Tiger's Tail

by Gus Lee

  “The Wizard doesn't kill. He's a sorcerer—he makes people disappear and switches them. Levine—Jimmy's alive. Maybe at Suwon.”

  “I don't think so, but you gotta see McCrail. He's been waiting nearly eight years in ROK solitary to fink on the Wizard. There's just one problem.”

  “Why am I not going to like this?”

  “Inside Suwon is a maximum-security facility called Naktong Tower—a solitary-confinement block for Korean penal scum—spies, traitors, child killers and Korea's worst foreign prisoners. It's a colony of truly lost criminal souls. No Yankees allowed except as inmates. Min says it's pride; we've pushed big into Korean life. At Naktong they drew the line: Korean visitors only.” Pause. “McCrail's in Naktong Tower.”

  She passed me ROK Army duds and underwear. “You tried janitor. Try being a Korean major in the ROK Airborne, courtesy of Min. And start eating.” She gave me a carton.

  “Kim chi—pickled, fermented cabbage in garlic, the national dish. It nukes colds, which, here, could kill you. Koreans take the scent in their pores for the health benefits. This is kamdongjoh, the king of all kim chis. Octopus, roe, abalone, dropwort. Eat.”

  “I'm healthy as a horse,” I said.

  “You smell like an American. No more English Leather.”

  “Then why not just rub it into my skin?”

  “Good idea. Kan, Curadess confessed before trial, under duress—a.k.a. torture. ROK national police were after his Korean drug network. They fried his privates; he gave names.” She took an angry breath.

  “Here's our scam. You are Major Hong, ROK Airborne. One of the innocent parties Curadess named is your beloved father, who we claim was crippled by the cops and, now, finally died after long suffering. Eat.” She gave me chopsticks. I ate. It was hot.

  “Major Hong wants to see the fat foreign circus beast. To tell him, as a good Confucian son, how foul he is, to spit at his big feet.”

  “That'll impress him.” I picked up a pair of boxers. “Down to underwear level? Tell me they don't cavity-search visitors.”

  “Can't be sure. I don't think a big bad ROK major of paratroopers would put up with anything more than a pat-down.”

  “I could end up being McCrail's bunkie.”

  “Yes. At night, he'll hear all about the girl you cry about. Sorry. Why didn't you pass as a janitor? Keep eating.”

  I ate. “I'm too big. And I got caught by Americans. With Koreans, I'll be humming the no-paddle anthem up Poop Creek.”

  She came close. “Then we admit you're Chinese. Overseas Chinese are here. They're almost looked up to. It's just unusual for them to be career military.”

  Just like America.

  She wrapped my head with a field dressing. “The problem is, you don't speak Korean. So we say your jaw was busted in an MSR crash. Who wouldn't believe that? With your jaw like this, you can't talk. We'll say your hearing was impaired.” She remembered my ear and blushed. “And you already know some Korean. I'll give you more to go with your Chinese authoritarian first-son mentality. That works big here.” She smoothed the bandage. She used a nice-smelling soap.

  “I'd wear your tunic under the ROK overcoat and over ROK trousers. Show McCrail who you really are. After seven years, he may be paranoid, even schizoid. I'll sew the blouse to the overcoat, so if you have to take off the coat in front of guards, the greens will follow. Snip the thread to show McCrail your blouse. And I'd wear every ribbon you have.”

  That was something I did not do. I thought for a moment. “Levine, ROK majors don't ride in American jeeps. And ROKs wear shorter hair.”

  “Min will get a ROK jeep in Yongsan to drive you in. He's taking a chance; penalty for impersonation is life.”

  I disliked Min's taking chances, but Infantry officers rely on the valor of volunteers. Levine pulled out scissors and comb and pointed me into the chair. She started cutting.

  “Kan, you know that Min is always asking me about you? He respects you—an Asian who's mastered the West.”

  She had a gentle, warm touch, removing big clumps.

  “This haircut will change his opinion.”

  Later, she checked her work, her face close. She looked in my eyes. “Good.” She licked her upper lip. “For someone going to the joint.” She brushed hair from my face and neck, not looking at me. She fired a Polaroid. “For the ID.”

  It was a nice shot. I looked like a public enemy who had fought a lawn mower with his head.

  She smeared kim chi on my neck, the garlic defeating all other scents. The peppers burned. “McCrail's an archive of the Wizard's tricks. I'd do it if I had a chance.”

  Hi, Warden. I'm a Korean major with the looks of a white devil foreign lady. Let me see the fat foreign person.

  “Levine, I see why Carlos likes you.”

  “He doesn't like me. He thinks I'm a pain in the ass.”

  “Really?” I said flatly. The kim chi stung my throat. I finished the carton and held up the shorts. “Too small.”

  “Yes,” she said lasciviously. “That's what all men say.”

  I looked around the room. Frowning, I checked pockets. Levine also looked around the room. “What'd you lose?”

  “My silly little dick. It was here a minute ago.”

  16

  DRUMMING OF CUPS

  Thursday, January 17

  I dreamed of the girl and awoke at three, staying on watch and letting Magrip sleep. I wrote poetry to Cara. Some of it was John Donne. Most of it was Dr. Seuss. I couldn't mail it, because no one was to know an IG team was in Korea, running about like a collective headless chicken while exuding pungent kim chi vapors.

  I used to awaken to look at Cara, reflecting on her full, robust personality, her expansive memory, her carnal laugh and healthy temper, now stilled by quiet sleep. She was resurrecting the man I had been before Vietnam, coaxing laughter, advocating mirth, uncritical of my patronage of street musicians and sad, broken panhandlers.

  Cara had a vulnerability: a man performing an unannounced abandonment. Her father had done it. Now, so had I.

  After a slogging run at dawn and wu-shu kicks and blocks, I phoned D cell to set Levine's visit with Major Nagol.

  “Sir, I swear ta God Almighty ya can't see the man.” “Corporal Davis. Stop telling me I can't Tell me why.”

  “Waal, sir, cuz he's croaked mostly dead. I mean we bed that man down with a shovel fer the last time. He's bumped off. Wolf meat. Whew, that sucker got a free ride from here on out. Sir, that old jasper's as dead as corned beef.”

  “Let me speak to the NCOIC”: the noncommissioned officer in charge—the warden. It took a while.

  “Staff Sergeant Scranton Plum, sir… Major Nagol, he's a deceased… Man was a juicer. Got DTs. Doc says he seizured and aspirated his vomit around Oh-Dark-Thirty… No, sir, Major Nagol made no statements. Well, ‘cept, he kinda said, ‘gaahcckkk!’” Sergeant Plum cackled happily.

  I recalled Nagol's ghastly appearance, his ills, his cancerous temperament and bad manners, his disappointment that I had not been bashed in the Vegas. But I still felt the distantly metallic aftertaste of moral guilt. I also regretted losing a good source of information.

  Min drove Levine and me down the wintery MSR to Seoul. No one was following us. Early Thursday, third day in-country. The traffic, in celebration of our MSR reprise, was worse.

  I shut my eyes, choosing ruminations of Nagol and dreams of the girl over witnessing my own death. Min drove faster, causing my unhappy guts to bunch. But I wanted him to hurry; Naktong's gates closed at noon, and we were seven years late.

  “Kan dae-wi” said Min, “you, me talk ‘Merican try?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  “Look at the bus coming at us,” said Levine, yawning.

  Min swerved as the bus blared at us, its air shaking the jeep.

  “Kan dae-wi, you like Korea?”

  “I admire its unity. I dislike the war-fear.”

  Min said nothing as we passed blocks of marching, white-uniformed
factory workers, chanting and shaking fists in unison as they snaked in a six-man front into a massive white stadium. A workers’ rally. It looked a little like Nuremburg.

  “Your father, dae-wi, he want you be like white man?” A huge question. BaBa wanted me to be loyal to his God.

  The thought made me blink. I saw BaBa's flintlike eyes and cleared my throat. “He wants me to be like Jesus Christ.”

  A long silence. “Jesu Christ, he white man,” said Min.

  I heard BaBa's voice. “Jesu only man who hate no one, fear no one, love everyone. My God, your God, my son. He make earth, make night sky, make river, make kwei-yu, fish, you swim after. He hold your baby brothers in His arms, love them. Better father than me.”

  I had sensed BaBa's God in Muir Woods, Yosemite Falls, and the granite mountains of West Point. I felt Him during my baptism when I accepted the long-dead rabbi as my saviour. I had seen God in my life until 7 July 1967, when dawn broke at the river. In the bung of the Dong Nai I realized how alone man was on earth. There was no loving God, no saving Christ, no Holy Trinity, only human error multiplied insanely upon itself. I threw soil on the women. I told God His system was crud, a cruel deceit. Your world sucks and You're not here. I had been a good man and had helped others. I had always done my job. I jerked as my M-16 popped and the dead fell as green leaves fluttered, the echoes of grenades in the tall trees.

  We passed a ring of mountains that Min called the Paegun-dae and entered Seoul, an immense sprawl of endless, hilled dun houses, temples, high-rises, rivers of smogging vehicles, covered in snow and brown soot.

  “Dae-wi, your father, he honcho general?” asked Min.

  “He was laoban. Boat boss-man. Now he owns a store. We borrowed two-percent money from our family association.”

  Min sucked in his breath. “Here, pyon-hosa, lawyer, only for yangban rich. Father farmer, his son also farmer. In ‘Merica, seem all mix up.”

  U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan was north of the Han River, next to Itaewon's bustling shopping district.

  Above Yongsan's gray skies was imposing, snow-covered Namsan, South Mountain. From there, the KCIA—the feared Korean Central Intelligence Agency— watched everything and everybody.

  The streets were clogged with cars, bicycles and suicidal pedestrians. A smartly turned-out MP with white leggings and helmet saluted as we entered the secure HQ compound for the U.S. Army and United Nations Command. I returned salutes from British officers in brown uniforms and New Zealanders in berets, Gurkhas with curved daggers and Turks with shopping bags. Across the street was the massive, antennaed, ten-story stone structure of ROK Army Headquarters.

  At Army HQ we got out and stretched. Levine would use the nearby Eighth Army computer center to print out Second Infantry claims disbursements, to check out the excessive payouts by the Wizard's staff. Good work, but we were being pulled away from Jimmy. Magrip would continue looking for him at Casey, doing another door-to-door. Min went to pick up a ROK jeep.

  A young Korean woman opened the door of Eighth Army HQ, blinking as the wind whipped her long hair. “Captain Kan? Phone-a call. SJA, Casey. Mos’ ‘portant, sir.”

  Min drove up in a dark green ROK jeep with Hangul markings.

  No time. I asked Levine to take it. I gave her my Academy class ring—something a ROK officer would not have—unwilling to part with my ID and dog tags. If Suwon busted me—illegitimately in the worst wrong place in Korea—I needed proof of U.S. citizenship. We wished each other luck.

  Min and I lurched toward the Han River bridges. In an NKPA invasion, eight million residents would try to cross the Han's twelve bridges before the ROKs blew them up to keep the Reds north of the river. Demolitions and black all-weather detonation wires were visible on piers above the half-frozen river. An air-raid drill siren wailed hauntingly across the river, making me wonder about the Wizard's interest in tac maps and explosives. I remembered that whenever the sirens had wailed in China, I had been hungry. I chewed gum.

  The McCrail file described a big Bronx Catholic with twenty-one Army years until the spring of 1966. Then, as top Army recruiter, Far East, he had been busted for ten counts of foreign grand theft. The evidence was compelling.

  “Under our Status of Forces Agreement,” Levine had said, “the ROKs give us all GIs except the drug dealers. They give those guys life or execute them by firing squad. It's a martial-law nation in a state of war with Pukhan—North Korea—with no ban on torture.”

  McCrail had been arrested for making the Silla Sperry rail computer siderail a ROK Army munitions train. It went from Pusan railhead to a bandit spur built for the theft. When the crew revived from a chloroform gassing, the train's contents were gone.

  The Republic of Korea was a strict, insular, Confucian-Buddhist state under martial law. It took grand baboe, foreigner guts, to take down one of its military trains on Buddha's birthday.

  The ROKs suspected the Inmingun, and the ROK police had been brutal to its own people; officials and staff had been questioned under duress and sacked en masse.

  The ROK com-sa, prosecutors, had security camera photos and percipient witnesses to put McCrail in the computer room at the point the train went off the program. Latents matched his prints.

  A grainy black-and-white photo showed an immense middle-aged man with a big nose and large lips, lighting a fat cigar in a small automated room, looking directly into the camera with hooded eyes. It was labeled “U.S. citizen criminal, Silla Rail Center Control Room. 0310 hours, 29 April 1966. Sony camera #One. Exposure 31.” I looked at the copy of his arrest photo: same man. The train had gone off system at 3:25 A.M.,29 April 1966.

  McCrail's 201 put him at six-five, two fifty, Military Occupational Specialty OOE, Double-Oh Echo, recruiter. An OOE would have no cause to mess with rail centers and ROK ammo trains.

  His prior job had been rifleman, MOS 1 IB—Eleven Bravo, Infantry. He had earned two Silver Stars in Vietnam. Years before, in the Korean War, McCrail had won the Soldier's Medal for saving lives of fellow POWs in Manchuria. He had extended the lives of his comrades before their eventual deaths in a Chinese camp.

  In an army of brothers, Soldier's Medal men were revered. Now, this savior of others had become a thief. Magrip had done two tours and was as friendly as a hemorrhoidal warthog. McCrail had done two wars and was for the second time a prisoner in the Orient. ROK penology was light in the giggle department, but being a POW in Manchuria was bottom-drawer foul luck. McCrail had lived the recipe for the creation of monsters. I closed the file for a while.

  The jeep jerked as Min popped the clutch on a missed downshift. I resumed reading. The 201 said that McCrail had been trained in computers at Belvoir, including Sperry mainframes, one of which was, of course, the exact model in the ROK rail center.

  The prosecutor could have convicted McCrail with one hand tied while taking clarinet lessons, doing stock deals and writing his memoirs. Worse, McCrail's counsel, one Fred LeBlanc, had reported him dead and sent him to Naktong under a drug dealer's alias.

  I wondered if McCrail would tell the truth. Most of my first clients had lied to me, richly and creatively. I had been lied to by experts and idiots, by men of different gods and by killers of children. McCrail was a professional soldier and a sergeant major, an exalted position in Army sociology. His background required intellectual breadth; his record bespoke competence, dedication, selflessness. If still sane, he would help us with Jimmy the Bee or he would lie through his teeth.

  We reviewed the procedure at Suwon. “Dae-wi, you, me, American try. Naktong numbah-ten place. You nakhasan pudae—big honcho paratroop man. Guard say do, I do what he say. You honcho man, do what want. Dae-wi, say ‘Uh-uuh.’ ”

  “Uh-uuh,” low and guttural.

  “Numbah-one, dae-wi! You good ROK officer!” He smiled hugely.

  We had left the highway for a snow-coated gravel road, passing through a farming village with whitewashed compounds, scrawny, winter-stricken scrub oak and screw pines. Ahead were long, gray med
ieval walls lined with snow-capped Japanese evergreens.

  “Suwon,” said Min.

  “Stop.” I stepped into deep snow, set the file on a rock, sprayed it with lighter fluid and lit it. I lifted the jeep hood and put my ID and dog tags under the air cleaner. Min pulled out a massive Bushmaster knife and slit his left small finger, letting it bleed into a first-aid compress. He bound the finger and bandaged my face with the compress. The blood soaked through.

  “Should have used my blood,” I said.

  “You officer, dae-wi, I sogging enlisted man.” He removed my gloves and rubbed garlic into my neck and hands. The ashes of McCrail's file fluttered away like black, broken butterflies.

  “Sorry I touch you, dae-wi. Wife take off my sock at night. Put on in morning. Wash me, dry me. Serve me dinner, watch me eat before she eat. You wife, she do same-same?”

  “No.” Cara, I got these great ideas over in Korea.

  I put on Ray-Ban sunglasses and buckled up; Min peeled out, jerking my neck. We passed through the open arch of an outer stone wall and entered the gray, shadowed courtyard of Suwon Prison. We were accelerating.

  Corporal Min pumped his leg. We were doing forty miles an hour. “Slow down!” I shouted as we skidded familiarly on ice.

  “Aeguuu!” he cried. I winced as we sides wiped the gray steel guard kiosk, tipping it and dumping heavily armed sentries into the snow. Min grunted, pumping his leg without effect. I pulled the emergency and we swerved toward the wall and dunked hard into a depression, smashing us into the dash and rattling my teeth.

  A mind-warping prison-break klaxon screeched like a mutilated beast. Our doors were pulled open and muzzles of M-16s and Browning automatic rifles intruded. In a way, I was flattered.

  A flushed pink face appeared at the windshield, disappeared, reappeared, then thrust itself close to me inside the windswept cab. It saw a ROK paratroop major with a busted head and sensed an alien at the gate. I was too big. It scanned me, smelling my skin. I pretended to ignore it.

  “Uuhh,” I intoned. The guard backed up. Min said I was Major Hong, nakhasan pudae, injured in the line of duty. Honor him.