The Iron Sickle (12 page)

In the hubbub that followed, an elderly woman appeared with another brass pot of tea and a few dumpling-shaped rice cakes. With both hands, Captain Prevault accepted the tray. She first poured a cup of tea for Dr. Hwang, who sat on a bench facing us.

“We like to live like this,” Dr. Hwang said in English, holding a rice cake aloft and gesturing toward the village that surrounded us. “It reminds my patients of a simpler time, a time when we were all children, a time before the war, a time before so much was lost.”

“All the people in this village are your patients?” I asked.

“All the people in the valley,” he corrected.

“How many, all told?”

“Over a hundred.”

“And they were all traumatized by the war?”

“Yes, that’s why they are all old, like me.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I had noticed that so far the youngest person I’d seen was maybe forty. “Do any of them ever leave?”

“Only for medical appointments, or if they’re released.”

“Who decides when they are to be released?”

“I do.”

“But I thought you were a patient here, too.”

“I am.”

Captain Prevault had been sitting quietly, sipping tea, but she finally spoke up. “The Korean government has a rule,” she said. “All government employees must retire when they reach
huangap
, age sixty-one. Supposedly, it’s to make room for new blood. Most people think it’s so Park Chung-hee can appoint hand-picked people who are loyal to him.” Captain Prevault glanced at Dr. Hwang and said, “Excuse me for criticizing your government.”

“Not to worry,” he said, waving his open palm. “We do it all the time.”

Captain Prevault continued. “Doctor Hwang had been working in this sanatorium since the war, and no one else understood the patients like he did. It would’ve been a disaster for him to leave. So, he petitioned the government and after some bureaucratic paper-shuffling, he had himself committed.”

“Committed?” I said. “For what?”

Dr. Hwang smiled. “I, too, was traumatized by the war. I lost my entire family. My wife and daughter were raped by soldiers, deserters actually, right in front of my eyes. Then they castrated my son, all the time demanding for me to tell them where I hid my gold and jewels.” As he related this, Dr. Hwang continued to smile evenly. “Of course, I didn’t have any gold or jewels. We were starving and anything of value I had ever owned had already been bartered for food. The soldiers knew this was probably the case but performed these atrocities nevertheless. Once they were through with them, they shot my wife and my daughter, and when they tired of my son’s screaming, they bludgeoned him to death with their rifle butts. Me, they strangled and left for dead.” He pointed to scars on his neck. “But they didn’t allow for the resilience of the human body. Some hours later, I started to breathe again, and shortly thereafter I was able to unravel the rope around my neck.”

I glanced at Captain Prevault. She was staring at him, her fists knotted in her lap.

“I didn’t have time to bury my family,” Dr. Hwang said. “As soon as I could walk, I set off after the men who had done me so much harm. Two days later, I found them, in a farmhouse in a village about thirty kilometers away. The farmer, lying dead outside, apparently had a cache of
mokkolli
in earthen jars. The deserters had besotted themselves, after raping the farmer’s wife, of course. She was crouching in the kitchen when I entered the farmhouse. She raised three fingers, telling me silently that all the deserters were there. Then
she handed me a knife. A thick knife, the type used for chopping turnips. For herself, she kept a thin sharp blade, normally used for slaughtering pigs, had there been any pigs left. I followed her into the living quarters, where she attacked one of the men, and I took two. We stabbed them in the stomach, hacking, slicing. They woke up howling, clutching their bleeding bodies, guts spilling through their fingers like free swimming eels. I wanted their deaths to be slow. I wanted their deaths to be painful. They were.”

His smile stayed glued to his face, unchanging.

I glugged down barley tea. After a respectful silence, I asked about the man with the iron sickle. Dr. Hwang gave me his opinion.

“He’s either mad or he’s a North Korean agent pretending he’s mad.”

“If you were me, how would you go about searching for him?”

“Well, if he’s a North Korean agent, I can’t help you. But if he’s mad, he might’ve been a patient of someone at some time.”

“Maybe you.”

“I thought of that. Ever since Captain Prevault called me, I’ve been reviewing both my memory and my files. Whoever this man was, he was never a patient of mine.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I specialize in people traumatized by the war. This man, whoever he is, is so violent and so full of rage, he could not possibly have lived these twenty-some years in our society without having previously come to our attention. This person is new.”

“New to the mental health profession?”

“No. New to madness.”

“How do you know?

“Because when anyone begins to enact their fantasies with such overt violence, they are not likely to live long.”

“Why not?

“Certainly when you see him, you will shoot him, won’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe about it. If you don’t shoot him, someone else will. I presume at your American army headquarters there are plenty of volunteers.”

I thought of Moe Dexter and every other MP walking a beat. “But maybe his psychosis has lain dormant,” I said.

“Possible. But unlikely.”

“Are there any records we could look at?”

“Not centralized records. Only those that are held privately by individual physicians. Mental health workers are still seen as something odd in Korea. Culturally, my country’s views on mental illness are backward. We still see it as something to be ashamed of, something to hide from the neighbors, something that can ruin the chance for a good career or a good marriage. This place was established by the government not out of kindness but out of desperation. After the war there were so many people suffering psychologically, and they were committing so much crime and mayhem, that the government saw the need to get them off the streets. At first, they were incarcerated.”

“But then you came along?”

“Yes, I managed to set up this sanatorium as an alternative to prison.”

“But there must’ve been others who weren’t allowed out of prison.”

“Many others. But of course there were no mental health records kept for them. Only criminal records. Impossible to cull out those who are ill from those who are merely criminals.”

I leaned toward him and spread my fingers. “So what can I do?” I asked.

Still smiling, he said, “I’ll make some inquiries.”

“With who?”

“With anyone who remembers someone who liked to kill with an iron sickle.”

I described the totem I had seen in the Itaewon Market.

“You think it was this killer who placed it there?”

“I think so. And then he removed it before dawn, before anyone else could see it.”

“Draw it for me.”

“Draw it? I can’t draw.”

“Of course you can.” Dr. Hwang snapped his fingers and the same woman who had brought us the tea appeared. He was about to issue an order when Captain Prevault pulled a pad and a pencil out of her purse.

“Here,” she said, thrusting it toward me.

Dr. Hwang sent the old woman away. Then he turned to me. “Do it,” he said.

I took the pad and pencil from Captain Prevault. At first, I kept drawing it with the wrong proportions, so I’d run out of paper. I kept scratching it out and turning the page and starting again. Finally, the proportions seemed right, or close to right, and after some roughing out the lines and filling them in, I finally had a sketch that looked something like the item I’d seen last night at the Itaewon Market.

I showed it to Dr. Hwang.

“A rat,” he said, holding the sketch at arm’s length, then bringing it closer. Captain Prevault held up a candle. “And a stand. Made of wood, you say?”

“Yes. The rat was hanging from the top of the grill by its hind legs.”

“On the nose of the rat; you’ve scratched something here.”

“Blood.”

“From the rat’s nose?”

“No. That was one of the weird things. The blood seemed to be from another source. A clot of it, as if it had been pasted to the rat’s nose.”

Dr. Hwang lowered the drawing to his lap and stared at me.

“You were right about drawing it,” I said. “I remember more things about it now. Things I hadn’t remembered before.”

“What do you think this means?”

“I don’t know. It’s weird.”

“Weird yes, but it has meaning to the man who created it. Very specific meaning. And it is for your eyes only.”

“For
my
eyes?” I asked.

“Yes. You’ve formed a bond with him. You’re the one pursuing him. He wants you to know why he’s doing all this. That’s why he placed it there for you to see, and once you’d seen it he took it away.”

“He didn’t want to share it with anyone else.”

“Precisely.”

“But what could a stand with a square grill of wires and a dead rat mean?”

Dr. Hwang shrugged. “It means nothing to me, but it means everything to him. I suggest you concentrate on that. He’s trying to tell you something.”

“What?”

“When you learn that, you will learn who he is, and you will learn why he’s doing these horrible things.”

“That totem has something to do with his trauma?”

“It has everything to do with it.”

We still had an hour and a half until the midnight-to-four curfew hit, but rather than taking a cab all the way back to the compound, I suggested to Captain Prevault that we stop somewhere to eat.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“Starving.”

So was I.

The cab let us off on Chong-no, literally “bell road,” named for the ancient bronze bell housed in a temple in the heart of Seoul where the road begins. We walked through a narrow alley that led to Mugyo-dong, a brightly lit shopping district that by night becomes a mecca for young people. The narrow lanes were lined with open-air eateries, pool halls, beer emporiums, and shops selling record albums, and they were swarming with revelers. The odor of crushed garlic mingled with the pungent smell of pork barbecuing on open grills. I always got lost back here, what with so many pedestrian lanes crisscrossing one another in every which way, but eventually we found a joint with an open table. We pushed our way through the crowd and grabbed seats.

“It’s so exciting out here,” Captain Prevault said, her eyes bright with reflected light.

“You’ve never been to Mugyo-dong?” I asked.

“Never.”

“Then you haven’t lived.”

“Apparently not.”

The waitress, a matronly woman in a full-body white apron, approached us warily, caution hardening her broad face. When I spoke to her in Korean, she relaxed somewhat and pointed to the menu, which was handwritten on a board behind the counter. “
Kom-tang
is good,” I told Captain Prevault. “Sliced beef and noodles. Or if you want something spicy with fish in it,
Meiun-tang
would be the way to go.”

“The fish,” she said without hesitation.

I ordered a bowl of
kom-tang
for myself and
meiun-tang
for Captain Prevault, and a plate of
yakimandu
as an appetizer. She also ordered a bottled soda, and I asked for a liter of OB beer, after making sure they served it cold.

“Some places serve beer warm,” I told Captain Prevault as the waitress popped off the bottle cap.

“Have her keep the soda,” Captain Prevault told me. “I’ll have beer, too.”

The waitress took the soda back to the counter and brought us another glass. After pouring the frothing hops, I raised my glass in a toast.

“Thanks for your help on the investigation,” I said.

“My pleasure.”

We clinked glasses and drank.

I was greatly enjoying Captain Prevault’s company. She was a pleasant-looking woman, and intelligent and determined to make something of herself in this world; all traits I admired. But also things that made me feel guilty. Doctor Yong In-ja was in hiding, sheltering our son. But as Ernie had so often told me, I couldn’t spend the rest of my life waiting for someone who had turned the page on me and entered another chapter of her life. I had to live.

When her soup arrived, Captain Prevault was somewhat nonplussed by the mackerel staring up at her, but she got over it quickly. I showed her how to use her chopsticks to split the already gutted mackerel in half, pick out the bones, and drop them on the polished tabletop.

“It’s okay to drop food on the table?” she asked.

“Sure. The parts you don’t eat. They come by with a cloth and clean it up after we leave.”

“Everything’s so different from the States.”

“Yes, very.”

If she hadn’t been out into Seoul much, she might not have understood how truly different things are. People on the compound interact mainly with Koreans who are fluent in English, who are familiar with American customs and polite enough to show respect for them.

Captain Prevault made me show her the drawing again.

“It’s so strange,” she said. “I can’t figure out what it is.”

“Neither can I.”

“Maybe you should show it around.”

“To who?”

“To anybody. Somebody, somewhere will have an idea of what it is.” She used her flat metal spoon to sip broth out of her metal bowl. “Maybe you could have it printed in the
Stars and Stripes
.”

The
Pacific Stars and Stripes
was read by virtually every GI and every American civilian in country. We were all starved for news from the States and the
Stripes
provided it. It was a single-fold newspaper with major news starting on the front page and extensive sports coverage starting on the back. In the center were editorials and letters to the editor. One thing it didn’t cover, however, was crime. In the military, crime is classified. If the Commander believes you have a need to know, he’ll let you know at morning formation, not in some damn newspaper. The only time the
Stars and Stripes
ever covered
crime was if the story had already been broken by one of the major news services. Then they covered it as briefly and as noncommittally as possible.