The male nurse switched off the light. He picked up the drawing and backed smartly out of the room. The door was opened just wide enough for him to exit, then slammed shut. With a sigh of relief, the male nurse slipped off the wire mask. His brown face was pale, and sweat poured down his forehead.
Inside the tiny cell, the woman was still screaming.
I dropped Captain Prevault off at Gate Five with my apologies for not stopping somewhere for dinner. I explained I had another appointment. She pretended it didn’t matter, but the way her shoulders tightened made me believe it did matter. I asked if she had time for lunch tomorrow so that after I’d had a chance to read the complete file, we could discuss it in more detail. This brightened her up somewhat, and we made a date to meet at noon in the main cafeteria of the 121 Evac Hospital.
After I dropped her off, I told the cab driver to take me to Sogye-dong. He asked for more money because the meter read almost twenty thousand won already, and I handed him another ten thousand won note. How I wished the tires of Ernie’s jeep hadn’t been slashed. I could’ve saved a bundle.
At the Mobom Teahouse in Sogye-dong, the meter indicated I owed the driver another four thousand three hundred and thirty won. I handed him a five thousand won note and surprised him by telling him to keep the change. In Korea, cab drivers don’t expect tips but I didn’t have the time to wait for the change. I was already forty-five minutes late for the 7 P.M. appointment. I walked into the teahouse.
As usual, every pair of eyes looked up at me. Maybe a dozen tables were occupied, twenty customers max. But they were all Koreans as this was an area of town that wasn’t near a military compound and therefore wasn’t frequented by American GIs. At six-foot-four, I was an oddity in the States, never mind here. They gawked at me, expecting me to do something. None of the staff approached me, so I just stood there, futilely trying to spot Mr. Pak from the Sam-Il Claims Office. Finally, I walked up to the glass counter, behind which sat plastic replicas of delicacies such as chopped squid tentacles and rolls of glutinous rice wrapped in seaweed. The man in a white cook’s hat behind the counter had his back to me, and he was concentrating on preparing something, studiously ignoring me. I knew the treatment. I was an American and he wanted me to go away; he might be afraid that talking to me would expose his ignorance of English and possibly provoke a confrontation with an unpredictable foreigner.
I said, “Yoboseiyo.” Hello. When I got no response I wrapped my knuckles on the glass counter and shouted, “Yoboseiyo!” They want obnoxious American, I’d give them obnoxious American.
The man set down the chopper and turned. I spoke in rapid Korean. “I was supposed to meet a man named Pak here at seven o’clock. Was he here? Was he waiting for me?”
The man stared at me dumbly as if I were some sort of display in a wax museum, then turned back to what he was doing. I was about to wrap my knuckles on the glass again when a young woman in a black skirt and white blouse hurried out of the back room. Apparently, she’d been alerted that there was a foreigner out front who refused to go away, and she’d been assigned the job of dealing with me. It was a status thing. The cook couldn’t be bothered. This waitress could.
She nodded slightly to me, not a full bow, and I proceeded to tell her what I had just told the cook. She seemed relieved that I spoke Korean.
“Mr. Pak?” she asked.
“Yes. He owns the Sam-Il Claims Office,” I said, pointing across the street at an angle. “It’s not far. He must’ve come in here before.”
“Yes. I’m sure he has. But no one here was waiting for a foreigner.” She paused, her smooth face glowing red. “We don’t see foreigners in here. We don’t know what to do with people like you.”
She was becoming increasingly flustered and increasingly incoherent. I too was a little tired of being treated like a stray circus animal. Many GIs would’ve become angry and caused a ruckus. I knew because I’d seen them in action, and I read the 8th Army blotter reports often enough. Me, I liked to think I took the more cosmopolitan view. Korea is a homogenous society and has been for thousands of years. Foreigners thrust into their midst throw them off balance-at least some of them.
I fought down my frustration, thanked the waitress and walked out of the Mobom Teahouse. Mobom means exemplary. I didn’t think it really applied.
I stood on the sidewalk. The wind I had noticed earlier picked up, blowing dust down the streetlit road and whirring plastic noodle wrappers about like mad ghosts. In the distance the moon lowered red toward the Yellow Sea. I inhaled deeply of the smog and grime and the chill night air. I loved it here, in the middle of this magnificent city, even when I felt embarrassed and out of place.
A cab pulled up and slowed. The driver leaned toward me. “Where you go?” he said in English. I waved him off. I wanted to stand there awhile, alone, away from the compound, away from Americans, away from the case I’d been pursuing for the last few days. I wanted to think.
I pulled the file Captain Prevault had given me out of my pocket. It was in English and only two pages long. A synopsis, I figured, of the longer Korean file. I’d already skimmed through it. Now I stood beneath a streetlamp and read the single-spaced typing more slowly.
The woman in the home for the criminally insane never had a name. For convenience’s sake, the staff at the home had called her Miss Sim Kok-sa, for the Buddhist monastery near where she’d been found. It was a ginseng hunter who found her, in a rundown hut on a remote plateau that had been farmed by an old woman and man. They were the ones found hacked to death with a hoe. The girl was estimated to be about ten years old at the time, and she was just sitting there near the rotting bodies, surviving off of raw grain. The testimony of the ginseng hunter, later confirmed by two local KNPs, led the doctors to believe the young girl had been enslaved by the elderly couple. If she’d been sexually abused, the report didn’t mention it. Not unusual in official Korean documentation, since sexuality was not a topic that was discussed in polite company, however widely it was practiced.
The girl was taken into custody, committed, and had been locked up in that small cell ever since. Where she’d come from, no one knew for sure. There had been so much tragedy and so much displacement during the Korean War that no one had taken the time to find out.
The question for me was, why did she react so violently to the drawing of the totem? Had she seen something similar? Is that what had driven her mad in the first place?
The area where she’d been found was near the Simkok-sa Buddhist monastery on the slopes of Dae-am Mountain in the Taebaek Range. I didn’t have a map but the report triangulated the position by saying it was located forty-five kilometers northeast of the city of Chunchon and thirty kilometers northwest of the port city of Sokcho. Both of those places I’d heard of, and both of them were out in the boonies.
What did it have to do with the man with the iron sickle? I didn’t know. I stuffed the report back into my pocket. Time to head back to the compound. I started looking for a taxi, but before I found one a small man in a tattered suit hustled up to me.
“Geogie! Geogie!” he said, waving at me frantically. He stepped into the light, out of breath. “I’m Ming,” he said proudly, as if that were supposed to mean something to me.
“Yes?” I said.
“The man you were supposed to meet in the Mobom Teahouse.” He frowned. “Over an hour ago.”