by Martin Limon
“Why did you choose me?” I asked.
“I heard about you through my clients. You speak Korean, you understand Korean people and, they all tell me, you do good things. Like him.”
“What was his name?”
She shook her head. “At first, he wouldn’t tell me.”
“You asked him?”
“Of course. The first time he arrived. But he wouldn’t tell me. It was as if he didn’t trust me right away. He couldn’t be sure that I would actually do something to help him. Then, finally, he made his decision.”
“He told you his name?”
“Yes.”
Auntie Mee reached into the folds of her thick red robe and pulled out a yellowed piece of paper. She handed it to me. I unfolded it. There, written in hangul script, were two words.
“I wrote it down,” Auntie Mee said, “in the middle of the night, while he was bothering me.”
“What was he doing?”
“Touching me,” she said, squirming beneath her robe. “Everywhere.”
I stared at her, keeping straight-faced, wondering if she was serious. She was. So were Doc Yong and Miss Kwon. They accepted her statement as if it were the most natural thing in the world. An American G.I. in bed with a Korean woman, what else would he do?
By guttering candlelight, I read the two words. The first was mori. This can mean either “head” or “hair” in the Korean language. The next word was di. This meant nothing in Korean. Perhaps the spirit was referring to the letter d as in the English alphabet.
“Does this name have any meaning?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m asking you,” Auntie Mee replied. “He’s an American; that’s his name. I thought you would understand.”
“There’s no such name as Mori Di. And no such word in English.”
I gazed at the script again and then held the paper up to the flickering candlelight, turning it over to make sure I hadn’t missed something. Maybe it was the absurdity of the situation or maybe I was just peeved at Auntie Mee’s sense of assurance, but I felt impish.
“Is the American G.I. here now?”
“No. Not now.”
“Could you call him?”
“Why?”
“I have questions for him.”
“Never question the dead,” she said. “What they want you to know, they will tell you.”
“You asked him his name.”
“Yes. And he didn’t answer me until he was good and ready.”
I turned to Doc Yong. My incredulity must’ve shown on my face. She nodded, encouraging me to accept the assignment, no matter how odd I thought it might be.
Auntie Mee sensed my hesitancy. “The reason Miss Kwon was upset a few minutes ago, and why Doctor Yong was angry on her behalf, is that they don’t like bad news about the future. But the fault doesn’t lie with me! It lies with the codex and with Mori Di.”
“The codex?”
“Yes. This.” She pointed to the pile of tattered pages. Now I could make out the title on the front page. Chom, which means “fortune-telling” or “divination”, was the first word. The second character was sketched in eleven precisely printed strokes. I didn’t recognize the character but I committed the lines to memory and made a mental note to look it up later. Ki was the last word, an ideograph meaning “narrative” or “account.”
“What does Miss Kwon have to do with any of this?” I asked.
Auntie Mee shrugged again. “Who’s to say? The fates of the living, and sometimes the dead, are intertwined in mysterious ways. If the bones of Mori Di are not found soon, and consecrated in a holy shrine then, unfortunately, Miss Kwon will meet an unpleasant fate.”
“What sort of fate?”
“Not good. Most likely she’ll die.”
This enraged Doc Yong. She leapt out of her crouch, stomped across the wood-slat floor and kicked the table in front of Auntie Mee. Candle and codex and votive urn flew straight up in the air. Before they landed, Doc Yong grabbed a chunk of the fortune teller’s thick black hair and yanked as if she wanted to rip it out of her skull. The two women grappled, screeching, and throwing ineffectual punches, but Doc Yong wouldn’t let go of her grip on Auntie Mee’s hair.
I bulled my way between the two women, trying to break it up. Doc Yong cursed like a Korean sailor. As the three of us struggled, Miss Kwon curled into a ball in her dark corner, her shoulders heaving. From what I could understand between screams, Doc Yong was telling Auntie Mee that she shouldn’t have brought Miss Kwon into this; she shouldn’t have frightened her by letting her know that if I failed in my mission to find Mori Di—or if I refused to accept the mission—Miss Kwon would die.
Auntie Mee, for her part, said that it wasn’t up to her. It was foreordained by the codex.
Finally, I broke them apart. Doc Yong was still fuming. Auntie Mee straightened her robe, acting like a queen who’d been rudely offended.
Once they calmed down, Doc Yong returned to the whimpering Miss Kwon, comforting her, cooing, apologizing. Auntie Mee relit a couple of candles that had sputtered out, repinned stray hairs in her coiffure, tidied up her table and codex, and resumed her place of power in the center of the room.
“Mori Di,” she told me, pointing at my nose, exasperated. “You find?” she asked. “No find?”
I glanced at Doc Yong. She was still angry but, reluctantly, she nodded.
Maybe it was Doc Yong’s encouragement. Maybe it was the curiosity that had been aroused in me, both by the passion of these two women and by the oddness of the assignment. Maybe it was the pitiful whimpers of Miss Kwon who still huddled in her dark corner. Maybe it was the nagging worry that maybe—just maybe—the fortune teller was correct and Miss Kwon would die if I didn’t find Mori Di’s sbones. But more likely my decision was based upon a feeling of kinship with a man Auntie Mee called Mori Di, a young American who’d traveled halfway around the world to a country he’d probably never heard of before and somehow, for some reason lost now to time, had met a cruel fate.
I found myself turning back to Auntie Mee and telling her, “I’ll do what I can.”
Doc Yong, still breathing heavily, hugged Miss Kwon, stared directly into my eyes, and smiled her fabulous smile.
2
“Your black-market stats are for shit,” Staff Sergeant Riley growled.
He tossed a printout to Ernie Bascom, my partner, who caught it on the fly.
“So what else is new?” Ernie replied and tossed the printout into the trash.
“You’d better retrieve that,” Riley said. “The First Shirt has a case of the ass and later this morning he’s going to be reviewing your lack of performance.”
“Screw the First Shirt.” Ernie grabbed Riley’s issue of today’s Pacific Stars and Stripes and snapped the pages open.
The three of us sat in the headquarters of the 8th United States Army Criminal Investigation Detachment on the first floor of Building 306-A on Yongsan Compound Main Post. Riley, his skeletal body lost in the starched folds of his khaki uniform, glared at Ernie. As the Admin NCO, it was Riley’s job to make sure that our statistics looked good in the reports that wound their way up the labyrinthine corridors of 8th Imperial Army. But in the day-to-day grind of criminal investigation, not everything can be quantified. I had little patience for Riley’s reports. Ernie had none.
Miss Kim, the statuesque Admin secretary, did her best to ignore the three of us. She pecked away at her hangul typewriter, theoretically translating documents from English to Korean. Actually, I believed most of her attention was on Ernie. They’d been close once but after reading some of my reports, which often included Ernie’s dealings with the fair sex, she’d begun to pull away from him.
He didn’t seem to mind. Ernie Bascom was just over six feet tall, slender, with short sandy blond hair and green eyes behind round-lensed glasses and for some reason he drove women mad. I’m not sure why. I could only guess that it was because he was unpredictable; no woman ever knew if he was going to t
ake a flying leap off a fast moving train or kneel and present her with a bouquet of spring roses. Ernie kept women guessing and once he had them confused he took his gratification where he found it.
Miss Kim had realized this and the realization made her furious at both of us. I tried to mollify her by being kind, occasionally placing a small gift on her desk, like a box of chocolates or a bottle of hand lotion from the Yongsan Main PX. It didn’t help. She blamed me, Ernie’s investigative partner, for leading him astray. Unfair. That was like blaming a canvas salesman for forcing Picasso to paint.
The time was now 0815. I clapped my hands. “Time to get cracking,” I said to Ernie.
He stared at me dully. He didn’t ask, Cracking on what?—not in front of Riley.
I half expected Riley to say that we had to wait for the first sergeant to return from his morning meeting with the provost marshal. He didn’t. That gave us deniability if the First Shirt later asked us where we’d been. Mentally, I rehearsed my line: “Nobody told us that we were supposed to wait around the office, Top.”
I rose from the gray, army-issue chair. Ernie stood too.
“Where the hell you two guys going?” Riley asked. “The commissary doesn’t open until ten.”
The 8th Army Commissary was where we monitored black-market activities. G.I.s, or more often their wives, bought goods from the commissary—bananas, maraschino cherries, instant coffee, soluble coffee creamer, sliced oxtail—all items difficult and expensive to obtain in Korea. Then they carted them out to Itaewon and sold them to one of the local black-market operators. The profit margin on most items was 100 percent, sometimes more. Despite the fact that there was a limit on how much a family could purchase each month, an industrious yobo—the Korean wife of an American G.I.—could pull down thousands of dollars per year; all of it strictly against Army regulations and strictly against the ROK– U.S. Status of Forces Agreement.
Black-marketing drove the honchos of 8th Army nuts. They didn’t like seeing all those Korean women scurrying around their PX and their commissary and they didn’t like the insolent attitude a G.I. developed when, for the first time in his life, he amassed ten thousand dollars in his bank account. That’s where the law enforcement officers of 8th Army CID came in. It was our job to bust black-marketeers. And at 8th Army staff meetings, the honchos considered this job just as important, if not more so, than solving assaults, rapes, murders, and other sorts of mayhem.
“We’ll be at the commissary by ten,” I replied.
“Yeah,” Riley said. “But where will you be till then?”
“At the SIR warehouse.”
SIR. Serious Incident Report. Riley didn’t ask us what we’d be doing there but, whatever it might be, it sounded like official business so he was satisfied. If he was questioned later by the First Shirt, his butt would be covered.
CYA. That’s what army bureaucracy is all about. Or as the Koreans say, cover your kundingi.
The warehouse was musty and the wooden door leading into the main storage area creaked when it opened. Fred Linderhaus, the NCO-in-charge, pointed us in the right direction.
“First thing in the morning,” he said, “two CID agents want to look at some old files. Must be something big.”
“Nothing big,” I said.
“Then what?”
Ernie stopped and turned to block Linderhaus’s way. “Do you have a freaking need to know?” he asked.
Since I’d first started working with Ernie Bascom, he’d been confrontational. This is a good thing in a criminal investigation agent and more than once his belligerent attitude had helped us gather information we needed or, more importantly, escape unscathed from a tough situation. Ernie’s temper also had its downside, like unnecessarily earning us enemies when what we needed was friends. His hometown was Detroit, the white suburbs not the black inner city, and I often thought that maybe it was something in the way he was brought up that caused him to be such a hothead. Or maybe it was the two tours he’d spent in Vietnam, under fire, buying pure China White from the snot-nosed boys on the other side of the concertina wire. Whatever the cause, lately Ernie had been more temperamental than usual. Almost anything would set him off. For the last few days, the chip on his shoulder teetered there like a claymore mine ready to explode. I hadn’t asked him about it. I hadn’t had the nerve.
Linderhaus’s eyes widened. “Hey,” he said, shrugging his big shoulders. “Just asking.”
“We’re doing research here,” Ernie continued, “because we’re writing a book. That’s all you need to know. You got it?”
“Got it,” Linderhaus replied. He stuck his hands in his pockets, turned, and shambled back down the dusty corridor.
After he’d left, I said, “You really know how to encourage voluntary cooperation, don’t you?”
Ernie snorted and grabbed his crotch. “He can voluntarily cooperate this.”
The warehouse was a large Quonset hut on a cement foundation divided by a series of plywood walls painted a shade of green the army calls “olive drab.” G.I.s call it “puke green.” Fluorescent lights, hanging from wooden rafters, buzzed overhead. Wooden shelving reaching ten feet high bearing cardboard boxes teetered above us. Each box was labeled. We were in a section marked SIRs, June 1962. Each box contained anywhere from thirty to a hundred SIRs for that month, statements concerning incidents that military police units throughout the Korean Peninsula considered important enough to report up the chain of command. If the 8th Army provost marshal agreed that the incident was serious, he included it in the blotter report that was presented daily to the commander, 8th United States Army. Once an incident was classified as a SIR, a file would be created, assigned a number, and an investigation launched, its progress tracked. The SIR remains open until the case is solved or otherwise declared closed.
Black-market cases usually don’t get SIR treatment, not unless the case is particularly egregious like the wholesale pilfering of a few tons of army-issue copper wire. Normally, SIRs are made about assaults, thefts, rapes, and murders involving US Forces personnel. Often, a Korean citizen is also involved—sometimes as the perpetrator, more often as the victim.
With 50,000 American G.I.s stationed in Korea since the war ended more than twenty years earlier, there had been plenty of serious incidents to report. Eighth Army’s purpose, according to military press releases, was to protect “Freedom’s Frontier.” That is, to deter the 700,000 North Korean Communist soldiers positioned just north of the Demilitarized Zone from invading their brethren in South Korea. Our real purpose, I believed, was to hold on to our empire. And many G.I.s who came to Korea and suddenly found themselves living in the lap of luxury—with houseboys to do their laundry and business girls to satisfy their needs after duty hours— took on the airs of potentates. And sometimes these petty potentates abused people they saw as their servants, which is why this SIR warehouse was stuffed full of box after box of paperwork reporting criminal activity.
The military, always mindful of its choirboy image, likes to keep this information under wraps. That’s why Fred Linderhaus doesn’t allow anyone in here unless they have a “need to know.” And the outside world—the world the military considers to be its enemy— never has a “need to know.”
We kept walking down the dusty hallways. Fleas flew in tight formations. I knew it was just my imagination but from within the boxes it seemed as if I heard the sobs of victims and the muffled screams of those who would never again draw the sweet breath of life.
“Doesn’t Linderhaus ever sweep up around here?” Ernie asked. He wasn’t listening to the same voices.
“They don’t allow Korean cleaning crews in the warehouse,” I replied. “The material’s too sensitive.”
“OK. So Eighth Army doesn’t want anybody nosing around in their dirty laundry. But they ought to allow a fumigation team in once in a while.” Ernie swatted at the swirling insects. “What the hell we looking for, anyway?”
“I told you. A G.I. who was murdere
d in 1953.”
“And for what again?”
I told him about Auntie Mee.
“You say she’s good looking?”
“Not bad.”
“But you couldn’t tell much beneath those thick robes.”
“I wasn’t looking that close,” I said.
“Because you’re stuck on Doc Yong. That’s the problem with you, Sueño. You like those smart chicks, the kind who wear glasses.”
I was about to tell him that not all women who wear glasses are smart but decided against it.
“So this fortune teller,” Ernie continued, “this Auntie Mee, is ranting about something that happened twenty years ago?”
“Right.”
“You didn’t pay her, did you?”
“No. She just asked me to check this out as a favor. Really, I’m doing it for Doc Yong.”
“Of course you are. You getting any of that?”
I ignored him.
I’m six foot four, Hispanic, with dark hair and dark eyes and some people have told me that I present a good appearance. But I have never had the success with women that Ernie has. I suppose I’m too serious. Growing up as an orphan in East L.A., as a foster child farmed out from family to family, I was forced to be serious. And observant. And cautious. Qualities that most of the silly girls we met in nightclubs didn’t prize but qualities that I hoped Doctor Yong In-ja would respond to. I wasn’t about to brief Ernie on my romantic progress—or lack thereof—with Doc Yong.
The boxes above us had reached the late fifties now and the color and sturdiness of the cardboard was rapidly deteriorating. We reached 1953, December, and then September and finally, after shifting a few boxes, July.
It was on the top shelf, the cardboard crumpled and the rectangular shape distorted. Probably because the box had been dripped on through a porous roof at one time and then dried out. According to Linderhaus, this tin-roofed Quonset hut had been built only a few years ago. Who knows where they’d stored stuff before that? We used a small stepladder. Ernie steadied me as I grabbed hold of the big box, slid it to the edge of the wooden shelf, and let it drop onto the cement floor with a thump.