Mr. Kill

13

The best way to pass the time in a jail cell-as I’ve learned from my two or three sojourns therein-is to sleep. Due to my state of extreme exhaustion, sleep was something I had no trouble doing. Actually, I wasn’t locked up in a jail cell, but rather in an interrogation room with no windows and a doorknob that turned freely but wouldn’t unlock. In the center of the room was a scarred wooden armyissue field table and two dented gray metal folding chairs. I pushed the chairs together, both facing the wall, and did my best to lie down on the impromptu bed. It was dreadfully uncomfortable, but my exhaustion was so complete that within seconds I was dead to the world.

A door slammed open and jerked me awake.

“On your feet!” someone shouted.

I staggered upright.

“The position of attention!” the same voice shouted.

I realized who it was; the same desk sergeant whom I’d jerked across the counter. It figured that he’d be a little cross.

When I was in a reasonable approximation of the position of attention-my back straight, my feet together, my hands at my sides, thumbs aligned with the seams of my trousers-the desk sergeant opened the door and an officer wearing his dress green uniform strode in. His name tag said Squireward, the gold maple leaf on his shoulder indicated his rank as major, and I already knew that he was the Provost Marshal of Camp Henry and of the 19th Support Group.

Major Squireward stopped in front of me and examined me like a hawk would a particularly distasteful rodent. Finally he said, “What have you got to say for yourself, Sueno?”

“About what, sir?”

“About pulling Sergeant Copwood across the counter.”

Sergeant Copwood leaned his weight from one foot to the other. “He didn’t pull me all the way across the counter, sir.”

“Shut up, Copwood.” Squireward continued to glare at me. “So what is it, Sueno? What’s your excuse?”

“No excuse, sir.”

“Then you admit you were in the wrong.”

I shrugged. “I have the right to remain silent, sir, like anyone else.”

Squireward’s narrow face seemed to suck in on itself, and his brown eyes flashed behind the hooked nose.

“We’ll see about that,” he said. “We’ll see if you can retain the right to remain silent. I’m not standing for that type of behavior in my area of operations, Sueno. Do you understand? I’m pushing this thing all the way up to Eighth Army. You think you’re smart now, coming down here from Seoul and throwing your weight around, but we’ll see who laughs last.”

I didn’t respond. I knew better. Most members of the US Army officer corps, when they’re angry, want desperately to deliver their tongue-lashings. If they’re allowed to do that, given time, they’ll calm down; once they come to their senses, any attempt they make at punishment will be less severe. Not that I thought Major Squireward could do much to me, but there’s no sense in tempting fate.

“I’ve already demanded,” he said, “that you and your partner, that guy Bascom, be removed physically from Camp Henry and all Nineteenth Support Group subordinate units. I want you out of here, and I want you out of here now. You got that?”

I nodded. “Got it, sir.”

“Good. And to that end, Seoul has sent down a babysitter for you. I’m signing both you and that Bascom character over to him, and he’ll escort you out of Taegu. Is that understood?”

“Understood, sir.”

Major Squireward glared at me again, this time for a long moment. Finally, he said, “It had better be understood, Sueno. It had better be. And it should also be understood that your investigation of the Blue Train rapist failed miserably.”

“How’s that, sir?”

“Talk to your KNP buddy down there. What’s his name? Inspector Kill. He’ll tell you.”

With that, Major Squireward pivoted on his highly polished low quarters and marched out of the interrogation room.

The “babysitter” who signed for Ernie and me was Staff Sergeant Riley. After we walked out of the front door of the Camp Henry MP station, Ernie said, “How the hell did you get down here so fast?”

“Chopper,” Riley replied. “The Provost Marshal has a case of the big ass.”

“That’s news?” Ernie asked.

“For starters,” Riley said, “you punched out Captain Freddy Ray Embry and put him in the aid station; and you, Sueno, roughed up the desk sergeant at the Camp Henry MP station.”

“Allegedly,” I said, “on both counts.”

“‘Allegedly,’ my ass,” Riley replied.

“Why is it,” Ernie asked, “that Eighth Army is always willing to believe the worst about us?”

“Because you deserve to have the worst believed about you,” Riley replied.

Ernie climbed in the driver’s seat of the old green sedan, pulled out his keys, and turned on the ignition. It started right up. Riley sat in back. I rode shotgun. On the way out the gate, Ernie waved to the MPs. They frowned back at him, hands on the grips of their. 45s.

“Where to?” Ernie asked.

“Pusan,” Riley replied. “We turn this vehicle in, and then I’m to escort you both back to Seoul.”

“Belay that,” I said.

“What? There’s no belaying shit. I’m under orders to return you two assholes to Seoul.”

“First,” I said, “we talk to Inspector Kill.”

“The hell you will,” Riley replied.

“The hell I won’t,” I said.

Inspector Kill shook his head sadly and pushed a sheaf of pulp across his metal desk. “No good,” he said.

I was sitting in the Pusan Central Police Station. Riley and Ernie were waiting for me in the sedan, partly because in the middle of the day, in downtown Pusan, Ernie couldn’t find a parking spot, and partly because Ernie was playing the role of mental health nurse while Riley fumed and turned red and cursed about being under orders to escort us back to Seoul. “Immediately if not sooner” was the way he put it.

“You brought in the witnesses,” I told Kill.

He nodded. “Separately. Both the woman who sold the purse in front of the train station and the cab driver who transported the Blue Train rapist to the Shindae Hotel. Both witnesses took their time, they studied the man, but in the end they both said the same thing. It’s not him.”

“But they don’t see many foreigners,” I said. “We all look alike to them. Maybe they’re mistaken.”

Kill shook his head. “The old lady in front of the train station sees plenty of foreigners; they shop there for souvenirs. And the driver works the Texas Street area. He probably has almost as many foreign passengers as he has Korean. They both took their time. We emphasized to them how important this was.” Kill fondled the black-and-white photo of Corporal Robert R. Pruchert. “It’s not him. He’s not the Blue Train rapist.”

Finally I accepted what he was telling me. Then my self-questioning began. What had I done wrong? Where had my investigative procedures failed? There are only so many American G.I. s at the compounds in Taejon, Waegwan, Taegu, and Pusan, totaling only in the hundreds, and they’re watched closely; passes and leave requests are monitored by their superiors. They don’t just run up and down the spine of Korea on the Blue Train willy-nilly.

Most crimes committed by American G.I. s in Korea are solved easily. G.I. s aren’t criminal masterminds and they don’t cover their tracks well. Often, it seems that many of them actually want to be caught. Maybe they’re tired of the slogging routine of military life. Maybe they’re tired of living in a country where they don’t understand the language and can’t read the signs, where they don’t understand the customs and everything seems to be done backward. When Koreans wave a hand they usually mean “come here,” not “good-bye.” When they say “yes,” they are often trying not to embarrass the person who’s doing the asking, and what they really mean is “no.” For Americans, who are used to revering youth and beauty, it seems odd that in Korea the young and the beautiful are expected to prostrate themselves in front of the old and the ugly. So G.I. s commit crimes out of rage and frustration, or just out of a desire to leave “frozen Chosun” and go home. That’s what I thought the Blue Train rapist case was. A guy acting out his resentments. A guy waiting to get caught.

Apparently, I was wrong.

The disappointment must’ve shown in my face. Kill leaned forward and slipped the photograph into a folder. “We’ll catch the right man,” he said. “You’ll see.”

I told him about Ernie and me being ordered back to Seoul.

Kill’s face hardened. “Eighth Army promised us your services until this case was solved.”

“I know. But my partner was involved in an argument with a superior officer. They’re very angry about that.”

“The people of Korea,” Kill said, “are very angry about the Blue Train rapist.”

He walked me out of his office and down the long corridor. “I will contact my superiors,” he said. “They will contact yours. Don’t leave Pusan until you’ve heard from me.”

I promised I wouldn’t.

In the foyer, just in front of the arched entranceway to the Pusan Police Station, a small group of people waited. Two were old grandparents wearing traditional Korean hanbok, supporting themselves on canes; another was a middle-aged man in a natty blue suit. With them were three children, a boy and two girls. The blue-suited man’s eyes widened when he spotted Inspector Kill. He stepped forward and bowed. The man wore glasses; he had a square face with high cheekbones, and I could see that his eyes were deeply lined in red. The children cowered next to their grandparents.

“This,” Mr. Kill told me, “is Mr. Ju, the husband of Hyon Mi-sook.”

In Korea, a wife doesn’t adopt her husband’s family name but keeps the name she was born with. This then was the husband of the woman who’d been brutally raped and then murdered in the Shindae Hotel. The children staring at me in wide-eyed horror had huddled in the bathtub while their mother had been humiliated, stabbed, and partially dismembered.

Without thinking, I held out my hand.

Mr. Ju recoiled from it. He stepped back, waving his palm negatively. “Andei.” No good. He launched into a vituperative spiel, some of which I couldn’t understand but, unfortunately, much of which I could. He said the American government must certainly know who had murdered his wife because soldiers are controlled and all their time accounted for, and therefore we Americans must be protecting the man who tore apart his family. He accused me of trying to block the investigation, trying to stall for time, hoping Koreans would forget about the outrage. He vowed he would never forget. He would continue to demand that we give up the killer even if it meant that Korea finally stood up for its rights and forced every last miscreant American G.I. to leave the country.

By now he was screaming, pointing his finger at me. The children were crying, burying their faces in the folds of their grandparents’ silk garments. A few uniformed cops loitered nearby, not sure what to do. Inspector Kill stepped toward Mr. Ju and held up two open palms.

Involuntarily I retreated from Mr. Ju’s assault, wanting to say it wasn’t true, we weren’t hiding anyone, but afraid of what he was saying; afraid of the truth of what he was saying. In each unit of the United States Army-especially while stationed overseas-we live cheek by jowl, both on duty and off. We know all about one another, often more than we want to know. If someone was leaving his unit, leaving his place of work, leaving his bunk in the barracks, and traveling around the country raping and murdering women, somebody who lived or worked with him would know of his strange behavior, or at least have strong suspicions. As of yet, no one had contacted 8th Army law enforcement. Not one tip. Partly that was because the story hadn’t appeared in the Pacific Stars and Stripes and therefore hadn’t risen above the level of rumor. But Riley confirmed to us that no tips had come in to the 8th Army CID office or the 8th Army MP station or any MP station in the entire country.

Was Mr. Ju right? Was 8th Army covering something up?

It had happened before. The Army protects its own. That’s not just an observation, it’s a motto that many soldiers-if not most-live by.

I stepped away from the screaming man, away from the crying children, away from Inspector Kill, who was trying to calm down the hysterical civilian. With a knot in my gut as big as a winter cabbage, I shoved my way out of the Pusan Police Station and stumbled down the stone steps. Ernie was in the sedan waiting for me, engine idling.

When I climbed in the front passenger seat, Riley said, “What the hell happened to you?”

My only response was “Drive.”

Ernie slipped the car in gear, stepped on the gas, and roared his way through the midday Pusan traffic.

After a few minutes, I started to calm down. The roads had widened now and were filled with fewer cars but, so far, no one had said a word. Even Riley was keeping his big trap shut. To fill the silence, Ernie started to explain what had happened between him and Captain Freddy Ray Embry.

“The USO popped for some really nice rooms in downtown Taegu,” Ernie told us. “Marnie and I were on the sixth floor-”

“What’s this ‘Marnie and I’?” Riley growled.

“Just what I said,” Ernie repeated. “‘Marnie and I.’ We were staying in room 607, up on the sixth floor.”

“You’re supposed to be guarding those broads,” Riley said. “Not cohabitating with ’em.”

Ernie shrugged. “So, anyway, it was just before the midnight curfew hit and suddenly there’s this pounding on the door. For a minute I thought it was the bed because Marnie was screaming at the time and thrashing around a bit-she’s a big girl-but finally I realized that somebody was at the door. I tried to get up, but Marnie wouldn’t let me go until finally I broke her grip and slipped on my jockey shorts. When I opened the door, there’s this big ugly G.I. screaming at me, wanting to know what I was doing with his Marnie.”

“She was really thrashing around that much?” Riley asked.

“Like I said, she’s a big girl. It was Freddy Ray at the door, raising all kinds of hell, so naturally I told him to get bent. He tried to barge into the room, and I shoved him back, and then he came at me again, and next thing I know we’re wrestling in the hallway, knocking shit over, and finally I break free and pop him with a couple of good lefts. By now, heads were poking out of doors, most of them the other girls from the Country Western All Stars, but a few Korean faces. Freddy Ray and I bounced around for a while, trading punches, but neither one of us getting the best of the other until finally, from out of the emergency stairwell, about a dozen Korean National Police wearing helmets and riot gear storm into the hallway. After a little more pushing and shoving, they take us both into custody. By now, Marnie’s wearing a see-through pink nightgown and she’s out in the hallway screaming at the cops to let Freddy Ray go. They can’t believe it. A half-naked American woman, taller than most of them, and they don’t know whether to use their batons on her or punch her out or what. And she wrestles with them and knocks a couple of the KNPs down, but finally they form a moving wall and shove her back into the room and shut the door.”

“She was naked,” Riley asked, “in her see-through nightgown?”

“Yeah,” Ernie replied, eyeing Riley. “Try to remain calm.”

“What happened then?”

“They handcuffed me and took me downstairs and threw me in a police van in the back along with Freddy Ray Embry and drove us over to the monkey house.”

“Did you and Freddy Ray get into it again?”

“What were we going to do? Butt heads? Our hands were cuffed behind our backs. He cussed me out and I gave him what-for, but mainly I was thinking about how freaking cold I was.”

“Was Freddy Ray hurt bad?”

“Hell, no. I think he cut himself on one of those flower vases on a stand. A lot of blood, and when the MPs arrived he was complaining like I was Jack the Ripper, but if it took even a half-dozen stitches I’d be surprised.”

“It took eight,” Riley replied.

“See?” Ernie said.

“Did he accuse you of having a knife?”

“He told the MPs he ‘wasn’t sure’ whether I had a knife. I’m sitting there in my jockey shorts and where am I going to hide a knife?”

They both stopped chattering when we pulled up to the big concertina-wire-covered front gate of Hialeah Compound. An MP stepped forward and examined our dispatch.

“There’s an order for you to leave the compound,” the MP said.

“We have to get our stuff at billeting,” Ernie replied.

The MP handed us our dispatch back and returned to the guard shack. After making a phone call, he returned.

“They say okay. But they want you to turn in the sedan at the motor pool while you’re at it.”

We didn’t respond.

The big gate was rolled back on squeaking wheels and we drove slowly onto Hialeah Compound.

In the morning, Ernie and I rose early and left Riley sleeping it off in billeting. We ate chow at the Hialeah Compound PX snack bar and then made our way to the MP station. I wanted to see a map.

They had a big one nailed to the wall of the MP briefing room. Almost six feet high with thumb-sized red tacks implanted at every compound, signal site, and supply depot in the 19th Support Group area, which included every army installation south of Seoul. Ernie pointed to a blue tack.

“K-2,” he said.

The Air Force base on the outskirts of Taegu. The only other blue tacks were the ones at Kunsan and Osan, both farther north.

“Our man could be a zoomie,” Ernie said.

“Maybe,” I said. “But Private Runnels, our only witness who’s actually spoken to the guy, thought he was Army.”

There’s a certain terminology that G.I. s use that’s different from the Air Force, the way they refer to unit designations and ranks and things like the BX, base exchange, rather than the PX, post exchange.

“He could’ve been wrong,” Ernie said. “Or our man could’ve been purposely trying to mislead him.”

“You’re right. I’ll have Riley make phone calls today up to Osan’s main personnel office, compile us a list.”

“Give him something to do, so maybe he’ll stay sober.”

“For a while, anyway. Still, I don’t think this guy is Air Force. He boarded the train in Pusan, according to Runnels. That would’ve been a long way to travel just to throw us off the track. And the way he climbed those barbed-wire fences in Anyang: this is a guy who’s used to accomplishing the physical.”

“Not as brainy as the zoomies.”

“Not that he’s stupid. It’s just that he throws his athletic ability in your face.”

“A guy like that doesn’t usually join the Air Force,” Ernie agreed.

“So what does he join?”

“The Marines,” Ernie replied.

Other than a small contingent at the embassy, there were no US Marines stationed in Korea.

“And if not the Marines?” I asked.

“The Special Forces.”

We looked at each other, and then we both returned to the map.

It was off the edge of the main part of the map, in its own little square: an oval-shaped island-about 50 miles south of mainland Korea and 175 miles southwest of Pusan-with a mountain smack-dab in the middle. Cheju-do. The Island of Cheju. We studied the map for a moment. Hallasan was the name of the mountain, a still-smoking volcano. At the base of the mountain was a small red pin. A training area. Run by a contingent of the United States Army Special Forces, more commonly known as the Green Berets.

Marnie stepped out from behind her electric keyboard, grabbed a G.I. from the front row, and started shimmying in her tight blue jeans and even tighter cowgirl blouse. A heartfelt somebody-done-somebody-wrong song was being belted out by the Country Western All Star Review behind her. The G.I. s of Hialeah Compound howled their mad delight.

I shouted in Ernie’s ear, “She’s letting loose tonight!”

He nodded his head, grinning from some sort of inner satisfaction.

Riley was still grumbling, complaining that we should’ve left for Seoul by now, but drowned his anxiety by jolting down a shot of bar bourbon followed by sips from a cold can of Falstaff.

We were in the Hialeah Compound NCO Club. Instead of turning in the sedan at the motor pool like the MPs wanted us to, we’d returned to billeting, where I’d spent the rest of the morning and half the afternoon sleeping. When I awoke I’d taken a long shower, shaved, and then climbed into my last clean set of clothes. Riley kept complaining all the while that we were supposed to check out of billeting, turn in the sedan, and return to Seoul ASAP. Both Ernie and I told him to shove it, and he grew increasingly worried until I told him finally that the orders would be changed.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“I know,” I replied.

He squinted his eyes, studying me. “It’s that Mr. Kill, isn’t it? He’s going to pull some strings.”

I didn’t answer.

“Look, Sueno,” Riley said. “You can get over on the honchos of Eighth Army sometimes. But when you do, they never forget. They make a record of it and that record is never washed clean. When this case is over and when Mr. Kill is no longer around to protect your low-ranking butt, your ass will be theirs.”

I shrugged.

Riley found some coffee down in the billeting office, and a deck of cards, and he’d spent the rest of the afternoon playing solitaire and getting himself wired on caffeine, waiting for the bar at the NCO Club to open.

The song finally ended and Marnie took a bow, to wild applause. The G.I. she’d been dancing with returned to his seat, reluctantly, and Marnie told the crowd that the Country Western All Stars would be back after a short break. The curtain closed; somewhere someone turned on a sound system, the music coming out a lot quieter than the raucous sounds that had just been blaring from the speakers and amps of the live band.

“Did you check with the MPs?” Ernie asked.

“Screw them. If they haven’t sent somebody to find us and escort us off-compound, it’s because they’ve received word from Seoul to leave us alone.”

Riley was talking to a group of G.I. s at the table next to us, bragging about how tough it had been in Nam during “the big one,” as he called it. They were egging him on and laughing at him because he was so drunk.

“You gonna stay here?” I asked Ernie.

“Where else do I have to go?”

“Nowhere. I’m going downtown.”

“To meet Kill?”

“Something like that.”

Ernie studied me. “What are you up to, Sueno?”

“Nothing. I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know when I do.”

“You’ll need backup.”

“Not on this one.” I didn’t want to get him involved in something I didn’t yet understand myself.

“Is it a girl?”

“Never mind, Ernie.”

“When will you be back?”

“What are you? My mother?”

“It’s not like you to run off without telling me what you’re up to.”

“It’s probably nothing. Don’t worry, I’ll be back before curfew.”

I glanced at Riley. He was aware that the G.I. s were laughing at him, but this only made him more aggressive in his storytelling. He was tall enough at five nine or ten, but so skinny from never consuming anything other than whiskey and coffee that he weighed only about 125 pounds. Still, he had a habit of acting like the toughest guy in two towns, especially after a couple of cold ones.

“Keep an eye on Riley,” I told Ernie.

“After three or four more shots of bourbon,” Ernie replied, “I’ll carry him back to billeting and tuck him in bed.”

I left the Hialeah NCO Club, made my way to the front gate, and flashed my CID badge at the pedestrian exit. The MP didn’t bat an eye. This confirmed to me that Mr. Kill had been true to his word and Ernie and I had been taken off Major Squireward’s escort-out-of-the-area list. I walked through the narrow wooden passageway and emerged into the Pusan night.

Salt-laced mist washed the air. Moist streets glistened from the glare of neon. A cab cruised by. I waved him down, the back door popped open, and I climbed in.

The cab driver said nothing. Probably because he didn’t speak English and didn’t expect me to understand Korean. He turned his head and waited for my instruction.

“Texas,” I said finally.

He nodded. An automatic spring popped the door shut and he shoved the little Hyundai sedan into gear.

The chophouse had a Korean name only, no English translation, written in black letters slashed across splintered wood: Huang Hei Banjom. Eatery of the Yellow Sea.

Technically we weren’t on the Yellow Sea. The Port of Pusan is located at the southeastern corner of the Korean peninsula where the Yellow Sea and the Eastern Sea converge. This can be confusing because the Eastern Sea, as the Koreans call it, is known as the Sea of Japan to the rest of the world. Koreans, however, don’t like to give unwarranted credit to the country that brutally occupied them for thirty-five years.

I stood across from the entrance to Pier Number 7, hidden in the shadows beneath a stack of wooden crates, studying the people who entered and departed the Eatery of the Yellow Sea. There were few Koreans, and the ones who did enter probably worked there. The main clientele was composed of Caucasian men. But not G.I. s. Their hair wasn’t cut short, they weren’t wearing neatly pressed PX blue jeans, and they didn’t sport nylon jackets with dragons embroidered on the back. These were men who looked as if they’d walked out of another century. Their hair was long and unkempt, and some of them had several days’ stubble on their faces. Their pants were loose, unpressed, hanging over scruffy brown leather brogans that in some cases looked as if they were about to fall off. Even from my distance of some twenty yards, their peacoats looked sopped through with the drizzle that washed across the pier in airborne waves from the sea.

Exotic foreign ports, sailors living a carefree life, none of that applied here at the Eatery of the Yellow Sea. This was a place for working men; poor working men at that, featuring hot noodles and fried rice and bottles of cheap rice liquor, soju, that would get you drunk and let you forget about today until the inevitable tomorrow. Greeks didn’t hang out here. They had their own places, somewhat classier than this joint. The Eatery of the Yellow Sea was for poor foreign sailors clinging to the bottom rung of the maritime ladder.

Occasionally I heard laughter from inside. Men’s voices in a language I didn’t understand. Through fogged windows I spotted a portly Korean woman with a bandanna tied across her hair serving the foreign sailors, not saying anything to them that I could see. No beautiful young women wearing hot pants and halter tops here. These sailors couldn’t afford the fare.

They looked harmless enough. Poor working men searching for a warm meal, a shot of fiery liquor, a respite from their dreary life of labor on an indifferent sea.

I waited until there was no one entering or leaving, and then I strolled past the Eatery of the Yellow Sea, stepped onto Pier Number 7, and followed creaking wooden planks that led into the darkness. Finally, I reached an overlook above the sloshing waters of the Port of Pusan. I stood next to a thick wooden piling, allowing the shadow to make my silhouette less distinct. I shoved my hands in my pockets and inhaled deeply of the cold night air. Occasionally a seagull dove toward the water and then gracefully lifted skyward. Clouds covered a silvery moon, sometimes parting to reveal its beauty. I stared up, wondering at the magnificence of the world in which we lived, and at its horrors.

I waited.