“Did he say what it was about?” I asked.
“No. He only said someone wanted to talk to you.”
“Someone?”
She nodded. The cannon for close of business sounded and the outside speakers blared out the tinny, tremulous notes of the retreat bugle. I picked up the phone and called Mr. Pak. No answer. It must be nice to be in business making good money. You didn’t have to work late.
I’d also received a message from Captain Prevault. She had a lead for me, she said, and she wanted me to pick her up at six with the jeep.
Ernie tossed me the keys to the jeep’s padlock. “Don’t let me butt in,” he said.
“It’s not a date,” I told him.
“ ‘Pick me up at six.’ What else are you going to call it? By the way, you spent quite a bit of time behind that hooch with Major Rhee. Was she interrogating you again?”
“Get bent, Ernie,” I told him.
He promised me he would.
When we went outside, three of the four tires of the jeep were flat. Ernie cursed and knelt next to the nearest tire, pointing at a slash in the rubber. Then he examined the other two. Same story.
“MPs,” Ernie said.
“Isn’t Dexter still locked up?” I asked.
“Yeah, but he’s got plenty of buddies.”
I handed him the keys back.
— 9-
As I approached the BOQ, Captain Prevault was outside waiting. She walked toward me wearing a warm coat and a large bag over her shoulder. At Gate Number Five we waved down a kimchi cab heading east.
“Where to?” I asked.
She pulled out a slip of paper with an address written on it. I read it to the driver.
“Aju molli,” he said. A long way.
I groaned inwardly, happy I’d gotten a petty cash advance from Riley.
We headed east for almost five miles along the blue ribbon of the Han River, spanning the southern edge of the city of Seoul, until finally we crossed the Chonho Bridge and headed southeast. We passed a few cement block housing areas and some tin-roofed factories, then acres of open junk yards, and finally we were back in the countryside; fallow rice paddies interspersed with small clumps of farm houses with wisps of smoke rising from narrow chimneys.
“Where the hell is this place?” I asked Captain Prevault.
“Not far.” She pointed to a wooden sign on the side of the road and said, “Chogi.” There.
The driver nodded and took the turn.
“You speak Korean,” I said.
“About ten words,” she replied.
“Do you know how to tell the cab driver to stop?”
“Seiwo juseiyo.”
The driver slammed on his brakes and veered toward the side of the road.
“No,” I told the driver in Korean. “Keep going straight. She was just practicing.”
He nodded, then shook his head. Crazy foreigners.
Captain Prevault held her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide with glee. “It worked,” she said.
The road wound up into low hills covered with stands of pine. A breeze bent some of the branches. It would be cold tonight. Maybe this was the end of the fall, I thought, and the beginning of the Korean winter; a freezing winter that howls out of the icy steppes of Manchuria. Finally another sign led us to a gravel parking area in front of a substantial two-story brick building.
“The Japanese built this as a prison,” Captain Prevault said.
“What is it now?”
“A home for the criminally insane.”
“Still a prison,” I said.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
We climbed out of the cab. I handed the driver a five thousand won note, about ten bucks, and asked him to wait. He said he would.
Inside, we were met by a middle-aged Korean man in a white medical uniform who bowed to Captain Prevault, then to me, and escorted us down a long hallway. The odor of kimchi wafted through the air behind him. At the end of the hallway, we descended stone steps into darkness. I touched the walls. They were cold, smeared with moss.
The female prisoner sat up, her back perfectly straight, and her eyes wide in the darkness.
“We can’t turn on the light,” Captain Prevault whispered to me. “She finds it upsetting.”
The ambient glow from a yellow bulb at the far end of the stone tunnel was the only illumination. We had descended a full three stories beneath the ground. The woman sat behind a heavy wooden door, but we were able to observe her through a wire-reinforced window made of half-inch-thick glass. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I could see she was holding a tattered rag doll.
“Why do they have her here?” I asked.
“Murder. She hacked three people to death with a hoe.”
“Another farm implement.”
“Precisely. But her crime was committed almost twenty years ago, shortly after the end of the Korean War.”
“She’s so young.”
“Yes. She wasn’t much more than a child when she committed the crime.”
I knew the Korean judicial system made no differentiation between juvenile and adult crime, in part because they saw so little juvenile crime. “So what does she have to do with my case?”
“Maybe nothing. It’s her reaction that caused us to think you needed to see her.”
“Reaction?”
“To your drawing. Doctor Hwang at the sanatorium took the liberty of distributing the drawing among his colleagues, to see if it meant anything to any of them. He came out here himself and showed the drawing to each of the inmates, under controlled conditions, of course.”
“He must’ve had his suspicions.”
“Yes, you might say he did.”
“What were these ‘controlled conditions’?”
“Physical protection.”
“From the patients?”
Captain Prevault nodded. “Many of them are dangerous.”
“How about this one?”
“Since she’s been incarcerated, she’s attacked two staff members. One lost an eye, the other the use of his right leg.”
“These were men she attacked?”
“Yes.”
“But she’s so tiny. What did she do?
“She might be tiny but she has teeth. The jaws of even a small woman can exert up to five hundred pounds of pressure.”
“She bit the guy’s eye out?”
“And half of the other guy’s leg.”
“Damn.” I looked back at the silent woman with more respect. “What made her go nuts?”
“I’ve made a copy of her file,” Captain Prevault replied. “When we’re through here, I’ll give it to you.”
“When we’re through?”
“Yes. Rather than describe her reaction to your drawing, we thought it best if we showed you.”
The male nurse joined us, but now he was wearing a square mask with an iron mesh, something like a baseball catcher’s mask. He also wore the padded chest and groin protection that karate experts wear in Taekwondo tournaments. On his lower legs he wore shin guards, the kind used in soccer. Two other white-clad attendants joined us. One of them opened the door, and the heavily armored man slipped on thick leather gloves and entered the room. He sat down on a stool opposite the tiny woman. So far, she hadn’t reacted at all. The man pulled a sheet of paper out of his sleeve. He placed it on the floor in front of her, propped up slightly with his foot. Then he pulled out a penlight and shone the bright beam on the drawing.
It was my drawing of the Itaewon alley totem all right: the wooden stand, the wire grill-like square, and a rat hanging by its ankles.
The light caused the woman to stir. She glanced at the space alien sitting across from her but seemed completely unperturbed. Then she looked down at the drawing. If I live to be a hundred I’ll never forget the look of horror that took possession of her face, as if she’d just seen the sum of all the fears any of us has ever imagined. A scream erupted from her open mouth and became progressively shriller, until it seemed like the intensity of the sound would pierce the stone walls that surrounded her. She leapt on top of her bench, crouching like a monkey evading a lion, her eyeballs riveted to the drawing, waving her free hand, as if clawing for it to go away, her tattered rag doll still clutched against her bosom.