Nightmare Range

by Martin Limon

  In fact, the Korean government would’ve been glad to give it. After a few months, a few years at the most, in a Korean jail, they would’ve shuffled him quietly out of the country. A face-saving gesture to assuage Korean public opinion. But if Ammerman fought them, they’d have to fight back to save face for the Korean judicial system and Korean pride and then they’d have to lay a sentence on him more commensurate with the enormity of his crime. Which was murder, after all, of an innocent woman. The Korean government didn’t want to do this. They didn’t want any publicity in the American press that would be adverse toward Korea and that might, in the long run, drive a wedge between the United States and Korea and jeopardize the longstanding security arrangements that held those seven hundred thousand Communist North Korean soldiers at bay. And even more importantly, the Korean government didn’t dare damage the steady stream of American dollars that flowed from the US Treasury to the Korean government in the form of both economic and military assistance.

  But not realizing this, Ammerman was taking a tough stance. He was refusing to cooperate with the Korean National Police, refusing to admit his guilt, and just in general pissing everybody off.

  All of this would’ve been his problem if it hadn’t been for the woman who appeared in the provost marshal’s office two days before the scheduled start date of Ammerman’s trial.

  The woman was his wife, Mrs. Mi-hwa Ammerman.

  Colonel Harkins, the current provost marshal of the 8th United States Army, didn’t want to talk to her. However, he could recognize potential trouble when he saw it, so he let her into his office. Her English wasn’t the greatest so I was called in for two reasons: I could speak enough Korean to translate and I was familiar with the case.

  When I sat down, Mrs. Ammerman started in on me in rapid-fire Korean. I interrupted her and slowed her down several times and, as best I could, I translated for the colonel. The gist of her complaint was, the Korean National Police wouldn’t allow her to talk to her husband.

  Did her husband want to talk to her?

  No. He had flatly refused and the KNPs wouldn’t force him.

  What she hoped to do was to convince her husband to plead guilty. Since the case had hit the newspapers and the television, everyone in the country had turned against her. That wasn’t so bad, for herself she didn’t care. But her children had been teased unmercifully at school and her oldest son, age twelve, had actually been beaten by a pack of older boys. So much disruption had been caused that the authorities at Seoul International School had asked Mrs. Ammerman to withdraw her children from the student body. With no money coming in, she would have to send her children to the Korean public schools. That would be a disaster. Not only were her children half-American, which was usually enough reason for harassment, but their father was a rapist and a murderer.

  “I can’t get a visa to go to the States,” Mrs. Ammerman told me. “I am a Korean citizen, so are my children. My husband never had any interest in applying for US citizenship for us.”

  She leaned toward Colonel Harkins, still speaking Korean to him, with me translating.

  “Even my older brother has had trouble. Everyone shuns him because of me, and now he’s been fired from his job. No Korean company wants anyone whose sister was foolish enough to marry an American. Especially an American killer.”

  Then she started to cry.

  I finished explaining everything she said to Colonel Harkins. He spread his hands and asked, “What does she want us to do?”

  “What I want you to do,” she said, “is force the Korean police to let me talk to my husband. I will convince him to plead guilty. Then my children’s lives will be returned to them. We will have our face back. People will respect their father for at least having repented of his crimes. We will be pitied but we will be tolerated. And my brother, he will have a chance to beg for forgiveness for having such a foolish sister and he will have a chance to get his job back.”

  What she said made sense. In Korean society, once you plead guilty and ask for forgiveness, no matter how heinous your crime, you will usually receive at least some measure of leniency. When the criminal offers atonement, all is well again under Heaven and the King is secure on his throne. At that point, not to grant the request for forgiveness would mean that the person turning down the request is not a person of true Confucian virtue. As the Koreans would say, he wouldn’t be showing a big heart.

  Eighth Army would also be pleased if Ammerman pleaded guilty. Although he wasn’t a soldier, we had sponsored his insurance company and his work visa, and his crime tainted the reputation of every American in Korea. A long, drawn-out criminal trial wouldn’t help anyone.

  The provost marshal was new in-country and the intricate dance of Korean justice he still found baffling. But he did know from every conversation he had over drinks at the Officers’ Club that 8th Army wanted this prosecution iced. He turned to me. “What can we do, Sueño?”

  I thought about it. “I’ll talk to the KNP Liaison Officer. If you throw your weight behind it, we should be able to force our way in to talk to Ammerman.”

  The provost marshal nodded his consent.

  Mrs. Mi-hwa Ammerman rose from her chair, her leather handbag clasped tightly in front of her black skirt. Then she bowed gracefully at the waist.

  Colonel Harkins didn’t know quite what to do so he just cleared his throat and nodded.

  With ramparts of hewn rock and a roof of upturned tile shingles, Suwon Prison looks medieval. Built during the Yi Dyansty, it had later been used by the Japanese Imperial Army when they colonized Korea prior to World War II. After the surrender of Japan, the United States provisional government took over, and now the Republic of Korea runs the place with all the efficiency that a military-dominated government can bring to bear.

  A uniformed guard led Mi-hwa Ammerman and me down cold stone steps. At the bottom of three flights, a light was switched on, and down a long corridor another guard waited in front of a thick wooden door. Our footsteps clattered on wet brick.

  In front of the door, Mrs. Ammerman tiptoed to peek through the grated opening. I peered in from behind her. The guard clicked another switch and the cell was suffused with light.

  Fred Ammerman stood a few feet from us, his beard long, his blue eyes bloodshot and wild.

  “What do you want?” His voice rasped like the hinges of ancient doors.

  At first his wife just cried. The guards and I stepped back to allow them some privacy. A few minutes went by. They whispered to one another through the rusted bars. I could make out some of what they were saying, but I tried to block it out. I didn’t want to eavesdrop. All this was their personal business. Not mine. As a law enforcement officer, I wasn’t officially involved. The result we wanted, the conviction of Fred Ammerman for rape and murder, was a foregone conclusion. No Korean judge would dare set him free.

  A voice began to rise—Fred Ammerman’s, not his wife’s. While he shouted, she stepped back against the stone wall. He kept up the tirade. Soon she knelt down, cowering, and made herself small. One of the guards had heard enough. He marched down the passageway and gruffly told Mrs. Ammerman that it was time to go.

  As I walked her up the steps, her husband continued shouting.

  “No way am I going to plead guilty,” he said. And then he added a few epithets that, in my opinion, Mi-hwa Ammerman didn’t deserve.

  On the day of Fred Ammerman’s trial for the rape and murder of Yi Won-suk, both Ernie and I wore our Class A green uniforms. We sat on polished wooden benches in the Hall of the Ministry of Justice in the heart of downtown Taegu. Mrs. Ammerman sat quietly in the first row directly behind her husband. Neither of her children was present.

  The American lawyer Ammerman had hired was named Aaron Murakami. He was from Hawaii and when he spoke, a Korean translator hired for the occasion would interpret whatever he said.

  How could Ammerman be so dumb? I had no reason to think that Murakami wasn’t a good attorney, but he was Japanese-America
n. The Koreans are still chafing over what the Japanese Imperial Army had done to them during the thirty-five years leading up to the end of World War II. A foreign lawyer was bad enough, but a Japanese lawyer would cause the Koreans to dig in their heels. If Ammerman was toast before, he was burnt ashes now. Even Ernie realized the mistake. When Murakami walked into the hall, Ernie smiled smugly and crossed his arms.

  “It’s over already,” he said.

  In a Korean courtroom there’s no jury. Only a grim-faced judge who, in this case, stared on at us mere mortals through thick-lensed bifocals.

  The judge droned on in Korean, something about the initial plea, but I could follow little of what was said. My facility with the Korean language started with the free classes that the Army offers on base, but after that most of it was picked up in barroom conversation. The legalese the judge spouted was beyond me.

  Ernie and I didn’t expect to be called to the stand until the trial was well underway. That would probably be late morning or mid-afternoon. Koreans don’t believe in long, drawn-out proceedings. It’s up to the police to capture the guilty party. After that, to spend a lot of time and effort and taxpayers’ money just to find that same person innocent would be a great loss of face. Not only for the police but also for the entire Korean judicial system.

  Ammerman would be tried—and almost certainly convicted—today.

  Suddenly, I realized that the judge was speaking English. Even Ernie perked up. The language was halting, as if the judge didn’t have too many chances to practice his conversational skills, but the syntax was precise. Not the bargirl talk I was used to.

  Fred Ammerman, whose head had been hanging down, sat up and listened. So did his attorney.

  “I want to be sure,” the judge said, “that you fully understand what is being offered. You have a chance, before we go to trial, to plead guilty.”

  I understood the choice Ammerman had to make, even if he didn’t. The Koreans don’t plea bargain. You either plead guilty and have a chance of being shown mercy, or you plead innocent and face the full wrath of the law. The judge continued to talk, glancing sometimes at Aaron Murakami, sometimes at Fred Ammerman. He continued until he was sure that both men understood the gravity of the decision they were about to make.

  When the judge finished, Murakami and Ammerman huddled and whispered fervently to one another.

  Mi-hwa Ammerman, sitting in back of her husband, had previously kept her face lowered. No she looked up hopefully, as if she wanted to climb over the railing and insert herself between her husband and his attorney.

  Fred Ammerman kept shaking his head.

  His wife stared at him in despair. Her hand lifted from her mouth as if she wanted to reach out to him. Only by a plea of guilty would Fred Ammerman’s family be allowed to reenter Korean society—not completely free of stigma but at least free of having to bear the burden of shame of being related to a killer and, even worse, of being related to an unrepentant killer. One who has not only defiled society but then proceeded to spit in society’s eye.

  Neither Fred Ammerman nor his attorney paid any attention to Mi-hwa. Aaron Murakami seemed to ask his client one final question. Vehemently, Ammerman shook his head. No.

  Like a collapsing doll, Mi-hwa Ammerman sank back into her seat. I expected her to start crying again. Instead she stuffed her damp handkerchief into her open handbag.

  Aaron Murakami rose to his feet. “Your Honor,” he said in English, “my client has decided to plead not guilty.”

  A murmur of disapproval ran through the crowd. Dutifully, the translator repeated what Murakami had said but by then no one was listening.

  Mi-hwa’s face was set like stone and drained of color. She sat perfectly still, staring straight ahead, her small hand tucked inside her large leather handbag.

  I elbowed Ernie. “She’s taking it hard.”

  Ernie glanced over at Mi-hwa Ammerman. “Yeah,” Ernie said, “but the woman Ammerman raped took it even harder.”

  The prosecutor, a dapper Korean man in a pin-striped suit, rose to his feet. He cleared his throat and started to drone on again in Korean legalese.

  Since he’d been brought into the room, not once had Ammerman acknowledged the presence of his wife or even so much as glanced in her direction. Instead he glared at the prosecutor, as if he wanted to leap across the room and throttle his neck as he’d throttled the neck of Mrs. Yi Won-suk.

  Ernie yawned and tried to make himself more comfortable on the wooden bench. We had already discussed which nightclubs we’d be hitting tonight. Before leaving Seoul, we’d changed a small pile of military payment certificates into won. The money would be put to its usual good use—cold beer and wild times, not necessarily in that order.

  While I was pondering these soothing thoughts, a glint of metal flashed from the seating area behind Fred Ammerman. Without thinking, I rose to my feet.

  Mi-hwa Ammerman, her face streaming tears, was standing now, her handbag dropped to the floor.

  Without conscious thought, I lunged toward her. A long butcher knife appeared in her slender hand. She raised it. She stepped forward.

  A shout bellowed through the hall.

  I shoved people out of the way and stepped over benches, trying to reach her, knowing all the time that I wouldn’t make it.

  Fred Ammerman never turned fully around.

  His attorney noticed that something was amiss and as he swiveled he instinctively held up his hands. A yell erupted from his belly but it was too late. Ammerman’s bearded face was turning toward Mi-hwa as she leaned over the railing, raised the glistening blade, and brought it down full force into her husband’s back.

  Fred Ammerman let out a grunt of surprise. No more. I kept moving forward and was only a few feet from him now. Mi-hwa held onto the hilt of the blade, shoving it deeper into heaving flesh. Gore spurted from Fred Ammerman’s back like the unraveling of a scarlet ribbon.

  The confusion in Ammerman’s eyes turned to dull knowledge. Then, a split second later, that knowledge turned to pain.

  Aaron Murakami reached for Mi-hwa. I leapt forward and elbowed him out of the way. Uniformed police were now surging toward us. I folded myself over Mi-hwa, enveloping her in my arms. She let go of the butcher knife and leaned backward, allowing me to pull her away from the railing and protect her there, while other men hurtled toward us. Bodies thudded into bodies but I held on, not letting them have her.

  She kept her eyes riveted on the back of her husband, as if mesmerized by the damage she had wrought.

  Ernie grabbed hold of Ammerman. One of the Korean cops jerked the butcher knife out of the blood-soaked back. That’s when Ammerman stood upright, supported by Ernie and Murakami, and then, as if someone had sucker punched him in the gut, he folded forward. Bright red blood spurted from his mouth.

  Mi-hwa Ammerman didn’t cry, she didn’t struggle, she just let me hold her as she stared at her husband, as if amazed at what she’d just done.

  And then someone jostled us and more men surrounded me, and despite my best efforts, Mi-hwa Ammerman was dragged from my arms. I followed her out of the main hall and down the corridor, but then she disappeared into the screaming, moving crowd. I returned to the courtroom.

  Ernie grabbed me by the shoulders and stared into my face. “You still with me?”

  I nodded.

  He slapped me lightly on the cheek, making sure I was all right. Then he said, “That’s one chick who knows how to save face.”

  On the floor, the thing that was once Fred Ammerman shuddered. Then his body convulsed and a whoosh of air exited his mouth, like a great bellows emptying itself in one final rush. The hot breath rose to the top of the stone rafters far above our heads, lingered for a while, and then was gone.

  THE WIDOW PO

  “Talking to dead people,” Ernie said, “isn’t exactly my idea of a good time.”

  Stone walls loomed above us as we wound our way through narrow cobbled lanes that led up the side of Namsan Mountai
n in a district of Seoul known as Huam-dong. Night shadows closed in on us, pressing down. A few dark clouds. No moon yet.

  “You won’t be talking to dead people,” I told Ernie. “That’s the job of the mudang.” The female shaman.

  Using the dim yellow light of an occasional street lamp, I glanced at the scrap of paper in my hand, checking the address against the engraved brass placards embedded into wooden gateways: 132 bonji, 16 ho. We were close.

  The request had been a simple one, from Miss Choi Yong-kuang, my Korean language teacher: to come to a kut. I’d learn something about ancient Korean religious practices and I’d be able to observe a famous Korean mudang first hand. And I’d be able to hear from an American GI who’d been disrupting this mudang’s séances for the last few months. A GI who—so the mudang claimed—had been dead for twenty years.

  “Bunch of bull, if you ask me,” Ernie said.

  “They’ll have soju,” I told Ernie. “And lots of women.”

  “Men don’t attend these things?”

  “Not unless invited.”

  Ernie gazed ahead into the growing gloom. “And you’ll be able to get near your Korean language teacher. What’s her name?”

  “Choi,” I told him.

  Miss Choi was a tall young woman with a nice figure and a smile that could illuminate a hall. When she asked me to meet her after class, I would’ve said yes to just about anything. Even a séance. Ernie and I hadn’t made this trip official. We were off duty now, carrying our badges but not our .45s. And we hadn’t told anyone at 8th Army CID about our plans to attend a kut.

  Who needed their laughter?

  The lane turned sharply uphill and became so narrow that we had to proceed single file. Beneath our feet, sudsy water gurgled in a brick channel. The air reeked of waste and ammonia.