Martin Limon: Mr. Kill

I knelt in front of the safe and twisted the knob.

I’m not a safecracker, but I do know something about human psychology. And I know something about Koreans. Even the best of them is superstitious. On that day when Inspector Kill was changing the combination to his safe, I had barged in on him. After I left, he must’ve continued with what he was doing. What combination would he choose? Something easy to remember, certainly. I changed the letters of my name to their corresponding numbers in the English alphabet: 19 for S, 21 for U, and so on. On the fourth number, the safe clicked open.

I pulled the fragment out, stuck it in my pocket, and relocked the safe.

Life was just starting to return to normal-mainly to busting Korean dependent housewives for selling instant coffee on the black market-and I wanted a second opinion as to what the fragment was all about.

I asked Mrs. Pei, my Korean-language teacher, to refer me to someone who could help me understand more about it. She called a man who had once been a professor of hers, and he consented to talk to me. It was a dark night when I found his address high on a hill in the Sodaemun district of Seoul. A maid let me into a rosebush-covered courtyard, and then I was ushered into a sitting room furnished with Victorian artifacts.

Professor Lim was an elderly man wearing silk hanbok with a wistful smile and only a few strands of silver hair left on a liver-spotted skull. I explained as much as I could about what the merchant marine had told me, and then I handed him the fragment. As he fondled the ancient document, he held his breath. He slipped on reading glasses, consulted an old volume in a small library in an adjacent room, and finally, after mumbling to himself for a long while, looked up at me.

“You gave this to the authorities?”

“Briefly. Then I took it back from them.”

He told me that this fragment was part of an ancient manuscript long rumored to exist but often discounted by certain scholars as a myth. “Its value,” he told me, “cannot be calculated.”

That part, I already knew.

The following weekend, I hopped on the free army bus to Munsan. From there, I took a cab to the fishing village of Heiyop-ni. They didn’t see many foreigners here, but no one followed me as I climbed a winding path to the top of a hill. The grounds were spotted with ancient burial mounds. Beneath a small clump of elms, I sat on yellow grass and stared out into the mouth of the Imjin River.

There were a few rocky islands in the distance; and beyond those, in the mist, loomed the Communist dictatorship of North Korea. A woman I’d known, Doctor Yong In-ja, had gone that way, voluntarily, to escape charges of murder here in the South. I’d let her go, ignoring my duty as a law enforcement officer, rationalizing my actions by convincing myself that she didn’t fall under my jurisdiction. I didn’t regret having let her escape. My only regret was that I hadn’t gone with her.

Now, apparently, she was trying to contact me. That’s what the fragment had been about. She was in possession of a valuable manuscript, and she was willing to make a deal to turn it over to the South. Her price, apparently, would be to attain her freedom. Help in escaping from North Korea.

How I’d go about bargaining for that help, I didn’t yet know.

The next morning, Riley was already in the office when I brought in two cups of coffee from the snack bar and plopped them on his desk.

“One’s for you,” I said.

“You win the Irish Sweepstakes?”

“No. I just felt generous.”

Riley lifted the plastic lid, sipped on the hot java, and then said, “Were you in the safe earlier this morning?”

“No,” I replied. “I just got here.”

“Somebody was. They moved my receipt book.”

I stood up. “Is the safe still open?”

“Yeah.”

I walked over to the safe, swung back the heavy door, and looked inside. It was gone.

“I had a sealed envelope in here,” I said, “marked Sueno. Did you take it out?”

“Not me,” Riley said.

I sat back in front of his desk and drank my hot coffee. Before half of it was gone, I knew what had happened. Inspector Kill. He’d wanted the fragment back, he’d figured I was the one who took it, and now, somehow, he’d managed to get it back in his possession. I should never have showed it to him in the first place, but that was back when I trusted him.

What I would do next, I wasn’t sure. Doctor Yong In-ja was a shrimp between warring whales. Somehow, the shrimp had to be saved.