Police Station. He waited outside, engine running.
When I marched into his office and sat down and told him what I wanted, Captain Kim looked at me as if I were mad.
“I need a search warrant,” he replied.
“So get one.”
“From who?”
“From a judge.”
His eyes narrowed. “You gonna tell judge, say Snake slicky Korean woman?”
“Yes.”
“Say Snake slicky Korean woman doctor and you think he gonna believe you after Snake already told judge he didn’t slicky Korean woman doctor?”
“Snake already told him?”
“He will. Who you think work for Snake?”
I knew the business girls did, and the bartenders and the waitresses. The owners of the small record shops and sports equipment outlets and food stands in the environs of Itaewon had to cough up a tribute to the honcho of the Seven Dragons. But judges, too? Clearly, Snake’s influence was more pervasive than I thought.
“How about you?” I asked.
It was a risky thing to say but I was desperate. Captain Kim’s entire body tensed. I was sure he was going to spring at me from across his desk and I prepared to pop him with a left while he was still on the fly.
Instead of attacking, he took a deep breath. Slowly, he relaxed.
“You don’t know,” he said finally. “Americans don’t know. Here, everybody gotta make money. Extra money. If don’t make extra money then can’t buy house, can’t send children to school, after too old to work, no have nothing. Everybody gotta do. So, I make money too.”
Captain Kim stared at me defiantly. I knew that the salaries of Korean cops-and the salaries of most civil servants-were miserably low. And the ROK government, and even the Korean taxpayer, winked at the fact that the cops and other people in government were expected to supplement their income by doing favors for people, like busting them for some small infraction and then collecting the fine on the spot or expediting paperwork that had mysteriously become stuck in bureaucratic channels. They were expected to do those things-everyone was allowed to make a living-but they were also expected to act in a humane way, a way that wouldn’t cause innocent people to suffer unduly. But the rich received their due. In Korea, as everywhere else, money talked. But loud enough to suppress a kidnapping accusation?
“If I go talk to Snake now,” Captain Kim said, “he hide woman, we never find. But, if you do what he tell you to do, bow low to him, do everything he say, then he relax.”
Captain Kim stared into my eyes, wondering if I understood. I did. No official action could be taken. Not without a judge’s order and since Snake was involved, a judge’s order was unobtainable.
“Then I’ll do what he says,” I told Captain Kim. “Quickly. And then I’ll present him with what I’ve found. Then I’ll make my move.”
“When people fighting,” Captain Kim said, “I don’t need judge.”
He meant that if there was an altercation at Snake’s mansion, or anywhere else in Itaewon, he could order his cops to move in without a search warrant.
A great boxer works best in close. He can lean in on his opponent and hammer him with hooks and methodically batter his ribs and his torso. But in order to get in close, I had to offer Snake something he wanted, the identity of the people who’d murdered Horsehead and Water Doggy, or at least some sort of credible evidence pointing in that direction.
And Captain Kim, in his own oblique way, was offering to help. Or at least I hoped he was.
Ernie’s jeep purred down the two-lane highway lined on either side with frost-covered rice paddies. Kids in black school uniforms skated on patches of water frozen between ancient mud berms. In the distance, straw- thatched farmhouses, smoke rising from narrow chimneys, stood in cozy clumps. Behind them rows of hills rose blue in the distance, capped with white, everything shrouded in a shawl of gray mist.
“Why don’t we just check out a couple of shotguns from the arms room?” Ernie asked. “Then we kick Snake’s door in, shove both barrels up his nose, and let him know we mean business instead of going to all this trouble.”
I’d already thought of that option and I’d rejected it. First, it would be a pretty difficult door to kick in. His home was situated atop a row of hills between Itaewon and the gently flowing Han River. There were mansions up there, all of them surrounded by ten-foot-high granite walls topped with shards of broken glass embedded in mortar. In addition to those routine security precautions, Snake also had a small army protecting his household. So kicking his door in, as Ernie suggested, would require the backup of your average-sized infantry battalion. I didn’t even bother to float the idea past the provost marshal. I knew what he’d say: The alleged kidnapping of one Korean national by another Korean national was clearly a problem for the Korean National Police. Who would he refer the information to? Lieutenant Pong, the KNP liaison officer at 8th Army, one of the men who, I suspected, was involved in the power struggle now playing itself out in the barrooms and back alleys of Itaewon. And the man who still hoped to charge Ernie and me with the murder of Two Bellies.
We were some twenty-five miles due east of Seoul now, heading for a mountain called Yongmun-san. Ernie downshifted through a patch of black ice. Either side of the road was lined with country folk waiting at the first bus stop we’d seen in over a mile. Some of the women balanced bundles of laundry atop their heads, others carried packages wrapped in red bandannas. The men wore sports coats without ties or, if they were older, the traditional silk vest and pantaloons of a retired Korean scholar, although I doubted there were many scholars out here. Everyone worked on the land.
I pulled an old map out of one of the folders in the SIR. It was dated September 24, 1952, issued by the Army Corps of Engineers, and stamped For Offi cia l Use Only. An inverted swastika, the symbol for a Buddhist temple, was stenciled in blue ink on the side of Yongmun Mountain. In the past twenty years, the mountain hadn’t changed, neither had the location of the Temple of Constant Truth, but the roads had altered considerably. Where there had been none, two-lane highways ran; where there had been only a dashed line on the map twenty years ago, indicating a gravel-topped path, there was now a modern four-lane paved thoroughfare. U.S. tax dollars at work so men and equipment could be quickly transported where needed in case of a resumed attack on the Republic of Korea by the forces of the Communist North.
It took a few wrong turns and a lot of questions shouted at startled farmers before Ernie and I found the narrow road that wound up the side of Yongmun Mountain to the nunnery. About halfway up to the craggy peak, we came to a halt in front of a walled fortress that seemed to have been transported here from out of the middle ages. Crows fluttered amongst stone ramparts. A wooden-slat bridge crossed a gully through which a half-frozen stream trickled and beyond that loomed a gate hewn from oak. Both massive doors stood wide open.
“A castle with a moat,” Ernie said, climbing out of the jeep.
I imagined that twenty years ago, to a band of frightened and half-starved orphans, this nunnery must’ve looked like a fairy castle. We waited out front, at the edge of the bridge, until finally someone came out to greet us. She was a shriveled Buddhist nun, bald, wrapped in gray robes. She bowed to us and I bowed back and then I told her in Korean about the orphans who’d come here twenty years ago and about Cort and about the reason we’d come.
When I finished my long speech in my rudimentary Korean, the wrinkled woman stared at me calmly and said in English, “Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea?”
Ernie and I glanced at one another, grinned, and accepted gladly.
During and after the Korean War, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Korean orphans were adopted by families overseas. Even years after the war the practice was still going on. Unwanted children were left at the doorsteps of churches or temples, transferred to adoption agencies, and sent overseas to grow up speaking English
