The Iron Sickle (17 page)

“Did he say what it was about?” I asked.

“No. He only said someone wanted to talk to you.”

“Someone?”

She nodded. The cannon for close of business sounded and the outside speakers blared out the tinny, tremulous notes of the retreat bugle. I picked up the phone and called Mr. Pak. No answer. It must be nice to be in business making good money. You didn’t have to work late.

I’d also received a message from Captain Prevault. She had a lead for me, she said, and she wanted me to pick her up at six with the jeep.

Ernie tossed me the keys to the jeep’s padlock. “Don’t let me butt in,” he said.

“It’s not a date,” I told him.

“ ‘Pick me up at six.’ What else are you going to call it? By the way, you spent quite a bit of time behind that hooch with Major Rhee. Was she interrogating you again?”

“Get bent, Ernie,” I told him.

He promised me he would.

When we went outside, three of the four tires of the jeep were flat. Ernie cursed and knelt next to the nearest tire, pointing at a slash in the rubber. Then he examined the other two. Same story.

“MPs,” Ernie said.

“Isn’t Dexter still locked up?” I asked.

“Yeah, but he’s got plenty of buddies.”

I handed him the keys back.

As I approached the BOQ, Captain Prevault was outside waiting. She walked toward me wearing a warm coat and a large bag over her shoulder. At Gate Number Five we waved down a
kimchi
cab heading east.

“Where to?” I asked.

She pulled out a slip of paper with an address written on it. I read it to the driver.

“
Aju molli
,” he said. A long way.

I groaned inwardly, happy I’d gotten a petty cash advance from Riley.

We headed east for almost five miles along the blue ribbon of the Han River, spanning the southern edge of the city of Seoul, until finally we crossed the Chonho Bridge and headed southeast. We passed a few cement block housing areas and some tin-roofed factories, then acres of open junk yards, and finally we were back in the countryside; fallow rice paddies interspersed with small clumps of farm houses with wisps of smoke rising from narrow chimneys.

“Where the hell is this place?” I asked Captain Prevault.

“Not far.” She pointed to a wooden sign on the side of the road and said, “
Chogi
.” There.

The driver nodded and took the turn.

“You speak Korean,” I said.

“About ten words,” she replied.

“Do you know how to tell the cab driver to stop?”

“
Seiwo juseiyo
.”

The driver slammed on his brakes and veered toward the side of the road.

“No,” I told the driver in Korean. “Keep going straight. She was just practicing.”

He nodded, then shook his head. Crazy foreigners.

Captain Prevault held her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide with glee. “It worked,” she said.

The road wound up into low hills covered with stands of pine. A breeze bent some of the branches. It would be cold tonight. Maybe this was the end of the fall, I thought, and the beginning of the Korean winter; a freezing winter that howls out of the icy steppes of Manchuria. Finally another sign led us to a gravel parking area in front of a substantial two-story brick building.

“The Japanese built this as a prison,” Captain Prevault said.

“What is it now?”

“A home for the criminally insane.”

“Still a prison,” I said.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

We climbed out of the cab. I handed the driver a five thousand
won
note, about ten bucks, and asked him to wait. He said he would.

Inside, we were met by a middle-aged Korean man in a white medical uniform who bowed to Captain Prevault, then to me, and escorted us down a long hallway. The odor of
kimchi
wafted through the air behind him. At the end of the hallway, we descended stone steps into darkness. I touched the walls. They were cold, smeared with moss.

The female prisoner sat up, her back perfectly straight, and her eyes wide in the darkness.

“We can’t turn on the light,” Captain Prevault whispered to me. “She finds it upsetting.”

The ambient glow from a yellow bulb at the far end of the stone tunnel was the only illumination. We had descended a full three stories beneath the ground. The woman sat behind a heavy wooden door, but we were able to observe her through a wire-reinforced window made of half-inch-thick glass. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I could see she was holding a tattered rag doll.

“Why do they have her here?” I asked.

“Murder. She hacked three people to death with a hoe.”

“Another farm implement.”

“Precisely. But her crime was committed almost twenty years ago, shortly after the end of the Korean War.”

“She’s so young.”

“Yes. She wasn’t much more than a child when she committed the crime.”

I knew the Korean judicial system made no differentiation between juvenile and adult crime, in part because they saw so little juvenile crime. “So what does she have to do with my case?”

“Maybe nothing. It’s her reaction that caused us to think you needed to see her.”

“Reaction?”

“To your drawing. Doctor Hwang at the sanatorium took the liberty of distributing the drawing among his colleagues, to see if it meant anything to any of them. He came out here himself and showed the drawing to each of the inmates, under controlled conditions, of course.”

“He must’ve had his suspicions.”

“Yes, you might say he did.”

“What were these ‘controlled conditions’?”

“Physical protection.”

“From the patients?”

Captain Prevault nodded. “Many of them are dangerous.”

“How about this one?”

“Since she’s been incarcerated, she’s attacked two staff members. One lost an eye, the other the use of his right leg.”

“These were men she attacked?”

“Yes.”

“But she’s so tiny. What did she do?

“She might be tiny but she has teeth. The jaws of even a small woman can exert up to five hundred pounds of pressure.”

“She bit the guy’s eye out?”

“And half of the other guy’s leg.”

“Damn.” I looked back at the silent woman with more respect. “What made her go nuts?”

“I’ve made a copy of her file,” Captain Prevault replied. “When we’re through here, I’ll give it to you.”

“When we’re through?”

“Yes. Rather than describe her reaction to your drawing, we thought it best if we showed you.”

The male nurse joined us, but now he was wearing a square mask with an iron mesh, something like a baseball catcher’s mask. He also wore the padded chest and groin protection that karate experts wear in Taekwondo tournaments. On his lower legs he wore shin guards, the kind used in soccer. Two other white-clad attendants joined us. One of them opened the door, and the heavily armored man slipped on thick leather gloves and entered the room. He sat down on a stool opposite the tiny woman. So far, she hadn’t reacted at all. The man pulled a sheet of paper out of his sleeve. He placed it on the floor in front of her, propped up slightly with his
foot. Then he pulled out a penlight and shone the bright beam on the drawing.

It was my drawing of the Itaewon alley totem all right: the wooden stand, the wire grill-like square, and a rat hanging by its ankles.

The light caused the woman to stir. She glanced at the space alien sitting across from her but seemed completely unperturbed. Then she looked down at the drawing. If I live to be a hundred I’ll never forget the look of horror that took possession of her face, as if she’d just seen the sum of all the fears any of us has ever imagined. A scream erupted from her open mouth and became progressively shriller, until it seemed like the intensity of the sound would pierce the stone walls that surrounded her. She leapt on top of her bench, crouching like a monkey evading a lion, her eyeballs riveted to the drawing, waving her free hand, as if clawing for it to go away, her tattered rag doll still clutched against her bosom.

The male nurse switched off the light. He picked up the drawing and backed smartly out of the room. The door was opened just wide enough for him to exit, then slammed shut. With a sigh of relief, the male nurse slipped off the wire mask. His brown face was pale, and sweat poured down his forehead.

Inside the tiny cell, the woman was still screaming.

I dropped Captain Prevault off at Gate Five with my apologies for not stopping somewhere for dinner. I explained I had another appointment. She pretended it didn’t matter, but the way her shoulders tightened made me believe it did matter. I asked if she had time for lunch tomorrow so that after I’d had a chance to read the complete file, we could discuss it in more detail. This brightened her up somewhat, and we made a date to meet at noon in the main cafeteria of the 121 Evac Hospital.

After I dropped her off, I told the cab driver to take me to
Sogye-dong. He asked for more money because the meter read almost twenty thousand
won
already, and I handed him another ten thousand
won
note. How I wished the tires of Ernie’s jeep hadn’t been slashed. I could’ve saved a bundle.

At the Mobom Teahouse in Sogye-dong, the meter indicated I owed the driver another four thousand three hundred and thirty won. I handed him a five thousand
won
note and surprised him by telling him to keep the change. In Korea, cab drivers don’t expect tips but I didn’t have the time to wait for the change. I was already forty-five minutes late for the 7
P.M
. appointment. I walked into the teahouse.

As usual, every pair of eyes looked up at me. Maybe a dozen tables were occupied, twenty customers max. But they were all Koreans as this was an area of town that wasn’t near a military compound and therefore wasn’t frequented by American GIs. At six-foot-four, I was an oddity in the States, never mind here. They gawked at me, expecting me to do something. None of the staff approached me, so I just stood there, futilely trying to spot Mr. Pak from the Sam-Il Claims Office. Finally, I walked up to the glass counter, behind which sat plastic replicas of delicacies such as chopped squid tentacles and rolls of glutinous rice wrapped in seaweed. The man in a white cook’s hat behind the counter had his back to me, and he was concentrating on preparing something, studiously ignoring me. I knew the treatment. I was an American and he wanted me to go away; he might be afraid that talking to me would expose his ignorance of English and possibly provoke a confrontation with an unpredictable foreigner.

I said, “
Yoboseiyo
.” Hello. When I got no response I wrapped my knuckles on the glass counter and shouted, “
Yoboseiyo
!” They want obnoxious American, I’d give them obnoxious American.

The man set down the chopper and turned. I spoke in rapid Korean.
“I was supposed to meet a man named Pak here at seven o’clock. Was he here? Was he waiting for me?”

The man stared at me dumbly as if I were some sort of display in a wax museum, then turned back to what he was doing. I was about to wrap my knuckles on the glass again when a young woman in a black skirt and white blouse hurried out of the back room. Apparently, she’d been alerted that there was a foreigner out front who refused to go away, and she’d been assigned the job of dealing with me. It was a status thing. The cook couldn’t be bothered. This waitress could.

She nodded slightly to me, not a full bow, and I proceeded to tell her what I had just told the cook. She seemed relieved that I spoke Korean.

“Mr. Pak?” she asked.

“Yes. He owns the Sam-Il Claims Office,” I said, pointing across the street at an angle. “It’s not far. He must’ve come in here before.”

“Yes. I’m sure he has. But no one here was waiting for a foreigner.” She paused, her smooth face glowing red. “We don’t see foreigners in here. We don’t know what to do with people like you.”

She was becoming increasingly flustered and increasingly incoherent. I too was a little tired of being treated like a stray circus animal. Many GIs would’ve become angry and caused a ruckus. I knew because I’d seen them in action, and I read the 8th Army blotter reports often enough. Me, I liked to think I took the more cosmopolitan view. Korea is a homogenous society and has been for thousands of years. Foreigners thrust into their midst throw them off balance—at least some of them.

I fought down my frustration, thanked the waitress and walked out of the Mobom Teahouse.
Mobom
means exemplary. I didn’t think it really applied.

I stood on the sidewalk. The wind I had noticed earlier picked up, blowing dust down the streetlit road and whirring plastic noodle
wrappers about like mad ghosts. In the distance the moon lowered red toward the Yellow Sea. I inhaled deeply of the smog and grime and the chill night air. I loved it here, in the middle of this magnificent city, even when I felt embarrassed and out of place.

A cab pulled up and slowed. The driver leaned toward me. “Where you go?” he said in English. I waved him off. I wanted to stand there awhile, alone, away from the compound, away from Americans, away from the case I’d been pursuing for the last few days. I wanted to think.