The Iron Sickle (15 page)

I moved off to the left and prepared to leap at Dexter if he resisted. That’s when I saw it, sliding out from beneath the baseball cap, an Army-issue .45 automatic. Dexter grabbed the pistol grip and started to turn.

I yelled something. I don’t remember what, and ran straight at Dexter.

The Provost Marshal wasn’t happy with us. He stood behind his desk, hands on narrow hips, scowling.

“What happened?” he asked.

“When Dexter went for his gun,” I said, “I charged at him. A round went off, scared the crap out of all of us, but by then I’d reached him and knocked him backward over his barstool and then him and me and the two other MPs went down in a heap. I’m not clear on what happened after that other than I kept swinging and when another round went off, we all stopped fighting.”

The Provost Marshal turned his scowl on Ernie. “That’s when you fired into the mirror behind the bar?”

“Yes, sir,” Ernie replied. “I managed to secure Dexter’s weapon and then fired it once, just getting their attention.”

Colonel Walter P. Brace, the Provost Marshal of the 8th United States Army, exhaled long and slow. “So now two MPs are in the hospital, one with a dislocated shoulder and the other with a concussion, and I have a weapons incident, shots fired during an arrest. And what, exactly, are the charges against Staff Sergeant Dexter?”

“Vandalism with malicious intent,” I said.

“Which means?”

“He destroyed a
pochang macha
.”

The colonel sat down. “A
pochang macha
?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

Colonel Brace stared quietly at the blotter in front of him. He started to thumb through some papers but thought better of it. Finally he looked back at us.

“And how about the murder of Corporal Collingsworth? And the hacking to death of Mr. Barretsford? Any progress on
those
?”

“We’re still developing leads, sir.”

“Leads.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the KNPs?”

“Lab reports on the
pochang macha
crime scene should be back this morning.”

“There’s that word again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you turn your daily progress report in to Staff Sergeant Riley?”

“Working on that now, sir.”

“Not now,” he said. “Get over to the KNP headquarters and add their lab reports into your daily. Go on now, get out.” He flicked his fingers at us, as if to chase away flies. “Get out.”

We saluted, turned, and marched out of his office.

In the jeep, Ernie said, “Asshole.”

Ernie parked the jeep in front of the Korean National Police headquarters, and we strode through the front door and past the information counter. Mr. Kill’s assistant, Officer Oh, told us he was conducting interrogations and couldn’t be disturbed.

“Do you have the lab reports?” I asked.

Her long face flushed red. “Only he can give those to you.”

Ernie was about to argue with her, but I waved him off. “Where’s the interrogation room?”

She debated whether to respond, but in the end she rose from her chair and said, “I’ll show you.”

We walked down the two flights of stairs we’d just climbed, but when we reached the ground floor we kept going down. After one flight, we hit a door. Officer Oh pressed a buzzer. A metallic voice said, “
Yoboseiyo, Kim Kyongjang imnida
.”

Officer Oh identified herself and then a buzzer sounded. We pushed through the door. A dimly lit cement hallway stretched into darkness. Doors were imbedded into the walls; holding cells. Officer Oh led us in the opposite direction and opened a door marked
Muncho-sil
, interrogation room. Straight-backed chairs and a counter faced a one-way window through which a red light glowed in a space not much bigger than a rectangular closet. The interrogation was being conducted.

“Where’s the popcorn?” Ernie asked.

Officer Oh motioned for us to sit and then she switched on the sound. They were speaking Korean, of course, in low but insistent tones. Mr. Kill was doing most of the talking. Next to him sat a young officer taking notes. What surprised me was the person being interrogated. Ernie and I both recognized her. She was the woman who ran the PX snack stand in the building opposite the 8th Army Claims Office.

“What the hell’s she doing here?” Ernie asked.

The woman looked haggard and thin, as if she’d been there for days. Patiently, Mr. Kill asked question after question, and she kept shaking her head, exhausted.

“How long has she been here?” I asked.

Officer Oh looked at me sharply but didn’t answer.

“Who else has he been interrogating?”

When she didn’t respond, I stood up and walked out of the room. Ernie followed. Officer Oh trotted after us. I continued down the long hallway, stopping at the doors, peering through the peepholes located just below my eye-level. Each of the rooms was well illuminated and had a short wooden bench and a bucket for waste. There were no windows, books, radios, televisions, or phones. Just a cement block cubicle. Even this peep hole, I imagined, worked only one way and would be opaque to the prisoner inside. After examining the first cell, I moved to the next.

Officer Oh said, “
An dei
.” Not permitted. She reached out as if to stop me, but I shrugged her off and kept moving. Ernie followed. We peered into every cell along the hallway and then started back on the ones on the opposite side. Besides the PX snack stand woman and her husband, I recognized the receptionist at the Eighth Army Claims Office, two of her co-workers, and the gate guard who was on duty the morning of the Claims Office attack.

When I was halfway back, Mr. Kill emerged from the interrogation room.

“Agent Sueño,” he said, “and Agent Bascom. Welcome.”

I strode toward him. “Why are these people locked up?” I said.

“We are interrogating them,” he replied calmly, “as part of our investigation.”

“But these people are witnesses,” I said. “
Witnesses
. Not suspects.”

“Can you be sure?”

“But there’s no reason to suspect them. No evidence links them to the crime.”

“Do you have evidence that proves they weren’t?” Mr. Kill asked.

The question stumped me. Ernie stepped in. “How long have they been locked up?”

“Long enough.”

“One day? Two days?”

Mr. Kill shrugged.

“You can’t just keep people like this.”

He stared at us blankly.

I tried to think, get over my shock. I knew the Republic of Korea was a police state. Their president, Pak Chung-hee, was a former colonel who’d taken over the government, promoted himself to general, and, through a polling process most international observers viewed as laughable, had finally won the election for president. There weren’t any local police departments run by cities or counties, only one police department run by the federal government: the Korean National Police. They were a quasi-military organization charged with not only fighting crime but also with protecting the country from foreign threats—mainly Communist North Korea—and from internal threats: anyone who had the nerve to challenge the legitimacy of the regime. They did things their way. There might’ve been human rights enshrined in their constitution but all that was for show. In reality the Korean National Police did whatever they wanted to do, all within the supervision and absolute control of the government officials in charge.

Mr. Kill wasn’t taking any chances. This was more than just a murder investigation. It was also an investigation into an incident that could threaten the special relationship between the United States and the Republic of Korea. As such, it would be monitored by the very highest levels of their government. Mr. Kill wasn’t identifying suspects. To him, everyone was a suspect.

“Let them out,” I said, pointing at the doors down the hallway. “They’ve suffered enough.”

“In due time,” Mr. Kill answered.

Incongruously, I thought of how well he spoke English. I don’t believe I’d ever heard a Korean use that phrase, “in due time.” And then I remembered the lab report. I asked him about it. He snapped his fingers at Officer Oh. She bowed and ran upstairs.

“Go back to your compound,” he told us. “When I have more information, I will call you.”

“You’re not going to release these people?” Ernie asked.

Mr. Kill swiveled on him and his face hardened. “Not your business,” he said.

“Well it damn sure
ought
to be our business. These people work for the United States government. They were originally identified as witnesses by Eighth Army law enforcement, and the crimes were committed on an Eighth Army military compound.”

“But they’re Korean citizens,” Mr. Kill said. “They fall under
our
jurisdiction. Not yours.” Ernie started to say something but Mr. Kill cut him off. “Your Colonel Brace knows we picked them up. He signed off on it. Didn’t he tell you?”

Ernie’s mouth started to open, but he quickly shut it again. He glared at Mr. Kill and for a moment I was afraid he was about to sock him in the jaw. But he must have rummaged around deep in the recesses of his reptilian mind and managed to find a modicum of self-control. Instead of doing what I knew he wanted to do, Ernie pulled a stick of ginseng gum out of his pocket, unwrapped it, and popped the gum into his mouth.

As he started to chew, I said, “Come on, Ernie.”

Ernie kept staring at Mr. Kill. Deliberately, he wadded up the gum wrapper and tossed it on the ground. Finally, he turned. Together we walked toward the stairs. Before we hit the first landing, Ernie was cursing up a blue streak—part of it in Korean, part in English, and some words I figured were Vietnamese—dredging up every dirty word he’d ever learned.

Painstakingly, I translated the KNP lab report from the scene of Collingsworth’s murder, using the
Essence Korean-English Dictionary
I kept on my desk. Some of the words were medical terms and weren’t
in my dictionary. I asked Miss Kim, the admin secretary, for help, but not all the words were familiar to her either.

“Why didn’t you wait for them to translate it?” Riley growled.

“Them?” I said. “How would you be able to trust the translation?”

“What do you mean?”

For Staff Sergeant Riley and most GIs in the 8th United States Army, translation into English was a simple thing, like one plus one equals two. Each Korean word could be replaced with the English equivalent word. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. But try to explain that to a colonel who’s in a hurry. Most KNP reports probably weren’t mistranslated intentionally. More likely, the work was just too difficult for the Korean clerks assigned to the job, and he or she was under pressure to finish quickly and just wrote down what was within reach of their English vocabulary.

I was trying to get it right.

I typed up the final draft and turned it in to Riley, who handcarried it to the Provost Marshal. All it said, really, were things we already knew. The few fingerprints the KNPs had been able to take off the serving counter and the drinking cups belonged mostly to Mrs. Lee, the woman who owned the
pochang macha
. Two other prints probably belonged to the two customers, who hadn’t yet been identified. As Mrs. Lee reported, the perpetrator himself wore gloves. At the murder site, the blood samples were all the same blood type as Corporal Ricky P. Collingsworth, O positive. The color, thickness, and texture of the hair samples were analyzed and appeared to match him and Senior Private Kwon Hyon-up, the ROK MP who’d been briefly knocked unconscious in the attack.

So that was it, nothing much at all. The man with the iron sickle wasn’t leaving us anything to go on. He’d worn gloves and long-sleeved clothing, and he knew the crime scene would be analyzed closely so he’d been careful not to leave traces. No traces at all, other
than the totem, which he’d later taken away. I pulled the drawing out and glanced at it again. I should’ve had copies made for Staff Sergeant Riley, the Provost Marshall, and every MP in 8th Army. For some reason, I hesitated. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because the Provost Marshal had given permission for Mr. Kill and the Korean National Police to pick up and interrogate people who were faithful employees of the US government—and he didn’t bother to tell me or Ernie. Maybe it was because of the sympathy he’d shown for Moe Dexter and his crew and the belittling attitude he’d displayed at the risk we’d taken in arresting them. Maybe it was because of the almost drooling agreement I’d seen amongst the 8th Army officer corps when the statuesque Major Rhee Mi-sook lectured them on the dangers of North Korean agents. Maybe it was one of those things, maybe it was all of those things. Whatever it was, I figured I had to hold something back. Like the man with the iron sickle, I decided to hide something under my coat. I’d pull it out at a time when it would provide maximum surprise and maximum discomfort for my enemies.

Who those enemies were, I wasn’t quite sure yet. At times it seemed like everyone was.

The phone rang. Staff Sergeant Riley picked it up. He identified himself and listened for a while, saying, “Will do” two or three times. He hung up.

“Sueño!” he yelled, although I was just a few feet from him. “Bascom! You two are to get your sorry butts out to the ROK Army headquarters right now. Report to Major Rhee. While you’ve been sitting on your sorry asses, someone in this man’s army has been doing some work.”

“What’ve they got?” I asked.

“What’ve they got? They’re just about to bust this case wide open. Get over there now. They want the Eighth Army to witness this historic moment in joint ROK/US law enforcement.”

“They got him?” Ernie said.

“How the hell should I know? But a big task force is moving out. Be there or be square. Move out sharply!
Hubba hubba
!”

Ernie and I shrugged on our coats. On the way out, Ernie flipped Riley the bird.

Even though she was wearing ROK Army fatigues, Major Rhee Mi-sook looked smashing. The baggy uniform had been tailored to accentuate the roundness of her hips and the smallness of her waist. Raven black hair had been piled atop her head and pinned beneath a camouflage cap.