by Martin Limon
“We got that all cleared up, Top.”
He shook his head at the memory. “But, anyway, it’s over. The Army likes things to proceed in orderly fashion. You need to remember that. You, too, Bascom.”
The first sergeant put his big hands flat on the desk. “Still, after all is said and done, I’ve got to admit that you two are the best ville rats I’ve got. Nobody can go out there, work with the Koreans, and come back with the goods like you guys.”
A compliment, the first one in months. And it obviously hurt him to say it, judging from his rictus grin. He was setting us up for a big one.
“That’s why I’ve called you into this one. I need you to get out there and find out all you can about this Miss Pak Ok-suk. Who she knew, what she was up to, and how she ended up the way she did. I’m taking you off the black-market detail effective immediately. You can consider yourselves on this case twenty-four hours a day. Just report back to the office every morning prior to zero eight hundred hours. You got that?”
“What about our expense account?” Ernie said.
“Sixty dollars a month.”
“Make it a hundred.”
The first sergeant gazed at Ernie for a moment and then at me.
“Okay. But I want results. And I want ‘em fast. And if I find that you’re out there screwing off on me, you’ll be cleaning grease traps from here to Pusan.”
We lifted ourselves out of our chairs and strode out into the hallway.
Ernie stopped in the Admin Section to shoot the breeze with Miss Kim, the fine-looking secretary. I found Riley, the CID Detachment’s personnel sergeant, hair greased back, working away frantically on a pile of paperwork.
“So what’s the deal, Riley?”
He looked up at me through thick square glasses. “It’s hitting the fan, George. Find out who dorked that girl and you’ll be a hero.”
“And if I don’t?”
Riley jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Back to the DMZ.”
“I’ve walked the line before.”
“Yeah,” he said, disinterested.
Ernie and I walked out into the cold wind of Seoul. Snow crunched beneath our feet, left over from the off-and-on fall we had had the night before. We jumped into the old motor-pool jeep and Ernie brought it coughing to life.
“Where to, pal?” he said.
“Where else?” I said. “Itaewon. The home of my fevered dreams.”
They say that Seoul is not as cold as other parts of Korea. Particularly not as cold as up north in the hills near the Demilitarized Zone or down south in the flat, unprotected plains of Taegu. But it’s cold enough. The Chosen peninsula has all four seasons; the summer almost tropical, the spring and autumn achingly beautiful. This was a big change for me. I was used to the flat, unrelenting sunshine of East Los Angeles, with the only variable being the thickness of the smog layer.
The streets I grew up on were mean but they never became part of me. Primarily because I kept moving. From one foster home to another. My mother died when I was two. Some people say she was killed. And then my father disappeared into Mexico, the ancient land whence he had come.
I don’t know the truth of how my mother died or why my father disappeared. As a child I had no choice but to accept it, and just before I was scheduled to graduate from high school, I joined the Army. I’ve thought a few times since then of going back, talking to some of my cousins and my uncles and aunts scattered around the city. After all, I’m a trained investigator now, but I’ve been busy and I’ve been overseas and maybe you could say that I’m afraid to find out the truth.
The foster homes I lived in were grim, a child always knows when he’s not wanted, but there was one bright spot. Mrs. Aaronson, one of my foster mothers and the one I lived with the longest, took a special interest in my schoolwork when she realized that the math and reading weren’t sinking in. She showed me what they really are—puzzles. She made sure I brought my books home and made sure I did some homework, whether it was assigned or not, every night. And after a while she didn’t have to check very close because the thrill of surprising the teachers and my fellow students with a perfect test score became my incentive to work on my own.
It didn’t last long, though. After I left Mrs. Aaronson, I climbed into the rebellious shell of all adolescents, and soon I was looking for a way out of high school other than the car washes or factories that swallowed whole legions of Mexican-American kids.
I dropped out and joined the Army. My high test scores landed me a clerical job and for a couple of years I kicked around in the States, my newly found buddies spinning off occasionally to Vietnam, spit out like tickets from a rotating drum in a lottery drawing. With a little more than a year left on my enlistment, I got orders to Korea. At first I couldn’t believe my luck. No getting shot at. And then they bused me and about a hundred other guys over to an Air Force base, strapped us into a chartered jet, and we were on our way. Hours later I saw Mount Fuji through the clouded porthole. We refueled and another couple of hours later we landed at Kimpo Air Field.
Like rats we wound through a maze of partitions, getting shots, having papers stamped, exchanging our greenback dollars for Military Payment Certificates, and then they put us on a bus for the Army Support Command Replacement Depot. I saw my first stern-faced Korean soldiers manning sandbagged machine gun emplacements.
I loved Korea. It was a whole new world of different tastes and smells, and a different, more intense way of looking at life. People here didn’t take eating and breathing for granted. They were fought for.
I got a job at Eighth Army Headquarters in Seoul and I did a lot of typing and filing and driving and standing for hours in the sun with an M-14 rifle that I never used, waiting to be inspected. I started taking classes in the Korean martial arts, tae kwon do, and the Korean language, and I got twisted into knots by Suki, one of the greedier girls out in the village of Itaewon.
When my year was up, I went back to the States reluctantly and figured I had to get out of the Army. Everybody else was. I started drawing on the GI Bill, attended Los Angeles City College for one semester, and then, just after I bought my books for my second term, I decided to hell with it all, and I went down to see the local recruiter and made his day by signing up as fast as he could fill out the reup forms.
I got assigned to the military police but I was a college boy now, so after a brief stint at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, I got sent to the Criminal Investigation School. My good study habits got me through, and I kept my mouth shut rather than ask the instructor why someone who steals some communications equipment, say, should be seen as a criminal while a colonel who leads his troops into combat from a helicopter three thousand feet in the air should be seen as a hero.
This was the Army, after all. You can question the Green Machine but don’t expect answers. And then I got orders to go back to Korea. Actually, I had pestered my local personnel sergeant until he called up a buddy at the Department of the Army and got me the assignment. At first they sent me down to Taegu and that’s where I met Ernie.
Ernie’s my kind of guy. Completely devoid of emotion. Unless they lock him out of the NCO Club on a Sunday. Ernie’s one of those who pulled a lottery ticket to Vietnam. He was in a transportation company there, driving a big deuce-and-a-half, rolling through thatched-hut villages in mile-long convoys at fifty miles per hour. Spikes in the road. Not stopping to change the tires until you got back to the base camp at Chu Lai. Nights in dugout bunkers, waiting for the random rockets to drop in. Pure heroin sold by children outside the wire for two bucks a pop.
After they sent him back to Fort Hood, he volunteered to return to Vietnam. One more year at the same base camp. And then he was out of the Army. He kicked around on the beaches of southern California for a while and then he came back in.
He hit Korea a couple of months before I did.
The night before, we had bounced from one Pusan bar to another like metal spheres in a Japanese pinball machine. And with about
as much conscious thought. We had ended up in a club with two good-looking girls, business girls—registered prostitutes who kept their VD cards up to date by going to the public clinic every month and getting the little red chop in the appropriate box. You’re supposed to check to protect yourself but I never did. Except sometimes the following morning, as a matter of curiosity. I always wanted a VD card as a souvenir.
The girl I had been with last night was slightly harelipped, I think, with a long, slender, unblemished body. She sneered at me through the whole thing. I think I hadn’t paid her enough money. And then she wouldn’t let me have any in the morning.
Just as well. I was so hung over I hadn’t really wanted it anyway. The attempt was a matter of form.
Ernie pulled the jeep up onto the sidewalk in front of the Itaewon Police Station, which was under the command of the Korean National Police, KNP. There was no other place to park, but normally I wouldn’t have let him do it because I was always careful to consider what Captain Kim, the commander of the police box, might find insulting. I figured he’d forgive us this time because it was sort of an emergency.
Sergeants Burrows and Slabem stood in front of the Korean desk sergeant’s counter, trying to look like they were doing something.
Jake Burrows was tall and thin with a pockmarked face that had long since healed over into a rough approximation of the Mojave Desert. Felix Slabem was short, soft, and round and for some reason he still had pimples, like an adolescent. He spoke first.
“Take the streetcar?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We figured you’d have the culprit by now.”
Burrows piped up: “The first sergeant told us just to perform liaison. The case falls under Korean jurisdiction.”
“Lucky for you.”
Ernie and I had been at odds with Burrows and Slabem from the start. They were always careful to push an investigation only far enough so it fit neatly into one of the categories on the provost marshal’s briefing chart. Our investigations were always a little more unconventional, involving people who maybe weren’t under suspicion in the first place and causing the honchos at the headshed to come up with some fancy explanations. At least that’s the way we saw it. As far as everyone else was concerned, we were just screwing off—making wild accusations in an attempt to justify the time we spent in the ville.
In the Army, going after the truth is usually seen as a criminal waste of time.
We nodded to the desk sergeant and walked down the short hallway to the little cubicle that was Captain Kim’s office. His face was buried in a stack of paper. Brown pulp. The Korean government couldn’t afford the reams of letter-quality bond that were routinely churned out of every Eighth Army office for no discernible reason. The Koreans didn’t have the redwoods for it. Or any other types of trees except for the ones they had planted since the Korean War.
Captain Kim looked up, kept his face impassive, and nodded. Coming from him that was like a joyous embrace.
I said a couple of polite things to him in Korean. His English was okay, my Korean barely passable—mostly culled from long intimate conversations in barrooms with beautiful women—but somehow we managed to communicate.
He treated Burrows and Slabem like any other interlopers from an alien planet. Us, he treated with bored indifference, which was one hell of a step up.
His face was flat and leathery with heavy, horizontal eyebrows that extended almost the width of each eye. His uniform was neatly pressed, open at the collar, and a deep brown color, reminding me of Sheriff John standing next to his wiener-mobile in back of a big shopping center in Pacoima. The uniforms of all the other cops were faded and patched.
He already knew what we were there for, to see the murder site, and he already knew that it was our job to come at the case from the GI angle. The Koreans were maintaining jurisdiction. When only GIs were involved in a crime, they often turned the prosecution over to the U.S. military authorities. But when a Korean was victimized, and the newspapers had gotten hold of it, there was no way they were going to let it go. He did realize, however, that he needed us to infiltrate the world of the U.S. soldiers and their Korean girlfriends.
He got up, put on his hat, and barked some instructions to his desk sergeant. We followed him out the door.
Next to the police station was a bank—smart move—and beyond that a few shops and then the nightclub district. The UN Club was first—big, blue, and boxy, with a little neon sign touting it as the gateway to Itaewon. Up the road, coiled neon hung off the sides of cement brick walls, looking dusty and sad in the gray morning air.
Alleys wound up the hill and formed a network like a giant spider impaled amidst the jumble of Korean homes.
Captain Kim leaned his head forward and trudged quickly up the incline, not turning left, as I expected, at Hooker Hill, but marching straight up past the King Club and then left, up a narrow alley, and right through an open metal gate imbedded in a ten-foot-high stone wall. The hooches formed a U shape. The one closest to the gate was gutted. It was charred and black and Captain Kim told us that the landlady had acted quickly to get the fire department there in time to save the rest of the rooms.
She had gray hair yanked straight back over her wrinkled face and knotted in the back with a polished wooden pin. I thought I saw worry in her eyes. Maybe it was just from living, maybe something else.
I talked to her briefly. She said she was an old woman and a light sleeper and she had a phone right next to her bed so she called as soon as she smelled smoke.
I decided not to be impolite and question her at length, since Captain Kim had told me in firm tones that he had already personally conducted an interrogation.
That was another thing I was sometimes accused of when somebody other than Ernie watched my investigative technique— being too soft, on Koreans usually. And taking too much instruction from the Korean police. The U.S. Army’s not real big on subtle moves.
The hooch itself didn’t reveal much. The body had been removed a couple of hours ago. There were the remnants of the usual business-girl apparatus: a big charred armoire for storing clothes, a melted-down stereo set, and the skeleton of a Westernstyle bed.
Ernie picked up a wooden stake that seemed to have been untouched by the fire. “Why wasn’t this one burned?” he asked.
Captain Kim understood the question and answered in Korean. Before I could translate, Ernie turned his back on us and started poking around in the remains. He uncovered a pile of charcoal in front of the bed. The bonfire. Probably what was left of a perforated cylindrical briquette, the type that is fired up in outside heaters to spread warm air through flues that ran beneath the house. He kept flipping with the clean wooden stake until he turned up a blackened pair of long straight tongs. It looked as if they had been used to carry the flaming briquette into the hooch.
The old woman and the other neighbors knew nothing more about the GI boyfriend than that his name was Johnny. The description they gave was vague and where it was explicit it could have applied to half the guys in Itaewon.
Ernie dropped the stake, dusted off his hands, and turned to the old lady.
“Where did Miss Pak Ok-suk work?”
“The Lucky Seven Club,” she said.
We asked the old woman for a list of her other tenants. Captain Kim didn’t like it much since he’d already interviewed them all and come up with nothing.
The only one who seemed worth interviewing was the one with the room that wasn’t much larger than a closet. Kimiko. We knew her well. In Itaewon, everyone knew her well.
“Where is Kimiko now?”
The old woman waved her hand towards the village.
We thanked her and walked down the hill in silence. I could think of a few places where Kimiko might be. All of them raunchy.
Burrows and Slabem were still waiting at the police box.
“Like a couple of hounds guarding a store,” Ernie said.
“Or waiting for us to make a mistake.”
Captain Kim didn’t say goodbye. Neither did we. Ernie cranked up the jeep and swiveled his head almost completely around to back off the curb.
“What’d Captain Kim say about that stake? The one that hadn’t been burned?”
“He said it couldn’t have been burned because it was protected.”
Ernie popped the jeep into first and edged out into the rushing traffic.
“Protected?”
“Yeah.”
The jeep lurched forward. Tires squealed and fourteen horns at least blared as Ernie bulled his way into the careening stampede.
2
Life in the Army isn’t anything like what most people think. Especially when you’re stationed on Yongsan Compound, the headquarters of the Eighth United States Army.
First of all, we don’t stand any formations. In the CID you’re not even issued rifles, only .45s, which we could check out of the arms room when we felt like it, which in my case was never. And we don’t wear uniforms. Of course the CID, the Criminal Investigation Division, never did, no matter where you were stationed. You always wore a coat and tie. The civilian clothes were supposed to help you blend into the civilian population. That probably made some sense in the 1930s and ‘40s, when everybody who could afford it wore a suit. But nowadays the only people who wear suits are either getting married, on their way to a funeral, or they work for the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division.
Our rank was classified. So if young buck sergeants, like me and Ernie, had to investigate a full-bird colonel, we wouldn’t be intimidated. That’s another one of those things that doesn’t really work in practice. After you’ve worked at Eighth Army Headquarters for a while, everybody knows you. And the colonels have this habit of protecting themselves and their fellow officers. In that order. Of course, the generals don’t have to worry about anything. They’re just one step below God.
People also have this idea of some sort of sad sack existence. I haven’t touched a mop since I left the States. We have houseboys. Every night I throw my dirty clothes on the floor, in the same spot, and in the morning after I shower and shave I put on the clean clothes that were laid out for me the day before. About an hour before I leave for work, my houseboy shows up and brings my footgear to a high spitshine. When I get back to my room, usually at lunch or in the late afternoon, the place is clean, the bed is made, and my work clothes for the next day are hanging in front of my wall locker.