The Iron Sickle (10 page)

“Why?”

“
Why
? Some man, a strange man, was offering her money. She took it.”

“This man asked her to steal Mr. Choi’s badge?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Did you see this man?”

“
No-oo
. Can I go to the bathroom now?”

She pushed past Mr. Kill. He let her go. After poking her feet into plastic sandals, she stomped down the hallway. The door to the bathroom only closed partially so we all stood there and listened to her tinkle. As we did so, the other women scooted away from us, various expressions of suspicion and alarm on their faces. Mr. Kill slid the door shut.

When Miss Na returned, he said, “So while this Mr. Choi was drinking, you slipped the badge off his lapel?”

Miss Na stomped her foot again. “I didn’t want to tell you.”

“You had no choice,” Mr. Kill said soothingly. “You had to go to the bathroom.”

The girl pouted.

“How did you get the badge?” Mr. Kill asked.

“It was easy,” Miss Na told. “Choi
ajjosi
gets so drunk.” Her button nose crinkled.

We left the bedroom and hurried downstairs. The older woman had changed into a long velvet house dress, combed her hair back and sat at the bar smoking. When Mr. Kill walked up to her she said, “He didn’t tell me his name.” Kill stood next to her, his hands in his pockets, glaring at her. As if discussing the weather, she continued. “He offered me twenty thousand
won
if I would get Mr. Choi’s badge for him.”

“How did he know Choi would be here?”

“He followed him. But we didn’t steal it.”

“How did you get it then?”

“We waited until Choi
Sonseingnim
was very drunk and then I had Miss Na ask him if he would give it to us. He did.”

“And you sold the badge for twenty thousand won?”

“You think I’m a fool?” She puffed her cigarette, blew out the smoke and said, “I sold it to him for forty thousand.”

When we returned to the CID Detachment, Miss Kim handed me a pink phone message printed in her precise hand. The caller was Captain Prevault. As she handed it to me she gazed at me inquiringly, a slight smile on her lips, wondering, I imagined, who this cultured woman was who called. I thanked her but didn’t answer her unspoken question.

I found a phone in the back of the detachment that wasn’t being used. I dialed. No answer. As the phone was ringing, Riley shouted at me.

“Sueño! Bascom! About time you got your butts back here. You have ten minutes to get over to the ROK MND.” The Ministry of National Defense. “They’re having a briefing on what they know so far about this North Korean agent.”

I set the phone down and walked toward his desk. “What North Korean agent?”

Riley put his hands on his narrow hips, staring at me, letting his eyes cross. “The man with the iron sickle, for Christ’s sake. The guy you’re looking for.”

“They’ve got him?”

“I don’t know about all that. All I know is that the Provost Marshal
will be there and the Commander of the Five-Oh-First Counter Intelligence unit and your sorry presence is
mandatory
.”

“Mandatory” was a word Riley dearly loved. He caressed the word, filtering it through his yellow, crooked teeth.

“Better belay that, Bascom,” Riley said to Ernie, who was lazily pouring himself a cup of coffee. “If you’re not there by fourteen thirty hours your ass is grass.”

Ernie stirred sugar into his coffee. Ten minutes later we sauntered toward his jeep. I glanced once again at the message from Captain Prevault and stuffed it in my pocket.

A ton of brass sat in the first few rows of the auditorium, the Korean officers looking relaxed, the American officers less so, out of their element in this oddly proportioned building reeking of
kimchi
. The seats were too small for Caucasian bodies. On the stage was a female ROK Army officer wearing a tight green skirt and a matching tunic, a woman so statuesque and beautiful that not one man in the room could tear his eyes from her. Her name was Major Rhee Mi-sook. I’d met her, if that was the right word, during my one and only sojourn into the Communist state of North Korea. There, she’d worn the brown uniform with red epaulettes of the North Korean People’s Army and her rank was Senior Captain, a rank that didn’t even exist in the South Korean army. As beautiful as she was, she repelled me viscerally. My stomach knotted just looking at her. She’d been pursuing me—or pretending to pursue me—in her capacity as a North Korean counter-intelligence operative. When I managed to escape back to South Korea where I’d been debriefed, she showed up again, this time in Seoul, this time wearing her South Korean army uniform.

I’d reported what I knew about her but I was told to keep quiet. I protested. How could we allow a North Korean intelligence officer to operate in our midst? She was a double agent, I was told, working
for the South Korean government, our allies, and only pretending to work for the North Koreans. I was ordered to let it go at that.

They could say she was on the South Korean side but I’d seen her operate in the north, and I didn’t believe anyone could fake that much love for the Dear Leader and that much avidity in her work. I had the scars to prove it.

Now that same Rhee Mi-sook was in charge of the hunt—on the ROK Army side—for the man with the iron sickle. Someone with stars on his shoulders—whoever had appointed her to this job—also had stars in his eyes, dazzled by her charm. As I watched her, it was easy to see why.

Major Rhee strode back and forth across the stage on her black stiletto heels, rapping her stainless steel pointer against charts and graphs, speaking every sentence first in Korean and then in sweetly pronounced English.

“There is no doubt,” she told the audience, “that the man who murdered Mr. Barretsford and the man who murdered Corporal Collingsworth are one and the same person. And there is also no doubt that he is a highly competent and thoroughly trained professional sent south by the North Korean bandit government to sew dissension between our ROK/US alliance. This,” she said, peering into the eyes of the silent officer corps, “shall not be allowed.”

The group broke into spontaneous applause.

“What is this,” Ernie said, leaning close to me, “a freaking strip show?”

“Quiet,” I replied.

“If she starts unbuttoning her tunic,” he told me, “these guys are going to go nuts.”

Ernie was right about one thing, the ROK Army was pulling out all the stops. They had their best up there delivering the briefing because they weren’t taking any chances of allowing a couple of murders to
damage the special relationship between South Korea and the US. Too much money was at stake. Hundreds of millions of dollars of military and economic aide passed each year from the American treasury to the ROK government, and if stories managed to make their way into newspapers back in the States about how our brave boys overseas were being brutally murdered by evil foreigners, that could jeopardize the steady flow of cash. Blaming the murders on the North Koreans had the effect of solidifying our alliance. It gave us a common goal. Stop the Commies.

Mr. Kill was not there, nor were any representatives of the Korean National Police. They and the ROK Army worked independently. By the amount of olive drab in the room, however, it was apparent the 8th Army had thrown their lot in firmly with the ROK Army.

Major Rhee was replaced at the podium by a senior officer, a husky middle-aged general brandishing a gold-plated pointer. The ROKs were good enough showmen to keep Major Rhee up on stage, sitting in a straight-backed chair, her long legs crossed and glistening beneath the overhead lights.

When the general had said his piece, the show was over. Officers filtered out. Not one item of hard evidence had been presented, only innuendo, such as the fact that there were a suspected two to three thousand North Korean agents in South Korea, and that their training included wielding mundane weapons like the
naht
and other farm implements. We were reminded they were experts at creating and using false identification, not to mention experts at survival, escape, and evasion.

None of this proved the man with the iron sickle was a North Korean agent. He might be, but also he might not.

The Provost Marshal spotted Ernie and me. When he didn’t gesture for us to join him, we made a quick retreat.

Just before leaving the auditorium, I stopped and looked back.
The woman I had known as Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook still stood on the podium, her arms crossed. Our eyes met. She didn’t smile. She wasn’t the smiling type. Her face was hard, cold, but hideously beautiful.

After leaving the ROK Ministry of National Defense, Ernie turned left toward the Samgakji Circle and then south toward Han River Bridge Number One. Halfway there, he hung a left and entered the back entrance of Yongsan Compound South Post. An MP I didn’t know stopped us at the gate and checked our dispatch.

“You headed to the morgue?”

“Eventually everybody is,” Ernie said.

“No, I mean now.”

“Why would we go there?”

The MP shrugged. “Seems like that’s where everyone’s going.”

“What do you mean ‘everyone’?”

“All the MPs.”

He waved us through, Ernie stepped on the gas, and the jeep surged through the gate.

“What the hell was that all about?” I asked.

“There’s a lot of hard feelings about Collingsworth. Maybe some people are stopping over there to pay their respects.”

“Maybe. Not a bad idea. I want to look at the body again anyway.”

Ernie shrugged but turned right after the 121 Evacuation Hospital, heading for the morgue.

There were three MP jeeps parked out front.

“A convention,” Ernie said,

He parked and locked the jeep and we walked past the wooden sign stenciled with the words
MORGUE, 8TH UNITED STATES ARMY
. We pushed through double doors into an air conditioned environment. The white smocked clerk at the front counter checked our badges.

“Collingsworth?” he said.

We nodded.

“Join the crowd. There’s a few of them back there.”

And he was right. A half dozen uniformed MPs stood inside the cold locker. One of the long metal cabinets had been pulled out of the wall, displaying a shroud with a body underneath.

As we walked down the central corridor, the MPs stared at us. Ernie nodded to them because we knew most of them. All of them had taken off their helmets and tucked them under their arms. Everyone was armed, with black holsters hanging off canvas web belts.

“He was a good man,” Ernie said.

They continued to stare, but no one responded. Then, single file, they marched out of the room.

After they left, Ernie said, “What the hell’s the matter with them?”

I stared at the body beneath us. “They figure since we’re CID we should’ve caught the man with the iron sickle after the first murder. Then maybe Collingsworth would still be alive.”

“We weren’t even on the case until this morning.”

“They don’t give a shit about that.”

We were used to hard feelings. From the MPs’ point of view, we Criminal Investigation agents got all the glory, and they did all the grunt work. Ernie shrugged it off. He gestured toward the body. “You want to do the honors?”

I took a deep breath, reached in, grabbed the edge of the heavy cotton shroud, and whipped it back.

Collingsworth stared straight up at us, his blue eyes open, shining with light almost as if he were alive. But his skin was pasty, his cheeks slack, and now that the blood had been washed away, the wound was nauseatingly apparent. Like a cloud of gas, the odor reached us: meaty, sour, dead. Grey tubes of flesh stuck out of a slash in the neck. Blood coagulated around the edges of the wound and it was so wide—about
four inches—and so deep that every artery and vein and esophageal passageway stood out as clearly as a drawing in
Grey’s Anatomy
.

Ernie looked away. “So what are we here for, anyway?”

“Just to see if there’s something I missed out at the crime scene. I was sort of hyper out there.”

I studied the wound more carefully. It was on the left side of his neck, starting almost at the spine and slicing forward. This was consistent with the wound on Barretsford at the 8th Army Claims office. They seemed to have been delivered so fast that the victim never even had time to flinch, much less raise his hands to ward off the blow. Apparently, Collingsworth heard something, he turned to look back, and the tip of the blade caught him in his neck, the
naht
slicing forward. Simultaneously, Collingsworth continued to turn and flinched backward. This had the untoward effect of causing the blade to slice even deeper into Collingsworth’s neck, severing his air passage and the carotid artery. Blood would’ve gushed out, pumping like a hose spewing water. Some of it would’ve landed on the attacker, on his coat, on his shirt. The killer must’ve been standing too close to avoid it, not like at the Claims Office, where he was reaching forward across Barretsford’s desk. This time, instead of continuing the attack in a frenzied manner, as he had on Barretsford, the man with the iron sickle backed off. There was only one slice, one wound, but it was a lethal one. He would’ve known that. He showed discipline, not madness. Knowing Collingsworth was a dead man, he departed immediately, as if concerned about being caught.

I pulled the shroud down further and examined Collingsworth’s arms. Untouched. No cuts or bruises. He’d never seen the blade coming.

This was a disciplined and skilled assassination, giving credence to the ROK Army theory that the man with the iron sickle was a highly trained agent. But why had he lingered at the Claims Office? Had he not been sure a fatal blow had been struck? Or was he merely enjoying
himself? Enjoying the kill? Or enjoying some other type of emotion? Lust? Revenge? Hate?

“You seen enough?” Ernie asked.

I nodded. He pulled the shroud back over Collingsworth’s open blue eyes.

Outside, the three MP jeeps were still parked. A fourth had joined them. When we pushed through the morgue’s double doors, all the MPs in every jeep climbed out and strode toward us. We stopped on the steps. Staff Sergeant Moe Dexter took the lead. He had both thumbs hooked over his web belt, and he was leaning back, a big smile on his round face. He was always smiling and always joking, even when he arrested someone. It was the way he dealt with life, the way he defused tough situations and the way he relaxed a miscreant right up to the moment before he jammed his baton in his gut.