Mr. Kill

8

Corporal Robert R. Pruchert worked at a commo site in a village known as Horang-ni, about twelve miles north of Pusan. In ancient times, Siberian tigers prowled these mountains. The wildlife was gone now, but what remained was a farming village that had wood huts with strawthatched roofs, and oxen in the field, looking like something out of the Brothers Grimm. Atop a rocky hill sat a First Signal Brigade microwave relay site. A few cement-block buildings were surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire; but the main feature, right in the center of the site, was a huge white geodesic dome, looking for all the world like a two-story-tall golf ball.

“What the hell is that?” Ernie asked.

“Science,” I replied. “That class you skipped in high school.”

“Why the soccer ball?”

I shrugged. I really didn’t know, but I told Ernie it was to protect the equipment inside. He bought it. We were driving a puke-green army-issue four-door sedan that we’d checked out of the Hialeah Compound Consolidated Motor Pool. The engine needed work. It stuttered and puttered along but, so far, it had gotten the job done, carrying us out of the city and into this idyllic countryside on a cold, gray, overcast afternoon. We pulled up to the main gate of the signal compound. A listless Korean contract guard in a khaki uniform checked our dispatch. He called ahead. Two minutes later, a buzzer sounded, the gate opened, and we drove through. Ernie parked on a gravel lot near the largest building. We climbed out of the sedan and, before we could reach the front door, an officer burst out, asking us what we wanted. His fatigues were sloppy, as if they hadn’t been pressed in a week. His name tag said Wilson, and his rank was major. I told him what we wanted.

“Pruchert’s not here,” he said. “He’s on leave.”

“Where did he go?”

“Hell if I know.”

I nodded toward the inside of the signal site. “Maybe some of your men know.”

“No. None of them know either.” When I continued to stare at him, he started to get nervous, and suddenly he spoke. “Pruchert is an odd bird. He does his own thing. Into all this Buddhism stuff. Where he goes, nobody here has any idea.”

“Then we’ll want to look at his personal effects. His wall locker, things like that.”

Major Wilson sighed as if it were the biggest imposition he’d ever faced. “All right. Come on.”

As we walked through the orderly room and started down a long hallway, Ernie leaned toward me and whispered, “Talk about a plug in his butt.”

This morning, before we left Hialeah Compound, I’d called Staff Sergeant Riley at the 8th Army CID admin office and asked him to have the Provost Marshal call ahead to the Horang-ni Signal Site to make it easier for us to get access. These signal types were fanatics for security. Not that I blamed them, but the way they kept everything-and everybody-under lock and key made me glad I didn’t work for them.

Corporal Robert R. Pruchert’s bunk was neatly made, and both his footlocker and his wall locker were secured. There were no personal photos tacked to the wall, only a poster of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, perched on a flaming lotus leaf, the thumb and forefinger of his raised hand forming a circle in the air.

“What’s with the circle?” Ernie asked. “Does that mean the spaghetti’s done?”

Major Wilson hovered near us, looking worried.

I studied the poster too. The Buddhist idea that human beings could perfect themselves and attain nirvana was stunning, especially for those of us under the influence of a religion that asked only for grace. It was odd for an American G.I. to take up Buddhism and to spend his precious leave time-time away from this signal site-on such a demanding religious pursuit. But the United States Army is composed of many odd ducks. Chinese characters were sketched below the Buddha. In my notebook, I copied them down.

Major Wilson was watching my every move. “What’re you copying that for?” he asked.

“Buddhism’s a profound religion,” I said. “Maybe I’ll take it up some day.”

He snorted in disbelief.

Ernie fidgeted, probably about to say something, either about Major Wilson’s lousy attitude or about finding somebody with a crowbar or a bolt cutter so we could bust into Pruchert’s wall locker. I waved him off.

“That’ll do it, sir,” I said, snapping shut my notebook. “That’s all we need.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

I smiled, and Ernie and I walked down the long corridor. Surly G.I. s slaved over blinking equipment, occasionally glancing at us over their shoulders. Jealous, I thought, that we were able to walk out of there.

Outside, Ernie said, “Don’t you want to search that wall locker?”

“No. I have all I need.”

We climbed back in the sedan, Ernie behind the steering wheel. He stared sourly at the automatic transmission.

“It’s just not natural,” he said.

“What?”

“This,” he said, pointing at the steering wheel. “No stick shift. It just doesn’t seem right, not like real driving. All I’m doing here is pointing and aiming.”

“That’s all you do with your. 45,” I said.

“But that’s different.”

“How?”

“After I point and aim and then pull the trigger,” he said, “people start paying attention to me. With this piece of shit, they just laugh.”

We backed out of the parking space, turned around, and waited until the khaki-clad guard pulled open the gate. Then we drove out into freedom.

“Where’s this place again?” Ernie asked.

I had an army-issue map open on my lap. It had been printed almost twenty years ago, so some of the roads had changed: some had been paved, others had disappeared.

“Hang a left up ahead.”

“Past that oxcart?”

“Yeah.”

We were way out in the boonies. The Chinese characters I’d copied off Pruchert’s poster were the name of a Buddhist temple. Even without being able to read all of the characters, I could understand that much because I knew the character for the word “temple.” The rest was just a matter of looking them up in the dictionary. Unfortunately, out here in the countryside in the middle of Kyongsan Province, some twenty klicks north of Pusan, I didn’t have a Chinese-English dictionary with me.

“So, how you going to read it?” Ernie asked.

“I’ll get help.”

At the first village we came to, I had Ernie pull over in front of a shack with a sign tacked to the door. The sign was a sheet of red paper with a single Chinese character printed on it, pronounced in Korean as chom. The word meant “divination.” It was the home of a fortune-teller.

“Fortune-teller?” Ernie asked. “I thought you didn’t believe in that stuff.”

“I don’t. But the fortune-tellers can usually read Chinese characters, because they have to look up astrological signs in the Book of Changes.”

“And that has what to do with us finding Pruchert?”

“They’ll be able to tell me the name of the temple that poster came from. And probably where it’s located.”

Ernie shook his head. “I’ll wait here.”

I didn’t tell him how relieved I was to hear that.

I knocked on the flimsy wooden door and a few seconds later sandals shuffled across dirt. The door opened. A toothless old woman peered out. I spoke to her in Korean.

“Please help me, Grandmother,” I said. “I have some Chinese characters that I can’t read. Maybe you could read them for me and help me find a Buddhist temple.”

The wrinkles and dark splotches on her face folded into a huge smile. She motioned to me to enter and had me follow her across a courtyard, and sat me down on a warm ondol floor. The room smelled of pungent, nameless aromas. We talked a while, and I showed her the characters and she read them immediately. Then she started pointing and giving me directions, and I tried to get her to show me on the map, but she wasn’t used to that. A young woman came in with two cups of cold barley tea.

“My granddaughter,” the old woman said. I nodded to the young girl, and she backed out of the room.

I listened carefully to the old woman describing directions, trying on my own to follow her on the map. But what really clinched it was when she told me that the temple was on the side of Chonhuang Mountain. Chonhuang meant A Thousand Emperors, and even I could read those characters. I found Chonhuang Mountain on the map and saw nearby the reversed swastika that indicated a Buddhist temple. With my pencil, I circled the swastika.

I drank the tea, thanked the woman profusely, and offered her 5,000 won. She said that was too much and tried to turn it down, but I convinced her that she’d done me a great service. Her granddaughter smiled as I walked across the courtyard, bowing deeply. Just as I was about to duck through the small door, the old woman scurried forward, stepping halfway out after me, and grabbed my arm. She made me stand like that, completely still, while she clutched my forearm with both her gnarled hands. She lowered her head. Suddenly everything was quiet around us, as if the entire countryside had gone still. I could barely hear my own breathing, and I couldn’t hear hers at all. Her grip tightened, the fingers digging deeply into flesh, cutting off circulation. The old woman’s body shuddered. Then, after what seemed a long time to stand in the middle of a door, her moist eyes looked up at me.

“Chosim haseiyo,” she said. Please be careful.

“I’m always careful, Grandmother,” I said.

“But you must be especially careful now. There is something waiting for you. Something awful and something very sick.”

“What’s waiting for me? A man?”

“Like a man,” she said, “but different. Different here.” She tapped her chest. “You must not let him drown you.”

“Drown me?”

Then she let go of my forearm and stepped back. I felt blood rush back toward my fingers.

“Who is he?” I asked.

The old woman shook her head, no longer making eye contact. Finally she took a step back, pulling the wooden handle after her. Ancient hinges screeched like a thousand children screaming.

The door slammed shut.

Early that morning, at the Hialeah Compound Consolidated Motor Pool, Ernie and I had been forced to cool our heels while we waited to be issued transportation. I took advantage of the delay to fill Ernie in on what I’d learned from Riley about the previous night’s message from 8th Army.

Marnie had complained to Mr. Broughton, the USO head of entertainment, that she and the other musicians were being stalked again. Things were disappearing, according to her, most recently two sets of underwear that the keyboard player had left in the dressing room at Osan Air Force Base.

“Probably one of the zoomies,” Ernie said, “jealous of her wardrobe.”

“There are other things missing too,” I told him, “like a set of drumsticks and another microphone.”

“Lost in the loading and unloading,” Ernie snorted, crossing his arms.

“Maybe. And they’re seeing faces again.”

“In the windows?”

“Where else?”

“Just fun-loving G.I. s,” Ernie explained.

“Voyeurs.”

“Yeah. That too. So, why us? Why not send some guys who are doing nothing but sitting around with their thumbs up their rears?”

“Two reasons, according to Riley. Number one, the Country Western All Stars are working their way south. Tonight Waegwan, after that Camp Henry in Taegu, and, at the end of the week, Hialeah Compound in Pusan.”

“So we have to drive all the way up to Waegwan just to play babysitter?”

I nodded.

“What’s the second reason?” Ernie asked.

“Because they specifically said they wanted us and nobody else. The MPs who were assigned the last few days didn’t work out, according to Marnie, and all the girls voted that they wanted you and me back.”

“They own us,” Ernie said.

“As long as they’re here in-country entertaining the troops and as long as the Eighth Army honchos want to keep kissing their butts, you’re right. They own us.”

“And if the Blue Train rapist strikes again?”

I had no answer for that. Tonight, we’d drive the seventy or so kilometers to Waegwan, schmooze with the girls during their show, and then make sure they were safely tucked in for the night. After that, we’d return to Pusan as time permitted.

“You called Kill?”

“Left a message for him.”

“He’ll be delighted to learn that we’ve been pulled off the case.”

“Not pulled off,” I said. “We have to do both.”

Ernie groaned. And groaned more when he saw the sedan we’d been issued.

The craggy peaks of Chonhuang Mountain were covered in mist. So far today, we’d been lucky because, although the sky had been gray and overcast, it hadn’t rained. The roads we were traversing were mostly dirt, with plenty of ruts indicating how impassable they’d be in a storm. Ernie shifted the old sedan into low gear, and it coughed and churned its way up a winding pathway. Off to the side, sheer cliffs fell into tree-choked valleys.

“Are they sure there are no more tigers up here?” Ernie asked.

“I’m sure. The last Siberian tiger in South Korea was hunted down and shot in 1956.”

“Not so long ago,” Ernie said. “Less than twenty years. Who knows? Maybe a few of them survived.”

“Maybe. I’ve heard they’ve been seen along the DMZ. But that could be just nervous G.I. s, exhausted after a twelve-hour shift in the cold and the rain.”

“We’re a long way from the DMZ here.”

Almost two hundred miles. We were safe from North Korean commandos, but not safe from the occasional rockslides that washed out the road we were traveling on. Often the pathway was so narrow that we stopped so I could walk up ahead to warn off any traffic that might be coming down the hill. None ever was.

Finally, we reached a plateau that was covered with evenly spaced fruit trees, cherry and apple and a couple of others I couldn’t identify. After a short drive, we came to an open area in front of a cliff. Two poles held a sign over the road. The sign was varnished red, and the Chinese characters were written in gold. I recognized them. “Dochung Sa,” the fortune-teller had told me. Temple of the Loyal Path.

We parked in front of a large wooden gate. Men were hoeing in plots on either side of the road. They immediately put down their tools and marched up to us, tilting their straw hats back and grinning broadly. One of them, a bald one, spoke English. “Hello,” he said. “Welcome.”

I showed him my badge and explained why we’d come.

“Pruchert?” he asked. “The American?”

“You have other foreigners?”

He shook his head rapidly. “No. He’s the only one.”

“Then may we talk to him, please?”

“That would not be possible.”

“Why not? It would only take a few minutes.”

The monk shook his bald head again. “I’m afraid he’s up there.” He pointed to the cliff looming above us. “In one of those caves.”

For the first time, I realized that the craggy cliff was dotted with ink-like splotches. The entrances to caves, dozens of them.

“When will he come down?”

“Impossible to say. He’s meditating, even as we speak, and it could take days.”

“Days? How long has he been up there?”

The monk looked to his comrades for the answer. They conversed among themselves. Finally, he turned back to me and said, “About a week. We take him water and a little food every day, leave it in front of his cave in case he needs it.”

“A week?” Ernie said. “Why in the hell is he doing that?”

For the first time, the monk studied Ernie. “To better himself,” the monk said.

That seemed to confuse Ernie. The monk smiled. “To become an initiate in our order, long periods of meditation are required.”

“He wants to enlist with you guys?”

“So it seems.” The monk smiled again.

“This is extremely important,” I said. “Have you heard about the Blue Train rapist?”

The monk shook his head. “We don’t read newspapers.”

“Nevertheless, I must talk to Corporal Pruchert,” I said. “He’s a soldier and I’m under military orders.”

The monk frowned, thought for a minute, and then turned and walked away. He went inside the temple. About twenty minutes later, he came out.

“If you insist,” he told me, “we will send someone up to fetch him.”

It took an hour. During that time, Ernie walked back into the orchard behind us to take a leak, and later I took my turn. I was starting to worry that we might not have time to make it back to the main supply route and drive north to Waegwan before the Country Western All Stars started their show.

Suddenly a young man in russet robes walked toward us. He was tall and gangly, his flesh white. On his protruding nose, he wore thick army-issue glasses. A few feet from us, he stopped.

“Cut yourself shaving?” Ernie asked.

Ernie was referring to a red slice along the side of the man’s head. The man was completely bald.

“I’m Pruchert,” he replied. “And I’m on leave. Officially signed out of my unit and everything. So what is it you want?”

“Just a few questions,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like, where were you on Thursday?”

“Where was I? You know the answer to that.”

Pruchert looked worn, very haggard, and thin. Dirt and straw had accumulated on the rear of his robe.

“We want to hear the answer from you,” Ernie said.

“I was right here,” Pruchert said, raising his voice. “Meditating. In another few days, I could reach chunggun, the middle rank, if I could just get in enough hours.”

“Sort of like merit badges,” Ernie said.

Pruchert swiveled on him. “It may be funny to you, but it’s not funny to me. If you don’t take steps toward enlightenment, you’re wasting your life. Throwing away a precious opportunity.”

He glared at Ernie, his implication clear. We were obstacles in his path to enlightenment.

Ernie leaned against the side of the sedan, his arms crossed. He asked, “When was the last time you had a woman, Pruchert?”

Blood flushed Pruchert’s face, spreading up through the raw scalp of his shaved head.

“You come here,” he said, pointing at the grounds of the temple, “to this holy place, and ask me a question like that?”

Ernie nodded.

I stepped between them. “When did you arrive here, Pruchert?”

Pruchert looked away. I repeated my question. Finally, he answered.

“Saturday, the day my leave started.”

“And have you left these grounds since then?”

“No.”

“When are you returning to your unit?”

“Next Friday.”

“Have you ever been on the Blue Train to Seoul?”

“Never.”

“Why not?” Ernie asked.

“Seoul’s an evil place,” Pruchert replied. “Full of evil people who have no sense of the crimes they’re committing against the universe.”

“Crimes against the universe?” Ernie asked.

“Yes. Creating evil karma. Causing people like you to come up here to this holy place.”

“Get bent, Pruchert.”

Pruchert started toward Ernie. Instead of stopping him, I stepped back and let him go. Ernie stood, uncrossing his arms.

Pruchert clenched a fist, his lips taut, his face turning even redder than it had been before. Finally, he threw his fist down to his side, swiveled on his leather sandals, and stormed off, mumbling-almost crying-to himself.

When he had disappeared to the far side of the temple, Ernie leaned toward me. “Frustrated guy,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

We took a different road down the mountain. A few splats of rain had made the gravel-and-dirt pathway slick, and when we lost traction, Ernie found himself skidding part of the way downhill. Expertly, he turned into the skids, maintaining control, and we somehow managed to avoid plunging off the edge of the rocky precipice. I held my breath all the way.

When we finally reached the bottom, I exhaled and said, “Thanks, pal.”

Ernie looked at me, puzzled. “For what?”

“For not getting us killed.”

“Oh, that,” he said, tossing his head back toward the mountain. “If we’d been in my jeep and I’d had a proper gearshift, you could have meditated all the way down.”

A village, large enough to be considered a small town, sat at the bottom of Chonhuang Mountain. We rolled slowly through the main street. The sun was setting now and someone had switched on a neon sign. I read it aloud: “Chonhuang Tabang.”

“Chonhuang Teahouse,” Ernie said. “That means teahouse girls. Maybe we should stop.”

“Two reasons we can’t,” I told him.

“The first is we have to get to Waegwan,” Ernie replied. “What’s the second?”

“It might interfere with your journey toward enlightenment.”

“Nothing,” Ernie said, “is going to interfere with my journey toward enlightenment.”

“Except for maybe Marnie Orville,” I added.

“Yeah,” Ernie agreed. “Except for maybe her.”

From in front of the teahouse, a kimchee cab suddenly pulled out into the road, making a U-turn without even looking. Ernie slammed on his brakes and honked his horn. Sheepishly, the driver grinned at us, waved, and kept going.

“Out here,” I said, “they don’t even think about traffic.”

“Much less worry about it.”

Ernie stepped on the gas, and in less than two hours we’d reached the city of Waegwan. A few minutes after that, we were pulling up to the front gate of the huge logistics storage area known as Camp Carroll.

“Ernie!” Marnie screeched.

She ran toward him, arms upraised, and grabbed him in a bear hug around his waist.

“Settle down, girl,” Ernie said. She tried to lift him but couldn’t, so he lifted her instead and carried her over to a straight-backed chair and sat her down. “Sit!” he said. “And behave yourself.”

Marnie stared up at him, her cowgirl hat tilted back and pinned to her blonde locks. “You can’t believe what we’ve been through since you and George walked out on us.” Then she pouted. “You didn’t even say good-bye.”

“Yes, I did,” Ernie replied.

“Not a real good-bye.” She smiled impishly and leaped back to her feet, the heels of her cowboy boots stomping on the wooden stage.

We were in the Camp Carroll NCO Club. The instruments were set up and Marnie and the rest of the girls were ready to start their performance. However, there was still no audience. The doors had been kept locked, by order of the base commander, because he didn’t want his troops leaving work early to claim a seat near the stage. Instead, he’d instructed the club manager to set up reserved seating by unit. The tables were pushed together in various-sized clumps, and in the center of each group of tables sat a unit banner or insignia. The Headquarters Company’s table was the largest, and the full-bird insignia of the base commander sat right at the head of the table, facing center stage. Rank has its privileges.

I grabbed a cup of coffee out of the kitchen. The Korean cooks studied me, some of them nodding, as did the waitresses, who were folding silverware into napkins. I greeted them all in Korean and they nodded and greeted me back. I carried an extra cup of coffee back to the stage for Ernie.

“Nothing for me?” Marnie pouted.

“You have to start work in a minute,” Ernie told her.

I sat down in a straight-backed chair near Marnie and asked her about these incidents that had been happening. The musicians of the Country Western All Star Review kept tuning their instruments.

“It’s been awful,” she said. “Just horrid. We never have any privacy and our equipment keeps disappearing, and then, of all things, Shelly has her underwear stolen. And those MPs they assigned to help us, dumb as bricks.”

Marnie’s face became serious. She lost her coquettishness and suddenly I could see the intelligent woman beneath the facade of gaiety: the woman who’d organized an all-female country-western band; the woman who’d landed a contract with the USO to travel overseas to the Republic of Korea; the woman who was scouring the world looking for the father of her child.

“But there’s something more important,” she said, lowering her voice. “Something I really need your help on.”

She reached out and touched Ernie with her left hand and grabbed my hand with her right.

“I haven’t told you everything,” she said.

“Somehow I thought not,” Ernie replied.

She pouted at him, the scamp, for just a second, and then she returned to her serious demeanor. She squeezed my hand.

“Casey’s father is not behind on his child support.”

“Casey?” Ernie asked. “Who’s Casey?”

“My daughter,” Marnie told him. “The one who’s with my mom right now.”

“So Casey’s father,” Ernie said, “is this guy you’re looking for. This Freddy Ray.”

“Yes. Captain Frederick Raymond Embry.”

She turned to me, as if hoping I’d jot the name down in my notebook. I didn’t.

“So if he’s not behind on his child support,” I asked, “why are you looking for him?”

“He never sees his daughter,” she said. “That’s not right. Children need their daddy, even if he’s a louse who walked out on us.”

“Sounds like you’re still carrying a torch for him,” Ernie said.

“No way. Not after what he did to me. You’ve already seen it,” she told Ernie. “He hasn’t.”

She stood up and pulled her silk cowgirl blouse out from beneath the leather belt of her tight blue jeans. Then she raised the blouse all the way up to her brassiere hook and turned to show me her back. It was a vicious scar, running from the left side of her rib cage to the center of her spine. She lowered her blouse, tucked it back in, and turned to face me.

“Thirteen stitches,” she said. “And if I hadn’t fought back, Freddy Ray would’ve killed me. I know he’s supposed to be an officer and a gentleman but, believe me, he’s no gentleman.”

“When this happened,” I said, pointing toward her back, “didn’t you file a complaint?”

“Of course I did. The cops arrested him and there was a trial, but he said that during the altercation I had attacked him, and when he’d pushed me away I’d tripped and fallen, and that’s how the wound had occurred.”

“Did you attack him?” I asked.

Marnie looked away. “Yes. I did.”

“So in Texas, him being an officer and a gentleman and you being partially responsible, they let him go.”

Marnie shook her head at the memory. “The judge said that since he was going to be serving his country overseas and since he’d ‘suffered enough,’ all charges would be dropped.”

“Okay,” Ernie said. “So Freddy Ray is an asshole. So why are you here? Do you just want to start up again?”

“No, it’s not about me. It’s about Casey.” She stared first at Ernie and then at me. “He says he hasn’t been seeing her because he doesn’t believe that she’s really his daughter.” She raised a finger and pointed it at Ernie’s nose. “And before you ask, the answer is none of your business. Whether Casey is Freddy Ray’s daughter or somebody else’s doesn’t make her any less precious to me.”

Ernie sat down and let the silence grow for a while. Finally he raised both his hands in supplication and said, “Okay. I understand. You want to confront Freddy Ray and persuade him to do the right thing by his daughter. Okay, fine. But what do you want us to do about it?”

“I want you to be there when I talk to him.”

“So you won’t get hurt,” I said.

“You got it,” she replied. “And I want you to set up the meeting.”

“Us?” Ernie asked.

She caressed his shoulder. “It would be so thoughtful of you.”

Ernie and I looked at each other. A commotion was starting at the front of the club. The door had been opened and the troops were flooding in. Some of them wore cowboy hats along with their fatigue uniforms, a dispensation that had been specially granted-today only-by the post commander. They started hooting as soon as they saw the female musicians on the stage.

Marnie jumped up, ordering the curtains to be closed, and we, along with all the girls of the Country Western All Star Review, scurried back into the wings. Marnie pulled me aside.

“You’re the only one who can help,” she said. “Your friend, that Staff Sergeant Riley in Seoul, he helped me find out where Freddy Ray is stationed. It’s Camp Henry, the place where we play tomorrow night. I just want you to find him for me so I can talk to him before the show.”

Before I could answer, she hugged me and strode out on stage.

On her count, the Country Western All Star Review started up a hot number. The curtains were pulled open and the entire NCO Club ballroom, jam-packed with G.I. s, went mad with joy.