Between the Dark and the Daylight by Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg

Author:Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg [Gorman, Ed; Greenberg, Martin H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-3076-0
Publisher: Tyrus Books
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Opposite of O

BY MARTIN LIMÓN

Never the twain shall meet,” a wise man once said.

He was referring to the Occident and the Orient, but as a criminal investigator for the 8th United States Army in Seoul, Republic of Korea, I can assure you that the two worlds often meet. Usually in harmony. Occasionally in conflict. And in the case of Private First Class Everett P. Rothenberg and Miss O Sung-hee, the two worlds collided at the intersection of warm flesh and the cold, sharpened tip of an Army-issue bayonet.

My name is George Sueño. Me and my partner, Ernie Bascom, were dispatched from 8th Army Headquarters as soon as we received word about a stabbing near Camp Colbern, a communications compound located in the countryside some eighteen miles east of the teeming metropolis of Seoul.

Paldang-ni was the name of the village. It clings to the side of the gently sloping foothills of the Kumdang Mountains just below the brick and barbed-wire enclosure that surrounds Camp Colbern. The roads were narrow and farmers pushed wooden carts piled high with winter turnips, and old women in short blouses and long skirts balanced huge bundles of laundry atop their heads. Ernie drove slowly through the busy lanes so as to avoid splashing mud on the industrious pedestrians that milled about us. Not because Ernie Bascom was a polite kind of guy but because he wasn’t quite sure where in this convoluted maze of alleys we would find the road that led to the Paldang Station of the Korean National Police.

Above a whitewashed building, the flag of Daehan Minguk, the Republic of Korea, fluttered in the cold morning breeze. The yin and the yang symbols clung to one another, like red and blue teardrops embracing on a field of pure white. Ernie parked the jeep out front and together we strode into the station. Five minutes later we were interrogating a prisoner: a thin and very nervous young man by the name of Private First Class Everett P. Rothenberg.

Geographically, Korea doesn’t sit on the exact opposite side of the Earth from the United States, but it’s pretty close. Things are different here. People look at their lives and their relationships and their place in the cosmos through a different lens than people in the States do. For example, G.I.’s new in country see Koreans waving good-bye to one another but are puzzled when no one departs. Actually, waving the hand with the palm facing downward means “come here.” So what looks like “good-bye” to an American actually means “hello.”

Similarly, a Korean never says “no” to another person’s face. Such a bald statement of negativity damages kibun, the aura of congeniality that envelopes human relationships. Instead, a polite Korean will answer “yes,” meaning “yes, I’ll think about it.” So “yes,” G.I.’s soon come to find out, usually means “no.”

Children also have a different attitude toward their parents. You’ll never hear a Korean child saying, “I didn’t ask to be born.” No matter how disaffected a Korean

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