Neither Fred Ammerman nor his attorney paid any attention to Mi-hwa. Aaron Murakami seemed to ask his client one final question. Vehemently, Ammerman shook his head. No.
Like a collapsing doll, Mi-hwa Ammerman sank back into her seat. I expected her to start crying again. Instead she stuffed her damp handkerchief into her open handbag.
Aaron Murakami rose to his feet. “Your Honor,” he said in English, “my client has decided to plead not guilty.”
A murmur of disapproval ran through the crowd. Dutifully, the translator repeated what Murakami had said but by then no one was listening.
Mi-hwa’s face was set like stone and drained of color. She sat perfectly still, staring straight ahead, her small hand tucked inside her large leather handbag.
I elbowed Ernie. “She’s taking it hard.”
Ernie glanced over at Mi-hwa Ammerman. “Yeah,” Ernie said, “but the woman Ammerman raped took it even harder.”
The prosecutor, a dapper Korean man in a pin-striped suit, rose to his feet. He cleared his throat and started to drone on again in Korean legalese.
Since he’d been brought into the room, not once had Ammerman acknowledged the presence of his wife or even so much as glanced in her direction. Instead he glared at the prosecutor, as if he wanted to leap across the room and throttle his neck as he’d throttled the neck of Mrs. Yi Won-suk.
Ernie yawned and tried to make himself more comfortable on the wooden bench. We had already discussed which nightclubs we’d be hitting tonight. Before leaving Seoul, we’d changed a small pile of military payment certificates into won. The money would be put to its usual good use-cold beer and wild times, not necessarily in that order.
While I was pondering these soothing thoughts, a glint of metal flashed from the seating area behind Fred Ammerman. Without thinking, I rose to my feet.
Mi-hwa Ammerman, her face streaming tears, was standing now, her handbag dropped to the floor.
Without conscious thought, I lunged toward her. A long butcher knife appeared in her slender hand. She raised it. She stepped forward.
A shout bellowed through the hall.
I shoved people out of the way and stepped over benches, trying to reach her, knowing all the time that I wouldn’t make it.
Fred Ammerman never turned fully around.
His attorney noticed that something was amiss and as he swiveled he instinctively held up his hands. A yell erupted from his belly but it was too late. Ammerman’s bearded face was turning toward Mi-hwa as she leaned over the railing, raised the glistening blade, and brought it down full force into her husband’s back.
Fred Ammerman let out a grunt of surprise. No more. I kept moving forward and was only a few feet from him now. Mi-hwa held onto the hilt of the blade, shoving it deeper into heaving flesh. Gore spurted from Fred Ammerman’s back like the unraveling of a scarlet ribbon.
The confusion in Ammerman’s eyes turned to dull knowledge. Then, a split second later, that knowledge turned to pain.
Aaron Murakami reached for Mi-hwa. I leapt forward and elbowed him out of the way. Uniformed police were now surging toward us. I folded myself over Mi-hwa, enveloping her in my arms. She let go of the butcher knife and leaned backward, allowing me to pull her away from the railing and protect her there, while other men hurtled toward us. Bodies thudded into bodies but I held on, not letting them have her.
She kept her eyes riveted on the back of her husband, as if mesmerized by the damage she had wrought.
Ernie grabbed hold of Ammerman. One of the Korean cops jerked the butcher knife out of the blood-soaked back. That’s when Ammerman stood upright, supported by Ernie and Murakami, and then, as if someone had sucker punched him in the gut, he folded forward. Bright red blood spurted from his mouth.
Mi-hwa Ammerman didn’t cry, she didn’t struggle, she just let me hold her as she stared at her husband, as if amazed at what she’d just done.
And then someone jostled us and more men surrounded me, and despite my best efforts, Mi-hwa Ammerman was dragged from my arms. I followed her out of the main hall and down the corridor, but then she disappeared into the screaming, moving crowd. I returned to the courtroom.
Ernie grabbed me by the shoulders and stared into my face. “You still with me?”
I nodded.
He slapped me lightly on the cheek, making sure I was all right. Then he said, “That’s one chick who knows how to save face.”
On the floor, the thing that was once Fred Ammerman shuddered. Then his body convulsed and a whoosh of air exited his mouth, like a great bellows emptying itself in one final rush. The hot breath rose to the top of the stone rafters far above our heads, lingered for a while, and then was gone.
THE WIDOW PO
“Talking to dead people,” Ernie said, “isn’t exactly my idea of a good time.”
Stone walls loomed above us as we wound our way through narrow cobbled lanes that led up the side of Namsan Mountain in a district of Seoul known as Huam-dong. Night shadows closed in on us, pressing down. A few dark clouds. No moon yet.
“You won’t be talking to dead people,” I told Ernie. “That’s the job of the mudang.” The female shaman.
Using the dim yellow light of an occasional street lamp, I glanced at the scrap of paper in my hand, checking the address against the engraved brass placards embedded into wooden gateways: 132 bonji, 16 ho. We were close.
The request had been a simple one, from Miss Choi Yong-kuang, my Korean language teacher: to come to a kut. I’d learn something about ancient Korean religious practices and I’d be able to observe a famous Korean mudang first hand. And I’d be able to hear from an American GI who’d been disrupting this mudang’s séances for the last few months. A GI who-so the mudang claimed-had been dead for twenty years.
“Bunch of bull, if you ask me,” Ernie said.
“They’ll have soju,” I told Ernie. “And lots of women.”
“Men don’t attend these things?”
“Not unless invited.”
Ernie gazed ahead into the growing gloom. “And you’ll be able to get near your Korean language teacher. What’s her name?”
“Choi,” I told him.
Miss Choi was a tall young woman with a nice figure and a smile that could illuminate a hall. When she asked me to meet her after class, I would’ve said yes to just about anything. Even a séance. Ernie and I hadn’t made this trip official. We were off duty now, carrying our badges but not our.45s. And we hadn’t told anyone at 8th Army CID about our plans to attend a kut.
Who needed their laughter?
The lane turned sharply uphill and became so narrow that we had to proceed single file. Beneath our feet, sudsy water gurgled in a brick channel. The air reeked of waste and ammonia.
Finally, the lane opened into an open space in front of a huge red gate. Behind the gate a large house loomed. Upturned blue tile pointed toward the sky. Clay figurines of monkeys perched on the ridges of the roof, frightening away evil spirits.
At the heavy wooden door, I paused and listened. No sound. It appeared to be a huge house and there was no telling how far the grounds extended behind this gate.
Ernie admired the thick granite walls. “Not our normal hangout.”
Once again, I checked the address against the embossed plate and then pressed the buzzer. A tinny voice responded.
“Yoboseiyo?”
In my most carefully pronounced Korean, I explained who I was and why I was here. The voice told me to wait. A few seconds later, footsteps. Then, like a secret panel, a small door hidden in the big gateway creaked open. An old woman stood behind, smiling and bowing. Ernie and I ducked through into a wide courtyard.