Nightmare Range

by Martin Limon

  “A kampei,” I said to her. A gangster.

  She shook her head vehemently. “No. Not that big. He small. How you say?” The overly made up young woman thought for a moment and then came up with the appropriate phrase. “He small potatoes.”

  In addition to buying her a drink, I slipped her a thousand won note—about two bucks. The tattered bill disappeared into the frayed waistband of her skirt.

  When Ernie and I entered the King’s Pavilion Pool Hall, all eyes gazed at us.

  There was no way for two Miguks to enter the second-story establishment surreptitiously. It was a large open room filled with cigarette smoke and stuffed with green felt pool tables from one end to the other. Narrow-waisted Korean men held pool cues and leaned over tables and lounged against walls, all of them puffing away furiously on cheap Korean cigarettes and all of them glaring at us, eyes narrow, lips curled into snarls, hatred filling the air even more thickly than the cloud of pungent tobacco smoke. This pool hall wasn’t for GIs. It was for Koreans. The GIs had their bars, plenty of them, about two blocks away from here in the foreigner’s bar district. Nobody, even the man who collected money at the entranceway, wanted us here.

  Ernie snarled back. “Screw you too,” he whispered.

  “Steady,” I replied.

  In Korean, I spoke to the bald-headed man collecting the fees. “Mr. Shin?” I asked. “Odiso?” Where is he?

  The man looked blankly at me. Then he turned to the men in the pool hall. From somewhere toward the back, a radio hissed and a Korean female singer warbled a rueful note. I said it again, louder this time, “Mr. Shin.”

  The snarls turned to grimaces of disdain. Korean cuss words floated our way. A few men laughed. More of them turned away from us, lifting their cues, returning their attention to eight balls and rebound angles and pockets. Nobody came forward. Nobody would tell us who Mr. Shin was or, more importantly, where to find him.

  Ernie and I turned and walked back down the stairway. At the next pool hall, we repeated the same procedure. With the same result.

  Later that night, we stood at the spot where Miss O had been murdered.

  The site was located atop a hill overlooking both Paldang-ni and Camp Colbern. On the opposite side of the hill, to the north, moonlight shone down on the sinuous flow of the Namhan River. One or two boats drifted in the distance, fishermen on their way home to straw-thatched huts. On the peak of the hill stood a tile-roofed shrine with a stone foundation and an enormous brass bell hanging from sturdy rafters. No one was there now but I imagined that periodically Buddhist monks walked up the well-worn path to sound the ancient-looking bell.

  “When did they find her?” Ernie asked.

  I pulled out a penlight to read my tattered notebook.

  “Zero five hundred this morning,” I said. “Just before dawn. Two Buddhist monks who came up here to say their morning prayers. She was laying right here.”

  I pointed at the far edge of the stone foundation, nearest the river.

  “Stabbed in the back once,” I continued. “And then four or five times in the chest. She bled to death.”

  “And the murder weapon?”

  “Never found. The KNPs assume it was a bayonet for two reasons, the size and depth of the entry wounds and the fact that Rothenberg, being a GI, would’ve had access to one.”

  “His bayonet was found in his field gear.”

  “He could’ve stolen another one. Happens all the time.”

  “Or,” Ernie replied, “the killer could’ve bought one on the black market.”

  I nodded. Ernie was right. The KNPs were taking a big leap in locking up Rothenberg. So far, they had no hard evidence linking him to the murder. Still, public opinion had to be mollified. When a young Korean woman is murdered, someone has to be locked up, and fast. Otherwise, the public will wonder why they’re spending their hard-earned tax dollars on police salaries. Someone has to pay for the crime. Like the yin and the yang symbols on the national flag, harmony in the universe must be restored. Someone is murdered, someone must pay for that murder. Everett P. Rothenberg wouldn’t be the first American GI convicted in Korea of something that there was no definitive proof he’d actually done. But if that was the case, harmony would come to his defense. If there was little or no evidence proving that he did it, Rothenberg would receive a light sentence, maybe four years in a Korean jail and then deportation back to the States. So far, no one—including me and Ernie—had any real idea who’d murdered Miss O Sung-hee.

  Rothenberg’s alibi was sketchy. After finishing the day shift at the 304th Signal Battalion Comm Center, he’d eaten chow, showered, changed clothes and headed to the ville. At about eighteen hundred hours, he’d arrived at the Full Moon Teahouse. There, he’d sat in a corner sipping on ginseng tea while Miss Kang and Miss O Sung-hee worked. Miss Kang did most of the actual serving and preparation. Miss O sat with customers—Korean businessmen, small groups of American officers—adding beauty and charm to their evening. Before the midnight curfew, according to Rothenberg, Miss O convinced him that she was too tired to see him that evening and he should return to Camp Colbern. He did. Since he returned to his base camp before the midnight-to-four curfew, the MPs at the main gate didn’t bother to log in his name. Lights were already out in the barracks. In the dark, he’d undressed, stuffed his clothes and wallet in his wall locker, and hopped into his bunk. None of the other GIs in the barracks had any recollection of his arrival.

  Ernie walked over to the bell and rapped it with his knuckles. A low moan reverberated from the sculpted bronze, like the whispered sigh of a giant. We started back down the trail. It was steep. Boulders and thick brambles of bushes blocked our way on either side. We stepped carefully, inching forward, watching our step in the bright moonlight.

  “Why’d we bother coming up here?” Ernie asked.

  As he spoke, the earth shook—just slightly, as if something heavy had thudded to the ground. I looked back. I could see nothing except Ernie staring at me quizzically, wondering why I had stopped. Then two more thuds, one after the other, shallower this time, as if something were skipping forward, becoming louder, rolling toward us.

  It emerged from the darkness above Ernie’s head, looking for all the world like a steam roller from hell.

  “Watch out!” I shouted.

  I leapt to the side of the trail and Ernie, not yet fully understanding, followed suit. He dove into a thicket of branches and I landed atop a small boulder and scrambled over it to the opposite side away from the trail.

  The noise grew deafening, one crash after another, and then an enormous metal cylinder flew out of the night, rolling down the trail, careening to the right and then left; barreling down the trail and smashing everything in its path. It clipped the edge of the thicket and missed Ernie by a couple of feet. I crouched. The huge metal rolling pin crashed against the boulder and the cylinder flew over, only inches above my head. After it passed, Ernie and I sat up, staring at moonlight glistening off the cylinder. The careening monolith continued its pell-mell rush down the side of the hill, smashing an old wooden fence outside a small animal shelter and then hitting the shelter itself. Lumber flew everywhere. The cylinder kept rolling until it slowed and finally landed in a muddy rice paddy with a huge, sloppy splat.

  “What the hell was that?” Ernie asked.

  I rose slowly to my feet, checking uphill to make sure nothing more was coming at us. “The bell,” I said.

  “The what?”

  “The bronze bell. Come on.”

  We ran back up the pathway. At the top of the hill, the shrine stood empty. Using my penlight I examined the weathered ropes hanging beneath splintered rafters.

  “Sliced,” I said.

  “With what?” Ernie asked.

  “Can’t be sure but with something sharp. Maybe a bayonet.”

  Mr. Shin found us.

  So did about five of his pals. Light from a yellow streetlamp shone on angry faces, all of then belonging to young punks w
ith grease-backed hair and sneers on their lips.

  “Why are you looking for me?” Shin asked in Korean.

  We stood in an alley not far from the King’s Pavilion Pool Hall Ernie and I had stopped in earlier today.

  “Your girlfriend,” I told him, “Miss O Sung-hee, was murdered last night. Where were you while she was being killed?”

  Shin puffed one time on his cigarette—overly dramatically—and then flicked the flaming butt to the ground. Ernie braced himself, about one long stride away from me, his side to the Korean man nearest him. He was ready to fight. Five to two were the odds, but we’d faced worse.

  “Not my girlfriend,” Shin said at last, switching to English. “No more. Break up long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe one month.”

  A long time all right. “Miss Kang didn’t mention your name to the Korean police. Why not?”

  “She no can do.”

  “ ‘No can do?’ Why not?”

  “She my … how you say?… sister.”

  “She’s your sister?”

  “Yes. Kang not her real name. Real name same mine. Shin.”

  “So you met Miss O through your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why’d you break up with Miss O?”

  Shin shrugged. “I tired of her.”

  I didn’t believe that for a minute. Shin was a tough guy all right and like tough punks all over the world there would be a certain type of woman available to him. Women who thought little of themselves. Women who, in order to build up their self-esteem, flocked toward men who were on the outs with the law. Men who they considered to be exciting. Korea, like everywhere else, had its share of this type of woman. But from everything I’d heard about Miss O Sung-hee, I didn’t believe she was that type. She went for cops and attorneys and helicopter pilots. Men of power. Men of real accomplishment. Not men who were broke and hung around pool halls.

  “She dumped you,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Miss O. She think, ‘I no like Shin anymore.’ She tell you karra chogi.” Go away.

  Shin’s sneer twisted in anger. “No woman tell Shin go away.”

  Ernie guffawed and said to me, “Is this guy dumb or what?” He stepped past me and glared at Shin. “So you took Miss O to the top of the hill and you used a knife and you killed her.”

  Shin realized that he was digging a hole for himself. “No. No way. I no take. That night, I in pool hall. All night. Owner tell you. He see me there.”

  Shin mentioned the pool hall owner because even he knew that nobody would believe the testimony of him and his buddies. I crossed my arms and kept my gaze steady on Shin’s eyes. He was a frightened young man. And when he’d heard that Ernie and I were looking for him, he’d voluntarily presented himself. Both these points were in his favor. Could he have murdered Miss O Sung-hee? Sure he could have. But something told me that his alibi would hold up. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be standing here anxious to clear his name. If he’d murdered her, he’d be long gone. Still, I’d check with the pool hall owner as soon as I could.

  Ernie had his own way of testing Shin’s sincerity. He stepped forward until his chest was pushed up almost against Shin’s. Ernie glared at Shin for a while and then snarled. “Out of my way.”

  Shin seemed about to do something, to punch Ernie, but indecision danced in his glistening black eyes. Finally, he sighed and stepped back, making way for Ernie and me. Grumbling, his pals made way too.

  We ran the ville.

  Shots, beers, business girls on our laps. Ernie was enjoying the rock music and the girls and the frenzied crowds and gave himself over to a night of mindless pleasure. Me, I sipped on my drink, barely heard the music, and ignored the caresses of the gorgeous young women who surrounded me.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Ernie asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Come on,” he coaxed. “What could possibly be wrong? We’re away from the headshed, on temporary duty, we have a pocket full of travel pay, and we’re surrounded by booze and bands and business girls. What more could you possibly want?”

  “A clue,” I answered.

  “A clue?”

  “A clue as to who murdered Miss O Sung-hee.”

  Ernie shrugged. “Maybe the KNPs were right all along. Maybe it was Rothenberg.”

  And maybe not.

  When the midnight curfew came along, GIs either scurried back to Camp Colbern or paired up with a Korean business girl. Ernie found one for me and the four of us went to their rooms upstairs in some dive. In the dark, I lay next to the girl, ignoring her. Finally, I slept.

  Just before dawn, a cock crowed. I sat up. The business girl was still asleep, snoring softly. I rose from the low bed, slipped on my clothes and, without bothering to wake Ernie, walked over to the Korean National Police station.

  The sun was higher when I returned. After gathering the information I needed at the police station, I’d walked over to Camp Colbern. There, in the billeting room assigned to me and Ernie, I’d showered, shaved, and then gone to the Camp Colbern Snack Bar. Breakfast was ham, eggs, and an English muffin. Now, back in Paldang-ni, I pounded on the door to Ernie’s room. The business girl opened it and let me in. Ernie was still asleep.

  “Reveille,” I said.

  He opened his eyes and sat up. “What?”

  “Time to make morning formation, Sleeping Beauty.”

  “Why? We don’t know who killed Miss O so what difference does it make?”

  “We know now.”

  “We do?”

  I filled him in on the testimony I’d received this morning from Private First Class Everett P. Rothenberg. When I finished, Ernie thought about it. “You and your Korean customs. Why would that mean anything to anybody?”

  “Get up,” I told him. “We have someone to talk to.”

  Ernie grumbled but dressed quickly.

  We wound our way through the narrow alleys of Paldang-ni. Instead of American GIs and Korean business girls, the streets were now filled with children wearing black uniforms toting heavy backpacks on their way to school and farmers shoving carts piled high with garlic or cabbage or mounds of round Korean pears. We passed the Dragon Lady Teahouse and just to be sure, I checked the doors, both front and back. Locked tight. Then we continued through the winding maze, heading toward the hooch of Miss Kang.

  What I’d questioned Rothenberg about this morning concerned his friendship with Miss Kang. How they’d both sat up nights in the hooch waiting for Miss O. But Miss O would stay out after curfew and then not come home at four in the morning and often Rothenberg had to go to work before he knew what had happened to her. But sometimes she’d be back early with some story about how she stayed at a friend’s house and how they were having so much fun talking and playing flower cards that the time had slipped by and she hadn’t realized that midnight had come and gone and she’d been trapped at her friend’s house until after curfew lifted at four in the morning.

  “You knew it was all lies, didn’t you?” I asked.

  Rothenberg allowed his head to sag. “I guess I did.”

  “But Miss Kang knew for sure.”

  “Yeah,” Rothenberg said. “Miss O had a lot of boyfriends. I realize that now.”

  Private Everett P. Rothenberg went on to tell me that sometimes Miss O made both him and Miss Kang leave the hooch completely.

  “She’d tell us that family was coming over for the weekend. And she didn’t want them to know that a GI like me was staying in her hooch. So Miss Kang helped out, she took me to her father’s home near Yoju. It was about a thirty-minute bus ride. When we arrived at her father’s home they were real friendly to me. I’d take off my shoes and enter the house and bow three times to her father like Miss Kang taught me. You know, on your knees and everything.”

  “You took gifts?”

  “Right. Miss Kang made me buy fruit. She said it’s against Korean custom to go ‘empty hands.’ ”


  “And you prayed to her ancestors?”

  “Some old photographs of a man and a woman.”

  “And you went to their graves?”

  “How’d you know? To the grave mounds on the side of the hill. We took rice cakes out there and offered them to the spirits. When the spirits didn’t eat them, me and Miss Kang did.” He laughed. “She always told me that food offered to the spirits has no taste. Why? Because the spirits take the flavor out of it and all you’re left with is the dough.”

  “Is that true?”

  “It was for me. But I never liked rice cakes to begin with.”

  I stared at Rothenberg a long time. Finally, he fidgeted.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “If you think there was something between me and Miss Kang, you’re wrong. Sung-hee is my girl. Miss O. I was faithful to her.”

  “You were,” I said softly.

  His head drooped. “Right,” he said. “I was.”

  Miss Kang wasn’t in her hooch.

  “She go pray,” the landlady told us.

  “At the shrine at the top of the hill,” I said, pointing toward the Namhan River.

  Her eyes widened. “How you know?”

  I shrugged. Ernie and I thanked her, walked back through the village and started up the narrow trail that led out of Paldang-ni, over the hills, and eventually to the banks of the Namhan River. On the way, we passed the bronze bell. It still hadn’t been moved and sat amongst a pile of rotted lumber.