by Brian Haig
Some Asians can be that way. The rite of suicide is an act of honor to purge some horribly disgraceful thing. Like killing a bunch of unarmed, innocent people – that would qualify.
Okay, that’s one scenario. Here’s another: The two shooters were a team. They weren’t firing in self-defense. They weren’t firing in the heat of the moment. They weren’t firing randomly. They were cold-bloodedly murdering as many Americans as they could, as swiftly as they could. They wanted to manufacture an atrocity. They wanted to get people’s attention.
But here’s the rub. Who’d do such a thing? The same people who tossed Melborne in front of a car? Or were the incidents unrelated?
Since I never much believed in random theories, I was assuming, just for the sake of argument, that both acts were done by the same people, which was why I was in my wheelchair on the road just outside the front gate of the Yongsan Garrison, with Imelda pushing me around as I pointed this way and that. I looked like a cranky old man with an even crankier nurse.
The road was closed and the massacre scene was fenced off with yellow tape. Korean and American military cops were climbing all over searching for clues. There were chalk-haloed silhouettes where yesterday real bodies had lain seeping their life’s fluids onto the tarmac. Their bloodstains were still visible in the concrete, and crushed and abandoned protest signs were strewn about, discarded in the moments of bald terror when two men with weapons were pumping round after round into the densely packed crowd.
I sat in my wheelchair and tried to recapture the stream of events that led up to the slaughter. In my head, there was a mass of protesters holding up signs, holding one another’s arms, breathlessly awaiting the confrontation. There was a platoon of riot policemen standing off to the left, the first group, the ones provided by the city to safeguard our “welcoming party.” Six buses were idling in front of us and police cars with flashing lights were arriving every few seconds. The line of riot police was clumping toward us – two steps forward, pause; two steps forward, pause; two steps forward – then only five feet away, a complete halt.
We were eye-to-eye: protesters and riot policemen totally, inexorably, fatefully fixated only on one another. Everybody – journalists, television cameramen, bystanders – had their eyes glued on the point of the confrontation. Everybody was staring anxiously at the narrow, tense fault line between the two sides. Nobody was paying attention to a shooter at the rear of the crowd or to two Korean cops who were choosing their killing roosts on opposite sides of the road. Hundreds of possible witnesses were blind to anything but the confrontation about to occur.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember the first shot, a dull crack behind me. Far behind me. Too far to have come from the mass of protesters, I was nearly certain. It was possible one of the protesters hadn’t been in the crowd, but had hung back behind it. But whoever it was should’ve stood out like a sore thumb. Presumably the police were rushing in cars to block off the road at the rear of the protest, just like they were at the front, so surely there were plenty of Korean cops back there.
Wouldn’t one of them have seen a protester as he or she lifted up a pistol or rifle and fired a round? Surely it would’ve been observed. A shooter can’t be inconspicuous.
I opened my eyes and looked up, because two men were walking toward me. One Korean and one American.
Michael Bales had his all-American, what-a-great-guy, just-everybody’s-pal look pasted on his face. It no longer looked friendly to me. It looked phony, contrived, the mask of a malevolent beast.
“Jesus, Major, I’m really glad you’re okay,” he announced, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Look what that bastard did to you.”
And Choi immediately chimed in, “That was very bad man we locked you up with. We make poor judgment. He no get away with this, though. We bring charges. He get punished. You see.”
For this particular episode of South Korean Masterpiece Theater, he had reverted to pidgin English, and his face was a portrait of pretend sympathy.
Then Bales said, “Thank God your lawyer brought over that film when she did. If she’d waited till the next morning, we wouldn’t have looked in on you till then. That brute in your cell would probably have killed you.”
They were good. Give them credit for that. They were telling me in their own inimitable way that they had already fabricated an alibi. They’d probably lined up a platoon of cops to attest I was pulverized to hamburger by my nonexistent cellmate.
I glanced up at Imelda, who had her hands gripped on the handles of my wheelchair. She’d picked up on the sarcastic undertone and was snorting with anger.
I wanted to get out of this chair and kick them in the nuts, but before I could say anything, Bales said, “Now, I hate to be pushy here, sir, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to please leave the crime scene. This is a quarantined area. We’re involved in an intensive police investigation. We can’t have bystanders contaminating the site, can we? You’re a lawyer. I’m sure you understand.”
He’d reverted to his courteous, I’m-just-a-humble-cop-trying-to-do-his-humble-job masquerade, and I had an almost irresistible urge to tell him where he could put his head.
But before I could say anything, Imelda deftly wheeled me around and began heading for the yellow tape that surrounded the investigation site.
Bales called out, “Hey, have a nice day.”
And Choi echoed, “Yes, have a nice day.”
When we were on the other side of the tape and back through the gate, Imelda coolly asked, “Them the two that ripped you up?”
“Uh-huh,” I furiously mumbled.
She said nothing more, as though it were just a passing question.
When we got back to the hair parlor, Allie the amazon was all over me. She literally tripped over herself to help Imelda wheel me in. She planted me beside a desk and fetched me some coffee, then stood there like a worried hen studying an egg with an ugly crack in it. I’d been transformed in her eyes. I’d become worthy. I’d shed blood for the cause.
I told her how sorry I was about Maria and she glumly nodded and sniffled once or twice. She was shrouded entirely in black, for mourning no doubt. The sight of Allie, all skinny, six feet three inches of her, draped in black leotards and a long black shift, combined with her spiky hair, nearly took my breath away.
I was touched, anyway. I truly was. Maybe some of it was pity, but I actually felt a wave of deep affection for her.
I also decided that having a couple of women busting a gut to take care of my every whim wasn’t too bad, so I hunched over in my wheelchair, occasionally coughing, or moaning, or working up a pained look. For half an hour the two of them sprinted around getting me more coffee and cups of water, and pencils and paper, until Imelda got suspicious and whispered in my ear, “Cut that shit out or I’ll give you a reason to moan.”
So I did. I perked up in my wheelchair and told her and Allie they’d accomplished a medical miracle, that I felt like a whole new man, thank you. Imelda rolled her eyes and Allie grinned like a shy debutante staring at the local stud coming to ask her to dance.
Then we got down to a drill they teach in law schools called mindmapping. The point of the exercise is to disaggregate a bunch of chaotic events, to list them on a wall, and search for possible linkages or connections. Allie was writing the events on the chalkboard while we spat ideas and linkages back and forth. And the thing that struck me right away was that I’d badly underestimated her. She had extraordinary recall of events and circumstances and facts.
At the end of two hours, the chalkboard looked like a giant cobweb spun by a schizophrenic spider on amphetamines. Lines crisscrossed every which way.
Here’s what we had. We had three prominent nexus, or nexi, or whatever. One: Lee No Tae’s murder. Two: the near murder of Fred Melborne, aka Keith Merritt. Three: the slaughter at the protest site. Link the three together and we had a web of death.
Off to the right of this, we tried to reason through some pos
sible motives. Our reasoning went like this:
People kill other people generally as an act of passion or chilling self-interest. Passions like rage, hatred, jealousy, or lust. Cold self-interest like greed, politics, or to cover other crimes. Of course, people kill one another by accident, too, or sometimes just out of sickening curiosity, or for fun, or because they’ve got a screw loose, but the kind of murderers we were looking for most likely weren’t the crossed-synapses types, or the whoopsy-daisy types, or the gee-ain’t-this-a-gas types.
Most times when a hetero murders a gay, it’s a crime of disgust. It’s labeled a crime of passion or hate, though more thoughtful psychiatrists would tell you the hetero murderers are trying to prove something to their peers, to be worshipped as something they don’t truly feel they are – to wit, a macho man of action. Thus it’s actually a crime of nauseating internal weakness, of self-disgust.
If you assumed Whitehall was innocent of Lee’s murder, and you connected all three events together, one conclusion would be that all this mayhem was perpetrated by someone with a grinding hatred toward gays. More than one person, though. A ring of gay haters. And probably not an American ring, because the men who’d shot the protesters were Korean. We also knew one of the shooters was legitimately a police officer. The other wore a police uniform, and used an M16, and fled in a police car. For the sake of argument, assume he wasn’t wearing a costume; assume he also was an honest-to-God flatfoot. Then toss in my hunch that there was a third police officer located behind the crowd, who’d fired the instigating shot as a pretext for slaughter.
“Guess where every finger points?” Allie suddenly suggested. She then answered her own question. “At the Itaewon Police Station.”
You know how sometimes somebody says something and the second you hear it, you realize how very obvious it is, and how easily you should have thought of it yourself? This was one of those moments.
“Yeah,” I said, amazed.
Allie stared at the chart. “The Itaewon police investigated Lee’s murder. They could easily have planted evidence and otherwise made it look like Thomas did it. Fred was in the Itaewon precinct when he was thrown in front of the car. The Itaewon police did the investigation and claimed they couldn’t find any witnesses. And the police cars at the massacre were most likely from the Itaewon station. The officer you killed, Sean, was assigned to that precinct.”
All this was true. She’d connected the dots. Her law school professors would be proud of her. I was proud of her. And if she was right, Allie had broken this case wide open.
She’d just given us our first suspect. Only that suspect was an entire police station. Although that sounds fantastic, the truth is that rotten precincts are stunningly common. Remember that New York City precinct that was using electric cattle prods to torture suspects? Remember that huge New York cop ring that Officer Serpico of later movie fame broke up? Or how about that more recent Los Angeles anticrime squad that kept shooting innocent suspects and planting evidence and covering up for one another?
And to tell the truth, I wanted it to be Itaewon Police Station. I mean, I really did. Call me vindictive, but there it is.
But where did Bales fit in? What was he? A dupe? A sadistic stooge who got his rocks off knocking prisoners around, who was too stupid to notice what was happening around him?
That was a gap we couldn’t fill in.
But what Allie suggested made sense. Terrifying sense.
After thinking about it a moment, I said, “What’s the motive?”
She scratched her head. “Hatred. They hate gays.”
“Possibly,” I muttered, so she wrote that down on the big board.
However, I wasn’t entirely persuaded it was sufficiently compelling. So we argued awhile. I said the hatred motive required a large dose of mass antigay hysteria, and I suggested that might be far-fetched. Allie assured me she knew more about these things, and she was convinced such a thing was within reason. Look at how Blacks were treated in the old South… even the not-so-old South. Look how hippies were treated by Mayor Daley’s Chicago cops. Look how gays are treated by the American military.
I said those were different things, and she strongly insisted they weren’t at all different, that all forms of mass psychosis had the same roots. We went back and forth like that for a few moments, until Imelda barked out, “Move on. What’s next?”
She’d been silently watching us this whole time, and for once she appeared to be somewhat mollified that we lawyers were starting to earn our keep. Of course, the shiftless, unruly children still needed a hard-driving referee if they were to make any further progress.
I wheeled myself back and forth in my chair a few times, then said, “How about a political motive? Like anti-Americanism.”
“How so?”Allie asked.
“Say some of the Korean police are linked to one of those nationalist, anti-American groups that are so rife over here. Say they found out Lee No Tae was gay and was having an affair with an American officer. Easy enough. The apartment’s in their precinct. They have stooges and spies on the streets. They see this American officer and his Korean boyfriend visiting the apartment a few times every week. They run traplines and discover Lee is the minister’s son. Maybe they find that really disgusting. I mean, Koreans find it racially insulting that our GIs sleep with Korean whores, but this, homosexual sex, really gets under their skin. Whitehall was exploiting a Korean body – that’s bad enough. But Lee, he was the one who was wantonly disgracing their race. So they killed him and they framed it on Whitehall, an American officer, a West Point graduate. They get two birds with one stone. Then maybe Fred was getting close to them, so they tried to kill him, too. Then the protest came up and they saw an opportunity to really do some havoc.”
Imelda and Allie stared at me, then glanced at each other, then started shaking their heads.
“Sean, look,” Allie said. “In the first place, nobody knew about the timing or nature of our protest. Katherine filed it under false pretenses.”
I said, “The police knew about the demonstration. The mayor’s office informed them. Maybe they figured out its real purpose.”
She said, “Second, the men who fired on the crowd were police officers. How could they be members of this anti-American group?”
I said, “Did you watch the ’88 Olympics on TV?”
They both shook their heads.
“The ’88 Olympics were held here, in Seoul. It was a grand moment for the Koreans, a coming-out party, an international tribute to everything they’d accomplished. So it’s the opening-day ceremony. The stadium is packed with a hundred thousand local spectators holding these tiny national flags in their hands. The American teams come marching out, and, I kid you not, nearly the entire stadium stood and booed. A while later, the Russian team marched out, and nearly the entire stadium got to their feet and cheered.”
Allie said, “I can’t believe that. We’re allies.”
“I know. Here’s the Russians, the same guys who put Kim Il Sung in place, who were completely responsible for the attack on South Korea, who fed and armed North Korea for fifty years, and they cheered them. And here’s our guys, representing the country that lost thirty-five thousand lives saving their asses, and then spent countless billions of dollars to protect them over the next fifty years, and they give us the Bronx cheer.”
Allie said, “It doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s a paradox. But I know this: They’re tired of having American troops on their soil. They’re tired of being dependent on another country. They’re tired of being told what to do by Americans. They don’t trust our motives for being here, and frankly our motives are damned hard to explain, even to ourselves. I mean, what does Korea offer the U.S.? Immigrants, and cheap electronics, and cars that American workers would rather manufacture themselves, right?”
Allie leaned up against the blackboard. “And you think they’d kill Americans to drive us out?”
There was a television r
unning in the corner and just at that moment CNN switched to a live broadcast of the Secretary of State climbing off a long, sleek U.S. Air Force 747. He looked like a former general as he came down the stairs, shoulders squared, back erect. He looked grim, too, like he wasn’t the least bit happy to be here.
At the bottom of the aircraft steps the president of Korea waited to meet him. Normal protocol would be for the foreign minister, his direct equal, to be there to handle the reception. This was a sign of how serious things were. He and the South Korean president pointedly didn’t shake hands. This was a sign of the mood.
The story cut back to a correspondent in Washington who was interviewing a florid, angry-looking gay congressman from Massachusetts.
“Representative Merrigold, do you really believe your troop withdrawal bill has any chance of passing?”
“Damn right I do,” he yapped. “I’ve already got enough support to get it on the House floor. And I’m picking up more support by the hour. Let me tell you something. Let me tell all of America something. This is no longer about gays, ladies and gentlemen. Forget their sexual preference, those were Americans murdered on that street. If the Republic of Korea won’t protect our citizens, why in the hell should we protect theirs? If they continue with this cover-up, every last American soldier will be out of that country by the end of the month. We’ll send Federal Express to pick up our equipment later.”
There was another cutback to an attractive anchorwoman who was struggling to look appropriately severe and apprehensive. “And so the Secretary of State has been sent by the President to try to salvage whatever he can out of a situation that all commentators agree is virtually hopeless. The death toll in Korea has now reached fifteen. Four of the wounded are still listed in critical condition. The Republic of Korea continues to insist that its police officers were provoked by sniper fire from the protesters, while sources on the Hill say chances a troop withdrawal bill will pass are excellent.”