The Iron Sickle (3 page)

Both of them stopped what they were doing, as if suddenly frozen by a cold wind from Manchuria. Finally, the old woman cleared her throat and said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean the Korean man who stepped in here yesterday morning to get out of the rain, just before eight o’clock. Did he order anything? Coffee maybe? Juice?”

The man and woman exchanged glances, and I guessed they must’ve worked together for many years.

“No,” the old woman said. “He ordered nothing.”

Bingo.

“Did he speak to you?” I asked.

“No.” The old man spoke for the first time, straightening up from his chores. “He said nothing to us. He just stood there in front of the door, staring at the rain.”

“What did he look like?”

Their description matched the one given by the employees of the Claims Office.

“Did you see him leave?” I asked.

“No, but I was glad when he did.”

“Why?”

“He just stared out the window. He didn’t move. Not one muscle the whole time he stood there.”

“There was one thing that moved,” the old woman corrected.

“What was that?” I asked.

“His lip. His lower lip. It was purple, puffed up, like something was
wrong with it. The whole time he stood there it kept pulsating, like blood was pounding through it.”

“Is that it?”

“No,” she replied. “He kept sniffling, as if his nose were running. I kept thinking he was going to cry.”

I tried more questions but stopped when I realized they had nothing else to tell us.

On our way back to the barracks, Ernie insisted we ought to tell Riley that none of the vaunted investigators who’d been assigned to the Barretsford case had thought to interview the couple who ran the PX snack stand across the pathway from the Claims Office.

“You just want to rub it in,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Let’s wait for them to come to us.”

This crime wouldn’t be solved on the American compound. Like an avenging warrior, the man with the iron sickle had emerged out of the vast city of Seoul. Eventually, if Colonel Brace wanted Americans to solve this case, he’d have to enlist someone who spoke Korean and wasn’t afraid of snooping around back alleys and asking embarrassing questions. That would be us. Most of the other investigators were afraid to even venture off compound. They couldn’t read the signs, Korean addresses made no sense to them, and not enough people out there spoke English. If you ventured too far from compound, toilets were hard to find; and when you did find one, it was often nothing more than a stinking square hole in a dirty cement floor. If you weren’t limber enough to squat, you were in trouble.

And more importantly, most of our American colleagues were afraid to piss off their military superiors. Ernie and I sometimes tried not to piss off our superiors, but it rarely worked. Mostly we just didn’t give a damn.

We sipped on our coffee for a while, each lost in thought, until suddenly Ernie said, “Whoa! Who’s that?”

I glanced up. Barreling across the parking lot was an American woman, light brown hair uncovered in the drizzle. She was wearing only a long black dress covered by a grey sweater, and was dragging a little girl behind her who looked to be about eight or nine. The woman was thin but strong, as if she worked out regularly, and she was glaring at us, enraged. As she headed straight toward us, I realized who she was. Ernie did, too.

“Trouble,” Ernie said, quickly climbing out of the jeep. I popped out of the passenger side and walked to the front of the jeep.

The woman marched up to Ernie and slapped his chest with her free hand.

“What are you
doing
here?” she asked.

Ernie stood with his mouth open, dumbfounded.

“You’re CID!” she shouted. “You’re supposed to be finding the man who murdered my husband. What are you
doing
here?” She glanced at the commissary, quickly turning back to us with an incredulous expression. “Are you worrying about the black market? Black
market
! At a time like this?” Her mouth hung open, and her eyes were scrunched in disbelief. “What is
wrong
with you people?”

This time she let go of her daughter’s hand and launched at Ernie in earnest, reaching sharp nails toward his eyes. Just in time, he grabbed her wrists and leaned away from the assault, but she continued to come at him, throwing a knee to his groin, pushing him back onto the hood of the jeep, screaming at the top of her lungs. The little girl, Barretsford’s daughter, Cindy, held both her hands to her mouth, her shoulders hunched in fear, crying.

I hurried around the jeep and grabbed Mrs. Evelyn Barretsford in a bear hug. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that people were beginning to congregate in front of the commissary, and a few of
them were trotting across the parking lot. In the distance, I heard the groan of an MP siren. By then, Mrs. Barretsford had started to calm down, and we let her go. She knelt and hugged her daughter, sobbing and saying, “You should be looking for
him
. You should be looking for the man who slaughtered by
husband
!”

A few other military dependent wives gathered around her, comforting her and her daughter, all the while shooting evil looks at us.

When the MPs arrived on the scene, even they gave us the business. “What are you doing here?” one of them asked. “You’re CID. Maybe you should forget about the black market for a while and go out and solve some real crime.”

“Get bent,” Ernie told him.

The MP, a burly fellow, took a step forward, then stopped, apparently seeing the fire in Ernie’s green eyes. The MP hesitated, shrugged, and turned back toward Mrs. Barretsford.

An hour later we were ordered to report to the Provost Marshal—immediately if not sooner. We found him out on the parade field in front of 8th Army headquarters, standing with a group of dignitaries on a white bunted podium. We skidded to a halt at the edge of the field.

“Too late,” Ernie said.

A bass drum pounded and the United Nations Command Honor Guard marched onto the raked gravel. First out was a unit of the Republic of Korea Army with their green tunics and white hats, followed closely by the American honor guard in their shiny brass buttons and dress blue uniforms. Finally a platoon of Gurkhas from the British Army swung white-gloved fists resolutely forward as they strutted onto the field in their bright red blazers. A six-gun salute from a battery of 105mm howitzers blasted into the sky as sergeants shouted commands and the parade wound into formation in front of the podium. Smoke roiled across the field, cuing the 8th Army band to strike up first the Republic of Korea national anthem and then “The Star Spangled Banner.”

“Who are they trying to impress?” Ernie asked.

“Some dignitaries from the UN,” I said, “here on an inspection tour.”

“Hope they watch out for guys with sickles.”

A Korean general spoke first. I couldn’t understand everything he said; the language was formal and used a vocabulary seldom heard in the red light district of Itaewon, but I picked up most of it. Every few sentences he paused, and a younger officer translated what he’d just said into English. The general expressed his gratitude to the countries of the United Nations for their support of the free Republic of Korea, both now and during their time of need some twenty years ago, when they’d been attacked by the forces of the North Korean Communists and the massed legions of Chairman Mao Tse-tung and the Red Chinese People’s Army.

After a few more droning remarks by the American general, which were similarly translated into Korean, a plaque was presented to a UN civilian in a grey suit. Dutch, I believe he was. Then a half-dozen Korean women, decked out in full-skirted silk
hanbok
, placed leis over the heads of the smiling dignitaries. The pretty young women backed up and bowed deeply. More martial music blasted out, and the UN Honor Guard saluted with their silver bayoneted rifles. Then, to the accompaniment of a pounding drum, they marched smartly off the field.

The assembly was dismissed and Colonel Brace, along with many of the other dignitaries, hopped off the podium. After saluting a few generals and exchanging some smiling remarks, he motioned for us to meet him beneath a quivering elm tree. When he reached us, his demeanor had changed completely. His eyes were squinting, and he glanced away from us, setting both fists on his hips, as if manfully controlling his temper. Colonel Brace was a jogger who kept his weight down to anorexic levels as was the fashion of the 8th Army officer corps. He might have been much smaller than either of us, but his fists tightened as if he were preparing to spring forward and pummel us both.

“Where do you two guys get off,” he said, “upsetting Mrs. Barretsford like that?”

“We didn’t upset her,” Ernie replied. “The fact that we were assigned to the black market detail is what upset her.”

Colonel Brace shook his head slightly, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. Finally, he said, “No ‘sir’ in that answer, Bascom?”

“Sir,” Ernie said.

“You should’ve kept a low profile,” he told us, “done your work without drawing attention to yourselves.”

When neither of us answered, Colonel Brace continued. “I’m putting you back on Sergeant-of-the-Guard duty, effective immediately. Report to the MP Station after evening chow. You’ll be on that detail every night until further notice.”

“No more black market?” Ernie asked.

“No more black market. And end your questions with ‘sir.’ Is that understood?”

“Understood, sir,” Ernie replied.

He stared at us for a while, as if amazed at the human wreckage he had to deal with. Finally, he shook his head again and said, “Dismissed.”

Ernie and I saluted, maintained the position of attention, and waited for the colonel to stalk away. As we watched him go, Ernie chomped on his gum a little louder. Other than that, he showed no reaction to the butt chewing. We were used to being treated as if we were lower than whale shit. It’s a leadership technique the officer corps uses. I believe at West Point they have a week-long seminar on the finer points.

When the colonel was out of sight, we returned to the narrow parking lot where we’d left our jeep. Ernie hopped in, but I hesitated to climb into the passenger seat. He looked up at me.

“I have work to do in the admin office,” I told him.

He rolled his eyes. “Suit yourself. I’m going to catch some shut-eye
before we start the night shift.” The jeep’s engine sputtered to life. Ernie backed out of the narrow space, shifted gears, and roared off in a cloud of carbon and grime.

Inside the CID office, Staff Sergeant Riley was busy shouting into the phone about some personnel transactions that had gone missing. The admin secretary, Miss Kim, industriously typed away on a stack of reports that had come in concerning the Barretsford case. She allowed me to read them, both the American ones and those from the Korean National Police. There wasn’t much to see: a whole lot of interviews, plenty of harassed bus drivers and cabbies, and US officers and civilians who had known Barretsford. But nobody seemed to know anything about why he had been attacked. In the entire stack, there was no new information. When I finished, I placed the paperwork back on her desk and said, “
Komap-sumnida
.” Thank you.

She smiled in response.

Miss Kim was a gorgeous woman, tall and shapely. I liked the way she held herself: poised and self-aware while at the same time quiet and watchful. I had often been tempted to ask her out on a date. What held me back was not shyness but worse. She had once been close to my partner, Ernie. At the time, she thought the relationship was serious, but eventually she discovered that to Ernie Bascom, nothing is serious, neither life nor death and certainly not romance. Now she could barely stand the sight of him. I believed she still cared for him, and I figured if I made a concerted effort I could break through those emotions and win a place for myself in her affections. But there’s something about the memory of another man—especially a man you know well—that can stop a romance from developing. Jealousy, it’s called. So instead of asking her out, I was unfailingly polite to her, showing kindness whenever the opportunity arose. I brought her gifts: a rose, a small bottle of PX hand lotion, candy on holidays. She
appreciated my thoughtfulness but I wasn’t winning her heart. And I wasn’t trying to—at least that’s what I told myself.

I found a typewriter on a wooden field desk at the back of the office. I rolled a sheet of paper, along with three carbon onionskins—one green, one pink, and one yellow—into the carriage. Carefully, I started to type, first the date and then the subject:
INTERVIEW AT THE PX SNACK STAND
. And the case:
C. WINSTON BARRETSFORD, HOMICIDE
.

I typed out what the couple at the tiny snack stand across from the Claims Office had seen. An Asian man in his thirties, about five ten, a hundred and forty to a hundred and fifty pounds, with a deformed lower lip; well dressed, wearing a suit and a long overcoat and apparently holding something hidden beneath the coat. I described how he stood completely still, out of the rain, staring at the locked front door of the Claims Office. I even mentioned how his nose was running and how the old woman had speculated that he seemed to be staring at some far away vision. I described how he abruptly disappeared after the Claims Office opened at zero eight hundred. At the end of the report I typed my name, rank, and badge number. Then I pulled the four sheets out of the typewriter, peeled off the carbon, and signed my name at the bottom. The original would go to Colonel Brace; the green copy would stay in the CID file cabinet; the yellow copy would go to Lieutenant Pong, the Korean National Police Liaison officer; and the pink copy was mine, to be stashed in a dusty brown accordion file I kept in my wall locker back in the barracks.

I dropped the reports into Riley’s in-basket, stuffed my copy into my pocket, and nodded my goodbye to Miss Kim.

Nobody else noticed me leave, which was good because if they’d asked me where I was going, I would’ve been reluctant to admit that I was on my way to see someone who my old drill sergeant in basic training would’ve referred to as an egghead.