I showed my badge to the two officers behind the counter and told them we were there to see Inspector Gil Kwon-up. The young woman’s eyes widened slightly, and without answering she lifted a phone, pressed a couple of buttons, and then whispered into it urgently, swiveling away from us and covering her mouth with her small hand.
“Cute,” Ernie said.
The male cop’s eyes crinkled.
“Easy, Ernie,” I said. “Don’t start making passes before we’ve even gotten through the door.”
Ernie reached in his pocket, pulled out a stick of ginseng gum, unwrapped it, and stuck it in his mouth. “You worry too much, Sueno.”
Finally, the young woman hung up the phone, turned, and gave me directions in broken English on how to reach the office of Inspector Gil Kwon-up, better known as Mr. Kill. I smiled and thanked her, and she stood and placed clasped hands in front of her blue skirt and bowed her head until her bangs hung straight down. Before we left, Ernie offered her a stick of ginseng gum, but she waved her flat palm negatively and backed away, her face turning red. The male cop glared at Ernie. Ernie shrugged and stuck the gum back in his pocket.
On the way up the elevator, I said, “You embarrassed that girl.”
“Bull. She loved every minute of it.”
When we reached the sixth floor, we stepped into a tiled hallway. Typewriters clattered and uniformed officers scurried back and forth on what appeared to be extremely important missions. I was about to stop one of them to ask where I could find Inspector Gil Kwon-up when a gaggle of men in suits emerged from one of the doors and hurtled down the hallway toward us. The man in front I recognized: Inspector Gil himself.
“You’re late,” he said. “Come on.”
As he rushed past us, he used the American gesture of crooking his forefinger, indicating we should follow. We did. He didn’t take the elevator but rather headed for a door marked Pisang-ku, emergency exit. We trotted down six flights of stairs. At the bottom we emerged out of the back door of the building into a parking lot crammed with small blue Hyundai sedans. One of them rolled to a stop in front of us and the doors popped open. Mr. Kill gestured for Ernie and me to climb into the back seat. He sat up front, next to the driver. The driver was a female officer with a curly shag hairdo that just reached the collar of her blue blouse. Her flat upturned-brim cap sat snugly atop the cascade of black hair. Ernie was craning his neck to get a better look at her but she kept her eyes strictly on the road as we zoomed out of the parking lot and into the midst of the swirling Seoul traffic.
“This is Officer Oh,” Inspector Gil said, without further explanation.
She nodded but did not turn back to look at us.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Where else?” Gil said. “To the scene of the crime. The game, as your British cousins so aptly put it, is afoot. We have no time to lose.”
“You believe he’ll strike again?” Ernie asked.
“Undoubtedly. He has everyone on the run now, doesn’t he? He’ll want to press that advantage and press it hard.”
Even though we’d worked with him before, it always took me a while to adjust to Inspector Gil’s fluency with the English language. He’d studied in the States, not only at an international police academy set up to train allied police officers in anti-Communist operations, but also at one of the Ivy League universities. I forget which one. And he read a lot, both in Korean and English and sometimes in classical Chinese.
“Why did you choose us for this assignment?” Ernie asked.
“You chose yourselves.”
When he didn’t elaborate, Ernie took the bait. “Okay, Inspector, how exactly did we choose ourselves?”
“This morning, when I took control of the crime scene from the Itaewon KNP station, the first thing I did was send my men out to canvas the neighborhood. At the open-air market, they found a vendor who told them that two Americans had been up at dawn, asking him if he’d seen something that had been left at his stall last night. He didn’t know who you were or why you were asking, but he told my man he’d been startled.”
“Startled by what?”
“Working in Itaewon, this man sees many Americans walking back and forth on their way to the military compound. Occasionally one of them even stops at his stall and purchases some vegetables or fruit. But the communication is always accomplished by pointing and hand gestures. This American, the one who asked him questions this morning, could speak the language of our illustrious forebears. And speak it well.”
“So you knew it was my partner, Sueno, here.”
“Do any other Americans in Eighth Army law enforcement speak Korean?”
“Hell no. Why bother? On compound everybody speaks English.”
“Exactly. So I knew it was you two, already investigating, already on the case.”
“That vendor,” I said, “did he give you any information that he didn’t give us?”
“He said he felt startled, as if he was staring into the face of a great ape who could talk.”
Ernie guffawed. “Damn, Sueno, I told you to shave before you went out to the ville.”
While Ernie enjoyed his laugh, Mr. Kill sat silently. Officer Oh’s narrow shoulders rose as she swerved through traffic. She said, “I don’t think he looks like an ape.”
Ernie stopped laughing and stared at the back of her head, surprised she could speak English.
Mr. Kill had made a number of changes at the murder site.
First, the pochang macha had been roped off, as had the area up the walkway where Corporal Collingsworth had been murdered. Technicians in blue smocks with the word kyongchal-police-stenciled on their backs were working both crime scenes: dusting for fingerprints, scraping samples of blood, searching under strobe lights for hair or loose strands of material. The KNP sergeant who’d been on duty last night stood off to the side, explaining to the technicians why he hadn’t secured the area earlier and called in forensics: the victim was an American, and therefore he didn’t fall under the jurisdiction of the Itaewon Police station. The KNP was red-faced and embarrassed, knowing it was a flimsy excuse and an inaccurate one, technically. Anything that happened off compound did in fact fall under the jurisdiction of the KNPs as the Provost Marshal had previously informed us. However, out here in Itaewon, the local KNPs often let the American MP patrols handle issues involving American GIs. Less paperwork.
Mrs. Lee, the owner of the pochang macha, sat forlornly on a wooden crate. I walked over to her.
“Did he come back last night?” I asked.
She looked up at me. “What? The killer?”
I nodded.
She hugged herself and shivered. “No.”
“Did you sleep in the cart?”
“Where else? But I couldn’t sleep much.”
I already knew many of the pochang macha owners were virtual mendicants. Their cart was their livelihood and their home. Without it, they had nothing.
She looked up at me, her eyes crinkled. “Will they be done before the evening rush starts?”
“We’ll see,” I said. I returned to Mr. Kill.
“We’ll send what we have to the lab,” he said, “and it will be given top priority.”
“I don’t expect much,” I said.