At the bottom of the hill I saw a familiar figure, wrapped tightly in a flowered raincoat. The Chinese girl. The same one I had seen inside the slicky boys’ dungeon.
She held out her umbrella for me.
“lrri-oseiyo,” she said. Come this way.
I wasn’t about to argue with her.
She led me by the hand to a tiny, immaculately clean yoguan, tucked back in an alley I’d never seen before. She paid for the room and, to my surprise, accompanied me down the creaking hallway. Once we were alone she told me to take off my clothes. It was an order she didn’t have to repeat. She took me into the bathroom and scrubbed me down and rinsed me and dried me and soon had me lying naked on the warm sleeping pad under a silk comforter.
After washing herself, she turned off all the lights except for a soft red bulb in the entranceway and slipped into the bed with me.
She was slim and soft and completely naked. And as sweet as any woman has a right to be.
This woman, with her perfect features and her hairless, unblemished skin, and her supple body like a willow bending in the wind, seemed to be another species altogether from us regular human beings. She seemed too perfect. Too smart. Too gentle. Too dreamlike.
I still think of the night I spent with the Chinese woman as something that happened to me while floating in a world untouched by hatred or fear or cruelty or death.
Of course, she was being paid for her work. That took some of the edge off. Not much.
Before drifting off to sleep, I realized that working with Slicky King So wasn’t half bad.
In the morning, the Chinese woman woke me. She held a breakfast tray, hot turnip soup, steamed rice, roasted mackerel. I washed my face and sat down on the floor to eat. As I wielded my wooden chopsticks, I noticed an envelope on the edge of the tray. When I reached for it she grabbed my hand with her soft fingers.
“Monjo pap mokku, kudaum ei ilkoyo.” Eat first, after that, read.
I did as I was told. She had risen from bed early, and her hair was up and braided and she wore her bright red silk chipao with its high collar and the short skirt riding up above her round knees.
The turnip soup and the rice and the mackerel were delicious. I was hungry and finished it quickly. She cleared the bowls, asking me if I wanted more. I told her not to bother. She handed me the envelope.
Inside was a piece of blank paper with a neatly printed series of numerals.
“RCP’s,” she said.
Ration control plates. The numbers that had been on the phony ration control plates the print shop had embossed for the killer.
Also inside the envelope was a small black-and-white photograph, and a list of four names and serial numbers that had appeared on bogus military identification cards. Each name was associated with one of the ration control plates. When a customer approaches the door of the PX or commissary, an attendant checks his ID card and RCP to make sure everything matches.
I studied the photograph. Short, light brown hair. A square face with a crooked jaw. A nose that had been broken somewhere along the line, tight lips, lifeless eyes. The Chinese girl looked down at the photo and shuddered.
He seemed like any normal GI-but mean.
I twisted the photo so the light from the naked bulb above us would hit it more clearly. Tiny scars, barely visible, ran along his cheeks and the ridge of his nose. There were others on his chin and at the side of his jaw, extending back toward his ears.
I handed the photo to the Chinese woman, tracing the scars with my finger. She nodded, very solemn.
“Orin i ddei, nugu deiryosso,” she said. When he was a child, someone beat him.
She had to be right. It was obvious that no one would’ve been capable of whipping him that badly and leaving so many scars once he reached adulthood.
That’s all I needed. A vicious, abused mongrel. The eyes in the photograph didn’t look particularly intelligent, but that could be deceiving. His actions so far had been swift, brutal, and cunning.
I didn’t want to leave, but the sun would be coming up soon and I had a lot of work to do. I kissed the hands and lips of the Chinese woman, trying to convince myself that she was real. She bowed as I left.
I strode out of the yoguan, her gentle fragrance still lingering about me, the killer’s face clutched in my fist.
30
I arrived at the CID office early. When Riley showed up, he pitched in and helped me. We compared the photograph the slicky boys had given me to MP mug shots and the long lists of AWOL GI’s and the photos the Korean National Police had sent along.
It took us over an hour. When we finished we still had nothing. No match.
“He’s not an AWOL GI,” Riley said. “And if he mustered out of the army and came back to Korea, he hasn’t raised enough hell, as far as the KNP’s are concerned, for them to bother taking his mug shot.”
“He’s the cautious type,” I said. “He wouldn’t have let himself be picked up for anything trivial.”
“No.”
Miss Kim came in, silently handed us two steaming cups of coffee, and removed the old ones. We were too preoccupied to thank her.
“But the print shop guy told you he used to be a GI?” Riley asked.
“Yeah. What he said exactly was Migun.” I snapped my fingers. Most of the U.S. forces in Korea are army units. But there is a sizable air force presence and even a small contingent of navy. “What that means literally is ‘American military person.'”
Riley was puzzled by my excitement.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean army,” I explained. “This guy could’ve been air force or navy.”
“You’re right,” Riley said. “A sailor who jumped ship or a zoomie who got tired of rocketing around the universe.”
Ernie walked in, a copy of the Stars amp; Stripes folded under his arm. Blue bags sagged beneath his eyes. Miss Kim swiveled on her typing chair and started pounding away on the keys, producing nothing coherent.
Riley studied Ernie. “Late night?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Ernie said. He glanced at the paperwork in front of us. “What you got?”
I filled Emie in on what we’d found, happy to have him back.
“How’d you get the RCP numbers?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you later.”
We decided that we had to check with both the navy and the air force liaison officers here on post. Ernie took the fly-boys. I took the squids.
“When the First Sergeant comes back from the command briefing,” I told Riley, “tell him we’re close. And we don’t have time for any damn black market detail.”
“Not to worry. I’ll keep him happy.”
As we were leaving, Miss Kim pulled a nail file out of her purse and slashed at red claws.
Ernie didn’t seem to notice. On the other hand, he didn’t offer her a stick of gum, either.
Sometimes you wear out shoe leather for days and come up with nothing, and other days you ask a simple question and people look at you like, “You didn’t know that?”
I passed by the big black anchors on the front lawn of the Commandant Headquarters, Naval Forces Korea, and pushed through a heavy teak door into carpeted offices. I pulled out the black-and-white photo that Herbalist So had given me and showed it to the petty officer sitting behind a varnished desk. The brass in the office gleamed; the odor of disinfectant and boiled coffee hung in the air.
“This guy?” the petty officer said, fingering the photo. “Sure I know him. Lieutenant Commander Bo Shipton. Navy Seal.” He shook his head. “Bad mother. Jumped ship about three, four months ago.”
Bingo!
“When did you last see him?”
“Nobody’s seen him since then.”
“Do you have his personnel folder?”
“You’ll have to talk to the commandant first.”
“Can do easy.”
The picture worked wonders. The commandant decided to see me right away. After a short chat, I obtained the information I wanted, assuring him that the integrity of the navy would be preserved. He was worried because anything that reflected badly on the navy could reflect badly on him.