Martin Limon: Ping-Pong Heart

Captain Kim nodded. “Already.”

Ernie and I returned to the jeep. As we climbed in, Ernie started the engine and said, “Looks like we’re sucking hind tit.”

“Mr. Kill wants to get a handle on this crime,” I said. “An American officer stabbed to death on the edge of Itaewon. His bosses will want a report every five minutes.”

The Republic of Korea was receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military assistance from the United States government. There were more than 50,000 American military personnel stationed in country with the mission of helping to protect the ROK from another invasion by the Communist regime to the north. Incidents involving the murder of American soldiers generated bad publicity back in the States, put pressure on politicians, and directly threatened the flow of military and financial aid. The Korean government leaders refused to tolerate such a risk. As such, as soon as it was out that an American field grade officer had been murdered, they’d put their best man, Mr. Kill on it, and so far he’d taken full control of the case and full control of the evidence.

“Before we go to the morgue,” Ernie said, “maybe we should check on Miss Jo.”

“Maybe we should,” I said.

Ernie parked the jeep on the edge of the Itaewon Market and we hoofed it into the narrow pedestrian alleys. But the landlady told us that Miss Jo had already moved out. With her hospital bills, she hadn’t been able to make the rent.

“Where’s her stuff,” Ernie asked, “the bed and her clothes?”

I translated and the landlady led us to a wooden storeroom. She pulled a keychain out of the deep folds of her house dress and popped open the padlock. Inside, stacked upright were the bed, the now dismantled plastic wardrobe, and cardboard boxes full of clothes.

“Is she coming back for them?” I asked in Korean.

The landlady shrugged. “That’s what she said. If she doesn’t, I’ll sell everything.”

I asked the landlady for a forwarding address, but of course she didn’t have one. She did believe that Miss Jo would be staying nearby, here in Itaewon, so she could earn enough money to pay her back rent and reclaim her clothes.

“Clothes are very important to a young woman like her,” she said.

The City Morgue in downtown Seoul is a giant stone building one major street over from KNP headquarters. There was no place to park, so after I hopped out, Ernie cruised around the block. Wisps of cold rain splattered against my face as I made my way up the steps and through the big glass double doors. Inside, the clerk was less than helpful. Even my 8th Army CID badge didn’t impress her. She did, however, pick up the phone, press a button, and was soon chattering away with someone who I believed was at KNP headquarters. She hung up and said, “You wait.”

Ernie showed up.

“Where’d you park?”

“I paid a mama-san to move her cart.”

Pushcarts serving bean curd soup or roast corn-on-the-cob or pindaedok , mung bean pancakes, roam the crowded streets of Seoul, mainly at night but some to service the lunch crowd during the day. They guard their territory with their life, but room can be made for a jeep if the price is right.

I was about to question the clerk again when a man accompanied by a young woman wearing the neat blue uniform of the Korean National Police pushed through the front door. Chief Inspector Gil Kwon-up, aka Mr. Kill, with his female assistant, Officer Oh.

He was dapper as usual, with grey hair swept back from his forehead and a neatly pressed suit that, for all I knew, was imported straight from Europe. They walked briskly toward us, then swerved to the right. “Come,” he said.

We did. Officer Oh lagged behind, making sure we followed her boss. She looked crisp and efficient in her knee-length dark-blue skirt with a sky-blue blouse buttoned to the collar. A flat, upturned brim cap sat atop a cascade of curly black hair. When I caught her eye, I nodded to her and she nodded back, smiling politely. We’d worked with her and her boss before; sometimes cooperatively, sometimes not so much. The four of us trotted down two flights of broad cement steps. At the bottom, we entered a low-roofed hallway illuminated by yellowing fluorescents. The bulbs grew dimmer as we rounded a corner until we finally pushed through a pair of swinging doors and entered a refrigerated room bathed in reddish light. A technician with a white smock stood at attention.

Mr. Kill barked an order.

The tech retreated to an inner room and within seconds, he rolled out a long table and shoved it in front of us. Then he pushed over a lamp on wheels and switched it on. When the lumpy object in front of us was fully illuminated, Mr. Kill whipped off the sheet.

Major Frederick Manfield Schultz, lifeless eyes staring straight ahead, looking, now, a little worse for wear. His cheeks weren’t puffed out anymore; they were sunken, and they certainly weren’t red, but a sickly grey. A stench wafted off the corpse. I knew the body had been washed, but the odor of two hundred pounds of dead meat still reminds one of the undiscerning darkness that will one day embrace us all.

Mr. Kill pointed toward the wounds. “Two knives,” he said. “Maybe one a small axe?” He made a chopping motion.

“A hatchet,” I said.

“Yes. A hatchet.” He seemed satisfied with the word.

Inspector Gil Kwon-up was a highly educated man, both in formal Western education and in the classical curriculum of the Far East. After receiving a four-year degree in Korea, he’d gone on to graduate work at an Ivy League school in the States. He was also versed in the Four Books and the Five Classics of the Confucian cannon, and was such an expert on Chinese calligraphy that he often lectured on the subject at local universities. Still, he was a man of the streets. He’d been working at this job for over twenty years, since the end of the Korean War, and he’d put away more killers and psychopaths than Ernie and I were ever likely to see.

I studied the wounds. “Two different blades,” I said.

“Yes. Here are the measurements.”

Officer Oh handed me a sheet of paper written in both hangul and English. The measurements were in centimeters. I thanked her and pocketed it.

“What was the cause of death?” I asked.

Mr. Kill nodded toward the technician, stepped forward and, with Officer Oh’s assistance, rolled Major Frederick Manfield Schultz onto his side. As they did so, his right arm flopped forward lifelessly, as if waving for us to join him in the endless depths.

While Officer Oh held the corpse in place, the technician hurriedly repositioned the lamp, aiming it at the back of Major Schultz’s head.

“Christ,” Ernie said.

I let out a gasp too.

It was a neat chop, slicing the flesh and then the skull, like a tomahawk blow to a tree.

“Hatchet,” Mr. Kill said once again.

“Hatchet,” Officer Oh repeated.

Then he turned to us. “Tell me what you know,” he said.

The KNPs put out an all-points bulletin for Miss Jo Kyong-ja. After her recent trouble with Major Schultz, she was a prime suspect in this murder. It was physically unlikely that she could’ve pulled off the attack herself, unless she’d caught him completely unawares, but it was possible that she put somebody up to it. In fact, Mr. Kill thought it likely.

The tentacles of the Korean National Police spread down every back alley of Seoul and into every village and hamlet in the still-pristine countryside of South Korea. If she was out there, they’d find her eventually. But sometimes, when people are well hidden, that can take years. It was agreed that for the first foray into Itaewon, Ernie and I would take the lead.