Mr. Kill

by Martin Limon

  “There’s more?” I asked.

  “Much more.”

  If this guy was a dealer in antiquities, I wouldn’t be interested in doing business with him. Not just because what he was doing was probably illegal but, more importantly, because I was in a different line of work. I’m a cop, not a hustler. But the question he’d asked me, the question about a stormy night in Itaewon, changed everything.

  “When will I meet you?” I asked.

  “We will be traveling to Tsushima for a few days and then we’ll return here. One week from today. We’ll only be in port three days. I’ll be here every night. If you bring someone with you or try to follow me, the deal will be off.”

  I nodded.

  The man left me with the fragment and started to walk away.

  “Wait,” I said. He paused and stared at me. “The night in Itaewon. How do you know about that?”

  He pointed to the fragment in my hand. “The owner of the manuscript, the one who entrusted it to me, she told me to find you and to trust no one but you.”

  “You’ve seen her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Where do you think?”

  He glanced toward the north, stared at me for a moment, and then shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and stalked away.

  The next day, before catching the ferry from Pusan to Cheju, I decided to check in at the Pusan Police Station. The uniformed Korean policeman in the hallway told me that Inspector Kill was busy. I told him it was important and stepped past him. An office at the end of the passageway had been temporarily assigned to Inspector Kill for the duration of the Blue Train rapist investigation. When I opened the door, Inspector Kill’s back was to me and he was leaning over the safe behind his desk, fiddling with the locking mechanism. Apparently, he was changing the combination. He stopped what he was doing, sat up straight, and turned to look at me.

  The fragment the mysterious sailor had given me was made of a brittle but very thick fibrous material. I held it in my open palm, touching only the wax paper the sailor had wrapped it in. I dropped it on the center of Inspector Kill’s desk.

  “Igot muoya?” he said in Korean, startled by something that he immediately recognized as being valuable.

  “You’re a calligrapher,” I told him. “You know about Chinese characters and about ancient styles of writing. Maybe you can tell me what this is.”

  Kill closed the door of the safe, turned back to his desk, and studied the fragment. After a few seconds, he looked up at me. “Where did you find this?”

  “It’s a long story. First, what does it mean?” I pointed. “This character means something about a king and there’s a lot of numbers, so I thought maybe it was a date.”

  Inspector Kill looked at me with increased interest. “You’ve studied hanmun.” Chinese characters.

  “A little.”

  He was impressed. Koreans revere education. Since the end of the Korean War, their schools and universities have been churning out mathematicians and scientists at an increasingly rapid rate. But despite this emphasis on modern knowledge, Koreans are still most in awe of the traditional forms of education, a curriculum that has been taught since the days of Confucius: Chinese characters, calligraphy, the ancient texts known as the Four Books and the Five Classics. These are thought of, even today, as the only true education. That a foreigner, especially an American G.I., would know how to read and write even a few Chinese characters never failed to impress.

  Inspector Kill turned back to the fragment. He reached in the desk, rummaged around for a while, finally pulling out a magnifying glass, and laid it on the table. Then he searched in another drawer and came out with a pair of gloves made of fine white cloth. He slipped them on. Gingerly, using a pair of silver chopsticks, he turned the fragment this way and that, examining it under the magnifying glass. As he studied, he spoke.

  “Korea made the first paper,” he said. “Not from the skin of animals—that had been done since time immemorial—but from bamboo, ground with a pestle, and then mixed with lime and the leaves of a birch tree. Finally the pulp was stretched on a screen to dry.” He switched on a green lamp. “Here, look at the grain in this paper. Even now, you can see tiny chunks of wood.”

  With the chopsticks, he pointed to a dark splotch.

  “So this paper is very old,” he said. “Probably made during the early part of the Chosun Dynasty, before modern paper was introduced. And you’re right about the date. It’s indicating the reign of King Sejong Daewang.”

  Even I’d heard of Sejong Daewang, Great King Sejong. A statue of him presided over the entrance to Doksoo Palace in Seoul, and his stern visage stared out from every freshly minted hundred-won coin. He was credited with having devised the hangul alphabetic script, freeing Korea from the Chinese writing system, and with other innovations that seem modern to us today, such as keeping track of national rainfall, distributing loans to farmers from the royal treasury, and even devising an early version of the seismograph, to measure the intensity of earthquakes.

  “Is that it?” I asked. “Is that all this fragment has on it, the date?”

  “Maybe not.”

  Deftly employing the chopsticks, Inspector Kill pried one sheaf of the parchment loose from the other. Like a flower opening to sunlight, it unfolded into a fragment almost as large as a full page of typing paper.

  More characters. Smaller handwriting shoved together in the “grass” style—that is, written quickly, like cursive handwriting, making it more difficult for a novice like me to read. Inspector Kill used the magnifying glass and leaned closer.

  “Whoever wrote this,” he said, “used a horsehair brush and expensive ink.”

  “You can tell just by looking at it?”

  “That’s my initial guess. We can have a more thorough analysis done in the lab.”

  “You’ve worked on ancient texts before.”

  “A few times,” he replied. “There are plenty of antiques and heirlooms and manuscripts hidden around Seoul and the rest of Korea. Sometimes they’re stolen. Sometimes they’re involved in crimes in other ways.”

  “Like people squabbling over an inheritance.”

  “Like that,” he said. “So if the paper was expensive and the writing brush made of horsehair, the most expensive of the time, and the ink of highest quality, chances are that whoever wrote this was a highly educated man.”

  Inspector Kill said “man” because in those days women were seldom allowed the opportunity to become literate.

  “Can you decipher what it says?” I asked.

  “A little.”

  Kill followed the writing, gliding the glass slowly above the rows of tightly scripted text. Three or four paragraphs’ worth, all in all, were jammed into a small space.

  Finally, Inspector Kill leaned back, as if shocked by something.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Who gave you this?”

  “I told you it’s a long story.”

  He lay down the magnifying glass and looked at me directly. “It’s a story,” he said, “that some very important people will soon become very interested in.”

  “Why? What’s this all about?”

  Then he told me. As he spoke, I pulled over a straight-backed chair and sat down.

  According to Inspector Kill, this fragment was part of a narrative concerning the chase for a man, some sort of “wild man,” who had been considered dangerous by the authorities at the time—sometime during the reign of King Sejong, approximately 1418 to 1450. This “wild man” was extremely strong and resourceful and managed to elude men on horseback by entering a network of caves in the Kwangju Mountains near Mount Osong. Upon entering the caves, the officials discovered a network of tunnels that took them much farther than they ever imagined. So far south, in fact, that they emerged in an area near Mount Daesong, located on a plateau between the Imjin River to the west and the tributaries leading to the Han River valley to the east. What apparently fo
llows in the remainder of the manuscript, according to Kill, would be a detailed guide to those underground caverns, a guide that without the help of the “wild man” would’ve taken years to compile, if it had been possible at all.

  “To drop into these caverns,” Inspector Kill said, “would be suicide if you didn’t know that there was a route out. And know how to find that route.”

  “Okay,” I said. “This stuff is of great interest to spelunkers,” I said, “but what good is it to us today?”

  “What?” Kill asked.

  “Spelunkers,” I repeated. “People who crawl through caves.”

  “For fun?”

  I nodded. “For fun.”

  Inspector Kill shook his head, unable to imagine such a thing being fun. He rose to his feet. “I’ll show you why this information could be valuable.”

  We walked over to a map of Korea tacked to his wall. He pointed, still wearing his white gloves.

  “Here,” he said, “are the Kwangju Mountains.” He pointed to a range that slashed across the center of the Korean peninsula. “According to that fragment, the wild man dropped into the caves here, near Mount Osong, and led his pursuers through a maze of caverns and underground rivers that took them three days to traverse. Eventually they emerged here.” Kill pointed again. “Somewhere near Mount Daesong.”

  I studied the two points, my mouth falling open. “Oh,” I said.

  “Now you see the value of this information?”

  I nodded.

  “The rest of the manuscript,” Kill continued, “could be of vital national interest. One side, where these men entered the caves, is in North Korea; the other side, where they emerged, is in South Korea.”

  “The remainder of the manuscript,” I said, almost speaking to myself, “shows the way beneath the DMZ.”

  The Korean Demilitarized Zone is the most heavily fortified demarcation line in the world: 700,000 Communist soldiers in the north; 450,000 ROK soldiers in the south. Not to mention a division of 30,000 American soldiers sitting smack-dab in the middle.

  “So maybe now,” Inspector Kill said, slipping off his gloves, “you’ll tell me where you found this fragment.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said. But for some reason I hesitated.

  “Okay,” Kill said. “You think about it. I’ll lock this fragment in the safe.” He did. Then we started discussing the Blue Train rapist. Ernie puked over the railing.

  When his guts were empty he stood and looked at me, bleary-eyed. “How long does this goddamn boat ride take?”

  “Eleven hours. Another two hours left,” I said.

  “Two hours?” Ernie groaned.

  Before we left Hialeah Compound, I’d checked with Specialist Holder at Headquarters Company about the personnel assigned to the Special Forces Training Facility, Mount Halla.

  “I have no data on them,” he told me. “The Green Berets run their own show. They don’t want rear-echelon pukes like us mucking around with their personnel records.”

  “Do you have any idea how many trainers are assigned?”

  “No idea. All I know is that combat units from up north in the 2nd Division area are flown out of the DMZ all the way down south to Cheju Island for specialized training. Rappelling. Mountaineering. Commando tactics. Things like that. How many Special Forces troops are assigned there at any given time, I don’t know.”

  “Who’s the commander?”

  Holder thumbed through a stack of computer printouts. “Some guy with about half his jaw blown off. Weird-looking character. Looks like a puppet made by Señor Wences. But mean. Don’t ever mention his jaw. Here it is.” Holder pointed to a name. “Laurel, Ambrose Q., Lieutenant Colonel. Not exactly a name you’d associate with someone so tough.”

  “How’d he lose his jaw?” Ernie asked.

  “Vietnam,” Holder replied. “Training Montagnards or something like that.”

  It wasn’t much information, but it was a start.

  We returned to billeting, woke up Riley, and gave him the chore of contacting the Air Force and compiling a list of zoomies who were on pass or leave or official travel on the days of the two assaults on the Blue Train.

  “Can do,” Riley said, without complaint, sitting upright on the edge of his bunk, holding his head, trying to clear his mind. He was a blowhard and a drunk, but in the final analysis Staff Sergeant Riley was one hell of a soldier. He’d complete the mission, no matter how miserable he felt. I told him where we were going.

  “Cheju-do?” he said. “This is no time for a vacation.”

  As the most southerly spot in the Republic, Cheju Island was known for its warm weather and balmy beaches, a Korean version of Hawaii.

  “This is no vacation,” I said. “We’re going to check out the Special Forces.”

  “Those guys? You think one of them might be the Blue Train rapist?”

  “Could be. We won’t know until we check.”

  “They’ll eat you for lunch.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Ernie replied.

  We left Riley sitting on the edge of his bunk, growling, spitting up, preparing to become human again.

  The ferry that ran from the Port of Pusan to Cheju Island was huge. It was said that it could hold three hundred passengers. There were only about two dozen of us aboard on this trip, though, maybe because it was the last ferry to depart in the evening. Ernie and I were the only foreigners. The other passengers kept to themselves, mainly because they were couples, recently married. Cheju Island had become the traditional place for a honeymoon in Korea.

  Ernie stared at the happy couples. “What are they grinning about?”

  “They just got married, Ernie.”

  “That’s a reason to be happy?”

  I slapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll cheer up when we hit shore.”

  Ernie’s eyes spun, and he leaned over the railing and threw up again.

  The ferry disembarked at a pier about a half mile from Cheju-si, the city of Cheju. In the early morning sunlight, Ernie and I carried our overnight bags and stood in line at a covered awning waiting for a taxi. When it was our turn, I leaned in the passenger-side window and spoke Korean to the driver.

  “The American compound on the side of Mount Halla, do you know where it is?”

  He nodded.

  “How much?”

  “Meto-ro dobel,” he said. Double meter because it was outside of his authorized area of operations. That’s the way cabs are regulated in Korea. If they transport a fare outside of their designated area, they aren’t allowed to bring a fare back. Therefore, the passenger must pay double. Ernie always balked at this arrangement, figuring they’d pick up an illegal fare on the way back anyway. Still, it seemed fair to me. We climbed in.

  I asked the driver if there were yoguans in the area of the compound and he said there were. We sped along the edge of Cheju City and we were almost immediately thrust into a lush green countryside. Rice paddies stretched all around us and ran up the sides of hills, leading in a terraced parade up toward the huge mountain that loomed off to our left. Ernie peered out the window.

  “It’s smoking up there.”

  “Mount Halla’s a live volcano,” I said.

  “Oh, great. First I get seasick; now I get splashed with molten lava.”

  The road was a narrow two-lane highway. Three-wheeled trucks and other cabs and ROK Army military jeeps sped past us. After about a mile, we veered toward the sea and the driver pointed toward a rocky promontory.

  “Haenyo,” he said.

  I rolled the window down to see better.

  “Haenyo,” Ernie repeated. “What’s that?”

  “There, Ernie,” I said, pointing. “Those little black dots in the water. See that?”

  “Yeah. I see ’em. So what?”

  “That’s them. The haenyo. The women of the sea. They dive for things.”

  Ernie raised himself to get a better look. “You mean like they dive for pearls?”

  “Not too many
pearls left, I don’t think. They dive for food. Sea anemones and octopus and seaweed and stuff like that.”

  “They make a living doing that?”

  “Yes. It’s like fishing. See those floats nearby? Those are the game bags where they keep their catch.”

  Ernie glanced at me. “How do you know so much about the haenyo?”

  “I read about them. At the Eighth Army library.”

  Ernie plopped back into his seat, staring at me in disgust. “You would.” To Ernie, reading was something that was done on an as-needed basis only, when you were desperate for information.

  The cab turned off the main road and started bouncing over a dirt track. We climbed steadily up Mount Halla. The road turned back on itself, reversed course again, and suddenly we popped into a tunnel hewn out of solid granite. The tunnel ran about a hundred yards, then emerged onto a shelf overlooking a plateau. We turned and turned again, finally crossing a ridge and looking down upon a valley with a mountain stream. On the far edge of the stream, across a short wooden bridge, was a gate covered by an arch that said Mount Halla Training Facility, and in smaller letters, United States Army Special Forces, Cheju Contingent. The buildings were Quonset huts painted puke green, the roads between them covered with neatly raked gravel, broad enough for a squad of soldiers to march through. Closer to us sat a village of about thirty buildings. The ones on the edge were farmhouses covered with thatched straw. Closer in to the main road that ran across the bridge were a few two-story buildings.

  “A G.I. village,” Ernie said. “I’d recognize it anywhere.”

  A sign said Nokko-ri. Nokko village. The cab driver drove through the narrow roads and took us to the one yoguan in town. He waited patiently as I counted out his fare. Faces peeped out of windows, slender fingers parted beaded curtains. Ernie climbed out of the cab, stretched, and gazed around, tucking his shirt in his pants, chomping on ginseng gum.

  We were something new to the people of Nokko-ri; G.I.s arriving on their own, in a fancy city taxicab, not in a military formation.

  Ernie studied the unlit neon signs of two bars: the Sea Dragon Nightclub and the Volcano Bar.

  “I think I’m going to like it here,” he said.