“That’s all you do with your. 45,” I said.
“But that’s different.”
“How?”
“After I point and aim and then pull the trigger,” he said, “people start paying attention to me. With this piece of shit, they just laugh.”
We backed out of the parking space, turned around, and waited until the khaki-clad guard pulled open the gate. Then we drove out into freedom.
“Where’s this place again?” Ernie asked.
I had an army-issue map open on my lap. It had been printed almost twenty years ago, so some of the roads had changed: some had been paved, others had disappeared.
“Hang a left up ahead.”
“Past that oxcart?”
“Yeah.”
We were way out in the boonies. The Chinese characters I’d copied off Pruchert’s poster were the name of a Buddhist temple. Even without being able to read all of the characters, I could understand that much because I knew the character for the word “temple.” The rest was just a matter of looking them up in the dictionary. Unfortunately, out here in the countryside in the middle of Kyongsan Province, some twenty klicks north of Pusan, I didn’t have a Chinese-English dictionary with me.
“So, how you going to read it?” Ernie asked.
“I’ll get help.”
At the first village we came to, I had Ernie pull over in front of a shack with a sign tacked to the door. The sign was a sheet of red paper with a single Chinese character printed on it, pronounced in Korean as chom. The word meant “divination.” It was the home of a fortune-teller.
“Fortune-teller?” Ernie asked. “I thought you didn’t believe in that stuff.”
“I don’t. But the fortune-tellers can usually read Chinese characters, because they have to look up astrological signs in the Book of Changes.”
“And that has what to do with us finding Pruchert?”
“They’ll be able to tell me the name of the temple that poster came from. And probably where it’s located.”
Ernie shook his head. “I’ll wait here.”
I didn’t tell him how relieved I was to hear that.
I knocked on the flimsy wooden door and a few seconds later sandals shuffled across dirt. The door opened. A toothless old woman peered out. I spoke to her in Korean.
“Please help me, Grandmother,” I said. “I have some Chinese characters that I can’t read. Maybe you could read them for me and help me find a Buddhist temple.”
The wrinkles and dark splotches on her face folded into a huge smile. She motioned to me to enter and had me follow her across a courtyard, and sat me down on a warm ondol floor. The room smelled of pungent, nameless aromas. We talked a while, and I showed her the characters and she read them immediately. Then she started pointing and giving me directions, and I tried to get her to show me on the map, but she wasn’t used to that. A young woman came in with two cups of cold barley tea.
“My granddaughter,” the old woman said. I nodded to the young girl, and she backed out of the room.
I listened carefully to the old woman describing directions, trying on my own to follow her on the map. But what really clinched it was when she told me that the temple was on the side of Chonhuang Mountain. Chonhuang meant A Thousand Emperors, and even I could read those characters. I found Chonhuang Mountain on the map and saw nearby the reversed swastika that indicated a Buddhist temple. With my pencil, I circled the swastika.
I drank the tea, thanked the woman profusely, and offered her 5,000 won. She said that was too much and tried to turn it down, but I convinced her that she’d done me a great service. Her granddaughter smiled as I walked across the courtyard, bowing deeply. Just as I was about to duck through the small door, the old woman scurried forward, stepping halfway out after me, and grabbed my arm. She made me stand like that, completely still, while she clutched my forearm with both her gnarled hands. She lowered her head. Suddenly everything was quiet around us, as if the entire countryside had gone still. I could barely hear my own breathing, and I couldn’t hear hers at all. Her grip tightened, the fingers digging deeply into flesh, cutting off circulation. The old woman’s body shuddered. Then, after what seemed a long time to stand in the middle of a door, her moist eyes looked up at me.
“Chosim haseiyo,” she said. Please be careful.
“I’m always careful, Grandmother,” I said.
“But you must be especially careful now. There is something waiting for you. Something awful and something very sick.”
“What’s waiting for me? A man?”
“Like a man,” she said, “but different. Different here.” She tapped her chest. “You must not let him drown you.”
“Drown me?”
Then she let go of my forearm and stepped back. I felt blood rush back toward my fingers.
“Who is he?” I asked.
The old woman shook her head, no longer making eye contact. Finally she took a step back, pulling the wooden handle after her. Ancient hinges screeched like a thousand children screaming.
The door slammed shut.
Early that morning, at the Hialeah Compound Consolidated Motor Pool, Ernie and I had been forced to cool our heels while we waited to be issued transportation. I took advantage of the delay to fill Ernie in on what I’d learned from Riley about the previous night’s message from 8th Army.
Marnie had complained to Mr. Broughton, the USO head of entertainment, that she and the other musicians were being stalked again. Things were disappearing, according to her, most recently two sets of underwear that the keyboard player had left in the dressing room at Osan Air Force Base.
“Probably one of the zoomies,” Ernie said, “jealous of her wardrobe.”
“There are other things missing too,” I told him, “like a set of drumsticks and another microphone.”
“Lost in the loading and unloading,” Ernie snorted, crossing his arms.
“Maybe. And they’re seeing faces again.”
“In the windows?”
“Where else?”
“Just fun-loving G.I. s,” Ernie explained.
“Voyeurs.”
“Yeah. That too. So, why us? Why not send some guys who are doing nothing but sitting around with their thumbs up their rears?”
“Two reasons, according to Riley. Number one, the Country Western All Stars are working their way south. Tonight Waegwan, after that Camp Henry in Taegu, and, at the end of the week, Hialeah Compound in Pusan.”
“So we have to drive all the way up to Waegwan just to play babysitter?”
I nodded.
“What’s the second reason?” Ernie asked.
“Because they specifically said they wanted us and nobody else. The MPs who were assigned the last few days didn’t work out, according to Marnie, and all the girls voted that they wanted you and me back.”
“They own us,” Ernie said.
“As long as they’re here in-country entertaining the troops and as long as the Eighth Army honchos want to keep kissing their butts, you’re right. They own us.”
“And if the Blue Train rapist strikes again?”
I had no answer for that. Tonight, we’d drive the seventy or so kilometers to Waegwan, schmooze with the girls during their show, and then make sure they were safely tucked in for the night. After that, we’d return to Pusan as time permitted.
“You called Kill?”
“Left a message for him.”
“He’ll be delighted to learn that we’ve been pulled off the case.”
“Not pulled off,” I said. “We have to do both.”
Ernie groaned. And groaned more when he saw the sedan we’d been issued.
The craggy peaks of Chonhuang Mountain were covered in mist. So far today, we’d been lucky because, although the sky had been gray and overcast, it hadn’t rained. The roads we were traversing were mostly dirt, with plenty of ruts indicating how impassable they’d be in a storm. Ernie shifted the old sedan into low gear, and it coughed and churned its way up a winding pathway. Off to the side, sheer cliffs fell into tree-choked valleys.