The monk next to the nun raised his naked arms in the air, slowly turning in a circle. Again, the crowd grew quiet. The monk shouted in Korean.
"These men helped the good nun. These men are not our enemies. Choi So-lan says they must be protected!"
A murmur of confusion rippled through the mob. The monk shouted again.
"They are the ones who saved her from her attacker!"
This time heads nodded and the murmur was higher pitched. Approval.
Like magic, small towels were offered out of the crowd. I took one, handed it to Lady Ahn, and took one for myself. The cuts on my forehead stung as I wiped them down. A woman in a light blue smock with a red cross on her vest emerged from the forest of torsos. She produced a bottle of purple ointment and dabbed the stinging potion onto our cuts.
Ernie hadn't been hurt at all. He sauntered over to the little nun and offered her a stick of ginseng gum. Smiling broadly, she accepted.
Over by the main gate, the chanting began again. "Down with the foreign louts! Avenge the nun! Go back to America!"
Ernie kept smiling. Lady Ahn clutched the grain bag to her chest. I spoke in Korean to the little nun. "You have become very famous."
The monk standing next to her ignored my Korean and answered me in English.
'Yes. She is a symbol now to all Koreans. Of our resistance to an American occupation that would allow one of your soldiers to brutalize one as innocent as this."
He sounded like a propaganda recording. "We did not allow it," I told him. "The man who attacked her is a criminal."
"But you haven't turned him over to the Korean authorities yet."
My surprise must've shown on my face. The monk started to smirk.
There was no reason why Eighth Army CID couldn't have picked up the culprit by now. Ernie and I had left all the information any good investigator would need. What was holding them up?
"I'm sure he'll be turned over soon," I said.
The monk shook his bald head. "No. Your superiors claim they haven't even captured him yet."
Haven't captured him yet! No wonder the Korean students were mad.
The little nun was paying no attention at all to us. She kept chomping on her gum and smiling up at Ernie. For his part, he scanned the crowd, occasionally pointing at somebody with their hair tied up by their white headband or their face smeared with paint, making faces, imitating them.
The nun laughed like a little girl.
"Why is she wearing a hemp robe?" I asked.
The monk crossed his long arms. 'You know nothing of Korean custom?"
"Hemp robes are the sign of mourning," I said.
"Yes."
"So who died?"
"No one yet. In two days someone will."
I waited. He smiled.
"The virtuous nun," he said. "The little one you see before you."
"What are you talking about?" I asked. "She's young. Healthy. What's going to kill her?"
"Fire. At a rally in downtown Seoul. If the attacker is not caught and turned over to us, this good nun, Choi So-lan, will pour gasoline over her body. She will set herself aflame."
A holler erupted from the demonstrators. People closed in and started shoving.
Down the street, emerging from the high stone gate of the Ministry of National Defense, slithered a long row of helmeted riot police, waving their batons.
The students hooted and tossed stones.
Ernie turned to me. "Time to un-ass the area."
The monk smiled. "I will see to that." He raised his arm. A few monks scurried away and in less than a minute a long American-made station wagon nosed its way through the throng. It was ancient, almost twenty years old, and the outer walls were paneled with revarnished wood. A "woody," they used to call it back in Los Angeles.
Ernie took one look at it and grinned. "Shit. And here I am all out of surfboard wax."
The station wagon pulled up next to us and two monks jumped out and opened the doors. The elder monk motioned with his arm.
"Please. Be our guest."
Ernie shook his head. "I'll walk. Itaewon's just a few blocks from here."
Lady Ahn preferred walking, too. With the jade skull strapped in a bag over her shoulder, she didn't trust these Buddhists at all.
They both looked at me. "Yes," I said. "We prefer to walk."
"Ah," the monk said, "but we insist."
A dozen tough-looking monks closed in on us in a tight circle. Behind them were hundreds of angry demonstrators. The police near the Ministry of National Defense started to scrape their batons along the tops of their riot control shields.
It was an eerie sound. Like Roman legions preparing to clear a square.
The monk motioned again for us to climb into the sta- tion wagon. Ernie ignored him and stepped away. Before I could move, three monks hoisted Ernie into the air, and shoved him into the backseat of the woody like a flailing side of beef.
We were outnumbered. There was nothing else for us to do but comply.
Lady Ahn clutched my arm but kept her face set in stony aloofness. Regally, she stepped forward and entered the car. I followed.
21
We cruised in the woody through downtown Seoul to a temple located at the rear of the grounds of Doksu Palace. The palace had been built during the fifteenth century, burned down a time or two by Japanese invaders, and each time rebuilt by the tradition-loving patriots of Korea. The front part of the palace was open to tour groups. But back where we were, hemmed in by elm trees and rows of spruces, no one could hear us.
Even if we screamed.
But it wasn't a dungeon we were brought to. It was a tile-roofed pagoda in the center of a small island, in a placid pond infested with lily pads, frogs, and elegantly floating swans.
Three monks shoved Ernie into the center of the main floor of the pavilion, amidst comfortable couches and celadon vases filled with flowers and ancient embroidered silk screens covering the walls.
Ernie cursed at his captors and straightened his shirt. "This place sucks," he said.
Actually, this place had been the summer retreat of a king. But Ernie's only impressed by free-flowing booze, sawdust on the floors, and hot and cold running women.
Lady Ahn acted as if she'd been born here. Still clutching her burlap sack filled with rice and the priceless jade skull, she slipped off her shoes, strode toward one of the handcrafted couches, and sat carefully in its center.
I sat next to her, checking out the odds against us. They weren't good. Besides the half dozen or so monks who had accompanied us in the woody, on the way in I had seen ten more monks arrayed around the residence. Extra security.
A novitiate brought a tray holding a teapot painted with white cranes rising from reeds. He poured us each a cup of jasmine-scented tea.
If it hadn't been for the evil-looking monks watching him, Ernie probably would've smashed his teacup and the pot and everything else on the varnished coffee table. Lady Ahn didn't touch her tea. Instead, she sat with her back ramrod straight, gazing into the distance as if pondering great thoughts.
I was the only one who drank the tea. It tasted good. Besides, I was thirsty.
Choi So-lan, the little nun, and the elder monk sat down on the divan across from us. The monk spoke.
"My name is Bo Hua," he said, "the Protector of the Flame. Thank you for accepting our hospitality."
"You can take your hospitality and shove it," Ernie said. He paced the varnished slat floor behind us, unwilling to sit down.
The little nun frowned and stared at the floor.
"The reason we brought you here," Bo Hua continued, "is that we seek the jade skull of Kublai Khan."
Lady Ahn's facial expression didn't change. But her breathing stopped and the knuckles on the hand gripping the burlap bag grew white.
"We have been searching for it for many centuries," Bo Hua said. "I will let Nun Choi explain."