The Iron Sickle

by Martin Limon

  We rounded the corner to the Inn of the Crying Rose, the bar Mr. Ming had brought me to before. It was dark, the neon sign turned off, looking sad and forlorn amongst all the blinking neon surrounding it. I tried the wooden door.

  “Locked,” I said.

  “Try knocking.” Ernie pounded on it. While we waited for an answer, he drank down the last of his soju. Then he pounded again, and we gave up and walked to a dark crack between the buildings.

  “Can you fit through that?” Ernie asked.

  “Sideways,” I said.

  Ernie motioned with his open palm. “After you.”

  I slid into the narrow passage first. The ground below was muddy and pocked with rocks and broken glass and other types of filth I didn’t want to think about. Finally, I popped out in back of the building. Ernie appeared right after me, brandishing his empty bottle of soju.

  “Let me at ’em,” he said.

  The alcohol was already doing its work.

  The back door of the Inn of the Crying Rose was locked just as tightly as the front. “Looks like she closed up shop,” Ernie said.

  “Apparently.”

  We went back around to the front but this time took the long way, walking down to the end of the block, turning toward the main drag, and then doubling back.

  “This is where they caught you?” Ernie asked.

  “Back a few blocks,” I said. “I had to run up here and then with all these people walking around, they left me alone.”

  “We could go back there and try to find ’em,” Ernie said.

  “Maybe later,” I said.

  He whooshed a left hook into the air. “I’m ’bout to knock me somebody the hell out.” The booze was hitting him hard because we were tired. After returning to the barracks this afternoon and cleaning up, we’d gone right back to work.

  I stopped in a noodle shop near the Inn of the Crying Rose. When I started asking questions, the owner waved his hand in front of my face and refused to answer. I tried a ladies’ boutique a couple of doors down that was just closing up for the night. This time, the well-dressed owner was more willing to talk.

  “She sell everything,” she told me in heavily accented English. “Go away. Say her brother come back. Want her leave Mia-ri.”

  “Her brother came back from where?” I asked.

  She shook her head. She didn’t know. She also didn’t know where the woman known as Madame Hoh had gone.

  “Maybe you ask owner.”

  “The building owner?”

  She nodded.

  “Who is it?”

  She pointed across the street. The man who owned the noodle shop.

  Ernie and I sat down and ordered a bowl of noodles. We were famished. When Ernie was about to order a bottle of soju to go with it, I told him to wait.

  “Wait for what?”

  “Let’s get this job done first,” I said. “Then we can kick out some jams.”

  “I’m ready to kick out the jams right now,” he replied.

  But he went along with my program. A rotund teenage girl, probably the owner’s daughter, served us two bowls of kuksu, steamed noodles with scallions and some sort of sea life floating around. We ate quickly. After slurping down the last of the broth, I told Ernie the plan.

  He nodded enthusiastically. “And then we can drink, right?”

  “Right.”

  When it was time to pay up, I flashed the girl my CID badge and demanded to see the owner. Her eyes widened but without a word she turned and fled to the kitchen. In less than a minute, the owner, the man who had waved his hand negatively before when I asked about the Inn of the Crying Rose, strode up to the counter.

  “Over here,” I said in English, pointing at the area beside our table.

  The man hesitated.

  “Bali,” I said. Quickly.

  He scurried over. Apparently the waitress had told him about our badges. He stood narrow-eyed, staring down at us.

  “How long had they been selling it out of the bar across the street?” I said in Korean.

  “Selling?”

  “Don’t act dumb. You know what they were selling. I asked you how long?”

  He shook his head.

  I sighed elaborately. “You must’ve known.”

  “I knew nothing.” He was getting worried.

  “Everybody knew,” I said, “The whole neighborhood knew. How is it possible you didn’t know?”

  “I didn’t know,” he said stubbornly.

  Ernie slammed his fist on the table, the empty bowls rattled, and he leapt to his feet. “What kinda bullshit is this?” he said, glaring at the smaller man. I stood also, sticking out my arm as if to hold Ernie back.

  “You say you didn’t know about it,” I said. “Then show us. Give us the keys.”

  I held out my open palm. The man looked confused. “Do you want us to call the Korean National Police?” I said.

  That seemed to make the decision for him. He whipped off his apron. “Jom kanman,” he said. Just a minute.

  Within seconds he returned with a set of keys clutched in his fist. We followed him outside and down the two doors to the Inn of the Crying Rose. I held a penlight for him as he shuffled through the keys. Finally, he located the right one and stuck it in the lock. He turned, and the door popped open. Together, we entered.

  It was quiet in there, and musty.

  “Where are the lights?” I asked in Korean.

  “In the back,” he replied.

  We made our way past empty booths and cocktail tables with chairs upturned on top of them. Finally, we reached the bar.

  “What were they selling?” he asked.

  “It’s better you don’t know,” I said. “Why did she leave in such a hurry?”

  “Something to do with her brother,” he told me.

  “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know. Her hometown. She didn’t tell me where it was.”

  Koreans, through accent and mannerisms, can always tell what part of the country another Korean is from. “What part of the country?” I asked.

  “The east coast, I think. Kangwon-do.”

  Ernie slid open the beer cooler. “Shine that light over here,” he said.

  I did. Empty.

  “Nothing but tin,” he said. The shelves behind the bar were similarly bereft of any liquor.

  The owner found the lights and switched them on. They weren’t bright, just a low red glow suffusing the main ballroom. I groped my way toward the back, past the empty storeroom, and finally to the door that opened onto the office. I stepped inside, to a small wooden desk, and searched the drawers. Empty, except for a few wooden matches, some awkwardly-sized Korean paper clips, and two broken pencils.

  I returned to the bar.

  “She cleaned out totally,” I told Ernie.

  “Yeah. Not so much as a tumbler of mokkolli.”

  At the mention of the Korean word for rice beer, the owner glanced at Ernie curiously.

  “There’s one spot we haven’t searched,” Ernie said.

  “Where?”

  “The cloak room.”

  He pointed toward the Dutch door next to the entrance. It had been dark when we walked past it.

  “Come on.”

  The owner followed.

  I shoved the top part of the door open and groped inside for a wall switch. There wasn’t one. I fumbled with an inner latch and pushed open the lower part of the door.

  “Above,” the owner said.

  I reached up and waved my hand around until I found a string. Gently, I pulled down. A bulb ignited the room. There were no coats on racks, not even any coat hangers, but sitting in the center of the room, perched on a wooden stool was something Ernie and I had seen before.

  The totem. The same one we’d seen in the Itaewon Market on the day when Corporal Collingsworth had been murdered. The same wooden stand, the same wire rectangle rising above, but this time there was no dead rat dangling by it’s feet. This time there was somet
hing else tied to the wire. Something that took a while for my eyes to bring into focus. Something slathered in blood, blood that had dripped down the rectangular wire and further along the wooden base of the contraption and puddled in a yard-wide lake of gore at the bottom of the stool.

  It was a head.

  The head of Mr. Ming, the man who had once been the top-earning field agent for the Sam-Il Claims Office.

  We didn’t return to 8th Army until noon the next day.

  By that time, the compound was alive with trucks and jeeps and vans, all ferrying personnel and equipment back from the field, away from 8th Army Headquarters South and back to the civilization of the Yongsan district of southern Seoul. The field exercise had been called off. Ernie and I were more exhausted than we thought possible. We drove straight to the 8th Army snack bar and parked the jeep.

  The place was packed. A lot of people were after some hot chow. Ernie and I stood in line at the grill, and he ordered a hamburger and fries, and I ordered two bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. When we finally paid for our lunch, it took us ten minutes of waiting to squeeze into a vacated table up against the wall. We were only a few feet from the jukebox and somebody had put on “Break It to Me Gently,” which was one of my favorite songs.

  Ernie said, “You like that?”

  I nodded.

  “You would,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that but I didn’t really care because I was too busy eating to pay him much attention. I’d just chomped into my second sandwich when a pair of combat boots appeared next to our table. Small combat boots. I looked up.

  Captain Leah Prevault stood next to us. I started to smile but then caught myself. The look on her face was more than grim, it was enraged.

  I started to say something but before I could even get out a greeting, her small hand swung from her side and landed on the side of my face. The sound bit into the air around us and all activity stopped. No more murmuring of voices, no more clang of porcelain on tableware. For some reason, even the jukebox chose that moment to shut off and whirr between records.

  All eyes turned toward us. Even Ernie seemed shocked.

  “You betrayed us,” Captain Prevault said.

  “What?” I stammered.

  “Doctor Hwang,” she said. “And the patients at the Mental Health Sanatorium. You betrayed them all. All!” she shouted.

  I was dumbstruck. I had no idea what she was talking about. “What?” I said.

  “They arrested them all!”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know! You know. They came with trucks and arrested Doctor Hwang and rounded up all the patients and took them away and now the entire valley is empty. I stopped by there on the way back from the field. There are military guards out front. They wouldn’t let me in until I insisted and finally they showed me. They’re all gone. For purposes of national security, they told me. You had them arrested!”

  “Wait a minute, lady,” Ernie said, standing up and holding out his hands. “My partner didn’t have anybody arrested. I was with him all last night, and we didn’t go near this place, this ‘sanatorium’ you’re talking about.”

  “Then his friends did it!” she said. “You have to do something about it. They’re not criminals!”

  And then she was crying. I finally stood up and tried to comfort her but she slapped my hand away, staring at me with a face full of rage, and turned and trotted out of the snack bar, knocking over somebody’s coffee on the way out.

  As we were about to climb into the jeep, Strange appeared.

  “Had any strange lately?”

  “Can it, Harvey,” Ernie said. “We’re in no mood for your bullshit.”

  “Who’s talking about bullshit? I’ve got the real deal for you.”

  “What deal?”

  Strange looked both ways. “Keep this under your hat,” he said. “You two were busy at Eighth Army headquarters last night.”

  “So?” Ernie said.

  Strange stepped closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. “They know about the Bogus Claims File. They know you have it. They want it back.”

  “They’ll have to ask nice,” Ernie said.

  “They know that,” Strange said. “Technically, the file doesn’t exist so they know they can’t arrest you for taking it. But there are all sorts of other charges they can bring you up on. Entering a restricted area, for one.”

  “The SOFA Secretariat’s Office?” I said.

  “Exactement,” Strange said. “Not to mention anything else they feel like making up.”

  Strange was right. The Uniform Code of Military Justice uses such vague language and covers so many broad areas of behavior that, when directed, the JAG office can charge just about anybody with just about anything.

  “So maybe we’ll give it back,” I said, “after the investigation.”

  “They want it now.”

  “People in hell want ice water,” Ernie said.

  “Then you better make yourself scarce,” Strange said. Like a hound sniffing danger in the air, he stepped away and turned his back on us. Within seconds, he was rounding the corner toward the snack bar and in the distance we heard a siren blaring.

  Ernie jumped in the driver’s seat and started the jeep. I got myself in the passenger seat just as he shoved the little vehicle in gear. We spurted out of the parking lot too late. The MP jeep spotted us. I glanced back. Staff Sergeant Moe Dexter was at the wheel, one MP on his right and two more crouched in the backseat. All of them were armed with M-16 rifles, except for Dexter, but I’m sure he had a .45 on his hip.

  Ernie slammed the jeep into high gear, and it surged forward. As we neared Gate Number Seven, a Korean guard marched out into the roadway, holding up his open palm, ordering us to halt. Ernie stepped on the gas. At the last second, the guard leapt out of the way.

  Horns blared as Ernie skidded into the busy midday traffic. Kimchi cabs, three-wheeled trucks, and the occasional ROK Army military vehicle made way as Ernie careened out of Gate Number Seven and headed east on the Main Supply Route. Moe Dexter and his boys barreled after us, siren blaring, only a few yards back.

  “Where are you going?” I shouted.

  “Itaewon.”

  “It’s too crowded,” I said.

  “That’s why I’m going there.”

  Ernie swerved past cabs, darting into and out of oncoming traffic, once even leaping up on the pedestrian walkway to get around a slow moving truck. I held on and prayed.

  An old woman with a cane, impervious to the swirling machinery around her, tottered across the roadway. “Watch out!” I shouted. Ernie slammed on his brakes, swerved to his right, downshifted, and once past the elderly halmonni, surged forward once again.

  Moe Dexter wasn’t nearly as deft. He slammed on his brakes in time to avoid murdering the old woman, but then he laid into his horn, thereby insulting a respected elder. I turned in my seat to watch. Pedestrians started shouting at him. One kimchi cab driver got out of his car as if to confront the four burly Americans, and a truck loaded with garlic nosed in front of Dexter’s jeep. Dexter ignored the taunts, backed up, and then slammed his front fender into the side of the kimchi cab. He twisted the little vehicle out of the way, the driver screaming and cursing at him all the while. And then Dexter was after us again.

  “About two hundred yards back,” I said.

  “He’s still coming?”

  “Still coming.”

  Ernie turned right and entered the narrow road that passed through the heart of Itaewon, past the UN Club, the Lucky Lady Club, the Seven Club, and finally the King Club. He hung a left up Hooker Hill. We passed a few middle-aged housewives with huge bundles of laundry balanced on their heads. They weren’t too mobile carrying that much weight and with only a few feet of clearance on either side of the jeep, Ernie had to slow to give them time to get out of the way. When we reached the top of the hill, Ernie turned right up a gradual incline that was even narrower than the road running
up Hooker Hill. I looked back and glimpsed Moe Dexter barreling uphill after us.

  “He’s still coming?” Ernie asked.

  “Still coming.”

  We passed one alley leading back down to the nightclub district and then another. On this second one, Ernie turned right. Immediately, our pathway was blocked by about three dozen young women milling about in front of an establishment with a sign that said Hei Yong Mokyok-tang, Sea Dragon Bathhouse. Caressing both sides of the Korean words were two brightly painted mermaids, smiling past long blonde tresses.

  Ernie could’ve avoided this alley, but he’d purposely slowed and inched forward into the crowd. Ernie tapped his horn playfully, waved at the girls, and blew kisses. Most of the girls carried metal pans containing soap and shampoo and other toiletries balanced against their hips. And they looked great. Their straight black hair was held up by metal clips, and many of them wore short pants with either T-shirts or pullover sweaters with no brassieres beneath, their full natural jiggle on fleshy display. Other than the bars and nightclubs themselves, the Sea Dragon Bathhouse was the main social gathering place for the Itaewon business girls. Here they could meet during the light of day, trade gossip, and catch up on which establishments were hiring waitresses or hostesses or barmaids and who amongst their exclusive clan had landed a rich boyfriend or, better yet, a GI who would marry them and carry them back to the Land of the Big PX. Still holding on to the steering wheel, Ernie leaned to his left, reached into his pocket, and pulled out an industrial-sized pack of ginseng gum. Quickly, he started handing out sticks to grasping hands.

  Behind us, Moe Dexter and his MP cohort rounded the corner.

  “Don’t let them through!” Ernie shouted. I repeated what he’d said in Korean, adding, “The MPs have arrested a Korean woman.”

  As our jeep passed, the girls clustered helpfully behind us. Moe Dexter was honking his horn, but it wasn’t working. Angry business girls stood in front of his jeep and on the sides, taunting the MPs, shouting at them to go back to their compound. Pent-up rage at having been humiliated by members of law enforcement, of having always to show their updated VD cards, of being busted for selling the gifts GIs gave them on the black market—all of these emotions bubbled quickly into anger, and in this large gathering the business girls of Itaewon finally held the power. Cursing and red-faced, Moe slammed the palm of his big hand on the jeep’s horn and held it down, screaming at them to get out of the way. This seemed to make the girls even more determined. They pressed forward in front of the jeep, and Moe Dexter was forced by the growing crowd of female pulchritude to come to a complete halt.