I squinted at him, waiting. He glanced away from me and then looked back. He told me his unit, which, frankly, I wasn’t paying any attention to. All my attention was riveted on his right hand, the hand that held the brick.
“Let me see some ID,” I said.
Bollington’s long fingers loosened and the brick fell to the ground.
Before Pruchert and I were halfway back to the casino, I saw a red light flashing. And then another. Police vehicles, on the edge of town where the high-rise buildings of the Haeundae Beach area started. A blue KNP patrol car sat nearby.
Pruchert and I walked up to the MP sergeant. He turned, and I realized that I knew him. Sergeant Norris.
“Sueno,” he said. “I thought you were in Taegu.”
“I was, earlier today.”
“We received a report about a disturbance at the Haeundae Casino involving Americans.”
I shoved Pruchert toward him. “Here’s your disturbance.”
Norris handed Pruchert off to his partner, who frisked him again and shoved him into the backseat of the jeep.
“You’ll want to turn him over to the KNPs,” I said.
“Why?”
I explained.
Norris whistled. “The Blue Train rapist. Good collar for you.”
Pruchert leaned forward in the backseat of the jeep. “What?” he shouted in a reedy voice. “What’s this about rape?”
“Shut the hell up,” Norris said.
The other MP shoved Pruchert back against the seat.
We held a quick conference with the KNPs, with me doing the translating. We finally arranged for Norris and his partner to drive Pruchert over to the Pusan KNP Station. I rode with the KNPs. My stomach felt queasy, from the fried chicken and gravy I’d eaten earlier in the evening, from exhaustion, from the stress of the collar. I didn’t want to start interrogating Pruchert yet and somehow screw things up.
Besides, I trusted Inspector Kill.
He’d been notified and was on his way to the station.
The case against Pruchert was based strictly on the fact that he’d had the means and the opportunity to commit the murder. The means, simply because he was bigger and stronger than the women who’d been raped, although we hadn’t found the murder weapon yet. The opportunity, because he’d been away from his post of duty during the times the crimes had been committed. Furthermore, he’d taken elaborate precautions to cover his tracks; to make it seem as if he were studying Buddhism in a remote monastery when in reality he was black- marketing in the slums of Taegu and using that money to feed his gambling habit. Did he have another habit? A habit of rape?
Both of the victims had been robbed, their purses rifled for whatever bills were available. Certainly Pruchert was well known in the Haeundae Casino. Was he also well known in the Walker Hill Casino in Seoul, closer to where the first rape had been committed? That was something Inspector Kill would be checking out.
The interrogation lasted for two hours, and Pruchert was smart enough to stick to a simple story. If his gambling habit-and his black-marketing habit-were uncovered, he’d lose his top secret clearance. Without that, he’d no longer be able to work on the highly classified signal equipment at Horang-ni Signal Site. Pruchert wasn’t rich, he had nobody at home backing him up, and he needed his job in the army. He was good at what he did on that job, and he fully expected to make warrant officer some day if he stuck with it. Therefore he’d taken elaborate precautions to keep his extracurricular activities secret. In the army, with so many men living together in close confines, everyone knows everyone else’s business-and this is especially true at a remote signal site. So Pruchert came up with a cover story. He was studying Buddhism, and was so devout that he actually was giving serious consideration to becoming a monk. The teachers at the Dochung Temple didn’t take on novices who they didn’t think were serious. On the other hand, they were a trusting lot. When Pruchert told them that he wanted to meditate on his own, alone in a small cave, they gave him the privacy they thought he needed. He had betrayed that trust and told Inspector Kill now that he regretted having done it.
“I had to get away,” he told Kill. “Don’t you see? Everyone was watching me.”
“Why do you gamble?” Kill asked.
“I don’t like to gamble,” Pruchert responded.
“Then why do you do it?”
“I did it once. Some buddies took me over. They thought it was fun. I didn’t. I lost all my money, everything I had in the bank.” He leaned forward and grabbed the cuff of Inspector Kill’s coat. “Don’t you see? It took me years to save it, years of hard work. I had to get my money back.”
The compulsive gambler’s famous last words: I have to get my money back.
Kill told Pruchert about the Blue Train, accusing him of traveling north toward Seoul, committing the rape, and leaving the train near Anyang. Pruchert vehemently denied it. Kill continued, claiming that when Pruchert returned from Seoul and arrived at the Pusan Station, he followed Mrs. Hyon Mi-sook to the Shindae Tourist Hotel and, while her two children cowered in the bathroom, he raped her; and when she resisted, he stabbed her to death.
Again Pruchert denied it. “The only time I’m ever on the Blue Train,” he claimed, “is when I travel from Taegu to Pusan, after I’ve black-marketed with Lucy.”
Lucy. The woman who was the leader of Migun Chonguk, G.I. Heaven.
After the interrogation, Inspector Kill had Pruchert locked in a cell, alone, to ponder his fate. He told Ernie and me that he was going to contact the Walker Hill Casino with a description of Pruchert to see if he was a regular there and, if so, when he’d last been there to gamble. Casinos in Korea keep records of the exchange of foreign currency to won, the Korean currency. These records are required by the government. If we were lucky, they might have Pruchert’s name in those records.
For my part, I promised to spend the morning back on Hialeah Compound checking Pruchert’s ration-control records, to see if we could get a handle on how much he’d been black-marketing and from where he’d made the purchases. Inspector Kill dispatched a patrol car to pick up the vendor who’d sold the rapist the purse in front of the Pusan train station and the cab driver who’d driven him to the Shindae Hotel. Once they were brought in, they’d see if the two witnesses could identify him.
I thanked Inspector Kill and told him I was returning to Hialeah Compound. Once more he insisted that I travel in one of his police sedans. I told him that I had my own wheels this time, although actually I could use a ride to the Haeundae Casino to retrieve the army sedan.
He consented and, after being dropped off near the vehicle, I made my way through the early-morning Pusan traffic, heading toward Hialeah Compound.
In the sedan, on my way to Hialeah, I thought about my latest conversation with Sergeant Norris. After we’d delivered Corporal Pruchert safe and sound to the Pusan Police Station, Norris had pulled me aside and said, “I talked to him again.”
“Who?”
“That sailor. The one who wants to talk to Sway-no.”
“What’d he say?”
“He wants you to meet him. The safest place is along the docks, at the end of Pier Seven. There’s a chophouse there that East European sailors sometimes use. He doesn’t want to meet you there. ‘Too many eyes,’ he said. But behind the chophouse about twenty yards, there’s an overlook along the water.”
“When?”
“Twenty-three hundred hours, any evening. He’ll be there waiting every night.”
“He sounds serious.”
“He is.”
