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Martin Limon: The Ville Rat

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Martin Limon The Ville Rat

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He walked back to us. Wearily, he nodded toward the corpse. “Your thoughts,” he said.

I let Ernie go first.

“Nobody but a madwoman would leave her house dressed like that, not in this weather.”

Mr. Kill nodded.

“And the knot holding her skirt came loose,” Ernie continued, “probably tied in a hurry.” He paused. “Do we know the cause of death?”

“No,” Mr. Kill replied, “but did you see her neck?”

We all turned and studied the body. Mr. Kill switched on his flashlight. The technicians were closing in on her now, one of them examining the silk skirt.

“Bruises. She was strangled,” Ernie said.

“Yes,” Mr. Kill replied. “The river is much too shallow for her to have drowned.”

Ernie glanced toward the invisible compound upriver. “I bet Eighth Army won’t see it that way.”

If an American GI was in any way involved, the powers that be at the 8th Imperial Army would do their best to deny it. A young woman, maybe inebriated, staggers around in the dark. She trips and falls into the frigid waters of the Sonyu River, she struggles, maybe hits her head against a rock. She’s disoriented and starts gulping down water. She passes out. Before you know it, she’s history.

Was that scenario possible? Barely. But all cops, military or otherwise, play the percentages. And with a battalion full of horny American artillerymen just a couple of hundred yards upriver, the percentages were that one of them had something to do with this.

One of the technicians squatted in the stream. Wearing plastic gloves, he searched the dead woman’s clothing. We waited expectantly. At first, he found nothing. No jewelry, no money, no laminated Korean National Identification Card, nothing that would make our lives easier. Finally, from the inner sleeve, he pulled out a piece of paper. He waded out of the water and handed it to Mr. Kill. The paper was wet but appeared to be made of cloth vellum. Thick. The type of paper used for official documents.

Kill, having similarly slipped on plastic gloves, unfolded the paper.

We held our breath.

Finally, he twisted the dripping paper toward us. It was a torn shard. Some of the ink had run but it was still legible, composed of the phonetic hangul script interspersed with Chinese characters.

“What does it say?” Ernie asked.

“You might recognize it,” Mr. Kill said. “It’s about a night and a meeting and something being stretched.” He surveyed our blank faces and almost smiled. “It’s poetry,” he said. “I’ll have it identified.”

“And the calligraphy,” I said.

“Yes, another key point. It’s clearly written with ink and a brush, not a ballpoint pen. That in itself is a lead. Very few people write this way anymore.”

Except for Mr. Kill himself. He was an expert calligrapher. He’d been educated in classical Korean, which included Chinese characters, and he’d attended university in the States, which was why he spoke English so well. And it probably explained why he so quickly recognized this snippet of writing as a fragment of a longer work of poetry.

“So maybe we can leave now?” Ernie said.

Kill stared at him quizzically.

Ernie glanced back toward Camp Pelham. “None of those guys is an expert calligrapher, or is likely to have anything to do with anybody who is.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“They’re nothing but a bunch of know-nothing GIs. Lowlifes.” Ernie jabbed his thumb into his chest. “I ought to know. I’ve been working with them all of my adult life.”

“You harbor such a high opinion of your fellow soldiers?”

“I’m being generous. These are guys who read comic books and watch cartoons on AFKN on Saturday mornings. Hell, anybody who can pass a fifth-grade spelling test, like my partner Sueno here, they think he’s a freaking genius.”

“Still,” Kill said, looking back at the body floating in the frozen river. “She was a beautiful woman. They are men. They would’ve been watching her.”

“Maybe,” Ernie said, “but the Second D MPI isn’t going to like it.”

He was referring to the 2nd Infantry Division military police investigators. They controlled the three-hundred-or-so-square-mile area in which the US 2nd Infantry Division operated. Even though the 8th US Army was the higher headquarters, and theoretically in charge of all operations in Korea, the 2nd D cops wouldn’t want us 8th Army investigators poking our noses into what they would consider to be none of our business. A jurisdictional dispute could be overcome, but it would take some high-level phone calls. And the Division would like even less the Korean National Police sniffing around one of their compounds.

“We will let the evidence lead us,” Mr. Kill said. With that, he turned and started to walk back to his blue police sedan.

Ernie called after him. “So that means we can’t leave?”

“No,” he replied without looking back. “I’ve already made some phone calls. Your fate is being determined as we speak.”

“Shit,” Ernie said, turning to me. “Division’s going to have a case of the ass.”

We’d dealt with the honchos of the United States Army’s 2nd Infantry Division before, and it hadn’t been pleasant. In fact, with all that firepower at their disposal-tank battalions, howitzer batteries, and gung ho infantry units-it could be downright dangerous.

The banks of the Sonyu River became muddier and more treacherous the closer we came to the outskirts of Sonyu-ri.

Ernie balanced himself by holding on to a clump of reeds.

“Why does Kill want us on the case?” Ernie asked. “What did we ever do?”

“We worked with him before,” I answered, hopping from one stone to another over a thin crust of ice. “He appreciated our efforts.”

“We didn’t do anything anybody else couldn’t have done. Except for you speaking Korean, that is.”

“Maybe,” I replied. “But he knows we don’t give a shit about what Eighth Army thinks. That’s what sets us apart.”

Ernie didn’t answer. He knew I was right. We both refused to brownnose to get a promotion, especially when it involved overlooking crimes that were considered embarrassing to the 8th Army command. It was an attitude that had gotten us in trouble more than once, and even got me busted down a stripe. But it was an attitude that, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t shake.

Ernie had spent two tours in Vietnam. He’d seen death and he knew he was lucky to be alive. And as such, he lived each day without worrying about tomorrow, and he sure as hell didn’t care what anyone thought about him.

I had a different take. I didn’t care what most people thought, but the opinion of those I respected was desperately important to me. Mr. Kill, for example. He’d somehow survived the Machiavellian politics of the South Korean government and managed to rise to top homicide investigator of the Korean National Police, all the while maintaining a reputation for impeccable integrity.

I wasn’t sure if that was possible for me, not in the 8th US Army, but I was trying. I’d been orphaned at an early age and grown up as a Mexican-American orphan in an indifferent Los Angeles County foster care system. What kept me from giving up were the very few people who had inspired me to do better. That’s what I was trying to do here and now in the US Army. And I believed that’s what Mr. Kill was demanding of me-to do better-because we owed it to that woman who’d been left to float all night, alone in a river of ice.

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