The Ville Rat

by Martin Limon

  “The Ville Rat,” Ernie replied, grinning now.

  “The who?”

  “The Ville Rat. While we were talking about Threets, I asked them about the skinny white guy with the red Afro. The one who stopped us on our way out of Sonyu-ri last time and led us on that merry chase. When I described him, their eyes lit up. After some coaxing, they told me about him.”

  “They knew him?”

  “Of course they knew him. He thinks he’s a soul brother himself. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  The proprietress of The Black Star Nightclub was a grumpy old woman with streaks of grey hair that fell past her ears. As she talked, she kept brushing unruly strands from her eyes, trying at the same time to keep a cheap Turtle Boat cigarette lit.

  “I don’t know Ville Rat,” she told us.

  “White guy,” Ernie told her, holding his hands to the side of his head. “Red hair. Sticks out like a soul brother.”

  “I don’t know,” she said stubbornly.

  I showed her my badge.

  “Ajjima,” I said, using the honorific form of address for an older woman. “We don’t want to bother you, we just want to know about the Ville Rat. But if you don’t want to talk to us, you can talk to this gentleman.”

  I pulled out Inspector Gil Kwon-up’s calling card and showed it to her. She took one look at the emblem of the Korean National Police and started shaking her head.

  “I don’t wanna talk him.”

  “Okay,” Ernie said. He walked around behind the bar. “Then you talk to me.” He rattled the chain that locked the metal cooler. “Open it.”

  The old woman frowned, took a long drag on her cigarette, and snuffed it out on a metal ashtray. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Anyway he black market. Sell me this shit.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Ville Rat,” she said impatiently.

  She pulled a ring of keys out from a pocket in her skirt and opened the cooler. Inside were the usual brown bottles of OB beer, but stacked neatly beside them was a row of ice-cold sixteen-ounce cans. She pulled one out and handed it to Ernie. “Soul brother like,” she said.

  It was a Stateside product, malt liquor, a brand known as Colt 45. It had a higher alcoholic content than regular beer. I’d tasted it before and hadn’t liked it much since it also had a fermented tartness that, as far as I was concerned, ruined the flavor of the hops and barley.

  Ernie held it up to the light to see if there were any customs labels on it. There weren’t. “Where does the Ville Rat get this stuff from?”

  The old woman shrugged. “How I know?”

  “What else does he bring?”

  She glanced at the liquor bottles behind the bar. There were three or four brands of imported cognac. Ernie lifted them up to the light and all of them had ROK customs labels on them. But the bottles looked ancient, scratched and chipped, probably refilled a thousand times. “Cognac?” Ernie asked.

  The old woman shrugged again. “Maybe brandy.”

  She refilled the expensive bottles with cheaper booze. Standard practice. After a few snootfulls most GIs couldn’t tell the difference, if they ever could in the first place.

  “Who else does he sell to?” Ernie asked.

  “Me, I’m the only one.”

  “The only one in country?”

  “The only one in Sonyu-ri. Maybe he go ’nother village, sell to ’nother club have soul brother.”

  She pronounced the word “village” like “ville-age-ee” and the word “soul” like the capital city of the country, “sew-ul.”

  “How often do you see him?”

  She shrugged again. “Maybe once a month.”

  “At mid-month payday or end-of-month payday?”

  “Maybe end-of-month.”

  “Does he live here in Sonyu-ri?”

  “No. Not live here.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe far away.”

  “Like where?”

  “How I know?”

  “Does he have a girlfriend here?”

  “Any Black Star girl like him.”

  “They do? Why?”

  “Because he smart. Not stupid, like GI. He make money.”

  “GIs make money,” I said.

  “Skoshi money,” she said. Little money. “All the time Cheap Charley.”

  “The Ville Rat is not a Cheap Charley?”

  “No. He spend money, buy girls tambei.” Cigarettes. “Satang sometimes.” Candy. “Any GI like Ville Rat too.”

  “So he’s spreading it around,” I said. She didn’t understand what I meant by that, so I said, “Who does he stay with when he visits The Black Star Club?”

  “I don’t know. Before curfew, he all the time go.” She waved her hand toward an unknown distance.

  A skinny little boy ran into the club. Breathless, he spoke to the proprietress.

  “Ajjima,” he said. “Migun wa-yo.” Aunt, American soldiers are coming.

  “Otton migun?” What kind of American soldiers?

  “Honbyong,” the boy said. MPs.

  That’s all I needed to hear. We thanked the woman and departed, in a hurry.

  -6-

  Ernie and I scurried through a narrow pedestrian lane, hopping over mud puddles, dodging ancient cobwebs that swung from rafters like low-hanging vines.

  “You think they’re after us?” Ernie asked.

  “Probably,” I replied. “We’re up here on the Threets case, and according to the memo from Eighth Army, the Threets case only.”

  “That’s what we’re doing,” Ernie said indignantly.

  “Maybe,” I replied. “Either way, it’s best if we un-ass the area.”

  The pedestrian lane let out onto a two-lane blacktop that I recognized. It ran north toward more small farming communities and, beyond that, the winding flow of the Imjin River. South only a couple hundred yards, it intersected with the road that ran in front of Camp Pelham and through the village of Sonyu-ri. We trotted across the street and when we hit the intersection we turned left. About fifty yards on stood the entrance to meikju changgo, the Non-Appropriated Fund transshipping point. We waved to the gate guards whom we’d already plied with packs of Kent cigarettes, and trotted to Ernie’s jeep. He started the engine and said, “Are we done up here?”

  “For the time being,” I said.

  He backed out, spinning gravel as he did so.

  Ernie’s left foot worked the clutch as his right hand fondled the crystal skull that topped the four-on-the-floor gear shift. He loved this jeep and had put a lot of work into it. Well, not work, exactly. What he did was, at every end-of-month payday, he gave a gift of one quart of Johnny Walker Black to the head honcho dispatcher at the 21st Transportation Car Company, or “21 T Car,” the main motor pool for 8th Army headquarters. As a result of this highly prized gift, what Ernie received was his personal jeep that was always dispatched to him and him only, topped off with gasoline, with maintenance thrown in and new tires every six months. In addition, Ernie popped for the tuck-and-roll black leather upholstery that puffed up proudly in the backseat.

  “Never know when some dolly might want to crawl back there with me,” Ernie’d told me.

  We sped out of the front gate of meikju changgo and turned right, heading for Sonyu-ri. The MPs approaching The Black Star Club had been on foot, and when we’d passed the intersection minutes ago there’d been no activity. So when we saw two MP jeeps lurking behind a brick wall on the near side of the Camp Pelham main gate, Ernie and I were both taken by surprise. As we passed, the MPs started their engines, turned on their overhead emergency lights, and gave chase.

  “Aren’t they ever going to stop messing with us?” Ernie asked.

  “This is Division,” I replied.

  As if that explained everything
, Ernie stepped on the gas. It was mid-afternoon, so the denizens of the Sonyu-ri nightlife were up and about and the roads teemed with pedestrians. Ernie swerved past kimchi cabs parked on the side of the road, avoiding an old man pushing a cart filled with yontan charcoal and rushing past scantily clad business girls carrying pans filled with soap and shampoo on their way to the public bathhouse. We must’ve been doing forty by the time we passed the front gate of RC-4. A half-mile later, we sped past the spot, off to our left, where the corpse of the woman in red had been found. We raced past the Country Health Clinic, still leaving the MP jeeps in the dust, when five hundred yards ahead a quarter-ton truck nosed out onto the road.

  “Damn.” Ernie swerved to his left, but the truck kept coming. To avoid it, he swerved back to his right, but the driver of the military vehicle seemed to have anticipated Ernie’s move and quickly backed up. Ernie slammed on the brakes. Behind us, the two MP jeeps kept coming. Ernie glanced back, shifted the jeep into reverse, but it was too late. The MP jeeps nudged up to our rear bumper and cut off all means of escape. Armed MPs hopped out of the rear of the quarter-ton truck.

  A half-dozen MPs surrounded us. Slowly, Ernie and I clambered out of the jeep.

  “You’re interfering with a freaking investigation!” Ernie shouted.

  Ignoring him, the MPs closed in. One of them I recognized: Specialist Austin, the gate guard who hadn’t given us the time of day. The ranking man appeared to be a buck sergeant. Four of them pulled their batons and the other two stepped toward us.

  “Assume the position,” the buck sergeant said.

  Ernie replied with his usual brilliant retort: “Get bent.”

  The four MPs hopped forward. I grabbed one of them, shoved him away, and Ernie popped another in the jaw. After that, confusion reigned, and after much jostling, Ernie and I ended up in the backseat of an MP jeep, hands cuffed behind our backs. An MP driver started the engine and, after another MP hopped in the passenger seat, he sped back toward Camp Pelham, Ernie and I bouncing in the backseat. But much to my surprise, when we reached Camp Pelham, the driver kept going past the main gate, continuing east, toward the hills that rose inland from the Western Corridor.

  “You guys are fucked,” Ernie shouted at the driver. “We had authorization to be up here!”

  He kept at it, screaming at the top of his lungs, calling the two MPs three kinds of asshole when finally the one riding shotgun cracked. “You had authorization,” he shouted back, “until you interviewed Groverly!”

  Ernie looked surprised and turned to me. I grimaced and then shrugged. Either Groverly had admitted that he’d talked to me or someone in the MP barracks had spotted us talking. Either way, Division was apparently using that as an excuse to take us into custody and ship us back south. At least, that’s what I thought was happening, especially when we turned right at one of the country roads and wound our way through hills and cabbage fields that led to the city of Popwon-ni. I figured we’d keep moving south from there, running parallel to the MSR on a road that would eventually reach the mountains just north of Seoul. But I was wrong. Four or five miles on, we turned into the back gate of Camp Howze.

  “Why are we going here?” I asked.

  The 2nd Infantry Division MP headquarters was at Camp Casey in the Eastern Corridor. The Western Corridor and the Eastern Corridor were both traditional invasion routes that stretched from China, through Manchuria, through North Korea, and finally ended at the capital city of Seoul. In ancient times they’d been used by Chinese legions, Manchurian raiders, and Mongol hordes. During the early 20th Century, the Japanese Imperial Army had used them to go north toward Siberia. Most recently, they were guarded by the GIs of the US 2nd Infantry Division. We were still deep in Division territory, more than ten miles north of the outskirts of Seoul.

  Neither MP answered. But I believed there was a certain smug satisfaction in their silence, a satisfaction that grew as we wound through the rows of olive-drab Quonset huts perched on the hilly ridges that comprised Camp Howze. It seemed like an awkward place for a military compound, surrounded by hills, until you realized that those same hills would probably provide excellent protection from North Korean artillery.

  We stopped at the back door of one of the larger Quonset huts. The quarter-ton truck pulled up behind us, and MPs hopped out and took up positions with nightsticks drawn. Like a couple of Brahma bulls, Ernie and I were pulled out of the jeep and herded through a door that said: no admittance. authorized personnel only.

  Amongst the US Army’s favorite directives.

  I expected an ass chewing. None came. Ernie and I sat in an interrogation room that was locked from the outside. Our handcuffs had been removed, but we hadn’t been provided chow, and from the growing darkness outside the painted window I could tell that night had fallen.

  Impatient, Ernie rose and pounded on the door. No one answered. He kept pounding. Finally, he shouted, “Goddamn it! I have to take a leak.”

  Five minutes later, the door creaked open. Before Ernie could pounce, a metal bucket was shoved in and the door slammed shut. Ernie carried the bucket to the far corner of the room and took his leak. Later, I took mine.

  We were dozing on a wooden bench and I wasn’t sure how many hours we’d been cooling our heels when there was a quick knock on the door and it swung open. My eyes opened at the same time. A man walked into the room; he wore baggy fatigues. He stopped in front of us and jammed both fists into his narrow hips.

  “What the hell is wrong with you two?” It was Staff Sergeant Riley.

  “Up yours,” Ernie replied, lazily rubbing his eyes.

  “I had to drive all the way up to Camp Howze to bail your sorry asses out!”

  “Bail?” I said.

  “They made me sign a chit. Taking responsibility for you two lowlifes and guaranteeing you’d un-ass the Division area.”

  “What about the Threets investigation?”

  “Finished,” Riley said. “Done. Kaput.”

  “It ain’t finished,” Ernie said, growling.

  “It’s finished up here,” Riley said. “Come on.”

  We followed him out into the hallway.

  The MPs wouldn’t give us Ernie’s jeep back, not until we were out of the Division area. Instead, two of their MPs drove it, their headlights tailing me and Ernie and Riley in Riley’s green army sedan. Just past the last Division checkpoint, we pulled over onto the side of the dark road. The two MPs hopped out of Ernie’s jeep and walked over to the floodlight illuminating the checkpoint. Soon they were bullshitting with the checkpoint guards, exchanging cigarettes, apparently waiting for transportation back.

  Riley drove south in his sedan. Ernie and I jumped in his jeep and followed. Speeding off, Ernie leaned out of his side of the door, held his arm high, and flipped the Division MPs the bird.

  “It’s past midnight,” I told him. “They can’t see what you’re doing.”

  Ernie shrugged. “It’s the thought that counts.”

  The compound known as ASCOM, the Army Support Command, sits about fifteen kilometers west of Seoul, just outside the city of Bupyong, not too far from the shores of the Yellow Sea. Ernie and I left early and drove on a two-lane elevated highway that wound through fallow rice paddies and past clusters of straw-thatched farmhouses. Metal chimneys spewed ribbons of charcoal smoke into the blue sky. At the ASCOM main gate, an MP checked our dispatch and rusty wheels squeaked as a Korean gate guard rolled the barbed-wire fence open. We drove through onto a small compound composed mostly of tin Quonset huts, which looked like all the other US military compounds in the country except that it was interspersed with massive concrete buildings that had been constructed before World War II by the Japanese Imperial Army, supposedly for ammunition storage.

  One of those huge storage bunkers was surrounded by another chain-link fence with a small administration building out front. The sign at the entrancew
ay said: welcome to the 8th united states army stockade. authorized personnel only.

  At the front desk, we showed our badges to a bored clerk. A couple of phone calls were made and then, after about ten minutes, an MP with a steel helmet and a plastic faceguard motioned to us with his truncheon. We followed. A long hallway led into the heart of the concrete bunker and, once inside, the world changed. Sounds were amplified. Metal clanging on metal and the sharp shouts of commands echoed down whitewashed corridors. We followed the MP through one of those corridors, turned right, and finally reached a door marked prisoner conference room. He pulled out a ring of keys, unlocked the door and waved us in.

  “I’ll be right outside the door,” he said. “Have a seat. The prisoner will be brought in shortly.”

  Ernie and I pulled straight-backed chairs out from beneath a counter and sat down. The partition reached from floor to ceiling and the windows were made of thick plastic with a metal mesh to speak through.

  “Where are the telephones?” Ernie asked.

  “What?”

  “In the movies,” he said, “the prisoner sits on one side and his visitor sits on the other, talking through telephones.”

  I studied the little metal duct.

  “I guess Eighth Army couldn’t afford them,” I said.

  Ernie peered through the thin wire. “You can spread germs through this thing.”

  Five minutes later, a burly MP, similarly masked with a metal helmet and a plastic visor, escorted in the prisoner. He wore army fatigues, but without rank insignia or a belt to hold up his baggy pants. Instead, he clutched them with his right hand, which was handcuffed to his left. His name tag said Threets. Peering at us, he remained standing until the guard pointed at the chair with his nightstick. Immediately, Threets sat down. The guard backed out of the room and shut the door behind him.

  Ernie glanced at me. I think I knew what he wanted to say. Threets looked like a child. The flesh of his face was soft and without whiskers, and even though he was rail-thin, baby fat rounded his cheeks. He wore Army-issue horn-rimmed glasses and his hair was tufted out a little too long for Army regulation.