by Martin Limon
Pedestrians carried briefcases or lugged too-large loads on A-frames strapped to their backs or pushed carts laden with more weight than they were designed to carry. Everyone was working hard. Straining. Nobody strolled along aimlessly. They had a mission to accomplish, and they went about it as if their lives depended on it. Which it often did.
I thought about the bank robbers. Wherever they were stationed, they must’ve somehow spotted a copy of this week’s Overseas Observer. Which confirmed, in my mind, that they were GIs. Everybody in uniform in-country was buzzing about the hookers being transported north toward the DMZ by order of the I Corps commander. So if these criminals were on or anywhere near a military base, they almost certainly would’ve heard about the latest Overseas Observer newsflash. They would’ve read the salacious headlines on the front page and thumbed through the paper, stopping at page three and studying the picture of me and Ernie in front of the Kukmin Bank. Reading the article, probably, from start to finish. Thanks to Katie Byrd Worthington, it was easy for them. They knew now what we looked like, that we were CID agents in Seoul, and that we were coming after them. What better plan than to take us out, and immediately?
What did they know about us? Had they done enough research to know we were the only CID agents capable of operating off base? The only ones with a direct line to the Chief Homicide Inspector of the Korean National Police? Had they done their homework? Or were they working the odds, figuring that if we had enough gumption to go after them by canvassing the shops in Itaewon, if they pushed us out of the picture, the investigators who replaced us wouldn’t be as motivated? Our hypothetical replacements would, understandably, fear for their lives. Maybe they’d hesitate before pushing the case forward, or at least be a hell of a lot more reserved than me and Ernie were being.
I explained my thinking to Ernie.
“Makes sense,” he said. “Still, though, how would they have found us so fast?”
“Pretty obvious they have access to a jeep. They drive to Seoul—”
“Or they’re already stationed here.”
“Yeah. Could be. Either way, they check the CID office and see it’s closed. So they start cruising around Yongsan Compound—past the parade field, past the bowling alley, maybe they park their jeep in the PX parking lot for a while.”
“Send somebody inside to see if we’re there.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Maybe. Anyway, somewhere along the line they spot us. Maybe at the snack bar, maybe near the Stars and Stripes office.”
“Why not take us out then?”
“Too many eyes on compound,” I said. “Trained eyes, people who would recognize the sound of gunfire coming from an M16. People who would immediately check the unit designation of a fleeing jeep.”
“And on compound, they can’t tape up their bumper.”
“No. An MP patrol would pull them over in seconds. But off base, the Korean civilians ignore US military vehicles. In Samgakji, army vehicles driving through are so common they’re practically invisible. And whether the unit designation is taped over or not is of no concern. Not to civilians.”
“Right. So the bank robbers get lucky. They’ve spotted us walking down the road and they follow us off base, watch us as we go down the side streets of Samgakji.”
“But they don’t want to be seen following us on foot carrying a freaking assault rifle. So they park the jeep, tape over the unit designation, and sit and wait, patiently, like hunters in a duck blind.”
“And take their potshot,” Ernie said, “when the two dumb freaking mallards emerge back out into the sunlight.”
“A plan that would’ve worked, too, if it hadn’t been for that guy with the onion cart. He saved our bacon. We should’ve tipped him.”
“God, Sueño. You’re the only guy in the world who wants to tip a clumsy old man pushing a produce cart.”
“So after attempting to kill us,” I said, “they drive off.”
“Why didn’t they take a second shot?” Ernie asked. “Or come after us while we were rolling around in the dirt?”
“For all they know,” I replied, “we’re packing. Carrying our .45s under our jackets. They’re afraid we’ll start shooting back.”
“And a shootout would alert even the half-asleep gate guards back on the compound.”
“Yeah. So they drive off, making their getaway. Then turn north toward Seoul Station, the same direction we’re traveling now. There are KNP checkpoints up ahead so they have to stop somewhere and rip that masking tape off their bumper.”
As we talked, I’d been keeping an eye out for just such a place. So far, I hadn’t seen one.
“Actually, in this traffic,” I continued, “they could get out of their jeep at a red light, run around back and rip off the tape. All these impatient drivers probably wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care. GIs do crazy things. It’s none of their business.”
“Yeah,” Ernie agreed. “Could be.”
The cab approached the front entranceway to the Bando. A man wearing a brimmed cap and a coat with epaulettes blew his whistle and waved us in. Under the enormous cement overhang, the little kimchi cab rolled to a stop, but before anyone could open the doors for us, Ernie and I popped out. I paid the driver, then we pushed through the rotating glass door and entered the lobby.
It was as if we’d wandered into the past. The tattered carpet on the floor reeked of mildew. The scarred mahogany of the check-in counter gleamed with layers of polish that I imagined had originally been applied when Japanese and Nazi diplomats used the Bando Hotel to plan the overthrow of legitimately elected governments. A heavy stone pot sat in the center of the floor, holding a jagged rose bush which seemed to be committing suicide by refusing water. Ancient celadon vases sat perched atop curved-leg tables in front of flower-papered walls.
Ernie inhaled deeply. “Smells like nobody’s aired this place out since fleas were invented.” He nodded toward the head clerk. “That guy looks like he’s about to foreclose on a mausoleum.”
The head clerk was indeed a bony old man with dried skin hanging over a skull that had long since fossilized. I stepped in front of him and pulled out my identification.
“Katie Worthington,” I said. “She’s expecting us.”
The old skeleton made a show of pulling on the sleeves of his wool coat, opening the ledger hidden on a platform just out of sight, and checking it carefully. After staring long enough for his moist eyes to glaze over, he raised his head and said, “We have no guest by that name.”
“She’s a reporter,” I said. “For the Overseas Observer.”
His eyes studied me unwaveringly, as if I’d spoken ancient Greek.
“Try Katie Byrd Worthington,” I told him.
He tugged on his sleeves again and reopened the ledger. A bony finger ran down a long list and he finally looked back up at me. “I’ll see if she’s in.”
He turned and grabbed a black telephone on the back counter. I tried to catch what room number he dialed, but he anticipated that and shuffled right and then left to block my view.
“Crusty old son of a bitch,” Ernie said.
The clerk spoke in muffled tones, not just for a few seconds but for almost a minute. He hung up the phone and turned back to us. “She’s not in,” he said.
“You just talked to her,” Ernie said, pointing at the phone.
Again, the old clerk stared impassively, not responding.
Ernie was about to do what I assumed he would, but instead of stopping him, I decided to help him out. I moved to my left and slammed my hand on the counter, then leaned forward and reached down, grasping for a pen. Startled, the old clerk rushed toward me, and as he did so, Ernie leapt across the counter like a dolphin sliding out of a pool and, balancing on his stomach, reached down and grabbed the leather-bound ledger. He pulled it up and out and sped off, racing with it to a seat against the far wa
ll.
The clerk panicked. He was screaming something in Korean that I didn’t quite catch, but it must’ve had something to do with calling security, because before his voice faded into blessed silence, three men in black suits appeared, as if by magic, from a door behind the central stairwell.
Ernie handed the ledger to me, stood, pulled the pair of brass knuckles he always carried from his pocket, and charged the three security guards.
Apparently he didn’t slug anybody right away, but grappled with them to slow them down. Which gave me time to open the ledger and frantically flip the pages until I found an entry in hangul that, when you sounded it out, came to something like Kei-ti Bu-duh Wo-ting-ton. Korean usually skips over “r” sounds before consonants and doesn’t have “th” sound at all. I checked the room number.
While Ernie shouted at the security guards and they shouted back at him, I slipped past the shoving mass and tossed the ledger back onto the check-in counter, then sprinted for the stairway that led upstairs to the seventh floor.
I was winded by the time I got there. Not much, but enough to want to slow my breathing before knocking on the door of room 703. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time. So with my chest still heaving, I pounded on the door and waited to see darkness behind the peephole.
There wasn’t any. Nobody looking out. I pounded again. Still no shadow. I tried the knob. Locked. She must’ve gone out, probably immediately after the desk clerk had called to notify her that someone was here to see her. What in the hell was she so nervous about? If she just left, that meant that I must’ve missed her. Maybe by seconds. She hadn’t come down the stairwell, or I would’ve bumped into her. And it seemed unlikely that she would’ve taken the elevator, since she would’ve been trapped and would’ve been seen by whoever was in the lobby. So where had she gone? How would she get downstairs?
And then I spotted it down the hallway. A red sign that said pisang-gu, emergency exit.
The sign was wrinkled and yellowed and seemed to have been pasted there back before the end of the Chosun dynasty. It sat above an open window. I ran toward it and poked my head outside and saw a rickety metal contraption that might’ve once passed as a fire escape, although I doubted it would hold my weight. Down below, at the bottom of the spindly steps, a figure seemed to be hanging by her hands like a trapeze artist, clinging for dear life to the last rung of the ladder. Katie Byrd Worthington, I presumed. But she was hesitating, as if she’d reached the limits of her gymnastic abilities.
She looked up and saw me peering down at her. We made eye contact. Apparently, that was the catalyst. She let go of her handhold and plummeted the last few feet to the ground, hitting hard, and falling on her butt as the melon attached to her body snapped backward and slammed into the dirty blacktop below. Except it wasn’t a melon, it was her skull. Even from up here, I could hear the thwunk.
Apparently, she had a hard head. Maybe a requirement of her position at the Overseas Observer. She pushed herself up to a seated position, rubbed the back of her cranium, and slowly rose to her feet. Some sort of equipment bag had landed near her. She picked it up, reached inside, and pulled out a camera on a long leather strap. She swung it in a looping arc over her shoulder. Thus outfitted, she took a few uncertain steps and, as if remembering something, stopped and looked up at me. She was a blonde woman with short bobbed hair. Skinny, almost spindly, wearing khaki pants and a multi-pocketed matching safari jacket over a blue blouse. Once we made eye contact again, she flipped me the bird. Apparently satisfied, she retracted her finger, grinned, turned, and trotted off.
-10-
When the elevator doors opened, I burst into the lobby.
Ernie was still in a shoving match with the security guards, his right fist cocked and covered with the cold brass of his store-bought knuckles. I shouted at him as I ran past. “She’s getting away!”
I shoved through the rotating door and felt it shudder as Ernie slammed into the door behind me. We ran past the liveried doormen and halted when we hit the street. I pointed west. “That way,” I said. “She just flipped me the bird.”
“How rude,” Ernie said.
“Check the cars going past,” I said, “especially the taxis.”
Ernie and I ran alongside the flow, peering into the back of every kimchi cab we saw, startling the drivers and the passengers. Like a herd of angry cattle jostling one another, traffic was stopped at a red light in front of a major intersection, no one paying any attention to the designated lanes. But as Ernie and I darted between the cars, the light changed to green. Suddenly, like parched buffalo heading toward a watering hole, the cars began their inexorable stampede. We kept darting between them, holding up our open palms and shouting at them to stop, but gradually had to make our way back to the safety of the sidewalk.
Finally out of harm’s way, we stood side by side. Ernie ran his hand through his short hair. “Nothing. How’d she get away from you?”
“Down the fire escape. Freaking Harry Houdini wouldn’t have followed her. If she didn’t grab a kimchi cab, what’d she do?”
“A bus,” Ernie said.
We glanced down the road, past the Bando and beyond to where I’d seen her turn and flip me the bird.
“She must’ve gone east,” Ernie said. “There’s a bus stop down there.”
“Right,” I said.
And then we were running.
One long block past the Bando, a bus was pulling away from the curb. Ernie pulled his badge, waved it in the air and ran straight at the front of the bus, ordering it to halt. But the driver pulled farther out into traffic and swerved around us, even as Ernie cursed and waved his arms. I almost made it to the side door, which was still open. A bus maid in her full uniform of blue skirt and red vest and red beanie was holding on for dear life, spread-eagled in front of the opening, making sure that no one in the packed jumble of humanity behind her popped out onto the pavement. But the bus was moving too fast now for me to hop on, and besides, every step was filled with human feet. Even if I’d been crazy enough to make the leap onto the moving bus, I would have been unable to find a toehold.
As the internal combustion leviathan glided past, I searched the faces staring out the steam-smeared windows. One was familiar. A narrow Caucasian face amidst a sea of Asians, with a pointed nose, sunken cheeks, and big round eyes blinking in surprise. Katie Byrd Worthington. She held her right hand atop her head. For two reasons, I imagined. One was to give her more space amongst the human sardines packed into Seoul’s city conveyance. And two, she must’ve been nursing an ugly bump from the beating her head had taken when she’d dropped from the fire escape.
Once again, we made eye contact. The right side of her mouth twisted into a broad smirk. She was enjoying herself. But at least this time, she didn’t flip me the bird. Probably because she couldn’t get her hand free.
At KNP Headquarters, Inspector Kill seemed relieved to see us.
“You’re working Sunday,” he remarked.
Ernie shrugged. “Can’t dance.”
Mr. Kill puzzled over that statement, trying to work out its meaning. Of course, it didn’t make sense to anyone else either, but that didn’t stop it from being widely used. Mr. Kill motioned for us to take a seat on the vinyl-covered benches on either side of the long coffee table in front of his desk. Normally, we would’ve received tea or coffee, but by way of explanation he said, “I ordered Officer Oh to take the day off. If I don’t, she shows up. No matter what.”
“Sort of like those bank robbers,” Ernie told him.
Mr. Kill studied him. “What do you mean?”
Ernie reached into his pocket, pulled out the wadded napkin, and laid it on the coffee table. Wrinkled tissue unfolded like a spring flower, revealing the smashed bullet inside. He nodded toward me, and I explained what had happened in Samgakji. Mr. Kill spent a moment processing the narrative. Finally, he said, “So these aren’t
your average GIs.”
“They’re clever,” I said. “They figured out how to find us. And they’re thorough, wanting to close off loose ends.”
“Meaning us,” Ernie added.
Mr. Kill nodded. “Yes. Clever. Very thorough.” He reached for the bullet, lifted it carefully by its paper wrapping and turned, placing it behind him on his desk. “I’ll have our lab take a look at this.”
Eighth Army didn’t have a forensics lab. According to the honchos, there wasn’t enough crime to warrant putting US taxpayers to such an expense. Which was true, in a way. If you refuse to see things, you can pretend they don’t exist. As a result, we had to package up all crime evidence, like spent bullets and blood samples, and ship them to Camp Zama in Japan. Exactly how high a priority the techs at Zama put on the evidence we shipped to them, I couldn’t be sure. But we seldom received results in less than two weeks.
Having the Korean National Police crime lab, located right in this building, process the evidence was much faster. Besides, they already had the fatal bullet from the latest bank robbery and would be able to compare the two.
Mr. Kill turned back to us. “I have bad news. The price of poker is going up.”
“Where’d you learn that?” Ernie asked. “‘The price of poker.’”
“At counterinsurgency school.”
“They have poker games there?”
“Pretty much constantly.”
“Did you win?”
I elbowed Ernie to shut up. “What happened?” I asked.
Mr. Kill paused and said, “The story about the bank robberies is about to break in the Associated Press.”
If the story made international news, even the Stars and Stripes would be forced to pick it up. And 8th Army wouldn’t be able to deny the involvement of American soldiers any longer, which I expected would elevate their anger from a middling pissed off to absolutely enraged.
“Damn,” I said.
“They’ll blame us for this getting out,” Ernie added.
