We Were Beautiful Once (33 page)

“How's school?”

“I take one course, English.”

“What's your major?”

“Don't have major.”

“How old are you?”

“I... twenty-one.”

“Wow, just a kid.”

“Kid?”

“Yeah, very young woman.”

“You have drink, Nick, beer?”

“Kentucky whisky, it's on the bar.”

Rachel got up, unwrapped two tumblers and poured a generous portion of whisky, a splash of water.

“Let's play game, Nick. I take white, you black.”

Nick smiled. He looked beyond Rachel and at the dresser where a single white gardenia rose from a thin vase and then turned to the window and saw the Han River as a black ribbon separating the city. “An odd start, but okay.”

Rachel arranged the pieces while Nick watched, sipping his whisky. She moved the white king's pawn to K-3. He mirrored her with his black king's pawn to K-3.

She moved the queen diagonally to the edge of the board.

Nick thought for a moment, then moved the queen's rook Q-4.

She quickly moved the king's bishop diagonally to the edge of the board.  

The board began to reel as Nick made a swipe for his knight. It had become so difficult to stay focused, and he felt so tired. Rachel's face, beautiful, young, blurred and loomed, then blurred again. Nick could feel the room tipping.

“Mr. Nick. Easy. You want I stay, Nick, no worries.”

“Yes, but no. It's best you go.” He thought he may have hurt her feelings as he walked over to the bed. He saw her unhurriedly leave her chair grabbing the sequined purse she had hung on the back. In slow motion, he watched her move toward the door before he fell back, eyes closed.

“Good night, Nick. Nick, good...  ”

Nick did not respond.

The next morning the Americans sat in the windowless room again.  Nick's head was in his hands.

“You all right, Nick?” asked Seymour.

“Yeah, too much whisky.”

“Not a closet drinker, are you?” Seymour jibed.

Nick tried smiling. He was about to mention Rachel, and how he did not remember getting into bed, did not remember undressing, but Colonel Park and General Lee entered and extended a curt good morning.

Lee addressed Freedman. “Sir, I would like to start today's meeting with a list of matters we had hoped that you could help with.”

“General, sir, our earlier meeting left unresolved if the representation could meet my requirements.”

“I assure you that we will meet your requirements.” The general paused. “But these things take time, as you, a man of great experience, know.” He paused to sip from a cup. “I need not restate our need for contacts in Washington, such as you could provide. We might consider you, exclusively, to help us soften the effects of poor past judgment.”

“General, some “poor judgments” are considered crimes by our government.”

“But hopefully you could broker a political solution to our alleged arms exports to Africa—that is if they conflicted with U.S. Export Law. Delisting denies us important access to armaments essential to our security.”

The men spoke around the details once again, and within the hour the meeting concluded when the general announced that he had to attend a scheduled meeting. The Americans returned to the hotel, Seymour saying, “I am getting bored with the pace at which the Koreans do business.”

On September 12, at approximately 8:30 a.m. Freedman received a call from the administrative assistant to the Chief of Staff to the President of the Republic of Korea. She requested a meeting at 11 at the Blue House. A car would pick them up at 10:30. When they arrived they were escorted to a conference room with pink and white flowered wall paper and several porcelain vases sitting on highly polished mahogany tables. A large octagonal table sat in the middle of the room atop a white and blue Persian rug. At least fifteen minutes passed before two men walked in, one of whom was Colonel Park. “This is Mr. Yoo, Chief of Staff to the President of the Republic of Korea.” Yoo, extending both arms, palms upward, said, “Please be seated.” He indicated that he had been fully briefed and that he would try and answer any questions Nick had. Nick again sketched out the case.

When Nick finished, Yoo nodded to Park who supplied the Americans with a synopsis of the war, particularly the October through December timeframe. Nick knew the history. But Park covered a more detailed account of events that were experienced by the ROK in conjunction with units of the 19th Regiment, especially in the vicinity of the village of Pakch'on and the Ch'ongch'on River between October 25 and November 27, 1950. They suggested that the information would be useful in putting the Girardin disappearance into a battle context, since he was last seen in these parts November 25, 1950.

Park spoke like an historian. “Mr. Castalano, I understand that the man you are looking for was in the 8th Army 24th Division, 19th Regiment, Company C. Our records show that therefore he was near the Ch'ongch'on River valley, which varies in width from six to thirty kilometers depending on who's measuring.” Park went on for fifteen minutes without taking a breath. Nick took notes. Then all became quiet, signaling that Park had finished.

Nick asked, “Mr. Park, do you have any information about the maps?”  

“We obviously have many thousands of such maps. We were able to confirm the ones you produced are of Camp 13. The one actually labeled Camp 13 shows a road near the camp area which looks like a long road for troop movements leading to a crossing point into Manchuria, and the symbols seem to coincide with our intelligence reports at the time of major minefields we may have laid later in the war. Our maps do not show such fields, but an analysis of our records indicates that those were areas where the U.N. forces were targeting such ordinance. I am afraid I have nothing further at this time.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” said the Chief of Staff.

“Sir, once again, could you tell us if your records tell you anything about the soldier named Girardin in Camp 13?” Nick asked.

“Well, there was one entry in an intelligence record that indicated that if we encountered a Private Roger Girardin or Sergeant Joseph Johns, we were to return them to Seoul CID, in connection with a classified report. Other than that we...  ”

Yoo raised his hand and then quickly completed the sentence for Park, “... we have nothing to report. No, we have no other record. Maybe you need to inquire at the U.N. Armistice Commission.”

“Do you know if there was any unit mentioned?”

“No, a rather superficial document. I wish I could share it, but it is classified,” Yoo countered.

Yoo lit a cigarette, blowing smoke in Seymour's direction. Seymour took a deep drag on a short butt and doused it in his coffee cup. Yoo rose from his chair and opened his arms, signaling to Park that the meeting was over. He extended a handshake to his guests wishing them a safe trip. “Colonel Park and I have to attend a meeting now. If you have any further questions, feel free to direct them to my attention. You have my card.”

 

In the week following the return to the U.S., Freedman made several visits to the Korean Embassy in Washington to entertain whether to represent the government. In the end, he applied for foreign agent status and set upon representing the ROK in the U.S.  His first assignment had to do with illegal arms exports.

 

 

ON THE PLANE FROM KOREA, NICK MULLED over Park's comment about the
long road for troop movements leading to a crossing point into Manchuria.
Yoo had obviously cut Park short. There was plainly more information than Yoo, or more accurately, the Korean government was letting on.
The fact that the symbols coincided with minefields, and that the U.N. forces were targeting the area for ordinance was also curious.
Stopping in the office on the way home, he left the map with a note in big black letters for Mitch:
Find an expert on signs, symbols, and hexes!
 

When Mitch had seen Nick's note to find out about signs, symbols and hexes, he took the most obvious first step for a recent post-grad: he called his friend, Bill Norgren, who was writing up his PhD in Mayan Hieroglyphics and asked if he could be pointed in a direction to figure out what the hexes meant.  
Norgren suggested that it could be some kind of language, a hieroglyph or ideogram he was unfamiliar with and passed Nick onto his friend Barry Eisenberg, a PhD linguist at Fordham University who knew something about codes and semiotics.
Mitch
faxed a portion of the map to Eisenberg who returned the next day. “I figure that the hexes might be a take-off on the symbol that is associated with the first Chinese character set. The legendary King Fu Xi from over 7000 years ago invented an ancient symbol referred to as the eight hexagons.”

 “It's no surprise they're Chinese in origin,” Mitch reasoned. “They were found on a map that may have been drafted by the Chinese. But what do they signify?”

“That I can't say. You may also want to see what databases might show the existence of the mark in other contexts.”

“Like what?” Mitch asked.

“I don't know, maybe religious, political, corporate logos for instance.”

Mitch turned to Skip Repetski, a friend who specialized in trademark law asking if he could figure out if the hexes were some kind of logo. Skip called Mitch the next day. “The search turned up several hexagons as logos for everything from diapers to aircraft parts, helicopter parts at one time.”

“Can you tell me who registered the mark for helicopters?”

“Yeah, a Hamilton Group.”

The mark Skip had found consisted of a hexagon within a series of diminishing hexagons. He took a magnifying glass and compared it to the ones on the map. “They look the same. You know the aspect ratio, each side of a hex is the same length, and the relative size of the interior hexes to each other is very close.  But maybe you don't have to take my word for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“There's this guy Henriques in AI over at computing who's big into patterns, he might be able to tell you more,” he said, writing out a number.

On the phone, Mitch told Henriques that Skip had suggested he talk to him about a pattern problem, but he was unsure why, exactly.

“Well, I work on systems that improve on automatic fingerprint identification and hand writing analysis,”  Henriques responded. The next day, a note Henriques left with the receptionist admitted Nick to the scientist's lab. The name on the door read:
Golois Logic For Optical Pattern Recognition,
or simply
GLOPR
, was the software program that, among other things, did statistical pattern recognition—that is, how close one image matched another.

Henriques looked up from this desk. “Mitch?”

“John? Thanks for taking the time to meet with me.”

“So, let's see what you got,” said Henriques.

Mitch showed Henriques the two symbols. “I need to know whether two symbols are precise matches in the mathematical sense. In other words, might you tell me whether they were authored by the same draftsman?”

“As a linguist might determine plagiarism?” Henriques asked.

“Yes, that sounds good.”

“In theory, I can. We do something called pattern recognition—not like a human does, but by reducing an image to its mathematical representation. It's a branch of topology.”

“Like mapping? Okay, and in plain English?”

“Let's assume that if these were drawn by different artists, there'd be variability in the drawing. We try and find out if the variability is due to random variations of one individual or more than one. If the variations are small it would tend to point to one artist. The idea behind
GLOPR
is to electronically scan the specimen images of the two hexagons, the ones from the maps and the ones from the trademark search. The computer will perform a shape analysis deciphering the images' mathematical properties in the geometrical sense. For example, there are spaces between the hexes as they recede into smaller and smaller hexes. We can measure the spaces, we can measure the aspect ratios. This means measuring the actual outer and inner shapes of each of the embedded hexagons, their areas, the line lengths, the areas of the spaces between the hexagons and even the texture, as well as highlighting any distinguishing features, such as curves, ridges and craters that are apparent.”

“So you're saying it will say to with what degree of mathematical certainty the two images were drafted by the same person?”

“Right, or at least you can talk about similarity in a statistical way. It'll take a few days to carry out the analysis.”

The following Monday night Henriques called Mitch with the result, “The tests are nearly conclusive: the same individual probably—within a certainty of ninety-eight percent—drew the hexagons on the map and the ones produced for the logo.”

 

 

 

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23rd AT THE STROKE OF TEN, Lindquist returned to the bench, open-collared, loosened tie, fresh red scar starting below his jaw and ending under his shirt. Ed Armstead, the CBS radio reporter, observed that Lindquist appeared ten pounds lighter, cheeks sunken, eyes more deeply set behind the specs that rested loosely on his nose.  The judge moved forward, positioning himself to look into the witness's face as best he could. The witness chair was already occupied by David Bradshaw, who had flown in from Atlanta the night before. Lindquist warned in a stern, but weak voice. “Sir, you are still under oath. Proceed, Counsel.”

“Mr. Bradshaw,” Nick began, “When you sat in that chair nearly six weeks ago, I showed you a map referred to as Plaintiff's Exhibit, marked B-1for identification, and asked if it fairly described an area you were familiar with. If you could step up to the easel to my right, let's go through that again, please.”