Nightmare Range

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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.

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