“You’ve seen her?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Where do you think?”
He glanced toward the north, stared at me for a moment, and then shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and stalked away.
The next day, before catching the ferry from Pusan to Cheju, I decided to check in at the Pusan Police Station. The uniformed Korean policeman in the hallway told me that Inspector Kill was busy. I told him it was important and stepped past him. An office at the end of the passageway had been temporarily assigned to Inspector Kill for the duration of the Blue Train rapist investigation. When I opened the door, Inspector Kill’s back was to me and he was leaning over the safe behind his desk, fiddling with the locking mechanism. Apparently, he was changing the combination. He stopped what he was doing, sat up straight, and turned to look at me.
The fragment the mysterious sailor had given me was made of a brittle but very thick fibrous material. I held it in my open palm, touching only the wax paper the sailor had wrapped it in. I dropped it on the center of Inspector Kill’s desk.
“Igot muoya?” he said in Korean, startled by something that he immediately recognized as being valuable.
“You’re a calligrapher,” I told him. “You know about Chinese characters and about ancient styles of writing. Maybe you can tell me what this is.”
Kill closed the door of the safe, turned back to his desk, and studied the fragment. After a few seconds, he looked up at me. “Where did you find this?”
“It’s a long story. First, what does it mean?” I pointed. “This character means something about a king and there’s a lot of numbers, so I thought maybe it was a date.”
Inspector Kill looked at me with increased interest. “You’ve studied hanmun.” Chinese characters.
“A little.”
He was impressed. Koreans revere education. Since the end of the Korean War, their schools and universities have been churning out mathematicians and scientists at an increasingly rapid rate. But despite this emphasis on modern knowledge, Koreans are still most in awe of the traditional forms of education, a curriculum that has been taught since the days of Confucius: Chinese characters, calligraphy, the ancient texts known as the Four Books and the Five Classics. These are thought of, even today, as the only true education. That a foreigner, especially an American G.I., would know how to read and write even a few Chinese characters never failed to impress.
Inspector Kill turned back to the fragment. He reached in the desk, rummaged around for a while, finally pulling out a magnifying glass, and laid it on the table. Then he searched in another drawer and came out with a pair of gloves made of fine white cloth. He slipped them on. Gingerly, using a pair of silver chopsticks, he turned the fragment this way and that, examining it under the magnifying glass. As he studied, he spoke.
“Korea made the first paper,” he said. “Not from the skin of animals-that had been done since time immemorial-but from bamboo, ground with a pestle, and then mixed with lime and the leaves of a birch tree. Finally the pulp was stretched on a screen to dry.” He switched on a green lamp. “Here, look at the grain in this paper. Even now, you can see tiny chunks of wood.”
With the chopsticks, he pointed to a dark splotch.
“So this paper is very old,” he said. “Probably made during the early part of the Chosun Dynasty, before modern paper was introduced. And you’re right about the date. It’s indicating the reign of King Sejong Daewang.”
Even I’d heard of Sejong Daewang, Great King Sejong. A statue of him presided over the entrance to Doksoo Palace in Seoul, and his stern visage stared out from every freshly minted hundred-won coin. He was credited with having devised the hangul alphabetic script, freeing Korea from the Chinese writing system, and with other innovations that seem modern to us today, such as keeping track of national rainfall, distributing loans to farmers from the royal treasury, and even devising an early version of the seismograph, to measure the intensity of earthquakes.
“Is that it?” I asked. “Is that all this fragment has on it, the date?”
“Maybe not.”
Deftly employing the chopsticks, Inspector Kill pried one sheaf of the parchment loose from the other. Like a flower opening to sunlight, it unfolded into a fragment almost as large as a full page of typing paper.
More characters. Smaller handwriting shoved together in the “grass” style-that is, written quickly, like cursive handwriting, making it more difficult for a novice like me to read. Inspector Kill used the magnifying glass and leaned closer.
“Whoever wrote this,” he said, “used a horsehair brush and expensive ink.”
“You can tell just by looking at it?”
“That’s my initial guess. We can have a more thorough analysis done in the lab.”
“You’ve worked on ancient texts before.”
“A few times,” he replied. “There are plenty of antiques and heirlooms and manuscripts hidden around Seoul and the rest of Korea. Sometimes they’re stolen. Sometimes they’re involved in crimes in other ways.”
“Like people squabbling over an inheritance.”
“Like that,” he said. “So if the paper was expensive and the writing brush made of horsehair, the most expensive of the time, and the ink of highest quality, chances are that whoever wrote this was a highly educated man.”
Inspector Kill said “man” because in those days women were seldom allowed the opportunity to become literate.
“Can you decipher what it says?” I asked.
“A little.”
Kill followed the writing, gliding the glass slowly above the rows of tightly scripted text. Three or four paragraphs’ worth, all in all, were jammed into a small space.
Finally, Inspector Kill leaned back, as if shocked by something.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Who gave you this?”
“I told you it’s a long story.”
He lay down the magnifying glass and looked at me directly. “It’s a story,” he said, “that some very important people will soon become very interested in.”
“Why? What’s this all about?”
Then he told me. As he spoke, I pulled over a straight-backed chair and sat down.
According to Inspector Kill, this fragment was part of a narrative concerning the chase for a man, some sort of “wild man,” who had been considered dangerous by the authorities at the time-sometime during the reign of King Sejong, approximately 1418 to 1450. This “wild man” was extremely strong and resourceful and managed to elude men on horseback by entering a network of caves in the Kwangju Mountains near Mount Osong. Upon entering the caves, the officials discovered a network of tunnels that took them much farther than they ever imagined. So far south, in fact, that they emerged in an area near Mount Daesong, located on a plateau between the Imjin River to the west and the tributaries leading to the Han River valley to the east. What apparently follows in the remainder of the manuscript, according to Kill, would be a detailed guide to those underground caverns, a guide that without the help of the “wild man” would’ve taken years to compile, if it had been possible at all.
“To drop into these caverns,” Inspector Kill said, “would be suicide if you didn’t know that there was a route out. And know how to find that route.”
“Okay,” I said. “This stuff is of great interest to spelunkers,” I said, “but what good is it to us today?”
“What?” Kill asked.
“Spelunkers,” I repeated. “People who crawl through caves.”
“For fun?”
I nodded. “For fun.”
Inspector Kill shook his head, unable to imagine such a thing being fun. He rose to his feet. “I’ll show you why this information could be valuable.”
We walked over to a map of Korea tacked to his wall. He pointed, still wearing his white gloves.
