by Martin Limon
And Cort became a pest. People groaned when they saw him coming and rolled their eyes after he left. But for a while he convinced his superiors to keep Moretti’s SIR open. And on his own time he kept adding to it, although less often than before.
* * *
A door slammed above us.
Ernie stopped hammering. So did I.
A small pile of gray powder lay on the floor beneath me but I still had not managed to pull even one brick out of the wall.
Footsteps.
Ernie stood and switched off the overhead light. We crouched in darkness, hidden behind a wall of stacked cases of beer.
Someone entered, mumbling to himself, cursing “Miguk-nom”—loutish Americans—and switched on the overhead light. He grabbed what I believed was a case of Seven Star soda water, and carried it outside. After setting it down, he returned, switched the light off again and carried the tinkling bottles upstairs.
Without speaking, Ernie and I returned to our labors.
The reports in the SIR became fewer and Cort only bothered to write one up once or twice a month. He was using his own time to investigate because the provost marshal had long ago pulled him off the Moretti case and assigned him to new duties, mostly involving the accountability of 8th Army supply lines. Since the end of the war, these lines had been porous. They had started prosecuting G.I.s for diverting supplies and selling them on the black-market. Their Korean co-conspirators were occasionally rounded up by the Korean National Police for dealing in contraband but keeping tabs on the millions of dollars in military supplies arriving in Korea was a project that would keep the MPs busy for years. Ernie and I, on the black-market detail, were still fighting that battle, however reluctantly.
Cort wrote a personal memorandum that he left in the SIR file. He didn’t mention names but someone in his chain of command had once again ordered him to lay off the Moretti case. It was over, ancient history, don’t stir it up now! But it wasn’t over for Cort. He kept working, gathering data, trying to figure a way to assault the impregnable fortress that now surrounded the Seven Dragons.
And every day the walls of that fortress grew higher.
* * *
Ernie was the first to pull a brick free. I stuck my nose into the opening and inhaled. There was a musty odor but nothing else in particular, other than dust. I shone the flashlight and looked inside. An open space stared back at me, about the same length as my elbow to my fingertip. How high this opening went I didn’t know but probably up to the angled ramp. Whatever we were looking for, however, would probably be resting on the dirt floor beneath, a floor that I couldn’t see.
We kept hammering.
When the Kimchee Kowboys took a break, we took a break. While we sat in the darkness, listening to the conversation and drunken laughter upstairs, someone clomped down the steps. Two people this time. When they switched on the light they were cursing and laughing. They grabbed crates of beer and carried them upstairs, making two trips, and then they switched off the light and left us alone in the dark. Evidently, they weren’t concerned about the padlock and they made no effort to lock the outside door. It figured that on a busy night they’d just as soon leave the door open. When the Kimchee Kowboys started up again, Ernie and I resumed hammering.
After a few minutes, the opening wasn’t quite as large as I wanted but it was large enough. Besides, we were both tired of this bone-jarring work. Ernie switched on his flashlight and pointed it into the hole. With his open palm, he invited me to enter. I stuck my head in as far as I could, twisting my neck as I did so. My shoulders stopped my progress.
“Twist the flashlight over here,” I said.
Ernie tried but I could only make out the wall on the far end of the narrow opening. Nothing to be seen. I needed more room to maneuver.
We started hammering again. After three more songs, we’d removed four more bricks and I tried again. This time, I could just barely squeeze my shoulders in. Ernie stuck his forearm in beneath my chest and twisted his flashlight around at my command.
“Hold it there,” I said. He did. “Twist it down farther.” Ernie complied. The light swept slowly across ancient dust.
That’s when I saw him. A scream started in my throat but somehow, before it erupted, I held it back. I pulled my head out of the opening, breathing heavily.
“What’s wrong?” Ernie asked.
I just pointed my thumb at the wall. He leaned past me and stuck his head inside all the way up to his shoulders. Within seconds, he’d pulled out again too.
Not talking, we loosened a few more bricks. Then, with enough space to stick my upper torso in and my forearm, I made a more careful examination and then grabbed what I wanted. I held it in my open palm. In the light of the flashlight, Ernie squinted, reading the embossed print. Tears came to his eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen Ernie weep—about anything. Angrily, with dirty knuckles, he rubbed the moisture out of his eyes.
It was a dog tag. The metal had rusted a reddish brown but the imprinted name was clear enough: Moretti, Florencio R. The blood type too: O-posi tive. And the religious preference: Roman Catholic.
As I’d promised Aunite Mee and Miss Kwon and Doc Yong, I’d found Mori Di.
I was sure it was him. The tattered remains of a uniform and even combat boots lay near the skeleton. The garment Cort had bought over twenty years ago in the Itaewon Market must have been amongst Moretti’s extra clothing stuffed into his duffle bag, not the uniform he was wearing. Whoever had done this hadn’t stripped him. Circling the still intact neck bones was a stainless steel chain looped through one dog tag and a smaller chain looped through a second dog tag. There was a reason for this duplication. The dog tag on the big chain, according to army policy, would be left with the corpse. The other dog tag, the one on the smaller chain, would be collected by soldiers of the body recovery unit to make a complete accounting of casualties. That’s the one I unfastened, the small chain, the one the body recovery unit normally would collect when cleaning up after a battle.
All the while, Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti was grinning at me. At least his skull was. It sat in the dust as if it had been waiting a long time and now it was happy that someone had finally stumbled into this tiny brick ossuary. By the light of Ernie’s flashlight, I studied the bones. I even reached in and touched one of them, turning it this way and that in the harsh beam of the flashlight, making sure that I wasn’t imagining what had jumped out at me when I first saw the skeleton.
The bones had been sliced with what appeared to be a sharp-edged knife. Not everywhere. Only on the fingers and the toes, as if someone had purposely tormented Moretti while he was still alive. One of the fingers, the large middle finger, was not only sliced but it had been forced backward so far that it had finally snapped between the big middle knuckle and the joint where the finger joined the hand. Even now, gazing at the wound some twenty years after the fact, I winced.
And then I studied the tip of another finger. It appeared discolored. I lifted the bone into the beam of the flashlight. No doubt. The tip of the bone was darker than the rest of the skeleton, as if it had been singed by fire. The fingertips are the most sensitive parts of the human body. Moretti’s fingertip, at least one of them, had been burnt off.
When the Seven Dragons spirited him away from the scene of the original attack on the night of the Itaewon Massacre, they’d hidden him from the American MPs and later nursed him back to—if not health—consciousness. Then they’d begun questioning Moretti as to the whereabouts of the gold and silver and ancient family heirlooms that the residents of Itaewon had left in his safekeeping. Maybe Moretti thought the MPs would rescue him any minute. Maybe he thought that the Seven Dragons were a bunch of punks and he could bluff them. Whatever he thought, he resisted. And when the answers weren’t forthcoming, the Seven Dragons had tortured him. How long had it lasted? How long had it taken for Mori Di to break? I would estimate quite a while. Maybe even a few days. But as bad as the torture was, there was
something else that bothered me even more.
Handcuffs, laying in the dirt near Moretti’s hands. G.I. issue. I recognized them because exactly the same type of metal cuffs were still in use today. And near his neck, dried wads of cotton and a narrow cloth sash. A gag.
Why would anyone gag a dead man?
The answer: they wouldn’t.
My conclusion seemed inescapable. So far, I hadn’t discussed it, even with Ernie, but all the evidence pointed toward one thing. Once the Seven Dragons tortured Moretti and he’d either told him where he’d hidden the valuables—or the Seven Dragons had discovered the hiding place on their own—they had no further use for Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti. He was a liability. They couldn’t let him go free. And it wouldn’t have been easy to transport him anywhere, not in a city swarming with military patrols. So they decided to hide him in the basement of the Grand Ole Opry Club. In this narrow opening not much larger than a coffin. And once they had him inside, handcuffed and gagged, they bricked the opening closed.
Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti, a man who’d tried to help the impoverished people of Itaewon, had watched the Seven Dragons do their work. He’d watched a gang of punk gangsters wall him up, brick by brick, until the final glimmer of light was covered by mortar.
He could scream inside his little brick tomb but no one could’ve heard those screams, except himself.
When I marched alone into the main ballroom of the Grand Ole Opry Club, I still wore my winter jacket with the tools stuck into the inner pockets, making me feel twenty pounds heavier than I actually was. I received some funny looks from the old retirees. It was the Korean employees I was most worried about. But none of them, neither bartenders nor waitresses, stopped their work to pay any attention to me.
I headed straight for the door and pushed through out into the fresh air of the cold Korean night.
A few minutes later, Ernie popped out after me. We hurried down the street.
We’d replaced all the bricks and repositioned the stacked cases of beer in the basement as best we could, to camouflage our activities. I hoped this would give us a couple of days before someone discovered what we’d done. Once someone took the time to look, it would be obvious as to what had happened. Would one of the Korean employees investigate? I was hoping that, what with the place being frantically busy, they wouldn’t notice the two guys who’d walked in, disappeared for an hour and a half or so, and then walked back out. That they’d just write off our behavior as the weirdness that they were used to in American G.I.s.
Still, we didn’t have much time until someone discovered that we’d broken through the brick wall in the storeroom. Before then, somehow, I had to convince 8th Army to wrangle us a search warrant so we could take full advantage of the evidence we’d discovered. We needed it to make our activities retrospectively legal.
I was filthy. So was Ernie. Brick dust salted my hair. It was still early, only half past eight, so we headed toward the far side of the nightclub district and entered an alley near the open-air Itaewon Market. The stalls were dark and shuttered at this hour, canvas flapping in the cold evening breeze. Hidden in a dark alley, lit only by a half-dozen green bulbs, lurked the last Korean bathhouse still open. At the entranceway, I plopped down a five thousand won note—about ten bucks—and the proprietress smiled a toothy grin, happy for the unexpected business.
The middle-aged woman assigned to scrub my hair clawed with the ferociousness of a lioness. Then she slipped her hand into a coarse red mitten and started in on my back. It felt as if she were systematically peeling my flesh. Oily pellets of black dirt emerged from every pore of my skin, like tiny insects searching for light. By the time she was done, I felt completely clean but my skin flamed red. She rinsed me off, dried me, and then oiled me with some sort of lotion. After slipping my clothes back on, I sat in the waiting room chatting with the bathhouse women, sipping on a can of cold guava juice. Ernie took a lot longer than I did. More than an hour longer. When he finally emerged he looked, for once in his life, subdued. And as limp as a freshly washed rag.
There was less than an hour left until the midnight curfew. We made our way back to the Grand Ole Opry Club and waited out front, watching as the band loaded their equipment onto a flatbed truck.
Kimchee Kitty, the lead singer for the Kimchee Kowboys emerged. Her lush hair was piled high atop her head and she was wrapped in a long cloth coat with a fur collar that she held tightly beneath the soft flesh of her face. Our eyes met and she smiled at me. I almost asked for her autograph but decided at the last minute not to. Too shy.
Ernie mingled with the half-looped retirees in the street who’d stayed until the end of the show. I sauntered around inside and casually listened to the conversations of the bartender and the waitresses. There was no indication that anyone had noticed the hole Ernie and I had knocked in the brick wall of the basement. This was good. It meant we’d have time to obtain our search warrant and retrieve the bones of Mori Di and any still existing evidence of who had murdered him.
The truck carrying the Kimchee Kowboys had departed and most of the customers had left when I emerged from the club. A couple of business girls were tugging on Ernie’s sleeve. They weren’t propositioning him, not this time. Instead there was terror in their eyes.
One of them said, “You CID, right?”
“Right,” he answered. No sense trying to keep it a secret. Everyone in the ville knew anyway.
“You go King Club,” she said. “Bali bali.” Quickly.
“Why?” Ernie asked.
“You look at roof. Some yoboseiyo up there.”
In Korean, yoboseiyo means “hello.” In G.I. slang, it means a person, usually a Korean person.
Ernie didn’t bother to question them further. He started to run, swerving left on Hooker Hill, heading for the King Club. I followed him.
A crowd had gathered in front of the King Club.
People were looking up, pointing, and that’s when I saw her. She wore a short skirt, its hemline above her knees and I noticed that her calves were round and sturdy. Her hair was cropped short, like a middle-school girl’s but shaggier. This was a common cut amongst the business girls of Itaewon since many of them had left school only weeks—or days—before starting work here.
Her blouse, long-sleeved and white, was made of a flimsy material that billowed in the cold wind blowing across the roof of the King Club. She had already climbed over the parapet and stood with the heels of her flat shoes dug into a ledge that was only three or four inches wide. Her arms were spread-eagled, holding onto drainpipes on either side of her.
“It’s Miss Kwon,” I said to Ernie.
“Who?” Ernie had never met her.
“The one Hilliard complained about.”
Ernie’s head swiveled. “I thought she went home.”
“Apparently,” I said, “she’s back.”
I ran through the entryway of the King Club, still clutching my winter jacket tightly around my waist, wishing like hell I didn’t have a mallet and chisel stuck inside my belt. The main ballroom was empty, no band, no G.I.s, no business girls. They were all out on the street gawking up at the suicidal Miss Kwon. Some of the G.I.s were already chanting, “Jump!” in mocking voices as if they were kidding. But I knew they weren’t kidding. That’s what they wanted her to do.
I shoved through the back door, found the steps, and climbed. Ernie was right behind me. We reached the top floor and spotted a wooden ladder at the end of the hall that had been pulled down from the roof. We climbed as fast as we could. On the roof I found Mrs. Bei, the manager of the King Club. Standing near her was a young man in black slacks, white shirt and bow tie—her bartender—and three or four waitresses. They all clutched the edge of the parapet, looking down, shouting at the person who clung to the outside of the wall. One elderly man, the janitor, stood farther away, leaning over the edge of the roof, staring at Miss Kwon with an embarrassed smile on his face.
I took off my jacket, dropped th
e chisel and mallet atop it, and peered over the edge of the roof.
I was only ten feet from Miss Kwon but she wasn’t looking my way. She was staring down at the street below, perspiration pouring off the soft cheeks of her sweet face. I turned and grabbed Mrs. Bei.
“She come back,” Mrs Bei said in English. “Family no want. They need money. Snake say she gotta sleep with any G.I. She no want.”
Ordering Miss Kwon to spend the night with Hilliard was the only way for Snake, the owner of the King Club, to avoid having Hilliard press his complaint. Since the race riot out here less than two years ago—white American G.I.s fighting black American G.I.s—8th Army was phobic about even the slightest appearance of racial conflict. That riot had hit the Stateside newspapers and caused the 8th Army commander to be relieved. The current commander wanted no repeat. To keep Hilliard from raising a stink there was an even chance that the 8th Army honchos would put Snake’s nightclub off-limits. Fifty-fifty wasn’t good enough odds for Miss Kwon to maintain her personal moral standards. She had to give it up.
Ernie was ready to climb over the parapet.
“Hold it,” I told him. “Even if you grab her, she could fall and pull you over with her.”
“We gotta do something.”
That was Ernie. Without thinking, he’d already decided that somebody he didn’t know had to be saved, even at the risk of his own life. But Agent Ernie Bascom never calculated risk. He just did what seemed right at the time.
I thought of speaking to Miss Kwon in Korean, but I was worried that just the voice of an American G.I. might cause her to jump. Mrs. Bei kept up a steady, soothing, harangue and it must’ve been doing some good because Miss Kwon hadn’t jumped yet.