Slicky Boys

by Martin Limon

  As we waited, I watched the stream of young GI’s, all with sheaves of paperwork in their hands, parading in to get a new ration control plate issued or an old one renewed. The time and money and effort the 8th Army put into ensuring that nobody sold a jar of instant coffee down in the village was enormous. Still, millions of dollars of black market goods found their way onto the Korean markets. The whole reason behind the system—supposedly—was to protect fledgling Korean companies from the unfair competition of duty-free goods from the U.S. Army compounds. The only problem was that there weren’t any Korean companies that grew bananas or bottled maraschino cherries or distilled Scotch whiskey, as far as I knew. So the demand was tremendous. And although the honchos of 8th Army went at their task with all the vigor of Hercules cleaning out his stables, they weren’t able to do much more than cause a ripple in the flow of contraband.

  I think, if the truth were known, they were more concerned with making sure a bunch of foreigners didn’t get their grubby hands on the products that, by divine right, belonged to Americans. Brainwashed by Madison Avenue, the army hoards consumables like gold.

  A courier came in carrying three oblong boxloads of data punch cards, stacked one atop another. He hoisted them onto the counter. Another bored clerk signed a receipt for them, then lifted them onto a long table with other stacks of boxed cards. I stood and wandered over to the end of the counter.

  Each box was marked in black grease pencil: Wonju, Osan, Pyongtaek, Waegwan, Taegu, Pusan. The cities near all the major U.S. bases. Every few minutes, from the other end of the table, a listless clerk picked up a box and fed the cards into one of the whirring machines.

  I sat back down and waited.

  “This coffee’s for shit,” Ernie said.

  “They use it on the printers when they run out of ink.”

  “I believe it.”

  He shuffled through a news magazine looking for pictures of naked women but didn’t find any.

  “Don’t they have a National Geographic around here?” he said.

  I helped him look. No dice.

  It took about a half hour but finally the harried sergeant came back out, holding a sheet of paper with the four numbers Herbalist So had given us on it.

  “Checked everywhere,” he said. “No luck. None of these numbers turned up. Not even in the history files. Which doesn’t surprise me because all of them are of a sequence that we haven’t even issued yet.”

  “Then they made a good guess when they chose those numbers.”

  “All four?” He frowned. “More likely they knew something.”

  “How could anyone determine what number sequences you use?”

  “Beats me. It’s strictly classified.” He handed the paper back to me. “Sorry we couldn’t help.”

  I pointed to the boxes on the table behind the counter. “What about those?”

  “Those? Cards from PX’s and commissaries around the country. They’re just in.”

  “How about running them for us? Checking for these numbers?”

  “But they just came in.”

  “It’s a bother, that’s for sure. But, you know, murder and all that . . .”

  He sighed, looking extremely tired and harassed. “Okay. But it’ll take a while.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  He went back into the noisy bowels of the data processing unit and I sat back down next to Ernie.

  “Dick,” Ernie said.

  It was almost midafternoon by the time the sergeant reemerged, and both Ernie and I were grumpy because with all the activity today we hadn’t been able to squeeze in lunch. The sergeant handed me a three-page computer printout. Rows of numbers were printed on it. The numbers were so light, I had to squint to read them.

  “Don’t you guys ever change your ribbon?”

  “Every week.”

  “What’s all this supposed to mean?”

  “Your number.”

  “Where?”

  “One of them anyway.” He pointed an ink-smudged finger at the second page. “Card was used once in the PX on Hialeah Compound. And again, less than an hour later, at the commissary on the same base.”

  “How long ago?”

  “This morning.”

  “Where’s Hialeah Compound?”

  “Pusan.”

  “How’d these cards arrive here so fast?”

  “Flown up by helicopter.”

  “They bring them in every day?”

  “Every day. Unless the weather grounds the aircraft.”

  So Shipton had murdered the Nurse and then hopped on a train or a bus and headed down to Pusan, the southernmost city on the Korean Peninsula, a trip of about five hours. He’d appeared bright and early this morning at the PX and commissary, making purchases, knowing that we wouldn’t be looking for him that far away.

  I grabbed the printout. “Can I keep this?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks for your help, Sarge.”

  Before he could say anything, Ernie and I were out the door, running for the jeep.

  It was finally time to level with the First Sergeant. Not about everything, but about most things.

  Before I had given him the whole story he raised his hand and said, “Hold it.”

  He checked on his intercom, received clearance, and the three of us marched down the slickly waxed hallway to the Provost Marshal’s office. The receptionist eyed us suspiciously but the Provost Marshal, Colonel Stoneheart, was waiting for us and waved us on into his office. We took seats in comfortable leather chairs. The flags of the United States, the United Nations, and the Republic of Korea stood behind his desk.

  The Provost Marshal relit his pipe.

  “Okay,” the First Sergeant said. “Go ahead.”

  I cleared my throat, hoping I’d be able to play this right. Ernie was tense; I needed to make sure they didn’t ask him any questions. With two of us answering, they could trip us up.

  “Cecil Whitcomb was a thief. You saw that, sir, in our preliminary reports. We have reason to believe that whoever killed Whitcomb down in Namdaemun knew him, or at least had seen him before.”

  “What reason?”

  “We’re not sure yet. We just don’t think it was random.”

  Ernie shuffled in his chair. I continued.

  “We got a lead that a woman in Mukyo-dong, a kisaeng—”

  “A what?”

  “A kisaeng, sir. A professional entertainer. Like a geisha girl.”

  “Oh.” The Provost Marshal fiddled with his pipe. “And where in the hell is Mukyo-dong?”

  “Downtown Seoul.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “So we got this tip—”

  “Where’d you get this tip?” This was from the First Sergeant.

  “Sources in Itaewon.”

  “Sources in Itaewon? You mean gossip from business girls.”

  I didn’t answer.

  The First Sergeant folded his arms. “Go ahead.”

  “So we went and talked to this girl. She knew a Korean man who owns a print shop, and he had an American friend. She thought this American guy was black-marketing, so we went to the print shop owner and got the guy’s picture.” Actually, the slicky boys stole the picture. But I didn’t want to tell the colonel that I was working with them. “We also found some phony ration control plate numbers.”

  The First Sergeant and the Provost Marshal looked at each other.

  “Good work,” the First Sergeant said. “But you’re not on the black market detail. You’re investigating a murder.”

  “So this kisaeng, the next morning, ends up dead.”

  The Provost Marshal shuffled through some papers. “I saw something about that in the blotter reports. And another one in Itaewon.”

  “Yes. This American guy’s next victim.”

  “What’d this Itaewon girl have to do with it?”

  “She knew us.”

  The Provost Marshal puffed furiously on his pipe, but it had gone out. “Corporal Sue�
�o, would you please explain yourself?”

  “This guy somehow found out that Ernie and I were investigating the murder of Whitcomb. Although our lead in Mukyo-dong wasn’t a very solid one, this guy, for reasons of his own, thought it might lead to something. He killed the kisaeng so she wouldn’t be able to identify him, and then he killed the woman Ernie has been seeing in Itaewon, probably trying to scare us off the case.”

  The Provost Marshal looked at Ernie. Ernie remained completely stoic, as if he hadn’t even heard what I said. The Provost Marshal turned back to me.

  “It’s sort of thin.”

  “You’re right, sir, but if we can pick this guy up, interrogate him, we’ll probably be able to pin the Whitcomb murder on him. If he hadn’t been involved, why would he be murdering these women we talked to?”

  I hadn’t thought out very clearly what I was going to say to the First Sergeant and the Provost Marshal, but I was warming to the explanation now.

  “He’s getting desperate. He probably thinks we know more than we do, and even if he didn’t kill Whitcomb, he certainly has information that will help. We can already bust him and turn him over to the KNP’s for the murders of those two women.”

  “Okay,” the Provost Marshal said. “We pick this guy up for questioning. But where can we find him?”

  I pulled the folded computer printout from my pocket.

  “We just got this from Data Processing. One of these phony RCP numbers, one of those associated with his photograph, was used down on Hialeah Compound in Pusan this morning. He probably thinks he’s safe down there for a while. Ernie and I can go there now. Pick him up when he makes his next purchase.”

  The First Sergeant didn’t like it. “Why not just notify the Pusan MP’s?”

  “How are we going to get the photograph down there to them that quickly? We’d have to send a courier down with it, anyway. Might as well be me and Ernie. Besides, the Pusan MP’s have other things to worry about. Ernie and I wouldn’t have anything else to concentrate on, other than busting this killer.”

  “What’s his name?” the Provost Marshal asked.

  “Beauregard Shipton. Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy. Former Liaison to the ROK Navy headquarters. Been AWOL for about three months.”

  The Provost Marshal set down his pipe. “An officer?”

  I nodded.

  He shuffled some papers, probably hoping it would give him time to think. Apparently it did.

  “Okay. Very good report, Corporal Sueño. You and Bascom can go now. First Sergeant, you stay here.”

  The First Sergeant followed us into the hallway. “Wait in my office,” he told us. He went back into the Provost Marshal’s office. The door closed.

  “Dick,” Ernie said.

  “Yeah. The world’s full of them.”

  Instead of the First Sergeant’s office, Ernie and I waited in the Admin section, shooting the breeze with Riley. Miss Kim still hadn’t thawed out, so Ernie didn’t know what to do with himself. And he was out of gum.

  Riley pulled something out of his desk. “The KNP Liaison gave me this.”

  It was a color photo of the blood scrawled on the wall at the Nurse’s hooch. He handed it to Ernie. Ernie didn’t flinch.

  He was acting tough. But that’s all it was: an act. Deep down inside he was burning about the Nurse’s death.

  Ernie studied the photograph. “Goddamn,” he said. “ ‘Dreamer.’ That’s your name, isn’t it, pal?”

  “One way to translate it.”

  “This guy’s really got a hard-on for you.”

  I shrugged. Hearing it said that baldly didn’t make me feel exactly warm and secure.

  Lights blinked on Riley’s phone. Carefully, he lifted the receiver, keeping the mouthpiece covered. After a few seconds he put the receiver back down.

  “The honchos’re burning up the wires.”

  “What for?”

  “Getting clearance from the head shed. Making sure this doesn’t embarrass the navy too much.”

  “Jesus,” Ernie said. “What the hell’s to clear? The guy’s a stone killer.”

  “But he hasn’t killed anybody important yet,” Riley pointed out. He saw our grim faces.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  A few minutes later the First Sergeant’s heavy oxfords thundered down the hallway.

  “Sueño! Bascom! I thought I told you to wait in my office!”

  We rose but didn’t answer.

  “Never mind that now.” The First Sergeant checked his wristwatch. “Go pack your bags. The last Blue Line leaves Seoul Station at seventeen hundred hours. I want you two on it.”

  Riley unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk. “I’ll issue them some petty cash, Top.”

  “Fifty bucks should do it.”

  We all stared at the First Sergeant.

  “Okay. A hundred each—but that’s it.”

  As Riley counted out the greenbacks and filled out receipts for us to sign, Ernie made eye contact with Miss Kim. She looked worried and didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. Finally, she pulled out a handkerchief and scampered down the hallway to the ladies’ room.

  Ernie shrugged. As if to say, “Who can understand them anyway?”

  32

  THE SEOUL TRAIN STATION IS A BRICK MONOLITH covering a full city block with a huge dome towering above its center. The station looks like something out of Czarist Russia. Which in a way it is, since the “bears to the north,” as the Koreans call them, built the station as a gift to the Korean king in the 1890’s. The Russians’ motives weren’t completely pure, since at the time they were locked in a power struggle with Japan over influence in the Far East.

  We pushed through the surging crowds of men in business suits and kids in school uniforms and old ladies with huge bundles balanced atop their heads. In all this madness there was a small sea of tranquility with the red-and-white cloverleaf of the 8th United States Army above its door. The RTO. The Rail Transportation Office. It had a lounge and a PX, and a ticket counter so GI’s wouldn’t have to stand in the long lines with the masses.

  While Ernie went over to the counter to get our tickets, I grabbed the military phone on the green shelf and looked up a number in the narrow U.S. Forces Korea phone book.

  After I dialed the number it rang twice, then a voice squeaked, “Distribution Center.”

  “Harvey?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “George.”

  “Hmmm,” he said. “Had any strange lately?”

  “Last night, as a matter of fact.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “How could it be someone you know if it was strange?”

  He didn’t have an answer for that.

  “Listen,” I said, “do you have anything new? On that J-two business?”

  “Some.”

  “What?”

  Strange hesitated. “This line isn’t secure.”

  “I’m on my way to Pusan. I don’t have time to come in and talk. You questioned the security NCO at J-two. Nothing was missing, but he was going to double-check the items that had been disturbed.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “What were they?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “I mean what was the subject of the documents? All I need is a general idea.”

  I heard a tapping on the phone.

  “What was that?”

  “Checking for bugs,” Strange said.

  “We’re not being bugged, for Christ’s sake. I just need the general subject.”

  Another long silence.

  “Okay,” I said. “She was Chinese. From Fujien Province. Came here with her family after Mao took over the mainland. Speaks Korean because she grew up here and went to school here, but right in the middle of things I had her lay a little Chinese on me. Just to see what it was like.”

  “And?”

  “She reminded me of a beautiful bird in a tree singing a song of happiness.”

  “Perched on your branch?�
��

  “Yeah. Perched on my branch. Now gimme the subject!”

  “Tunnels.”

  “What? Did you say ‘tunnels’?”

  The line clicked and buzzed and went dead.

  I thought of calling him back but decided against it. We didn’t have much time until the Blue Line left and besides, Strange probably wasn’t going to tell me anything more over the phone anyway.

  Security guys. They’re all a bunch of whackos.

  We hustled out of the back door of the RTO down the long, covered corridors of the Seoul Train Station. The layout is massive, with signs everywhere written in Korean and English and crowds rushing through the overpasses and the underpasses heading like lemmings for the various trains that find their hub there.

  The Blue Line is the only deluxe accommodation that runs nonstop all the way down the Korean Peninsula, from Seoul to Pusan. Well, not exactly nonstop. It stops for exactly four minutes each at the two major cities along the route: Taejon and Taegu. The entire trip of about 340 kilometers takes about five hours. Leaving at five P.M. would get us into Pusan a little after ten, enough time to scrounge accommodations before the midnight curfew. The government won’t allow trains to travel any later.

  We stood on the platform waiting with the other passengers, mostly well-dressed Koreans; ladies in fine western outfits or the colorful flowing skirts and blouses of the traditional Korean hanbok, men in suits. Vendors shouted the benefits of their wares: candy and snacks for the kids, or dried cuttlefish and a tin of orange juice to wash it down, or baskets of fat winter pears ready to be peeled.

  Ernie stopped one of the saleswomen and bought two large packs of ginseng gum. He was ready how for any adventure.

  The train pulled up in a shriek of billowing steam. We climbed aboard on the wrong car but managed to push our way through the crowded aisle until we found our seats. We stowed our bags in the overhead rack and leaned back in the comfortable seats. Plenty of legroom.

  After ten minutes, the whistle sounded, the conductor bellowed, and slowly we started to chug forward.

  The blue-suited stewardess came by, checking to make sure everyone was seated and comfortable. Ernie stared at her and twisted his head 180 degrees as she passed, zeroing in on her butt.

  When she was gone, he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.