by Martin Limon
After keeping us in conversation for a few more minutes the young monks had put our tires back on. The elder monk had offered us lunch at the temple and I would have loved to check the place out but I declined since Ernie was still fuming.
The story he’d told about Kimiko had just heightened the mystery of the woman for me. After World War II, when she’d been chased out of Itaewon along with all the other gisaeng girls who catered to the Japanese, she’d wandered for a long time and almost starved to death.
When the Korean War broke out she was on the road, as most everyone was, streaming south to evade the Communist North Korean invaders. She fell in with a young man, a fellow refugee, who was as broke as she but very generous and very kind to her. When the frontlines solidified somewhat, Kimiko was able to go back to plying her trade near the bases of the United Nations forces that had flooded into Korea. The young man stayed with her, still doing any kind of coolie labor he could find during the day, and pretended not to notice Kimiko’s nightly assignations.
After MacArthur’s landing at Inchon, and the second retaking of Seoul, the young man told Kimiko that he must return north to refurbish the monastery from which he had fled. All the monks had been killed by the northern Reds; only he had escaped. Kimiko wanted to go with him, he wouldn’t let her. He did tell her where the monastery was and how to find him if the war ever ended. Eventually it did. And Kimiko found him. He was the head of a fledgling Buddhist monastery. She came as a simple supplicant, not advertising the fact that she and the master had lived as man and wife.
The master wasn’t ashamed of her, though, and told all the monks how she had helped him and how they had been one during the disruption of wartime. Kimiko continued to visit and make contributions for years afterward. A few years after the master had died, Kimiko got in trouble up north in Yongjukol and was sent to jail.
Who had she buried, I had wanted to know, even though the answer seemed obvious.
“Miss Pak,” the monk replied.
11
Yongsan Compound on Monday morning was bursting with energy. I bundled up and walked out into the cold air, past the deep reds and browns of the old brick buildings and past the leafless trees, shivering like skeletons in the morning breeze, past the soldiers and civilians scurrying to their posts.
First I went to the snack bar and got a warm cup of coffee. I didn’t bother with a copy of the Stripes. I had too much to think about.
I wanted to get out to the ville and talk to Ginger, but I would be lucky if the place opened by noon. Meanwhile I had to kill some time.
The Lower Four Club opened at eight on weekdays. I finished my coffee, went for the free refill, and by the time I was good and hopped up on caffeine, I walked up the hill to the club. It was 9:05.
I tried to figure why I kept pressing on this case. Everybody else was happy. The first sergeant was happy, the Eighth Army provost marshal was happy, the chief of staff was happy—so why did I keep going after it?
Part of the reason was Miss Pak. Someone had denied her the rest of her life. She wasn’t happy.
There was also Spec-4 Johnny Watkins. He was about to become a bitter young man.
Why did the damn Army make me take an oath if they weren’t serious about it?
The wind whipped in sudden gusts down the road. The Lower Four Club loomed up ahead.
My reasons for wanting to solve the case went even deeper. When I had been moving from home to home, handled as just another number by an overburdened bureaucracy, it had been the odd individual who had taken an interest in me that had saved me. They had kept me from drowning in despair.
I owed something to Miss Pak Ok-suk and Mr. Watkins. Not because they were friends or relatives but just because they had been assigned to me: my responsibility. I’d be damned if I’d take the easy route and not do my best for them.
Kimiko was another matter. I’d developed a grudging respect for her. Just a few days ago I had thought of her as the sleaziest short-time trick-turning artist in the village. Knowing something about her had made me realize how she had ended up here, how she had struggled to stay alive, and what her hopes had been. I was starting to like her.
But the problem was that Kimiko was standing between me and doing my duty for Miss Pak and Johnny Watkins. I was either going to find a way around her or I’d bust through her.
I had three days before Johnny Watkins went on trial.
The cocktail lounge of the Lower Four Club was open. The light was dim, glassware tinkled, and the place reeked of sliced lemon, disinfectant, and stale booze. Home again.
A few of the stools were already taken. Retirees. Gravelly-voiced Merle, cheerful Kenny Burke, somber old Hermann the German.
“How’s it hanging, George?”
“Straight down, Kenny. How are you guys?”
“Gradually getting rid of the shakes.” Kenny lifted his glass as if to demonstrate. Ice rattled.
I ordered a beer. Mr. Pyon, the bartender, served me and then went back to his station by the cash register. My eyes adjusted to the dim light. Across the bar, slot machines blinked on and off, waiting for the crowd of inveterate gamblers that would filter in before noon. Two pretty young Korean waitresses, in bright red dresses, chatted quietly with old Mr. Pyon: a grandfather making mild jokes with his granddaughters.
None of the business girls had made their way into the club yet. Still too early.
Two husky Korean men clad in cooks’ white uniforms wheeled a huge metal cart back to the kitchen laden with various sized card board boxes. Stocking up for the day’s business. One of them brought Merle and Kenny an illicit breakfast.
With the food in front of them, Merle and Kenny got busy. They buttered their rolls and then started in on the condiments. Merle must have put half the contents of the pepper shaker on the various items on his plate. Kenny, meanwhile, covered his scrambled eggs with a puddle of Louisiana hot sauce. Then they traded.
Maybe Vietnam had done it to them.
The Lower Four Club was the hub for certain of the American expatriates: electronics technicians making extra pay for the “hardship tour,” insurance salesmen thriving in a sea of uninsured young bachelors, and the occasional representative for a distributorship zeroing in on the PX market.
Many of them were veterans, military retirees living on their pension checks, former NCOs who’d finished their twenty years and now got a check every month for fifty percent of their former pay. Most of them held part-time, horse-shit jobs on the compound. Almost to a man, the retirees had a Korean wife or mistress who they lived with down in the village. A lot of them had kids. Often it was their second set; the first kids, by an American wife, were grown and on their own.
They were a strange lot. A few of them had lived through the Korean War and couldn’t get away from it. Most of them didn’t really understand why they lived in Korea. They only understood somehow that they would never go home.
I sipped the cold hops. The beer tasted good against the film of coffee still on my palate.
Five minutes later Ernie walked in. He had the Nurse with him. We walked over to the dining room and each ordered the ninety-five-cent breakfast special: two eggs, bacon or sausage, hash browns, toast, and coffee or tea. I had two of them. With beer. Ernie had one. And then he ate half of what was on the Nurse’s plate.
She spread jam on his toast and seemed very happy.
By the time we got out to Itaewon we were all half looped. I had talked them into going with me to the American Club and I had told Ernie about the information I needed.
“Why didn’t you find that shit out before?”
“In all the excitement, I forgot about it.”
“What excitement?”
Sometimes I wondered if Ernie wasn’t suffering from brain damage.
The American Club was completely empty. All the chairs were upside down atop the tables and someone had just finished a thorough mopping of the floor. The Lower Four Club, by contrast, was jumping by the time we left. People sp
end their days on the compound and their nights in Itaewon.
I pulled a line of stools off the bar and we sat down. Ginger came out of the back room, her hair tied up with a heavy-duty barrette, her hands in long yellow gloves.
“Aigu! Watkun a!” You’re here.
We ordered three cold OBs from Ginger and she called back to one of her boys, who hustled out and started putting all the chairs down on the floor. She dimmed the lights and turned on the stereo system. Gordon Lightfoot. Ginger was a genius. She remembered everything, including her customers’ favorite musicians. No memory loss there.
She took off her rubber gloves, wiped some sweat from her brow, and fussed with her hair for a while. When Ernie and the Nurse became engaged in conversation, she leaned toward me.
“Why you no come, Georgie? Miss Lim she been looking for you.”
“I thought she was mad, about the last time she saw me with Kimiko.”
Ginger shook her head. “Yeah. She was mad. But I told her you CID. Sometimes you have to hang around with people you don’t really like. To get information. She thought about it. She calmed down. She’s okay now. Pretty soon she go back to the States. You be nice to her, okay, Georgie? Don’t make Ginger lose face.”
She sliced her chubby hand across her round face.
“Okay, Ginger. Don’t worry. You call her now. Tell her I’m sorry.”
Ginger’s face brightened and she trundled off to the phone. When she came back, she was smiling.
“Did you get that information you were going to get for me, Ginger?”
“What’s that?”
“About the girl who used to be Kimiko’s friend. Before Pak Ok-suk.”
“Oh yeah, I got.” Ginger crossed her arms on the bar and leaned close. “She was young girl. Pretty too, like Miss Pak. Kimiko take her, introduce many men, make a lot of money. One day this girl gone. Nobody know why. Some people say she went back to country. Back to her family.”
“What was her name?”
“Li Jin-ai.”
I made a motion with my hand as if I were scribbling. Ginger brought me a pad and pencil. I wrote the name in English and then in Korean, but I misspelled the Korean so Ginger wrote it for me correctly.
“Did she have any friends here in Itaewon? Other than Kimiko?”
“I don’t know. Not many, I think. She wasn’t here long.”
“How long?”
“Maybe three or four months.”
“Which club did she hang out at?”
“The Double Oh Seven Club.”
Another boy came in and Ginger got busy shouting orders to him about more cleaning. She kept a very clean club. No stale booze smell, just the lingering fragrance of ammonia. I liked jaded old places better. Where the liquor and the sweat and the burnt tobacco has seeped into the pores of the leather and the wood and the cement.
The wheels in Ernie’s mind were churning, I could see, as he leaned in at the bar rail.
“Aw,” he said, “we might as well face it. When you figure all we got to do and then add the time to do it, we sure as shit aren’t going to get much time down in the ville. All this because some broad got herself killed,” Ernie said.
“Remember, the mortician’s report said Miss Pak had been sexually abused just prior to her death,” I said, trying to interest him.
Ernie lowered his beer and looked at me in open-mouthed incredulity. “Sexually abused? Every girl in this country has been sexually abused.” Ernie turned and stared intently at the vacant wall. “A crusade,” he said, and let out a dramatic sigh. “There goes our time in the village.”
“Not necessarily. I might be able to wrap this thing up quick.” I gave Ernie my best sly smile but it never has seemed to work very well. “I got an idea.”
“You’re full of them.” But he couldn’t resist. “What is it?”
I took a quick drink of my OB. “We could solve this case.”
Ernie’s head swiveled. “You must have been mainlining rice wine again.”
“No,” I said. “I’m serious. I mean, we’re investigators, aren’t we? We’re highly trained dicks for the greatest investigatory agency in the world, aren’t we? The Criminal Investigation Division of the United States Army. That’s the C-I-fucking-D! I mean, after all, we could just solve the son of a bitch!”
Ernie clutched the edge of the bar and took a deep breath.
“Shit, pal. I never thought of that,” he said sarcastically.
“Yeah, we could just do it.”
“Fuck.” Ernie scowled. He checked his watch. “Mount up.”
The first sergeant was busy, getting briefing charts ready, while Riley stoked piles of paperwork into the big bureaucratic furnace that was the Eighth United States Army. They were too busy to mess with us. I pulled Ernie away from Miss Kim to review again the list I had made of the chaplain’s marriage packets signed out to the Eighth Army staff during the last few months. Each entry had the name of the service member, the prospective spouse, and the initials of the staff member who had taken a packet.
“Who do you know up at the headshed?”
“Strange.”
“What?”
“Strange—he works right there in the distribution center, in charge of the paper shuffle and the classified documents. You remember him. Receding hairline, dark glasses, cigarette holder.”
“The guy who hangs out on the MSR trying to pick up little girls?”
“That’s him, Strange.”
I shook my head. A pervert in charge of top-secret documents. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
We slid out of the office and wound through the old brick buildings of Eighth Army Headquarters, past brown squares of frozen lawn and short rows of naked trees. Just inside the back door of one of the Eighth Army Headquarters buildings was a snack stand with stale cellophane-wrapped doughnuts and a steaming urn of coffee clouding the windows. We turned right down the hallway and passed the sentries at the broad entranceway, one British and one Korean. Both were in their dress uniforms and armed with .45s—members of the United Nations Command Honor Guard.
Halfway down the corridor we stopped at a wood-paneled room with large metal-barred windows. An empty cigarette holder peeped through the rods.
“Had any strange lately?”
Ernie pinched the cigarette holder and pulled it slightly forward. The pursed lips behind it seemed to be cemented in place.
“No strange, Harvey. No strange. What we came for is to get some information from you. On the QT.”
I slapped the list, palm down, on the narrow counter.
Strange glanced down at it but his lips were still cemented to his cigarette holder. Ernie noticed and let him go. Strange stood up slowly, slightly offended but unruffled. He glanced down at the piece of paper and then a bony claw flashed out and snatched it, wadding it quickly into his left pants pocket. He said nothing but turned away from the window. Then we saw a door open on the paneled wall along the hallway and the cigarette holder and then Strange peeped out. He looked both ways down the long plush carpet. The hallway was deserted. He crooked a finger and we followed him about five yards behind. He kept looking back over his shoulder, snapping his head back and forth.
His shoulders were narrow and his hips were just slightly wider than his waist. He was flabby. Unused. Like sliced suet sweating in the sun.
When he reached the men’s room he pulled the door open slightly and stepped through sideways until he disappeared. If I had blinked, I would have missed it.
“Why are we going in here?”
Ernie shrugged. “He feels most at home near a sewer.”
Strange waved us over to the sink in front of the last stall. His clawlike hands held the rumpled list and his cigarette holder traveled back and forth along his thin lips as he studied it.
“List of names,” he said. “GIs. And Korean women. But what’s all this shit?”
He pointed at the row of letters written next to the names.
Someone walked into the latrine. An officer, in a dress green uniform.
I pretended to wash my hands in the sink. Ernie combed his hair in front of the mirror. Strange shoved the list back into his pocket and jumped into one of the stalls. The officer finished his business at the urinal and then frowned at us as he splashed a little water on his hands. When he left I knocked on the door of the stall that Strange was in.
“All clear.”
No answer. I opened the door. He was sitting on the commode, pants still up, studying the list. His cigarette holder was waggling furiously. He pointed to one of the entries.
“This one’s gotta be Ida up at Protocol. That old bitch likes to get into everybody’s business. No reason for her to be signing out marriage packets. And this is Major Hardy from the G-2 office.”
“Security?”
“Yeah. Some of these guys must have clearances.”
I stepped further into the stall, almost completely blocking the light.
“What about these entries here?” I pointed to the letters behind Pak Ok-suk and Li Jin-ai. “Do you know whose initials these are?”
“KMH. It doesn’t jerk my chain.”
“Maybe if you looked at some of the signatures back at your office you’d be able to find it.”
Reluctantly Strange got up from the commode and waddled out of the latrine and down the hallway. We waited outside the barred window as he shuffled through various ledgers and logs and piles of paperwork. He came back to the window shaking his head.
“KMH. I can’t find anyone in the headshed here with the initials KMH. Nobody who picks up distribution anyway.”
“Do you have a complete list of employees?”
“No. No reason to break it down that way. The Civilian Personnel Office would have a complete list but that would be of all the employees at the Eighth Army Headquarters. The whole complex. Not just this building.”
“People from other buildings sign stuff out here?”
“Sure. A lot of them.”