Nightmare Range

THE FILIAL WIFE

Before dawn on the last day of her life, Mrs. Yi Won-suk rose from her sleeping mat beside her husband, washed her face, and slid back the oil-papered front door of her home. She stepped out into her plot of about one-half pyong in which she had been tending twelve rows of peichu, the thick-leafed cabbage that the people of Korea soak in brine and use as the prime ingredient in kimchee, their spicy national dish.

After her husband rose and trudged off to his fields, Mrs. Yi’s daughter, Myong-son, wiped her sleepy four-year-old eyes and joined her mother in the field, making a pretense of holding a flickering candle so her mother could see more clearly as she slashed at the bases of the fat green cabbages.

As dawn broke behind Palgong Mountain, Mrs. Yi continued to work, tossing the heavy heads of peichu into her wooden cart. After she’d plucked all the ripe leafy vegetables from the earth, she took Myong-song by the hand and together they washed and changed into freshly pressed skirts and woolen blouses and bright red head scarves.

Myong-son climbed atop the pile of peichu, Mrs. Yi grabbed the handle of the cart, and together they walked through the first glimmerings of golden sunrise in the Land of the Morning Calm, heading for the produce market in the city of Taegu.

Today, mid-November by the Western calendar, marked the beginning of kimjang, that time of year when Korean housewives buy large piles of ripe peichu and prepare enough cabbage kimchee to last throughout the cold winter. Sales in Taegu were expected to be good. Mrs. Yi needed the money to supplement the earnings she and her husband made from the backbreaking work of tending their rented field of rice and soybean.

As Mrs. Yi and Myong-song entered the outskirts of Taegu, three-wheeled trucks and early morning taxicabs swished by on the narrow strip of blacktop that was the main road leading into the city from the west. Straddling the entranceway to the Taegu Market stood a huge wooden arch with fancy lettering welcoming one and all. Mrs. Yi pushed her cart past enormous glass tanks full of wriggling mackerel, past rows of snorting pigs and honking geese, and piled rolls of wool and cotton and silk. The entire market area was laid out like a giant squid in the center of the city of Taegu, with overhanging balconies and eaves and lean-tos made of canvas and bamboo blocking out the sun. Mrs. Yi finally jostled her way through the crowd until she reached the produce area and the stall of the mother-in-law of her husband’s second cousin. The elderly woman smiled and greeted Mrs. Yi and hugged Myong-song and soon enough space was cleared on the raised plywood platform. Mrs. Yi piled her iridescent green cabbages alongside mounds of round pears and red persimmons and jumbled green beans and all the earthly bounty that the fertile southern valleys of Korea offer in such abundance.

Myong-song played, the women chatted, Mrs. Yi sold most of her cabbage at a good price, and for the last day of her life they tell me she was happy.

My partner, Ernie Bascom, held the photograph up toward fluorescent light. His lips were pursed and there was no apparent emotion on his face. Behind the round lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses, however, his green eyes glowed.

“Nice chest on her,” Ernie said finally.

Mrs. Yi Won-suk, like many petite Korean women, was about as flat-chested as it is possible to be. Still, she was beautiful. The photo was taken at a resort area. She stood by the shore of the Naktong River, vamping with some of her girlfriends on an outing just before she was married some five years ago. Her face was calm and unblemished, with full lips and a smoothly rounded nose and eyes that were bright and cheerful. Her legs were straight and the calves, revealed by a short skirt, were full and round.

Ernie and I had been flown down to Taegu by chopper, mainly because the 8th Army provost marshal was worried that once the Korean newspapers got wind of what had happened to Mrs. Yi, the proverbial waste would be splattered all over the Korean tabloids.

I took the photograph out of Ernie’s hand and slid it into the neat dossier that the Taegu detachment of the Korean National Police had prepared.

Our host was Lieutenant Rhee Han-yong. He’d picked us up at the military helipad and transported us over here in a police van, sirens blaring, until we reached this red brick police headquarters building in the heart of downtown Taegu.

Lieutenant Rhee pulled out a pack of cigarettes, Turtleboat brand, and offered one to me and then Ernie. We both declined. Lieutenant Rhee had the weathered face of a cop who’d spent many years standing on a round platform directing traffic. Now he directed a homicide squad. Smoke swirled past his flat nose, causing him to squint.

“GI,” he told us. “Must be. Other foreigners live in Taegu we already check.”

“They had alibis?” Ernie asked.

“Yes. Alibi. Good alibi. Very good.”

“What kind of alibis?” I asked.

“Two Peace Corps workers. That day they take go mountain somewhere. Also five priests. How you say? Chondu-kyo.”

“Catholic,” I said.

He nodded. “Yes. Catholic. Everybody say they inside church that day.”

Taegu is a city of about a hundred thousand people. It sits in the central valley of South Korea and is responsible for more than half the country’s output of exportable produce. Few foreigners live in Taegu because there are few business opportunities. The big industrialized capital of Seoul gobbles up most of those, along with the dynamic seaport of Pusan to the south.

That meant that the main source of foreigners living in Taegu was the US Army compound, Camp Henry, headquarters for the 19th Support Group. I’d already checked before Ernie and I left Seoul. Camp Henry was home to about fifteen hundred GIs. A decent-sized pond for a criminal to swim in.

Forensic science is not the most highly developed art in Korea. In fact, it has not developed very well here at all. Why? Because with the Park Chung-hee government firmly in power and the Cold War raging and President Nixon and now President Ford providing total backing to the Park regime, the Korean National Police enjoy the luxury of solving crimes with methods more traditional than forensic.

A judiciously employed rubber hose is one example. A sucker punch to the stomach another. But in this case those crude techniques wouldn’t do much good.

No suspect was in custody.

Why were the KNPs so sure that the perpetrator had been a foreigner? Two pieces of evidence: the semen and the pubic hair. The semen showed a blood type of O positive, extremely rare amongst the ancient and largely homogenous tribe that occupies the Korean Peninsula. And the pubic hair was obviously Caucasian. Short, curly, light brown.

Because of this evidence, the Korean National Police had requested our presence to help them find the GI who had raped and murdered Mrs. Yi Won-suk.

When a married woman is violated and then strangled, right in front of her four-year-old daughter, it is bad enough. When that unspeakably hideous crime is perpetrated by a foreigner, it becomes intolerable. The KNPs would go to any lengths to nab the killer. But their long arm didn’t reach into the inviolable sanctuaries of US Army compounds.

That’s where Ernie and I came in.

“I need to see the site,” I told Lieutenant Rhee.

“You no go check compound?”

“We’ll check the compound and we’ll find the GI who did this. But first I see the site.”

Ernie nodded his agreement.

Lieutenant Rhee glanced back and forth between us, not liking the idea. Finally, he sighed and stubbed out his cigarette. As he stood to his full height, he straightened his wrinkled khaki uniform and said, “Kapshida.” Let’s go.

Lieutenant Rhee, like most Korean cops, didn’t want the 8th Army CID interfering in his operation. What he wanted us to do was the same thing the powers that be here in Korea wanted US military police to do. Control GIs. Slap them down when they became unruly and particularly when their wild ways caused grief to Korean civilians.

Not that the Korean government wanted us gone. Quite the contrary. Communists on the northern side of the Demilitarized Zone were massively equipped by the Soviet Bloc, fielding a standing army of over seven hundred thousand soldiers. South Korea’s army could hold the northern troops off for a while, but in a prolonged conflict, the naval and air support of the US would prove indispensable.

The Koreans needed us here for their very survival.

But sometimes those of us assigned to defend their country-especially young GIs far away from home and far away from everything that made them civilized-could prove to be a royal pain in the butt. Like when they became drunk and unruly and brawled with whomever happened to be in their way. Or when they drove their tanks and their armored vehicles too fast through sleepy, straw-thatched-hut villages. Or when they treated Korean women as if they were dolls to be toyed with and then discarded.

We ducked through a rickety wooden gate and entered a small courtyard. Earthen jars, probably filled with winter kimchee, lined the wall to the right. On the left, chicken wire housed a skinny white rooster who was busy scratching the earth. Flagstone steps led to a raised wooden platform that served as the floor of the hooch. In front of the sliding door sat an old woman. The neighbor, Lieutenant Rhee told me, and the first person to hear the four-year-old Myong-song when she burnt her hand and started wailing.

I nodded to the old woman. With sad, wrinkled eyes, she nodded back.

Next to her, leaning against a pedestal, was a large photograph of Yi Won-suk bordered in black. In front of the photo stood a short bronze incense holder.

Cops at a murder site are not expected to participate in ritual behavior. I could tell by his body posture that Lieutenant Rhee wanted me to keep moving. But rules had been broken here. The KNPs had allowed this old woman to set up this shrine to the dead not more than a few feet from a police crime scene. The KNPs had let their own rules be broken not only out of respect for the dead but also because of the age of this mourner. Old grandpas with poor eyesight can totter across busy intersections in Seoul, against the red light, and cops with whistles will stop traffic and make sure that younger drivers swerve safely around the old man. To ticket a venerable elder for jaywalking would be considered the height of impropriety.

And no one had the heart to shoo away this old woman.

Ernie was already slipping off his loafers in front of the raised floor, but I didn’t join him. Instead, I approached the old woman, bowed, and spoke in Korean. “I’m very sorry for your trouble, Grandmother.”

She cackled. Surprised to hear a foreigner speak the tongue of the gods.

“No trouble for me,” she answered. “Trouble for the young Mrs. Yi. And more trouble for her husband. And for their child, Myong-song.”

“Yes. For my country’s part in this, we are greatly ashamed.”

“Good for you. But don’t waste your breath on a foolish old woman.”

“Did you see the man who did this, Grandmother?”

“No. I heard Mrs. Yi return from the market and push her cart through the gate, but after that nothing. Apparently Myong-song was asleep from the long ride home. All was quiet, so I went about my business until about an hour later. Then I heard Myong-song scream.”

“And you came over here?”

“Yes. Myong-song was a quiet child. I’d never heard her scream before. I found her in the kitchen. Apparently her mother had taken a pot of warm water off the charcoal brazier, but she must’ve been interrupted because she left the flame exposed. Myong-song reached in and burnt her hand.”

“And her mother?”

“In the back room.” The old woman shook her head. “Don’t ask me more. That young policeman knows everything.”

I thanked the old woman, slipped off my shoes, and stepped into the silent home.

The front room was wallpapered but barely furnished. Only a small wooden chest with brass fittings and a stack of sleeping mats and folded blankets sat neatly against the wall. The floor beneath my feet was still warm. Apparently, the old neighbor woman had been good enough to change the charcoal for the heating flues that ran beneath the stone foundation. The late Mrs. Yi must’ve been a good housekeeper. The floor’s vinyl covering was scrubbed immaculately clean.

We entered the kitchen. Pots and pans hung from the wooden rafters. No sign of struggle. Only an open charcoal brazier that had now died out. The metal lid had not been replaced. Surely the old woman was right. When Mrs. Yi Won-suk pulled the pan of hot water off the open charcoal flame, someone must’ve jumped her from behind. Someone huge. Overpowering. She wouldn’t have had a chance to struggle. Yet someone who was stealthy enough to tiptoe past the sliding door and across the vinyl-floored front room without being heard. Or if she had heard him, maybe Mrs. Yi thought it was her husband returning early from the fields.

We entered the back room, where Mrs. Yi had been taken. Again, no sign of struggle. A small table in the corner with a mirror, bottles and jars of ointments and lotions, all undisturbed. Maybe the man had threatened Mrs. Yi with a knife. Or worse, threatened to hurt her daughter.

Lieutenant Rhee pointed to the center of the floor.

“The body was found here,” he said in Korean. I translated for Ernie.

Then he told us that her skirt had been pulled up, her long underpants and leggings ripped off, and that the doctor who examined her corpse found enough tearing in her small body to conclude that she’d been violated forcibly by a powerful man.

Lieutenant Rhee pointed to his own neck. Bruises, he told us, had formed a line beneath the curve of Mrs. Yi’s delicate jaw.

For the next two days, our work at Camp Henry was routine. After a while Ernie and I started to feel like a couple of personnel clerks. The officer corps was under orders to account for the whereabouts of every soldier in every unit under their command on the afternoon of the murder. Hundreds of soldiers were eliminated almost immediately because if there’s one thing the army’s good at it’s keeping track of GIs. Support activities are what soldiers do on Camp Henry, so Ernie and I spent a lot of time making phone calls to ensure a truck convoy had actually reached its destination or that a piece of communications equipment had actually been repaired on the day in question.

Our progress was rapid. We were scratching off whole blocks of names and narrowing down our suspects to a short list. We didn’t stop with the enlisted men, we also checked on the officers and even the three or four dozen US civilians employed on the base. The entire process became more and more exciting as each and every alibi was checked and the list grew smaller and smaller. Finally, at the end of the second day, Ernie and I compared notes. To our horror, we obtained the one result that neither of us had expected.

Everybody had an alibi.

We sat in stunned silence for a while, drinking the dregs of the overcooked coffee in the pot in the small office we’d been assigned.

Finally, Ernie spoke. “How the hell are we going to break this to Eighth Army?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The Korean newspapers have been all over it.”

The original thought that only the Korean tabloids would carry the story of the sordid murder of Mrs. Yi Won-suk had long since gone by the boards. Koreans have an affinity for the simple country life. Even though nowadays they work in high-rise office buildings or fly back and forth to Saudi Arabian oilfields or cut deals with Swiss bankers, they still think of themselves as the pure and virtuous agrarian people that their ancestors had once been. Mrs. Yi was so attractive, her surviving daughter Myong-song so charming, and her husband so stalwart and brave that the heart of the country had been drawn to their little family. The biggest newspapers in the country had run her photograph on the front page. Television reporters had produced specials on her, showing the craggy peaks and streams near her home. Some of them had even tried to talk to Ernie and me, but so far we’d managed to avoid them.

Finally, Ernie and I decided to do what we always do when we don’t have a plan. We locked up the office, strode outside the gate of Camp Henry, and headed toward neon.

When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was.

What I did know was that my stomach was churning and my head ached and my bladder was so full that I was afraid to move. Finally I did move. I threw a silk-lined comforter off my body, rolled over onto a warm ondol floor, and slowly rose to my feet. I was in a rectangular room not much bigger than a closet. I found my clothes and threw them on and pulled back the sliding door, stepped out onto a narrow wooden porch, and squatted down and put on my shoes. The courtyard wasn’t much bigger than the room I’d been sleeping in. The sky was overcast and a light sheen of drizzle filled the sky. Quickly, I stepped across moist brick to the byonso on the other side of the tiny courtyard.

After I relieved myself, a woman with a pocked face, hair in mad disarray and a cotton robe wrapped tightly about her slim body, stood in the center of the courtyard waiting for me. I had no idea who she was.

She told me. I gave her the money that I had apparently promised her the night before, and I left.

Back at the temporary billets at Camp Henry, I showered, shaved, and changed into clean clothes. Still Ernie hadn’t arrived. He was probably passed out somewhere in a hooch behind the bar district. I didn’t have time to wait for him.

The night before, somewhere in our mad swirl from bar to bar, an idea had come to me. There was something I’d missed back at the murder site. I wasn’t sure what it was but I had convinced myself that there had to be something.

Without bothering with breakfast, I strode over to the Camp Henry main gate, and once outside, I waved down a kimchee cab.

Three miles outside of Taegu, I told the driver to slow down. A few homes lined the right side of the road. Behind them were steeply sloping hills, spattered on the lower elevations with a few clumps of pear trees. On the other side of the road stretched many acres of rice and bean fields. Already, men wearing straw hats and with their pants rolled up to their knees were out there working, even in this foreboding overcast.

I saw the home of Mrs. Yi Won-suk and told the driver to slow down. We cruised past. I studied the home. Quiet. Next door, smoke rose from the narrow chimney of the old woman who had been the first to arrive on the murder scene.

I thought about what it would be like for an American in this area.

If he took a cab like I was doing now, he could cruise past the homes along the street and not be observed. Lieutenant Rhee and the Korean National Police had interviewed every cab driver in Taegu-Korean cabbies are used to providing information to the police-but no one had come forward and admitted to hauling a foreigner to this area on the afternoon of the murder. It was possible that someone was lying or had forgotten, but I doubted it. Koreans in general were upset about this case and wanted to solve it. That would include cab drivers.

The other possibility was that the foreigner had come here on foot. Or on bicycle. But either way he would’ve been noticed. Foreigners stay near the compound or in downtown Taegu. They have no reason to come out here to this agrarian suburb. And the road leading from town is lined with car washes, auto repair shops, noodle restaurants, and any number of curious proprietors who would’ve noticed a big-nosed foreigner walking or peddling by. The KNPs had interviewed them all and come up with nothing.

So how did a foreigner arrive in this neighborhood unobserved? And how had he managed to case the home which held Mrs. Yi Won-suk and her daughter? How had he known that she was alone? Surmise? Maybe. He would’ve guessed that her husband would be at work in the fields. Maybe taking that chance was part of the thrill.

That still didn’t tell me how he’d arrived unobserved.

And then it hit me. The obvious: by POV.

POV. One of those cherished military acronyms. This one means Privately Owned Vehicle. Not a military vehicle. Most GIs aren’t allowed to own a POV. You have to leave your car in the States when you’re transferred to Korea. But some high-ranking NCOs and officers, mostly in Seoul, are authorized to have POVs. So are civilians.

But the whereabouts of the NCOs and officers and civilians at Camp Henry had already been accounted for. Of course there could be holes in those alibis. Someone might be lying or someone might be covering up for a buddy. To expose that would take more digging. A lot more digging.

By now we’d traveled about a half mile beyond Mrs. Yi’s home. The cab driver asked me where I wanted to go. I told him to turn around and drive slowly back toward town.

Were there possible suspects other than the foreigners stationed at Camp Henry? Could someone have been driving out here in a POV and just by chance have spotted the attractive Mrs. Yi entering her home? After all, this road leads from Taegu up north to Taejon, the home of another US military base, Camp Ames.

But how would that work? Okay, so the guy’s cruising along, he spots Mrs. Yi, maybe he slows down to follow her. He even turns around, and then he spots her entering her home, pushing her cart through the gate with her daughter, Myong-song, inside. Nobody opening the gate for her. Nobody greeting her.

She’s home alone.

But then what does he do? If he parks the car along this road he’d have been spotted. Somebody would’ve remembered him. Foreigners are a rarity in this area. Who knows? Somebody might’ve even gone outside and waited for him by his car so they could practice their conversational English. Koreans do that all the time. It’s considered a friendly gesture. But nothing like that had happened. Lieutenant Rhee and his men had checked. Everyone along this road from here to Taegu had been interviewed.

They’d seen nothing.

So what had the guy done?

I told the cabbie to stop. Up above Mrs. Yi’s home loomed a cliff covered with shrubs and tufts of long grass. I pointed and asked the cabbie if there was a way up there.

We’d have to follow the road we were on back into town, he told me, and then another road that led back to the top of that hill.

“Is it a seldom-used road?” I asked him. “One that’s hard to find?”

He shrugged. “Anyone who drives around here knows about it.”

I told him to show me.

Ten minutes later the cab pulled into an open area atop a hill. The space was used, he said, for parking on weekends when filial descendents paid homage to their dearly departed.

I paid him and climbed out of the taxi. More gently rolling hills spread behind me and away from the city of Taegu. Each was dotted with tombstones and small mounds.

A graveyard. Koreans bury their dead sitting upright, so they can maintain a view of the world around them. On weekends families come up here with picnic lunches, sit near the mounds, eat, talk, laugh, and try to make the dead person feel that the family hasn’t forgotten them.

The cabbie asked me if I wanted him to wait. I told him no thanks. As he sped off I glanced down the hill in the direction of the city. Below spread a perfect view of the road we had been on and the home of Mrs. Yi Won-suk.

First I examined the parking lot. Nothing. Then I walked down the hill. It was an easy walk because a pathway had been cut by ten thousand footsteps. Soon I was behind the other homes in the area and no curious eyes peeked out to spy on me. A minute later, I stood in front of the open gate of the home of Mrs. Yi Won-suk.

That’s how it must’ve happened. He’d cruised by on the main road, seen Mrs. Yi entering the gate that led to her courtyard, driven up to park atop the hill, and then walked down here.

But who had the time during the middle of a workday? And who had a vehicle dispatched for his personal use? Not any GI at Camp Henry. The murderer had to be someone who owned a POV. Maybe he wasn’t from Camp Henry at all. Maybe he’d been traveling. An inspection team from 8th Army? Not likely. They travel in groups.

Someone with his own POV, traveling the back roads of Korea. A happy wanderer.

That’s when it hit me. A salesman. Insurance. That was it. They wandered from one military installation to another selling their wares. Like camp followers.

I walked back to the road in a state of excitement, dying to tell Ernie what I’d come up with. I had to wait twenty minutes until another cab cruised by.

You’d think that an unmarried GI with one hundred percent health insurance and free dental and a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cheap Serviceman’s Group Life wouldn’t need another insurance policy. And they don’t. But life insurance salesmen somehow managed, every day, to convince young American GIs that they do. It’s a legitimate product. In fact, before an insurance salesman is allowed access to one of 8th Army’s compounds, he and his company have to be vetted by the Judge Advocate General’s Office. Any policy they sell to a GI must contain a clause that his life insurance is still valid if he’s unexpectedly shipped out to a combat zone. Most of the big companies have no problem with this. GIs are young and healthy and the odds are that not many of them are going to die soon.

So it’s a profitable market.

Once Ernie and I returned to Seoul, I checked with JAG and was surprised to discover that there were over thirty certified life insurance agents operating amongst the fifty US military compounds in the Republic of Korea. Every one of them owned a POV.

Once we had a list, it was a matter of straight police work eliminating those with alibis. We didn’t approach them directly but rather pretended to be potential customers and asked for the agents who served the Taegu area. Most of them didn’t. Seoul and the area north to the Demilitarized Zone are where most young GIs can be found. Down south there are relatively slim pickings. None of the agents actually kept a home base there. But we found of the seven US insurance companies operating in-country, six of them had agents who traveled to Taegu periodically. We were able to establish that four of the agents had been in Seoul at the time of the murder of Mrs. Yi Won-suk. The other two had been traveling in the southern area of the country, covering the bases in Taejon, Waegwan, Taegu, and Pusan. Of those two, one insurance agent was a black man. The other was a Caucasian male with light brown hair and blood type O positive.

We had our man.

The bust was made with the assistance of the Korean National Police. Lieutenant Rhee from Taegu traveled all the way up here to Seoul for the honor of arresting the man who had caused such an uproar in the Korean media.

His name was Fred Ammerman. He lived in the outskirts of Seoul in a cement-block apartment complex in Bampo, just south of the Han River. His wife, a Korean national, was absolutely flabbergasted by the proceedings, but she knew enough not to interfere with the Korean National Police. Ammerman was a man of average height and average weight, except for the potbelly that protruded over the waistline of his tailored slacks. He remained calm while the Korean police handcuffed him and while Lieutenant Rhee told him in broken English that they were taking him in for questioning.

Ammerman did glance at us hopefully and say, “What about Eighth Army?”

“We have no jurisdiction over you, Ammerman,” Ernie said. “This is between you and the ROKs.”

As a civilian in country on a work visa, military law couldn’t touch him.

After the KNPs took Ammerman away, I spoke to his wife for a few moments. She was a husky Korean woman, taller and stronger than Mrs. Yi Won-suk had been, but with attractive facial features that softened the pronounced bone structure beneath the flesh. She stared into the distance as she spoke.

“My children are both at school,” she said. “For that I am happy.”

“Did you know what he was doing on those trips?” I asked her.

“I knew he had women. That I know long time. But take woman like that. Punch her. Kill her. That I don’t know.”

But there seemed little doubt in Mrs. Ammerman’s mind that the charges were true.

Already a crowd of neighbors was beginning to gather outside on the sidewalk. Mrs. Ammerman glanced toward them and, with a worried look, started clawing at her lower lip. After they’d arrested her foreign husband, the Korean cops had shown no concern about Mrs. Ammerman at all. They didn’t question her because a wife is not expected to offer any evidence that might hurt her husband. And they certainly weren’t concerned about her mental state. By now, Ernie was outside, leaning against his jeep, waiting for me, chewing gum.

“Is there anyone I can call?” I asked. “A friend or relative who can be with you?”

She glanced at me as if awakening from a dream. “Don’t worry. Pretty soon they come. Everybody come. I no can stop them.”

I left her and walked out to the jeep.

Once Ammerman was in custody, the evidence against him piled up fast. They tested his blood just to make sure that the medical records Ernie and I had checked earlier were correct. He was in fact O positive. And they matched his body hair by microscopic analysis with the pubic hairs found at the murder site of Mrs. Yi Won-suk. A perfect match. Also, Ammerman had no convincing alibi for his whereabouts on the day of the murder, but he took a hard line and chose not to speak to the Korean National Police. This was tough to do since they have their way of convincing you that it would be in your interest to answer their questions. But Ammerman gutted it out and kept mum.

His insurance company dropped him like a bad habit. But Ammerman did have savings and the word we received from the KNPs was that Ammerman was hiring some American lawyer from Honolulu who’d worked on foreign cases before. Not smart. The Koreans considered this move to be an insult to Korean lawyers and the Korean judicial system in general. The better move would’ve been to plead guilty and express great remorse and ask the court for leniency.

In fact, the Korean government would’ve been glad to give it. After a few months, a few years at the most, in a Korean jail, they would’ve shuffled him quietly out of the country. A face-saving gesture to assuage Korean public opinion. But if Ammerman fought them, they’d have to fight back to save face for the Korean judicial system and Korean pride and then they’d have to lay a sentence on him more commensurate with the enormity of his crime. Which was murder, after all, of an innocent woman. The Korean government didn’t want to do this. They didn’t want any publicity in the American press that would be adverse toward Korea and that might, in the long run, drive a wedge between the United States and Korea and jeopardize the longstanding security arrangements that held those seven hundred thousand Communist North Korean soldiers at bay. And even more importantly, the Korean government didn’t dare damage the steady stream of American dollars that flowed from the US Treasury to the Korean government in the form of both economic and military assistance.

But not realizing this, Ammerman was taking a tough stance. He was refusing to cooperate with the Korean National Police, refusing to admit his guilt, and just in general pissing everybody off.

All of this would’ve been his problem if it hadn’t been for the woman who appeared in the provost marshal’s office two days before the scheduled start date of Ammerman’s trial.

The woman was his wife, Mrs. Mi-hwa Ammerman.

Colonel Harkins, the current provost marshal of the 8th United States Army, didn’t want to talk to her. However, he could recognize potential trouble when he saw it, so he let her into his office. Her English wasn’t the greatest so I was called in for two reasons: I could speak enough Korean to translate and I was familiar with the case.

When I sat down, Mrs. Ammerman started in on me in rapid-fire Korean. I interrupted her and slowed her down several times and, as best I could, I translated for the colonel. The gist of her complaint was, the Korean National Police wouldn’t allow her to talk to her husband.

Did her husband want to talk to her?

No. He had flatly refused and the KNPs wouldn’t force him.

What she hoped to do was to convince her husband to plead guilty. Since the case had hit the newspapers and the television, everyone in the country had turned against her. That wasn’t so bad, for herself she didn’t care. But her children had been teased unmercifully at school and her oldest son, age twelve, had actually been beaten by a pack of older boys. So much disruption had been caused that the authorities at Seoul International School had asked Mrs. Ammerman to withdraw her children from the student body. With no money coming in, she would have to send her children to the Korean public schools. That would be a disaster. Not only were her children half-American, which was usually enough reason for harassment, but their father was a rapist and a murderer.

“I can’t get a visa to go to the States,” Mrs. Ammerman told me. “I am a Korean citizen, so are my children. My husband never had any interest in applying for US citizenship for us.”

She leaned toward Colonel Harkins, still speaking Korean to him, with me translating.

“Even my older brother has had trouble. Everyone shuns him because of me, and now he’s been fired from his job. No Korean company wants anyone whose sister was foolish enough to marry an American. Especially an American killer.”

Then she started to cry.

I finished explaining everything she said to Colonel Harkins. He spread his hands and asked, “What does she want us to do?”

“What I want you to do,” she said, “is force the Korean police to let me talk to my husband. I will convince him to plead guilty. Then my children’s lives will be returned to them. We will have our face back. People will respect their father for at least having repented of his crimes. We will be pitied but we will be tolerated. And my brother, he will have a chance to beg for forgiveness for having such a foolish sister and he will have a chance to get his job back.”

What she said made sense. In Korean society, once you plead guilty and ask for forgiveness, no matter how heinous your crime, you will usually receive at least some measure of leniency. When the criminal offers atonement, all is well again under Heaven and the King is secure on his throne. At that point, not to grant the request for forgiveness would mean that the person turning down the request is not a person of true Confucian virtue. As the Koreans would say, he wouldn’t be showing a big heart.

Eighth Army would also be pleased if Ammerman pleaded guilty. Although he wasn’t a soldier, we had sponsored his insurance company and his work visa, and his crime tainted the reputation of every American in Korea. A long, drawn-out criminal trial wouldn’t help anyone.

The provost marshal was new in-country and the intricate dance of Korean justice he still found baffling. But he did know from every conversation he had over drinks at the Officers’ Club that 8th Army wanted this prosecution iced. He turned to me. “What can we do, Sueño?”

I thought about it. “I’ll talk to the KNP Liaison Officer. If you throw your weight behind it, we should be able to force our way in to talk to Ammerman.”

The provost marshal nodded his consent.

Mrs. Mi-hwa Ammerman rose from her chair, her leather handbag clasped tightly in front of her black skirt. Then she bowed gracefully at the waist.

Colonel Harkins didn’t know quite what to do so he just cleared his throat and nodded.

With ramparts of hewn rock and a roof of upturned tile shingles, Suwon Prison looks medieval. Built during the Yi Dyansty, it had later been used by the Japanese Imperial Army when they colonized Korea prior to World War II. After the surrender of Japan, the United States provisional government took over, and now the Republic of Korea runs the place with all the efficiency that a military-dominated government can bring to bear.

A uniformed guard led Mi-hwa Ammerman and me down cold stone steps. At the bottom of three flights, a light was switched on, and down a long corridor another guard waited in front of a thick wooden door. Our footsteps clattered on wet brick.

In front of the door, Mrs. Ammerman tiptoed to peek through the grated opening. I peered in from behind her. The guard clicked another switch and the cell was suffused with light.

Fred Ammerman stood a few feet from us, his beard long, his blue eyes bloodshot and wild.

“What do you want?” His voice rasped like the hinges of ancient doors.

At first his wife just cried. The guards and I stepped back to allow them some privacy. A few minutes went by. They whispered to one another through the rusted bars. I could make out some of what they were saying, but I tried to block it out. I didn’t want to eavesdrop. All this was their personal business. Not mine. As a law enforcement officer, I wasn’t officially involved. The result we wanted, the conviction of Fred Ammerman for rape and murder, was a foregone conclusion. No Korean judge would dare set him free.

A voice began to rise-Fred Ammerman’s, not his wife’s. While he shouted, she stepped back against the stone wall. He kept up the tirade. Soon she knelt down, cowering, and made herself small. One of the guards had heard enough. He marched down the passageway and gruffly told Mrs. Ammerman that it was time to go.

As I walked her up the steps, her husband continued shouting.

“No way am I going to plead guilty,” he said. And then he added a few epithets that, in my opinion, Mi-hwa Ammerman didn’t deserve.

On the day of Fred Ammerman’s trial for the rape and murder of Yi Won-suk, both Ernie and I wore our Class A green uniforms. We sat on polished wooden benches in the Hall of the Ministry of Justice in the heart of downtown Taegu. Mrs. Ammerman sat quietly in the first row directly behind her husband. Neither of her children was present.

The American lawyer Ammerman had hired was named Aaron Murakami. He was from Hawaii and when he spoke, a Korean translator hired for the occasion would interpret whatever he said.

How could Ammerman be so dumb? I had no reason to think that Murakami wasn’t a good attorney, but he was Japanese-American. The Koreans are still chafing over what the Japanese Imperial Army had done to them during the thirty-five years leading up to the end of World War II. A foreign lawyer was bad enough, but a Japanese lawyer would cause the Koreans to dig in their heels. If Ammerman was toast before, he was burnt ashes now. Even Ernie realized the mistake. When Murakami walked into the hall, Ernie smiled smugly and crossed his arms.

“It’s over already,” he said.

In a Korean courtroom there’s no jury. Only a grim-faced judge who, in this case, stared on at us mere mortals through thick-lensed bifocals.

The judge droned on in Korean, something about the initial plea, but I could follow little of what was said. My facility with the Korean language started with the free classes that the Army offers on base, but after that most of it was picked up in barroom conversation. The legalese the judge spouted was beyond me.

Ernie and I didn’t expect to be called to the stand until the trial was well underway. That would probably be late morning or mid-afternoon. Koreans don’t believe in long, drawn-out proceedings. It’s up to the police to capture the guilty party. After that, to spend a lot of time and effort and taxpayers’ money just to find that same person innocent would be a great loss of face. Not only for the police but also for the entire Korean judicial system.

Ammerman would be tried-and almost certainly convicted-today.

Suddenly, I realized that the judge was speaking English. Even Ernie perked up. The language was halting, as if the judge didn’t have too many chances to practice his conversational skills, but the syntax was precise. Not the bargirl talk I was used to.

Fred Ammerman, whose head had been hanging down, sat up and listened. So did his attorney.

“I want to be sure,” the judge said, “that you fully understand what is being offered. You have a chance, before we go to trial, to plead guilty.”

I understood the choice Ammerman had to make, even if he didn’t. The Koreans don’t plea bargain. You either plead guilty and have a chance of being shown mercy, or you plead innocent and face the full wrath of the law. The judge continued to talk, glancing sometimes at Aaron Murakami, sometimes at Fred Ammerman. He continued until he was sure that both men understood the gravity of the decision they were about to make.

When the judge finished, Murakami and Ammerman huddled and whispered fervently to one another.

Mi-hwa Ammerman, sitting in back of her husband, had previously kept her face lowered. No she looked up hopefully, as if she wanted to climb over the railing and insert herself between her husband and his attorney.

Fred Ammerman kept shaking his head.

His wife stared at him in despair. Her hand lifted from her mouth as if she wanted to reach out to him. Only by a plea of guilty would Fred Ammerman’s family be allowed to reenter Korean society-not completely free of stigma but at least free of having to bear the burden of shame of being related to a killer and, even worse, of being related to an unrepentant killer. One who has not only defiled society but then proceeded to spit in society’s eye.

Neither Fred Ammerman nor his attorney paid any attention to Mi-hwa. Aaron Murakami seemed to ask his client one final question. Vehemently, Ammerman shook his head. No.

Like a collapsing doll, Mi-hwa Ammerman sank back into her seat. I expected her to start crying again. Instead she stuffed her damp handkerchief into her open handbag.

Aaron Murakami rose to his feet. “Your Honor,” he said in English, “my client has decided to plead not guilty.”

A murmur of disapproval ran through the crowd. Dutifully, the translator repeated what Murakami had said but by then no one was listening.

Mi-hwa’s face was set like stone and drained of color. She sat perfectly still, staring straight ahead, her small hand tucked inside her large leather handbag.

I elbowed Ernie. “She’s taking it hard.”

Ernie glanced over at Mi-hwa Ammerman. “Yeah,” Ernie said, “but the woman Ammerman raped took it even harder.”

The prosecutor, a dapper Korean man in a pin-striped suit, rose to his feet. He cleared his throat and started to drone on again in Korean legalese.

Since he’d been brought into the room, not once had Ammerman acknowledged the presence of his wife or even so much as glanced in her direction. Instead he glared at the prosecutor, as if he wanted to leap across the room and throttle his neck as he’d throttled the neck of Mrs. Yi Won-suk.

Ernie yawned and tried to make himself more comfortable on the wooden bench. We had already discussed which nightclubs we’d be hitting tonight. Before leaving Seoul, we’d changed a small pile of military payment certificates into won. The money would be put to its usual good use-cold beer and wild times, not necessarily in that order.

While I was pondering these soothing thoughts, a glint of metal flashed from the seating area behind Fred Ammerman. Without thinking, I rose to my feet.

Mi-hwa Ammerman, her face streaming tears, was standing now, her handbag dropped to the floor.

Without conscious thought, I lunged toward her. A long butcher knife appeared in her slender hand. She raised it. She stepped forward.

A shout bellowed through the hall.

I shoved people out of the way and stepped over benches, trying to reach her, knowing all the time that I wouldn’t make it.

Fred Ammerman never turned fully around.

His attorney noticed that something was amiss and as he swiveled he instinctively held up his hands. A yell erupted from his belly but it was too late. Ammerman’s bearded face was turning toward Mi-hwa as she leaned over the railing, raised the glistening blade, and brought it down full force into her husband’s back.

Fred Ammerman let out a grunt of surprise. No more. I kept moving forward and was only a few feet from him now. Mi-hwa held onto the hilt of the blade, shoving it deeper into heaving flesh. Gore spurted from Fred Ammerman’s back like the unraveling of a scarlet ribbon.

The confusion in Ammerman’s eyes turned to dull knowledge. Then, a split second later, that knowledge turned to pain.

Aaron Murakami reached for Mi-hwa. I leapt forward and elbowed him out of the way. Uniformed police were now surging toward us. I folded myself over Mi-hwa, enveloping her in my arms. She let go of the butcher knife and leaned backward, allowing me to pull her away from the railing and protect her there, while other men hurtled toward us. Bodies thudded into bodies but I held on, not letting them have her.

She kept her eyes riveted on the back of her husband, as if mesmerized by the damage she had wrought.

Ernie grabbed hold of Ammerman. One of the Korean cops jerked the butcher knife out of the blood-soaked back. That’s when Ammerman stood upright, supported by Ernie and Murakami, and then, as if someone had sucker punched him in the gut, he folded forward. Bright red blood spurted from his mouth.

Mi-hwa Ammerman didn’t cry, she didn’t struggle, she just let me hold her as she stared at her husband, as if amazed at what she’d just done.

And then someone jostled us and more men surrounded me, and despite my best efforts, Mi-hwa Ammerman was dragged from my arms. I followed her out of the main hall and down the corridor, but then she disappeared into the screaming, moving crowd. I returned to the courtroom.

Ernie grabbed me by the shoulders and stared into my face. “You still with me?”

I nodded.

He slapped me lightly on the cheek, making sure I was all right. Then he said, “That’s one chick who knows how to save face.”

On the floor, the thing that was once Fred Ammerman shuddered. Then his body convulsed and a whoosh of air exited his mouth, like a great bellows emptying itself in one final rush. The hot breath rose to the top of the stone rafters far above our heads, lingered for a while, and then was gone.