by Martin Limon
Outside, our KNP escort lit a cigarette. Neither Ernie nor I smoked, so we sauntered toward the line of blue KNP sedans. Bemused passersby gawked at us. Foreigners were often seen near the American military bases, but if you wandered a couple of miles away from the compound, you became a novelty, something like a rare animal or alien from Venus.
“Mr. Kill’s here,” Ernie said. “So where’s Officer Oh?” His female assistant.
“You’ve got me,” I said.
Ten minutes later, Chief Homicide Inspector Gil Kwon-up emerged from the bank.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Ernie replied.
He stared at Ernie curiously, wondering, I supposed, if he was joking, and decided to ignore the comment.
“I asked for you both,” he said.
“Thanks,” Ernie replied. “I think.”
“The other two investigators, what are their names?”
“Burrows and Slabem.”
He shook his head. “They’re useless.”
“We like to think so,” Ernie replied.
“I contacted my superiors, who contacted your chief of staff. That’s why you’re here.”
Mr. Kill had not only earned a university education in Korea, but had been trained from a young age in the Four Books and the Five Classics, or the traditional Confucian cannon. He was an expert at calligraphy, ancient literature, and traditional fine art, not to mention the analects of the Great Sage himself. After joining the Korean National Police, he’d been selected for an anti-Communist leadership course sponsored by the US Department of Defense. Under their auspices, he’d traveled to the States for graduate courses in criminology and counter-insurgency at an unnamed Ivy League school. So he was not only brilliant, but also well-educated and could speak better English than most GIs.
Ernie—a high school graduate, and lucky at even that—resented Mr. Kill, sensing their class difference. I’d dropped out of high school during my senior year to join the army and eat regular. But despite my humble beginnings, I had a different take on the situation, seeing Inspector Kill as a valuable source of knowledge. He knew more about crime fighting than either of us probably ever would know. Or for that matter, ever want to know.
“It seems likely,” I told Mr. Kill, “that Eighth Army and the Korean government will want to cover up these crimes, or at least keep them from the public eye. Our colleagues, Burrows and Slabem, are better for that.”
“You’re right. They would be. But the policy has changed. We hoped that these men would strike just once. That they’d keep their two million won, have a party, and not take the chance of thieving again. As you can see,” he said, nodding toward the bank’s entranceway, “we were wrong. Now an innocent woman is dead. Ricochet. The bullet hit the heating unit, dipped, and rebounded at a thirty-degree angle. Caught her in the neck.” He pointed to his own throat. “Denial isn’t going to work any longer. If these Americans keep robbing, and more people die, word will leak out. We can control the Korean newspapers, but not the international press. And if our own citizens realize we’ve been hiding something of this magnitude, even President Park will be in trouble.”
Which was saying something, since the Park Chung-hee regime was willing to beat people, lock them up, or even make them disappear for publicly opposing government policies.
“So what’s the plan?” Ernie asked.
“We’re going to catch these miscreants. Bring them to justice before they strike again.”
Miscreants. I sometimes forgot how extensive and formal Mr. Kill’s vocabulary could be. It was refreshing, something I’d never hear in the barracks.
“We’ll take them down,” Mr. Kill continued. “By any means necessary.”
“You mean dead or alive?” Ernie asked, perking up.
“Yes.” He pointed to us. “And your job is to ferret out information on the American compounds. To find them from the inside.”
“Eighth Army won’t like it,” I said.
“They’ll have to like it. As we speak, our Minister of the Interior is in discussion with your ambassador to Korea. They’ll force Eighth Army to admit the obvious. That these criminals are American GIs who must be stopped at all costs.”
When the 8th Army honchos are forced to do something, they feel humiliated and take out their frustrations on someone—usually the lowest-ranking enlisted scum on the totem pole. Which was Ernie and me. But this was nothing new to us. In fact, it was becoming our signature MO.
“Where’s Officer Oh?” I asked.
“Canvassing the area. With a task force.”
“Something the Itaewon police didn’t bother to do.”
“No. But I understand you did.”
How he discovered these things, I never quite knew. There were Korean National Police stations throughout the country, plus their paid—and unpaid—informants. Still, sometimes Mr. Kill’s access to information seemed uncanny. Instead of admitting my surprise, I shrugged. “We had nothing else to do that night.”
“And what did you find out?”
I told him.
“A fourth man,” he repeated. “And tape on the vehicle.”
“Yes, over the unit designation.”
“We’ll check on that.”
“But they’d have to take it off,” I said, “almost immediately after leaving the bank. If they didn’t, they’d risk being pulled over by a random MP patrol. And they certainly wouldn’t be allowed through the gate of any of the American compounds, not with the tape still hiding their unit designation.”
There were over fifty US military installations in the Republic of Korea, stretching from the Demilitarized Zone in the north to the Port of Pusan two hundred miles to the south.
Mr. Kill thought about it. “So after the robbery, the thieves would’ve left the Kukmin Bank in Itaewon and pulled over somewhere to take off the tape?”
“Yes. Probably somewhere not too far away.”
“Still a large area to canvass.”
Seoul was crowded with millions of shops and homes and government facilities, not to mention people.
“Maybe we can narrow the search area down,” I said.
“How?” Mr. Kill asked.
I told him. Or tried to. Before I could finish, one of the female employees of the Daehan Bank, holding a handkerchief to red eyes, stormed out of the double-doored entranceway and headed straight for us. Mr. Kill swiveled, but not in time to stop her. She shoved past him, raised her free hand, and swung her fist toward my face. I sidestepped the blow and her small fist landed on my chest, about as jarring as a tap from a baby. But she kept swinging, her fresh tears throwing off her aim.
“You kill,” she shouted in English. “You big-nose people kill good woman. She mother. Have three children. What they do now? How they grow up?”
By this time, Mr. Kill had grabbed the distraught woman by the shoulders and was pulling her gently away. Other cops surrounded us and stepped between me and Ernie and the woman. Her energy spent, she relented and slouched forward, still sobbing as Kill led her back to the bank.
Standing atop the front steps of the Daehan Bank were the rest of the employees. They’d filtered out and arranged themselves in rows, almost as if posing for a group photograph. Instead of smiling and saying kimchi, they stared at me and Ernie with eyes that were red and tearful and angry. Wishing, I imagined, that we big-nosed people had never set foot in their country. Never ripped it in two. Never set Korean against Korean. And never robbed the Daehan Bank.
-5-
Officer Oh finished supervising her canvass of the area and joined us in Ernie’s jeep. She sat on the low back seat, knees together, in her KNP uniform of a dark-blue skirt and a light-blue blouse buttoned to the neck. Her regulation pillbox hat with an upturned brim was pinned in front of a clasped fold of long black hair.
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br /> Mr. Kill was busy at the crime scene, so he’d sent her with us to look into my theory of the GI bank robbers pulling over to remove the tape from their bumpers.
Officer Oh grabbed the back of my seat, leaned forward, and asked, “Uri odi gayo?” Where are we going?
I answered in Korean that I wasn’t quite sure yet. As we emerged from the bank’s tiny parking area, I told Ernie to take a right onto the main road. What I was looking for were logical places to pull over. Seoul was extremely crowded and the traffic could be maddening, so I searched for a place where someone pulling over and stopping wouldn’t be hit from behind and, if possible, where there weren’t too many witnesses. After traveling over a mile, I didn’t see anywhere that seemed likely. Parked cars lined the road except at designated bus stops.
“Maybe they used one of the bus stops,” Ernie said. “That’s all that’s open.”
“Too many witnesses lined up there,” I said. “And there are so many buses, one of them would’ve been liable to pull up behind the jeep and start honking. Or worse, blocked them in so they couldn’t get away. Attracted a cop.”
He swerved past a truck piled high with Napa cabbage. “You think they pre-planned the getaway?”
“I think so. They probably did a test run beforehand. Everything else about the robbery was pulled off with something resembling military precision.”
“Except for the dead teller.”
“Yeah. Except for that.”
Officer Oh spoke some English, but not nearly as well as Mr. Kill. In the rearview mirror, I could see her eyes darting back and forth between us, trying to keep up with our conversation.
“Hey, turn around,” I told Ernie.
He did. Right in the middle of the road. Kimchi cabs—boxy Hyundai sedans—and three-wheeled produce trucks slammed on their brakes and honked their horns.
Officer Oh’s eyes widened.
“You trying to get us killed?” I asked.
“Police business,” Ernie said. “Time’s a-wasting.”
Ernie loved breaking rules. To him, having permission to break them was almost as enjoyable as not having permission.
We passed Daehan Bank and kept going. This time, the side of the road was less crowded. There were a few businesses catering to cab drivers, with men wearing rubber boots and holding hoses standing outside of quick-serve chop houses, offering a quick wash while the busy cabbies wolfed down bowls of noodles.
“They could’ve pulled into one of those,” Ernie said.
“Too many eyes,” I replied.
Finally, we reached Tong-il Lo, Reunification Road. At the three-way intersection, I said, “They must’ve stopped here.”
Ernie glanced over at me. Officer Oh leaned forward.
“Why?”
“Because when you continue north on Tong-il Lo, you leave the city and hit the countryside. And Division territory.”
The US Second Infantry Division guarded the valley that stretched from Seoul to Munsan, across the Freedom Bridge and on to the DMZ and the truce village of Panmunjom. Beyond that loomed North Korea like an ancient terra incognita.
“And Division has MP patrols,” Ernie said.
“Plenty of them. And checkpoints. If someone were to have tape covering their unit designation, the MPs would immediately become suspicious.”
“Here,” Ernie said. He pulled over onto the blacktop parking area surrounding a gas station with a dozen pumps. A huge sign overhead had two Chinese characters that were pronounced “Sokyu” in Korean. Meaning “rock oil.” Which perfectly corresponded with the Latin-derived word “petroleum.”
“They wouldn’t want to buy gas,” Ernie said.
“No. You can bet they topped off at a POL point before starting this mission.”
POL was the military acronym for petroleum, oil, and lubrication. Spots where properly dispatched military vehicles could gas up for free.
Ernie parked the jeep on the edge of the station, and Officer Oh climbed out of the back seat and strode confidently the twenty yards to the sales office. About ten minutes later, she returned. “One of the employees remembers GIs stopping here this morning.” She pointed to a spot a few yards from where we stood. “They did something to their vehicle, but the employees were busy and didn’t pay them much attention.”
“Did anyone see their unit designation?”
“No. They weren’t interested. Besides, they couldn’t have read it from this distance.”
We strolled toward the spot where the GIs had parked. Off the edge of the blacktop, Ernie bent down and plucked something from a clump of weeds. He held it up to me.
A mangled wad of black electrical tape.
As we drove away, Ernie asked, “How’d you figure that out?”
“A documentary I saw on AFKN.” The American Forces Korea Network. Since Stateside television broadcasts couldn’t reach Korea, 8th Army had its own TV network, AFKN, which rebroadcast US television shows, including plenty of documentaries, along with local military news and public service announcements.
“What? A documentary about how to find GI bank robbers?”
“No. It was about hunters in Africa chasing wounded gazelle. They lose sight of the gazelle and don’t have time to study the hoof prints and the broken twigs and stuff, so they trot along, following the contours of the landscape, taking the easiest routes and trying to think like the animal. Some hunters are expert at it.”
“George Sueño,” Ernie said. “Big game hunter. Should I call you bwana?”
“Can it, Ernie.”
We drove to Itaewon to try the same tracking technique, starting from the Kukmin Bank. We weren’t sure in which direction the thieves had made their departure, so we’d try both right and left. Navigating instinctively was a little more difficult since we were on the southern edge of the city, farther from the countryside. Here there were more crowds and traffic between tightly packed buildings.
After an hour, we gave it up as a lost cause. Still, Officer Oh thought we’d made headway.
That evening in Mr. Kill’s office at KNP headquarters, we went over everything we’d learned from the bank employees. It wasn’t much. That the three gunmen and the driver were Caucasian, there was little doubt. That they were American soldiers seemed to be a foregone conclusion. We had estimates of their height and weight, but only one of them seemed any bigger than your average GI. The guy who’d stood watch at the front door and rifle-butted the bank guard and eventually fired the warning shot that ricocheted and killed the teller. His shoulders were broad enough that some of the male employees thought he might be a bodybuilder. Beyond that, we didn’t know their hair color or eye color or, because of the camo stick, even the complexion of their skin. All appeared to be clean-shaven, and they’d all worn black GI-issue leather gloves, so the KNP forensic team was unable to recover any fingerprints. Basically, they’d left us nothing.
The bullet that had killed the bank teller was being evaluated at KNP headquarters. Until we had a rifle to match it against, though, it wouldn’t do us much good.
At 8 p.m., while we were still going over the evidence with Mr. Kill and Officer Oh, the phone rang. Officer Oh answered it. After listening for a moment, she covered the receiver and said to Mr. Kill, “Saum-i nassoyo.”
A fight had broken out.
-6-
The main Seoul railway station, which Koreans call Seoul-yok, was a stately old building made of brick with a central round dome that looked like something right out of Doctor Zhivago. I’d been told it was a gift from the Russian czar to the Korean king back in the 1890s, when both Russia and Japan were competing for influence on the Korean Peninsula. I wasn’t sure if that story was true, but it sounded right, and I liked to wonder about it as I watched the lights around the edges of the roof make the dome glow like a huge orb of polished jade.
The KNP checkpo
int was set up in front of Seoul-yok. A convenient spot because Tong-il Lo ran down from the DMZ past Seoul Station and continued for less than a mile to the Samgakji Circle. GIs familiar with the city would hang a left there for the short run to 8th Army Headquarters on Yongsan Compound. Plenty of US military vehicles passed through. And because of the bank robberies and the shooting, the KNPs were doing something they hadn’t done in years, or maybe ever. Stopping American army vehicles and demanding that the GIs show their dispatch and identification and state their destination and the nature of their business.
In other words, the KNPs were busy closing the barn door long after the horse had escaped.
“I didn’t order this,” Mr. Kill told us.
“Somebody up top is angry,” Ernie said. “It’s for show.”
Kill’s expression hardened, but he didn’t reply.
Officer Oh drove us in her blue KNP sedan. When we pulled up to the checkpoint, Mr. Kill climbed out of the front passenger seat. Immediately, a uniformed police officer hurried forward and saluted him. Floodlights illuminated Kill’s face as he questioned the officer.
Two GIs, heads lolling, were handcuffed and leaning against a two-and-a-half ton truck. I checked its unit designation: 531 M&S CO. The 531st Maintenance & Supply Company. I flashed my badge and asked them to identify themselves.
“Screw you,” one of them said.
“Why’d they stop you?” I asked.
“How the hell should we know? I’m driving with our load, and all of a sudden these guys are standing in our way pointing the business ends of their M16s in our faces.”
“You should’ve run them down,” the other GI said.
“Yeah,” the driver replied. “Maybe I should have. They don’t have the right to stop the American army. Who the hell do they think they are?”
“It’s their country,” Ernie said.
“Screw their country. I didn’t ask to be sent here.”
