The Iron Sickle

by Martin Limon

  First Lieutenant Wilson was the 8th Army Staff Duty Officer for the evening. A leather armband designating him as such was strapped around his left shoulder. He kept rubbing his forehead and pushing his garrison cap backward over his cropped hair, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “The Provost Marshal has been informed,” he told me. “Burrows and Slabem are out there right now at the Itaewon Police Station.”

  “Waiting for the police report,” I said.

  He studied me, suspicious of the insolence in my voice. “That’s their job,” he told me.

  At their core, the Korean National Police are a political organization; their main reason for existence is to support the military dictatorship of President Park Chung-hee. Despite this fact, the honchos of 8th Army allow the KNPs to translate their own police reports into English. That’s what CID agents Jake Burrows and Felix Slabem were waiting for now, the KNP English translation of the police report concerning the attack at the pochang macha. I doubted either Burrows or Slabem could read even one word of Korean. In the past, I’d gone to the trouble of comparing the Korean version of a KNP police report to the English version. Often the English version was watered down even more than the Korean version. Important information was left out in an effort not to upset 8th Army or in any way damage the special relationship between the US and Korea.

  I considered explaining all this to Lieutenant Wilson, explaining the need for first hand information, the need for American cops capable of interviewing Korean witnesses, but I was too tired to go into it. Instead, I said, “Yes, sir.”

  Lieutenant Wilson pushed his cap back even further and rubbed his furrowed brow. “I’ll let the Provost Marshal decide what to do with you. For now, I want you to finish your shift as sergeant of the guard.” He checked his watch. “Two more hours until morning chow. I expect you out there, on patrol, until then. When you’re properly relieved, report back here to the desk sergeant. He’ll log you out.”

  Lieutenant Wilson asked me if I understood what he’d just told me, and I said I did. He was treating me like an idiot, and maybe there was some justification. In the army an experienced NCO who risks reprimand in order to do the right thing is suspected of either not understanding the situation or, more likely, of having gone mad.

  I was starving by the time I was relieved from guard duty, but instead of making a beeline to the chow hall, I went back to Itaewon to search for Ernie. When I reached Miss Ju’s hooch, I knew I must’ve found Ernie because the sliding latticework door in front of her room was hanging halfway out of its frame.

  “Ernie?” I said, rapping on the edge of the wooden porch. A bleary-eyed Korean woman peered out from behind strips of shredded oil paper that had once been part of the door. She realized who I was and her eyes popped open. She raised her knee and stomped behind her at something. A man grunted. Ernie.

  I reached into the hooch, sliding forward on my knees, and shook him.

  “Reveille,” I said. “The Provost Marshal wants to talk to us at zero eight hundred.”

  Ernie sat up and rubbed his eyes. As he got dressed, Miss Ju said, “You owe me money!”

  “Money?” Ernie repeated in mock outrage. “I thought you rubba me too muchey.”

  She slipped on a robe and stood leaning against the broken door as Ernie slid into his trouser and tucked in his shirt. “Not that,” she said. “Last night you come here, you punch Bobby, you break door. You gotta pay!”

  “No, sweat-ida,” Ernie said. “I’ll get your money.”

  Miss Ju was a slender woman with permed black hair twisted in jumbled disarray. Still, she looked cute when she frowned. “When?” she asked. “When you get money?”

  “As soon as I find Bobby,” Ernie replied.

  “You make him pay?”

  “Sure. He’s the one who broke the door, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, because you push.” She mimed a two-handed shove.

  Ernie shrugged. “He shouldn’t have complained when I told him to karra chogi.”

  “He don’t wanna go. Why he gotta go just because you say he gotta go?”

  “You wanted him to go, didn’t you?”

  “No. I want him stay. He not Cheap Charley like you.”

  “Women,” Ernie said, turning to me, “who can understand them?” He finished lacing up his combat boots and stood up and grinned. “Life was simpler in Vietnam.”

  “You mean you just took women when you wanted them.”

  “Yeah. Later, they’d ask for money but the two things weren’t associated, you know what I mean?” He shook his head. “Koreans are so mercenary.”

  As we left, Miss Ju stood with her cloth robe wrapped tightly around her slender torso, glaring at us. A few yards down the road, Ernie stopped and told me he forgot something, and he’d be right back. Before he left, he paused and said, “You wouldn’t have twenty bucks you could loan me, would you?”

  I did. I pulled out two blue ten-dollar military payment certificates and handed them to him.

  “Thanks.” He shoved the MPC in his pocket and returned to the hooch. He didn’t want me to see him reimburse Miss Ju for the damage to her room. When he came back, he shrugged. “Don’t want no hard feelings out here in the ville.”

  I slapped him on the back. “You did the right thing.”

  As we walked away, Ernie stuck his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

  “About what?”

  “About me paying Miss Ju for the damage.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Good. Riley’d never let me hear the end of it.”

  In the army, performing a good deed is considered to be a character flaw.

  We stopped in the open-air Itaewon Market. Beams of early morning light filtered through canvas awnings and piles of fat fruit shone in their red and purple glory. Vendors and farmers bustled everywhere, jostling with the mostly female shoppers with their wire-handled baskets slung over chubby forearms. We found the stall where last night we’d discovered the dead rat, but the totem was gone. I asked the proprietor what he’d done with it.

  “Jui-sikki?” he asked.

  “Yes, a rat.” I described the wood slat foundation and the twisted rectangle of wire.

  He shook his head vehemently. “An boayo.” He hadn’t seen anything.

  “The guy must’ve doubled back last night,” Ernie said.

  That’s when I told him about my encounter with the man in black on my way back to the compound. He didn’t say anything, just shook his head and whistled.

  The Provost Marshal kept us waiting for almost an hour. Ernie and I had showered, shaved, and changed into our dress green uniforms. The mood at the 8th Army MP Station and here at the CID headquarters was somber to say the least, what with one of our own lying dead at the 8th Army Morgue. I’d only had time to jolt back one cup of strong coffee in the CID admin office, and my stomach was growling.

  When we were told to enter, we marched into his office and stood in front of the Provost Marshal’s mahogany desk. Behind him, displayed on three poles, were the flags of the United States, the Republic of Korea, and the United Nations Command. We saluted. He didn’t salute back, just continued to glare at the paperwork in front of him. Without looking up, he said, “You left your posts.”

  Ernie spoke up. “An MP was dying out there, sir. We had to do something.”

  Instead of barking a rebuke, which is what I expected, Colonel Walter P. Brace, the Provost Marshal of the 8th United States Army said nothing. The silence grew long. Finally, he said, “The KNPs are asking for you.” For a moment I wondered if Miss Ju had filed charges against Ernie for trashing her hooch, but then Colonel Brace continued. “Inspector Gil Kwon-up. You’ve worked with him before.”

  “Mr. Kill,” Ernie said.

  “Yes. The first murder was committed on compound, under our jurisdiction. The murder last night was committed off compound, under Korean ju
risdiction. The KNPs are giving it their highest priority and assigning their most senior homicide investigator, this Mr. Kill. He asked for you, specifically, and his request has been approved by the Chief of Staff, Eighth Army.”

  “Both of us?” Ernie said.

  “Yes, both of you. Apparently he was impressed with your work on that last case you worked on together.”

  The Colonel shuffled through more paperwork, as if he were trying to understand why his two most unreliable CID agents had been assigned to his highest profile case. Colonel Brace preferred investigators like Jake Burrows and Felix Slabem, who would never dare follow up on information that might prove embarrassing. He was worried about losing control of the investigation. Once Ernie and I were out there with the KNPs, Mr. Kill, and all the resources of the Korean law enforcement establishment at our disposal, the investigation would go wherever it went, regardless of whether Colonel Brace wanted it to go there or not. The whole face-saving cover story of the man with the iron sickle being a North Korean agent might be blown sky high.

  Colonel Brace shifted in his seat. Here it comes, I thought, as he began to speak in a deeper, more authoritative voice. “Now that one of our MPs has been killed, we’re pulling all our agents off other cases. We’re going to find this guy, and we’re going to find him immediately. Is that understood?”

  Ernie and I nodded.

  Blood had rushed up from beneath Colonel Brace’s tight collar and reddened his ears. “You might be working with the Korean National Police, temporarily, but you are first and foremost soldiers in the Eighth United States Army. Is that understood?”

  Ernie and I nodded again.

  “You’ll turn in progress reports to Staff Sergeant Riley by close of business each and every day. Is that understood?”

  We nodded again.

  “All right, now get out there, and get me some results.”

  I would’ve been happy to get out of there, but Ernie knew the Provost Marshal was over a barrel. The decision to assign us temporarily to the Korean National Police had been made above his pay grade and now was our chance.

  “How about our expense account?” Ernie said.

  “What about it?” Colonel Brace asked.

  When working an investigation, we were allowed to turn in receipts to reclaim expenses of up to fifty dollars a month.

  “How about upping it to a hundred a month?” Ernie asked. “Each.”

  Colonel Brace frowned.

  “We’ll be in downtown Seoul,” Ernie continued, “working with Mr. Kill. Things are expensive down there.”

  “You’ll be wherever the killer is,” Colonel Brace said.

  “Yes, sir,” Ernie replied, “but if we let the KNPs pay for everything, Eighth Army loses face.”

  Colonel Brace continued frowning and shuffling through paperwork until finally he said, “Okay, approved. Tell Riley.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We saluted and turned toward the door. Before we reached it, Colonel Brace said, “One more thing. Don’t think that because you’ve received sponsorship from someone high up in the Korean government that you can go around me. All reports come through me and me alone. No contact with anyone outside the chain of command.”

  “Yes, sir,” we said in unison. As quickly as we could, we escaped from his office.

  Out in the hallway, Ernie asked, “What in the hell did you do to us, Sueño? Pissing off the Provost Marshal like that?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “This Mr. Kill thinks highly of you. That’s why he asked for you.”

  “He asked for you, too.”

  “Only because he knows you’re no good without me.”

  I barked a laugh.

  “You know it’s true,” Ernie said.

  No one else could watch my back like Ernie. And I watched his. It was the way we worked.

  In the admin office, Ernie told Staff Sergeant Riley about the increase in our monthly expense account.

  “Getting over again, eh Bascom?”

  “We’ll be hobnobbing with the elite,” Ernie said. “Got to keep up appearances.”

  “You? The elite? This I’ve got to see.”

  “Just keep the money flowing, Riley. Me and Sueño, we’ll take care of the inter-governmental diplomacy.”

  “You better watch your ass, Bascom,” Riley said, “or one of those big dogs will bite it off.”

  The KNP headquarters in downtown Seoul was a seven-story monolith with a horseshoe-shaped driveway. Ernie and I pulled up in his jeep. Two young cops, their blue uniforms sharply pressed, blew their whistles and snapped a white-gloved salute. They would’ve opened the doors for us but the jeep didn’t have any doors, just an open-sided canvas roof. One of the cops promised to watch over the jeep, but Ernie waited as he parked it a few yards away from the entrance. Satisfied, we pushed through the big glass double doors.

  Fan-driven air whooshed through the foyer. I inhaled deeply, catching the familiar odor that seemed to permeate every Korean office building: cheap burnt tobacco and fermented cabbage kimchi. The soles of our shoes clattered on a tiled floor. Behind a circular counter another cop sat along side a young female officer, her jet black hair cut in bangs. A sign above them said Annei, information.

  Off guard duty now, I hoped permanently, Ernie and I were wearing civilian clothes: namely the coat and tie that are required garb for all 8th Army CID agents. The idea was a cockeyed one. The honchos at 8th Army wanted us to wear civilian clothes so we could blend in, but they didn’t want us looking like slobs, so they required us to wear a coat and tie and have our slacks pressed and our shoes shined. In the early 1970s nobody wore a coat and tie—not unless they were either getting married or on their way to a funeral. That plus our short GI haircuts and our youthful demeanor meant we didn’t blend in with anybody. We might as well have had flashing neon signs attached to our foreheads saying “8th Army CID Agents. Make way!”

  I showed my badge to the two officers behind the counter and told them we were there to see Inspector Gil Kwon-up. The young woman’s eyes widened slightly, and without answering she lifted a phone, pressed a couple of buttons, and then whispered into it urgently, swiveling away from us and covering her mouth with her small hand.

  “Cute,” Ernie said.

  The male cop’s eyes crinkled.

  “Easy, Ernie,” I said. “Don’t start making passes before we’ve even gotten through the door.”

  Ernie reached in his pocket, pulled out a stick of ginseng gum, unwrapped it, and stuck it in his mouth. “You worry too much, Sueño.”

  Finally, the young woman hung up the phone, turned, and gave me directions in broken English on how to reach the office of Inspector Gil Kwon-up, better known as Mr. Kill. I smiled and thanked her, and she stood and placed clasped hands in front of her blue skirt and bowed her head until her bangs hung straight down. Before we left, Ernie offered her a stick of ginseng gum, but she waved her flat palm negatively and backed away, her face turning red. The male cop glared at Ernie. Ernie shrugged and stuck the gum back in his pocket.

  On the way up the elevator, I said, “You embarrassed that girl.”

  “Bull. She loved every minute of it.”

  When we reached the sixth floor, we stepped into a tiled hallway. Typewriters clattered and uniformed officers scurried back and forth on what appeared to be extremely important missions. I was about to stop one of them to ask where I could find Inspector Gil Kwon-up when a gaggle of men in suits emerged from one of the doors and hurtled down the hallway toward us. The man in front I recognized: Inspector Gil himself.

  “You’re late,” he said. “Come on.”

  As he rushed past us, he used the American gesture of crooking his forefinger, indicating we should follow. We did. He didn’t take the elevator but rather headed for a door marked Pisang-ku, emergency exit. We trotted down six flights of stairs. At the bottom we emerged out of the back door of the building into a parking lot crammed with small blue Hyundai sed
ans. One of them rolled to a stop in front of us and the doors popped open. Mr. Kill gestured for Ernie and me to climb into the back seat. He sat up front, next to the driver. The driver was a female officer with a curly shag hairdo that just reached the collar of her blue blouse. Her flat upturned-brim cap sat snugly atop the cascade of black hair. Ernie was craning his neck to get a better look at her but she kept her eyes strictly on the road as we zoomed out of the parking lot and into the midst of the swirling Seoul traffic.

  “This is Officer Oh,” Inspector Gil said, without further explanation.

  She nodded but did not turn back to look at us.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Where else?” Gil said. “To the scene of the crime. The game, as your British cousins so aptly put it, is afoot. We have no time to lose.”

  “You believe he’ll strike again?” Ernie asked.

  “Undoubtedly. He has everyone on the run now, doesn’t he? He’ll want to press that advantage and press it hard.”

  Even though we’d worked with him before, it always took me a while to adjust to Inspector Gil’s fluency with the English language. He’d studied in the States, not only at an international police academy set up to train allied police officers in anti-Communist operations, but also at one of the Ivy League universities. I forget which one. And he read a lot, both in Korean and English and sometimes in classical Chinese.

  “Why did you choose us for this assignment?” Ernie asked.

  “You chose yourselves.”

  When he didn’t elaborate, Ernie took the bait. “Okay, Inspector, how exactly did we choose ourselves?”

  “This morning, when I took control of the crime scene from the Itaewon KNP station, the first thing I did was send my men out to canvas the neighborhood. At the open-air market, they found a vendor who told them that two Americans had been up at dawn, asking him if he’d seen something that had been left at his stall last night. He didn’t know who you were or why you were asking, but he told my man he’d been startled.”