“I am sorry,” Kill said in English. “There is much bad feeling in Pusan. About the Blue Train rapist. The military has been alerted and they know that the perpetrator is probably an American soldier. So in their minds, every soldier is a suspect.”
“You think that’s why we were arrested?”
“I’m sure of it. The sergeant who detained you told me himself that he had been carefully checking every foreigner he came across. And when he saw you two, out so late, it occurred to him that Ernie, Agent Bascom here, looked like a rapist.”
I glanced at Ernie. “He does, a little.”
Ernie flipped me a quick bird.
Inspector Kill shook his head. “Ignorant, to think that criminals can be spotted by their looks.”
“Will he be in much trouble?”
“Yes. For the embarrassment he’s brought to his superiors.”
“No harm done,” Ernie said, rubbing his back. “Except for a few bruises.”
That was Ernie. He held a grudge for exactly five seconds. I was a little less forgiving. My head still pounded with a splitting headache, and my nose had been bruised again, more red and tender than it had ever been. Still, I had a job to do, and that ROK Army sergeant would probably be scrubbing latrines for the next six months.
“What happened to our sedan?” I asked.
“We’ll have someone fetch it for you. ”
“Where are we going now?”
“To Weyworth,” Kill said. “For the moment, we have him surrounded.”
Curfew had just ended. In the darkness, an occasional three-wheeled vehicle purred in from the countryside, a canvas-covered load of turnips or cabbage or garlic balanced on the bed of the truck, heading for the produce market. A man in a gray smock pushed a trash cart into a dark alley. Ambitious cab drivers were parked at the entrances to dimly lit tourist hotels, sitting with their arms crossed and snoring in the front seat, dreaming desperately of a fat fare. Old women, their heads covered with scarves, whisked debris from the front of their homes, brandishing short straw brooms.
The Five Star Yoguan was a four-story brick edifice with a long neon sign bolted to its side. The name was written vertically in hangul script and at the bottom was a half-circle with three wriggly lines rising from it, the symbol for hot baths.
“He’s in room 307,” Kill said. “I have two men on the roof and four men stationed on the stairwell halfway up from the second floor.”
And another half dozen Korean National Policemen standing outside here with us. A drizzling mist from the ocean suffused the world with the odor of fish, a fleshy smell, reminding us that the sea was a living, breathing thing, an overpowering thing. We stood across the street from the yoguan, beneath a striped canvas awning in front of a small grocery store that was barred with an iron grating. Shivering.
“How’d you find him?” I asked.
“He registered under another name,” Kill replied. “But the local constables had been ordered to check every foreigner in every hotel or yoguan in the area. Once we located him, we put him under surveillance. Last night, a Korean woman with a small child came to visit him. The constable stopped her after she left and she admitted that the man inside was Weyworth.”
“The child was half-American?” I asked.
“Yes. A girl.”
Jeannie’s mother, I thought. Weyworth must’ve contacted her while he was in hiding.
“So we’re all here,” Ernie said. “Let’s kick the freaking door in and get this over with.”
Mr. Kill nodded. He barked commands to a couple of uniformed officers, and they scurried off around the edge of the building. We marched to the front of the yoguan. The double front doors were unlocked. Kill pushed through and we followed him into the darkness. Without taking off our shoes, we stepped up onto raised varnished flooring and then climbed a narrow stairwell, steps creaking angrily beneath us. Halfway up, we found four bored-looking uniformed cops. They straightened as Kill approached.
The hasp of a glassed-in case was broken. Inside, a neatly folded fire hose sat wedged between brackets and a sign above said Pisang Yong. Emergency use only. Other brackets sat empty.
“Where’s the extinguisher?” I asked.
Kill shrugged. The exterior of this building was made of brick, but the interior was all wood. Fire safety is a big issue in Korea, especially with these old ondol buildings being heated by flaming charcoal briquettes.
Kill whispered something to the four cops and we continued up to the third floor. Down a vinyl-covered hallway, we found room number 307. The door was small-Ernie and I would have to crouch to get through-and there was one pair of shoes out front.
Ernie knelt and examined the inner labels.
“PX,” he whispered to me. I nodded.
Kill raised his eyebrows and gestured toward the door, as if asking who wanted to go first. Ernie stepped in front of the door, braced himself, and then raised his foot and slammed it sole-first, with all his weight behind it, into the rickety wooden door. The door burst open. Like a cat, Kill darted into the room. Then me. Then Ernie.
The Republic of Korea, in the early seventies, did not have a drug problem. Marijuana, even hashish, was tolerated because the Koreans see those things as herbs, natural products of the earth, and not drugs. Besides, the hardworking and ambitious Korean populace wasn’t interested in marijuana and hashish. The little that was grown in-country was almost exclusively sold outside military compounds to American G.I. s. Heroin, opium, cocaine-all the harder drugs-were absolutely prohibited by the Korean government. The penalty for trafficking in them was death; a penalty that, more than once, had been enforced. As such, no one but the extremely foolhardy ever tried to move any hard stuff into the Republic of Korea.
For Ernie, this was good. Like many G.I. s who’d served a tour in Vietnam, he’d developed a drug habit. And after two tours, the habit had become an addiction. Being assigned to Korea, however, had saved him from that habit. Heroin wasn’t available. Even if it had been, Ernie was heroically fighting off the urge to use the stuff, replacing it with a drug that was not only approved, but even encouraged, by the honchos of the 8th United States Army: alcohol. In the Class VI store on compound, a quart of Gilbey’s gin could be purchased for ninety-nine cents, Johnnie Walker Red for less than four dollars. Regular-priced drinks in the NCO Club used to be fifteen cents for a can of beer, twenty-five cents for a highball. Both prices had recently been raised to thirty-five cents, causing an uproar among people like Staff Sergeant Riley and other aficionados of the distilled and brewed arts. At happy hour, however, which was held daily, the price of either a beer or a shot of liquor dropped to a dime. With these kind of prices, who could afford not to drink? Certainly not me, and certainly not Ernie. As long as I’d known him, Ernie had been completely over his heroin habit. Or at least that’s how it had seemed until we burst into room 307 and found Specialist Four Nicholas Q. Weyworth spread-eagled on his sleeping mat on the warm ondol floor of the Five Star Yoguan.
Ernie sniffed the air. Later, he told me he could smell it.
Mr. Kill checked Weyworth’s neck. Still a pulse. Still breathing.
Near Weyworth’s sleeping mat, a red cylinder lay on the floor. Weyworth moaned. He seemed to be coming to. At least we wouldn’t have to carry him out. I knelt to examine the cylinder, already knowing what it was: the fire extinguisher. Apparently, as stoned as Weyworth had been, he still maintained the presence of mind to want a fire extinguisher nearby. I was about to raise myself back to my feet when Ernie shouted.
“Drop!”
I did. Letting myself go completely, I collapsed facedown onto the floor. Behind me Weyworth wrestled with blankets, and just inches above my head something heavy whooshed through the air. With a jarring thud, it smashed into wood. Ernie and Kill leaped on Weyworth. He screamed. They struggled. I looked up and saw an ax, a short-handled firefighting ax, wedged into the wall just inches above where my head would’ve been. An ax that we later found fit perfectly into the empty brackets in the fire-extinguisher case. Savagely, Ernie punched Weyworth one, two, then three times. He lay still.