I had other questions that maybe had nothing to do with the crime: Who tore up the photograph on the small shrine in the alcove? Who picked up and returned the pieces to their proper place on the pedestal? Who relit the sticks of incense? Who were those two people in the photograph? What did ancestors have to do with all this?
There were too many questions, all swirling madly through my mind. And while I struggled to sort them out, all I could see was the small body of Han Ok-hi, lying unmoving and helpless beneath white sheets. How I wished that she would sit up and tell me, and then her mother, that she was all right.
After leaving the Huang Hei Medical Center, Ernie and I drove to the Inchon Headquarters of the Korean National Police. I sat in the jeep for a few minutes, breathing deeply of the fresh salt air. Ernie waited patiently. When I felt I’d recovered, we went inside. Using the accounts of the casino employees, one of the police artists had already made sketches of the two thieves. After meeting with Lieutenant Won to discuss strategy, Ernie and I returned to the jeep and sat outside the red-brick headquarters building, staring at the sketches.
“Ugly fuckers,” Ernie said.
“Yeah,” I said, “but now I understand why everyone in the casino was so frightened when we walked in. These two guys look like us.”
“Naw, they don’t. It’s just because of the way they’re dressed. Coat and tie. And they’re wearing shades. And one of them’s Caucasian and a little shorter, and the other one is dark and a little taller. That’s the only similarity.”
Ernie didn’t want to see the resemblance but it was there. Still, he was right that if you took away the Western clothing and set them out on the street standing next to us, no one would mistake them for two stalwart enforcers of the law like Agents George Sueno and Ernie Bascom.
The City of Inchon rises from the sea up to the hills that comprise the downtown business district. From where we sat we could see the big cement block building of the Olympos Hotel and Casino, out to the Port of Inchon, and beyond to the rippling waters of the Huang Hei, as the Koreans call it- the Yellow Sea. The sun was low on the horizon.
I thought of Miss Han Ok-hi. Would she pull through? Would she one day be whole and healthy again? Or would she give up the ghost and allow her spirit to rise through this golden glow to join her ancestors?
Ernie broke the spell.
“The KNPs will be looking for more leads all night, talking to cab drivers, checking with the bus companies, seeing if they can locate witnesses and a getaway car.”
When a foreigner kills a Korean it makes headlines in the morning papers. The KNPs, although prime players in a highly controlled state, are not completely insensitive to public opinion. Pressure, and a lot of it, would be coming down from on high, and coming down soon. A GI-or someone who appears to be a GI-callously shot a fine young Korean woman. No politician could put up with that. And the sooner the KNPs arrested a suspect, the safer they would be.
I saw where Ernie was going. “So we have to go some place where the KNPs can’t.”
“The GI angle,” Ernie said. “That’s why Lieutenant Won let us examine the crime scene. He wants us to figure out who these guys are and where they’re stationed so he can collar them.”
“We’ll make the collar,” I said.
“Good,” Ernie agreed. “Let’s do that. So our first step is to think like these guys. If you had just robbed a casino, shot an innocent girl, and were now on the run with a bag full of money, where would you go?”
“To Seoul,” I said.
“Right. To hide amongst the multitudes. But think of how fast the KNPs arrived on the scene, and Lieutenant Won told us the roadblocks on the highways leaving Inchon were set up in a matter of minutes.”
“The thieves must’ve had a vehicle waiting.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Still, it would’ve been risky to flee Inchon right away.”
Ernie was right about that. There was only one superhighway running from here to Seoul, another old meandering country road running roughly parallel, and a third thoroughfare heading south along the coast. Nothing going north or east to the Yellow Sea. KNP traffic units routinely patrolled those three roads, and as soon as they were notified by radio of the bank robbery, they’d have set up roadblocks, checking everyone out, searching bags. They hadn’t found any wads of cash or suspicious Miguks trying to leave town. If the thieves had tried to escape by sea, they’d be even easier to catch. Korean fishermen talk, and the Korean Navy had been alerted. It was hard to believe that two Americans wouldn’t soon have come to the attention of the inquisitive Korean National Police. Fleeing via aircraft was out of the question. Kimpo International, the nearest airport, is located on the road to Seoul, beyond the KNP roadblocks, and all other aircraft was strictly controlled by the Korean military.
“Maybe they beat the roadblocks,” Ernie said. “If so, they’re gone and there’s nothing we can do about it now. But I doubt they would’ve been able to move that fast. If they didn’t beat the roadblocks, if they’re still here in Inchon, where would they go?”
“A GI compound?”
“Maybe. That little transportation unit sits right below the Olympos. Unlikely that even a couple of GIs would be stupid enough to conduct such a daring robbery in their own backyard, but stranger things have happened. We’ll check it out.”
“And the Seaman’s Club,” I said.
“Yeah. Merchant marines. Who knows?”
Ernie started up the jeep but I motioned for him to stop.
“What?” he said impatiently.
“I just thought of something. Wait here.”
Reluctantly, Ernie turned off the jeep’s engine, while I climbed out and ran back into the police headquarters building. A half-hour later, when I returned, the sky above the Yellow Sea had turned a dark blue. Ernie was still sitting behind the steering wheel, sleeping, his fingers laced across his stomach. A buzzing yellow street lamp shone down on him. I shook him awake.
He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What you got?” he asked groggily.
I unrolled a police sketch and held it up to the light of the street lamp.
Ernie whistled. “Who’s that?”
“The smiling woman,” I said.
He whistled again. “Now I understand why you followed her into a dark alley.”
I studied the sketch. The woman was gorgeous. The Korean artist, a talented young man, had captured completely the description I’d given him. He even had her smiling. What he couldn’t catch, no matter how many times I tried to explain, was the madness in her eyes. In the sketch she looked beautiful. Radiant. In real life, she’d looked obsessed. Desperate. Crazed.
I rolled the sketch up, walked around and jumped into the front seat next to Ernie. He started the jeep’s engine and cruised in first gear down the steep hills. The air began to reek of fish and garlic and the tang of salt- splashed sea.
I hugged the sketch closer, wondering about the smiling woman. Wondering if I’d ever see her again.
First we stopped at the tiny military compound.
The compound was nestled behind the United Seaman’s Service Club in the shadow of the huge Olympos Hotel.
It was after regular duty hours for GIs now, and the dark compound seemed deserted. The arch over the main gate bore a replica of the red-and-white 8th U.S. Army cloverleaf patch and said 71st Transportation Company. The entire complex consisted of six Quonset huts, which included the sleeping quarters for the fifteen GIs stationed there.
In the Orderly Room, an irritable corporal assigned the night duty as Charge of Quarters managed to locate an even more irritable First Sergeant. After we identified ourselves and told him the nature of our business, he pointed to a board behind his desk marked “Personnel Roster.” There were black-and-white photos of every GI in the unit, arranged in a pyramid from the Captain, who was the Commanding Officer, to the First Sergeant himself, down to the lowliest private. No one was absent without leave, the First Sergeant told us, and everyone had been at their assigned duty stations at eleven hundred hours this morning. We showed him and the Charge of Quarters the sketches of the two thieves the KNPs had provided. Both claimed to have never seen those men before.
On our own, we compared the sketches to the photos on the personnel roster. No obvious matches. But the
