by Martin Limon
"Outside guy?"
'Yeah. Foreigner."
"Which country?"
"I don't know. He look like Korean, only maybe he out in sun too much."
A chill ran through my body. Without thinking I stepped forward, looming over Sister Julie.
"What did he wear, this guy?"
She stared up at me. Her sneer disappeared. "Chump-change clothes. Like he farmer or something."
I reached for the top of my skull. "And on his head…"
"Yes. He wear something wrapped around." She twirled her finger around her exploding hairstyle. "Like kullei."
"Like a rag? Wrapped around his head?"
"Yes."
A sunburnt Asian man wearing a turban. I turned to Ernie.
"Sounds familiar," he said.
"Sure does."
I turned back to Sister Julie. "What was his name?"
"Rag something." She frowned and then snapped her fingers. "Ragyapa. That was it."
The man who had paid Sister Julie to convince Bro Hatch to attack and rob the little nun was Ragyapa. The same man who had kidnapped Herman's daughter Mi-ja.
When the MPs arrived, Sister Julie hugged Bro Hatch and kissed him and told him that she wouldn't let any other man touch her while he was gone. After the MPs drove away with Bro Hatch, Ernie grabbed Sister Julie by the soft flesh of her upper arm.
"You're right about not letting any other man touch you while he's gone." She tried to tug away from him but he held tight. "Unless it's a KNP," he said.
We turned Sister Julie over to the Korean National Police for her collusion in the mugging of the Buddhist nun. We filed charges and filled out a report and asked her a few more questions. When we left the little Samgakji Police Station she was still cursing, waving a red-tipped finger, promising to get even with us.
Ernie's molars clicked on a new stick of gum. "Righteous sister," he said. "Especially when she's angry."
Using Sister Julie as his go-between, Ragyapa had put Bro Hatch up to attacking the Buddhist nun. He had even paid Sooki to inform Ernie and me.
Why had he done this?
To divert our attention? Probably. But more important, to divert the attention of the entire United States Army. With riots against our presence in Korea sweeping the country, we'd be less worried about some kidnapped Korean orphan and an old jade skull that had been lost for centuries.
But was that it? To divert our attention? Or was there some other reason?
Maybe he also wanted to divert the attention of the other Buddhists in the country. The Buddhists who the little nun represented.
If that was his intention, he had succeeded admirably.
Nobody noticed us when we sauntered into the MP station. Now that the Provost Marshal had Pfc. Ignatius Q. Hatcher in custody, they had no time to acknowledge the two CID agents who'd made the arrest. Typical bureaucrats. Basking in the glory of somebody else's hard work.
Ernie stood in the hallway, watching the shimmering blue water bottle glug. Inside an oak-paneled office, the Provost Marshal and the First Sergeant and Lieutenant Roh from the ROK Liaison Office hashed out Pfc. Hatcher's future.
"The Korean government demands custody of Hatcher," Lieutenant Roh said. "Right now."
"You're out of bounds, Lieutenant," the Provost Marshal answered. "There are clear procedures to be followed, outlined in the Status of Forces Agreement, when a U.S. serviceman is to be turned over to ROK authorities."
"You have the power to waive those procedures," Lieutenant Roh insisted. "In this case you must."
"We must do what is in the interest of the United States Government."
Ernie glanced over at me, raising his eyebrows. I leaned toward him and whispered. "The Eighth Army honchos must be pissed about all the demonstrations. Maybe the Korean police didn't crack down fast enough. Maybe some colonel caught a rotten egg in his puss."
"If they hold Hatcher," Ernie said, "there will be more demonstrations."
"Maybe the Provost Marshal doesn't give a damn."
Outside of the MP Station, a crowd of Koreans had gathered in front of the main gate. MPs and a chain-link fence held them back. A few were chanting anti-American slogans, trying to encourage everyone to join in. Somehow they already knew we had the nun's attacker in custody.
A rock whistled through the air, launched high into the gray monsoon sky. Ernie watched it soar, reach the top of its arc, and sail down and clatter harmlessly against the blacktop in front of us.
"Incoming," he said.
"Yeah," I agreed. "Prepare for heavy swells."
We exited the compound by a side gate where no demonstrators had yet gathered. Crossing quickly over the big stone block that composed the sidewalk, we reached the jumbled stalls and shops of Itaewon. Leather bags and sneakers and jackets hung from wooden rafters in mad disarray. Signs touting espresso shops and beer halls peeked out of the swirling collage, punctuated by an occasional obstetrics clinic promising help for venereal disease or pregnancy.
"There it is again," Ernie said. "The smell."
I knew what he was talking about. The aroma of spiced cabbage fermenting in earthen pots. Raked earth, damp from the monsoon rain. Bubbling septic tanks waiting to be drained. Perforated charcoal briquettes, smoldering out their last red gasp.
I breathed in deeply. "What's that?" I asked.
"What's what?"
"Smoke."
"Charcoal?"
"No," I said. "More than that."
I gazed above the skyline, about a half mile ahead to the bar district. A steady plume of black smoke rose into the gray sky, like a signal from Apache renegades.
"Something's on fire," I said.
Ernie and I started to trot. Tongues of flame flickered into the sky.
"The yoguan," I shouted. "It's on fire!"
"Which one?"
"The one we were in this morning. The one where we stashed Lady Ahn."
24
The first splats of monsoon rain slapped into my forehead as we ran toward the yoguan. Children in stiff-necked school uniforms scurried out of our way and a cabbage vendor wheeled his cart frantically to evade our onslaught. But the obstacles in the road meant nothing to me. All I could see was Lady Ahn. The high contours of her cheekbones, the stony set of her eyes, the pursed lips as she gazed down upon a world that had never quite met her exquisite royal standards.
She had become an obsession with me. But it was an obsession that made me happy to be young and male and alive. An obsession that I had no desire to break.
The rust-flavored wetness of a sudden monsoon sprinkle moistened the cobbled road. I slipped, quickly regained my footing, but Ernie surged past me. Up ahead the flames shot out of windows and engorged themselves in a brighter red.
Possibilities flashed through my mind. Maybe the fire was just a freak happenstance. Maybe it had nothing to do with Lady Ahn or with the skull or with Herman the German or with the kidnapped Mi-ja.
Maybe. But I didn't think so. I'd been a cop too long. Things didn't happen by coincidence.
As I ran, I steeled the inside of my gut. Lining it with iron. The same protective covering I'd used every time life presented me with a kick in the ribs.
Nothing good could come of this.
The Itaewon Fire Department was already on the scene, their fat red tanker truck wedged into the alley leading to the yoguan. Ernie clambered over it, ignoring the shouts of the firemen, and I followed.
The top floors of the yoguan were burning pretty good. Outside, the woman who had rented us our rooms stood screeching at the top of her lungs, pointing that there were more people upstairs.
Ernie didn't even slow down. He charged into the blackness of the front door.
But I hesitated for a moment, gazing up, searching for the small window of Lady Ahn's room. The window was totally engulfed in flames, more than any other spot in the building. The conflagration had started there. Of that I was sure. If she was still in that room, we were too late. I squeez
ed down the side alley, heading for the back entrance.
I kicked old boxes stuffed with trash out of the way and shoved open the wood slat doorway. The smoke wasn't bad back here.
Before I reached the second floor, however, the smoke was too thick to continue. Footsteps pounded down the stairway. Something black loomed above me, then burst out of a cloud of ink.
Ernie, tugging on an old woman wrapped in a long cotton dress.
I heard the swoosh of fire hoses; water started cascading against the walls above us. Outside, as if the rusty old fire station apparatus had primed something, the heavens opened and rain pelted down with a fury. As the old woman coughed and retched I sat her down on the varnished floor near the back door and shouted at her in Korean.
"Is there anyone else upstairs? A young woman?"
She gazed up at me, her eyes blank with fright. "They took her."
"Who did?"
"Those men. Those foreigners. She fought with them. She wouldn't let them in. They broke down the door. She fought them. I think it was she who started the fire."
"And these men took her out before the flames grew?"
"Yes."
"Where did they go?"
"Out back. The alleys. She was struggling so hard that they all had to hold her."
Ernie was bent over, leaning against the wall, spitting and wiping his eyes with the back of his hands. I slapped him on the back a few times to clear his lungs.
"Ragyapa's taken Lady Ahn," I said. "Come on!"
Ernie hacked and spit up some phlegm. "Son of a bitch!"
We rushed out into the narrow maze of alleys behind the yoguan, pushing past the gawkers watching the fire. The rain fell in steady sheets.
A group of men carrying a struggling woman must've left some sort of trace. We scurried like rats in a maze, twisting and turning, having no idea which way they might've gone. Through the mist, light glowed inside the homes we passed. Rain splattered on tin roofs. The soil beneath our feet rapidly turned into a muddy quagmire.
I stopped two pedestrians and shouted questions at them. We were drenched, our faces still covered with soot, our eyes enflamed with a frantic madness. The first person could only stutter. The second insisted he knew nothing.
We ranged up the hill, getting farther and farther away from the main nightclub district of Itaewon.
Finally, beneath the canvas awning of an open-front grocery store, I spotted a Korean policeman. He wore a long raincoat and a plastic hood pulled over his cap, and he was hunched over, listening intently to a woman who gestured wildly. We ran up to them. The KNP was so absorbed in the woman's story that he didn't glance over at us. I could make out most of the woman's rapid Korean.
A group of men-foreigners, she thought-were wrestling with a woman. The woman was bruised and bloodied and kept shouting for help. But there were no men around in these rain-drenched alleys. No one who could help the poor woman. I'm only a housewife, she said. I have children. What could I do?
I interrupted the tirade.
"Where did they go?"
Both the policeman and the housewife stared at me. I pulled out my badge.
"Odi kasso?" I shouted. Where did they go?
The woman pointed. "Down there. Toward the car park behind the Unchon Siktang." The Driver's Eatery.
"I tried to stop them," she said. "But what could I do? I am-"
But Ernie and I were already sloshing away in the rain, heading downhill toward the road that wound through the nightclub district and back to the main road. Once Ragyapa and his boys reached that, they'd have access to all the major thoroughfares in Seoul. And once they reached the main road, catching them would be impossible.
"They must've stashed a car behind the Driver's Eatery," Ernie said. "And then they walked through the back alleys to the yoguan."
"Looks like it."
"But how did they know where Lady Ahn was?"
"No clue," I said. "We'll have to worry about that later."
"And why would they kidnap her?"
"They figured she had the jade skull," I said. "When they realized she didn't, they decided to take her as a bargaining chip."
Ernie swore. "Isn't one kidnap victim enough for these guys?"
"I don't think anything's enough for them," I said. "Not until they hold in their hands the jade skull of Kublai Khan."
The muddy parking lot behind the Driver's Eatery must've held about twenty small taxis. There were also a few three-wheeled flatbed pickup trucks. Ernie took one side of the lot and I took the other. We checked each vehicle closely. When we finished, we met behind the eatery. Tired drivers sat behind steamed windows, slurping on bowls of wet noodles, sipping on barley tea.
"Zilch," Ernie reported.
"Me, too. Nothing." I looked inside the eatery. "Somebody in there must've seen something."
Ernie pushed through the door.
The little restaurant was cramped, and reeked of human sweat and boiled cabbage and charcoal gas. A couple of the drivers stared up at us, unevenly burning cigarettes hanging from brown lips.
I pointed back to the parking lot and spoke in loud Korean.
"Some men brought a woman down here," I said. "She might've been struggling. They put her in a car and drove away with her. How many of you saw it?"
There was silence. I repeated what I had said, careful of my pronunciation, trying to make sure that everyone understood me. No answer.
Ernie strode over to the heating stove in the center of the room. He hoisted a large brass pot of barley tea and held it at chest level, and when he had everyone's attention he tossed hot tea out of the spout and let it splash on the floor. Then he turned slowly in the center of the rickety tables.
"Who saw it?" I asked.
Still no answer. Ernie sloshed steaming water onto the Formica-covered table in front of him. Three astonished drivers sprang to their feet, slapping the steam rising from their trousers. As one, they all started cursing.
Ernie sloshed more water at the drivers. They kicked their chairs back and leapt out of the way.
"Who saw the men who took the woman?" I shouted.
A burly young driver stepped toward the kitchen and grabbed a butcher knife from a wooden chopping block. An older, gray-haired man noticed him, turned back to me, and started to speak.
"It wasn't a car," he said.
I turned to him, waiting. Ernie stopped sloshing tea.
"It was a truck," the man said. "Three wheels. The back seemed to be loaded, but they shoved the woman in there."
"Was she struggling?"
"No. I thought she was asleep. Or drunk."
"Where did the truck go?"
"Down the hill." He jerked his thumb toward the nightclub district. "It was a blue truck."
That didn't narrow it down much. Almost every truck in Korea was either blue or green or gray.
"Did you see the license plate number?"
"No reason to look."
"What was the truck loaded with?"
"Garlic." The driver with the butcher knife pushed himself past some of his irate comrades, edging closer to Ernie. The gray-haired man noticed him and spoke again. "If you had arrived two minutes earlier, you might have caught them."
The guy with the knife lunged at Ernie. I shouted. Ernie swiveled and tossed the brass pot at him. Steaming water exploded into the air, splashing into the driver's face. He screamed.
I grabbed Ernie, shoved him forward, and kicked open the front door. We dashed out into the pelting rain. Behind us, a gaggle of drivers stood in the doorway, staring. But none of them looked too anxious to follow. They had lives to lead. Money to make. Families to support.
I hoped that the guy who received a faceful of tea wasn't hurt too badly.
Ernie turned back and flashed the drivers the finger.
"Dickheads," he said.
We searched the roads of Itaewon but there was no sign of a blue truck loaded with garlic.
And no sign of Lady Ahn.
; 25
I leaned over Staff Sergeant Riley's desk, breathing down the collar of his starched fatigue shirt.
"You must have something for me, Riley. Don't the Koreans keep goddamn records?"
Riley leaned away from me. "Back off, Sueno. Of course they keep records. Give me some breathing space and maybe I'll find something."
We were back in the CID office. Ever since Ragyapa and his thugs had taken Lady Ahn, I'd been badgering everyone-the KNPs, the MPs, even Sergeant Riley-to find me some sort of lead so I could nail those bastards.
Before Ernie and I left Itaewon, we'd stopped in the Police Station and questioned Captain Kim on his progress on the Mi-ja kidnapping case. He admitted there hadn't been much.
"Too much demo," he said. Demonstrations. "Ever since Buddhist nun beat up, whole country crazy."
The madness that was sweeping the country-and especially Itaewon-over the mugging of Choi So-lan, the Buddhist nun, had all Kim's cops working double shifts. Devotees bearing flower bouquets and a huge photo of the little nun dotted the Main Supply Route leading out of Eighth Army Headquarters. What with the occasional altercation between GI and demonstrator, and the nightly rallies, there was little time left to investigate the kidnapping of a little girl.
I filled out a police report on the abduction of Lady Ahn. Kim thanked me and filed it away.
"I want action on that!" I said.
Captain Kim nodded. "When I can. When I can."
Ernie had to pull me away.
Now, back at the CID office, Ernie was still working on keeping me calm. Talk about a switch. He poured two cups of coffee out of the metal urn and handed me one. I slurped it without tasting it.
A map of Seoul hung on the wall of the CID Admin office. Usually, I was fascinated by it. All the ancient palaces and gateways and temples. But today, it depressed me. A city of eight million people. How in the hell was I going to find Lady Ahn?
I shouldn't have let her stay alone. I should have known better. Either Ernie or I should've stayed with her. Or we should've brought her along.
Ernie slapped me on the back. He'd been peering at me.