by Martin Limon
“Yes.”
“It seems that death follows in your wake, Agent Sueño.”
I didn’t answer.
“For our services there will be a price.”
“It’s in your interest to stop this man, too.”
“It was,” he said, staring at me, “when it was thought that we might have been responsible for the death of Lance Corporal Whitcomb. But with these new deaths, the trail of evidence will lead away from us. We are satisfied now. Our operation is secure.”
I thought of telling him that if he didn’t help me I’d bust his entire syndicate wide open. That I’d put everything I’d learned about the slicky boys into a report for the eyes of the 8th Army Commander, he’d assign a task force to the problem, and we’d put the slicky boys out of commission for good. But I knew it was futile. So’s contacts ranged too widely. Even if the 8th Army honchos listened to me, Herbalist So would just keep his head down and when the staff changed at 8th Army and another crisis arose that seemed more important, he’d swing right back into normal operation. And, of course, there was always the possibility that in order to avoid the inconvenience, he and his boys would decide to drop me below the ice floes bobbing in the Han River.
Despite what he said, however, I knew he wanted to help. A murderer on the loose would cause everyone to be nervous. Him, 8th Army, the Korean National Police. It couldn’t be good for his business. But I had insulted him. That had to be overcome.
“Yes,” I said softly. “Your operation is secure. But, still, I need your help. What Can I do to get it?”
He studied me without replying. I kept my eyes down, my hands folded in my lap.
Maybe it was my imagination but I thought I heard a sigh of approval coming from the shadowy men surrounding us.
Herbalist So’s voice spread out clear and smooth amidst the clattering rain.
“Our assistance will require two things.”
“Name them,” I said.
“A favor, at an unspecified future date.”
“What sort of favor?”
Herbalist So spread his fingers. “Only time will tell. When we need one, Agent Sueño, we will call on you.”
I thought about it: the trouble helping the slicky boys could land me in. I also thought of the Nurse. Her slashed body, the life drained out of her beautiful face.
I nodded my head. “You’ve got it. What’s the second condition?”
Herbalist So leaned back slightly in his chair. Overhead, the rain grew louder. “That will require a seibei.”
I looked up at him. I knew what a seibei was. I’d seen it done in documentaries about ancient Korean life but I’d never heard of a foreigner being required to do it. But then I realized that although we Americans saw it as a form of degradation, Herbalist So thought of his offer as a compliment. Maybe some sort of an initiation. After all, if I was going to be doing favors for him in the future, I was, in effect, becoming a member of his organization. A slicky boy myself. But more important, if I turned him down, I would be insulting him again. I not only wouldn’t receive his help, I would be lucky to get out of here in one piece.
“You honor me,” I said, almost choking on the words.
Herbalist So barked some quick commands. I was still too stunned to understand exactly what he said, but the shadows came out of the rain and became men. One of the men rushed into the teahouse and came back with a straw mat. He placed it on the dirty cement of the patio. I stood up and someone told me where to stand, just off the edge of the mat. A cushion was placed on the other end of the mat and Herbalist-So rose from his chair, slipped off his shoes, and sat down cross-legged on the cushion. The men backed away. All was quiet. They were waiting for me to begin.
I wasn’t sure exactly how it went but I supposed they’d forgive me as long as I got the substantial portion of the ceremony correct.
A seibei is a method of showing respect from inferior to superior. At New Year’s it was performed by the oldest son to his parents. Even a man who was seventy years old would bow before his mother or father if they were still alive.
I thought of the other instances in the history of the East and the West, when this sort of formality had caused so much trouble. Like when the British envoys of Queen Victoria had refused to prostrate themselves before the Chinese Emperor.
It’s a fine way to act if you have gunboats to back you up. I didn’t.
I slipped off my shoes and knelt on the edge of the pad. Still holding my upper body straight I shuffled forward until I was only a few feet from Herbalist So. Slowly, I bent forward at the waist and placed both my hands, palms flat, on the mat in front of me. I lowered my forehead until it touched the ground between my fingers and thumbs, then raised myself again. I repeated the movement three times. When I was finished, I squatted back, hands resting on my thighs.
“Well done,” he said. “But you forgot the chant.”
He spoke some Korean words of supplication for me. I didn’t understand them, they were archaic language, but I repeated them as best as I could.
Finally, So nodded. Satisfied.
So I’d lowered myself to a common thief. A Korean one, at that. Most GI’s would swear that they’d never do such a thing. But most GI’s bubbled over with racial hatred and an inflated sense of pride that came from being part of a country that had been on the top of the heap for over a century. Such things didn’t bother me. I was from East L.A. I’d been fighting my way up from the bottom all my life. Herbalist So had power. A lot more than I did. In certain areas, more than the Commander of 8th Army. He deserved respect. This little ceremony didn’t bother me any more than standing at attention in a military formation and saluting some potbellied general with stars on his shoulder.
Herbalist So began to speak.
“Already, our minions are watching the village for the man you seek, Agent Sueño. But he seems to be intelligent and resourceful. We don’t expect to capture him with such crude methods. As far as your print shop is concerned, that will be checked tonight. Tomorrow you will be contacted with the results.”
“Where?”
“Wherever you are.”
“Who will contact me?”
“Whoever we designate. Keep an open mind, Agent Sueño.”
“I will.”
Herbalist So nodded. The meeting was over. 1 stood up, put my shoes back on, bowed once more, and made my way out through the tiny tea shop. There were still no customers. And no one serving tea.
At the bottom of the hill I saw a familiar figure, wrapped tightly in a flowered raincoat. The Chinese girl. The same one I had seen inside the slicky boys’ dungeon.
She held out her umbrella for me.
“lrri-oseiyo,” she said. Come this way.
I wasn’t about to argue with her.
She led me by the hand to a tiny, immaculately clean yoguan, tucked back in an alley I’d never seen before. She paid for the room and, to my surprise, accompanied me down the creaking hallway. Once we were alone she told me to take off my clothes. It was an order she didn’t have to repeat. She took me into the bathroom and scrubbed me down and rinsed me and dried me and soon had me lying naked on the warm sleeping pad under a silk comforter.
After washing herself, she turned off all the lights except for a soft red bulb in the entranceway and slipped into the bed with me.
She was slim and soft and completely naked. And as sweet as any woman has a right to be.
This woman, with her perfect features and her hairless, unblemished skin, and her supple body like a willow bending in the wind, seemed to be another species altogether from us regular human beings. She seemed too perfect. Too smart. Too gentle. Too dreamlike.
I still think of the night I spent with the Chinese woman as something that happened to me while floating in a world untouched by hatred or fear or cruelty or death.
Of course, she was being paid for her work. That took some of the edge off. Not much.
Before drifting off to sleep, I realized t
hat working with Slicky King So wasn’t half bad.
In the morning, the Chinese woman woke me. She held a breakfast tray, hot turnip soup, steamed rice, roasted mackerel. I washed my face and sat down on the floor to eat. As I wielded my wooden chopsticks, I noticed an envelope on the edge of the tray. When I reached for it she grabbed my hand with her soft fingers.
“Monjo pap mokku, kudaum ei ilkoyo.” Eat first, after that, read.
I did as I was told. She had risen from bed early, and her hair was up and braided and she wore her bright red silk chipao with its high collar and the short skirt riding up above her round knees.
The turnip soup and the rice and the mackerel were delicious. I was hungry and finished it quickly. She cleared the bowls, asking me if I wanted more. I told her not to bother. She handed me the envelope.
Inside was a piece of blank paper with a neatly printed series of numerals.
“RCP’s,” she said.
Ration control plates. The numbers that had been on the phony ration control plates the print shop had embossed for the killer.
Also inside the envelope was a small black-and-white photograph, and a list of four names and serial numbers that had appeared on bogus military identification cards. Each name was associated with one of the ration control plates. When a customer approaches the door of the PX or commissary, an attendant checks his ID card and RCP to make sure everything matches.
I studied the photograph. Short, light brown hair. A square face with a crooked jaw. A nose that had been broken somewhere along the line, tight lips, lifeless eyes. The Chinese girl looked down at the photo and shuddered.
He seemed like any normal GI—but mean.
I twisted the photo so the light from the naked bulb above us would hit it more clearly. Tiny scars, barely visible, ran along his cheeks and the ridge of his nose. There were others on his chin and at the side of his jaw, extending back toward his ears.
I handed the photo to the Chinese woman, tracing the scars with my finger. She nodded, very solemn.
“Orin i ddei, nugu deiryosso,” she said. When he was a child, someone beat him.
She had to be right. It was obvious that no one would’ve been capable of whipping him that badly and leaving so many scars once he reached adulthood.
That’s all I needed. A vicious, abused mongrel. The eyes in the photograph didn’t look particularly intelligent, but that could be deceiving. His actions so far had been swift, brutal, and cunning.
I didn’t want to leave, but the sun would be coming up soon and I had a lot of work to do. I kissed the hands and lips of the Chinese woman, trying to convince myself that she was real. She bowed as I left.
I strode out of the yoguan, her gentle fragrance still lingering about me, the killer’s face clutched in my fist.
30
I ARRIVED AT THE CID OFFICE EARLY. WHEN RILEY showed up, he pitched in and helped me. We compared the photograph the slicky boys had given me to MP mug shots and the long lists of AWOL GI’s and the photos the Korean National Police had sent along.
It took us over an hour. When we finished we still had nothing. No match.
“He’s not an AWOL GI,” Riley said. “And if he mustered out of the army and came back to Korea, he hasn’t raised enough hell, as far as the KNP’s are concerned, for them to bother taking his mug shot.”
“He’s the cautious type,” I said. “He wouldn’t have let himself be picked up for anything trivial.”
“No.”
Miss Kim came in, silently handed us two steaming cups of coffee, and removed the old ones. We were too preoccupied to thank her.
“But the print shop guy told you he used to be a GI?” Riley asked.
“Yeah. What he said exactly was Migun.” I snapped my fingers. Most of the U.S. forces in Korea are army units. But there is a sizable air force presence and even a small contingent of navy. “What that means literally is ‘American military person.'”
Riley was puzzled by my excitement.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean army,” I explained. “This guy could’ve been air force or navy.”
“You’re right,” Riley said. “A sailor who jumped ship or a zoomie who got tired of rocketing around the universe.”
Ernie walked in, a copy of the Stars & Stripes folded under his arm. Blue bags sagged beneath his eyes. Miss Kim swiveled on her typing chair and started pounding away on the keys, producing nothing coherent.
Riley studied Ernie. “Late night?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Ernie said. He glanced at the paperwork in front of us. “What you got?”
I filled Emie in on what we’d found, happy to have him back.
“How’d you get the RCP numbers?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you later.”
We decided that we had to check with both the navy and the air force liaison officers here on post. Ernie took the fly-boys. I took the squids.
“When the First Sergeant comes back from the command briefing,” I told Riley, “tell him we’re close. And we don’t have time for any damn black market detail.”
“Not to worry. I’ll keep him happy.”
As we were leaving, Miss Kim pulled a nail file out of her purse and slashed at red claws.
Ernie didn’t seem to notice. On the other hand, he didn’t offer her a stick of gum, either.
Sometimes you wear out shoe leather for days and come up with nothing, and other days you ask a simple question and people look at you like, “You didn’t know that?”
I passed by the big black anchors on the front lawn of the Commandant Headquarters, Naval Forces Korea, and pushed through a heavy teak door into carpeted offices. I pulled out the black-and-white photo that Herbalist So had given me and showed it to the petty officer sitting behind a
varnished desk. The brass in the office gleamed; the odor of disinfectant and boiled coffee hung in the air.
“This guy?” the petty officer said, fingering the photo. “Sure I know him. Lieutenant Commander Bo Shipton. Navy Seal.” He shook his head. “Bad mother. Jumped ship about three, four months ago.”
Bingo!
“When did you last see him?”
“Nobody’s seen him since then.”
“Do you have his personnel folder?”
“You’ll have to talk to the commandant first.”
“Can do easy.”
The picture worked wonders. The commandant decided to see me right away. After a short chat, I obtained the information I wanted, assuring him that the integrity of the navy would be preserved. He was worried because anything that reflected badly on the navy could reflect badly on him.
The commandant offered me a cup of coffee but I didn’t have time. I was out the teak door, past an old Korean man in a ragged khaki shirt. He silently scrubbed a huge brass ball with a sticky yellow fluid.
Children skated on frozen rice paddies and smoke curled from tubelike chimneys above the straw-thatched roofs of farmhouses. The roads were slippery and spotted with broad fields of black ice. Snorting oxen pulled wooden carts laden with giant turnips. Ernie sped around the obstacles as if he had every curve and hazard preprogrammed into his brain.
“Navy Seal, huh?” he said.
“Yeah. As bad as the Green Berets. On his way up, too. An officer, twelve years in.”
“So why in the hell did he go AWOL?”
“That’s what the commandant wouldn’t talk about. His personnel folder was excellent. Beauregard Shipton, from south Texas, father a small-time rancher near the Mexican border who lost his land wildcatting for oil. Shipton had some problems with his father and wanted to be on his own. After Seal training he went to Vietnam. Served two tours there. A bunch of awards. Looks like he loved it.”
“Those fucking Seals used to go up into North Vietnam. Right into Haiphong Harbor.”
“According to Shipton’s personnel record,” I said, “he caught shrapnel in the jaw, couldn’t breathe, and performed a field tracheotomy on himself. Sliced into his own thr
oat, stuck a bamboo tube into his windpipe, and survived like that for three days until they managed to med-evac him out.”
Ernie shifted into low gear and slowed for two farmers perched atop a rickety tractor. The tractor’s ancient engine chugged doggedly forward, billowing black smoke into the gray sky. Ernie spotted an opening in the oncoming traffic, stepped on the gas, and swerved around the rattling machine. The two farmers stared.
When he built his speed back up Ernie asked, “So you gonna tell me now? About how you got those ration control plate numbers?”
I told him about the message written in blood above the Nurse’s body and the tattered vocal cords of the landlady. I told him, too, about my meeting with Herbalist So, although I didn’t mention the ceremony.
“So in the morning,” Ernie said, “the Chinese girl gave you this information?”
“Right.”
“This guy, Shipton, must be living off the black market, pulling down a grand or two every month.”
“Probably.”
“So why’s he killing people?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who do you think is next on his list?”
“Us.”
Ernie nodded. “Makes more sense than the people he’s killed so far. At least with us he has a reason. We’re trying to put him behind bars.”
I moved my arm and felt the 38 rub against my chest. “Behind bars,” I said. “That’s one place to send him.”
“Or to hell, huh?”
“Maybe better.”
The road curved into a farm village. Ernie didn’t slow much but blinked his lights on and off, and the white-gloved policeman on a platform in the center of town whistled us through. Schoolgirls with waist-long pigtails scurried out of our way, pointing and giggling at the long-nose GI’s.
The road sign pointed toward Heing-ju Sansong, the fortified cliffs of Heingju, two kilometers away.
In the sixteenth century the Japanese Shogun, Hideyoshi, invaded Korea. The bulk of Hideyoshi’s naval armada streamed up the Han River, past the cliffs of Heing-ju, heading for Seoul, the ancient capital of the Yi Dynasty. It was there at Heing-ju that the Korean defenders made their stand. They blockaded the river with pontoons filled with fighting men and huge sharpened stakes near the shore and from the cliffs of Heing-ju they launched fire arrows and blazing oil-soaked clumps of hemp and rock from wooden catapults.
