The Iron Sickle

— 6-

When we returned to the CID Detachment, Miss Kim handed me a pink phone message printed in her precise hand. The caller was Captain Prevault. As she handed it to me she gazed at me inquiringly, a slight smile on her lips, wondering, I imagined, who this cultured woman was who called. I thanked her but didn’t answer her unspoken question.

I found a phone in the back of the detachment that wasn’t being used. I dialed. No answer. As the phone was ringing, Riley shouted at me.

“Sueno! Bascom! About time you got your butts back here. You have ten minutes to get over to the ROK MND.” The Ministry of National Defense. “They’re having a briefing on what they know so far about this North Korean agent.”

I set the phone down and walked toward his desk. “What North Korean agent?”

Riley put his hands on his narrow hips, staring at me, letting his eyes cross. “The man with the iron sickle, for Christ’s sake. The guy you’re looking for.”

“They’ve got him?”

“I don’t know about all that. All I know is that the Provost Marshal will be there and the Commander of the Five-Oh-First Counter Intelligence unit and your sorry presence is mandatory.”

“Mandatory” was a word Riley dearly loved. He caressed the word, filtering it through his yellow, crooked teeth.

“Better belay that, Bascom,” Riley said to Ernie, who was lazily pouring himself a cup of coffee. “If you’re not there by fourteen thirty hours your ass is grass.”

Ernie stirred sugar into his coffee. Ten minutes later we sauntered toward his jeep. I glanced once again at the message from Captain Prevault and stuffed it in my pocket.

A ton of brass sat in the first few rows of the auditorium, the Korean officers looking relaxed, the American officers less so, out of their element in this oddly proportioned building reeking of kimchi. The seats were too small for Caucasian bodies. On the stage was a female ROK Army officer wearing a tight green skirt and a matching tunic, a woman so statuesque and beautiful that not one man in the room could tear his eyes from her. Her name was Major Rhee Mi-sook. I’d met her, if that was the right word, during my one and only sojourn into the Communist state of North Korea. There, she’d worn the brown uniform with red epaulettes of the North Korean People’s Army and her rank was Senior Captain, a rank that didn’t even exist in the South Korean army. As beautiful as she was, she repelled me viscerally. My stomach knotted just looking at her. She’d been pursuing me-or pretending to pursue me-in her capacity as a North Korean counter-intelligence operative. When I managed to escape back to South Korea where I’d been debriefed, she showed up again, this time in Seoul, this time wearing her South Korean army uniform.

I’d reported what I knew about her but I was told to keep quiet. I protested. How could we allow a North Korean intelligence officer to operate in our midst? She was a double agent, I was told, working for the South Korean government, our allies, and only pretending to work for the North Koreans. I was ordered to let it go at that.

They could say she was on the South Korean side but I’d seen her operate in the north, and I didn’t believe anyone could fake that much love for the Dear Leader and that much avidity in her work. I had the scars to prove it.

Now that same Rhee Mi-sook was in charge of the hunt-on the ROK Army side-for the man with the iron sickle. Someone with stars on his shoulders-whoever had appointed her to this job-also had stars in his eyes, dazzled by her charm. As I watched her, it was easy to see why.

Major Rhee strode back and forth across the stage on her black stiletto heels, rapping her stainless steel pointer against charts and graphs, speaking every sentence first in Korean and then in sweetly pronounced English.

“There is no doubt,” she told the audience, “that the man who murdered Mr. Barretsford and the man who murdered Corporal Collingsworth are one and the same person. And there is also no doubt that he is a highly competent and thoroughly trained professional sent south by the North Korean bandit government to sew dissension between our ROK/US alliance. This,” she said, peering into the eyes of the silent officer corps, “shall not be allowed.”

The group broke into spontaneous applause.

“What is this,” Ernie said, leaning close to me, “a freaking strip show?”

“Quiet,” I replied.

“If she starts unbuttoning her tunic,” he told me, “these guys are going to go nuts.”

Ernie was right about one thing, the ROK Army was pulling out all the stops. They had their best up there delivering the briefing because they weren’t taking any chances of allowing a couple of murders to damage the special relationship between South Korea and the US. Too much money was at stake. Hundreds of millions of dollars of military and economic aide passed each year from the American treasury to the ROK government, and if stories managed to make their way into newspapers back in the States about how our brave boys overseas were being brutally murdered by evil foreigners, that could jeopardize the steady flow of cash. Blaming the murders on the North Koreans had the effect of solidifying our alliance. It gave us a common goal. Stop the Commies.

Mr. Kill was not there, nor were any representatives of the Korean National Police. They and the ROK Army worked independently. By the amount of olive drab in the room, however, it was apparent the 8th Army had thrown their lot in firmly with the ROK Army.

Major Rhee was replaced at the podium by a senior officer, a husky middle-aged general brandishing a gold-plated pointer. The ROKs were good enough showmen to keep Major Rhee up on stage, sitting in a straight-backed chair, her long legs crossed and glistening beneath the overhead lights.

When the general had said his piece, the show was over. Officers filtered out. Not one item of hard evidence had been presented, only innuendo, such as the fact that there were a suspected two to three thousand North Korean agents in South Korea, and that their training included wielding mundane weapons like the naht and other farm implements. We were reminded they were experts at creating and using false identification, not to mention experts at survival, escape, and evasion.

None of this proved the man with the iron sickle was a North Korean agent. He might be, but also he might not.

The Provost Marshal spotted Ernie and me. When he didn’t gesture for us to join him, we made a quick retreat.

Just before leaving the auditorium, I stopped and looked back. The woman I had known as Senior Captain Rhee Mi-sook still stood on the podium, her arms crossed. Our eyes met. She didn’t smile. She wasn’t the smiling type. Her face was hard, cold, but hideously beautiful.

After leaving the ROK Ministry of National Defense, Ernie turned left toward the Samgakji Circle and then south toward Han River Bridge Number One. Halfway there, he hung a left and entered the back entrance of Yongsan Compound South Post. An MP I didn’t know stopped us at the gate and checked our dispatch.

“You headed to the morgue?”

“Eventually everybody is,” Ernie said.

“No, I mean now.”

“Why would we go there?”

The MP shrugged. “Seems like that’s where everyone’s going.”

“What do you mean ‘everyone’?”

“All the MPs.”

He waved us through, Ernie stepped on the gas, and the jeep surged through the gate.

“What the hell was that all about?” I asked.

“There’s a lot of hard feelings about Collingsworth. Maybe some people are stopping over there to pay their respects.”

“Maybe. Not a bad idea. I want to look at the body again anyway.”

Ernie shrugged but turned right after the 121 Evacuation Hospital, heading for the morgue.

There were three MP jeeps parked out front.

“A convention,” Ernie said,

He parked and locked the jeep and we walked past the wooden sign stenciled with the words MORGUE, 8TH UNITED STATES ARMY. We pushed through double doors into an air conditioned environment. The white smocked clerk at the front counter checked our badges.

“Collingsworth?” he said.

We nodded.

“Join the crowd. There’s a few of them back there.”

And he was right. A half dozen uniformed MPs stood inside the cold locker. One of the long metal cabinets had been pulled out of the wall, displaying a shroud with a body underneath.

As we walked down the central corridor, the MPs stared at us. Ernie nodded to them because we knew most of them. All of them had taken off their helmets and tucked them under their arms. Everyone was armed, with black holsters hanging off canvas web belts.

“He was a good man,” Ernie said.

They continued to stare, but no one responded. Then, single file, they marched out of the room.

After they left, Ernie said, “What the hell’s the matter with them?”

I stared at the body beneath us. “They figure since we’re CID we should’ve caught the man with the iron sickle after the first murder. Then maybe Collingsworth would still be alive.”

“We weren’t even on the case until this morning.”

“They don’t give a shit about that.”

We were used to hard feelings. From the MPs’ point of view, we Criminal Investigation agents got all the glory, and they did all the grunt work. Ernie shrugged it off. He gestured toward the body. “You want to do the honors?”

I took a deep breath, reached in, grabbed the edge of the heavy cotton shroud, and whipped it back.

Collingsworth stared straight up at us, his blue eyes open, shining with light almost as if he were alive. But his skin was pasty, his cheeks slack, and now that the blood had been washed away, the wound was nauseatingly apparent. Like a cloud of gas, the odor reached us: meaty, sour, dead. Grey tubes of flesh stuck out of a slash in the neck. Blood coagulated around the edges of the wound and it was so wide-about four inches-and so deep that every artery and vein and esophageal passageway stood out as clearly as a drawing in Grey’s Anatomy.

Ernie looked away. “So what are we here for, anyway?”

“Just to see if there’s something I missed out at the crime scene. I was sort of hyper out there.”

I studied the wound more carefully. It was on the left side of his neck, starting almost at the spine and slicing forward. This was consistent with the wound on Barretsford at the 8th Army Claims office. They seemed to have been delivered so fast that the victim never even had time to flinch, much less raise his hands to ward off the blow. Apparently, Collingsworth heard something, he turned to look back, and the tip of the blade caught him in his neck, the naht slicing forward. Simultaneously, Collingsworth continued to turn and flinched backward. This had the untoward effect of causing the blade to slice even deeper into Collingsworth’s neck, severing his air passage and the carotid artery. Blood would’ve gushed out, pumping like a hose spewing water. Some of it would’ve landed on the attacker, on his coat, on his shirt. The killer must’ve been standing too close to avoid it, not like at the Claims Office, where he was reaching forward across Barretsford’s desk. This time, instead of continuing the attack in a frenzied manner, as he had on Barretsford, the man with the iron sickle backed off. There was only one slice, one wound, but it was a lethal one. He would’ve known that. He showed discipline, not madness. Knowing Collingsworth was a dead man, he departed immediately, as if concerned about being caught.

I pulled the shroud down further and examined Collingsworth’s arms. Untouched. No cuts or bruises. He’d never seen the blade coming.

This was a disciplined and skilled assassination, giving credence to the ROK Army theory that the man with the iron sickle was a highly trained agent. But why had he lingered at the Claims Office? Had he not been sure a fatal blow had been struck? Or was he merely enjoying himself? Enjoying the kill? Or enjoying some other type of emotion? Lust? Revenge? Hate?

“You seen enough?” Ernie asked.

I nodded. He pulled the shroud back over Collingsworth’s open blue eyes.

Outside, the three MP jeeps were still parked. A fourth had joined them. When we pushed through the morgue’s double doors, all the MPs in every jeep climbed out and strode toward us. We stopped on the steps. Staff Sergeant Moe Dexter took the lead. He had both thumbs hooked over his web belt, and he was leaning back, a big smile on his round face. He was always smiling and always joking, even when he arrested someone. It was the way he dealt with life, the way he defused tough situations and the way he relaxed a miscreant right up to the moment before he jammed his baton in his gut.

“Sweeno,” he said, purposely mispronouncing my name. “And Agent Ernestine. How are my two favorite CID pukes doing this fine afternoon?”

“Get bent, Dexter,” Ernie said.

“Oh,” he said in a falsetto voice. “Are you going to bend me over? How thrilling.”

Ernie walked down the steps, and I followed. When Dexter didn’t get out of the way, Ernie shoved him.

Dexter staggered back in mock alarm. “Oh, rough stuff. How could you?”

The eight MPs followed us to our jeep. Ernie and I were about to climb in but stood waiting for them, staring them down. The smile had dropped from Dexter’s face. He stared at us through tinted rectangular glasses.

“When you have a lead on this guy,” he said, “you point him out to us. None of this playing footsy with the KNPs, none of this showing respect to their bullshit judicial system. This guy killed an MP.” Dexter jammed his thumb over his shoulder. “He was one of our own, and you’re MPs too, or you used to be. Once you find him, you turn the guy over to us,” he said, “not to the ROK Army, not to the Korean National Police.”

There was a long silence. “I can’t do that,” I said.

“Why?” Dexter said, stepping closer. “Because you’re too close to the Koreans? Because you speak their freaking language and eat that foul-smelling shit they put in their mouths? Is that why, Sweeno, because you think you’re better than us? Better than regular GIs?”

“There’s nothing regular about you, Dexter,” I said.

“Not without using Ex-Lax,” Ernie added.

Dexter threw his helmet at Ernie. Ernie dodged it but slid around to the front of the jeep, and before anyone could stop them, the two men were trading blows. Dexter’s hard left jab slid off Ernie’s ear, leaving Ernie close enough to land a right uppercut to the taller man’s ribs. I jumped in, holding the two men apart. Some of the more levelheaded MPs grabbed Dexter.

“Don’t you betray us,” Dexter shouted, spewing spit. “Don’t you throw your lot in with people who ain’t our people. You understand me, Sweeno?”

Without answering, I shoved Ernie into the passenger seat, stalked to the other side of the jeep, and climbed behind the steering wheel. I started the jeep and bulled forward through the MPs, kicking up gravel as I gunned the little jeep out of the parking lot.

I drove to the CID office and got out. Ernie had calmed down a little and he was smiling, trying to pretend Dexter’s taunts hadn’t effected him. He slid into the driver’s seat and told me he’d meet me in the ville at twenty hundred hours. Before he left, I said, “You’re not hurt, are you?”

“From that puke? No way.” He gunned the jeep’s engine and sped off.

Inside the office, both Miss Kim and Riley had already gone home. I picked up a phone and tried Captain Prevault’s number. Still no answer. It figured there wouldn’t be since the cannon had gone off signifying the end of the duty day. I used Riley’s Rolodex and then called the duty officer at 8th Army Billeting. I identified myself, gave him my badge number, and asked for the location of Captain Prevault’s BOQ, Bachelor Officer Quarters. He gave it to me. Yongsan Compound South Post, female BOQ 132, Unit 4. A pretty good walk but one I could manage.

A half hour later, I stood in a long central corridor lined with individual rooms and knocked on the door of Unit 4. It took a few minutes but eventually darkness covered the peephole. The door opened slightly, a security chain drawing taut. A smooth-complexioned face peeked out, hair wrapped in a white towel.

“Agent Sueno,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You didn’t call.”

“I tried.”

“Wait a minute. I have to get dressed.”

She closed the door. I stepped back and leaned against the far wall. Occasionally, a female officer entered or exited a room down the hall, glanced toward me, and when I smiled went about her business. With my short haircut and my CID coat and tie, I didn’t look too threatening.

The door to Captain Prevault’s room opened.

She wore blue jeans and sneakers and a light rain slicker over a white blouse. “You ready?” she asked.

“For what?”

“For a visit to a nut house.”

She smiled demurely, cocked her head, and walked down the corridor. I followed.

Our destination was in the northwest corner of Seoul, an area snuggled beneath Bukhan Mountain known as Songbuk-dong. The kimchi cab chugged up a winding road, past a break in the ancient stone ramparts that had once protected the city from waves of invaders: Chinese, Manchurians, Mongol hordes. Now lovers strolled along it, hand in hand, gazing down at the sparkling expanse of the city of Seoul.

“Where are we going?” I asked, staring out at the darkness.

“A sanitarium,” she replied. “What you call a ‘nut house.’ ”

“Sorry about that.”

She turned and in the light of a passing street lamp, I saw her prim smile once again.

A sign in slashed Chinese characters loomed ahead and Captain Prevault motioned for the driver to turn left through stone gates. The driveway wound another quarter mile through dense foliage and finally circled in front of an Asian-style building with moonlight reflecting off a tile roof. Clay monkeys perched on the edges, protecting the inhabitants from evil spirits. A yellow bulb in the entranceway illuminated a double front door painted crimson, and all around the light, moths flailed madly.

As I paid for the cab, I inhaled deeply of the tree-scented air until the cab sped off, spewing carbon.

Captain Prevault stood a few feet away, smiling and gazing around her. “It’s nice up here, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

She turned and walked toward the front gate. I followed. She pounded with a brass knocker. The gatekeeper must have been just inside because within seconds the big red doors swung open. A toothy old man bowed to Captain Prevault, recognizing her. She smiled and bowed back, and then we were walking past the front building and climbing broad stone steps lined with more wooden buildings. Captain Prevault pulled a flashlight out of her bag and switched it on.

“It gets dark up here.”

“Where is here, exactly?” I asked.

“The National Mental Health Sanatorium. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“A doctor or a patient?”

“Both.”

The steps stopped in front of a more modern building, one with plate glass windows through which to enjoy the view and a door reinforced with iron bars. Captain Prevault pressed the buzzer. A metallic voice said, “Nugu seiyo?” Who is it?

“Leah Prevault, here to see Doctor Hwang.”

Without further preamble, the buzzer sounded, and Captain Prevault pushed through the door. For a moment I felt I was back in my element: an administrative office with three desks, a typewriter on a table, a water cooler, a short row of wooden filing cabinets, and papers stacked everywhere. Overhead, fluorescent bulbs glowed.

The man who let us in was young, not much older than a teenager, and he wore a white tunic and matching pants. His open-toed sandals made him look somewhat less than professional. He bowed deeply to Captain Prevault.

“I called for Doctor Hwang,” she said. “He should be expecting us.”

I’m not sure if the young man understood. His face remained blank, but he turned abruptly and started to walk away. Captain Prevault followed, as did I.

The place was quiet. We were obviously outside of their regular duty hours, and only a skeleton crew would handle the night shift. As our feet clattered on tile corridors, I started to realize this place was bigger than it looked from outside. We turned right and then left and climbed a short flight of stairs until we stood in front of a very narrow elevator. I’d seen them before in downtown Seoul, appearing as if they were squeezed into a building as an afterthought or purposely made tiny to save money. The young man pressed the button and the door slid open a few feet. The three of us stepped into the elevator, crammed together tightly, each of us staring in a different direction so as not to wash our fellow passengers with hot breath.

Our floor said six, and the young man pressed the button for two. The little elevator shuddered and descended into the bowels of Bukhan Mountain. I felt as if I were in a coffin. The elevator wheezed and moved down fitfully. Finally, it slowed, then shuddered, and the narrow doors slid open. Captain Prevault got off first. I tried to wait for the white-smocked technician, but he insisted I precede him.

We stood in a smooth walled cubicle with a single bulb glowing above us. The bulb was incased in an iron cage. There was nothing here that could be broken, or used as a weapon.

Brusquely, the technician hurried down a long corridor. I was expecting “tiger cages” like I’d seen pictures of at the Long Binh Jail in Vietnam or rock-hewn cells like I’d seen before in the Korean “monkey houses.” Instead, the technician led us through a double door into a spacious lawn with wrought iron chairs and matching round tables. Beyond that, a gentle slope dropped off into a valley lined with narrow walkways that led to stands of willow trees and small tile-roofed buildings adorned with bulbs blinking merrily in the brisk autumn air. On the far side of the valley, about three quarters of a mile away, the sister peak of Bukhan Mountain rose sharply, its jagged silhouette illuminated now by a low-hanging moon. To the right and to the left, the valley was similarly walled off.

Captain Prevault leaned close to me. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It’s like a bowl, in the center of the mountains.”

“Yes, a safe place for patients to recover. I wish Eighth Army had a similar facility.”

“What does Eighth Army have?”

“The stockade in Pupyong.”

The silent technician motioned for us to sit. Dr. Prevault strolled toward one of the tables but continued to stand, arms wrapped tightly across her chest, turning in slow circles as she enjoyed the beautiful cool evening and the fresh breeze wafting into the valley from the mountains above. Night birds trilled and wings fluttered, even at this late hour.

The technician disappeared back into the building. I studied the light shining from the homes in the valley below us. There didn’t seem to be anybody moving about, no central hub of activity. So far, there were no zombie-like mad men shuffling toward us, animated by murderous obsession. I felt safe. It was quiet and peaceful.

The technician reappeared with a steaming brass pot and set it on a white towel he folded and placed in the center of the table. Then, from the pockets in his tunic, he produced two porcelain cups. With his open palm he gestured toward the pot.

“Thank you,” Captain Prevault said and sat down primly. The man poured her a cup of steaming barley tea. With both hands, she lifted the cup, sipped tentatively, and then smiled and thanked the man again. He poured me a cup, set down the brass pot, and backed away.

I tasted the tea. Hot, earthy. Little lumps of barley bounced against my lip.

We sat in silence for a while. Finally, I broke the ice. “Who are we waiting for?”

“I told you. Doctor Hwang.”

“You also said he’s both a doctor and a patient.”

“Yes. It’s sort of a long story.”

“Looks like we have time.”

“After the war,” she said, referring to the Korean War, which had ended twenty years ago, “there was so much death and devastation, so many orphans and people separated from their families, that no one was surprised by the widespread prevalence of mental illness. But it was more than that. The war had been so intense and so disruptive, turning almost everyone in the country into a refugee or worse. You might say that, in a real sense, the entire country had gone mad.”

She paused and sipped her tea. In the valley below, branches swayed and leaves rustled.

“Doctor Hwang did what he could. But there were only a handful of trained mental health professionals in the country. The mentally disturbed were handled in traditional ways, which could mean by medical practitioners or even by shamans, but usually it meant they were handled by the police.”

And eliminated by the police, I thought.

Without warning, someone was standing beside us. Startled, Captain Prevault rose. “Doctor Hwang,” she said. Involuntarily, her right hand touched her neck.

I stood also.

A small man stood before us. In the ambient light, I could see he was dei mori, as the Koreans call it, bald on the top of his head with flecks of grey at the temples. He wore the plain cotton tunic and white pantaloons of a peasant from the Chosun Dynasty. His shoes were rubber slippers with the toe pointed upward. The only part of the traditional outfit he lacked was the broad-brimmed horsehair hat. It was as if he’d been in a hurry and had forgotten to put it on. He was a sturdy man, not fat, not skinny, and his face, although lined, was set in a non-committal, albeit pleasant, gaze. He bowed to Captain Prevault and then regarded me.

“Agent Sueno,” Captain Prevault said. “He’s the one I told you about.”

Without changing his expression, Dr. Hwang performed an elegant bow, straight from the waist. I bowed in return. He didn’t offer to shake hands, so I didn’t either.

“Come,” he said, already heading down the long lawn.

Captain Prevault’s eyes widened in an expression of exasperation, but she grinned and tilted her head for me to come along. She gathered up her bag and we followed the quiet little man down into the valley.

We sat on a wooden bench hewn out of a log. Straw-thatched homes surrounded a dirt-floored central courtyard. Villagers stood and squatted, some of them clapping rhythmically as a woman twirled in the center of the circle, with a human rainbow of red, blue, green, and yellow ribbons. She chanted some ancient song and banged on a drum that was looped by a hemp rope over her shoulder. As we sat mesmerized, someone leapt out of the crowd. Women squealed. It was a barefoot man, dressed in white, raising his knees high, as if stepping over knife blades, dancing to the rhythm. He held a brightly painted wooden mask in front of his face, a mask with a huge grimacing red mouth and green eyes flashing evil.

He ran after the woman. She darted away from him but the rhythm of the music grew faster and all around eyes widened and mouths gaped as the demon pursued the shaman. Finally, she stopped and threw her arms toward the heavens and chanted as if directly to the gods. She staggered, gripping her chest, and then struggled back to her feet, as if she had just received a jolt of power. She reached into the folds of her skirt and pulled out a naht, a wooden-handled sickle. Using it, she smote the demon, who backed away snarling, twisting out of her reach, doing his best to avoid the slashing blade until he finally crouched and bowed and retreated from the central square. The shaman banged more on her drum, slowed, and then bowed to the thunderous applause of the crowd and skipped away into the darkness.

In the hubbub that followed, an elderly woman appeared with another brass pot of tea and a few dumpling-shaped rice cakes. With both hands, Captain Prevault accepted the tray. She first poured a cup of tea for Dr. Hwang, who sat on a bench facing us.

“We like to live like this,” Dr. Hwang said in English, holding a rice cake aloft and gesturing toward the village that surrounded us. “It reminds my patients of a simpler time, a time when we were all children, a time before the war, a time before so much was lost.”

“All the people in this village are your patients?” I asked.

“All the people in the valley,” he corrected.

“How many, all told?”

“Over a hundred.”

“And they were all traumatized by the war?”

“Yes, that’s why they are all old, like me.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I had noticed that so far the youngest person I’d seen was maybe forty. “Do any of them ever leave?”

“Only for medical appointments, or if they’re released.”

“Who decides when they are to be released?”

“I do.”

“But I thought you were a patient here, too.”

“I am.”

Captain Prevault had been sitting quietly, sipping tea, but she finally spoke up. “The Korean government has a rule,” she said. “All government employees must retire when they reach huangap, age sixty-one. Supposedly, it’s to make room for new blood. Most people think it’s so Park Chung-hee can appoint hand-picked people who are loyal to him.” Captain Prevault glanced at Dr. Hwang and said, “Excuse me for criticizing your government.”

“Not to worry,” he said, waving his open palm. “We do it all the time.”

Captain Prevault continued. “Doctor Hwang had been working in this sanatorium since the war, and no one else understood the patients like he did. It would’ve been a disaster for him to leave. So, he petitioned the government and after some bureaucratic paper-shuffling, he had himself committed.”

“Committed?” I said. “For what?”

Dr. Hwang smiled. “I, too, was traumatized by the war. I lost my entire family. My wife and daughter were raped by soldiers, deserters actually, right in front of my eyes. Then they castrated my son, all the time demanding for me to tell them where I hid my gold and jewels.” As he related this, Dr. Hwang continued to smile evenly. “Of course, I didn’t have any gold or jewels. We were starving and anything of value I had ever owned had already been bartered for food. The soldiers knew this was probably the case but performed these atrocities nevertheless. Once they were through with them, they shot my wife and my daughter, and when they tired of my son’s screaming, they bludgeoned him to death with their rifle butts. Me, they strangled and left for dead.” He pointed to scars on his neck. “But they didn’t allow for the resilience of the human body. Some hours later, I started to breathe again, and shortly thereafter I was able to unravel the rope around my neck.”

I glanced at Captain Prevault. She was staring at him, her fists knotted in her lap.

“I didn’t have time to bury my family,” Dr. Hwang said. “As soon as I could walk, I set off after the men who had done me so much harm. Two days later, I found them, in a farmhouse in a village about thirty kilometers away. The farmer, lying dead outside, apparently had a cache of mokkolli in earthen jars. The deserters had besotted themselves, after raping the farmer’s wife, of course. She was crouching in the kitchen when I entered the farmhouse. She raised three fingers, telling me silently that all the deserters were there. Then she handed me a knife. A thick knife, the type used for chopping turnips. For herself, she kept a thin sharp blade, normally used for slaughtering pigs, had there been any pigs left. I followed her into the living quarters, where she attacked one of the men, and I took two. We stabbed them in the stomach, hacking, slicing. They woke up howling, clutching their bleeding bodies, guts spilling through their fingers like free swimming eels. I wanted their deaths to be slow. I wanted their deaths to be painful. They were.”

His smile stayed glued to his face, unchanging.

I glugged down barley tea. After a respectful silence, I asked about the man with the iron sickle. Dr. Hwang gave me his opinion.

“He’s either mad or he’s a North Korean agent pretending he’s mad.”

“If you were me, how would you go about searching for him?”

“Well, if he’s a North Korean agent, I can’t help you. But if he’s mad, he might’ve been a patient of someone at some time.”

“Maybe you.”

“I thought of that. Ever since Captain Prevault called me, I’ve been reviewing both my memory and my files. Whoever this man was, he was never a patient of mine.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I specialize in people traumatized by the war. This man, whoever he is, is so violent and so full of rage, he could not possibly have lived these twenty-some years in our society without having previously come to our attention. This person is new.”

“New to the mental health profession?”

“No. New to madness.”

“How do you know?

“Because when anyone begins to enact their fantasies with such overt violence, they are not likely to live long.”

“Why not?

“Certainly when you see him, you will shoot him, won’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“No maybe about it. If you don’t shoot him, someone else will. I presume at your American army headquarters there are plenty of volunteers.”

I thought of Moe Dexter and every other MP walking a beat. “But maybe his psychosis has lain dormant,” I said.

“Possible. But unlikely.”

“Are there any records we could look at?”

“Not centralized records. Only those that are held privately by individual physicians. Mental health workers are still seen as something odd in Korea. Culturally, my country’s views on mental illness are backward. We still see it as something to be ashamed of, something to hide from the neighbors, something that can ruin the chance for a good career or a good marriage. This place was established by the government not out of kindness but out of desperation. After the war there were so many people suffering psychologically, and they were committing so much crime and mayhem, that the government saw the need to get them off the streets. At first, they were incarcerated.”

“But then you came along?”

“Yes, I managed to set up this sanatorium as an alternative to prison.”

“But there must’ve been others who weren’t allowed out of prison.”

“Many others. But of course there were no mental health records kept for them. Only criminal records. Impossible to cull out those who are ill from those who are merely criminals.”

I leaned toward him and spread my fingers. “So what can I do?” I asked.

Still smiling, he said, “I’ll make some inquiries.”

“With who?”

“With anyone who remembers someone who liked to kill with an iron sickle.”

I described the totem I had seen in the Itaewon Market.

“You think it was this killer who placed it there?”

“I think so. And then he removed it before dawn, before anyone else could see it.”

“Draw it for me.”

“Draw it? I can’t draw.”

“Of course you can.” Dr. Hwang snapped his fingers and the same woman who had brought us the tea appeared. He was about to issue an order when Captain Prevault pulled a pad and a pencil out of her purse.

“Here,” she said, thrusting it toward me.

Dr. Hwang sent the old woman away. Then he turned to me. “Do it,” he said.

I took the pad and pencil from Captain Prevault. At first, I kept drawing it with the wrong proportions, so I’d run out of paper. I kept scratching it out and turning the page and starting again. Finally, the proportions seemed right, or close to right, and after some roughing out the lines and filling them in, I finally had a sketch that looked something like the item I’d seen last night at the Itaewon Market.

I showed it to Dr. Hwang.

“A rat,” he said, holding the sketch at arm’s length, then bringing it closer. Captain Prevault held up a candle. “And a stand. Made of wood, you say?”

“Yes. The rat was hanging from the top of the grill by its hind legs.”

“On the nose of the rat; you’ve scratched something here.”

“Blood.”

“From the rat’s nose?”

“No. That was one of the weird things. The blood seemed to be from another source. A clot of it, as if it had been pasted to the rat’s nose.”

Dr. Hwang lowered the drawing to his lap and stared at me.

“You were right about drawing it,” I said. “I remember more things about it now. Things I hadn’t remembered before.”

“What do you think this means?”

“I don’t know. It’s weird.”

“Weird yes, but it has meaning to the man who created it. Very specific meaning. And it is for your eyes only.”

“For my eyes?” I asked.

“Yes. You’ve formed a bond with him. You’re the one pursuing him. He wants you to know why he’s doing all this. That’s why he placed it there for you to see, and once you’d seen it he took it away.”

“He didn’t want to share it with anyone else.”

“Precisely.”

“But what could a stand with a square grill of wires and a dead rat mean?”

Dr. Hwang shrugged. “It means nothing to me, but it means everything to him. I suggest you concentrate on that. He’s trying to tell you something.”

“What?”

“When you learn that, you will learn who he is, and you will learn why he’s doing these horrible things.”

“That totem has something to do with his trauma?”

“It has everything to do with it.”