Jade Lady Burning

by Martin Limon

  Kimiko had been around long enough to know GIs. She knew about the problems they had getting an overnight pass, she knew that they’d get shafted if they were caught on the street after the midnight curfew, and she knew that some of them would do anything to get promoted and others didn’t care. Some of them just wanted to do their time and get out and some of them had much more money at home than the U.S. Army could ever pay them. And she kept looking for that one starry-eyed young GI from a rich family who would flip for her. She was like an old sourdough in the desert, pulling her old burro along, searching for that last shining vein of boyish El Dorado.

  When she came back into the Lucky Seven Club after such a long absence, she was prim and proper. She behaved herself. And she didn’t get drunk. She sat at the bar, sipped on a Chilsung Cider, and left early. She didn’t hang around for those last few GIs who were too drunk to walk—her normal clientele—but instead held a polite conversation with the one person behind the bar who seemed to have some sort of respect for her age and her experience: Pak Ok-suk.

  None of the girls remembered exactly when they had started talking together. It was something that just happened. Kimiko would pontificate, waving an American-made cigarette in the air and punctuating her discourse with sips of beer, while Pak Ok-suk leaned across the bar, a devotee at the feet of a guru.

  Some of the girls tried to warn her: Stay away from Kimiko. But they couldn’t give concrete reasons. Kimiko had never messed with the other girls in the village unless she caught them with one of her boyfriends, one of her sources of livelihood. Mainly she was just aggressive about making her living.

  The girls were unanimous in not blaming her for that. After all, who else would take care of her? But they knew that Kimiko was bad news for Miss Pak, yet Miss Pak didn’t listen, and now all their dire warnings had come to pass.

  “Did Kimiko kill Miss Pak?”

  Mangnei pulled her head back, her eyes and mouth rounding. “Of course not.”

  “Then who did?”

  She didn’t know. But Kimiko had probably gotten Miss Pak involved with a man she couldn’t handle. Who?

  She didn’t know that either. She only knew that Miss Pak had quit her job behind the bar and started wearing nice clothes and getting her hair done and learning how to dance, until she was the sexiest girl in Itaewon. Often she had left the club in the company of Kimiko. On important missions. And each day she seemed to have more money and more clothes and soon had her own hooch. After a while she stopped talking to any of the girls who worked in the Lucky Seven Club.

  “What about her boyfriend, Johnny?”

  “He was crazy about her and used to follow her all the time.”

  “Has he been in lately?”

  “Every night. He sits over there, same table.” She pointed. “Waiting for Miss Pak. But she didn’t have time for him. She talk to him for few minutes and then goes with Kimiko.”

  “Was he here last night?”

  “Yes. Early. But then left.”

  “What time?”

  “Maybe ten o’clock.”

  “Where does he work?”

  The girls buzzed amongst themselves on that one. They mentioned some other names—Freddy and Sammy—friends of his, and one of the girls seemed certain that they worked at the motor pool.

  I turned to her. “How do you know?”

  She blushed. The other girls laughed. She’d spent the night there.

  We didn’t bother to ask the girls where we could find Kimiko. She could be anywhere and then turn up where you least expected her. We’d find her ourselves. Or she’d find us.

  As we walked out of the Lucky Seven Club, the amplified instruments on the bandstand clanged to life and the ballroom began to whirl with multicolored light. People jumped up from their tables and chairs and soon the dance floor was packed with gangly GIs and sweet young girls just in from the lush green valleys of Korea, all dancing to Motown.

  GIs bounced up the main road of Itaewon, hands in their pockets, breath and laughter billowing from their mouths, ignoring the slippery ice as they headed for the neon.

  The village was a huge web of brightness, shrouded in snow. Nightclubs lined the main road, and alleys branched off, up steep stone steps, to smaller, cozier clubs. Old women lurked in the darkness ready to lead any willing GI to a brothel if he didn’t have the time or the temperament for the dancing and the booze and the laughter.

  Ernie took a deep breath of the biting air and let it out slowly.

  “It’s good to be back.”

  “After forty-eight hours away?”

  “Entirely too long.”

  We popped into the King Club, elbowed our way through the crowd, and asked a few questions. No one had seen Kimiko. We got some strange looks. Normally people tried to avoid her.

  At each club the answer was the same. No one had seen her.

  “Sort of like the dog that didn’t bark,” Ernie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, normally when you come to Itaewon there’s three things you can count on—cold beer, women, and Kimiko bugging the shit out of you. So if we come out here one night, get all the cold beer we want, have to push our way through bunches of sweet young girls, but still we can’t find Kimiko no matter how hard we look, there’s got to be something wrong.”

  “What’s that got to do with a dog that didn’t bark?”

  “Like in Sherlock Holmes. If a burglar breaks into a place and the dog didn’t bark, that’s got to mean that maybe a burglar didn’t break into the place.”

  “Not in East L.A. The mutts just snarl and attack.”

  We decided to hit up Ginger at the American Club. It would be good to get in out of the cold. Relax, have a beer, and maybe learn something.

  When she saw us, she pounded down the planks behind the bar, squealing all the way.

  “Georgie! Ernie! Long time no see! Short time how you been?”

  Ginger made a point of making all her customers feel welcome.

  She was a big girl. Round. Maybe not chubby but definitely husky. She was Korean through and through but her bobbed hair was light brown and her face was dotted with freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. All the old NCOs and retirees who hung out at her place kidded her about it: “A little Miguk in the woodpile, eh, Ginger?” Meaning, she was half Caucasian—a mixed blood.

  She called herself Ginger because it was a spice used in a lot of Korean cooking. When she found out that Americans used it too and it was a woman’s name, she couldn’t resist.

  She took pains to be the sauciest gal at any gathering and she was the smartest woman in Itaewon, as far as I was concerned. The only one to own a club outright, and not part of a family-run operation.

  We ordered a couple of beers. The place was full, with quite a few nice-looking women, but most of them escorted. No heavyhanded hustle in Ginger’s place. A row of beer bellies, belonging to middle-aged American men, lined the bar. Luckily, the countrywestern band was on break.

  Ginger poured our beers, made change, and then propped her elbows on the bar.

  “I got a problem, Ginger,” I said. “We can’t find Kimiko.”

  Her eyes widened and then set back into their normal position.

  “Information?”

  We laughed. “How’d you know?”

  “You guys can’t be looking for a woman that old for sex. Not unless you’re getting kinky on me. And you’re not looking for her for black market. Nobody does black market with Kimiko, except for a newbie. So you must be looking for her for some sort of information. Hot information. Like maybe something to do with that poor little girl who was murdered last night.”

  “Don’t stop now, Ginger,” Ernie said. “We’ll just drink beer and listen.”

  “In Itaewon during the day, when the GIs are at work, the main thing everybody does is wait for beer deliveries and gossip. Today there was only one subject, Kimiko and Pak Ok-suk. Kimiko had been running that girl around, maki
ng money off of her, and she must have got her involved with some mean guys.”

  “Anybody know who they are?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. Kimiko always took little Miss Pak out of the village, away from Itaewon. Nobody knows who they were seeing. Everybody expects Kimiko to disappear for a while. Eventually she’ll come back and try to find a new girl.”

  “Has she done this before?”

  “Yeah. The last one wasn’t killed, at least not that I know of. She just disappeared.”

  “Do you know who she was?”

  “No. But I can find out for you. Check back tomorrow.”

  Nothing like a little murder to convince people to support law enforcement.

  We ordered a couple more beers just before the band started and if we hadn’t I probably would have left before the first song was over. They were young, Korean, and enthusiastic but that didn’t make up for their lack of skill. Of course, I’m not too crazy about country music even when it’s played well. The old guys at the bar didn’t seem to mind. Already anesthetized. And at least it wasn’t rock and roll.

  Ginger had jumped into an intimate conversation with a woman down the bar. She was elegantly dressed, tall, with a big shining rock on her finger. Ernie pointed his nose at a few of the girls on the dance floor and finally one of them walked over to him and stood leaning against his bar stool, his legs spreadeagled around her.

  Ginger brought me another beer and leaned over to talk in my ear so I could hear her above the dulcet sounds of “The Orange Blossom Special.”

  “This is from her. She wants to talk to you.”

  I glanced down the bar for a second. The woman was older than I usually liked, closing in on thirty. Her eyes were cast demurely down.

  “No sweat,” Ginger said. “She’s my friend, here from the States. On vacation.”

  I walked down the bar and she smiled when I took the seat next to her. Ernie got lost and, by the time the band was ready to start another break, so did we, scooting out the front without even saying goodbye to Ginger.

  Her name, she told me, was Miss Lim and she claimed she owned one of those hostess bars in Honolulu that cater to Japanese tourists and mainlanders looking for something exotic. What it meant, probably, was that she was married to a Gl, worked in one of those bars, and made more in tips during one good weekend than he made for the entire month.

  She told me about how she prepared the puupuus, the free snacks, for her customers every night. What she didn’t tell me about were the handjobs under the table. When I asked, she just laughed.

  She’d been here in Seoul, staying with her mother, for a few days and had to leave Korea in another week or so. I figured she could afford a nice hotel room but she didn’t think much of the idea.

  “You man,” she said.

  Since I was paying for it, we went to a rundown yoguan.

  She didn’t want to wash me like the business girls do and she balked when I asked her for a particularly intimate sexual favor.

  “It’s only our first date,” she said.

  They go to hell fast when they go to the States.

  At dawn, gray light filtered through the tattered cloth curtain covering the small window. Miss Lim lay next to me, naked. Thanks to Miss Lim I was not too hung over and I lay still in the bed, trying to put myself in Kimiko’s place and imagine where she might have gone.

  Kimiko was old enough to have been born during the Japanese occupation of Korea. That’s probably why she used a Japanese woman’s name, Kimiko, as her working name. She had seen Korea transformed from an Oriental colony into a hideous battlefield for warring superpowers and now into what verged on a modern industrial state. During all that time she had remained firmly entrapped on the lowest rungs of society.

  I couldn’t begin to imagine what must be going through her mind. We were too different. My guess was, though, that she understood me and others like me—completely.

  4

  When the first sergeant heard about Johnny he tried to take over the operation.

  Ernie said, “You don’t want to do it that way, Top. Let me and George go in quietly and find out what’s going on with this guy before you send in the cavalry and the sirens and every glory hound in Eighth Army.”

  The first sergeant stood up from behind his desk and leaned forward.

  “All right. But I want this guy Johnny, whoever he is, arrested before close of business today. And don’t screw it up. The CG is screaming for a suspect. He has to keep explaining to the Koreans why no GI has been arrested yet and they don’t really want to hear it.”

  “International relations, eh?”

  “Don’t get cute, Bascom. Just get us the suspect.”

  The first sergeant sat down and started to take a sip out of his coffee mug but realized it was empty. He got up, walked over to the metal coffee urn on the counter, tilted it, and cursed. It was empty, too.

  Ernie and I looked at our full, steaming cups nervously. The first sergeant turned and looked at them, too.

  “And you were late again. Both of you.” He sat back down behind his desk. “And why didn’t you give me the lead on this guy Johnny last night? We could have had him behind bars by now. The provost marshal is at the command conference room, as we speak, giving his briefing on our lack of progress on the case and getting his ass chewed. Don’t you guys have any loyalty?”

  “Loyalty?” Ernie said. He looked at me. “Sure, We got loyalty.”

  I sipped on my coffee. “Loads,” I said.

  The first sergeant glared at us. One of his management techniques. His day was going too smoothly, I decided.

  “What if he didn’t do it?”

  “What?” He looked startled.

  “What if Johnny didn’t kill Miss Pak Ok-suk? I mean all we have established so far is that he knew her and spent some time with her. No particular reason to believe that he was the guy who offed her.”

  “He’s the boyfriend, isn’t he?” the first sergeant said. “It’s always the boyfriend.”

  “Maybe he can prove where he was the night of the murder,” Ernie said. “Maybe he didn’t have an overnight pass. Or maybe he was Staff Duty Driver that night.”

  The first sergeant toyed with his coffee mug. He gazed at it sourly. “We’ll worry about that shit once we get him behind bars.”

  Burrows and Slabem breezed into the office.

  Ernie stood up. “We’ll take care of the arrest, Top. Don’t sweat it.”

  “What arrest?” Burrows said.

  I tapped him on the chest. “Cardiac arrest. The one Top would have if you two guys ever actually dug out some information on your own.”

  “What information?” Slabem said.

  When we got to the Admin Office we waved at Miss Kim and trotted down the steps to Ernie’s jeep.

  If we hesitated about going to the motor pool, the first sergeant might change his mind and send Burrows and Slabem. Not that they’d do a better job, they’d just do a more reliable one. Since Eighth Army needed a suspect, they’d arrest a suspect, and not pay any attention to frivolous bothersome facts.

  Ernie popped the clutch, the wheels caught on the ice, and we jerked forward.

  “Looks like Mr. Johnny stepped into a world of shit,” he said.

  “Either that or we have.”

  The jeep slid swiftly along the tree-lined avenues of Eighth Army Headquarters. My skin tightened at the rush of frigid air.

  21 T Car was one of those great GI acronyms that actually stood for the Twenty-first Transportation Company, alias the motor pool: the place that provided the jeeps and the sedans and the buses and all the other requisite wheeled vehicles in support of the activities of the Eighth United States Army Headquarters. The huge open parking area was surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with trident-pronged barbed wire. At the entrance a green arch covered the guard shack, emblazoned with a martial welcome and the insignia of the U.S. Army Transportation Corps.

  The Korean guards waved us thro
ugh. They knew Ernie.

  Most of the other CID agents had to use the handful of sedans provided for their use at the detachment. Usually it was a half day’s work trying to prioritize the various cases everyone was working on and playing politics to see who got which sedan. After ending up with the clunker most of the time, Ernie took matters into his own hands and romanced the dispatchers down at 21 T Car into assigning him a jeep that they had managed to slip off the ready-for-duty list.

  Two quarts of liquor every payday kept the jeep reserved and all regular maintenance was thrown in. We had the added advantage of being a little harder to spot by the bad guys, who had the makes and models of the CID sedans memorized.

  “Where to first?” I asked

  “Chief Winkle.”

  Ernie jerked the wheel to the left and pulled up to a big ramshackle one-story wooden building that was the dispatchers’ office. He parked, locked the chain, welded to his floorboard, to the steering wheel, and got out.

  Inside the building, he waved at the Korean dispatchers, who flashed big block-toothed grins, and we walked down a long narrow hallway until we came to the last office with a small wooden sign over the door that said CHIEF, DISPATCH.

  Chief Warrant Officer-3 Frank Winkle sat ramrod straight in neatly pressed fatigues behind his cluttered desk. Talking on the phone, he looked for all the world like a worried doctor taking a discouraging lab report. He peered up, calm but concerned, then smiled when he saw Ernie.

  “Okay, you got it,” he said. “Minus three on the Jets.” He hung up the phone, beamed at us, and waved to the empty lounge chairs. “Sit down, gentlemen. Just having a conversation with the ambassador. What can I do for you today?”

  “The ambassador? Ours?”

  “The same.”

  “He bets football?”

  “Oh, no. He just likes to match wits with the odds makers. Merely a hobby of his.”

  Chief Winkle ran what was, as far as I knew, the only bookmaking operation for American sports in the Republic of Korea. His busiest time of the year was the pro football season, but he also took bets on baseball, basketball, and boxing. He used the betting line that was published every Thursday in the Pacific Stars & Stripes. His trusted customers were allowed to place bets over the phone and he’d collect when he saw them, usually at the Embassy Club or the United Nations Compound Club. If they won, he had a Korean soldier transport their winnings directly to them in a U.S. government vehicle. He was in the perfect spot for running his operation—the transportation hub of the post.