Ping-Pong Heart

by Martin Limon

  “How do people live in this mess?” Ernie asked.

  “Pretty well, sometimes,” I said. “Behind those brick walls, some of those hooches are pretty luxurious.”

  “Some,” Ernie said. “Most not.”

  We turned up a narrow lane. The first few yards were paved until, about halfway up the hill, blacktop gave way to mud. The jeep’s four-wheel drive churned upward. Now most of the homes were held up by walls not of brick, but of splintered wood.

  “Miss Kim always looks so nice when she comes to work,” Ernie said.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  We marveled at how she’d managed it, emerging like a goddess from a soiled cocoon. Finally, we neared the address we were looking for—117 bonji, 227 ho. Walkways too narrow for the jeep split off the main path.

  “Stop here,” I said. “Let me hop out and look around.”

  I walked down one pathway, reading the numbers painted on wood, but they were wrong, so I doubled back and tried the pathway on the opposite side of the road. About three hooches down, I found it. I ran back and waved to Ernie. He inched the jeep as close to the wall as he could, turned off the engine, padlocked the steering wheel, and joined me at the mouth of the alley.

  “How we going to work this?” he asked.

  I studied him. “My God, Ernie, you’re nervous.”

  “I’m not nervous,” he said. But his shoulders had risen, his stomach was pulled in and his eyes darted from side to side like a schoolboy at his first dance.

  “Okay,” I said, slapping him on the shoulder. “You’re not nervous. I’ll do the talking.”

  We marched through the muddy lane until we reached the gateway marked 117 bonji, 227 ho. The family name printed next to the number was Kim. Miss Kim’s family name, obviously, but that didn’t mean much. In Korea, roughly a third of the country is named Kim, from three or four ancient clans. Another third of the country is named Pak or Lee, and the final third shares about a hundred different names. Was this the right Kim? According to the five-by-eight card Staff Sergeant Riley had given me it was, but there was only one way to be sure. I pushed the buzzer. A few seconds later a woman spoke through the intercom. “Nugu seiyo?” Who is it?

  I could tell from her voice that she wasn’t Miss Kim.

  I leaned forward and spoke directly into the metal grate. “We’re from Eighth Army,” I said in Korean. “We’re looking for Miss Kim who works on the compound. My name is Geogie.”

  I pronounced George the Korean way, dropping the hard “r” sound and abrupt consonant ending.

  There was a long silence, as if the person on the other end of the intercom was stunned. “Wei-yo?” she finally said. Why?

  At least we had the right place. I searched for the appropriate Korean words. “Because we need her at work. It is very important.”

  Professional responsibility was ingrained in Korean culture. I knew Miss Kim possessed that national trait.

  In the background, there was muffled speaking, as if a hand was being held over the intercom. Finally, the woman’s voice came back on. “Jomkkanman-yo.” Just a moment. Then the buzzer sounded. We pushed through the small metal door in the larger wooden gate.

  She kept her head down, as if she were ashamed or had done something wrong. We sat in a well-appointed sarang-bang, front room, with tea placed before us on a low folding-leg mother-of-pearl table. The oil-papered floor was immaculate, and the flowered wallpaper made a fine background for three watercolors of sparkling seascapes. The paintings leaned forward from the wall at about a 45-degree angle, as was customary in Korea so those sitting on the floor could look up and have a better view. Miss Kim wore a long, green housedress made of felt over a white cotton blouse. Her hair was tied back in a bun and clasped with a jade pin. She looked gorgeous, which I’m sure wasn’t lost on Ernie. He kept reaching for his tea, nervously sipping tiny amounts and setting the porcelain cup back on the table.

  “We want you back,” I told Miss Kim in English.

  She didn’t answer.

  “It came as a big shock when we found out you were gone,” I continued. I motioned toward myself and Ernie. “Maybe we did something wrong?”

  I thought of Ernie following her on the bus, and the fact that we’d rousted Specialist Four Fenton for bothering her after she’d expressly asked us not to.

  She shook her head. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Then why have you left us?” I asked.

  Ernie raised his eyes, also waiting for her answer.

  She finally spoke. “He came here.”

  “Came here? To your home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “The man who was bothering me,” she said. “The man who used to wait for me after work and then walk beside me to the Main Gate.”

  I described him. “Thin, reddish hair, sort of curly, cheap patterned suit?”

  She nodded. “That’s him.”

  “When did he come here?”

  “The night you and Ernie talked to him.”

  “How’d you know we talked to him?”

  “He told me. He told me that you punched him. He told me that you think you’re tough.”

  I was surprised for a lot of reasons. Usually, twerps who bother women back off immediately when they know someone is watching. And most GIs are afraid to venture out in Seoul any farther than the red-light district of Itaewon. They can’t read the signs, they can’t speak the language, and with everybody staring at them, they feel hopelessly out of place. Specialist Four Fenton had more resourcefulness than I’d initially given him credit for.

  “Did you let him in?” Ernie asked.

  She shook her head again. “No. We talked through the . . . What do you call it?”

  “The intercom,” I said.

  “Yes. We talked through the intercom.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “The same thing he said on compound when he walked next to me.”

  We waited for her to elaborate, but when she didn’t, I figured she didn’t want to repeat the probable obscenities he’d used.

  “What’d he say?” I asked. “Bad words?”

  She shook her head vehemently. “He never said bad words.”

  I was surprised. “Never? Did he ask you to do bad things?”

  “Yes. Very bad things.”

  “Sexual things,” I said.

  “No.” Her face flushed red, but to her credit, she swallowed and kept talking. “He asked me to do worse things than that. In fact, I didn’t know the English word. I had to look it up.”

  I gulped down some of my tea. Ernie didn’t want to ask, so I had to.

  “What did he ask you to do?”

  Miss Kim leaned forward, as if afraid to say the word out loud. “He asked me to spy.” She sat back up, straightening her lower back. We both watched as she paused, breathing out and breathing in. “He said that if I didn’t spy on you two, and tell him every day what you were doing, that he knew where I lived and he knew where my mother lived, and he’d be back.”

  Then she started to cry. Ernie and I both fumbled around for a handkerchief, but neither of us had one. Finally, Miss Kim’s mother crouched into the room and slid a box of tissue across the floor. Miss Kim daintily snatched two or three sheets and dried her eyes.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked.

  “I was afraid.”

  “But you kept coming to work.”

  “Yes. My mother and I, we need the job.”

  “But something changed.”

  I waited. She blew her nose. Not a Korean custom to do such a thing in front of other people, but she was amongst Americans now.

  “Yes,” she said, “something changed.”

  “What?”

  “He came back.”

  “W
hen?”

  “Last night. Late. Just before curfew. He buzzed on the intercom. When I answered, he didn’t say anything.”

  “How’d you know it was him?”

  “His breathing. How do you say? Heavy.”

  “Maybe it was someone else,” I ventured.

  “No. It was him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Only an American would do such a thing.”

  She was probably right. I looked at Ernie. “It wasn’t me,” he said.

  I turned back to Miss Kim. “Maybe it was the same guy who bothered you before. But please, come back to work. We need you.”

  Ernie reached for her hand. “We’ll protect you,” he said.

  She studied him above the wad of tissue, doubt in her eyes. She glanced at me and I nodded in affirmation. Then she bowed her head and continued to cry.

  -21-

  As Ernie sped north through the heavy traffic of downtown Seoul, I studied our copy of Major Schultz’s inspection report alongside my map of Kyongki Province.

  According to what Miss Kim just told us, Specialist Fenton had first started bothering her about a month ago. That would’ve been shortly after Major Schultz launched his inspection of the 501st. It made sense. Captain Blood must have believed that a thorough inspection of his operation might lead to criminal charges and, if so, such a high-level classified inquiry wouldn’t be handled by the MPs. It would be handled at a higher level, by the 8th Army Criminal Investigation Division.

  “So he decided to cover himself,” Ernie said, “just in case. Get himself a spy inside our organization.”

  “So he had Fenton go after the most vulnerable person,” I replied. “A woman who was terrified of losing her job.”

  “Maybe that’s what he thought. But he didn’t bargain for someone as brave as Miss Kim.”

  “No.”

  We drove in silence. Finally, when we passed Songbuk-dong and the last remnants of the ancient northern wall, Ernie said, “How many branch offices does the Five Oh First have?”

  “Five, north of Seoul.” Which figured, because most US Army base camps sat between the capital city of Seoul and the Demilitarized Zone, which sliced across the Korean Peninsula about thirty miles to the north. On the far side of the DMZ, 700,000 North Korean Communist soldiers waited impatiently for the orders to flood south. So far, since the Korean War twenty years ago, they hadn’t, other than small-scale incursions and the occasional commando raid or stray artillery round. The South Korean Army averaged one fatality a month at the hands of the North Koreans; the US Army, about one per year. Of course, our commitment was much smaller than the ROK’s: 50,000 soldiers to their 450,000.

  “So which one are we going to hit?” Ernie asked.

  “Uijongbu,” I said. “They’ve busted three GIs in the last year and a half.”

  Ernie whistled. “Busy little beavers.”

  It was unlikely that the compounds as small as those surrounding Uijongbu had one American GI selling secrets to the North Korean Communists, let alone three in eighteen months. But according to Major Schultz’s inspection report, that was how many arrests had been made there. The GIs had been ferreted out by the excellent counterintelligence work of a certain Sergeant Leon Jerrod of the 501st Military Intelligence Battalion. One of the accused had faced military court-martial, in camera, been convicted, and was now serving a twenty-year sentence at the Federal Penitentiary in Fort Leavenworth. The other two had taken bad-conduct discharges and left the military with no pay or benefits. Better, at least, than rotting in federal prison. An appendix to the report had the dates of the proceedings and the names of the witnesses who had testified against the GIs. It was a long shot, but I was hoping to locate one of those witnesses and, after interviewing them, use the information they gave us to pressure Sergeant Jerrod into spilling his guts.

  Until we knew what was really going on at the 501st, we couldn’t determine the likelihood that Captain Blood or anyone else there had a motive to murder Major Schultz. They certainly had the means: These were trained soldiers who’d already demonstrated a willingness to use force. And they had a three-quarter-ton truck that could easily transport a body to Itaewon, even after curfew, and dump it behind the Dragon King Nightclub. But had there been more at risk than receiving a bad inspection report?

  And that’s why we were avoiding the Provost Marshal. Unless we came to him with concrete evidence, he’d never let us go forward with an investigation against a military unit and a fellow officer who could be promoted to field-grade rank within a year.

  And whether or not the Provost Marshal would believe Miss Kim’s story about being threatened and ordered to spy by Specialist Fenton was impossible to tell, even though she was our trusted office assistant. Ernie and I believed her absolutely. But the honchos at 8th Army had a different standard of belief based not on a person’s integrity, but whether the report would reflect poorly on themselves or the Command. And having a rogue counterintelligence unit threatening innocent women and railroading GIs into prison just to acquire power and funding wasn’t likely to be well received by the honchos of 8th Army. We’d need proof. The same type of proof that Major Schultz had apparently been after. At least, according to the inspection report Strange had pilfered for me. The inspection was thorough and backed up by facts, figures, and dates. If I were doing something illegal, I wouldn’t want Major Schultz after me.

  “Our mistake was,” Ernie said, “we didn’t kill that guy Fenton when we had the chance.”

  “We don’t need to kill him, Ernie. We’ll just send him to jail. That’s good enough.”

  “We’ll see,” Ernie replied.

  His knuckles were white on the steering wheel, and he cursed when a kimchi cab swerved in front of him, something he seldom did.

  “Easy,” I said. “Nobody’s going to hurt Miss Kim now. We’ll make sure of that.”

  “You’re damn right we will.”

  The city of Uijongbu sits about fifteen miles north of Seoul, on the route known as the Eastern Corridor. Since Uijongbu is an important intersection with several major roads leading north and another slashing across mountains toward the Western Corridor, a half-dozen military compounds are located nearby.

  The 501st kept their Uijongbu office manned by Sergeant Leon Jerrod at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars branch, or VFW, in a district known as Kanung-dong. The VFW was only a couple of hundred yards from the front gate of Camp Red Cloud, a compound that housed the headquarters that had been known as I Corps during the Korean War.

  Ernie and I had been in this area before on other cases, and as we rolled up the MSR into the city of Uijongbu proper, I told him where to veer off. The side road led to a traffic circle that old-timers told me had been notorious during the Korean War. Truck drivers running supplies to and from the front lines stopped here and traded C-rations, heating fuel, medical supplies, and other military items for whatever their hearts desired: booze, drugs, women, you name it. Those days were over, but there was still a river of neon leading from the traffic circle through the Kanung-dong area and right up to the front gate of Camp Red Cloud. The VFW sat smack-dab in the middle of all the action.

  “Nice place to be stationed,” Ernie said. “Away from the flagpole, plenty of creature comforts. What’s the name of the agent again?”

  I checked the appendix to the report. “Sergeant Jerrod.”

  Ernie didn’t ask the first name. We seldom used them in the military. As an old drill sergeant once told me, “Your first name is your rank, and your last name is printed on your name tag, in case you forget it. But don’t ever forget your rank.”

  Ernie parked the jeep on a side street. We climbed out and walked toward the VFW.

  When we pushed through the front door, a sleepy-eyed Korean woman behind the bar looked up. She had long black hair, sagging cheeks and the unperturbed air of someone who
’d been bored for the better part of her life.

  “What you want?” she asked.

  “Jerrod,” I said.

  She went back to the Korean film star magazine in front of her. “He not here.”

  “When is he coming in?”

  “How I know?”

  “Where does he live?” Ernie asked.

  She looked up, her eyes widening. “You buy drink, no buy drink? That’s my job.”

  “That and charm,” Ernie replied.

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  She glared at us and turned back to her magazine.

  “Do any customers ever come in here?” I asked.

  “Most tick they come,” she replied.

  “When?”

  She looked at me, greatly annoyed. “When they come, they come.”

  I grinned at her. The time was about fifteen-thirty, three-thirty in the afternoon. She was right—it was still early for the bar crowd.

  “Do you have happy hour?” Ernie asked.

  “No happy hour,” she said without looking up.

  “I didn’t think so,” he told her.

  A hallway led toward the latrines out back. While Ernie waited with Miss Congeniality, I checked out both the men’s bathroom and women’s, just to be thorough. Both empty. I pushed through another door that led to a storeroom, then an alley out back. No sign of life. Although this place was designated as a Veterans of Foreign Wars official chapter, there wasn’t much to it. Just a bar. No meeting hall, no games of chance.

  When I returned, I shook my head in the negative to Ernie. To the left of the bar, a stairway led up toward the second floor.

  “What’s up there?” Ernie asked the barmaid.

  “Not your business,” she said.

  We both walked toward the stairs. Finally, she looked up from her magazine and said, “What you do?”

  “We’re gonna leave a note in Jerrod’s office.”

  “No can do. No can go up there.”

  Our assumption was right. If the VFW was in this building, Jerrod’s office would be, too. We ignored her and climbed the stairs. On the second floor, a short hallway led to a window. I peered outside. Nothing below but an empty alleyway. The doorway on the right was stenciled in black letters: president, uijongbu branch, veterans of foreign wars. The doorway on the left had another sign: private.