by Martin Limon
“Sounds all-American to me.”
“Yeah. But in his mind, they’ll use their power to take over.” This line of logic seemed irrational to us, but the history of Chinese aggression was a strong memory for many Koreans. Korea and China had warred on and off for hundreds of years, with Korea refusing to become a part of the Chinese empire.
Ernie had become bored with my dissertation. He peered at me curiously. “You’re a real egghead, you know that, Sueño?”
I didn’t bother to answer.
He finished his beer. “Fine. So anyway, how do we find that daytime bartender? Why don’t you make a scene—start a fight or something? While everybody’s distracted, I’ll drag the new bartender out into the alley and beat some freaking information out of him.”
I shook my head. “We have to be more patient.”
“Why?”
“Because when we asked about Holdren, it was obvious we weren’t from around here, and that bartender made her call. Whoever’s in charge of those guys panicked. They figured they’d scare us off by beating us up.”
“That didn’t work.”
“No. But we have to ask ourselves, what were they protecting? Holdren was a regular here. Let’s assume he went missing because of something—or someone—he ran into at the Wild Lady Nightclub.”
“Like the gummy whore?” Ernie said.
“If Holdren is here all the time messing around with business girls, and all of a sudden he’s seen with an older, upper-class Korean woman, someone would notice.”
“So they were afraid that we’d talk to someone here who’d give us a lead to Holdren and the gummy whore.”
“Right.”
“But who?”
“I don’t know. There are hundreds of GIs who come in here. And we can’t be sure the ones we want to talk to—anyone who saw Holdren with the gumiho—will ever come in again.”
“It could take forever to track him down.”
“Right. And if someone who can provide us a lead is an employee or one of the business girls, they could already have fired her.”
“Or moved her to another club,” Ernie said. “I mean, if they’ve been operating the rackets here since the beginning of the Korean War, you can bet they’ve expanded their operation. A company has to grow or die.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“TIME magazine,” he said.
“I’m impressed.”
“You oughta be.” Ernie paused. “So now that they know we’re in the neighborhood, they’re likely to shut down any source of information that will lead us to Holdren.”
“Right.”
“So we’re spinning our wheels.”
“Right again.”
“I’ve been thinking about something,” Ernie said.
“What?”
“We’ve been assuming that since Werkowski is dead, Shirkey and Holdren are at risk of being killed, too.”
“Yeah.”
“But what if they’re just being locked up, being held for ransom or something?”
“The Army would’ve received a demand by now.”
“Right. So maybe they’re being held for some other reason.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something bad.”
I thought of how frightened the woman at the Best Hotel near Camp Kyle had been when she’d mentioned the driver with the mangled face. And how Miss Kim had shivered upon hearing the term gumiho.
“So if they’re alive . . .”
“Yeah,” Ernie replied. “We don’t have much time.”
Ernie and I wandered from one flashing neon sign to another, drinking all the way, practically taunting the Chinese thugs to take another shot at us. I knew it was dumb, but I had no idea what else to do; they’d checkmated us. We weren’t going to be able to find any information here in ASCOM City with the people who ran the place watching us. We just held onto a sliver of hope that we could find one or two of the thugs and give them a bad enough beating that they’d tell us something about who they worked for, or why they’d been sent after us.
It was unlikely, but we were down to that.
It was getting close to the midnight curfew, and we were walking down the well-lit main drag again when Ernie backhanded my chest. I stopped. His jaw had dropped open. Before I could ask what he was looking at, he took off sprinting. I ran after him.
We must’ve zigzagged through twenty dark alleys before emerging back on the MSR in front of the railroad tracks. About twenty yards to our right loomed the front gate of ASCOM compound, illuminated by floodlights.
“What?” I asked, huffing and puffing and leaning forward to rest my hands on my knees. “What did you see?”
“It must’ve been my imagination.”
“What did you see?”
“You’re not gonna believe this.”
“Try me. What did you see?”
“Strange,” he told me. “I saw Strange.”
-10-
The next morning, back in Seoul, Ernie and I strode past two Honor Guard soldiers and into the 8th Army headquarters building. The classified documents vault stood just past the foyer, wedged beneath the main stairway. Behind a barred window, Sergeant First Class Harvey—also known as Strange—sat at a small desk, thumbing through documents.
“What the hell were you doing in Bupyong last night?” Ernie said.
Strange nearly jumped out of his chair. He hurried toward the window and gripped the iron bars as if pleading to get out. His cigarette holder waggled nervously, and behind his nearly opaque sunglasses, I thought I saw his eyes dart back and forth.
“Not here,” he whispered urgently.
Ernie grabbed for him through the bars, but Strange dodged backward. Officers in Class A uniforms and highly spit-shined low quarters padded silently down the carpeted hallway. One of them gazed at us curiously. I turned away.
Ernie realized that we wouldn’t be able to break into the classified documents vault and drag Strange out. “Where should we meet you?” he asked.
“The Snatch Burr,” Strange answered—the name he’d invented for the 8th Army Snack Bar.
“When?”
“I can’t break out until noon.”
Ernie pointed at him. “Don’t mess with us, Strange.”
“The name’s Harvey.”
“Whatever. Be there. At noon.”
Strange swallowed. “I will.”
Leaning up against the bars, Ernie jabbed his hand forward and managed to flick the tip of Strange’s cigarette holder. It clattered off the edge of his desk and rolled to the floor.
When we returned to the CID Admin Office, Staff Sergeant Riley stood, hands on narrow hips, and gave us his usual warm greeting. “Where in the hell have you two been? And why haven’t you delivered that freaking refrigerator?”
I explained our inability to dispatch a truck.
“Well, you better shit one. That broad Allsworthy came back and gave the Provost Marshal hell. He’s getting sick and tired of it.”
“So why don’t you have Burrows and Slabem make the delivery?”
“I told you. They’d never find the place.”
“They couldn’t find their butts,” Ernie told him, “if you gave them a color-coded topographical map.”
“Don’t be crude,” Riley said, a stunning comment coming from him.
“So why don’t you borrow a truck?” I said. “Make the delivery yourself.”
“I have work to do.”
“Paperwork,” I said. I was angry. I knew it, but I kept going. “We have one GI dead, two missing. Nobody knows what happened to them, or whether they’re alive or dead. For all we know, they’re undergoing torture right now, as we speak, and all you rear-echelon pukes can think about is delivering a goddamn refrigerator.”
Riley st
uck out his bony cage of a chest.
“Who you calling a rear-echelon puke?”
“Is there somebody else standing behind that desk?”
“You better get your ass in gear, Sueño. The Colonel isn’t going to tolerate that Katie whatever-her-name-is coming back in here and cussing him out again.”
I clenched my fists. Then Miss Kim approached, and I unclenched them. She spoke in a soft voice. “Geogie,” she said, “you received a phone message.”
She handed me a pink slip of paper. She had written a phone number on it, one I recognized.
“Officer Oh,” Miss Kim said, staring up at me, worried.
“Thank you,” I said, stuffing the note in my pocket.
“Would you like some tea?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” I replied, trying to muster a smile. “I have to steal a truck.”
“Let me help you with that,” Ernie said, patting me on the back. Together, we strode out of the office.
Instead of a truck, we stole a trailer. The two-wheeled kind that’s usually covered in canvas and pulled behind a jeep. We didn’t know whose it was and we didn’t much care, but it sat in a line of vehicles in the parking lot behind the 52nd Supply Depot, and Ernie managed to unhook it quickly. I helped him rehook it onto the back of our jeep. We checked to make sure the brake lights worked, then drove off.
The refrigerator barely fit in the trailer. In fact, we had to tilt it at an angle and didn’t have anything to tie it down with, but Ernie drove slowly through Seoul traffic. When we reached the Women’s Power Coalition, we stopped and hoisted the refrigerator out, then banged on the front door.
It slid open, and the impressive physique of Miss Wang Ok-ja stood before us. She snorted and stood back, happy to let us carry it in. As Ernie reinstalled the transformer, I turned to her and thrust out some paperwork Riley had typed up.
“Sign,” I said.
“Why?”
“To prove we returned it to you.”
“You shouldn’t have stolen it in the first place.”
Her long hair hung past her shoulders, and her face was impassive. I let the silence grow, mainly to give myself more time to stare at her. Since Doctor Leah Prevault had been transferred to Hawaii, I’d only received a handful of letters. She was busy, she said, with a backlog of patients in the psychiatric ward that had built up over the years. Apparently, there were a lot of nuts in Honolulu. I was lonely and upset, and maybe desperate for someone to talk to who wasn’t Ernie.
I considered asking Wang Ok-ja out, but in the end, I decided against it. The vision of Leah kept me on the straight and narrow. What I did think in that moment was that I’d contact Leah and demand that we set up a time and place to meet, somehow. After this case, I could take some leave and catch a military hop to Hawaii. Or she could come here. But things between us had to be resolved.
I realized that Wang Ok-ja was staring at me with curiosity. Once again, I offered her the receipt. She grabbed it from my hand, walked with it over to the kitchen counter, found a pen, and scribbled her signature. She thrust the receipt back at me.
Behind us, Ernie had apparently finished his work. The refrigerator’s cooling unit began to hum contentedly.
When we returned to the 52nd Supply Depot, the jeep we’d stolen the trailer from was gone. We unhooked the trailer and left it in the same parking spot we’d found it in.
“He’ll probably make an MP report,” I said.
“Good,” Ernie replied. “That’ll give them something to do.” We climbed back into our jeep, and he started the engine. “Think they’ll solve the mystery of the purloined pull-cart?”
“Given time,” I replied.
Ernie glanced at the trailer. “Maybe we should leave some more clues.”
I groaned. He shifted into first and roared off.
“I saw you sizing up that dolly,” Ernie said, “the one at the Women’s Power Coalition. You gonna make a move on her?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t wanna talk about it, huh?”
“Nothing to talk about.”
“Still pining for Doc Prevault?”
When I didn’t answer, he said, “Nice-looking, though. Worth chasing after.”
“Now that they have the refrigerator back,” I said, “I probably won’t see her again.”
“That’s the problem with you, Sueño. You’re too fatalistic.”
“Fatalistic?” I said.
“Yeah. You settle for whatever the fates send your way.”
“Don’t you?”
“Me?” Ernie said, turning at the traffic light and heading back toward the main compound. “No, I don’t settle for the hand fate deals. I make my own luck.”
“Like when?”
“Like when I decided to put down heroin.”
“After you came back from Vietnam?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It ain’t easy to turn your back on a sweet lady like that.”
“And now?” I asked.
Ernie smiled. “And now I’m a drunk. Perfectly acceptable in polite society.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“So if I can do it,” he said, winding down his lecture, “you can get into that lady’s pants. Even if she is a Communist.”
“She’d look good in red,” I replied.
“Yeah,” Ernie agreed. “Or wearing nothing but a Mao jacket.”
Once we reached the snack bar, the first thing I did was enter the manager’s office and borrow his phone. The 8th Army telephone exchange operator switched me to an outside line and dialed Officer Oh’s number for me. It rang twice, and she picked up.
I identified myself, and she said, “Jomkanman.” Just a moment.
As I waited, I stared out into the main floor of the snack bar. The lunch hour was just getting into full swing. GIs entered, along with civilian workers, most of whom were American. The Korean workers at 8th Army headquarters, of which there were hundreds, often brought their own small lunch consisting of a tin of cold rice and bean curd and vegetables, called a toshirak. Most of them didn’t eat kimchi for lunch because they knew that Americans could smell it on their breath. I wasn’t bothered by the smell; in fact, I found it pleasing, but many Americans complained bitterly about it. When these complaints came from people who’d been here for years, or even had a Korean spouse, I found it nuts. Ernie and I agreed that if you didn’t like kimchi or the smell of garlic, you were definitely living on the wrong peninsula.
A voice came on the line. Chief Homicide Inspector Gil Kwon-up. Mr. Kill.
“Sueño?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“Where are you?”
I told him.
“You were in Bupyong last night,” he said.
“How’d you know? The local KNPs spotted us?”
“Yes and no,” he replied. “They spotted you, but they didn’t report it to us. Not formally, at least.”
“So how’d you know?”
“We have ways.”
I took that to mean that he had eyes and ears—maybe an informant—in the Bupyong police station, and he didn’t want that information spread around. I was flattered by the confidence. Ernie and I had worked with Mr. Kill and Officer Oh on a few cases now, and I believed we were developing a level of trust that was possibly unprecedented between US Army law enforcement and the Korean National Police.
He asked, “Were either of you hurt?”
“No, sir,” I replied. Just a few bumps and bruises. And we’d washed away the mud from the rice paddies. Mostly.
“They tipped their hand,” he said.
“By attacking us?”
“Yes. I believe it was a mistake. Possibly made by one of their low-level operatives when you walked into that bar. What was it called?”
“The Wild Lady Nightclub.”
“Yes. What you’re getting close to,” he told me, “is very dangerous.”
I still didn’t know for sure what he was talking about. “What, sir? What are we getting close to?”
“The Chinese gangs. Don’t underestimate them.”
I wondered if that were true or if Mr. Kill was just displaying the very ingrained ethnic bias against the much larger Central Kingdom.
“Apparently,” I said, “the Chinese run the rackets in ASCOM City.”
“Yes. We’ve been trying to bring that under control for years. They’ve proven to be slippery.”
And they had the KNPs in Bupyong on their payroll. But I knew better than to embarrass him with the assertion. Instead, I asked, “So what do they have to do with the disappearance of the three GIs?”
“We need to talk,” he said, “but not on the phone. We’ve found evidence.”
“What evidence?”
“Not now. We need to move; we can’t be sure how much time we have. I’ve formulated an operation, and it must begin tonight.”
“Okay. Where should we meet you?”
He told me. I was surprised by his choice of meeting place, but this seemed urgent, and I didn’t want to question his decisions. I promised we’d be there.
“And,” he said wryly, “be sure to wear your running-the-ville outfits.”
“Should we be armed?” I asked.
He hesitated before answering. “No. If they realize you’re police officers, they’ll kill you without hesitation, no matter how much firepower you bring.”
He hung up the phone. I returned to the main dining room and sat opposite Ernie, thinking over what Kill had told me.
Strange was late.
He pushed through the big double door of the snack bar, glanced around the large room, and, after spotting us, took a surreptitious route to our table.
“He thinks he’s Double Oh freaking Seven,” Ernie said.
When Strange finally sat down, he appeared flustered. “Couldn’t break away,” he said. He glanced around the room, and then, tightening his lips around his cigarette holder, he leaned toward us. “The gummy whore,” he said.
“We know,” Ernie replied. “You wrote it in sugar last time.”