by Gus Lee
Through his stained and grimy window was a slow-moving jeep. The driver was Korean. He resembled the man who had surveilled us at the airport. I moved but couldn't read the bumper stencils as he sped away, banging gears.
Foss snapped fingers. “Don't be dumb. Gimme orders.”
They showed we were TIGs; we were now on the radar screen. Small ears moved below the cap. “About time.” He frowned, stood and patted Magrip, linebacker neck swelling.
Then he recognized Magrip and saluted. “An honor.”
“C'mon, man,” said Magrip, “can that crap.”
“‘Can that crap, sir,’ right?” he growled. “‘And please to hell excuse the grenades in my armpits, sir,’ right?”
Magrip nodded and slowly returned the major's salute.
Foss cocked his head at me and then at the door. “In there.” To Magrip, “Honor Man, you stand fast. Keep your frag pins bent.”
It was a concrete cell with a lightbulb on a ceiling wire. It was like my quarters in the Presidio, only colder.
“POB and gimme your green card.” Birthplace and immigration legal resident papers. Welcome to New York.
“Shanghai, China. Naturalized citizen,” I gave him my card.
He looked at me, up and down. “Who won the first Super Bowl?”
“Green Bay. Me, I'm a Niners fan. Getting infiltrators?”
“Don't fart in my barn. You a Peregrine? With some of you shamming as Seventy-six Yankees?”—76Y, supply clerks.
Murray and I had been in the Bien Hoa snake pits, lousy with Nam dust and Okie avgas, when he said he had extended for another year. “We're forming a Peregrine”: an Asian-American strike team of paratroopers, Rangers and Special Forces, a rich Eastern blend of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Samoan, Tongan, Hawaiian, Vietnamese, Thai, Campuchean, Okinawan, Laotian, Nien, Fijian and Hmong killers.
“Old Man wants you to head it. Do you want it?”
Do I want it? I had begun to count the days. I feared wrongful deaths of children. Peregrines operated behind the lines and killed witnesses. I shook my head. “It's not for me.”
“Negative,” I said to Foss. “Not aware of any such operation.”
He hitched his head toward the door. I returned to the relative warmth of the main room. Foss followed. “You must be grade-one hot shit ass-kickers to roll in here in civvies with Colonel Sanders overcoats.”
“I screwed up,” announced Magrip. “I'm being punished.”
I nodded. “We pluck chickens. It's not as easy as you'd think. The chickens have figured out why we pluck them.”
“Ha. Wait one. I gotta call the Wizard.”
“Major Foss,” I said, “The Inspector General, capital T, does not want the SJA or his JAGCs to know we are here yet. You will not inform him. I am on record giving you that advice.”
I pulled out my pad and made the note. “Captain Richard Johnson said you still worked for America.”
Foss dropped his hand heavily from the phone, fingers moving like crab legs. “Well, crap, ain't you a piece a work? Freak my guards and drop names. Well, Mr. Shanghai Hot Pants, Wizard left orders to let him know if TIG shows.” He scratched his head through the cap. “You're dropping feathers in my office.”
“Major,” I said, “we're IGs. Stay out of our road.”
He held his head. “Damn lawyers. You give me a case of ass.”
Magrip puffed out his chest. Foss nodded, jaws tight. I trusted him to stay quiet about us. We left and got in our jeep. The guard saluted. Min popped the clutch, whiplashing us violently as we jerked into Casey, feathers floating in the icy wind.
“Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,” said Magrip. “Crap. Guard's on the phone.”
“Stop, back up,” I said to Min. Weaving nauseatingly in reverse, Min banged into the kiosk, knocking snow from its roof, busting brake lights, stressing backs and snapping our necks.
Magrip cursed. “Just our luck. We got a North Korean driver.”
“Hang up,” I said. The guard hung up. “Who were you calling?”
“SJA, sir.” He studied the huge dent in his kiosk. “You call,” I said to the sentry, “I'll extend you in Korea.”
“Hey, sir, I ain't callin’ nobody!” He saluted. I saluted and our lumbars popped as Min hit the pedal like it was his enemy.
“Once LeBlanc knows we're here,” I managed, “the evidence will disappear. We approach him smart and indirectly.”
Magrip spat out the jeep. “Like your style, Kan. Lots of guts. Stud IG. Hide your badge and run from the suspects.”
Casey was as Henry Jubala had described it: an east-west camp of tired Quonsets astride the valley invasion route, a hobo rest home and a bull's-eye for a wrecking ball.
I told Min that we needed TA-50 winter gear, a janitor's uniform and a civilian overcoat, all extra large, and a new jeep top and maps. If he followed orders like he drove, he'd bring us a silk bathrobe and a Volkswagen hubcap.
Headquarters, Second U.S. Infantry, was a long tool-shed that looked like the casual work of angry orangutans. In the snow-covered lot stood a miniature gray stone, six-level torii pagoda tower surrounded by dead shrubs. The HQ jeeps were parked noses out; the staff was ready for incomings and a quick emergency exit.
The interior had the charm of a refugee center. The sentry stared at me, Magrip and Min, then stood and called the SGS, the secretary of the General Staff. I gave him our orders and asked to see the commanding general.
“You smell,” said Major Young, “like saccharin. We're groady on the Z and we live in grutch, but you're pushing it.” He checked the time. “CG has a commander's Tac briefing in zero-niner. I can get you in.”
General Michael Peters was short, immaculately handsome, and black. Alert and tired eyes, stupendously large forehead, his voice soft and measured. Hanging from a coatrack was his sidearm.
“What do you need, Captain Kan? Besides a chicken coop?”
“Housing, sir, and run of the post.” Major Young scribbled a note on the CG's red-flagged, two-star stationery.
“Done. If we have a race problem here, I want to know ASAP. How's our one-legged bandit, Law Man?”
“Sir, Colonel Murray is sarcastic and warmer than us.”
The CG signed the paper; the SGS passed it to me. “All courtesies, no limits, by my order, LTG Michael Paul Peters, CG 2X.” “2X” was short for Second Infantry. This was a Disneyland “E” ride ticket, good for all concessions, parking and rides.
“I say he needs a shower,” said the CG. “Let them use the gym.”
Something passed across Major Young's face. “Yes, sir. Gym showers below, Captain. I'll arrange quarters. Need office space?”
I declined; we would work out of our Q.
Major Young led us through a bomb shelter tunnel to a dark stairway. Min slipped, jettisoning our luggage in all directions as he lost his balance, windmilling his arms. “Aiguuu!” he cried, grabbing an overhead pipe as he fell, tearing it from the wall. He thumped down the stairs in an avalanche of rotten clay-pipe fragments into a small, dank, concrete weight room, colliding with rusting stacks of weights that fell, crashed and rang like an OSHA catastrophe.
“Bleeding human banana peel,” said Magrip.
Min brushed himself and wobbled away. He was embarrassing me.
“Kan,” snapped Young, wincing at the wreckage, “out of here ASAP.” Magrip and I showered for two minutes, when the tepid metallic water ran out. We cleared feathers from the drain, put on long Johns and double winter socks. Magrip gave me the imperial sword-and-fasces IG brass for my collar and got into uniform.
Min returned. The janitor's rig felt like a small.
“It's you,” said Magrip, shaking his head as he eyed my ill-fitting clothes. Then he mocked an evaluation report: “This officer sets unusually low standards for himself and fails to achieve them.’ ”
“Guess who'd be wearing this if you could pass for a Korean janitor. Get the housing from the SGS, then check the gate. See if Jimmy entered or left Ca
sey. Use the CG and IG carte blanche letters.”
Magrip pulled out a notepad. “Wizard's got twelve lawyers, five of them for six years. The five were rated at the bottom of the Corps before coming here as boozers: Nagol, McNallum, Willoughby, Wilperk, Remca. I wouldn't turn my back on ‘em.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Enough playing house. Let's find Jimmy.”
It was like any other staff judge advocate shop on an overseas shantytown post: cold and open until eight P.M. The wind whistled as I shut the door. Clerks and Korean civilian staff banged typewriters in a big bay. Those on break huddled around clanking, red-eyed heaters, sucking odorous barley tea and smoking. Lawyers’ offices ran in a long row down the right wall.
A big, freckled, red-haired specialist fourth class with a pug nose looked up. My entry had hit him with frigid air. He wore a sidearm, which was highly unusual for a JAGC office. He looked like Howdy Doody after puberty.
“Hey, slick! You bad numbah-ten janitor! Bad slicky boy, bad!” I resisted barking, rolling over and waiting for him to throw a ball. “Hey, craphead, close that door mos-tic! Cho-gi me java ricky-tic, chop-chop, slicky boy, and ask me how I like it!” He was angry; my size had disoriented him.
“How you likee Java, boss?” I asked in a high voice. Sugar, no cream. I grounded my gear, bent over and employed every obsequious move employed by Asian bit actors in American films to get his coffee. I was captured, in Korea, by an American presumption of the servile nature of colored people. He was the reason Cara had a political viewpoint. I wanted to lift him by his throat, ask him about Jimmy Buford and pinch his head off. If angry, said Master Wong, breathe as if air is gold. I breathed slow and deep.
He sucked Java. “Unass my AO, slick.” Korean GI talk. Units of the Second Infantry had been here since the end of World War II and had spawned “gook” from the Korean word for country, “unass” from the anal nature of the DMZ, and “in-country” from the prepositional failures of three generations of day-counting, hip-jive Army clerks.
This jargon had given birth to the lexicon of Vietnam.
Ears hot, I entered the Wizard's den. A shrine to knocking ducks, elk, deer and golf balls. Shotguns lined the walls. One rack was empty. Golf bags leaned against walls like soldiers after a hot march. A teak desk was bare but for dust and an ivory nameplate:
COL F. LEBLANC JAGC THE JUDGE BE ALL YOU CAN BE
Empty waste can. No unit photos, Academy sheepskin or bar placards. He didn't work here very often. He liked guns.
Major Thomas Nagol, deputy SJA, the number-two man, had an office that was culturing morgue mold. His desk was a ruin of undone work. Cigar ash coated unopened mail and paper bins like Vesuvian dust. Pill bottles lay like empty cartridges on a battlefield. No court calendar. He was not an organized man overcome by demand; he was a slob who had been defeated by it.
Without a search warrant, I could look only at the debris in plain view. An unread phone message said:
URGENT RED FLAG: 1315 HRS 8 JAN TO: MAJ NAGOL: LTC ARMSTRONG 8A SJA CALLED RE: CPT JAMES T. BUFORD, INSPECTOR GENERAL, MISSING. FIND AND CALL ARMSTRONG URGENT AT YONGSAN 4511 OR QUARTERS 6743 ANY HOURS. WILLOUGHBY
Carlos had presumed a sinister presence in Jimmy the Bee's disappearance. He hadn't thought of blaming negligence. Carlos said he had waited six days to send a search party because he had gotten messages from Jimmy. But they had been bogus. Someone had faked us out.
I emptied Nagol's wastebasket into a sack labeled “N,” and threw the sack into my utility can.
I found the chief prosecutor. The sign said: CHIEF OF JUSTICE, CPT MILES ALTMAN. SO Pig Breath and his war cry for convictions über alles had come to Casey. Pig advocated military flogging, cruel and unusual punishment and hostile, jumping halitosis. He would be as helpful as a German invasion.
Pig Breath Altman was in the library, sitting at a battered, stained table that probably had been a MASH surgical surface twenty years ago in the Korean War. The library was unstocked. Pig still bore the trademark Prussian flat top. A bulbous, cauliflowerlike nose dominated a weak face made worse by the absence of a chin. His chicken neck was the handle to the frying pan of his Southern-fried-steak gut and old truck driver's flat bottom. He was prematurely farsighted, holding the case reports at a distance in the coldly unpleasant library. He took short, sharp notes while clearing an active throat. Intent in all he did, he had no idea I was there.
His office was psychotically neat. I dumped his waste can into a paper sack. His clerks’ desks were orderly. Pleadings, sentences and summaries seemed normal, heavy on assaults and larcenies. Pig Breath's three trial counsels worked in their offices.
The two Defense offices were in a cold back corner and empty. Their clerks’ desks were overloaded and smelled of dank defeat. The trial calendar was anemic; convictions were by guilty pleas. JAGCs rotated into Korea for one-year hardship tours, did their jobs and returned stateside, grateful for Chicago winters.
But five of them had made Korean service a career. One was Nagol. The other four were in claims, a job normally done by one JAGC. If a GI lost a rucksack or a mortar tube, he'd have to pay for it, unless he could convince the claims officer that the loss had been line-of-duty and act of God—like a monsoon or a lightning strike.
The claims paperwork suggested a massive payout for lost gas masks, rifles, rucksacks, entrenching tools and radios. For confirmation, I needed a cumulative computer printout from Seoul.
“Hey, slick, what the hell you doing?” A man with an automatic in his hand, the hammer back, muzzle down. His name tag and rank: Captain Willoughby, JAGC, one of the Wizard's own.
I had a broom and a garbage can and remembered Ma's admonition to be a man of letters. I threw the claims papers in the air, punted a waste can, tossed the broom and cried “Aie-guuuu!” and dropped, hoping my Min imitation wouldn't startle him into shooting me. Captain Willoughby jerked with my shout, ducking the flying papers and clattering broom as he backed out the door, his gun arm up as a shield.
On the floor, I scrambled to pick up the papers, keeping my face turned while retrieving my cherry-picked garbage collection. I left with my head down, grimacing in a Jerry Lewis forced smile, banging into walls and doors, working for a laugh.
“Meeahn-hae-yo!” I hissed—Sorry!
“Goddamn douchebag janitor!” shouted Willoughby. “Asshole! Jerk! Scared me to death!” He clumsily unhammered with both hands and I winced as he almost shot himself; I had been in greater danger than I realized.
This was Korea, where crooked JAGCs majored in graft and even janitors were at mortal risk. Nice place, Carlos. Come and visit sometime. Bring the kids.
7
ICE PALACE
The sun was down. Our Q was north of HQ on Hill 340, charitably called the Ice Palace and uncannily sited to take harsh Manchu winds in the shorts. The wind howled around its walls. The room failed prison standards. “Club Med, I presume?”
“House of Usher,” said Magrip. Space heaters ran futilely at max strength in the paint-peeling room. One metal bunk bed with bayonet-scrawled graffiti, one desk and two metal folding chairs constituted the decor. The naked, glaring lightbulb buzzed angrily, surrounded by dark fly carcasses from summers past that dangled thickly from the cracked, sagging ceiling. I didn't like the buzzing.
It was Spartan, like West Point before it was founded. “Rat crap,” muttered Magrip. “Honeymooning on Waikiki and a Pentagon scumbag does me. Fucking Korea. Again.” He hurled jump boots against fading paint on defaced, hole-punched walls.
Honeymoon? “Sorry, Magrip.” Cara, abandoned by me for a covert government mission while detectives chased the President of the United States for Watergate. I threw my bags on the lower bunk.
“I want the low bunk,” muttered Magrip. “Got a bad back.”
I was about to give it to him when I saw, in my kit, a photo of Cara I had taken at a Mendocino coast cabin. Her dark hair was highlighted by the fireplace, smiling as she lifted a glass of Merlot. Her memory warme
d the room and made my guts flutter. I sank into the photo, into her eyes, her mouth.
We were at her door under a canopy of stars. Tenth date, and we had never kissed. With women, I had been very careful; each one could be a wife. After Vietnam, care had been replaced by withdrawal.
Her eyes closed. Our lips touched, grazed, caressed. We kissed, her lips parted, her breathing the sighs of female gods who could stop time. Her mouth was heaven and the world rushed like the Yangtze in spring.
It was exquisite in a boundless, private universe of two, the possibilities of us summoned in our hearts into a promise, as if Guan Yin, goddess of mercy, had designed our lips, our bodies and our lives from a central poem. I held her close. Her hands swam over me, touching, caressing, her body warm and full. She pressed in an urgent, endless kiss, moaning as I broke from her. “Oh, God.”
I spun in her excitement. She hungrily covered my mouth, her passion restoring, reconstructing the persona I had once been. The pleasure of her was like a narcotic of the gods.
“Your girl?” asked Magrip.
I put the photo away. “Sorry about your honeymoon,” I said.
“Yeah? Then get me the fuck outa here.”
Three mounds capped by helmets showed Min's good work: he had pulled our TA-50 winter military gear. The third was for Levine, whenever he got here. Three captains to find Jimmy and trick a Wizard.
I got into uniform. Down the hall, two Korean men scrubbed uniforms in the shower that would service thirty officers after the dawn reveille run. A sign said we owed them twenty cents a day.
“The Wizard's boys are the deputy and in claims. Doing fraud.”
Magrip spat in the waste can, making it ring. “So bust ‘em.”
“First, we get Jimmy. You know why the Puzzle Palace is worried about LeBlanc? I asked Murray and he didn't say.”