by Martin Limon
After a hearing conducted by the judge advocate general, the MPs who responded to Moretti’s distress call that night were formally reprimanded though not brought up on court-martial charges, and all of them were shipped back to the States.
When the dust settled, the hunt for Moretti had been forgotten. As was the hunt for the seven men who had assaulted him. Forgotten by everybody, that is, except for an MP investigator named Cort.
The progress report I turned into Staff Sergeant Riley at the 8th Army CID office indicated that our search of Itaewon the previous night for Corporal Paco Bernal had turned up negative results.
“You mean he’s not there?” Riley asked us.
I shrugged. Ernie was busy fixing himself a cup of coffee poured from the big silver urn behind Miss Kim’s desk.
“I can’t tell the first sergeant this shit,” Riley said, “that you didn’t find nothing.”
“Why not? That’s what happened.”
“So you don’t have any leads on the whereabouts of this guy?”
I shrugged again. “We’re working on it,” I said.
“The provost marshal wants positive, measurable progress,” Riley said. “Estimates of when a goal will be attained. Not just ‘we didn’t find nothing.’”
“If they want positive,” I said, “they’ll just have to wait.”
“No, they won’t,” Riley said, grabbing a pencil. He spoke as he wrote. “Ongoing searches of the areas the suspect was known to frequent are expected to turn up results prior to the next reporting period.”
“Bullshit.”
Riley looked up from his work. “What do you think we do here?”
Ernie finished his coffee.
The two of us left the CID office and drove over to the barracks at the 21 T Car motor pool. According to the head houseboy, Paco Bernal had not returned to his room. A couple of the G.I.s who knew him couldn’t provide any new information and, moreover, they didn’t seem concerned about Paco’s fate.
As we walked back to the jeep, Ernie said, “They really watch out for one another in this unit, don’t they?”
As we left 21 T Car and drove out Gate 9, heading toward Itaewon, I surprised Ernie by telling him to turn left on the road leading toward Namsan Tunnel.
He swiveled his head and asked, “We going downtown?”
I nodded.
“What the hell for?”
“You’ll see.”
I’m not sure why I hadn’t told Riley that we had thought we had actually seen Paco Bernal—although only fleetingly. Something told me it wasn’t going to be easy to catch Paco until he wanted to be caught.
At the tollbooth I tossed a hundred won into the tin basket. Ernie gunned the jeep’s engine and slid through the milling field of kimchee cabs. Namsan means literally “South Mountain” and it hovers on the southern edge of Seoul like a sentinel monitoring the life of the entire city. The tunnel that was recently carved through it is the technological pride of the country. It’s open mouth loomed before us.
We cruised into its cold depths.
Ernie and I must have been the only Miguks to enter the big cement block building of Seoul City Hall in quite a while judging by the stares we received. None of the signs were in English and some of the Korean was beyond my capacity so I ended up stopping men in suits carrying briefcases and asking them tomfool questions. Since I didn’t know the technical jargon, I described what I needed in broad terms. Cute young secretaries stared at Ernie and me as if we were animals escaped from the zoo. Ernie grows antsy in these situations and I was worried he’d do something ill-considered. After we were directed to the third wrong office in a row, a kindly elderly woman finally directed us to what I later found out was the Office of Building Plans for the Southern Districts of Seoul.
The original plans to the seven buildings Moretti had built were still on file. Not blueprints. Nobody had time for something so time consuming after the war. Buildings had to be built and they had to be built now. Most of the plans were nothing more, really, than glorified sketches done on pulp paper with pencil and ruler, notations in Korean and English made in the margins. Then, after a number of erasures, the broad outlines of the structure had been recopied, right over the pencil lines, in blue ink.
I paid for photocopies to be made of each set of plans. I counted out the won and the grim-faced clerk handed me the plans in a brown envelope along with a receipt. Ernie and I walked back out into the broad hallway.
“What are you going to do with these things?” Ernie asked.
“Some comparison shopping.”
“You really are nuts, Sueño.”
Across the street from city hall, we found a teahouse with waitresses wearing blue uniforms and white gloves. Ernie convinced one of the girls to slip off her gloves and started fondling her fingers, all the while—supposedly—teaching her how to count in English. While the waitresses giggled, I sipped on ginseng tea and studied the plans, comparing them to what I’d seen in Itaewon last night.
There had been a lot of changes made since the buildings were originally erected. Rooms added, walls torn down, electrical wiring installed. And, of course, the Yobo Club had been completely demolished and replaced by a brand new structure, not a nightclub but a shopping emporium: trinkets, T-shirts, sporting equipment.
After the Itaewon Massacre, the ROK Army and the Korean National Police had clamped down on the entire area. For the better part of a month, Itaewon had been put off-limits to all civilians. The only people allowed to enter were those who could prove, by the address on their national identity card, that they were residents. All vehicles leaving the village were searched, either by the ROK Army at roadblocks or by the KNPs. Cort searched Itaewon himself, assisted by two armed MPs. They concentrated on the bars and brothels controlled by the Seven Dragons and any places likely to hide a corpse, including icehouses and electrical refrigeration units. They came up with nothing.
The Han River was about two miles away but the KNP roadblocks had been slapped on so fast after the fight that it was unlikely the killers could have made it out of there in time to dump the body. And even if they had, the corpse probably would’ve been spotted when it rose to the surface a few miles downstream near the Han River Estuary.
Of course, the Seven Dragons could’ve buried Moretti’s body in an empty field. But the southern edge of Seoul—and, indeed, the entire city—was so crammed with refugees after the war that there weren’t any empty fields to be found. Squatters were everywhere. Someone would’ve spotted men burying a corpse. The squatters would have been afraid to report it to the KNPs. Still, rumors would’ve spread. Someone would’ve heard something. And no such rumor had ever come to light.
Maybe the Seven Dragons had chopped up Moretti’s body and disposed of it. This was a possibility so grim I didn’t like to think about it. As vicious as the Seven Dragons were, they had never been known to resort to anything quite so macabre, according to Cort. The Seven Dragons would have been subject to the same superstitions as other Koreans and chopping up someone’s body is the perfect way to insure that their spirit will come back to haunt you.
In fact, when no sign of Moretti’s corpse surfaced, Investigator Cort started to suspect—or maybe hope—that Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti was still alive.
5
That night, Ernie and I caught a kimchee cab out to the ville and then entered into the den of iniquity known as the King Club. We were wearing our running-the-ville outfits: blue jeans, sneakers, sports shirts and nylon jackets with fire-breathing dragons embroidered on the back. In other words, we looked like two typical G.I.s out to spend a mindless evening of drinking beer and playing pinch-butt with as many Korean business girls as we could get our hands on.
During the duty day, Ernie and I are required to wear a white shirt with a tie and a sports jacket. Not uniforms. That getup, coupled with our short haircuts, fairly screams that the two guys you’re looking at are 8th Army CID agents. But that’s the military mind. The
y want us in civilian clothes in order to blend in with the civilian population but they don’t want us wearing the clothes that civilians actually wear.
At least now, after work, we could dress like two regular G.I.s. Not that we were fooling many people. Itaewon is a small village and most everybody knew who we were.
Miss Kwon hadn’t arrived at work yet and the all-Korean rock-and-roll band on the stage was still tuning up so I started talking to the middle-aged woman behind the bar, Mrs. Bei. She managed the place for the real owner.
“Who’s the G.I. who complained about Miss Kwon?” I asked.
Mrs. Bei frowned. She didn’t know his name. She only knew that he was a black man, that he wasn’t a youngster, and then she held her splayed fingers at the side of her head to show me that his hair stuck out farther than army regulation allowed.
There are over 1,500 American G.I.s stationed at 8th Army headquarters on Yongsan Compound. After you’ve been here awhile, and especially when you’re in my line of work, you get to know quite a few of them. In fact, 8th Army is much like a small town, full of gossip and backbiting, and everyone knows all about everyone else‘s business.
Back at my barstool, I told Ernie what Mrs. Bei had said.
Without hesitating, Ernie said, “Hilliard.”
He was referring to Sergeant First Class Quinton A. Hilliard, the NCO-in-charge of the 8th Army EEO Office. Equal Employment Opportunity.
I agreed. It sounded like Hilliard.
After the “race riot” in Itaewon in 1972, the 8th Army honchos finally acquiesced to setting up what other government agencies already had: a staff to monitor race relations within the command. Prior to 1972, Itaewon had been segregated. White soldiers, and other “honorary” whites like Chicanos and Asians, frequented the red-light village of Itaewon. The black soldiers had their own smaller ville on the other side of Yongsan Compound, in a district of Seoul called Samgakji. Samgakji is still there, and still thriving, but now black soldiers can venture into Itaewon without fear of reprisal, for the most part. However, when Ernie and I had occasionally gone to Samgakji on an investigation, we’d never once seen a white G.I.
Ernie and I ordered beers and sat through the rock band’s first set. After a half hour, when the club was almost full, Miss Kwon still hadn’t shown up. We decided to look for her. I asked around amongst the business girls and received directions to her hooch which was, as I suspected, located in the maze of dark alleys behind the nightclub district. We pushed through the double doors of the King Club and stepped out into the street. After some searching through narrow pedestrian lanes and knocking on doors, we found the hooch the King Club business girls had described. It was a three-story building behind a high brick wall.
I pounded on the wooden gate. When a cleaning woman opened up, I explained who we were and who we wanted to talk to. The bent-over old woman nodded and shuffled off slowly and led us to Miss Kwon’s hooch on the top floor. She slid open the oiled-paper door. Darkness. Ernie stepped into the room and switched on the single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.
The room was just a ten-foot-by-twelve-foot square with flowered paper peeling off the walls and yellow vinyl pasted to the floor, empty except for a few scraps of newspaper crumpled at the bottom of a plastic armoire.
“Domang kasso,” the cleaning woman said. Miss Kwon had run away.
I was happy for the shy young woman. Maybe she could escape from this life, escape from doing things that she hated to do.
Ernie was less optimistic. “She’ll be back,” he said.
Cort was reassigned to other investigations; the usual ones that came up back in those days, thievery—of heating oil, food, medical supplies— anything that could alleviate the unrelenting poverty the Koreans were living in, being the most prevalent. At that time G.I.s weren’t allowed to wear civilian clothes. They were ordered to be in uniform at all times, on and off compound. In spring and summer, they wore puke green army fatigues. But in the autumn, when the leaves turned red and yellow and brown and the nights became longer and colder, G.I.s started to wear their woolen winter fatigues. The tailor shops in Itaewon specialized in sewing a silk lining inside them and, if a G.I. popped for the money, he enjoyed the luxury of wearing a very comfortable set of clothes—smooth on the inside, warm on the outside.
That was the type of uniform Moretti was wearing on the night of the Itaewon Massacre.
During his off-duty time, Cort searched the Korean open-air markets looking for Moretti’s uniform. It was a long shot, he knew, but what Cort was counting on was that in Korea at that time, nothing was wasted, not even a wool uniform stolen from a dead G.I.
Cort knew Moretti’s uniform size and, of course, Moretti would’ve had his name tag sewn onto the front of his fatigue blouse but that could’ve easily been removed. But what might’ve been overlooked by the person selling the garment would be the laundry tag, a strip of white cloth with the G.I.’s initials written on it, attached to every piece of clothing a G.I. owned so that during the massive laundry operation conducted each morning in the 8th Army barracks, each item could be identified. Even socks.
The old women dealing in salvaged clothing at the canvas lean-to stalls in the Itaewon Market must’ve thought Cort was a very careful shopper. In the weeks following the Itaewon massacre, Cort sorted through mountains of used clothing. Finally, his diligence paid off. He found a pair of wool pants with the silk lining ripped out, but with a small white patch sewn on the inside of the left cuff bearing the initials FRM.
Three spots of crusted blood had dried into the material.
Cort made a show of bargaining with the proprietress. In the end he paid too much for the garment but he didn’t mind. He immediately had the blood tested at the 121 Evacuation Hospital. The result was O-positive, the same blood type as Moretti. That didn’t prove it was his, not for sure, but it was indicative.
Cort indicated in his notes that this discovery gave him a certain sense of accomplishment. It also gave him a sense of sadness. Now hope of finding Moretti alive was all but gone.
Based on the new evidence, Cort asked for permission to upgrade the Moretti case from absent without leave to murder. Eighth Army thought it over but without a body, they wouldn’t upgrade the case. And furthermore, Cort was ordered to lay off. If he didn’t, his investigative specialty would be pulled from his personnel records and he’d be sent back to where he came from. The infantry. That meant walking the DMZ in three feet of snow in the freezing Korean winter.
In his notes, Cort speculated as to why 8th Army had refused. To him, the answer was obvious. For public relations reasons they wished the Itaewon Massacre had never happened. And if they ignored it, it would go away.
Cort saluted, said nothing, and, on his own time, continued to investigate the death of Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti.
The next morning, I sat in a teahouse in the Namyong-dong district of Seoul and watched as Doctor Yong In-ja studied the copies of the building plans I’d purchased from Seoul City Hall. She immediately absorbed the meaning of what I was trying to do.
“You compare these,” she said, pointing to the short stack of papers, “to the buildings today and see if you can find some place where they might have, a long time ago, buried Mori Di.”
“Exactly.”
“But they might’ve buried the body some other place.”
“Maybe not,” I said. I explained my theories of how crowded Seoul was in those days—and still is—and how digging a grave and dropping a body in it wouldn’t likely go unnoticed. And the culprits couldn’t take the chance that someone might spot them, report them, and an honest cop might be called. Or at least a cop who would then blackmail them for more money than they wanted to pay.
Doc Yong frowned at my implication that the Korean cops in those days were corrupt.
“Everybody was poor at that time,” she said.
I nodded in agreement. People were poor now too but, thankfully, not as desperate as they were then.
“Maybe they took the body to mountain,” Doc Yong said. By “mountain” she meant the countryside. Korea is a mountainous country and every square inch of arable land is either cultivated or used for human habitation. So when Koreans refer to the wilderness they often use the word mountain because only on craggy peaks does any sort of wilderness still remain.
“There were too many roadblocks in those days,” I replied. “Some by the Korean army, some by the American army. Everybody was looking for North Korean Communist agents. It would be too dangerous for the killers to rent a truck and take the body out of Seoul. If they were stopped by 8th Army MPs, they’d be toast.”
“Toast?”
“It means they’d be burned, like a slice of bread.”
She nodded, not quite sure what I meant. I also explained why I didn’t believe the Han River was a good place to dispose of a body. And no unidentified G.I. bodies, floating or otherwise, had been reported any time after the Itaewon Massacre. Cort had checked.
“So they bury him someplace safe,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“In the buildings they own.”
“They didn’t own the buildings on paper but they controlled them.”
“Same-same,” she said.
I agreed. “Same-same.”
In her agitation, Doc Yong was stooping to using business-girl slang. It figured she’d pick some up, working with them all the time. Probably she had picked it up unconsciously, what with the empathy she felt for those downtrodden women.
I’d already told Doc Yong about Miss Kwon packing up and leaving Itaewon. She took the news stoically but asked me to continue to check out the details of the complaint that had been filed against the young woman. I promised her I would.