.

I shouted in Ernie’s ear, “She’s letting loose tonight!”

He nodded his head, grinning from some sort of inner satisfaction.

Riley was still grumbling, complaining that we should’ve left for Seoul by now, but drowned his anxiety by jolting down a shot of bar bourbon followed by sips from a cold can of Falstaff.

We were in the Hialeah Compound NCO Club. Instead of turning in the sedan at the motor pool like the MPs wanted us to, we’d returned to billeting, where I’d spent the rest of the morning and half the afternoon sleeping. When I awoke I’d taken a long shower, shaved, and then climbed into my last clean set of clothes. Riley kept complaining all the while that we were supposed to check out of billeting, turn in the sedan, and return to Seoul ASAP. Both Ernie and I told him to shove it, and he grew increasingly worried until I told him finally that the orders would be changed.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“I know,” I replied.

He squinted his eyes, studying me. “It’s that Mr. Kill, isn’t it? He’s going to pull some strings.”

I didn’t answer.

“Look, Sueño,” Riley said. “You can get over on the honchos of Eighth Army sometimes. But when you do, they never forget. They make a record of it and that record is never washed clean. When this case is over and when Mr. Kill is no longer around to protect your low-ranking butt, your ass will be theirs.”

I shrugged.

Riley found some coffee down in the billeting office, and a deck of cards, and he’d spent the rest of the afternoon playing solitaire and getting himself wired on caffeine, waiting for the bar at the NCO Club to open.

The song finally ended and Marnie took a bow, to wild applause. The G.I. she’d been dancing with returned to his seat, reluctantly, and Marnie told the crowd that the Country Western All Stars would be back after a short break. The curtain closed; somewhere someone turned on a sound system, the music coming out a lot quieter than the raucous sounds that had just been blaring from the speakers and amps of the live band.

“Did you check with the MPs?” Ernie asked.

“Screw them. If they haven’t sent somebody to find us and escort us off-compound, it’s because they’ve received word from Seoul to leave us alone.”

Riley was talking to a group of G.I.s at the table next to us, bragging about how tough it had been in Nam during “the big one,” as he called it. They were egging him on and laughing at him because he was so drunk.

“You gonna stay here?” I asked Ernie.

“Where else do I have to go?”

“Nowhere. I’m going downtown.”

“To meet Kill?”

“Something like that.”

Ernie studied me. “What are you up to, Sueño?”

“Nothing. I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know when I do.”

“You’ll need backup.”

“Not on this one.” I didn’t want to get him involved in something I didn’t yet understand myself.

“Is it a girl?”

“Never mind, Ernie.”

“When will you be back?”

“What are you? My mother?”

“It’s not like you to run off without telling me what you’re up to.”

“It’s probably nothing. Don’t worry, I’ll be back before curfew.”

I glanced at Riley. He was aware that the G.I.s were laughing at him, but this only made him more aggressive in his storytelling. He was tall enough at five nine or ten, but so skinny from never consuming anything other than whiskey and coffee that he weighed only about 125 pounds. Still, he had a habit of acting like the toughest guy in two towns, especially after a couple of cold ones.

“Keep an eye on Riley,” I told Ernie.

“After three or four more shots of bourbon,” Ernie replied, “I’ll carry him back to billeting and tuck him in bed.”

I left the Hialeah NCO Club, made my way to the front gate, and flashed my CID badge at the pedestrian exit. The MP didn’t bat an eye. This confirmed to me that Mr. Kill had been true to his word and Ernie and I had been taken off Major Squireward’s escort-out-of-the-area list. I walked through the narrow wooden passageway and emerged into the Pusan night.

Salt-laced mist washed the air. Moist streets glistened from the glare of neon. A cab cruised by. I waved him down, the back door popped open, and I climbed in.

The cab driver said nothing. Probably because he didn’t speak English and didn’t expect me to understand Korean. He turned his head and waited for my instruction.

“Texas,” I said finally.

He nodded. An automatic spring popped the door shut and he shoved the little Hyundai sedan into gear.

The chophouse had a Korean name only, no English translation, written in black letters slashed across splintered wood:
Huang Hei Banjom
. Eatery of the Yellow Sea.

Technically we weren’t on the Yellow Sea. The Port of Pusan is located at the southeastern corner of the Korean peninsula where the Yellow Sea and the Eastern Sea converge. This can be confusing because the Eastern Sea, as the Koreans call it, is known as the Sea of Japan to the rest of the world. Koreans, however, don’t like to give unwarranted credit to the country that brutally occupied them for thirty-five years.

I stood across from the entrance to Pier Number 7, hidden in the shadows beneath a stack of wooden crates, studying the people who entered and departed the Eatery of the Yellow Sea. There were few Koreans, and the ones who did enter probably worked there. The main clientele was composed of Caucasian men. But not G.I.s. Their hair wasn’t cut short, they weren’t wearing neatly pressed PX blue jeans, and they didn’t sport nylon jackets with dragons embroidered on the back. These were men who looked as if they’d walked out of another century. Their hair was long and unkempt, and some of them had several days’ stubble on their faces. Their pants were loose, unpressed, hanging over scruffy brown leather brogans that in some cases looked as if they were about to fall off. Even from my distance of some twenty yards, their peacoats looked sopped through with the drizzle that washed across the pier in airborne waves from the sea.

Exotic foreign ports, sailors living a carefree life, none of that applied here at the Eatery of the Yellow Sea. This was a place for working men; poor working men at that, featuring hot noodles and fried rice and bottles of cheap rice liquor, soju, that would get you drunk and let you forget about today until the inevitable tomorrow. Greeks didn’t hang out here. They had their own places, somewhat classier than this joint. The Eatery of the Yellow Sea was for poor foreign sailors clinging to the bottom rung of the maritime ladder.

Occasionally I heard laughter from inside. Men’s voices in a language I didn’t understand. Through fogged windows I spotted a portly Korean woman with a bandanna tied across her hair serving the foreign sailors, not saying anything to them that I could see. No beautiful young women wearing hot pants and halter tops here. These sailors couldn’t afford the fare.

They looked harmless enough. Poor working men searching for a warm meal, a shot of fiery liquor, a respite from their dreary life of labor on an indifferent sea.

I waited until there was no one entering or leaving, and then I strolled past the Eatery of the Yellow Sea, stepped onto Pier Number 7, and followed creaking wooden planks that led into the darkness. Finally, I reached an overlook above the sloshing waters of the Port of Pusan. I stood next to a thick wooden piling, allowing the shadow to make my silhouette less distinct. I shoved my hands in my pockets and inhaled deeply of the cold night air. Occasionally a seagull dove toward the water and then gracefully lifted skyward. Clouds covered a silvery moon, sometimes parting to reveal its beauty. I stared up, wondering at the magnificence of the world in which we lived, and at its horrors.

I waited.

14

I
stood alone on the walkway at the edge of Pier Number 7 for well over an hour. At half past eleven, I was certain that whoever had promised to be there must’ve been pulling Sergeant Norris’s leg. Sailors wandered in and out of the Eatery of the Yellow Sea, but no one turned down this dark pathway that ran along the edge of the bay.

When he did appear, he seemed to emerge from the shadows. He must’ve seen me, but he walked right past. Then, without turning his head, he said in English, “Follow me.”

I did, at about six paces. The wood-planked pathway turned slightly, until we were out of the glow of the single floodlight in front of the Eatery of the Yellow Sea. He stopped and turned, keeping both hands in the pockets of his thick jacket.

“You’re Sway-no,” he said.

“Sueño,” I replied, correcting his pronunciation.

“Ah.” He nodded. “Spanish.”

“I’m an American.”

“Yes. So I was told.”

His accent was difficult to place. Eastern Europe, I supposed, but that was more from a process of deduction than from any analysis of the sounds. Which country this guy was from, I couldn’t say. He was five or six inches shorter than me, maybe five eight or five nine, and he must’ve weighed close to 180; sturdy, with a low center of gravity. His face was mostly hidden in shadow, but, from what I’d seen when he walked past me, it was nondescript: brown hair, brown eyes, thick eyebrows, and a prominent nose rounded at the end. He seemed fairly young, not yet forty, but his cheeks sagged like an old man’s jowls.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“That’s not important.”

“Okay. It’s not important. So, what do you want?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “I am only doing a favor for someone. I am relaying a message.”

“And there’s no money in it for you?”

He shrugged. “Maybe some.”

“What’s the message?”

“First, I must make sure that you are Sueño.”

“How do you want to do that?”

“I need to see your identification.”

“Okay. But that could be faked.”

“Yes. But that first.”

I pulled my badge up and held it out, twisting it toward moonlight. He stepped forward, squinted his eyes, and read, making no move to pull his hands out of his pockets. Finally, he stepped backward. I slipped my badge back into the inner pocket of my coat.

“Now what?”

“I ask you a question.”

“What question?”

He paused for a moment and then said, “In a snowstorm in Itaewon, we left one place and found refuge in another. What are the two places?”

I stopped for a moment, stunned by the question. I knew what he meant, but I was so shocked by the implications that for the moment I was unable to allow the full import to sink in. Thoughts flashed around in my brain like a pinball looking for a home.

The sailor could see that I’d been thrown off balance.

“Well?” he asked.

I cleared my throat. “Just a moment. Let me think.” And then I told him. “We left the home of Auntie Mee and then we found refuge in a yoguan, a Korean inn.”

“Very good,” he replied. “You passed the test. I’m convinced that you are truly Sueño.”

Then he pulled his right hand out of his pocket. A piece of thick paper—vellum or parchment, really—about the size of a playing card cut in half, wavered in the evening breeze. “Here,” he said. “For you.”

I took it out of his hands.

“What is it?”

He gestured toward the fragment. “Read.”

With both hands I held it up to my nose and twisted it to catch as much light as possible. Chinese characters. Only a few. What appeared to be a name and a date designation. Not dates like we use them, but characters for numbers and the formal designation of an imperial reign.

“Take that,” the sailor told me, “to someone who knows about these things. Let them help you determine its value. Then come back with money, however much you think my information is worth, and I will tell you how to obtain the full manuscript.”

“There’s more?” I asked.

“Much more.”

If this guy was a dealer in antiquities, I wouldn’t be interested in doing business with him. Not just because what he was doing was probably illegal but, more importantly, because I was in a different line of work. I’m a cop, not a hustler. But the question he’d asked me, the question about a stormy night in Itaewon, changed everything.

“When will I meet you?” I asked.

“We will be traveling to Tsushima for a few days and then we’ll return here. One week from today. We’ll only be in port three days. I’ll be here every night. If you bring someone with you or try to follow me, the deal will be off.”

I nodded.

The man left me with the fragment and started to walk away.

“Wait,” I said. He paused and stared at me. “The night in Itaewon. How do you know about that?”

He pointed to the fragment in my hand. “The owner of the manuscript, the one who entrusted it to me, she told me to find you and to trust no one but you.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Where do you think?”

He glanced toward the north, stared at me for a moment, and then shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and stalked away.

The next day, before catching the ferry from Pusan to Cheju, I decided to check in at the Pusan Police Station. The uniformed Korean policeman in the hallway told me that Inspector Kill was busy. I told him it was important and stepped past him. An office at the end of the passageway had been temporarily assigned to Inspector Kill for the duration of the Blue Train rapist investigation. When I opened the door, Inspector Kill’s back was to me and he was leaning over the safe behind his desk, fiddling with the locking mechanism. Apparently, he was changing the combination. He stopped what he was doing, sat up straight, and turned to look at me.

The fragment the mysterious sailor had given me was made of a brittle but very thick fibrous material. I held it in my open palm, touching only the wax paper the sailor had wrapped it in. I dropped it on the center of Inspector Kill’s desk.

“
Igot muoya?
” he said in Korean, startled by something that he immediately recognized as being valuable.

“You’re a calligrapher,” I told him. “You know about Chinese characters and about ancient styles of writing. Maybe you can tell me what this is.”

Kill closed the door of the safe, turned back to his desk, and studied the fragment. After a few seconds, he looked up at me. “Where did you find this?”

“It’s a long story. First, what does it mean?” I pointed. “This character means something about a king and there’s a lot of numbers, so I thought maybe it was a date.”

Inspector Kill looked at me with increased interest. “You’ve studied hanmun.” Chinese characters.

“A little.”

He was impressed. Koreans revere education. Since the end of the Korean War, their schools and universities have been churning out mathematicians and scientists at an increasingly rapid rate. But despite this emphasis on modern knowledge, Koreans are still most in awe of the traditional forms of education, a curriculum that has been taught since the days of Confucius: Chinese characters, calligraphy, the ancient texts known as the Four Books and the Five Classics. These are thought of, even today, as the only true education. That a foreigner, especially an American G.I., would know how to read and write even a few Chinese characters never failed to impress.

Inspector Kill turned back to the fragment. He reached in the desk, rummaged around for a while, finally pulling out a magnifying glass, and laid it on the table. Then he searched in another drawer and came out with a pair of gloves made of fine white cloth. He slipped them on. Gingerly, using a pair of silver chopsticks, he turned the fragment this way and that, examining it under the magnifying glass. As he studied, he spoke.

“Korea made the first paper,” he said. “Not from the skin of animals—that had been done since time immemorial—but from bamboo, ground with a pestle, and then mixed with lime and the leaves of a birch tree. Finally the pulp was stretched on a screen to dry.” He switched on a green lamp. “Here, look at the grain in this paper. Even now, you can see tiny chunks of wood.”

With the chopsticks, he pointed to a dark splotch.

“So this paper is very old,” he said. “Probably made during the early part of the Chosun Dynasty, before modern paper was introduced. And you’re right about the date. It’s indicating the reign of King Sejong Daewang.”

Even I’d heard of Sejong Daewang, Great King Sejong. A statue of him presided over the entrance to Doksoo Palace in Seoul, and his stern visage stared out from every freshly minted hundred-won coin. He was credited with having devised the hangul alphabetic script, freeing Korea from the Chinese writing system, and with other innovations that seem modern to us today, such as keeping track of national rainfall, distributing loans to farmers from the royal treasury, and even devising an early version of the seismograph, to measure the intensity of earthquakes.

“Is that it?” I asked. “Is that all this fragment has on it, the date?”

“Maybe not.”

Deftly employing the chopsticks, Inspector Kill pried one sheaf of the parchment loose from the other. Like a flower opening to sunlight, it unfolded into a fragment almost as large as a full page of typing paper.

More characters. Smaller handwriting shoved together in the “grass” style—that is, written quickly, like cursive handwriting, making it more difficult for a novice like me to read. Inspector Kill used the magnifying glass and leaned closer.

“Whoever wrote this,” he said, “used a horsehair brush and expensive ink.”

“You can tell just by looking at it?”

“That’s my initial guess. We can have a more thorough analysis done in the lab.”

“You’ve worked on ancient texts before.”

“A few times,” he replied. “There are plenty of antiques and heirlooms and manuscripts hidden around Seoul and the rest of Korea. Sometimes they’re stolen. Sometimes they’re involved in crimes in other ways.”

“Like people squabbling over an inheritance.”

“Like that,” he said. “So if the paper was expensive and the writing brush made of horsehair, the most expensive of the time, and the ink of highest quality, chances are that whoever wrote this was a highly educated man.”

Inspector Kill said “man” because in those days women were seldom allowed the opportunity to become literate.

“Can you decipher what it says?” I asked.

“A little.”

Kill followed the writing, gliding the glass slowly above the rows of tightly scripted text. Three or four paragraphs’ worth, all in all, were jammed into a small space.

Finally, Inspector Kill leaned back, as if shocked by something.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Who gave you this?”

“I told you it’s a long story.”

He lay down the magnifying glass and looked at me directly. “It’s a story,” he said, “that some very important people will soon become very interested in.”

“Why? What’s this all about?”

Then he told me. As he spoke, I pulled over a straight-backed chair and sat down.

According to Inspector Kill, this fragment was part of a narrative concerning the chase for a man, some sort of “wild man,” who had been considered dangerous by the authorities at the time—sometime during the reign of King Sejong, approximately 1418 to 1450. This “wild man” was extremely strong and resourceful and managed to elude men on horseback by entering a network of caves in the Kwangju Mountains near Mount Osong. Upon entering the caves, the officials discovered a network of tunnels that took them much farther than they ever imagined. So far south, in fact, that they emerged in an area near Mount Daesong, located on a plateau between the Imjin River to the west and the tributaries leading to the Han River valley to the east. What apparently follows in the remainder of the manuscript, according to Kill, would be a detailed guide to those underground caverns, a guide that without the help of the “wild man” would’ve taken years to compile, if it had been possible at all.

“To drop into these caverns,” Inspector Kill said, “would be suicide if you didn’t know that there was a route out. And know how to find that route.”

“Okay,” I said. “This stuff is of great interest to spelunkers,” I said, “but what good is it to us today?”

“What?” Kill asked.

“Spelunkers,” I repeated. “People who crawl through caves.”

“For fun?”

I nodded. “For fun.”

Inspector Kill shook his head, unable to imagine such a thing being fun. He rose to his feet. “I’ll show you why this information could be valuable.”

We walked over to a map of Korea tacked to his wall. He pointed, still wearing his white gloves.

“Here,” he said, “are the Kwangju Mountains.” He pointed to a range that slashed across the center of the Korean peninsula. “According to that fragment, the wild man dropped into the caves here, near Mount Osong, and led his pursuers through a maze of caverns and underground rivers that took them three days to traverse. Eventually they emerged here.” Kill pointed again. “Somewhere near Mount Daesong.”

I studied the two points, my mouth falling open. “Oh,” I said.

“Now you see the value of this information?”

I nodded.

“The rest of the manuscript,” Kill continued, “could be of vital national interest. One side, where these men entered the caves, is in North Korea; the other side, where they emerged, is in South Korea.”

“The remainder of the manuscript,” I said, almost speaking to myself, “shows the way beneath the DMZ.”

The Korean Demilitarized Zone is the most heavily fortified demarcation line in the world: 700,000 Communist soldiers in the north; 450,000 ROK soldiers in the south. Not to mention a division of 30,000 American soldiers sitting smack-dab in the middle.

“So maybe now,” Inspector Kill said, slipping off his gloves, “you’ll tell me where you found this fragment.”

“Maybe I will,” I said. But for some reason I hesitated.

“Okay,” Kill said. “You think about it. I’ll lock this fragment in the safe.” He did. Then we started discussing the Blue Train rapist. Ernie puked over the railing.