I showed it to Dr. Hwang.
“A rat,” he said, holding the sketch at arm’s length, then bringing it closer. Captain Prevault held up a candle. “And a stand. Made of wood, you say?”
“Yes. The rat was hanging from the top of the grill by its hind legs.”
“On the nose of the rat; you’ve scratched something here.”
“Blood.”
“From the rat’s nose?”
“No. That was one of the weird things. The blood seemed to be from another source. A clot of it, as if it had been pasted to the rat’s nose.”
Dr. Hwang lowered the drawing to his lap and stared at me.
“You were right about drawing it,” I said. “I remember more things about it now. Things I hadn’t remembered before.”
“What do you think this means?”
“I don’t know. It’s weird.”
“Weird yes, but it has meaning to the man who created it. Very specific meaning. And it is for your eyes only.”
“For my eyes?” I asked.
“Yes. You’ve formed a bond with him. You’re the one pursuing him. He wants you to know why he’s doing all this. That’s why he placed it there for you to see, and once you’d seen it he took it away.”
“He didn’t want to share it with anyone else.”
“Precisely.”
“But what could a stand with a square grill of wires and a dead rat mean?”
Dr. Hwang shrugged. “It means nothing to me, but it means everything to him. I suggest you concentrate on that. He’s trying to tell you something.”
“What?”
“When you learn that, you will learn who he is, and you will learn why he’s doing these horrible things.”
“That totem has something to do with his trauma?”
“It has everything to do with it.”
— 7-
We still had an hour and a half until the midnight-to-four curfew hit, but rather than taking a cab all the way back to the compound, I suggested to Captain Prevault that we stop somewhere to eat.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“Starving.”
So was I.
The cab let us off on Chong-no, literally “bell road,” named for the ancient bronze bell housed in a temple in the heart of Seoul where the road begins. We walked through a narrow alley that led to Mugyo-dong, a brightly lit shopping district that by night becomes a mecca for young people. The narrow lanes were lined with open-air eateries, pool halls, beer emporiums, and shops selling record albums, and they were swarming with revelers. The odor of crushed garlic mingled with the pungent smell of pork barbecuing on open grills. I always got lost back here, what with so many pedestrian lanes crisscrossing one another in every which way, but eventually we found a joint with an open table. We pushed our way through the crowd and grabbed seats.
“It’s so exciting out here,” Captain Prevault said, her eyes bright with reflected light.
“You’ve never been to Mugyo-dong?” I asked.
“Never.”
“Then you haven’t lived.”
“Apparently not.”
The waitress, a matronly woman in a full-body white apron, approached us warily, caution hardening her broad face. When I spoke to her in Korean, she relaxed somewhat and pointed to the menu, which was handwritten on a board behind the counter. “Kom-tang is good,” I told Captain Prevault. “Sliced beef and noodles. Or if you want something spicy with fish in it, Meiun-tang would be the way to go.”
“The fish,” she said without hesitation.
I ordered a bowl of kom-tang for myself and meiun-tang for Captain Prevault, and a plate of yakimandu as an appetizer. She also ordered a bottled soda, and I asked for a liter of OB beer, after making sure they served it cold.
“Some places serve beer warm,” I told Captain Prevault as the waitress popped off the bottle cap.
“Have her keep the soda,” Captain Prevault told me. “I’ll have beer, too.”
The waitress took the soda back to the counter and brought us another glass. After pouring the frothing hops, I raised my glass in a toast.
“Thanks for your help on the investigation,” I said.
“My pleasure.”
We clinked glasses and drank.
I was greatly enjoying Captain Prevault’s company. She was a pleasant-looking woman, and intelligent and determined to make something of herself in this world; all traits I admired. But also things that made me feel guilty. Doctor Yong In-ja was in hiding, sheltering our son. But as Ernie had so often told me, I couldn’t spend the rest of my life waiting for someone who had turned the page on me and entered another chapter of her life. I had to live.
When her soup arrived, Captain Prevault was somewhat nonplussed by the mackerel staring up at her, but she got over it quickly. I showed her how to use her chopsticks to split the already gutted mackerel in half, pick out the bones, and drop them on the polished tabletop.
“It’s okay to drop food on the table?” she asked.
“Sure. The parts you don’t eat. They come by with a cloth and clean it up after we leave.”
“Everything’s so different from the States.”
“Yes, very.”
If she hadn’t been out into Seoul much, she might not have understood how truly different things are. People on the compound interact mainly with Koreans who are fluent in English, who are familiar with American customs and polite enough to show respect for them.
Captain Prevault made me show her the drawing again.
“It’s so strange,” she said. “I can’t figure out what it is.”
“Neither can I.”
“Maybe you should show it around.”
“To who?”
“To anybody. Somebody, somewhere will have an idea of what it is.” She used her flat metal spoon to sip broth out of her metal bowl. “Maybe you could have it printed in the Stars and Stripes.”
The Pacific Stars and Stripes was read by virtually every GI and every American civilian in country. We were all starved for news from the States and the Stripes provided it. It was a single-fold newspaper with major news starting on the front page and extensive sports coverage starting on the back. In the center were editorials and letters to the editor. One thing it didn’t cover, however, was crime. In the military, crime is classified. If the Commander believes you have a need to know, he’ll let you know at morning formation, not in some damn newspaper. The only time the Stars and Stripes ever covered crime was if the story had already been broken by one of the major news services. Then they covered it as briefly and as noncommittally as possible.
“I doubt the Provost Marshal would go along with that,” I said.
“Why not?”
“They’re keeping a lid on this thing, as tightly as they can. So far, none of the wire services have picked up on it.”
“And the Korean newspapers?”
“They can’t print a thing until the government gives them the go-ahead.”
“It seems that in a case like this what you need is the public’s help.”
I shrugged. “What we need and what we get are two different things.”
She set her spoon down. “I can’t believe you’re so passive about this.”
“I’m not passive. I’m trying to find this guy. But if I spend all my time and energy trying to get the honchos of Eighth Army to do what they should be doing, I wouldn’t have time for anything else. Also,” I said, “it would be futile. They’re more worried about keeping the American public happy about our presence overseas than they are about a few slashed throats.”
“Protecting the empire,” Captain Prevault said.
I hadn’t thought of the 8th United States Army in Korea as an empire but maybe she had something there. After all, even GIs call it “Eighth Imperial Army.”
I found Ernie where I figured I’d find him. On Hooker Hill. He stood in the darkness on the narrow road a few yards away from a yellow street lamp. Three or four Korean “business girls” stood near him, poking him in the ribs.