by Martin Limon
“So he’ll branch out?”
“Maybe.”
“To what?”
“Don’t know,” I replied. “It depends on what his obsessions are.”
“Obsessions?”
“Yeah. Obsessions.”
“That could be anything,” he said.
“You’re right. That’s why the best bet is to catch him. Then he can tell us himself what his obsessions are.”
“That should be fun listening to.”
Ernie slowed at a railroad crossing but after checking that no train was coming, stepped on the gas again. We bounced across the tracks. On the far side, he said, “So, what was the name again of that mekju house?”
“Migun Chonguk.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You don’t know? Here, break it down. The first word is migun. What does that mean?”
Ernie thought about it a moment. “G.I.,” he said.
“Right. Literally, ‘American soldier.’ And what does chonguk mean?”
Ernie thought about this one a little longer. Finally he gave up. “I’ve heard the word. It’s just not coming to me right now.”
“It means ‘heaven,’” I told him. “Literally, ‘heavenly country.’”
Ernie slammed the sedan in low gear, slowed for a truck ahead of us, and when the road was clear, he slid the automatic shift back into drive and sped around the slow-moving truck.
“I get it now,” he said. “This signal site refugee, pretending to be a Buddhist monk, sneaks away from the monastery, stops in the Chonhuang Teahouse for a little refreshment and female companionship, and then he takes a cab ride all the way to G.I. heaven.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Why did he go to all that trouble?” Ernie asked. “Why not just check out on leave from the Horang-ni signal site, catch a ride to Hialeah Compound, and then take the bus to Taegu?”
“Alibi,” I said. “He was trying to establish one that might hold up.”
Ernie nodded, thinking it over. “As if we’re going to believe that he was meditating for ten days.” Then he chuckled. “G.I. Heaven. This place, I’ve got to see.”
* * *
It turned out that the district of Taegu that the cab driver, Kwok, told me about was the same district in which the U.S. Army’s 19th Support Group headquarters at Camp Henry was located.
“We finally caught a break,” Ernie said.
“What do you mean?”
“Camp Henry is where Marnie and the girls are playing tonight.”
After finishing up their performances near the Demilitarized Zone, the Country Western All Stars had been systematically working their way south. Last night Waegwan, tonight Camp Henry.
The Korean countryside is beautiful this time of year, with trees covered in red and brown and yellow, distant mountains capped with white, and miles of rice paddies dotted with piled straw. But we were both tired of driving all over hell and gone, and sick of taking leaks on the side of the road, finding nothing to eat other than a bowl of hot broth from a roadside noodle stand.
Camp Henry was about three miles south of the East Taegu Train Station, the place where Pruchert might have bought a ticket and climbed aboard the Blue Train. Ernie drove slowly through town, following my directions as I studied our army-issue map. Old ladies hustled across streets with huge piles of pressed laundry atop their heads. Children in school uniforms marched across intersections in military-like formations, finally heading home after their long school day. Empty three-wheeled trucks made their way back to the countryside, and taxicabs with their top lights on cruised slowly by, searching for passengers heading home after the end of the workday.
Ernie rolled down the window. “Garlic,” he said. “The whole city reeks of it.”
“A lot of agriculture around here,” I told him. “Pork bellies, rice, cabbage, garlic. It’s what makes the world go round.”
The front gate of Camp Henry was protected by a guard shack and a stern-looking American MP. We continued past the gate and then turned around, drove back past the gate again, and turned east across the railroad tracks. There were a few nightclubs we could see from the main road: the Princess Club, the Pussycat Lounge, the Half Moon Eatery. But most of the joints lurked back in the narrow pedestrian alleyways inaccessible by car.
When the G.I. village petered out, Ernie turned around and found a spot along the cement-block wall topped with concertina wire that marked the boundaries of Camp Henry. He pulled over and locked up the car.
We purposely didn’t drive into Camp Henry proper. Not yet. The MP at the gate would check our emergency dispatch and our CID badges, and in about five seconds he’d be on the horn to the Camp Henry Provost Marshal. Other military law enforcement agencies track 8th Army CID agents more carefully than criminals, worried that we might file a negative report that could reflect poorly on their command. I didn’t want the hassles. And I certainly didn’t want any nosy MPs following us around the village.
We trotted across the main supply route and after half a block entered a narrow alley that housed the dark world of bars and brothels and business girls that lurks outside every army compound in Korea. The air was moist, from the flowers that stood in pots along the cobbled lanes and from the panfuls of water that were tossed by shopkeepers to discourage floating dust. Ernie strode confidently down the street.
“It’s good to be back,” he said.
From the windows above barrooms, feminine eyes stared out at us. Ernie spread his arms, wanting, it seems, to embrace the entire debauched alley and everyone in it.
We walked up and down three narrow roads and six alleys and a dozen byways but saw no sign that said “G.I. Heaven”—or, for that matter, “Migun Chonguk.”
We stopped a couple of business girls on their way to the bathhouse. They both wore G.I. T-shirts without brassieres, and tight shorts enveloping their shapely posteriors; their straight black hair was tied up and clasped by stainless-steel clips. They balanced pans full of soap and washrags against slender hips. When I said, “Anyonghaseiyo,” they giggled and stared at us boldly.
“I’m looking for a club,” I told them in English. They seemed to understand, so I continued. “They tell me that its Korean name is Migun Chonguk.”
“Migun Chonguk?” they both asked, brown eyes opening wide.
I nodded.
They looked at each other, looked back at me, and broke into laughter. In a few seconds, one of them regained her composure, waved her arm to indicate the entire area, and said, “Da migun chonguk.” It’s all G.I. heaven.
I stood there sheepishly, realizing that the cab driver back in Chonhuang-ni by the name of Kwok had been pulling my leg. Then I saw a sign behind the girls. It was a rectangular stripe of red paper pasted onto ancient brick. Slashed on it in black ink were the characters mi for beauty, gun for soldier, chon for sky, and gook for kingdom.
I pointed. The girls swiveled to look. Their expressions remained blank. With only sixth-grade educations—the mandatory minimum in Korea—they probably couldn’t read the hanmun, Chinese characters. I walked over to the sign and pointed again and read it off for them. “Migun Chonguk.” An arrow on the sign pointed down the darkest and narrowest walkway we’d seen yet.
“There?” one of the girls said, crinkling her nose.
They both snorted, turned, and walked away from us. Under her breath, I heard one of them say, “Nabun nyon.” Evil bitches.
Ernie strode over next to me. “They didn’t seem too happy with the place.”
“Disgusted would be a better word for it.”
Ernie grinned. “We ain’t there yet.”
The entrance to the place known as Migun Chonguk, or G.I. Heaven, was a splintered wooden doorway at the end of a narrow pedestrian walkway lined with brick walls. In the center of the lane, filth flowed in an open sewer. Ernie and I hopped back and forth to either side of the path, finding precarious footholds on the moss-slimed rock.
I tried the door. Locked. I pounded with my fist. We listened. Nothing. I pounded again. Finally, the slap, slap, slap of plastic slippers. The door slithered open. A weathered woman’s face peeked out. The mouth opened. It spoke.
“Whatsamatta you? Too early. Anybody sleep time.”
“Too early?” Ernie said. “The sun’ll go down in an hour or two.”
He shoved the door open and crouched through the small opening. I followed. The courtyard was minuscule. Only enough room for a byonso made of rotted lumber, no bigger than a phone booth, and a half-dozen earthenware jars, each capable of holding about fifty pounds of cabbage kimchee.
The old woman closed the door behind us and slid a rusty bolt into place. She was less than five feet tall, hunched at the shoulders, her face marked with wrinkles and liver spots. Most of her teeth were missing.
“Anybody sleep time,” she said again.
“Mekju isso?” I asked the woman. Do you have beer? After all, Kwok the cab driver had told us that Migun Chonguk was a G.I. mekju house.
The woman studied me and squinted her eyes. “Nighttime mekju have,” she told me. “Now no have. Anybody sleep time.”
Ernie wandered around the courtyard, peeking into the gap between the main hooch and the courtyard wall. He must not have found anything out of order, because he wandered over to the opposite side.
“G.I.,” I told the old woman. “Mori oopso.” No hair. “Odiso?” Where is he?
She stared at me blankly. Out of my wallet, I pulled the photocopy I had made of Corporal Robert R. Pruchert’s personnel records snapshot. The copy machine needed toner, so it was not a clear copy; but the old woman snatched the paper out of my hand and studied it carefully.
“He no have hair?” she said, pointing at the photo.
“No. All cut off,” I said.
“Why?” She looked up at me quizzically.
“He want to be deing deingi chung,” I said. A Buddhist monk ringing an alms bell.
“Deing deingi chung.” She laughed. “How you know deing deingi chung?”
I shrugged and pointed at the picture. “You see that G.I. before?”
“Maybe,” she said. “All G.I. same same. All the time Cheap Charley. All the time argue mama-san.”
“How about the others?” I asked, pointing toward the hooch. “Do they know him?”
“Jom kanman.” Just a minute. “I checky checky.”
Still clutching the photocopy in her gnarled hand, she slipped off her sandals and climbed up on the raised wooden floor. She padded down the hallway, wood slid on wood, and then a woman’s voice erupted into moans of protest. Apparently, someone was waking up.
Ernie gave me the thumbs-up sign, slipped off his shoes, and stepped up onto the platform. In stocking feet, he tiptoed into the dark hooch. I had no reason to stand out here in this courtyard alone, so I took off my armyissue low quarters and followed.
Sliding wooden doors, made of latticework covered with oil paper, lined either side of the central hallway. Hazy sunlight oozed through the outside windows, blocked mostly by the taller buildings that surrounded us. At the end of the hallway, one of the doorways had been slid open; Ernie stood near it, listening.
I stopped and waited.
The voices were arguing. All female. Despite the late-afternoon hour, someone was very angry at being awakened. Another woman started protesting shrilly. Behind me, blankets rustled and then another door slid open.
“Weigurei?” someone shouted. Why this way?
A lot of other voices were grumbling, and naked feet started to slap on vinyl-covered floors; one by one, doors on either side of the hallway slid open.
“Wei-yo?” one voice shouted. Why?
“Sikkuro!” someone else hollered. Shut up!
And then a gaggle of women surrounded us, many of them in cotton nightgowns, some in silk. They paraded past us, heading for the byonso, rubbing their eyes, coughing, cursing beneath their breath. Matches sizzled, cigarettes were lit, and the narrow hallway started to reek of cheap tobacco. Ernie and I stood in the hallway, towering over the small flock of femininity, realizing for the first time that not one of them was young. Every woman here was middle-aged or older. One or two of them must’ve had tuberculosis, to gauge by the coughing and spitting going on into porcelain pee pots.
One of the huskier women, wearing a red terry-cloth bathrobe, stopped in front of Ernie.
“What you do, G.I.?” she said. “Why you come see mama-san so early?”
Ernie shrugged. “I was in the neighborhood.”
“Neighborhood? You likey this neighborhood?” She cackled and stalked off down the hallway.
After a few minutes, when the entire household was awake, pots and pans started to clang. Washrags and soap holders appeared, and the women vigorously scrubbed their faces and armpits, squatting in front of an outdoor faucet. When the ablutions were complete, the women returned briefly to their rooms, dried off, and changed into old housedresses and loose shifts.
The husky woman in a red robe was done first. She was wearing a green dress now, and she beckoned us toward the back, leading us into the largest room in the house, and told us to sit on flat cushions. Foothigh legs were unfolded and a five-foot-long mother-of-pearl table was placed in the center of the room. A brass pot of boiling water appeared, and women squatted near the edge of the table and stirred instant coffee or herbal concoctions into cups of boiling water. The husky woman, without asking, prepared us two cups of Maxim coffee crystals. She was about to shovel a heaping tablespoon of soluble creamer into mine when I stopped her.
“Just black,” I said.
“Black?” she asked. “Nomu jja.” Too bitter.
Sensibly, Ernie tasted the coffee first and then accepted a half teaspoon of the creamer and two tablespoons of sugar.
Most of the condiments being pulled out of cupboards were PX-purchased. Sugar from Hawaii, seedless jam from Ohio, even a tin of cookies from Denmark. Placed in opposite corners of the room were a stereo set with Bose speakers and a small Zenith television.
When most of the women were gathered around the table, sipping on various hot brews, I said, “Yogi ei Migun Chonguk i-ei-yo?” Is this G.I. Heaven?
At first all I saw were open mouths and wide eyes. Then the women started glancing at one another and then, simultaneously, they broke into laughter. The husky woman in the green dress, who seemed to be their leader, said, “Who teach you speaky Korean? ”
“He taught me,” I said, jabbing my thumb toward Ernie.
Ernie looked up from his coffee, in which he’d been totally absorbed.
“Him?” the husky woman said. Then she shook her head. “No. Not him. He dummy.”
The other women murmured in agreement.
I grinned at Ernie. “You going to take that?”
He shrugged. “They know what I’m good at.”
Indeed, they probably did. These women had already figured us out. As the conversation progressed, I became even more convinced of the accuracy of their observations.
The husky woman’s name was Lucy. That’s the only name she would admit to; she refused to give her Korean name.
“Long time ago,” she said, “I stop using Korean name. My life as Korean over. Now I’m Lucy.”
The other women nodded in assent. They were all of a similar age, the youngest were in their mid-forties, the oldest well above sixty. What were they doing together? Why did they all live here and not with their families? Why did they call this place Migun Chonguk? G.I. Heaven?
Of course, Ernie and I had known the answer almost from the moment we’d stepped inside the courtyard. Or at least we’d known part of the answer. This place was—or at least appeared to be—a brothel. But how did these women, whom most G.I.s would describe as old hags, survive when they were surrounded by a sea of desirable young business girls? That was the question. As we sat
there talking with them, I believed I was starting to figure it out. They might have once been an active brothel, but they’d changed with the times, or changed because of necessity. Now they were the nerve center for black-marketing in this area. They offered the best deals both for the G.I.s who chose to sell their PX-bought goods directly and for the business girls who sold what their G.I. boyfriends gave them.
When my coffee was almost gone, another of the women refilled my cup. By now, ashtrays had been pulled out of hiding places and the little room was awash in cigarette smoke. Normally, I would’ve sought the relief of fresh air, but I was here to gather information and I suspected that the women of G.I. Heaven were guarding a wealth of information. The oldest of the women, the one who’d opened the door for us, was the housemaid and the cook. She spread out on the table the paper I’d given her with the picture of Corporal Pruchert. He’d still had hair then, when the picture was taken, but I didn’t say anything more as they studied the sheet, passing it back and forth.
Finally, Lucy turned to me and said, “You CID.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“Anybody know,” she replied. “Short haircut, wear coat and tie, come from Seoul. But you not worried about black market. You not bother us old ladies who only can live because of black market.”
“That’s not what we’re here for,” I said.
Lucy puffed on her cigarette, squinting behind the smoke as she studied the photo she held in liver-spotted fingers.
“What he do?” she asked.
“We’re not sure yet,” Ernie said. “Right now, we’re just tracking his movements.”
“Tracking?”
“We just want to see where he went.”
“Oh.”
“When was he here last?” I asked.
Lucy set the photo down and turned to face me. “We tell you, what you give Lucy? What you give my friends?”
“It’s not what we’ll give you,” Ernie said, “it’s what we won’t give you. We won’t pay attention to all this blackmarketing and we won’t give you a ride to the monkey house.”