by Martin Limon
“But you’re not going to hear about it,” Ernie continued, “not until you spill a little information of your own.”
“What information?”
Ernie looked at me. Strange turned in my direction, cigarette holder waggling.
“Major Schultz,” I said.
Strange stared at me like an overweight, wanton grasshopper. “What about him?”
“What’s his story? How’d he get himself dead?”
“You’re the cops. You’re supposed to know that.”
“We want to know more about his personal life.”
Strange nodded, getting it now. “You want to know if he had any strange lately?”
“Exactly. And if there were any problems he had. Any enemies. Anybody who would want him dead.”
“Wait a minute.” Strange sat back. “This could be dangerous.”
“Maybe.”
“It’ll cost you.”
“Cost me what?”
“He always tells me stories.” Strange jammed his thumb in Ernie’s direction. “You want this information, now it’s your turn.”
“Maybe I haven’t had any strange lately.”
Strange crossed his arms. “Maybe you’d better find some.”
Ernie was grinning ear to ear. “Right, Harvey. That’s telling him. It’s his turn.”
Strange nodded.
I was stuck, but we needed the information. “Okay,” I said, “you win. I’ll get some strange. ASAP. But we’ll be out of town and we need everything you can dig up on Major Schultz. I’ll call you.”
“No!” Strange said. “No phones.”
“Why not?”
“They’re tapped. Every line in the Yongsan Telephone Exchange is recorded and listened to daily.”
Panic rose in me for a moment as I thought of my calls with Leah Prevault. But we’d spoken in code and never said anything incriminating. “By who?”
“I ain’t saying.”
“Okay, Strange,” I said. He frowned. “I mean Harvey. We’ll be back in a couple of days. I’ll call you and we’ll set up a meeting.”
“Say it’s about the football bet I won.”
“Gambling’s against Army regulation. If somebody’s listening . . .”
“They don’t care about football betting,” he explained. “That’s all-American.”
“And so are you, right?”
“To the core.”
And the damn thing was, he was right.
We stopped briefly at the CID Admin office to let Sergeant Riley know where we were going.
“Anjong-ri?” he asked. “Why the hell you going down there?”
“None of your beeswax,” I said.
“You and that Mr. Kill,” he replied. “You think you’re hot shit now, but you’ll be back on regular duty soon.”
I asked him to check with his sources at personnel to find out what he could about Major Schultz.
“Why? He was offed by that business girl. What do you need to go poking into his background for?”
“Just find out, will you?”
“You’ll owe me.”
I glanced at Miss Kim’s desk. It was bare except for her teacup, which was empty.
“Where’d she go?” I asked Riley.
“Hell if I know. She’s been leaving the office a lot lately, and her work’s been backing up. She’d better get on the stick.”
Her in-box was empty as far as I could tell, but that was Riley for you. Always put the worst face on any given situation. On the way out, when Riley wasn’t looking, Ernie grabbed Riley’s copy of today’s Stars and Stripes and stuck it in his back pocket.
Ernie and I returned to the barracks and changed back into our running-the-ville outfits. Mr. Yim, the houseboy, had already washed and pressed my blue jeans and my button-down shirt. My previously dirty nylon jacket he handed me on a hanger. We were still more than a week out from mid-month payday, but since Ernie had given me part of the KNP expense money, I decided to pay Mr. Yim now. I handed him three ten-thousand-won notes, almost sixty bucks.
“Too much,” he said.
“Forty for the month,” I said, “and I won’t have time to buy soap or shoe polish.”
“No sweat,” he said. He’d ask another GI to purchase extra from the PX.
He was a middle-aged man, probably in his fifties. Before dawn, when he made his way to work, he—like the other houseboys—wore a suit and tie. Face was everything to him, and he didn’t want other Koreans to know that his job on the compound involved menial labor. Once Mr. Yim reached the barracks, he locked his suit in a wall locker and changed into the baggy shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops that he wore now. Some of the GIs lorded their status over the houseboys, barking orders at them. This wasn’t smart. They found minor ways to take their revenge; refusing to take combat boots off compound for repair or not bothering to carry their uniforms to the base laundry to have new patches sewn on. I was always respectful of Mr. Yim. Not only was he older than me—and Confucian propriety dictated that I be respectful to my elders—but I knew he’d lived through a lot. More than twenty years ago, as a young man, he’d been conscripted into the North Korean army. During one particularly horrific battle, he’d managed to slip away from his unit and escape to the south. Unfortunately, once he arrived in Seoul, a big army deuce-and-a-half rattled by, full of armed soldiers, and he was once again conscripted, this time into the South Korean Army. He’d survived the war, but just barely. After I’d gained his trust, he showed me the shrapnel wounds he’d suffered on his back and his upper thigh.
“American doctor save my life,” he told me. “I always like America.”
I supposed that was as good a reason as any.
He’d landed a job on compound washing GI laundry, shining GI boots and making GI bunks, and had been here ever since. Somewhere along the line, he’d married and he now had two kids, both recent high school graduates. He was proud that he’d gotten them such a high-level education. Still, they were both looking for work, and so he continued to put up with abuse from obnoxious American soldiers.
Once I made the mistake of asking him about his family in North Korea. When the war ended and the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone was set up, it became almost impossible to escape from the Communist-controlled north. Hundreds of thousands of families were divided. Mr. Yim stopped shining shoes and looked at the ground. It was almost two minutes until I realized that a puddle of tears had formed on the cold cement.
I never asked him again.
-11-
We gassed up the jeep at the 8th Army POL point (petroleum, oil, and lubricants) and crossed the Chamsu Bridge, leaving the Han River and the City of Seoul behind. We cruised south on the Seoul-to-Pusan Expressway, admiring the new road that had been completed little more than a year ago.
“Korea’s going to hell,” Ernie said.
He was alluding to the road. It looked almost like a Stateside freeway: two lanes in either direction with a ten-yard-wide divider in the middle. Much of it had been carved into the countryside, and the ridges on either side were lined with newly planted birch trees.
“Can’t even see the rice paddies,” I said.
Ernie nodded.
We preferred the old roads. Two-lane affairs that wound through pear orchards and passed craggy peaks and narrowed when entering farming villages, with ramshackle wooden buildings and homes covered with straw thatch and old men sitting on stone porches puffing serenely on long-stemmed pipes. Of course, this new expressway from Seoul to Pusan did cut the driving time by more than half.
“Look!” I pointed at a billboard with a giant picture of a pretty young girl about to chomp into a Choco Pie. Such advertisements were never allowed before.
“I told you,” Ernie said. “The road to perdition.”
About sixty kilometers
south of Seoul we turned off the expressway, heading for the city of Pyongtaek. Before we reached it we turned west toward our destination. After passing a busy bus station and bouncing over a double row of railroad tracks, we entered the small village of Anjong-ri. As far as I knew, it hadn’t even existed before the Korean War. If it had, it was probably just a country intersection that wasn’t on maps. But after the war, it was settled that the US military would be using the flat plains in the surrounding area to construct a large helicopter base, and the town had sprung up like wet rice shoots reaching toward sunlight. First had been the bars, then the chophouses, and finally the shops: tailor shops, brassware souvenir emporiums, photography studios, sporting goods stores. And from there, the place had continued to grow. Rat-infested yoguans—Korean inns—and endless catacomb-like alleys where the business girls plied their trade.
One thing Anjong-ri did have was a brand-new white cement-block building housing the local office of the Korean National Police. We cruised past it, the flag of the Republic of Korea—its red and blue yin-yang symbol on a pure white background—fluttering in the cold morning breeze. I thought of the card Mr. Kill had given me for Lieutenant Kwon. I hoped I wouldn’t need it.
As we neared the front gate, pedestrian traffic increased: young women scantily clad, wearing just shorts and T-shirts with a sweater thrown on to protect them from the cold, plastic pans canted against their hips, on their way to the bathhouse; old men pushing carts laden with produce or hay or old pieces of junk metal that were somehow valuable to them; the occasional GI in civvies, rubbing his eyes and making his way back toward base.
At the big front gate of Camp Humphries, we were waved to a halt by an MP. Without a word, Ernie handed him our dispatch.
“CID,” the MP said.
“No,” Ernie snapped, “just Eighth Army Provost Marshal’s office. Nothing to be gabbing about.”
The MP handed the clipboard back to Ernie, who in turn handed it to me.
“ID,” the MP said.
We both showed him our military identification. Grim-faced, he waved us through.
Ernie gunned the engine. “In five minutes, every MP on base will know that two CID agents from Seoul have come to poke into their business.”
“Forget ’em, Ernie,” I told him. “We’ll be operating off base. They won’t bother us.”
“They better not.”
Ernie turned left into a row of angled parking spots. He switched off the ignition, lifted the chain welded to the floorboard, and wound it through the steering wheel. When it was knotted securely, he clicked home the padlock. We hopped out of the jeep and strode toward the pedestrian exit. The same MP glanced at our identification again and stared at us suspiciously, but waved us through.
The dirty neon of Anjong-ri flickered in the overcast afternoon, the village greeting us without emotion, like a sullen victim of domestic abuse.
It wasn’t difficult to find the Yobo Club. We wound around the narrow alleys past the Kisaeng Bar, China Doll Nightclub and Mini Skirt Scotch Corner until we found it. As we pushed through the single wooden door, a bell rang above us. A girl who had been dozing behind the bar sat upright.
The joints in Anjong-ri were much smaller than the spacious nightclubs of Itaewon, which made sense because they were catering to fewer GIs. Only a few hundred soldiers were stationed full-time at Camp Humphries. And Anjong-ri didn’t draw anyone other than GIs. No English language teachers, no tourists, no foreign businessmen, no Peace Corps workers on a Friday night out. What it had was GIs. GIs and business girls. And that was it.
“I love this place,” Ernie said.
Other than the girl behind the bar, the Yobo Club was empty. “You love the Yobo Club,” I asked, “or the whole village?”
“The whole village,” Ernie said, spreading his arms. “It’s so beaten up, so run-down, so depraved.”
“Like you,” I said.
“Like my ping-pong heart.”
We took a seat at a table against the wall. The girl came out from behind the bar. No sense beating around the bush. I asked her if she knew Miss Jo Kyong-ja. She shook her head no. I explained that Miss Jo had left Anjong-ri a few months ago, and the girl said that she’d only been working here a few weeks. She seemed pleased to be speaking Korean to an American, a new experience for her. She told me how difficult it was to understand the English the GIs spoke, so different from what she’d studied in middle school, but apparently the more experienced employees of the Yobo Club had told her she’d pick it up soon enough. She hoped that was true.
Ernie waited patiently while we talked and finally said, “Can a guy get a beer around here?”
The girl didn’t understand, so I translated.
She brought two brown bottles sporting the Oriental Brewery label. When I ordered a glass to go with mine she seemed surprised, but brought it back quickly. It was smudged and dusty, but I’d used worse.
Ernie paid her out of the envelope Mr. Kill had given us.
I asked to talk to the mama-san. The girl seemed surprised and explained that she wouldn’t be in until five, when the cannon on compound went off.
“Tell her we need to talk to her now.” I showed her my badge. She couldn’t read it or understand it, but just knowing we were some sort of government officials was enough to frighten her. Without hesitation she took off through a door in back. Ernie and I sat alone, quaffing our cold beer.
“You gotta stop being so friendly to these girls, Sueño.”
“Why?”
“They lose respect for you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You make it too easy for them. Speak their language and all that. You gotta make them work for it.”
“Being mutually unintelligible helps interpersonal relationships?”
“Lets them know who’s boss.”
I was formulating a response when someone burst through the back door. A small woman with a round face and a grey bouffant hairdo, wearing black slacks and a red Chinese blouse. Without slowing down, she barreled around the far edge of the bar.
“Who wanna talk mama-san?” she asked, peering around the small barroom like a bull who’d just entered the ring. Surprised, Ernie turned and studied her. Slowly, he raised his right hand and pointed at me.
She pounded across the wood-planked floor. “What you want?” Her voice was like the scrape of a razor along leather.
“Have a seat,” I said, motioning to an open chair.
“You talk first,” she said. “Then I sit. Maybe.”
Before I could say anything, the cannon went off. In a few minutes, off-duty GIs would be filtering out of the front gate of Camp Humphries and into the village of Anjong-ri.
“You talk,” she said. “Pretty soon I busy.”
I asked her again to sit, this time in Korean. She thought it over, stepped forward, and keeping her butt toward the front edge of the chair, sat down. “You speaky Korean pretty good,” she said. “Who teach you?”
“I study it,” I said. “On compound.”
“They teach Korean on compound?”
“In Seoul, yes.”
She shook her head. “Number hucking ten.” No good. There’s no “f” sound in the Korean alphabet so often it’s replaced with “h.” And in GI slang, number one—or hana—is best and, reasonably enough, number ten is worst.
“Why number ten?” I asked.
“GI speak Korean, all girl lose respect for GI.”
Ernie grinned and sipped on his beer.
I took the bait. “Why lose respect?”
Her eyes widened. “Talk like baby. All girl laugh at them.”
Ernie glugged even more of his beer down, trying to keep from bursting into laughter.
“Okay,” I said. “No more Korean. Only English.”
“That smart,” she said, reasonabl
y.
Then I asked her about Jo Kyong-ja.
Her eyes squinted but she answered. “She long time go.”
“Go where?”
“Seoul. She owe me money. Why you look for her?”
I showed her my badge.
“You MP?”
“No, CID.”
I explained the difference. We handle mostly capital crimes as opposed to misdemeanors and lesser felonies and we’re trained in the latest techniques of forensic science. When I was done, she waved her hand. “MP same same.”
Ernie was thoroughly enjoying himself.
“You want ’nother beer?” she asked, turning to him. When he didn’t answer right away, she shouted to the girl behind the bar to bring two more beers. For a moment I thought she was going to pay for them, but when she demanded money, I realized she wasn’t impressed with our law enforcement status. Ernie pulled out the wad of Korean bills again and the mama-san eyed them knowingly.
“You not GI,” she said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Too much Korean money.”
I was about to steer her back toward the subject of Jo Kyong-ja when a half-dozen GIs pushed through the door. They wore dirty fatigues and the shoulder patch of the local aviation unit, and every one of them, it seemed, had fingers darkened with grease. They marched resolutely toward the bar and the girl pulled out cold OB and set them up all around. One of them kept turning his head toward me and Ernie and the mama-san sitting at the table.
She ignored them, keeping all her attention on Ernie’s envelope of won.
I asked her when she’d last seen Jo Kyong-ja, and she said months ago and that the girl owed her money for the last month’s rent; all the girls who worked in the Yobo Club also lived out back.
“Why didn’t she pay?” I asked.
“She wanna go to Seoul. So she pack her bag, leave at night time, everybody sleep.”
“Did she go with a boyfriend?”
“No. By herself. Probably she take taxi to Pyongtaek. From there take train.”
“Did you try to find her?”
“No.” The old woman pulled out a pack of Kent cigarettes and lit one up. “Too hard find. Anyway, I make money. She gone.”