Nightmare Range Read online

  Also by Martin Limón

  Jade Lady Burning

  Slicky Boys

  Buddha’s Money

  The Door to Bitterness

  The Wandering Ghost

  G.I. Bones

  Mr. Kill

  The Joy Brigade

  Copyright © 2013 by Martin Limón

  Introduction © 2013 by Timothy Hallinan

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  The stories contained herein originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “Nightmare Range,” Pulphouse, Vol. 2, Issue 2, 1993. “The Black Market Detail,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January, 1991. “Pusan Nights,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, May, 1991. “A Piece of Rice Cake,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, June, 1991. “The Woman from Hamhung,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, July, 1991. “The Gray Asian Sky,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, October, 1991. “Seoul Story,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January, 1992. “ASCOM City,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Mid-December, 1992. “Night of the Moon Goddess,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, October, 1994. “Seoul Mourning,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Mid-December, 1995. “Payday,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, February, 1998. “The Mysterious Mr. Kim,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, April, 2002. “The Filial Wife,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, March, 2003. “The Widow Po,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, September, 2003. “The Cold Yellow Sea,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January/February 2004. “The Opposite of O,” Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, July/August 2008.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Limón, Martin, 1948–

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Nightmare range : the collected Sueno and Bascom short stories / Martin Limón

  p. cm

  eISBN: 978-1-61695-333-1

  1. United States. Army Criminal Investigation Command—Fiction. 2. Military intelligence—Fiction. 3. Sueqo, George (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 4. Hispanic American soldiers—Fiction. 5. Bascom, Ernie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 6. Americans—Korea—Fiction. 7. Korea (South)—Politics and government—Fiction. 8. Political fiction. I. Title.

  PS3562.I465N54 2013

  813′.54—dc23 2013009578

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  v3.1

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Timothy Hallinan

  Nightmare Range

  The Black Market Detail

  Pusan Nights

  A Piece of Rice Cake

  The Woman from Hamhung

  The Dragon’s Tail

  The Gray Asian Sky

  Seoul Story

  ASCOM City

  Night of the Moon Goddess

  Seoul Mourning

  Payday

  The Mysterious Mr. Kim

  The Filial Wife

  The Widow Po

  The Cold Yellow Sea

  The Opposite of O

  INTRODUCTION

  Timothy Hallinan

  Cool and hot. Yes and No. Head and shoulders. Matter and antimatter. Laurel and Hardy.

  Sueño and Bascom.

  Martin Limón has created my favorite crime-solving team since (and, perhaps, including) Holmes and Watson. He’s taken a perfectly balanced union of opposites and put them into a whole landscape of opposites. Army grunts versus Army brass. The rigidity and pragmatism of the US 8th Army versus the truculence and tradition of Korean officialdom. On a larger scale, the permanent war between North and South Korea.

  It’s in the intermittently neutral spaces between all these grinding jaws that Limón sets the stories in which George Sueño and Ernie Bascom right wrongs caused by crime, betrayal, stupidity, misunderstanding, prejudice, drugs, and heartbreak. This is American-occupied Cold War South Korea, long after the armistice that resolved nothing and long before the miracle explosion of the economy. So, in addition to all the other opposites in Limón’s books and stories, we have a vast economic and political division between haves and have-nots, between the powerful and the weak.

  Martin Limon owns this world in a way that very few writers can claim their setting and characters. He learned it first-hand, over the course of a decade spent with the Army in Korea. Like George Sueño, he opened himself to Korean culture and learned the language. Like Ernie Bascom—who will walk through a wall when it’s the shortest distance between two points—he developed a healthy loathing for the cover-your-ass obstructionism of Army procedure.

  So he had the experience to tell these stories. But hundreds of thousands of people graduated from that same school of experience, and none of them came up with George and Ernie. None of them came up with the AWOL soldiers in the Ville, none of them came up with the tragically exploited working girls, the Army’s boneheaded officers and lost boys, the hard-eyed Korean cops, the whole landscape of want and desperation, invisibly layered with a rich and deeply spiritual culture thousands of years old.

  And that’s because Martin Limón is a writer of the very first rank. He’s a poet of the people, although without the political connotations that phrase might suggest. He looks at people of at least two cultures and at every level, and he sees all the way through them, and then he uses his gifts to put them on the page so fully the reader feels that he or she can walk around them. And then, sometimes, he allows them to be broken into tiny pieces, and as we readers retreat to our fundamental conceptions of right and wrong and our comfortable certainty that right will prevail, George and Ernie’s investigation reminds us forcefully that in this particular world, that’s often not the case. Sometimes tiny victories are the only ones in sight, and sometimes you have to search even for those.

  I discovered Limón when his first novel, the astonishing Jade Lady Burning, came out. I waited, often impatiently, for each succeeding book. It got to the point where all I had to do was open the cover to smell the charcoal cookers, feel the cold, see the eyes of the people—almost know what was around the corner—because the world Limón creates is so consistent, so thoroughly known, in a way that only the very best writers’ fictional worlds are. If you think of, say, a prose description of a street as the point of view of a camera that’s been placed there, Limón is one of those rare writers who could tell you instantly what’s behind the camera and what’s out of view to the right and the left. (He can do the same with the internal landscape of his characters.) I soon learned to put aside a big chunk of time when the new Martin Limón novel finally landed in my lap, because I wasn’t going to be home, or anyplace close to home, until I’d finished it.

  When I set out to write my own books about the emotional and spiritual collision between two cultures, Martin Limón was my primary inspiration. In thinking about my books, I read Limón not for events or characters or tropes but for the particular wizardry with which he keeps the larger perspective in view even while he’s got his reader at the level of details. When we see a movie, we’re rarely conscious of the lens the director has chosen, even though it can have a huge impact on how we see the scene. For Limón, it seems to me, this ever-present awareness of a cultural gulf is the lens through which we view the action in his books and stories, and it brings everything into a very clear and specific relief.

  I am not a short-story reader, so it came as a complete surprise to me when Soho told me this volume was in the planning stages. All I can say is that it’s a bonanza on the King Solomon’s Mines scale, probably the best news of my reading year. I invi
te you to read these tales slowly or fast or however you do it (I really had to take my time because they’re so rich and so many of them are so overpowering), and once in a while, ask yourself whether you know any other writer who could do what Martin Limón does here.

  And if you think of one, send me his or her name.

  NIGHTMARE RANGE

  The mama-san didn’t know how long the body had been out there. “Three, maybe four days,” she said. Her girls had just conducted their business a few yards farther away from it each day.

  “Where is it now?” I asked.

  “Policeman take go.” She waved her cigarette, and smoke filtered through the darkened gaps between her teeth.

  The morgue was in Chorwon-ni, ten miles to the south. Ten miles south of Nightmare Range, and fifteen miles from the Demilitarized Zone that slashes like a surgeon’s knife through the heart of the Korean Peninsula.

  The war had been over for twenty years but still it lingered: a big dumb ghost that refused to go away. No peace treaty had been signed—just a cease-fire. So the fourth and fifth largest armies in the world, armed to their squinting eyeballs, faced each other across the line, fingers on trigger housings, knuckles white, dancing to the sound of no breathing.

  Our police escort, Lieutenant Pak, stood back, arms crossed, glaring at the squatting woman. He was a tall man for a Korean, slim but muscular. His khakis were starched and fit as if he had been born in them. I didn’t ask him why it had taken so long to dispose of the body. The non-person status of a “business girl” follows her into death.

  One by one the doors to the hooches slid open and groggy young women, their faces still puffed with sleep, gaped at us curiously. Some squatted in long underwear, their arms crossed over their knees, while others lay on the floor, beneath the wrinkled patchworks that were their blankets. All of the girls were ugly in some way: ravaged complexions, tufted hair, splotches of discolored skin. It seemed more like a ward for the incurably ill than a whorehouse.

  Maybe it was both.

  Lieutenant Pak asked a series of questions of the old woman and I managed, struggling, to keep up with most of it. There had been a number of American units in the field that day and just before nightfall the old woman had stationed a few of her girls near each encampment. As darkness approached, the girls called to the young GIs from just outside the concertina wire.

  I’d seen the game before. Sometimes the GI would wade out into the tall grass and lie on the blanket, both he and the deformed girl protected by the enshrouding night. Sometimes the bolder fellows would bring the girls into their tents, risking the wrath of the Sergeant of the Guard and sneaking in and out of the camp with the stealth of a North Korean infiltrator.

  I pulled out a map, showed it to the mama-san, and pointed to the area around Nightmare Range and the village of Mantong-ni. The old woman looked at it carefully and consulted with some of the girls. A few of them were up and dressed now. They chattered for a while and then came to a conclusion. With my pen, I marked the area beneath the old woman’s gnarled fingernail.

  I asked what type of unit it was. Big guns, they decided.

  Lieutenant Pak wiped his hands on the sides of his khaki trousers and took a step toward the gate.

  “Mama-san,” I said. “This girl. What was her name?”

  “Miss Chon,” the old woman said. “Chon Ki-suk.”

  I wrote it down. “Do you have a picture of her?”

  The mama-san barked an order and one of the girls handed me a tattered piece of cardboard folded in half like a small book. A VD card. Chon Ki-suk peered out at me from a small black-and-white photograph. She had a round face with full cheeks that sagged like a bloated chipmunk. All visible flesh had been pocked by the craters of skin disease. She differed little from her sisters now breathing heavily around me, a timid little girl awaiting death.

  Lieutenant Pak stomped into the mud.

  I stood up and walked with him to the gate. As he stooped to get through the small opening, I looked back at the rows of blemished faces sullenly watching our every move. None of them smiled. None of them said goodbye.

  My partner, Ernie Bascom, was in the jeep curled up with a brown-paper-wrapped magazine from somewhere in Scandinavia. He unfolded his six-foot frame as we approached and started up the jeep. Some people said he looked like the perfect soldier: blue eyes behind round-lensed glasses, short-cropped sandy-blond hair, the aquiline nose of the European races. What had blown it for him was Vietnam. Pure horse sold by dirty-faced kids through the wire, women taken on the dusty paths between rice paddies, the terror rocket attacks during innocent hours. His placid exterior hid a soul that had written off the world as a madhouse. Looks were deceiving. Especially in Ernie’s case.

  We dropped Lieutenant Pak off in Mantong-ni. A dozen straw-thatched farmhouses huddled around the brick-walled police station as if longing for an extinguishing warmth.

  Ernie popped the clutch, our tires spun, and we lurched forward into the misted distance.

  The roads were still slick, but all that was left of the early morning rain were ponderous gray clouds rolling like slow-motion whales through the hills surrounding the long valley. We plunged into a damp tunnel, and when we came out, the valley widened before us. Dark clouds in the distance glowered at us like fat dragons lowering on their haunches for a nap.

  “Nightmare Range,” Ernie said. “Where generals meet to see how much their boys can take.” He pumped lightly on the brakes and slid around a sharp curve. The water-filled rice paddies on either side of the road strained impatiently toward our spinning tires. This valley had been the scene of some of the most horrific battles of the Korean War. Americans, Chinese, Koreans, had all died here, and the bones of some probably still embraced each other deep beneath the piled mud. I had looked it up in the military section in the library, how many had died here. All I remember is that there was a number followed by a lot of zeros.

  The austere cement-block building of the Firing Range Headquarters was painted in three alternating shades of green. Inside, a brightly colored relief map of Nightmare Range covered a huge plywood table.

  A ROK Army sergeant with short, spiky black hair and a crisply pressed khaki uniform thumbed through a handwritten log of the units that had been using the training facility. He came to the correct date and the correct position and pointed to the entry: Charlie Battery, 2nd of the 71st Artillery. They had returned to their base at Camp Pelham.

  “Our next stop, Camp Pelham,” Ernie said.

  We returned to the jeep.

  “Tough duty, pal.” Ernie leaned back in a patio chair at the snack stand just inside the front gate of Camp Pelham, sipping a cold can of PBR. We were dressed the same way: blue jeans, sneakers, and black nylon jackets with brilliantly hand-embroidered dragons on the back. Standard issue for GIs running the ville.

  The outfit usually got us over. We were the right age, both in our early twenties, and we both had the clean, fresh-faced look of American GIs. If we played with the girls enough, laughed, horsed around, toked a few joints, no one would suspect that we were conducting a criminal investigation.

  Ernie looked like the typical GI from the heartland of America. I looked like his ethnic sidekick, taller than him by about three inches, broader at the shoulders, with the short jet-black hair of my Mexican ancestors. My face often threw people. The nose was pointed enough, and the skin light enough to make them think that maybe I was just one of them. But I’d grown up on the streets of east LA and I’d heard the racial slurs before. When some GI started in on “wetbacks” somebody usually elbowed him, whispered something in his ear, and looked nervously in my direction. They didn’t have to worry though. That’s part of America, after all. I wouldn’t deny them their fun.

  The afternoon was glorious but cold. The crisp, clear blue sky of the DMZ, far away from the ravages of industrialism, seemed to welcome even the likes of us.

  Camp Pelham is in the Western Corridor, about twenty miles from the Divisio
n Headquarters at Camp Casey and forty miles from Nightmare Range. The Western Corridor was the route the North Korean tanks had taken on their way to Seoul in the spring of 1950. It was expected to be the route they would take again.

  The camp was small—you could walk around it in ten minutes—but it still managed to house the battalion’s three batteries of six guns each. The big howitzers of Alpha and Bravo Batteries pointed to the sky, their barrels snugly sheathed in plastic behind protective bunkers. Charlie Battery was out in the field again but scheduled to return that afternoon.

  We heard distant thunder and ran to the chain-link fence. Across the narrow river, rows of dilapidated wooden shacks sat jumbled behind a main street lined with nightclubs and tailor shops.

  Charlie Battery rumbled down the two hundred yard strip. A small jeep maintained the lead while six big two-and-a-half ton trucks barreled after it as if trying to run it down. A half dozen 105-millimeter howitzers bounced behind the big trucks like baby elephants trotting behind their mothers.

  The men of Charlie Battery stood in the beds of the trucks, shouting, their winter headgear flapping wildly in the wind.

  An M-60 machine gun crowned the cab of each truck, partially hidden behind bundles of neatly tied camouflage netting. Rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire, draped over stanchions on either side of the truck bed, swayed lazily with the rattling of the trucks like huge and sinister gypsy earrings.

  Some of the villagers of Sonyu-ri waved happily at the unstoppable convoy. Others scurried to get themselves and their children out of the way.

  When the Camp Pelham gate guards swung open the big chain-link fence, the men yelled and laughed and the drivers gunned the truck engines. Diesel fumes billowed into the air.

  The jeep sped by and headed for the Battery Orderly Room. The truck turned in the other direction to get hosed down at the wash point and topped off with diesel at the fuel point.

  We finished our beers and walked down the road. In front of the Orderly Room a disheveled-looking little man rummaged through the back of the jeep trying to locate his gear. I spotted his name tag. Sergeant Pickering, the Chief of the Firing Battery.