by Martin Limon
“Where is she,” Ernie asked, “the woman who bought that stuff out of the Class Six?”
Tiger Kang glowered at him. “Why you bother her? She good woman.”
“She works for you?” I asked.
“Sometimes. Sometimes we have big party. Need more girls. I call. Sometimes she come. Sometimes she no come.”
“What’s her husband think about this line of work?” Ernie asked.
Tiger Kang shrugged again. “Not my business.”
“We want to talk to her,” I said.
“She go.”
“So quickly?”
“She think you follow her, so she go.”
That was pretty brazen. She could’ve taken the stuff home, wherever that was, and then we’d have no case against her. Instead, she’d brought it here to Tiger Kang’s, as if to taunt us into making the arrest; figuring we wouldn’t because of Tiger Kang’s connections.
“Wherever she’s gone,” Ernie said, “we’ll find her.”
I had the receipt. That and the ration control record at the Class VI would be enough to trace her.
“Maybe,” Tiger Kang said.
“No maybe about it,” I replied. “We’ll find her. And we’re going to confiscate that stuff in the storeroom.”
“No,” Tiger Kang said. “You no take.” Tiger Kang poured cream and ladled sugar into her coffee. “You no take,” she repeated.
“Why the hell not?” Ernie asked.
“Honchos get angry. Your honcho, Eighth Army, they all the time come here.”
“They drink your black market scotch?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Anything they drink. They all the time want American beer. That’s why I buy.”
Ernie sipped on his coffee. “Not bad,” he said.
“Tiger Kang no use Folgers,” she said. “I buy from Colombia.”
“Nice,” Ernie replied. “You must have some rich dudes coming in here.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Many rich dudes.”
Ernie glugged down the last of his coffee and stood up. “Let’s get that stuff, Sueño, and load it into the jeep. We still have time to make a couple more black market busts today and get old Mrs. Wrypointe off our butts.”
Tiger Kang was studying him as he spoke.
“You leave here,” she said, “then you don’t have to take to MP Station, get hand receipt. Save you time.”
Ernie eyed her suspiciously. “You know a lot about how this works.”
“Tiger Kang know,” she said, pointing at her nose. “All the time I talk to honchos.”
It actually wasn’t going to make any difference if we confiscated the commissary and Class VI items. We already had the receipt and even without that, through the ration control records, we’d soon know the name of the woman who’d purchased them, and the name of her husband. As far as proof of the fact that she’d delivered them to Tiger Kang’s, our testimony was good enough. Usually we took both the woman and the black market items back to the MP Station—mainly just as a show to humiliate her more than anything else—but since she was gone, it was too late for that.
We could’ve contacted the Korean National Police liaison and turned Tiger Kang in for a customs violation but that would’ve been a waste of time. The KNPs wouldn’t do anything to someone who hobnobbed with the rich and powerful. Mrs. Wrypointe and the 8th Army Provost Marshal wanted volume, a lot of black market arrests. If the details of the police work were a little sloppy, that was besides the point. The purpose was to scare the hell out of the yobos and thin out their ranks in the commissary and PX. Ernie and I knew the game. We’d played it before.
Ernie turned to Tiger Kang. “What’s her name?” he asked.
“Who?”
“The woman who brought the liquor and beer.”
“Kokktari,” Tiger Kang replied. Long Legs.
“That’s it?” Ernie asked. Even he knew that wasn’t a proper Korean name.
Tiger Kang shrugged. “That’s what we call her.”
“Where does she live?”
Tiger Kang shrugged her silk-clad shoulders. “Moolah me.” I don’t know.
“All right,” Ernie said. “No name, no address, no Johnny Walker Black.”
He rose from the table and we walked back to the storage room. We left the two cases of pop but Ernie hoisted the beer and I hoisted the liquor and we carried it out past Tiger Kang, through the kitchen, and out to the jeep. All the while, I kept thinking Tiger Kang would jump us and try to scratch our eyes out, or at least have her boys do it. Other black market mama-sans had attacked us before in attempt to protect their ill-gotten contraband. But Tiger Kang did nothing. She just crossed her arms and glared at us.
I kept thinking of her curse. Maybe that’s why she didn’t lift a finger to stop us. Maybe somebody else would. Maybe somebody in our own chain of command. And maybe Tiger Kang was right. Maybe we truly were in deep kimchi now.
But like Ernie said, we’d been there before.
Back at the Class VI Store I made the Korean manager come out and unlock the green metal ammo can that held the ration control punch cards. With him watching, I shuffled through the thick stack and compared each one of the cards to the purchase receipt I held in my hands. Finally I found it: two cases of soda, two cases of beer and four bottles of Johnny Walker Black.
The name imprinted on the punch card was Mei-lan Burkewalder, dependent wife of Captain Irwin Burkewalder, US Army. Her first name didn’t sound Korean to me. Maybe Chinese. Since Red China was our avowed enemy and therefore no-man’s land for American GIs, I figured she must be from somewhere else. Hong Kong or Singapore, maybe. More likely Taiwan. Back at the CID office, I asked Staff Sergeant Riley, the Admin NCO, to use his contacts at 8th Army personnel to find out more about the Burkewalders.
Later that afternoon, Ernie and I made two more black market busts, these out in Itaewon, and we figured that would take the pressure off of us, at least temporarily.
Early the next morning, Ernie gassed up his jeep at the Twenty-one T (Car) motor pool, picked me up at the barracks, and we wound our way off compound, through the still-quiet streets of Seoul, past carts being pushed and glimmering piles of cabbage being unloaded, and headed north on the Main Supply Route. At the outskirts of the city, the sign said UIJONGBU, 15 KM. What we were looking for was a lead on the GIs who’d gang raped Sunny.
Fallow rice paddies lined the road. Ernie stiff-armed the big steering wheel around broad curves. Off to the east, the sun was just beginning to peek over distant hills.
“It feels good,” he said, “to be investigating real crime for once.”
I inhaled the crisp autumn air. Wisps of smoke rose through metal tubes atop tile-roofed farmhouses. Men in straw hats and women huddled in linen hoods balanced wooden hoes and scythes across their backs as they trudged toward distant fields.
“What’d Riley find out about that kisaeng we busted yesterday?” Ernie asked.
“She’s a third country national,” I told him, “from Taiwan. Mother’s Korean, father’s Chinese. They fled mainland China with the Kuomintang to Taiwan a couple of years before she was born. Somehow she met this Captain Burkewalder. They got married.”
“Where’s he stationed?”
“Vietnam. MAC-V advisory group.”
Ernie whistled. “Lucky dog,” he said.
Ernie’d spent two tours in Vietnam, loving every minute of it. The first tour he drove big trucks up and down Highway One and spent his off-duty hours smoking pungent hashish in his sand-bagged bunker. By the time he returned on his second tour, things had changed. No hashish available. The only way for a GI to get high was to buy pure China White from snot-nosed kids through the concertina wire.
“Uncle Ho used it as a weapon,” he always said, “and it worked.”
For Americans, the war had wound down. Richard Nixon’s Vietnamization program had succeeded and the few thousand American GIs still left in-country were mostly advisors to ARVN troops. Still
, it was a dangerous job, maybe more dangerous than being part of an American combat unit, and I didn’t envy the assignment.
“So you think they’ll notify Captain Burkewalder about his wife having her PX privileges revoked?”
“They have to,” Ernie replied. “He’s her sponsor, theoretically responsible for everything she does. Helluva thing to have to worry about when you’re concentrating on staying alive.”
We reached the outskirts of the city of Uijongbu and Ernie downshifted the jeep.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Turn right up there, toward Songsan-dong.”
We were headed to Camp Stanley, headquarters of the Division Artillery.
I riffled through the printout Staff Sergeant Riley had collated for me yesterday: the names and ranks and DEROS (date of estimated return from overseas) of every Chief of Firing Battery in the Second Infantry Division. Two battalions of artillery were stationed at Camp Stanley, another battalion of 155mm howitzers nearby at Camp Essayons, and a final battalion closer to the DMZ up at Camp Pelham, about thirty miles northwest of here in the Western Corridor. There were three batteries per battalion so that made a dozen NCOs who held the official designation of Chief of Firing Battery or, in GI jargon, Chief of Smoke.
If taking these guys down involved violence, that would be fine with us. Ernie’d brought his brass knuckles. I’d brought my .45.
“Smoke?” the young GI asked. “You want to talk to the Chief of Smoke?”
“That’s right.”
“Hold on.”
He trotted away.
We were on Camp Stanley, in the motor pool of Bravo Battery, 1st of the 38th Field Artillery. Six 105mm howitzers were aligned in a neat row, leather-sheathed barrels pointing toward a crisp blue sky. Next to them, in geometrical counterpoint, sat six square equipment lockers; everything air mobile, everything ready to be airlifted by chopper into a combat zone at a moment’s notice.
Ernie unwrapped a stick of ginseng gum and popped it into his mouth. “This is man’s work,” he said. “Not all that sissy paper-pushing like back at Eighth Army.”
“Nothing sissy about Eighth Army,” I said. “You think it’s easy busting housewives who purchase too many packages of sanitary napkins?”
“No, I guess not,” Ernie replied. “I’ve got the scars to show for it.”
A man wearing the three-stripes-up and two-down insignia of a Sergeant First Class strode toward us. Using a red cloth, he cleaned grease off his hands.
“You looking for me?”
I showed him my badge. “You’re the Chief of Firing Battery,” I said.
“Chief of Smoke,” he corrected.
He didn’t bother to shake hands because he was still cleaning them, which was okay with us. His nametag said Farmington. We asked about leave policy and if a senior NCO had to sign out on pass.
“No,” he replied. “In the Division if you’re E-6 or above, your ID card is your pass. What’s this all about?”
“Where were you this past weekend? On Saturday night to be exact.”
He crinkled his eyes. “Why do you want to know?”
We told him about Sunny, and how she’d been brutally raped.
“The guys who did it,” he asked, “they were in this unit?”
“We don’t know yet,” Ernie said. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
Sergeant Farmington told us that he had a steady yobo out in the village of Songsan-dong and that was where he’d been. “I don’t see the point of taking the bus all the way down to Seoul and then paying too much for pussy. I’d rather stay up here where things are cheap.”
“Can you prove that you were here?”
Farmington thought about it. “Yeah, I suppose I can. First, I bought a case of beer at the Class VI on Friday night, that should be in their records. And Saturday morning I checked in with the CQ about two of my soldiers who were assigned to weapons cleaning duty.”
“The Charge of Quarters put that in his log, you suppose?”
“I suppose.”
“What about Saturday night?” Ernie asked.
“My yobo can vouch that I was there. And by Sunday night all the beer was gone.”
Farmington grinned.
I took notes and knew that if we had to, every step of Sergeant Farmington’s alibi could be checked out, but I also knew that, for the moment, we wouldn’t bother. Farmington’s long record in the service and his easy-going attitude left little doubt that he was telling the truth. Time was everything. We’d move on to the other names on the list.
“Anyone else from your unit went to Seoul recently? Maybe a group of three guys?”
“Not that I know of. Nobody was bragging about anything. And they usually do when they come back from Seoul.”
When we told him more about Sunny, and what had happened to her, his face clouded with concern. He volunteered to go into the Bravo Battery Orderly Room and check the sign-out register. This was a big help because we didn’t need any hassles from some Battery Commander suspicious of 8th Army investigators from Seoul.
After about ten minutes, Farmington returned. “Nobody in the unit went to Seoul last weekend.”
“At least not that they admitted to,” Ernie replied.
“Right, at least not that they wrote in the pass register. But I’d be surprised if anybody did. We were out in the field last week, came in late Friday. There was still a lot of maintenance to do Saturday morning. So they wouldn’t have been able to get away until mid-afternoon Saturday at the earliest.”
“How long does the bus to Seoul take?”
Farmington shrugged. “Maybe an hour. Hour and a half when the traffic’s bad.”
“So still possible.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Definitely possible.”
Ernie and I conducted the same type of interviews at Alpha Battery and then Charlie Battery and then at the other three batteries on the far side of Camp Stanley and then three more 155mm howitzer batteries at Camp Essayons. Each one of the Chiefs of Firing Battery was suspicious at first but then cooperative when we described what had been done to Sunny.
It was mid-afternoon by the time we were finished.
“A lot of alibis,” Ernie said.
“One for each Chief of Smoke.”
“We have to check them out.”
“No time,” I replied. “The Provost Marshal will be busting a gut by now.” I checked my watch. Our whole trip up here had been a long shot. We thought maybe, with the knowledge that one of the rapists had been called “Smoke,” that we might be able to stumble on a Chief of Firing Battery without an alibi. Of course, things are not usually that easy. “If we leave now,” I said, “we’ll still have three or four more hours to bust people at the commissary.”
“Screw the commissary,” Ernie said. “Let’s go direct to the source.”
I knew what he meant. We could get a couple of easy busts by working with a man we knew in Itaewon. A man by the name of Haggler Lee.
We hopped in the jeep and headed toward the MSR.
“They owe me money,” Haggler Lee said.
Haggler Lee was substantially older than us, maybe forty, but in some ways he seemed younger. He had a baby face, kept his black hair neatly coiffed, and he wore the sky blue silk tunic and white cotton pantaloons of the traditional outfit of the ancient yangban class who ruled Korea during the Chosun Dynasty. He seemed soft, patient, averse to violence. A hell of a thing for the man who ruled the Itaewon black market operation with an iron fist.
When we entered his warehouse, he sat on a flat square cushion in the middle of a raised floor heated by charcoal gas flowing through subterranean ondol heating ducts. Swirling mother-of-pearl phoenixes and snarling dragons were inlaid into the black lacquered table in front of him. As we approached, he lay a horsehair writing brush on an inkstone and looked up at us.
“Anyonghaseiyo?” he asked. Are you at peace?
We lied and told him that we were, slipped off ou
r shoes, and stepped up on the warm ondol floor. We grabbed a couple of cushions and sat. Out of the darkness, a young woman, wearing a full, flowing chima-chogori traditional gown, appeared and, using two hands, poured steaming hot water into porcelain cups. She hefted a small tray onto the table that was laden with sugar, soluble creamer, Lipton tea bags and a jar of Maxim instant crystals. Ernie and I both stuck with the coffee. We ladled it into the hot water and swirled it around. It tasted good after our long drive back from Division.
“It has been too long since I’ve seen my good friends,” Haggler Lee told us, sipping on a handle-less cup of hot green tea.
“You know why we’re here, Lee,” Ernie said. “Eighth Army’s going nuts on the black market statistics again.”
Haggler Lee nodded and set his cup down. “Mrs. Wrypointe,” he said.
“You know her?”
“Oh, yes.” He smiled his pleasant smile. “A fine lady.”
“You like her?” I asked.
“Yes, very much.”
“But if she gets her way, she’ll kick every Korean woman out of the commissary and the PX. That would be the end of your business.”
“If she gets her way. Right now, she’s merely driving up prices, which of course is good for my business.”
“But she hates Koreans,” Ernie said. “That’s why she wants them all out of her commissary and her PX.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” Haggler Lee said. “Another way to look at it is that she’s a woman of principle. She actually believes that black marketeering is bad. One has to admire such a steadfast attitude.”
“You admire that old witch?” Ernie asked.
“Oh, yes. An admirable lady.”