Authors: Martin Limón
It was already 6:20 and I was sipping my second cup of instant coffee. I’d already paid the teenage girl in the waitress uniform over four hundred won. Miss Pak Ok-suk was beginning to get expensive and I wondered if she was worth it. I could have been asleep back at the hooch with Miss Oh. Certainly Lindbaugh had crashed, probably with one of those girls at the
gisaeng
party.
Last night I had answered Ernie’s grumbling with a conjecture. For all we knew, the guy waiting in the alley for Kimiko had been planning on killing her, and early this morning, when we went to check her out, we might stumble on a corpse.
But I didn’t think so. I figured if these hoodlums had wanted to waste Kimiko, they could have done it long before this, and if they had planned to kill her last night I doubted that they would have waited around in alleys to do it.
They were following her. For the same reason they had roughed her up before and searched her hooch. The problem was that I didn’t know what that reason was.
But the harassment had stopped, it seemed, and somehow Kimiko had come into money. We’d seen evidence of that. She was enjoying herself, putting on the dog at the Lucky Seven, a place that had barred her in the past and had just had one of its employees killed—Miss Pak Ok-suk. Kimiko had to hustle every night just to keep afloat. Suddenly she was flush and coasting.
Perhaps the old crone who ran the club didn’t feel like tussling with Kimiko any longer and let her come and go as she pleased.
Had Kimiko been paid for murdering Pak Ok-suk or for setting her up to be murdered? But why would anyone want to kill a simple business girl?
The first night after the murder, when Kimiko disappeared, where had she gone?
Her friend is murdered. She disappears. When she returns, thugs search her room and keep her under surveillance. Then she comes into money.
She’s got something they want. The only way to find out what is to do the same thing the thugs are doing. Follow her.
Tires screeched in the parking lot outside the coffee shop and somebody leaned heavy on their horn. Ernie.
I got up, pocketed all my change, and pushed through the turnstile doors.
“You’re late.”
“The Nurse wanted me to practice my injection technique.”
We sped up the hill towards Itaewon and Ernie pulled to the side of the road before we got to the turnoff to Kimiko’s hooch. I walked up the road while he waited, the engine idling for a quick takeoff. I stayed across the street from the entrance to the alleyway, hoping I wouldn’t be noticed. I walked up, past the alley, waited a couple of minutes, and then made another pass going downhill. I returned to the jeep.
“He’s still waiting, in a doorway across from her hooch.”
“She’s probably still asleep.”
“Probably.”
“What now?”
“We wait. Hide the jeep.”
Ernie groaned, jammed the gearshift into reverse, and whined down the road and then back into an alley out of sight.
In a few minutes he came around the corner walking towards me.
“I need some coffee.”
“Me too.”
Everything in Itaewon was closed. This part of Seoul was reserved for the night.
The shutters on a market up the road rattled and then one of the panels fell back in. A middle-aged Korean man, in sleeveless T-shirt and pajama bottoms, methodically unlocked and pulled back the protective partitions. We waited until the front of the store was completely open and then sauntered towards the little one-story building. I bought a small bottle of orange juice and Ernie bought some gum. I talked to the old man about coffee. He said they didn’t have any. I told him about how bad we needed it and finally he relented and yelled something to his wife, who was just getting up from her bed on the floor in the room directly behind the store. Two children, about ten and twelve years old, were still asleep under the blankets.
We waited outside, keeping an eye on the alley, while his wife boiled water. I shook my bottle of orange juice and drank it down in one gulp. I returned the empty to the man, who was sweeping behind the counter. His wife, with a robe on now, came out with a tray and poured two glasses full of boiling water and then mixed in generous portions of instant coffee, Maxwell House spelled out in Korean characters. I offered her money. She waved it away and went back to her room.
Outside we sat on stools at a metal table with a big OB beer umbrella over it. The coffee was good. I had been so busy last night that I hadn’t been able to get too drunk.
I felt better than I had in a while. And grateful to the store owner and his wife who had made the coffee for us.
In so many ways we were so different from the Koreans, and sometimes the GIs resented them a lot. But in a thousand small ways the Koreans were extremely generous and friendly. I imagined it was that way with all the people who had misunderstood each other over the centuries. Hatred in war and then friendship, and even love, when you had time to get to know them.
Last night’s booze and this morning’s caffeine were getting to me.
A gnarled stick poked over the wall of the hooch on the corner across the street. I elbowed Ernie. We took our coffee with us and walked back into the store.
A hand reached up on the wall and then another and then a head followed, hooded by gray material. The top of the ten-foot-high wall was studded with various colored shards of broken bottles but the person behind the wall placed a straw mat atop the glass and gingerly pulled herself over. It was a woman. A Buddhist nun. The hood turned into a gray cape and beneath it was a long dress of the same material. She wore soft-soled black shoes and black stockings that disappeared beneath the dress.
She clung to the top of the fence like a cat. Carefully, she lifted the straw mat and threw it back into the courtyard she had just left. Then she dropped herself to the street, hit, and rolled smoothly onto her buttocks and back. A jumpmaster at the Fort Benning Airborne School couldn’t have done better. She popped up, dusted herself off, and tiptoed to the mouth of the alley. She peered around the corner. The hoodlums were half-asleep, their faces turned away from her. She glanced around in our direction.
That’s when I saw her face.
She darted across the alleyway like a large gray mouse. Then she trotted down the hill and slowed to a brisk walk, looking back occasionally, and straightening her shoulders when she realized that no one would be following. She brandished her polished walking stick in front of her and looked for all the world like a proud representative of a religion that had preached peace and mercy for the last twenty-four hundred years.
We put our half-empty glasses down on the counter and waved our thanks to the owner. And then we were running. Ernie had the jeep started and moving before I could climb all the way in.
After Kimiko.
Kimiko knew the hoodlums were waiting for her outside and they had underestimated her. She had put on the Buddhist nun outfit, climbed over the wall that surrounded the cluster of hooches among which she lived, crossed the neighbor’s courtyard, and then climbed the wall that led to the main street running through Itaewon.
She was more careless now because she hadn’t counted on a second set of pursuers.
The jeep hummed through the frigid Korean countryside. The rice paddies were brown and frozen, and most of the trees had long ago dropped their leaves for the winter. Smoke curled from straw-thatched houses, sturdy oxen pulled wooden carts, and heavily bundled children skated on smooth fields of ice.
Ernie had the heater on full blast but it was still cold in the jeep.
“That must be her plan,” Ernie said. “Freeze our balls off before we get to wherever she’s going.”
Kimiko had walked a couple of blocks down the Main Supply Route and then caught a local bus that took her to the Central Seoul Bus Station. It had been a little rough tracking her there. Ernie kept the jeep idling while I scouted around, trying to keep my big six-foot-four body from being too conspicuous. Luckily, it had been easy to spot her from a distance in her Buddhist nun outfit. Unless I had gotten her confused with another nun, in which case we were screwed. But I didn’t think I had. She bought a ticket and boarded a bus heading north. We followed at a respectable distance. There were a number of stops—it wasn’t an express—and at each one Ernie held back a little, keeping the jeep across the street on the blind side of anyone getting off the bus, while I trotted across the road and hid behind whatever was available to see if Kimiko got off.
So far she hadn’t.
I also kept an eye on the back windows of the bus to see if anyone was showing any curiosity about the jeep that was following them. So far no one had.
If the bus driver was anything more than somnolent he must have noticed that we were following. We weren’t trying to be subtle about it because we couldn’t afford to lose her. There was no indication that it bothered him, though.
As we traveled north it became increasingly obvious that this road, known as the MSR, the Main Supply Route, had been built by, and for, the military. Small compounds appeared with greater regularity as the bus drew inexorably closer to the Demilitarized Zone.
I read the signs in Korean: “slow, compound ahead.” As we passed, the armed soldiers blew their whistles and waved us on. Every half mile or so there seemed to be another installation.
One small compound was American. The tall guard at the gate wore a fur-lined winter cap. Its upturned bill made him look like a cossack. Over the guard shack a large sign read: INFORMATION ON NORTH KOREAN INTRUDERS WELCOMED AT THIS GATE.
Then came the roadblocks. Korean soldiers with M-14 rifles peered suspiciously into the bus and then motioned the driver forward to continue the northward journey.
And then the tank traps. Huge cement blocks, weighing tons each—formed enormous overhangs across the road. Loaded with explosives, they would be blown by the last retreating South Korean units—the final attempt to block the advance of the onrushing North Korean tanks.
The bus swam upstream against a river of Korean soldiers. Most had huge packs on their backs, some humped commo gear, and some had machine guns balanced like scales across their shoulders. But they all had a somber and weary look, as if they’d been on this road for years, centuries, a never-ending stream of young men going off to cram their bodies into the insatiable maw of an impervious history.
They were on maneuvers; they had left their base camps and they were moving out. Behind them the deep rumbling of tanks came toward us, the sound carrying like tremors through the cold, packed earth. They lined both sides of the road, and when Ernie followed the bus to a turnoff, he had to flash his lights and wait until there was a break in the endless files to make his left turn.
And then there were no U.S. military compounds, no signal sites, no antiaircraft artillery batteries. Just flat farmland with a few rolling hills between valleys.
In a few more miles we’d come to the foothills of the mountain range that ran along the Korean peninsula like the jagged spine of a long-dead dragon. Where was she going?
The road through the wooded hills narrowed, and gradually there were fewer villages and fewer stops for us to worry about. When the incline really steepened, the road started to twist like a snake as the bus climbed the mountain out of the misty valley. There must have been only a few people on the bus now and Kimiko had to be one of them. Kangnung sat on the other side of the mountain range near the coast of what the Koreans call the East Sea. The rest of the world called it the Sea of Japan.
Suddenly, the bus stopped. There was no village nearby that we could see. Nothing.
Ernie reacted quickly. He zipped past the bus to an outcropping of rock beside the road, and backed the jeep up behind it. We were concealed. He shut off the engine.
The bus idled but not for long. The driver shifted gears and the big powerful diesel groaned slowly up the side of the mountain, picking up speed as it went. We chanced a look.
Across the road, a grove of poplar trees rustled in the breeze, but there were no buildings and no one there, only a wooden sign and a small footpath that led off past the poplars into the evergreens.
Ernie looked at me for a decision. We could always catch up with the bus but we were taking the risk that Kimiko would get off while we weren’t watching. I told him to wait while I investigated.
The sign was painted with an inverted swastika, the ancient symbol for a Buddhist temple that predated the Nazis by about two and a half millennia. The sign, sharpened at one end like an arrow, pointed up the path. The fresh imprints of two small feet led away from the bus stop. Soft-soled shoes. I trotted back to the jeep feeling particularly proud of the Indian blood of my ancestors from Mexico.
Of course, the pathway had been carefully raked and any idiot could have followed those tracks. The Apache trackers didn’t have to worry about their place in history.
Ernie chained the jeep and we started after her. A few yards up the footpath we heard it. It wasn’t just a sound but a long low reverberation that passed through the brush and the forest that surrounded us and then entered our bodies, seeping into our bones and our innards, lifting them gently on a slow wave and then passing serenely by.
A gong. It was calling supplicants to prayer.
That was us, a couple of supplicants. The kind who sit on a stool waiting for the bar to open, hoping the bartender won’t be upset at the intrusion and will slam a cold one down in front of us, like some sort of nugget of holy wisdom.
From the low timbre of the gong I figured we weren’t very far at all from the temple. I didn’t want to stumble upon someone too soon, so I motioned to Ernie for us to get off the footpath, and we crashed straight up a hill through the underbrush until we found a good vantage point.
The temple was made of wood that must have come from the surrounding trees. Except for its enormous size and the smooth, finely shaped slats, it would have looked something like a log cabin. There was a gateway, a large courtyard of raked gravel, and then the main hall. The roof of the hall was shingled and turned up slightly at the ends like the raised toe of a young girl in a traditional dance. Life-size figurines of monkeys lined the roof, protecting the holy place from demons. The foundation of the big hall was made of squared stones neatly fitted together.