food: cabbage kimchee, steamed rice, tofu stew, roast mackerel, strips of dried turnip. Before we ate, a plate of song-pyun was placed in front of the photographs.
Suk-ja’s brother motioned for us to dig in. I picked up my chopsticks and inhaled deeply of the clean scent of roasted pine needles. How wonderful it was to be welcomed by such a warm family. They were poor, they suffered through much, but they had each other.
I set down a slice of kimchee. Suddenly my hunger left me. Everything rushed together in my brain: Chusok, the warm family setting, the scent of pine needles, the dumplings, the photograph of ancestors.
I turned to Suk-ja. “What’s next?” I asked.
She stared at me blankly.
“At Chusok,” I said. “You first roast pine needles, then you bow to your ancestors, then you serve them songpyun. What’s the next step?”
“Oh. Understand. Next step is we take food for us and dumplings for the dead up to Happy Mountain.”
“Happy Mountain?”
“Yeah. You know, place where dead people live.”
“The cemetery,” I said. Then I corrected myself. “The burial mounds.”
In Korea, people are buried in mounds, six-foot-high round hills. Not flat graves. The idea is the dead can sit there and gaze out upon pleasant surroundings.
“Yes. Place where ancestors live. We have picnic there, perform ceremony again.”
“Will you go today?”
“No. Too far. My parents’ home in Taejon. Many people go daytime. All train, bus, too crowded.”
“How about going at night?”
Suk-ja’s eyes widened. “At night? Too many ghosts.
Anyway, my parents, how you say, burned?”
“Cremated,” I said.
“Yeah. Cremated. We keep ashes before, but I think my oldest sister in Taejon, she take them.”
“So does anybody go to the grave mounds at night?”
“No, no. Nobody go. But today, during daytime, many people will be at all the cemeteries around Korea. On Chusok, bury places very crowded.”
I rose from the table, apologizing to Suk-ja’s older brother and his wife and then to Suk-ja.
“Where you go?”
“This case we’ve been working on, it has to do with Chusok. Everything about it has to do with Chusok. I was just too dumb to see it.”
Each crime scene ran through my mind, like a movie film fast-forwarding through the projector. And now, when I compared those scenes to what I had learned here with Suk-ja’s family, they all made a weird sort of sense.
First, Captain Noh, the Korean cop in the village of Songtan, didn’t want to explain to me the significance of the roasted pine needles at the murder site of Jo Kyong-ah. He thought someone was mocking Korean custom, and he didn’t want to admit such a loss of face to foreigners like me and Ernie. Second, both Jo Kyong-ah, and later Specialist Five Arthur Q. Fairbanks, had been forced to kneel face-down in an awkward position, as if they were performing the seibei bowing ceremony. Third, Haggler Lee’s young serving girl was found with songpyun dumplings shoved in her mouth- the next step in the Chusok ceremonies.
The final step? Grave mounds.
“I have to go,” I said.
“I go with you.”
I didn’t argue.
I had to find Ernie. Even if that meant interrupting his tryst with his old girlfriend, Miss Na.
The proprietor of the Silver Dragon mokkolli house was a rotund man with a bushy black mustache and a white apron tied around his waist. As soon as I walked in the door, he looked perplexed. Then he pulled out a sheet of lined notebook paper and handed it to me.
This one folded in the shape of a turtle.
I unfolded it. It was written in hanmun, Chinese characters, and said only: Hyodo. Filial piety.
I remembered the words because they were the first two Chinese characters my Korean language teacher had written on the chalkboard. The basis, she’d told us, upon which Confucian society is built.
In Korean, I asked, “Who gave this to you?”
“She said American man come. Tall American man. Dark hair. Like you.”
“What did she look like?”
“Korean, but not Korean. Light-colored hair.”
“Half-American?”
“I think so.”
“Smiling strangely?”
His eyes widened. “How you know?”
I asked him if he’d seen Ernie or any other American GIs. He said no. GIs seldom found their way into this dirt-floored mokkolli house and when they did, it was late at night and they were too drunk to know where they were.
Suk-ja and I thanked him and walked out the door.
Next door to the Seven Dragon mokkolli house was a noodle shop with a parking area for cabs. Unchon Siktang the sign said: Driver’s eatery. The cabbies could catch a quick bowl of steaming noodles while one of the young men out front hosed down their cabs and washed them off. There were three of these young men, all wearing rubber boots that reached almost to their knees. I asked each of them if they’d seen any GIs in the area today. None had.
We entered the noodle shop.
A stout woman with a bandana over her hair said she’d seen a GI approaching through the back alley. Maybe he was heading for the mokkolli house next door but she couldn’t be sure. I described Ernie to her, and she said yes, that was what he looked like.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Back there.” She pointed. “He stop for a few minutes. Waiting. Then black car pull up. Window open. He lean in. Talk. Then he raise both hands to sky, like praying.”
“Praying?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Then what did he do?”
“He get in car. They go.”
“Did you report this to anybody?”
“Report? No. Why report? I no want trouble here at Unchon Siktang.”
I asked her a few more questions, and then jotted down her name and told her we’d be talking to her again soon.
“Abduct?” Captain Kim pronounced the word awkwardly. “You mean somebody take go?”
“Yes. In a black Hyundai sedan. Ernie’s hands were raised, as if somebody inside the car was holding a gun on him.”
Captain Kim studied my face. “Maybe your gun.”
I nodded.
“That’s why you feel so bad.”
I nodded again.
“This woman, Miss Na, you know her full name?”
I didn’t. And that made it impossible for us to check to see if she’d actually returned to Korea as Ernie had been told in the note. Was this a setup? Had somebody known about Ernie’s old flame, and then used her name to induce him to meet them at a certain place and time? Captain Kim told Suk-ja and me to sit down and try to relax while he made a few phone calls.
I used the phone at the other desk and finally got through to the Charge of Quarters at the barracks where Ernie and I lived. I waited as he wandered down the hallway and checked with the houseboy. No, Ernie wasn’t in,
