The Iron Sickle

by Martin Limon

  We stood in a smooth walled cubicle with a single bulb glowing above us. The bulb was incased in an iron cage. There was nothing here that could be broken, or used as a weapon.

  Brusquely, the technician hurried down a long corridor. I was expecting “tiger cages” like I’d seen pictures of at the Long Binh Jail in Vietnam or rock-hewn cells like I’d seen before in the Korean “monkey houses.” Instead, the technician led us through a double door into a spacious lawn with wrought iron chairs and matching round tables. Beyond that, a gentle slope dropped off into a valley lined with narrow walkways that led to stands of willow trees and small tile-roofed buildings adorned with bulbs blinking merrily in the brisk autumn air. On the far side of the valley, about three quarters of a mile away, the sister peak of Bukhan Mountain rose sharply, its jagged silhouette illuminated now by a low-hanging moon. To the right and to the left, the valley was similarly walled off.

  Captain Prevault leaned close to me. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It’s like a bowl, in the center of the mountains.”

  “Yes, a safe place for patients to recover. I wish Eighth Army had a similar facility.”

  “What does Eighth Army have?”

  “The stockade in Pupyong.”

  The silent technician motioned for us to sit. Dr. Prevault strolled toward one of the tables but continued to stand, arms wrapped tightly across her chest, turning in slow circles as she enjoyed the beautiful cool evening and the fresh breeze wafting into the valley from the mountains above. Night birds trilled and wings fluttered, even at this late hour.

  The technician disappeared back into the building. I studied the light shining from the homes in the valley below us. There didn’t seem to be anybody moving about, no central hub of activity. So far, there were no zombie-like mad men shuffling toward us, animated by murderous obsession. I felt safe. It was quiet and peaceful.

  The technician reappeared with a steaming brass pot and set it on a white towel he folded and placed in the center of the table. Then, from the pockets in his tunic, he produced two porcelain cups. With his open palm he gestured toward the pot.

  “Thank you,” Captain Prevault said and sat down primly. The man poured her a cup of steaming barley tea. With both hands, she lifted the cup, sipped tentatively, and then smiled and thanked the man again. He poured me a cup, set down the brass pot, and backed away.

  I tasted the tea. Hot, earthy. Little lumps of barley bounced against my lip.

  We sat in silence for a while. Finally, I broke the ice. “Who are we waiting for?”

  “I told you. Doctor Hwang.”

  “You also said he’s both a doctor and a patient.”

  “Yes. It’s sort of a long story.”

  “Looks like we have time.”

  “After the war,” she said, referring to the Korean War, which had ended twenty years ago, “there was so much death and devastation, so many orphans and people separated from their families, that no one was surprised by the widespread prevalence of mental illness. But it was more than that. The war had been so intense and so disruptive, turning almost everyone in the country into a refugee or worse. You might say that, in a real sense, the entire country had gone mad.”

  She paused and sipped her tea. In the valley below, branches swayed and leaves rustled.

  “Doctor Hwang did what he could. But there were only a handful of trained mental health professionals in the country. The mentally disturbed were handled in traditional ways, which could mean by medical practitioners or even by shamans, but usually it meant they were handled by the police.”

  And eliminated by the police, I thought.

  Without warning, someone was standing beside us. Startled, Captain Prevault rose. “Doctor Hwang,” she said. Involuntarily, her right hand touched her neck.

  I stood also.

  A small man stood before us. In the ambient light, I could see he was dei mori, as the Koreans call it, bald on the top of his head with flecks of grey at the temples. He wore the plain cotton tunic and white pantaloons of a peasant from the Chosun Dynasty. His shoes were rubber slippers with the toe pointed upward. The only part of the traditional outfit he lacked was the broad-brimmed horsehair hat. It was as if he’d been in a hurry and had forgotten to put it on. He was a sturdy man, not fat, not skinny, and his face, although lined, was set in a non-committal, albeit pleasant, gaze. He bowed to Captain Prevault and then regarded me.

  “Agent Sueño,” Captain Prevault said. “He’s the one I told you about.”

  Without changing his expression, Dr. Hwang performed an elegant bow, straight from the waist. I bowed in return. He didn’t offer to shake hands, so I didn’t either.

  “Come,” he said, already heading down the long lawn.

  Captain Prevault’s eyes widened in an expression of exasperation, but she grinned and tilted her head for me to come along. She gathered up her bag and we followed the quiet little man down into the valley.

  We sat on a wooden bench hewn out of a log. Straw-thatched homes surrounded a dirt-floored central courtyard. Villagers stood and squatted, some of them clapping rhythmically as a woman twirled in the center of the circle, with a human rainbow of red, blue, green, and yellow ribbons. She chanted some ancient song and banged on a drum that was looped by a hemp rope over her shoulder. As we sat mesmerized, someone leapt out of the crowd. Women squealed. It was a barefoot man, dressed in white, raising his knees high, as if stepping over knife blades, dancing to the rhythm. He held a brightly painted wooden mask in front of his face, a mask with a huge grimacing red mouth and green eyes flashing evil.

  He ran after the woman. She darted away from him but the rhythm of the music grew faster and all around eyes widened and mouths gaped as the demon pursued the shaman. Finally, she stopped and threw her arms toward the heavens and chanted as if directly to the gods. She staggered, gripping her chest, and then struggled back to her feet, as if she had just received a jolt of power. She reached into the folds of her skirt and pulled out a naht, a wooden-handled sickle. Using it, she smote the demon, who backed away snarling, twisting out of her reach, doing his best to avoid the slashing blade until he finally crouched and bowed and retreated from the central square. The shaman banged more on her drum, slowed, and then bowed to the thunderous applause of the crowd and skipped away into the darkness.

  In the hubbub that followed, an elderly woman appeared with another brass pot of tea and a few dumpling-shaped rice cakes. With both hands, Captain Prevault accepted the tray. She first poured a cup of tea for Dr. Hwang, who sat on a bench facing us.

  “We like to live like this,” Dr. Hwang said in English, holding a rice cake aloft and gesturing toward the village that surrounded us. “It reminds my patients of a simpler time, a time when we were all children, a time before the war, a time before so much was lost.”

  “All the people in this village are your patients?” I asked.

  “All the people in the valley,” he corrected.

  “How many, all told?”

  “Over a hundred.”

  “And they were all traumatized by the war?”

  “Yes, that’s why they are all old, like me.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I had noticed that so far the youngest person I’d seen was maybe forty. “Do any of them ever leave?”

  “Only for medical appointments, or if they’re released.”

  “Who decides when they are to be released?”

  “I do.”

  “But I thought you were a patient here, too.”

  “I am.”

  Captain Prevault had been sitting quietly, sipping tea, but she finally spoke up. “The Korean government has a rule,” she said. “All government employees must retire when they reach huangap, age sixty-one. Supposedly, it’s to make room for new blood. Most people think it’s so Park Chung-hee can appoint hand-picked people who are loyal to him.” Captain Prevault glanced at Dr. Hwang and said, “Excuse me for criticizing your government.”

  �
��Not to worry,” he said, waving his open palm. “We do it all the time.”

  Captain Prevault continued. “Doctor Hwang had been working in this sanatorium since the war, and no one else understood the patients like he did. It would’ve been a disaster for him to leave. So, he petitioned the government and after some bureaucratic paper-shuffling, he had himself committed.”

  “Committed?” I said. “For what?”

  Dr. Hwang smiled. “I, too, was traumatized by the war. I lost my entire family. My wife and daughter were raped by soldiers, deserters actually, right in front of my eyes. Then they castrated my son, all the time demanding for me to tell them where I hid my gold and jewels.” As he related this, Dr. Hwang continued to smile evenly. “Of course, I didn’t have any gold or jewels. We were starving and anything of value I had ever owned had already been bartered for food. The soldiers knew this was probably the case but performed these atrocities nevertheless. Once they were through with them, they shot my wife and my daughter, and when they tired of my son’s screaming, they bludgeoned him to death with their rifle butts. Me, they strangled and left for dead.” He pointed to scars on his neck. “But they didn’t allow for the resilience of the human body. Some hours later, I started to breathe again, and shortly thereafter I was able to unravel the rope around my neck.”

  I glanced at Captain Prevault. She was staring at him, her fists knotted in her lap.

  “I didn’t have time to bury my family,” Dr. Hwang said. “As soon as I could walk, I set off after the men who had done me so much harm. Two days later, I found them, in a farmhouse in a village about thirty kilometers away. The farmer, lying dead outside, apparently had a cache of mokkolli in earthen jars. The deserters had besotted themselves, after raping the farmer’s wife, of course. She was crouching in the kitchen when I entered the farmhouse. She raised three fingers, telling me silently that all the deserters were there. Then she handed me a knife. A thick knife, the type used for chopping turnips. For herself, she kept a thin sharp blade, normally used for slaughtering pigs, had there been any pigs left. I followed her into the living quarters, where she attacked one of the men, and I took two. We stabbed them in the stomach, hacking, slicing. They woke up howling, clutching their bleeding bodies, guts spilling through their fingers like free swimming eels. I wanted their deaths to be slow. I wanted their deaths to be painful. They were.”

  His smile stayed glued to his face, unchanging.

  I glugged down barley tea. After a respectful silence, I asked about the man with the iron sickle. Dr. Hwang gave me his opinion.

  “He’s either mad or he’s a North Korean agent pretending he’s mad.”

  “If you were me, how would you go about searching for him?”

  “Well, if he’s a North Korean agent, I can’t help you. But if he’s mad, he might’ve been a patient of someone at some time.”

  “Maybe you.”

  “I thought of that. Ever since Captain Prevault called me, I’ve been reviewing both my memory and my files. Whoever this man was, he was never a patient of mine.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I specialize in people traumatized by the war. This man, whoever he is, is so violent and so full of rage, he could not possibly have lived these twenty-some years in our society without having previously come to our attention. This person is new.”

  “New to the mental health profession?”

  “No. New to madness.”

  “How do you know?

  “Because when anyone begins to enact their fantasies with such overt violence, they are not likely to live long.”

  “Why not?

  “Certainly when you see him, you will shoot him, won’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “No maybe about it. If you don’t shoot him, someone else will. I presume at your American army headquarters there are plenty of volunteers.”

  I thought of Moe Dexter and every other MP walking a beat. “But maybe his psychosis has lain dormant,” I said.

  “Possible. But unlikely.”

  “Are there any records we could look at?”

  “Not centralized records. Only those that are held privately by individual physicians. Mental health workers are still seen as something odd in Korea. Culturally, my country’s views on mental illness are backward. We still see it as something to be ashamed of, something to hide from the neighbors, something that can ruin the chance for a good career or a good marriage. This place was established by the government not out of kindness but out of desperation. After the war there were so many people suffering psychologically, and they were committing so much crime and mayhem, that the government saw the need to get them off the streets. At first, they were incarcerated.”

  “But then you came along?”

  “Yes, I managed to set up this sanatorium as an alternative to prison.”

  “But there must’ve been others who weren’t allowed out of prison.”

  “Many others. But of course there were no mental health records kept for them. Only criminal records. Impossible to cull out those who are ill from those who are merely criminals.”

  I leaned toward him and spread my fingers. “So what can I do?” I asked.

  Still smiling, he said, “I’ll make some inquiries.”

  “With who?”

  “With anyone who remembers someone who liked to kill with an iron sickle.”

  I described the totem I had seen in the Itaewon Market.

  “You think it was this killer who placed it there?”

  “I think so. And then he removed it before dawn, before anyone else could see it.”

  “Draw it for me.”

  “Draw it? I can’t draw.”

  “Of course you can.” Dr. Hwang snapped his fingers and the same woman who had brought us the tea appeared. He was about to issue an order when Captain Prevault pulled a pad and a pencil out of her purse.

  “Here,” she said, thrusting it toward me.

  Dr. Hwang sent the old woman away. Then he turned to me. “Do it,” he said.

  I took the pad and pencil from Captain Prevault. At first, I kept drawing it with the wrong proportions, so I’d run out of paper. I kept scratching it out and turning the page and starting again. Finally, the proportions seemed right, or close to right, and after some roughing out the lines and filling them in, I finally had a sketch that looked something like the item I’d seen last night at the Itaewon Market.

  I showed it to Dr. Hwang.

  “A rat,” he said, holding the sketch at arm’s length, then bringing it closer. Captain Prevault held up a candle. “And a stand. Made of wood, you say?”

  “Yes. The rat was hanging from the top of the grill by its hind legs.”

  “On the nose of the rat; you’ve scratched something here.”

  “Blood.”

  “From the rat’s nose?”

  “No. That was one of the weird things. The blood seemed to be from another source. A clot of it, as if it had been pasted to the rat’s nose.”

  Dr. Hwang lowered the drawing to his lap and stared at me.

  “You were right about drawing it,” I said. “I remember more things about it now. Things I hadn’t remembered before.”

  “What do you think this means?”

  “I don’t know. It’s weird.”

  “Weird yes, but it has meaning to the man who created it. Very specific meaning. And it is for your eyes only.”

  “For my eyes?” I asked.

  “Yes. You’ve formed a bond with him. You’re the one pursuing him. He wants you to know why he’s doing all this. That’s why he placed it there for you to see, and once you’d seen it he took it away.”

  “He didn’t want to share it with anyone else.”

  “Precisely.”

  “But what could a stand with a square grill of wires and a dead rat mean?”

  Dr. Hwang shrugged. “It means nothing to me, but it means everything to him. I suggest you concentrate on that. He’s trying to
tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “When you learn that, you will learn who he is, and you will learn why he’s doing these horrible things.”

  “That totem has something to do with his trauma?”

  “It has everything to do with it.”

  -7-

  We still had an hour and a half until the midnight-to-four curfew hit, but rather than taking a cab all the way back to the compound, I suggested to Captain Prevault that we stop somewhere to eat.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “Starving.”

  So was I.

  The cab let us off on Chong-no, literally “bell road,” named for the ancient bronze bell housed in a temple in the heart of Seoul where the road begins. We walked through a narrow alley that led to Mugyo-dong, a brightly lit shopping district that by night becomes a mecca for young people. The narrow lanes were lined with open-air eateries, pool halls, beer emporiums, and shops selling record albums, and they were swarming with revelers. The odor of crushed garlic mingled with the pungent smell of pork barbecuing on open grills. I always got lost back here, what with so many pedestrian lanes crisscrossing one another in every which way, but eventually we found a joint with an open table. We pushed our way through the crowd and grabbed seats.

  “It’s so exciting out here,” Captain Prevault said, her eyes bright with reflected light.

  “You’ve never been to Mugyo-dong?” I asked.

  “Never.”

  “Then you haven’t lived.”

  “Apparently not.”

  The waitress, a matronly woman in a full-body white apron, approached us warily, caution hardening her broad face. When I spoke to her in Korean, she relaxed somewhat and pointed to the menu, which was handwritten on a board behind the counter. “Kom-tang is good,” I told Captain Prevault. “Sliced beef and noodles. Or if you want something spicy with fish in it, Meiun-tang would be the way to go.”

  “The fish,” she said without hesitation.

  I ordered a bowl of kom-tang for myself and meiun-tang for Captain Prevault, and a plate of yakimandu as an appetizer. She also ordered a bottled soda, and I asked for a liter of OB beer, after making sure they served it cold.