The Wandering Ghost (16 page)

Later, the
bruja
arrived. She burnt some bones of a crow and added smelly herbs to the small fire but this time I didn’t complain. She promised not to chase my mother away but just to talk to her. The trance lasted hours and I fell asleep. But when the old crone shook me awake, she grabbed my hand in her cold fist and told me that my mother would always be with me.

Ever since then, she has.

As the corpse rolled toward his feet, Ernie leaped backwards.

“What the—” After the body stopped rolling and Ernie managed to gather his courage, I handed his flashlight back to him and he kneeled and studied the pile of clothing beneath us. I held the beam of my flashlight on a face mostly covered by a broad-brimmed hat. Then I leaned forward and touched my fingers to a fleshy neck. No pulse. I pushed deeper. Was I sensing warmth? No. None. How long had this man been dead? Hours, I thought. Involuntarily, my hand recoiled. Ernie slipped the hat back to reveal a face.

Pak Tong-i. Fat tongue hanging lewdly to the side of purple lips. Face flushed red. Not red like a beet but a red so bright that it looked like a clot of blood held together by a transparent membrane of flesh.

We stood silent, trying to gather our wits. Trying to be professional. But in the middle of the night in this cold, cement office building with only the soft green glow of a lamp to comfort us, it wasn’t easy. Death never is.

Taking a deep breath, I checked for wounds. I took my time about it, loosening his clothes, making sure I didn’t miss anything. No physical trauma, not even bruises, except for chafing around his wrists. He’d been bound. And there were burns around his neck. Rope burns. The lines ran up his pudgy neck in a steady progression.

“They interrogated him,” Ernie said finally. “Tightening the rope each time he refused to answer.”

I checked the bone beneath the flesh of the neck. It didn’t seem to be damaged and his air passage seemed clear. The rope burns on his neck were superficial. Strangulation was not the cause of death. The vermilion hue of his face told its own story.

“Heart attack,” I said. “While he was being questioned and systematically strangled, he popped a valve.”

“Heart attack, strangulation, either way it’s murder,” Ernie said.

We searched Pak’s pockets and his wallet. Keys, coins, a few wrinkled
won
notes. Ernie was the one who noticed it first. A bracelet tied above his elbow, hidden by the long sleeves of his shirt and jacket.

“Look at this,” Ernie said, holding it up in the dim light.

I took the item from his hand and shined my flashlight on shimmering silver. An amulet. Silver chain, silver heart-shaped setting. Inside, a tiny color photograph of a woman. Overly made-up, bright smile, cheekbones carved from granite, dark curly hair. Korean. On the back of the amulet an engraving in
hanmun
, Chinese characters:
JINAIJOK YONG
-
AI
. My darling Yong-ai.

“At least we know what she looks like,” I said.

“Who?”

“Kim Yong-ai. This is her.”

“So Pak Tong-i,” Ernie said, “was getting it on with Kim Yong-ai who was the stripper who was the friend of Corporal Jill Matthewson.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“And Pak didn’t tell us anything because he was covering up for his girlfriend and Corporal Jill.”

“Sounds likely.”

“But covering up what?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe they never owed two thousand dollars. Maybe they still owe two thousand dollars. Maybe Pak paid it for them. Maybe not.”

“What you’re saying,” Ernie said, “is we still don’t know squat.”

“That’s about it. Except we do know that they ran away and someone is still after them. Someone who is willing to kill.”

“And that someone has Kim Yong-ai’s file and a big head start on us.”

Downstairs a door slammed.

We froze. Then Ernie tiptoed to the office door, opened it slightly, and listened. Footsteps tromped up cement stairs. A pack of them. KNPs? Most likely.

If we stayed we could tell them the truth: We are two 8th Army Criminal Investigation Division agents investigating a case. Except we’d have to explain to the KNPs why we’d broken into Pak Tong-i’s office illegally. And we’d have to explain that we had nothing to do with his death. Korean forensic techniques are not the best. Neither are the 2nd Division MPI’s. Still, once the time of death was established, they’d see that Pak must’ve died before we arrived on the scene. That is presupposing that we’d be able to prove that we arrived on the scene only a few minutes ago. The assumption of both the Korean National Police and the 2nd Infantry Division would be that we were guilty until proven innocent. Ernie and I would be stuck in a jail cell for days, hoping to prove our innocence, while whoever actually committed the crime stalked Kim Yong-ai and Jill Matthewson at leisure.

All this ran through my mind in less than a second.

Ernie, apparently, had already made his decision. “Come on!”

I slipped the silver amulet in my pocket, stepped away from the body of Pak Tong-i, and followed Ernie into the hallway. We climbed the staircase swiftly and silently.

Footsteps pounded after us, then someone shouted.

The muscles on my back knotted, anticipating the searing impact of a bullet. We kept climbing. Then we ran, flat out. Panicked.

Kimchee jars were arrayed along a short cement wall that lined the edge of the building’s roof. Ernie didn’t slow down. He charged the precipice and when he hit the short cement wall he leaped into the air. I expected him to plummet to the dark depths below but he cleared the ten-foot span and landed safely on the roof of the opposite building.

I hesitated and looked down.

KNPs. Swarms of them. Shouting and pointing but no one looking up.

“Move it!” Ernie hollered.

Footsteps clattered behind me and two KNPs emerged from the door at the top of the stairwell. I turned back to Ernie. Across the divide, he was motioning for me to jump. I looked back at the cops. One of them reached for his pistol. That made up my mind for me. From a standing start, I jumped. It seemed as if I hovered over the dark void forever. Finally, my front foot hit cement. Ernie grabbed my waist and pulled me over the ledge onto the roof.

The two KNPs charged straight at us. When they reached the low cement wall, they hesitated. I can’t blame them. Ernie had made the leap look easy but he was over a half a foot taller than either one of these policemen, his legs were longer and, more importantly, Ernie was crazy. I could almost hear the question in their minds: “Are we paid enough to do this?”

The answer, apparently, was no.

Instead the two men pulled their pistols, aimed them at us, and shouted, “
Chongji
!” Halt!

Ernie and I crouched and low-crawled until we found cover behind metal vents.

“What now?” I asked.

“Easy,” Ernie replied. “We hop to the next building.”

“They’ll shoot us.”

“From that distance? Come on.”

Without further discussion, Ernie was on his feet and charging toward the far edge of the roof. When he leaped, a couple of rounds were fired but they missed him by a mile. I knelt like a runner at the starting blocks, taking deep breaths, trying to encourage myself, when from deep in the bowels of the building, boots pounded on cement. A herd of them. That was all the encouragement I needed.

I dashed toward the wall and this time I cleared the gap easily, landed on my feet, rolled, and kept moving. Ernie had already reached the next roof but from the light of the half moon I could tell there was no building after that. Not one, anyway, that was three stories tall.

When I arrived on the roof of the fourth building, Ernie was kicking at a door. He looked at me, his face lathered in sweat, exasperated.

“Can you kick this thing in?”

“Stand back,” I said.

I stood with my side facing the wooden door, flexing my knees and half squatting, feeling the spring in my thighs. Since arriving in Korea I’d been training in the Korean art of Taekwondo, which literally means “the path of kicking and punching.” At six foot four, with long legs, I believed that my side kick was one of the best in the business. I inhaled and let the air out slowly. From below, the shouts of Korean National Policemen wafted on the cold night air.

“Would you kick the goddamn thing in, for chrissakes!” Ernie shouted.

I ignored him, fully in a trance now. The air drifted effortlessly from my lungs and, without thinking, I hopped forward and my foot slammed into lumber.

The door burst inward.

Ernie ran past me and his footsteps pounded on squeaking wood. I followed him down a dark staircase. It was narrow and wound back on itself. Finally, when I figured we had descended to the second floor, Ernie turned off the stairwell and down a narrow hallway. Moonlight shined through a far window. Shoes and slippers and an occasional metal pee pot sat in front of closed wooden doors. The ceiling was so low that I had to duck. Ernie reached the end of the hallway and zipped to his right. When I rounded the corner he had opened a window and was climbing out.

Ernie lowered himself and then he let go. I heard a thud, looked out, and saw Ernie dusting himself off in a brick alleyway just wide enough for one person. I climbed through the window. Ernie braced me when I hit so I didn’t fall backward. Then he pulled me toward the alley that ran behind the building. He squatted, peeked around the corner, and abruptly jerked his head back.

“KNPs,” he whispered. “Off to the left about twenty meters. But there’s an alley to our right less than ten meters away. We’ll be exposed for a few yards but once we jog behind the brick wall, we’ll be out of their line of sight. If we move quickly, they might not spot us. Even if they do, we’ll have a head start and a clear run into downtown TDC.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“That alley could be a dead end.”

“You’re too negative, Sueño.”

Maybe I was. But Ernie didn’t give me time to think about it. He peeked around the corner again, waved for me to follow, and trotted out onto the dark path. The KNPs didn’t seem to notice. They were probably watching the roofs or checking the narrow walkways in front of them. But as soon as I emerged, someone shouted and then a whistle blew and it was as if the entire police force of TDC had zeroed in on my back. We ran. Ernie jogged to his left at the next alley and I followed. It was narrow, maybe six feet wide, lined by brick and wood and cement block walls on either side, protecting small courtyards and homes. The only illumination was from moonlight. The homes on either side were dark and there were no street lamps. I couldn’t tell where I was stepping.

Korean sewers run underground, covered by stone blocks with fist-sized vents, lowered into place, not cemented. These blocks are sometimes lifted out for one reason or another or, more often, crushed by something heavy rolling over them. So you never know when a gaping hole may appear in an otherwise level flagstone walkway. These thoughts surged through my mind as I peered into the darkness, moving cautiously, hoping not to crash into a hole and break my leg.

No similar doubts plagued Ernie. He ran flat-out down the middle of the alley as if he were sprinting on a groomed track at the U.S. Olympic trials.

Ernie twisted and turned like a jackrabbit evading hounds. The warren of homes we passed stretched from the western edge of Tongduchon toward the east. Where we were exactly, I didn’t know. Neither, apparently, did the KNPs. At intersections I slowed, glanced backward, and saw nothing coming at us through the darkness.

Finally, after a sharp turn, I almost plowed into Ernie.

Breathing heavily, he gazed down a slope at the shuttered environs of the TDC bar district. The lanes were a little wider here, with shops and bars and coffeehouses, their neon signs switched off.

“Anybody following?” he asked.

“I think we lost ’em.”

I bent forward and placed my hands on my knees, trying to regain my breath.

Ernie pointed. “There’s an alley off to the left, behind that line of bars. It leads to the railroad tracks and beyond that the main gate.”

“We can’t go there,” I said.

GIs passing through the main gate of Camp Casey this late would be arrested by the MPs for curfew violation and turned over to their unit commanders in the morning. With our 8th Army CID badges, Ernie and I were amongst the elite few in Korea who were exempt from the midnight to four curfew. The MPs wouldn’t arrest us but they would note the time of our arrival in the duty log. Under the circumstances not an entry we wanted made.

And the KNPs would almost certainly be waiting for us in front of the main gate. Even though they hadn’t been able to identify us specifically, the Korean cops knew—by our height and by our clothing—that we were foreigners. And only one type of foreigner lived in Tongduchon: American GIs.

“So where to?” Ernie asked.

In the Seoul bar district of Itaewon, our home turf, there were plenty of business girls and nightclub owners who would take us in. At least until curfew was over. But up here we were strangers. Mostly. Ok-hi and Jeannie knew us. But the Silver Dragon was on the far side of the bar district.

I was about to respond to Ernie’s question when he shoved me against the wall.

“White mice,” he whispered.

A few yards in front of us an American-made jeep, painted white, cruised by slowly. We stepped back farther into the shadows of a recessed gateway. Crossed beams from the jeep’s headlights caressed the brick in front of us. We held our breath. The lights never faltered. They continued illuminating the brick wall, skipped over us in our dark enclave, and moved on.

When the sound of the jeep’s engine faded, we started to breathe again. It figured that the curfew police would patrol the bar district more diligently than they patrolled other parts of town. Trying to make it all the way to the Silver Dragon was too risky. So where could we go? There was only one other person in town that we knew.

“The Black Cat Club,” I said. “It’s closer. And some of the girls have hooches out back.”

“Maybe they’re busy.”