Blood spurted from the pierced jugular. The scarred O of the man’s mouth opened in a silent scream, but almost immediately the one seeing eye began to glaze over. The body beneath Brendan twitched violently for a few moments, then was still.
Brendan rose from the corpse, threw open the door to the confessional, and, wiping blood from his face, ran through a labyrinth of narrow stone and wood corridors toward the cardinal’s private chambers.
He found the old man, looking even paler and with pain clearly evident in the watery eyes, sitting at the desk in his study, seemingly holding himself upright with his palms on the polished oak surface before him.
“Brendan,” Henry Cardinal Farrell breathed as Brendan came through the door, stopped. “Thank God. My prayers have been answered.” He paused and squinted, as if he were having trouble seeing. “You’re hurt …?”
“The blood is Werner Pale’s, eminence, not mine.”
“Thank God.”
“Thank you for your warning. It saved my life.”
“I couldn’t warn you outright, priest. He was listening.”
“I understand,” Brendan said and again started forward. He stopped a few feet from the desk when the cardinal raised one trembling hand with the palm outward, as if to push him back.
“He came to me … to kill me, of course, since I was responsible for sending you into his life. He wanted to know where to find you and the girl, and he said that he would kill me quickly if I told him. There is nothing he could have done to make me tell him, Brendan. Believe me.”
“I do, eminence. You don’t have to explain.”
“But I want to,” the old man said in a voice that was growing progressively weaker.
“I believe he spent most of the past five years in hospitals, or he would have known how famous you’ve become. He would have had no trouble finding you, and you would have had no warning. He might also have traced the girl, Lisa. I decided to gamble for your life and the girl’s; you had defeated him once before, and perhaps you could do it again. I sensed that he was afraid of you. But I also sensed that he badly wanted to make you suffer, and that shooting you down from some rooftop would not be satisfying for him. I acted well, Brendan. I got down on my knees before him and begged him for my life. I told him I would bring you to him and extract the information he wanted, if only he would spare my life. I also told him I would help trap you in a closed space, where you would be at his mercy. He was very pleased with the idea of killing you in the confessional booth, positively delighted when I suggested that he could pretend to be me. He said he was going to shoot you in the belly or kneecaps first, and then carve you up. He couldn’t stop laughing when I showed him the robe and sash he could wear. He loved the idea of dressing up like a priest to kill you.” The old man paused, and the broad smile that suddenly appeared on his face seemed to belong to a much younger and less troubled man. “That’s when I knew we had a chance, priest, for you, of all people, would find it rather odd that I, of all people, would ask you to join me in an act of heresy.”
Then the cardinal coughed blood and pitched forward on the desk. Brendan rushed forward, lifted the old man by the shoulders, saw the blood, and the handle of the stiletto that was protruding from the other man’s stomach. He also saw that it was too late.
“Pray for me, priest. God listens to you. Pray for me. Help my soul find its way to heaven.”
“I will.”
“Do you … understand what I … mean?”
“Yes. I will.”
And then the old man was gone. Brendan walked to the wardrobe in a corner of the office, removed a robe, and put it on. He removed the crucifix from the cardinal’s neck, put it around his own. Then he knelt beside the old man’s body and began performing the last rites, his last rite. For the first time in five years he prayed in the old way, as if it mattered.
MARTIN LIMÓN
PUSAN NIGHTS
May 1991
MARTIN LIMÓN made his publishing debut in AHMM in 1990 with the historical mystery “A Coffin of Rice,” and a few months later he introduced his best-known characters, George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, in our pages in “The Blackmarket Detail.” Sueño and Bascom are military police officers stationed in Seoul, South Korea, and Limón has subsequently featured them in both novels and short stories. Limón himself spent ten years in South Korea when he was in the army; unlike many of his fellow soldiers, he learned the language and took every opportunity to soak up Korean history and culture. That experience infuses his stories with a rich sense of authenticity.
“The last time the USS Kitty Hawk pulled into the Port of Pusan, the shore patrol had to break up a total of thirty-three barroom brawls in the Texas Street area. Routine. What we didn’t expect was the fourteen sailors who were assaulted and robbed in the street. Six of them had to be hospitalized.
“From eyewitness accounts, the local provost marshal’s office ascertained that the muggings appeared to have been perpetrated by Americans, probably the shipmates of the victims. However, no one was caught or charged with a crime.”
We were in the big drafty headquarters building of the 8th Army’s Criminal Investigation Division in Seoul, two hundred miles up the Korean Peninsula from Pusan. When the first sergeant had called me and my partner, Ernie Bascom, into his office, we expected the usual tirade for not having made enough black-market arrests. What we got was a new assignment. The first sergeant kept it simple.
“First, make sure you get on the right flight out of Kimpo. Then, when you get to Pusan, infiltrate the waterfront area and find out who’s been pulling off these muggings.”
Ernie adjusted his glasses and tugged on his tie.
“Maybe the gang who did it has left the navy and gone on to better things.”
“Not hardly. The Kitty Hawk was here only six months ago. The tour in the navy is four years, minimum. Not enough time to break up the old gang.”
Ernie got quiet. I knew him. He didn’t want to seem too anxious to get this assignment, an all-expenses-paid trip to the wildest port in Northeast Asia, and he was cagey enough to put up some objections. To put some concern in the first sergeant’s mind about how difficult it would be to catch these guys. That way, if we felt like it, we could goof off the whole time and come up with zilch, and the groundwork for our excuse was already laid.
I had to admire him. Always thinking.
“And you, Sueño.” The first sergeant turned his cold gray eyes on me. “I don’t want you running off and getting involved in some grandiose schemes that don’t concern you.”
“You mean, stay away from the navy brass.”
“I mean catch these guys who are doing the muggings. That’s what you’re being paid for. Some of those sailors were hurt badly the last time they were here, and I don’t want it to happen again.”
I nodded, keeping my face straight. Neither one of us was going to mouth off now and lose a chance to go to Pusan. To Texas Street.
The first sergeant handed me a brown envelope stuffed with copies of the blotter reports from the last time the Kitty Hawk had paid a visit to the Land of the Morning Calm. He stood up and, for once, shook both our hands.
“I hate to let you guys out of my sight. But nobody can infiltrate a village full of bars and whores and drunken sailors better than you two.” His face changed from sunshine to clouds. “If, however, you don’t bring me back some results, I guarantee you’ll have my highly polished size twelve combat boot placed firmly on your respective posteriors. You got that?”
Ernie grinned, a little weasel-toothed, half-moon grin. I concentrated on keeping my facial muscles steady. I’m not sure it worked.
We clattered down the long hallway and bounded down the steps to Ernie’s jeep. When he started it up, he shouted, “Three days in Texas Street!”
I was happy. So was he.
But I had the uneasy twisting in my bowels that happens whenever I smell murder.
BY THE TIME we landed in Pusan I had read over the blo
tter reports. They were inconclusive, based mainly on hearsay from Korean bystanders. The assailants were Americans, they said, dressed in bluejeans and nylon jackets, like their victims and like all the sailors on liberty who prowled the portside alleys of Texas Street. The navy shore patrol had stopped some fights in barrooms and on the streets, but they were unable to apprehend even one of the muggers.
By interservice agreement, the army’s military police increased their patrols near the dock areas when a huge naval presence moved into the port of Pusan. The aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, with its accompanying flotilla and its over five thousand sailors, more than qualified as a huge naval presence.
The MPs were stationed, for the most part, on the inland army base of Hialeah Compound. They played on Texas Street, knew the alleys, the girls, the Mama-sans. But somehow they had been unable to make one arrest.
Sailors and soldiers don’t often hit it off. Especially when the sailors are only in town for three days and manage to jack up all the prices by trying to spend two months’ pay in a few hours. It seemed as if the MPs would be happy to arrest a few squids.
Something told me they weren’t trying.
WE CAUGHT A cab at the airport outside of Pusan and arrived at Hialeah Compound in the early afternoon. We got a room at the billeting office, and the first thing we did was nothing. Ernie took a nap. I kept thumbing through the blotter reports, worrying them to death.
There was a not very detailed road map of the city of Pusan in a tourist brochure in the rickety little desk provided to us by billeting. Hialeah Compound was about three miles inland from the main port and had got its name because prior to the end of World War II the Japanese occupation forces had used its flat plains as a track for horse racing. The U.S. Army had turned it into a base to provide security and logistical support for all the goods pouring into the harbor. Pusan was a large city, and its downtown area sprawled between Hialeah Compound and the port. Pushed up along the docks, like a long, slender barnacle, was Texas Street. Merchant sailors from all over the world passed through this port, but it was only the U.S. Navy that came here in such force.
Using a thick-leaded pencil I plotted the locations of the muggings on the little map. The dots defined the district known as Texas Street. Not one was more than half a mile from where the Kitty Hawk was docked.
ERNIE AND I approached the big MP desk.
“Bascom and Sueño,” Ernie said. “Reporting in from Seoul.”
The desk sergeant looked down at us over the rim of his comic book.
“Oh, yeah. Heard you guys were coming. Hold on. The duty officer wants to talk to you.”
After a few minutes, a little man with his chest stuck out and a face like a yapping Chihuahua came out. He seemed lost in his highly starched fatigues. Little gold butter bars flapped from his collar.
“The commanding officer told me to give you guys a message.”
We waited.
The lieutenant tried to expand his chest. The starched green material barely moved.
“Don’t mess with our people. We got a good MP company down here; any muggings that happen, we’ll take care of them; and we don’t need you two sending phony reports up to Seoul, trying to make us look bad.”
His chest deflated slightly. He seemed exhausted and out of breath.
“Is that it?”
“Yeah.”
Ernie walked around him and looked back up at the desk sergeant.
“How many patrols are you going to have out at Texas Street tonight?”
“Four. Three MPs per jeep.”
“Three?”
The desk sergeant shrugged. “We’d have four per jeep if we could. The advance party of the Kitty Hawk’s arriving tonight.”
“All patrols roving?”
“No. One in the center of the strip, two more on either end, and one patrol roving.”
“You must put your studs in the center.”
“You got that right.”
“Who performs your liaison with the shore patrol?”
The desk sergeant shrugged again. “The lieutenant here, such as it is. Mainly they run their own show, out of the port officer’s headquarters, down by the docks.”
“Thanks. If we find out anything—and there’s time—we’ll let your MPs make the arrest.”
“Don’t do us any favors. Those squids can kill each other for all I care.”
The lieutenant shot him a look. The desk sergeant glanced at the lieutenant and then back down at the comic book on his desk.
We turned to walk out. Ernie winked at the lieutenant, who glared after us until we faded into the thickening fog of the Pusan night.
TEXAS STREET was long and bursting with music and brightly flashing neon. The colors and the songs changed as we walked down the street, and the scantily clad girls waved at us through beaded curtains, trying to draw us in. Young American sailors in bluejeans and nylon jackets with embroidered dragons on the back bounced from bar to bar enjoying the embraces of the “business girls,” who still outnumbered them. The main force of their shipmates had not arrived yet, and the Kitty Hawk would not dock until dawn. But Texas Street was ready for them.
We saw the MPs. The jeep in the center of Texas Street was parked unobtrusively next to a brick wall, its radio crackling. The three MPs smoked and talked, big brutes, all. We stayed away from them and concentrated on blending into the crowd.
Ernie was having no trouble at all. In bar after bar we toyed with the girls, bought drinks only for ourselves, and kept from answering their questions about which ship we were on by constantly changing the subject.
One of the girls caught on that we were in the army by our unwillingness to spend too much money and by the few Korean words that we let slip out.
“Don’t let the Mama-san hear you speaking Korean,” she said. “If she does, she will know that you’re in the army, and she will not let me talk to you.”
“What’s wrong with GIs?”
I could answer that question with volumes, but I wanted to hear her version.
“All GIs Cheap Charlie. Sailors are here for only a short time. They spend a lot of money.”
We filed the economics lesson, finished our beers, and staggered to the next bar.
Periodically we hung around near one of the MP patrols, within earshot of their radio, waiting for a report of a fight or a mugging. So far it was a quiet night.
Later, a group of white-uniformed sailors on shore patrol duty ran past us, holding on to their revolvers and their hats, their nightsticks flapping at their sides. We followed and watched while they broke up a fight in one of the bars. A gray navy van pulled up, and the disheveled revelers were loaded aboard.
We found a noodle stand and ate, giving ourselves away as GIs to the wizened old proprietor by knowing what to order. Ernie sipped on the hot broth and then took a sip of a cold bottle of Oriental beer.
“Quiet night.”
“No revelations yet.”
“Maybe tomorrow, when the entire flotilla arrives.”
“Flotilla. Sounds like the damn Spanish Armada.”
“Yeah. Except a lot more powerful.”
Just before the midnight curfew the shore patrol got busy again chasing the sailors back to the ship or off the streets.
We had taken a cab all the way back to Hialeah Compound before we heard about the mugging.
“One sailor,” the desk sergeant said. “Beat up pretty bad. The navy medical personnel are taking care of him now.”
“Any witnesses?”
“None. Happened right before curfew. Apparently he was trying to make it back to the ship.”
In the morning, before our eggs and coffee, we found out that the sailor was dead.
THE BUILDINGS that housed the port officer’s headquarters were metal Quonset huts differentiated from the Army Corps of Engineers’ Quonset huts only by the fact that they were painted battleship gray, while the army’s buildings were painted olive drab. Slightly less colorful than Tex
as Street.
The brass buttons on the old chief’s coat bulged under the expanding pressure of his belly. We showed our identification.
“Who was the sailor who got killed in the mugging last night?”
The chief shuffled through some paperwork. “Petty Officer Third Class Lockworth, Gerald R.”
“What ship was he on?”
“The USS Swann. One of the tenders for the Kitty Hawk. They say he was carrying a couple months’ pay.”
“Nothing left on him?”
“No.”
“Maybe the girls got to it first.”
“Maybe. But I doubt it. He was a three-year veteran of the Pacific Fleet.”
“What was the cause of death?”
“Massive hemorrhage of the brain.”
“Have you got your eyes on any particular group of sailors that might be preying on their shipmates?”
“Not really. The brass tends to think that it’s some Korean gangs working the streets. Maybe they’ve developed a taste for the 7th Fleet payroll. That would explain why there haven’t been any arrests made.”
“The police here want to protect the sailors. There’s a lot of pressure from the ROK government to make the U.S. Navy feel welcome.”
“Maybe. But at a lower level, policies have a habit of being changed.”
“Do you buy all that, chief?”
“Could be. I keep an open mind. But in general I tend to go with the scuttlebutt.”
“What’s that?”
“That it’s some of your local GIs that got a taste for the 7th Fleet payroll.”
“If the average sailor starts to believe either one of those viewpoints, it could cause a lot of trouble down here on Texas Street.”
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense Page 36
