by Martin Limon
“You done good?” I said. “You almost broke up their marriage forever.”
Ernie’s grin broadened. “You really don’t understand women, do you, Sueño? If it hadn’t been for me, Marnie never could’ve made Freddy Ray jealous and Casey would’ve had to grow up without her daddy.”
We were in the CID admin office. Staff Sergeant Riley was ignoring us, shuffling through the small mountain of paperwork that had built up while he was gone. I decided not to push it. If Ernie was happy with what he’d done, then let him be happy.
Miss Kim, meanwhile, had stopped typing on her hangul typewriter and stared at Ernie in utter astonishment.
The 8th Army honchos were also happy with what we’d done. For once. The Blue Train rapist had indeed turned out to be an American G.I.; but by the time that was fully revealed to the Korean public, the guy was already dead, and dead at the hands of a man, Inspector Gil Kwon-up, who was now a bigger national hero than ever. Of course, the official line was that Parkwood had been killed inadvertently while resisting arrest—and, in a way, that was true. If the guy had just given up and hadn’t insisted on waving that straight razor around, he’d still be with us today.
I wrote a letter to Specialist Vance’s mother, telling her what a wonderful man he’d been and telling her that even though I’d only worked with him briefly, he’d proven himself to be a courageous soldier and he’d died fighting.
Back on that beach on Cheju Island, Staff Sergeant Warnocki had tied a tourniquet around his own leg and dragged himself to the main road, where a Good Samaritan picked him up and rushed him to the nearest medical clinic. He fully recovered from his wounds and was now back training troops on the slopes of Mount Halla.
When he made his occasional appearance at the 8th Army officers’ club, Lieutenant Colonel Ambrose Q. Laurel was asked about the case, but the word was that he was reluctant to talk about our adventure at sea. He was ashamed that Parkwood had gotten away with as much as he did, right under the noses of his Special Forces troops. And maybe he was also ashamed that we’d had to be saved by the haenyo.
The Country Western All Stars returned to the States. I had intended to ask Shelly out for coffee, but, after returning from Taejon, I was so busy that somehow I never got the chance.
21
Maybe it was what I’d seen on the banks of the Gapcheon River that made me change my mind about the fragment I’d given to Inspector Kill. Within twenty-four hours of leaving Taejon, I had already wrangled a chopper flight back to Hialeah Compound. I took a cab to the Pusan Police Station, and when I walked down the long hallway, nobody challenged me. The door to Inspector Kill’s temporary office was open. I entered and shut the door behind me. The safe was locked. It was an old safe, big and black, made in Germany, probably thirty or forty years old. A survivor of the Korean War and of World War II.
I knelt in front of the safe and twisted the knob.
I’m not a safecracker, but I do know something about human psychology. And I know something about Koreans. Even the best of them is superstitious. On that day when Inspector Kill was changing the combination to his safe, I had barged in on him. After I left, he must’ve continued with what he was doing. What combination would he choose? Something easy to remember, certainly. I changed the letters of my name to their corresponding numbers in the English alphabet: 19 for S, 21 for U, and so on. On the fourth number, the safe clicked open.
I pulled the fragment out, stuck it in my pocket, and relocked the safe.
Life was just starting to return to normal—mainly to busting Korean dependent housewives for selling instant coffee on the black market—and I wanted a second opinion as to what the fragment was all about.
I asked Mrs. Pei, my Korean-language teacher, to refer me to someone who could help me understand more about it. She called a man who had once been a professor of hers, and he consented to talk to me. It was a dark night when I found his address high on a hill in the Sodaemun district of Seoul. A maid let me into a rosebush-covered courtyard, and then I was ushered into a sitting room furnished with Victorian artifacts.
Professor Lim was an elderly man wearing silk hanbok with a wistful smile and only a few strands of silver hair left on a liver-spotted skull. I explained as much as I could about what the merchant marine had told me, and then I handed him the fragment. As he fondled the ancient document, he held his breath. He slipped on reading glasses, consulted an old volume in a small library in an adjacent room, and finally, after mumbling to himself for a long while, looked up at me.
“You gave this to the authorities?”
“Briefly. Then I took it back from them.”
He told me that this fragment was part of an ancient manuscript long rumored to exist but often discounted by certain scholars as a myth. “Its value,” he told me, “cannot be calculated.”
That part, I already knew.
The following weekend, I hopped on the free army bus to Munsan. From there, I took a cab to the fishing village of Heiyop-ni. They didn’t see many foreigners here, but no one followed me as I climbed a winding path to the top of a hill. The grounds were spotted with ancient burial mounds. Beneath a small clump of elms, I sat on yellow grass and stared out into the mouth of the Imjin River.
There were a few rocky islands in the distance; and beyond those, in the mist, loomed the Communist dictatorship of North Korea. A woman I’d known, Doctor Yong In-ja, had gone that way, voluntarily, to escape charges of murder here in the South. I’d let her go, ignoring my duty as a law enforcement officer, rationalizing my actions by convincing myself that she didn’t fall under my jurisdiction. I didn’t regret having let her escape. My only regret was that I hadn’t gone with her.
Now, apparently, she was trying to contact me. That’s what the fragment had been about. She was in possession of a valuable manuscript, and she was willing to make a deal to turn it over to the South. Her price, apparently, would be to attain her freedom. Help in escaping from North Korea.
How I’d go about bargaining for that help, I didn’t yet know.
The next morning, Riley was already in the office when I brought in two cups of coffee from the snack bar and plopped them on his desk.
“One’s for you,” I said.
“You win the Irish Sweepstakes?”
“No. I just felt generous.”
Riley lifted the plastic lid, sipped on the hot java, and then said, “Were you in the safe earlier this morning?”
“No,” I replied. “I just got here.”
“Somebody was. They moved my receipt book.”
I stood up. “Is the safe still open?”
“Yeah.”
I walked over to the safe, swung back the heavy door, and looked inside. It was gone.
“I had a sealed envelope in here,” I said, “marked Sueño. Did you take it out?”
“Not me,” Riley said.
I sat back in front of his desk and drank my hot coffee. Before half of it was gone, I knew what had happened. Inspector Kill. He’d wanted the fragment back, he’d figured I was the one who took it, and now, somehow, he’d managed to get it back in his possession. I should never have showed it to him in the first place, but that was back when I trusted him.
What I would do next, I wasn’t sure. Doctor Yong In-ja was a shrimp between warring whales. Somehow, the shrimp had to be saved.