Not long after Matsuda was discussing beisu-boru with Sabatelli. And Sabatelli, who showed a talent for cards, began to give instruction in western card games to Matsuda and the crew.
“We are not going to find anything,” Hobson remarked, as he looked out at mudflats that seemed to stretch out forever.
“So why did you have me charter a steam cutter?” Sabatelli snorted.
“I mean, even if we find something. We are not going to find anything.” Hobson responded unfazed and looking over his shoulder. There was no one within hearing.
“Look, the U.S. Navy is pretty skittish about the Japanese, and I am, too. This Japanese noncommissioned officer seems to be okay, but he is here to spy on us. I met him briefly in Seoul and now I get the feeling that one contact may be an embarrassment for him. Now there’s a distance, where we’d been pretty chummy. There’s some other factor here. The Japanese have an interest in all this somehow.”
Sabatelli shook his head.
“Not that concerned.” Hobson added. “He’s not a sailor, knows nothing about coastal chartwork, and his English is not that good. I suspect he can’t even swim.
“The Japanese military police, or the Kempeitai either, for that matter, don’t know we have a set of sites to my way of figuring. We’re going to every possible site and act as if we had discovered nothing. In fact every day I am just going to do some leisurely rowing and come back pleasantly refreshed, my daily constitutional. At least until I can figure out how the Japanese fit into all this.”
“Just so Lighthouse Insurance gets that barque back.” Sabatelli said in a way that indicated that his professional survival depended on it.
It was part of the daily routine. They had several canvas tents with stoves which they pitched ashore.
One day was particularly mild. Just as the sun was setting, the Korean crew built a bonfire on the beach as the tide went out. On the horizon were rocks and islands strewn like twisted chess pieces from an overturned board. The flickering light from the fire played on the rocks while the setting sun glowed behind them with a cold raspberry hue. The pines, weathered by wind and saltwater, were twisted and picturesque.
“Elysian, positively Elysian.” Sabatelli observed.
Something tugged at his subconscious, and Hobson, though touched by the beauty of the location, was not sure why he felt uneasy. It had that picturesque aesthetic quality reserved for Korean gravesites. There were posts strewn about and partially caved in holes that seemed in a sort of circle. Often mountainsides were chosen for graves and special ceremonies, but not always.
The Korean crew, feeling playful, had built the fire far greater than needed. Once the sun had set the beach took on an eerie aspect. Somewhere beyond the light cast by the fire were watchers…the Kempeitai, the New Hwarang, the otherworldly? He could not tell. He simply had the feeling that there was a presence that lurked beyond the light of the fire.
Hobson’s mind returned to the mudang and to the heads. Spirits, spirits, every religion he knew believed in spirits in one form or another. If there were such things as spirits, where did they reside? Were certain places more prone to spiritual infestation than others? Who decided where spirits resided? Did they pick places that displeased, or places that pleased? Did the spirits decide themselves or were there some rules or a formula for linkage? Or did they not pick at all, but remain where they had fallen? If choice were a factor, this cove would be haunted.
What kept spirits from piling up? How many Koreans had lived and died since the first descendant of Hwan-Ung had issued from the she-bear turned into a woman? Perhaps all these places with appropriate yin and yang were simply view ports, no more. As he thought about it, he realized that the shaman had to cross a bridge to contact the spirits and Christianity sent the spirits to a mansion. It was better for spirits to have their own place where the living could get on with their own lives.
He tossed several logs on the fire. Something primeval told him that light and fire kept evil away. Rational Hobson chuckled, but intuitive Hobson was not about to pass judgment.
That night he dreamed of drowning men and women. He was consumed by swirling currents and cold, cold water that grew ever darker as he descended into a mighty, all-encompassing maelstrom. He could not see their faces though he tried desperately to seize the pale bodies as they drifted past. He searched their blank faces trying to identify a lay missionary and his wife. He would reach for the bodies and they would come apart in his hands. He found himself entangled in the clothing discarded by disintegrating bodies and screaming soundlessly.
In the morning he awoke and rubbed the tattoos of a pig and a rooster on his ankles that assured a sailor that he would never die a watery death.
Behind a heavy steel door purchased from Wells Fargo, Stuyvesant Draper studied the framed portrait of Lefcadio Hearn with disgust, pecked at his typewriter, and laughed. His laugh had a hollow echo because he was alone and the room was airtight.
Because of Hearn and his ilk, Draper was probably the only librarian he knew who risked an anonymous death. East was East and West was West and those who attempted to get the twain to meet rated a knife between the ribs. The naval militia officer took his bolo knife and tossed it at the photo and continued to sip his tepid saki. He was surprised to see the knife stick point first slightly to the right and about neck level with the great scholar of things Japanese.
He reshuffled the papers and re-arranged the files, “Construction of Capital Ships,” “Battle Cruiser Design,” “Kongo,” “Fuel Estimates,” “Eight-eight Fleet,” “Transcripts of Diet Discussion of Naval budget,” “Navy General Staff,” and “Sato Tetsutaro.” Next he would arrange the charts, Sailing Directions and personal diaries. He was not sure how to handle patents and industrial processes.
Scion of a distinguished New York family, Stuyvesant Draper had shown a talent for dead languages, had become a rising authority on ancient Greece, and had developed as a much-sought-after lecturer on the Peloponnesian Wars. As a graduate student, he had been honored to serve as a backup guest lecturer on the Peloponnesian Wars at the Naval War College in Newport. No great commitment, just a fill in when the professor, a guest lecturer only, could not make the lecture. A first rate scholar, he had chosen Japanese as his modern language for no other reason than he had enjoyed Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado, preferred Japanese silk for ties, and found paper parasols delightful. He found his visits to Newport enjoyable. During those visits, he came to realize that he had missed something, the benefits of an adventurous, misspent youth. He had had no youth. He had squandered it soaking up languages and winning prizes.
The answer to the sudden call for adventure had been a sharp white uniform with a high white collar. The Great White Fleet had left a strong national imprint, particularly on young minds, and at his university in the Empire State, membership in an organization that had mobilized during the Spanish-American War, the New York Naval Militia, had gained currency. The militia members spent their time learning semaphore, handling rifles, pushing around field pieces, marching in parades, and, from time to time, cruising the Hudson or Long Island Sound in antiquated naval vessels or aboard yacht-like steam launches. This was camaraderie and the prospect of naval adventure in bite size portions.
Meanwhile Draper became involved with a comely, but married, Japanese woman, the wife of an instructor at the same upper West Side university. This, however, set the stage when on one of his visiting lecturer jaunts, a War College student and naval officer, learned that Draper had studied Japanese and was in the naval militia. The naval officer asked Draper if he would be interested in traveling to further his linguistic studies. Often, the students wore civilian clothes, so he had no idea to whom he was speaking. It turned out that he had talked to a senior officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence, not that the man wearing a uniform would have told him that.
It had all boiled down to a hunt for a mo
re fulfilling love life, having tasted the fruits however briefly.
His university gave him a sabbatical with surprising alacrity and the next thing he knew he was on his way from the Empire State to the Island Empire.
His duties consisted of monitoring Japanese naval and military affairs and collecting all the navigational information he could about Japan and its possessions. Sometimes he interviewed returning merchant skippers and sometimes he sent junior officers off on cross-country leave. The U.S. Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy recognized each other as potential adversaries, some considering a clash as inevitable. All high-level planning on either side of the Pacific took cognizance of the possibility.
Occasionally, his skills had been diverted to other locales. He had spent some time with the Marines in the Philippines, but his knowledge of Tagalog was minimal and the undertakings unsubtle. Always, he looked for signs of Japanese intervention.
He was involved in the height of ungentlemanly conduct, espionage. His fellow college lecturers at the New York university would not have approved.
Not that they would have been the only ones. Within the Navy there was doubt with regard to the utility of the Office of Naval Intelligence. A Navy won by virtue of the caliber of its guns, the seamanship of its officers, and the courage of its men. Backdoor eavesdropping was ungentlemanly and ineffectual.
If they only knew. In essence, he saw himself as a librarian. He gathered books and publications and indexed them. He transcribed reports. He synopsized documents. He had even developed a cross-referencing system. He published a monthly classified report that was distributed to dozens of naval commands.
Several of his counterparts at other embassies had from, time to time, simply disappeared. Japan was in the throes of a military power struggle and he realized that he ran the risk of clandestine elimination, an option so simple to bring to fruition as to be laughable. The great strategist of Asia, Sun Tzu, had laid out the necessity for intelligence services and clandestine operations with greater success than any Western strategist ever had.
He, Stuyvesant Draper, could disappear in the blink of an eye for the crime of describing Japanese ship construction too well. Yet in many naval circles he and his duties were viewed with distaste.
To date, he met only one woman who had shown an interest in him and she had been Portuguese. On the other hand, the level of intrigue had cured him of that desire for adventure for some time to come.
He looked at the portrait of Lefcadio Hearn and laughed. His laugh echoed back.
Korean and Japanese fishing junks laced lazily through the coastal islands. Unlike his family’s sleek, old Yankee schooner, their junks were heavy-timbered and angular. The larger boats were under sail, while the smaller boats were rowed only. Sometimes, when they came close to shore or an island, Sabatelli would notice women swimming with small net bags with gourd buoys. They whistled and then would sink below the surface.
“Hae nyo, women of the sea.” Hobson offered. “They’re divers. They swim off the coast and harvest octopus, shellfish, just about anything edible. Sometimes, a boat takes them out. Most of the time they just swim off the beach. I used to try to keep up with them when I was a youngster. Couldn’t do it, by a far sight. They could swim farther and dive deeper than I ever could. Deeper and farther than most men. They had a reputation for toughness that was out of keeping with the general Western impression of Asian women. “
“No Madame Butterflies, eh?”
Sabatelli explained the new opera to Hobson.
Hobson guffawed.
The list of villages, the groundings, and Hobson’s rowing melded into a blur. Hobson visited site after site without success. Sabatelli and Hobson began to doubt the wisdom of crediting a witch’s vision. In the villages, from time to time, Hobson thought he saw men and women he had known from his parents’ missionary work, but held his tongue. Matsuda’s presence, either personally or as a Japanese soldier, had a chilling effect on their contacts on the Korean villagers and until he understood the full extent of why, he was not going to draw attention to anyone or show. It might jeopardize them. It might jeopardize him.
Aboard the steam cutter, there was a great deal of mystery about his ability to speak Korean. The crew regarded him with consternation. Even Matsuda asked him several times where he had learned to speak Korean so well and wondered why he had taken the effort to learn. Hobson had rehearsed his story. He had been stationed at Pearl Harbor and there he had amused himself by learning the language from an immigrant cane-cutting family. Matsuda shrugged, he had learned Korean because it was his job. Sailors were a strange and eccentric lot the world over.
Several evenings, Hobson lit his corncob with his back to the wind and watched the reflected sunlight dance on the surface of the West Sea and remembered when he had seen these waters last. He scratched his head under his watch cap and turned up his collar to the growing chill.
The approaches to Mokp’o were a sailor’s nightmare, a maze of islands, contorted rock formations, and leeshore dead-ends. One morning, a Korean fishing boat with a rich harvest of octopus and eels approached them just southwest of Mokp’o.
Just starboard of the fishing boat’s tiller Hobson spotted it. One weathered flat basket with a double interwoven blue reed.
They put in to the nearest village for water and Hobson realized it was a mistake, a terrible mistake. Why had he ever returned? What difference did one barque make? The dead were dead.
It was a village he knew all too well, one of the largest on this stretch of coast. Memories cascaded over him. Its market was a chaotic maze of dangling drying fish, fresh vegetables, woven mats, some ceramics, and bustling, aggressive Cholla Koreans.
“It is you, isn’t it.”
Hobson recognized the voice immediately, turned, and knew the moment had come. He was in dungarees, a watch sweater and a peacoat. Who would recognize him, it had been years? But he knew. She would not have recognized him at a distance, but he had not kept his distance.
It was Eun, as lovely as he had remembered her, her hair in braids coiled behind her ears. She must be the schoolmarm now, he thought. Married, too, for she wore the hanbok of a married woman. He looked cautiously around for Matsuda, but Matsuda was off examining fish, well behind him deep in the marketplace.
“No one knows me here,” he said hoping she would take his full meaning. “My name is Hobson…now.
“I see.”
How could she “see?” He was returning with a different name and in strange clothes like a thief or a spy.
“You know your parents arc dead. Yes, you’d know that.”
She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him through a gate into a courtyard, then stared him into a wall. The courtyard wall was eight feet tall. They were out of sight, out of Matsuda’s sight.
It was such a sudden rush of emotion that he felt the muscles in his face tightening up and he had difficulty maintaining his balance. It was unfair, incredibly unfair. Their deaths and seeing her now. He must regain control, he was a sailor now, a hard bitten “seen-everything” old salt.
“I knew they had died, but there was never any explanation. I suppose I guessed why.” The words sounded strange to him. He realized he had never said them to anyone.
It was her turn to look furtive.
“Umyong.”
It was the Korean word for fate, fortune, and destiny.
The compound was large, it was the home of a yangban, an aristocrat. The girls who came to the missionary schools were often from the yangban class.
“Umyong. Poor Chosun, a shrimp among hungry whales. Your parents came to us with generous hearts and they have suffered for those generous hearts. The countries around us are so great and there is no one to help us. I sometimes think to be Korean is to be born under a unlucky cloud.”
He remembered when they were playmates and she was a tomboy in a cul
ture that kept its women behind walls when it could. Now she was still small, but rounded in every aspect. Somehow the missionaries had overcome the Korean tendency to shelter and protect women by using the Koreans’ own love of scholarship. Her hair was black silk woven into braids, in a manner more fascinating to him than any coxcombing a sailor could weave. She stood with an air he could not put his finger on. Pride? Defiance?
“Much has changed since you left. We are heavily taxed and many have had their lands seized by the Japanese. Our men are conscripted into labor gangs. I must teach a school curriculum that is strictly controlled by the Japanese.
“People are taken away in the night.” She looked up and blinked rapidly.
“Several from our mission, your parents’ mission, became part of the Sinminhoe, the New People’s Society, a Korean political party. It was your father and mother’s doing…indirectly. They taught us about government and ways of making laws and about what they thought human beings should be able to expect in life. They helped us start a newspaper. Your parents were proud of those who joined the Sinminhoe. They told us how change came about in democratic countries.”
Korea had needed change desperately to survive and his parents had realized it.
“But this is not a democratic country. We organized politically to resist Japanese colonialism and absolutely nothing happened. The Japanese laughed at us, and slowly took over the schools and conscripted the politically active into their military and into civil construction battalions. Part of Sinminhoe went underground and sought the overthrow of the Japanese by…by force of arms. They went out of the country for military training in China, Hawaii, and Nebraska. They called themselves the New Hwarang.”
Hobson could only think of those dark brown eyes. Those dark brown eyes were blinking rapidly now, trying to hold back tears. What was it they talked about back at Sangley Point, oriental inscrutability? It was only relative and merely a matter of degree.
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