After Inchon the front pushed north of Seoul and kept moving, encountering haphazard resistance or no resistance at all. Sometimes the KPA would fall back and simply disappear. Town after town was retaken and then the UN forces went crashing over the thirty-eighth parallel and began liberating towns that had been under KPA control all along. Once the army passed through, Rhee’s National Police would arrive to hunt out Communists. Sometimes a village produced one or two vigilantes who claimed to have taken up arms against the Communist insurgents out of love for the motherland, but proving active resistance to what had been the status quo since 1945 was extremely difficult. Large numbers of villagers living north of the parallel and south of the advancing front were shot. Because the atrocities went unreported in the States, the mandate to expose them was taken up by the British press, and in early October Langston left for the front with no clear idea of when he’d be back. Chuck missed him sharply. In Langston’s absence he and Peterfield were left uncomfortably alone with each other. They pursued their separate duties as automatically as they could, avoiding communication with each other, and were aided by the well-oiled, self-confident generosity of the army’s information office. The numbers were so good that the numbers of the numbers multiplied; at the daily press briefing the army’s information officers were now eager to provide numbers of enemy wounded, enemy dead, successful engagements, and even American casualties. In the terrible months before the Inchon turnaround, when the KPA had threatened to go all the way to the sea, the Eighth Army’s numbers had often been “unavailable” or obviously manipulated, but these new numbers were robust and shameless, and very good press. Chuck had become the unofficial liaison between the Eighth Army’s information office and Seoul’s Korean-language papers, and he was lavished now with numbers, which he appended to his usual chunky pieces of translated wire-service prose, and passed along.
He came home one day and found Miki packing her things. Her sister had resurfaced, sidling cautiously up to the grand house, with its iron gate standing open and already showing the rust pimples of beginning decay, its waist-high weeds from the summer, its ruined garden, the petty violences done to its rooms. The two women had stared at each other as if they had stumbled upon their reflections in some unexpected place. He stood watching Miki whisk her small room clean and roll her sleeping mat up. He helped her tie it closed. He wanted to ask her to stay, but he couldn’t. Since the end of the occupation their intimacy embarrassed them both, not because life had returned, to the extent that it could, to normal, but because there’d been no sign of Kim. Without him they were drawn too close together, and the insuperable disparity in their positions could no longer be ignored. Kim had always bridged that gap, even in his absence, until it was clear that he was not coming back. “If he was in the city during the occupation he would have gotten to us here, I’m sure of it,” she said, thrashing the bedroll. Plumes of dust shot up, and melted away in the air.
“He left the city before the fighting started.”
“How do you know?”
“He came to me. To borrow money.”
She had straightened from her work and stood now as if nailed to the floor. At last she said, “You didn’t tell me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I would have stayed here with you. Even if I’d known he was gone.”
“I never doubted that you would.”
“Of course you did. You don’t trust me.”
“Yes, I do.”
“There’s no reason you should.” She hefted her bag briefly onto her shoulder and dropped it again, looking for anything she had forgotten. But the room was a bare box.
“He never told me where he was going, or for how long. I thought he might come back here, too.”
“If he didn’t while the KPA had the city, he won’t now.”
“It’s safe here now.”
“For you it is. Kim’s not working for the government. He could be in jail already. Or,” she said, and didn’t finish the sentence.
“I’m not working for the government. I’m working for the Americans.”
“There’s no difference.”
“I think there is.”
She shrugged and lifted her bag again. “Kim would say that working for the Americans you’re still working for the divided Korea. He works against it.”
“How?”
“You know.”
“I don’t.”
She studied the floor. “He never told me his activities,” she said finally.
“What made you think he would have told me?”
“He trusted you. More than he trusted me.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“He told you he was leaving. He never said good-bye to me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Don’t.”
Although she was holding her bag she didn’t move to go. They kept standing in the empty room, awkwardly. At last he said, “You could stay if you wanted to. I’d like it if you did.”
“I know.” He saw her flush slightly. Then the moment of shared sentiment annoyed her. “I wouldn’t want to be here when the KPA come back. I was all right when it looked like I was in this house alone. They thought I was robbing the landlord. It would be different if I was seen here associating with the Young Master himself.”
“You seem so certain they’ll come back.”
“I think they will.”
“Hopeful, even,” he said angrily.
“Whose side are you on?” She leveled him with a strange, snide gaze. Before the war she never would have spoken to him this way, not under any circumstances, and the instinct to reprimand her was irresistible.
“I reject both sides. I’m against this war. I can see that’s not your feeling anymore.”
“‘I reject both sides,’” she aped him. “Oh, no you don’t. That’s the idealist’s role. That’s what Kim is doing, wherever he is. You’re a pragmatist, like me.”
“Meaning?”
“We’re out for ourselves. Taking sides is the only way to do that.”
“That’s a contradiction.”
“You’re thinking too hard,” she said, leaving.
With Miki gone he drew one or two rooms close to himself the way he drew the blankets all the way around his body when he slept, cocoonlike, and never set foot in any of the others. In November MacArthur inaugurated a scorched-earth policy north of the front, razing the way for his army to march to the Yalu. He wanted a wasteland. Anything that could be located, within a generous margin of error, was intensively bombed. “Sinuiju,” the information officer announced, “has been removed from the map.” Towns and factories were bombed flat, burned out, plowed under, removed from the map. This phenomenon was also enumerated. Endless columns of refugees began to wind south toward Seoul, seeking the benefits of democracy; in Seoul they choked the streets with human waste, set fires to combat the increasing cold, starved to death in large numbers, and were easily recruited to become civilian spies. Striking stationary targets situated in clear, open spaces could be done entirely from the air, but moving targets had to be found on the ground, where they lurked in the trees. After the war Chuck would learn that the Communist forces had worn white on their daylight marches, and lain down in the snow when they heard a propeller. He would never forget this, and the extent to which everyone under-estimated what the Communists could do. The Americans assumed the Communists were retreating so frantically that the fact that they broke contact with their enemy, making the determination of their position impossible, was only a matter of course. Northern refugees who were recruited, starving, sick, and often partially gangrenous, were flown back over enemy lines into the countryside they had just emerged from and air-dropped in the middle of the night, to walk back again. If the spy wasn’t shot by the KPA while dangling in his parachute from a tree, or while making his way south, or by ROKA troops at the front, or by National Police patrols behind it; and if he didn’t starve, or freeze, or become lost, or perish in some other way, but actually returned to Eighth Army Headquarters in Seoul and provided a coherent account of what he had seen, he was given a small payment and asked if he wanted to go again. Army Intelligence had officers sitting in jeeps across the front waiting to pluck these men out of the routinely harassed refugee columns and speed them back to Seoul. Ten or twenty were dropped every night, and of these, an average of one made it back. He was often injured and addled, acutely sleep-deprived, and so difficult to debrief, an inconvenience which was left to the translator to contend with, because the debriefing had to take place immediately. Any intelligence obtained in this way was likely to go stale within a few hours.
Chuck began debriefing civilian spies in the middle of November, days before Thanksgiving. The approach of that holiday, which had once formed part of a grandiose prediction of MacArthur’s concerning the end of the war, was provoking general surliness. The optimism of October had begun to wear thin. The Army Intelligence officer in charge of debriefings quarreled violently with one of his ROKA translators and fired him. The first time Chuck filled in he extracted an elaborate account from his subject, largely, the observing officer thought, because he wasn’t in uniform. When spies were debriefed by uniformed ROKA officers their loathing was visible. They would produce a modicum of information, and then demand payment. With Chuck the spy was somewhat conversational. From that time on Chuck was regularly pulled out of USIS. “There’s always a fresh way to get fucked,” Peterfield said. “Intelligence uses you and I get to pay you.” But they were both relieved to spend less time together.
On Thanksgiving the American troops were given turkey drumsticks and photographed eating them on the banks of the Yalu River; copies of the picture were distributed at the daily press briefing. Three days later the Chinese entered the war and the front fell to pieces. Now it was the UN forces that broke contact, falling back as quickly as they could move. By the time the front was reestablished it had slid far south. The civilian spies that had been dropped just before the Chinese attack were written off and forgotten, but one of them, in obedience to the iron law of unvarying probabilities, came in. He was badly frostbitten. Three of the toes on his good leg had fallen off, and the bad leg was missing flesh from knee to ankle. The entire calf muscle was gone. He had ridden in an army truck from Kaesong and as the truck’s heater thawed his flesh he had started to scream and not stopped until they reached Seoul, and fed him tranquilizers and whiskey. By the time Chuck saw him he was goggle-eyed but remarkably articulate. The man’s trousers were knotted around his knees. Chuck looked at the leg and broke out in a sweat. The intelligence officer was angry. “Look at him. He’s pumped full of booze.” An army surgeon entered the room and said, “I want to cut that off. Now.”
Chuck spoke to the man in Korean. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Your leg looks bad.”
The man looked at it impassively. “A dog did it,” he said.
“A dog?”
“A wild dog. Tried to eat me.” The man blinked hard and raised his eyebrows, trying to stay awake.
The man had come down, in part, by hopping a freight car. This was how he had made it so quickly. Chuck translated as the man talked. “He gets a freight car. He hop, hops-jumps it.”
“A freight car!” the intelligence officer said. He gave the man an exasperated, threatening look. “Tell him that’s impossible. We’ve bombed all their track.”
Chuck spoke to the man and listened carefully to his reply. “They lay it down again,” he told the information officer. They were laying down the track, picking it up and putting it on trucks when the train had moved over. This was extremely slow, but systematic. They were moving a great quantity of heavy things, matériel, this way. The man didn’t know exactly what was on the train. No people. The man rode this freight train, hiding, to a town called Chaesong. This was the end of the line, and he slipped off unseen. He had not yet been attacked by the dog. He knew he was in Chaesong because there was a Christian church that said Chaesong on it. This Christian church was very beautiful, still standing because made out of stone. Chuck nodded wordlessly. “What is he saying?” snapped the intelligence officer.
“He ends in Chaesong. The train stops in Chaesong.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s pretty near to Seoul, maybe a half day by wagon,” Chuck said. He paused and threw his head back, remembering. “Maybe two hours by car, if there is a flat road. A dry road.” Someone brought a map and Chuck silently pointed to Chaesong, which wasn’t marked. “It’s a very small, a farm village.” While Chuck spoke to the intelligence officer the man waited patiently.
The man had followed a road out of Chaesong that he hoped headed south. He walked for a long time, but he didn’t know how long. Maybe it had been a short time. He had been very tired. The sun began to come up and he didn’t want to walk alone in the daylight. He saw what looked like an old estate, an abandoned place, recognizing it by the useless kind of stone columns marking the entrance to an avenue, and he followed this avenue in the strengthening light. There were handsome old trees lining the avenue and to be less exposed he moved among their trunks. The place was very derelict; he could see that the great lawn sloping away from the avenue and back toward the road had been cut into plots and plowed. Their furrows were etched with old snow. At the top of the avenue was a big house, falling down. He did not want to go in here out of fear of finding other people. He went through the trees around the edge of this house and behind it discovered the trees gave out and a great exposed space descended a long way to a river, probably frozen over, but beyond this was an orchard, tightly packed globes of bare branches that looked like a dense mouse-colored carpet from where he stood, and he decided he wanted to be inside this shelter. He made a run for it down the great exposed space, crossed the river at a footbridge he found, and slipped into the trees. These trees were planted in perfect rows, which gave him the urge to continue. After some time he saw a hard shape ahead and growing near to it realized it was a tank, and that there were row upon row of tanks parked here among the trees, which frightened him, so he got out of there and walked all day and all night. The next night the dog had attacked him.
The rest of his story was of no interest to the officer. “Where was this?” he said. He handed the man a map but the man shook his head. “Christ!” the officer said.
“I think they were pear trees,” the man said to Chuck hopefully. “They grow very neat.” He made a shape with his hands.
“Yes, I think you’re right.”
“What the hell are they talking about?” the officer asked the surgeon.
He wanted to make no mistake. “When you went up the avenue, did it run steadily uphill, and curve to the left?”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t see into the house because there is a stone wall running all the way around, high enough that only the very tops of the trees reach above it.”
“Yes. Behind the house the open space isn’t completely empty. There is one big tree standing there by itself, and a shrine.”
Chuck turned to the army surgeon. “You should take him now.”
“Have you got it?” the intelligence officer said.
“Yes, I got it.”
After the army surgeon had taken the man away Chuck went into the hallway alone and sat down on the floor. With that place severed so cleanly from his life it had been easy to absorb the loss. He hadn’t even felt it. But the sudden knowledge that the estate still existed filled him with longing. Tears flooded his eyes. He blinked wildly, trying to make them dissipate. The intelligence officer came out into the hall and looked at him. “I need your help,” he said. “With the map.”
“You are going to bomb it?”
“What?”
“You are going to bomb there? The orchard?”
“Not if you don’t come in here, we’re not. Come on.”
“Oh, please!” he said. “Please!”
But the intelligence officer only pulled him upright by the elbow and steered him back into the room. “You’re tired,” the officer said kindly, after he’d made a neat X on the map.
The next day Langston returned from the front. It wasn’t until Chuck came into the office and saw him, sitting with his heels on a desk, rolling one of his pencil-thin cigarettes, that he realized how afraid he’d been Langston would die. He felt his eyes flooding again, and he turned away in embarrassment. Now that he’d let himself cry he seemed ready to cry all the time. Langston pretended not to notice. “I’ve got stories,” he said, cheerfully. “Bad stories. Let me buy you a drink.” Peterfield waved them on and when they were standing outside alone Langston suddenly embraced him. He clutched his arms across Langston’s narrow back, his bumpy spine, and let go hesitantly.
“Have you been all right?” Langston said.
“Yes.” He accepted the cigarette Langston had finished and watched him roll a new one, with his wonderful, delicate adeptness, as they walked.
“This is the way it is,” Langston said, when they were sitting in the Banto bar together. “The UN forces are in total rout. Your guys in particular are simply disintegrating, they’re abandoning everything out there. There are shoulder launchers and radio units and wrecked jeeps and what have you, the wounded, everything, lying all over the roads. The desertion rate isn’t being released anymore. I don’t think they can calculate it. They’re melting away.”
“They are not any ‘my guys.’”
“No, they’re certainly not. I’m sorry. That was a filthy insult. But that’s what else I want to talk about.”
“Finish you were saying.”
“I think the Chinese numbers are a lie. No way there are that many of them. I think it’s smoke. The UN cannot hold the line, but it’s not because of hordes of Chinese. The Chinese and KPA are attacking from the north, timed with guerrilla attacks in the east. They are synchronized and they span the entire peninsula. It’s leagues beyond what anyone anticipated. Last week Truman said he thought he might drop the atom bomb. That was a terrible gaffe. Attlee flew to Washington and ripped hell out of everyone.” Langston was grinning. He was always enlivened by the spectacle of British rationality confronting American stupidity. “That’s neither here nor there. The point is that the Americans will not waste an atom bomb on Korea. They’ll sooner leave.”
“They can’t leave it now.”
“Perhaps not, but they can imagine leaving. Your army intelligence line is that the guerrilla activity in the South is wholly unrelated to the activity in the North. Two completely separate bands of misfits with no intention to coordinate their efforts, let alone the capacity to do so. This may not be true. I think it’s not true at all. What is important is that your commanders are beginning to think it might not be true. They are being defeated by KPA-guerrilla coordination in the North, and the Communists are supposed to have a fraction of the UN’s troop force. The rumor coming out of Britain is that the Americans are drafting plans for the evacuation of their troops from the peninsula. Cut their losses, bug out.”
“I don’t think they do it.”
“They’re very stupid, so you’re probably right. But the bottom line is that at the moment there is no agreement how to stop the Communist advance and so nothing’s being done. Units are scattered all over the place, trapped, and they’re dying trying to get each other out. That’s all that’s going on. Your commanders are looking somewhere else, they’re looking at digging in their heels at Pusan or getting out completely. As far as they’re concerned, Seoul’s already lost.”
“You think Seoul falls again?”
“Certainly. I’ll bet you. If it doesn’t I’ll buy you steak every night for the rest of your life. I hope I get to.”
“But you do think.”
“Yes. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Peterfield tells me I should sign up with ROKA.”
“Don’t listen to him. ROKA is vile and corrupt, and worst of all, they’re utterly incompetent. There’s no safety for you there. They are killing everyone north of the parallel. They’re rounding up whole villages of civilians, looping them up in rope as if they meant to take them prisoner, and shooting them.”
“I can join KPA.”
“I think that time is past. They will take you for rearguard ROKA if they find you here, or a spy.”
“I don’t really mean it.” There was a time when he might have meant it, before the KPA had occupied Seoul. Now he never could have stomached it.
“I think you’d better get out of Seoul.”
“When?”
“Soon. But you’re going to have trouble moving. There are checkpoints on the roads south of here and they’re picking up every male of age who isn’t marching in a regiment. Do you have a way to get out?”
“I think so.”
“Smart boy. I knew you would.”
Langston always seemed to drink with bravado, but he got drunk quickly. His face would become rakish and sentimental. They walked to the elevator together and he felt distractedly through his pockets for his room key. “Don’t disappear on me,” Langston said. He gave Chuck a crooked smile. “Promise you’ll leave but please don’t disappear. Say a word before you go. I can’t stand these disappearances. They wreck my sleep.”
“I know,” he said.
“You’re such a young creature. When you get as old as I am you’ll find people have dropped out of sight all around you. I lie awake at night thinking, What ever happened to so-and-so? and that face is as vivid to my mind as if a ghost had come into the room. I can never forget them.”
“I have a lost friend.”
“I’m sorry. You’re too young for that.”
“I have the feeling it’s okay. I have dreams that seem he is here. A very plain dreams. Nothing special is happening.”
“Mundane dreams.”
“We are sitting on the ground, or walking, or eating.”
“Ah, yes. Secret-agent dreams. They disguise themselves as memories and muddle up your thinking. How long has he been gone?”
“Since before fighting started.”
“He’s holed up somewhere.”
“I hope so.”
“I’m sure of it. Mind what I said.”
“I will,” he said.
He went home and curled up in his bed, pulling the blankets against his skin all the way around so that there was not even the smallest pocket of empty space beneath them. It was hard to keep warm. After some time he felt Kim pushing on his feet. “Wake up.” He wrapped his head in his arms. Kim said, “I want to watch the sun rise. Sit up and move over.” There was only one bench in the park with all its slats. The others were painful to lie on. Kim shook him. “Sit up or we’ll miss it.” They would drink in this park until Chang simply tipped over, snoring. When he woke again Kim was always clear-eyed, chatting, smoking his cigarette, as if their conversation had suffered no interruption. “Here’s the sunrise,” Kim said. First the shadow from the opposite hill would fall over them, and then start to shrink as the sun climbed above it, until at last it passed over and they were sitting in the light. The bench bounced violently. He caught his breath and shrank against the wall.
“You were dreaming,” Miki said.
“How did you get in?”
“I still have my keys. Do you want them back?”
“No. You frightened me.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know how else to find you. Kim is on Cheju.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s a message chain. Part of it goes through the Farmers’ Union in South Cholla Province and part of it goes through a priest at the Catholic mission on Cheju. All I know is the Seoul link. A man came to my sister’s house looking for me. Kim was on Cheju at the beginning of November, in a cave.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know. You would have to go to the Catholic mission on Cheju, in the main village, and ask for Todaro, the priest. Tell him you’re looking for Kim.”
“What if Kim isn’t there?”
“I don’t know. Will you go?”
“I don’t think so. It’s dangerous to leave the city.”
“But they’re drafting everyone now.”
“I’m not worried,” he lied.
“You said you never wanted to take sides.”
He laughed. “Now you believe me.”
“My sister’s husband was drafted last week. The NPs picked him up in the street. They drove him to the house to get his clothes, and then they put him in a truck. And he’s old. He’s at least forty.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Say you’re sorry to my sister.”
They were silent awhile. “If you went to Cheju you’d be safe from the draft.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“I’m not sure you will.”
He lit the lamp beside his bed and her face sprang into view for the first time, an intent moon. He could see the faint threads of the scar, like a scrap of lace sunk just beneath her skin. When his eyes met hers she looked away quickly.
“Just be careful.”
“I will,” he said.
“If you do go, I want you to take me there.”
“I’ll stay here. Traveling is too much of a risk.”
“Staying here is a risk.”
He nodded without speaking and she said again, “If you do go I want you to take me. Please.” Now she looked at him.
“I don’t think,” he began.
“Promise me.”
“I promise,” he finally said.
She took up the edge of the blanket and smoothed it, repeating the gesture distractedly. “I trust you. Because he does.”
“I don’t think it will ever be so dangerous here that I’d decide to risk leaving.”
“I know you don’t. But you could always change your mind.”
“It’s possible.”
“You’ve promised,” she stated simply. Then she went.
At the next morning’s Army Information Office briefing he drew neat, empty boxes in his notebook. “The U.S. First Marines have been rescued from complete encirclement in a courageous effort,” the information officer said. A Reuters correspondent asked about casualties. “We don’t have a count at this time. That’s unavailable.” The number of engagements with the enemy was also unavailable. The number of yards that had been gained or lost was not yet calculated. The Chinese force was estimated, with vague stubbornness, at 500,000. Chuck paged backwards in his notebook and read, from three days before, “Chinese: some 150,000.” He flipped the notebook shut. When the briefing broke up the officer approached him. “These numbers aren’t for use, okay? I’ll get you something tomorrow.”
“What do I ought to say now?”
“Say the line is secure above Seoul. None of the departments are releasing troop movements to the local newspapers. Rhee doesn’t want panic.”
“Is there reasons for panic?”
“Not really. I’m going to level with you: I think the biggest danger right now is panicking civilians. We don’t need that situation. I know you read the foreign press, but those accounts are exaggerated because the war isn’t popular. Particularly Time magazine. I don’t know why. Someone over there’s got an ax to grind.”
“I like Time.”
“Yeah, I do too. Nice pictures. I’ll have something for you tomorrow.”
That night he called his uncle, the congressman, for the first time. After the Inchon landing his uncle had returned to Seoul from Pusan with the government and begun to rebuild his textile business. Chuck had seen him mentioned in the papers. Lee was an entrepreneur fifteen years younger than his half-brother, Chuck’s father; Chuck’s father and Lee were the sons of the same woman, Chuck’s grandmother, by two different men, Chuck’s grandfather having died in the Doctor’s boyhood. When Chuck was growing up, his uncle had never visited his home and had almost never been referred to. If he was mentioned, he was referred to only by his initials. He was a well-known philanderer and gambler. He had turned his failure to receive a university education to his advantage when he ran for public office, in 1948, and during that campaign he had also denounced Chuck’s father in the press and questioned his recent acquittal. When Chuck called he simply said, “This is your nephew.” There was no other person in that category. If his uncle was surprised he did not betray it.
“What can I do for you?”
“I need a favor.”
“What sort of favor?”
“The tide is turning. I have it from Army Intelligence and it’s all over the foreign news service. The offensive is cut to pieces and the talk is Seoul will fall.”
“This isn’t what I’ve been hearing. The government plans to stick it out.”
“They’re putting a good face on it. They’re having the news from the front censored on its way to the Seoul papers.”
“I guess if we decide to go, we’ll go.”
“Rhee won’t put out the word until the last possible minute. It will make him look very bad to have to evacuate his government for the second time in six months. You won’t have time to dump your stock or clear your business. I have access to more information than you. I know more than you do already.”
There was a slight pause. Finally his uncle said, “How close do you think you can come?”
He thought about it. “I think I can peg it within about a week.”
“What’s your best guess right now?”
“Within a month.”
“You have to be sure.”
“I will be.” In exchange he got a car, and a driver.
At the beginning of the third week of December all the Rhee administration’s political prisoners were taken from the jails and shot. Langston and his photographer got two or three usable pictures of them, lashed together at the ankles and wrists and being shuffled through the streets wearing basketlike hoods on their heads. A few of them were carrying shovels that they would share when they got to the woods, to dig their own graves. The jails were empty now. The hush in them must have been like the hush in the streets. “Clean up, bug out. Leave nothing useful behind,” Langston said. Langston and Peterfield had spent most of this day smoking wordlessly and playing gin on Peterfield’s desk. A shallow pile lay between them, of nickels, dimes, quarters, candies, the butts from cigarettes, bottle caps, bullet casings, won, yen, shillings, shekels, small clods of wax. Langston lay his cards down on the desk, taking care not to mar the fan he’d made of them, and lit a cigarette. When he felt Chuck watching him he lit a second and handed it to him. “Did you ever find your friend?”
“I don’t look.”
“Smart boy.”
“What friend?” Peterfield said.
“Friend of Chuck’s,” Langston said, taking up his cards again. He began rearranging them with thumb and forefinger outstretched, as if plucking hairs. From where he stood Chuck could see Langston’s hand. He registered vaguely that Langston was losing. All afternoon he had been too restless to sit down with them. While they played he remained on his feet, ripping noisy reams of news off the wire, reading as he ripped, throwing much of it away. Crumpled balls of news lay all over the floor, most nowhere close to the trash can at which he’d been aiming them.
“Oh, yeah. The friend of Chuck’s who’s Chuck’s friend. See, that helps me. Now I know what we’re talking about.”
“A friend of Chuck’s that went missing in May.”
“I don’t know if missing,” Chuck said.
“You thought that he might be in jail?” demanded Peterfield. “Why?”
“He could have been picked up anywhere, like anyone,” Langston said.
“Like Chuck here. Goddamned uncredentialed civilian.”
“He’s safer here than enlisted,” said Langston mildly, but when Peterfield turned back to his cards Langston gave Chuck a sharp look.
“We’re all fucked anyway.”
“And his friend is probably free as a lark.” Langston ignored Peterfield. “He’s halfway to Timbuktu by now. Smarter than you, Chuck.”
“This may be,” Chuck said.
A few minutes later Langston flung his hand into the middle of the desk, scattering the loot. “I fold,” he announced.
“Then fold, for Christ’s sake, just put your goddamn cards down.” Peterfield lay his own hand aside and began herding chips into separate piles. “What were shekels?”
“Fives. Your glow of satisfaction is blinding.”
“You’re a lousy loser.”
“Nonsense. I’m buying.” Langston stood and pulled his jacket on, shrugging his shoulders into place. “Chuck?” he said, expectantly.
He looked up. Langston stood there, in the mouth of a tunnel that endlessly ran from this moment. He would soon turn and enter it. “In a few days there may be no drinks to be drunk,” Langston sang. Behind him Peterfield stood in the doorway, jacketed and impatient. “Or no bar to have the drinks in, or no city to have the bar in.” This would be Langston, this image before him. He swore to remember it. “You know what they say, about sunshine and hay.”
“Make the hay,” Chuck said.
“That’s the boy. On with your jacket.”
“In a minute.” His falseness made him dizzy. “I just do a little study.”
“Come on,” Peterfield said, irritated.
“At the Banto, then. Don’t be long.”
“Yes.” It came out easily. But halfway to the door Langston turned back again. Their eyes met.
“I will see you,” Chuck said.
After they were gone he started moving. He had thought they would knock off much sooner. He sorted through the deck of cards, removing the one without pips. The card was embellished at its borders, like a treasury note. It read Genuine Bicycle Brand. On its reverse were summarized the game rules for poker, hearts, and gin, in tiny, dense type. He took it to the Underwood on Peterfield’s desk and spent several minutes adjusting the card against the platen. He wanted the added line of type to be flawlessly parallel with the line of print on the card. It was not what was said but the manner in which it was presented, the blackness of the type against the white field, the positioning of the letterhead emblem, the invisibility of the glue. He knew it wouldn’t be convincing. The best he could hope for was to provoke a sufficient amount of uncertainty. After the typing he closed the card into the dictionary to flatten it again. In the desk he found a sheet of USIS letterhead and Peterfield’s razor. He removed the blade, wiped it several times against his shirt, placed the letterhead on top of a folder and began to cut into it. His cuts were impossibly small and precise. He cut at the emblem, careful of every arrow and leaf. When he had finished this he telephoned his uncle.
“You’re all set,” his uncle said.
He felt the car bob slowly over the Han River pontoon bridge. The Han was freezing over every night now, a clear skin forming on the black water after sunset that gradually grew opaque and stiff, creaked, snapped cracks in itself that resealed, and by morning was solid and still. Then ROKA mortared it again, to prevent people crossing undetected by the checkpoints. It was only an hour after sunset, and he could already hear the floes groaning against each other. The car stopped at the bridge entrance and the driver spoke with the sentry. The car had government plates, and the conversation was brief. The carpet pinioned him flat, filling his nostrils with dirt, hair, dust, a wet animal smell.
The car took him as far as Inchon, and then the driver uncovered him. He blinked uncomprehendingly. “My uncle said Pusan.”
“Inchon,” the driver said. “I can’t take you all the way to Pusan.”
He was dizzy from hunger and when he took a step his knees buckled. He could still taste the vomit in his mouth. “Don’t you have a coat?” the driver said.
“No.”
“Take this.” The driver peeled a wool overcoat free from the loot in the back seat and gave it to him. “It’s my extra. It’ll be a little large.”
“You’re supposed to take me to Pusan.”
“I’m supposed to move the congressman’s things to Pusan. I was only supposed to get you out of the city. You can find a boat here.”
“Please,” he said. The driver pushed him, gently but firmly, away from the car. He reeled and almost fell over. “I’ll tell my uncle.”
“That won’t matter. I’m only doing what he told me to do.”
“I can pay you,” he pleaded. But the driver got back into the car and pulled away.
He wrapped himself in the coat and stood quaking in the road, watching the taillights shrink and abruptly disappear. His hand found his heart. The card was still there, damp from his nervous sweat and perhaps from his vomit. The glued parts were peeling. He flung it away from himself and felt its maddening lack of momentum. It bumped up against the air’s resistance and quickly fluttered to the ground. In a pointless act of fury he stamped on it. His attempt at cunning had been so inept. And so he had nothing, no homemade I.D., no useless American amulets, when he walked into the level, filthy, blasted, black streets of Inchon. Every streetlamp had been shot off its pole. He felt his way along the shapes of blind buildings to the waterfront, and spent the night curled in the belly of a boat with a greasy tarp over him. In the morning, reeking of fish gore, red-eyed, sweating from a sudden fever, drunk from hunger, and seeming even more diminished for the size of his coat, he discovered that a Japanese freighter was carrying displaced persons south to refugee camps on the coast. The Japanese had lent the Americans in Korea their navy, for evacuations and minesweeping, in the hopes of ameliorating the conditions of their 1945 surrender. He shuffled onto the freighter in the arms of the crowd, questioned by no one, and was lowered into an unlit, unventilated hold below deck with hundreds of unwashed and sick refugees. He lost consciousness, awakened briefly only by the terrible implorings of a woman in labor. A man beside him vomited into a hat. Children squatted in the tiniest of spaces, to urinate. The ship was three days at sea, two days in transit and a third full day sitting at anchor, although he didn’t know this, and wouldn’t know he was not at Pusan but on Cheju Island, fifty miles off the coast of the mainland, until he came onto the deck.