Jade Lady Burning

by Martin Limon

  Miss Lim took off her coat, assisted by the ex-lifer, sat down primly, and ordered a drink from the concerned and attentive Ginger. When the drink appeared, she dupshida-ed with the guy, took a sip, and glanced at me.

  Yeah, I was riveted to her every move. And kept trying to brush Kimiko off. Finally, Kimiko realized what was going on, stared for a while at Miss Lim, and then turned back to me.

  “She married. Why you mess around with married woman?”

  I didn’t answer, just ordered another round of straight shots. Morality lectures from Kimiko, yet.

  After a while Ernie and I both got tired of standing so we took a tiny table and Kimiko followed us. We were working our way through Ginger’s liquor storehouse at a pretty steady clip; the table started to pile up with empty beer bottles.

  Kimiko turned her attention towards Ernie since I was beginning to slow down on the generosity angle. They were warming up to a major public display when a woman materialized from the crowd. I didn’t recognize her at first but when I realized it was the Nurse, I knew this just wasn’t our night.

  The Nurse wore soft-soled shoes, blue jeans, a black turtleneck, and a black bandana around her forehead. Her small knotted fist brandished a four-foot-long cudgel. Actually, I think it was a broom handle but at the moment it looked like a cudgel.

  She floated towards us, taking small steps, arms raised high, and then she whacked the broom handle across our small cocktail table. Beer and shattered glass flew everywhere. The crash stopped the band and the talking. The only sound was me and Ernie scuffling back our chairs, and then she was advancing, jabbing the stick at Ernie, screaming at him in incoherent Korean.

  Kimiko salvaged a full bottle and scuttled off to the side, hiding herself in the crowd.

  Ernie twisted and dodged, hands outstretched, trying to ward off the stick, stumbling backwards over chairs and tables as people jumped out of the way, drinks and glassware smashing. Finally he crashed into the amps of the band on stage. Ernie grabbed the broom handle, trying to pull it out of the Nurse’s grasp. They grunted and cursed at each other. She let go of the stick with one hand and clawed at his face, screaming.

  “You go out every night! Play with woman! No take care of home! No take care of rent! No take care of food!”

  Ernie ripped the stick from her grasp and just stood there panting, not knowing quite what to do with it. The Nurse lunged again. He dropped the stick and threw his hands up to protect his face.

  She screamed and clawed and slavered, and Ernie backed closer and closer to the main door. I tried to pull her off but she elbowed me in the ribs, stomped on my foot, and went after him some more. Locked arm in arm, they went out the swinging doors of the club. A crowd gathered.

  They strained against each other, muscle on muscle, and then the Nurse let go, all at once, and Ernie had to hold her up to keep her from collapsing.

  She was crying, pulling away from Ernie. And Ginger was there, comforting her. Other women stepped forward to help.

  Both the Americans and the Koreans in the crowd turned their attention to Ernie and me. Their comments became progressively uglier. I tugged on Ernie’s elbow. He seemed to come out of his trance and he followed me as I pushed our way through the crowd, heading for the welcome darkness of Itaewon’s back alleys. And then we were running.

  Heels clicked behind us. Kimiko.

  When the light from the street lamp hit her face, she stared at us. Deadpan, she said, “You buy me drink?”

  Ernie looked like chalk. I stifled a laugh.

  I turned back to Kimiko. “Sure. Why not?”

  I dragged both of them to Milt Gorman’s place, the Roundup. Ernie went to the latrine to rearrange his ripped shirt and his scratched face. Kimiko stuck close by me while we ordered our drinks. Ernie returned. He sipped listlessly on his beer. He paid no attention to our conversation, and my efforts to cheer him up were useless. After he drained the last of his suds, and without a word, he got up and left.

  Milt Gorman stopped by and asked me how the investigation was going. I told him it was over. He smiled and had one of his waitresses bring us a couple of beers. The nice-looking young woman gave us some strange looks as she poured our beer and tidied up the table. Kimiko ignored her. A lot of the GIs were giving us strange looks, too. I was a little uneasy about the attention but I ignored it.

  Something made Kimiko decide to tell me her life story. I didn’t have anywhere to go so I listened.

  Her father was a very rich man, rich enough to own large tracts of land in North Cholla Province, land that was worked by tenant farmers. He had a main wife and second and third wives, but Kimiko’s mother wasn’t a wife at all. Just a scullery maid. And her earliest memories were of running through the pigpens and the open fields and the orchards ripening with pears and apples. There were plenty of children to play with and most of them were related to her in some way, but as she got older and started school, her place was made clear to her. She was not a real child of a real wife and as such she would be allowed six years of schooling and then must go to work, like her mother.

  There was a large household to feed, the biggest burden being the noon meal, when Kimiko’s father was obligated to feed the day laborers who were so often working in various of the fields. She and her mother packed up wooden carrying boxes with rice and bean curd soup and cabbage kimchi, and her mother would head in one direction and Kimiko in the other.

  After Kimiko finished her sixth year of schooling, she noticed changes in her body and, much sooner than the other girls her age, she started to turn into a woman.

  It was her breasts that caused her the most grief. They were large and pointed and she strapped them in tightly, hurting herself every morning when she put on her chima and chogori, hoping they wouldn’t get any bigger and cause her any more shame. In Korea large-breasted women were considered to be stupid, and her body seemed to be betraying her, confirming everyone’s already low opinion of her.

  I asked Kimiko about her first experience with love. It must have been on a beautiful spring evening, I said, under the blooms of a cherry tree in the orchard.

  She shook her head. No one touched her at her father’s house. “No can do. Not supposed to.”

  As Kimiko reached her thirteenth year her mother’s health started to fade. More and more of the chores in the big kitchen fell to her, and her father would allow no new help. Finally, after months of hacking and spitting up blood, in the heart of a cruel winter, Kimiko’s mother wasted away and died. Her father buried her, without excessive ceremony. The snow was too deep and the watching eyes of the first, second, and third wives too critical to allow for much in the way of mourning. Only Kimiko grieved. And now the full weight and responsibility of the kitchen fell upon her and she threw herself into her work.

  As she lay dying, her mother had given Kimiko a small brooch, a gift from her father when they had first started meeting, late at night after the first wife had gone to bed. It was made of jade, a finely etched design of white cranes rising from their nests.

  In the spring, when the orchards burst back into life, Kimiko packed a small bag and walked through the fragrant fields, away from the life into which she had been born. She walked for three days, sleeping on the side of the road, begging handouts from strangers, until she arrived in Chonju, the capital of North Cholla Province.

  There she sold the brooch, for much less than it was actually worth, and bought a new skirt, new blouse, and a ticket on the steam vehicle to the capital city of Seoul.

  When she arrived in bustling Seoul Station she had no money, just her wits and her burgeoning young body.

  Kimiko wandered, trying to find employment. She wheedled information and food but after a few days she was profoundly hungry and tired of sleeping in the street, huddled under the clayshingled alcove of a temple or a large house.

  In a wine shop, an old woman with a brazenly made-up face looked Kimiko over.

  “Do you speak Japanese?”

 
“Only what they taught me in school, ma’am.”

  The woman laughed a harsh laugh. “That’s enough. The Japanese soldiers don’t expect too much talk from you. You can get a full-time job, food, and a place to stay. In Itaewon, the Japanese village.”

  Kimiko’s eyes widened and her throat convulsed. She was unable to speak.

  “Well, what do you say, girl? I have a friend there who owns a wine shop. A large, grand wine shop. Not like this little hovel.”

  Kimiko nodded, and in a few minutes the woman had bundled her into the back of a pedicab and they were heading south, past Namsan Mountain, into the sloping Han River lowlands of Itaewon.

  The wine shops were large, made of wood and concrete, and signs with Japanese lettering were everywhere. Some of the buildings were two or three stories high, and young women looked down at the urchin in the pedicab from their balconies above the puddled dirt street. Kimiko felt small and alone.

  The woman who had brought her got out, went into the largest of the wine shops, and was gone for what seemed a long time. She came out all smiles, and another, even older woman came out and took a good look at Kimiko. She was led into the bowels of the darkened shop and she realized now that she had been sold.

  It was hard to adjust. Many of the other girls hated her immediately, just because she was new and younger. But slowly she made a few friends and they washed her up and gave her new clothes and taught her how to wear her hair piled up in the Japanese style and how to put on makeup. Soon she was entertaining the Japanese soldiers who came to the wine shop every night to eat and drink rice wine and clap their hands and sing. The work was much easier than that in the kitchen at her father’s house and soon the men started to notice her. They noticed her shyness and her youth and quietly they began whispering to the old proprietress. One evening Kimiko was sold to an older balding man who, it was said, was a very important officer on Yongsan, which was the headquarters of the Japanese Imperial Army in Korea.

  She didn’t mind so much, it didn’t hurt, and the next morning the old woman gave her a share of the money. It was more than Kimiko had ever seen in her life.

  After that, she began to make her own friends, and have her own customers, men who would vie for her attention, and the jealousies of the other girls grew greater.

  Then suddenly the war was over. The emperor had surrendered Japan. The cruel forty-year reign in Korea was ended. That day, the soldiers stopped coming to Itaewon. They stayed in their barracks, fortifying themselves for the vengeful onslaught of civilians that they expected before the Americans or the Russians could arrive. But the Koreans had no arms, and those of heroically rebellious spirit had died long ago.

  The old woman brought all her girls together and gave them each some money and told them they must go. She could no longer afford to house and to feed them. Kimiko did not know what to do. That night there was a great fire and men ran through the streets yelling curses at the girls of the Japanese quarter. They grabbed them by the hair and pulled them into the street, calling them traitors. The fire spread rapidly, and Kimiko put on her old clothes and bundled all her money and her few possessions into an old rag.

  The village of Itaewon was reduced to charred rubble, and Kimiko was back on the streets of Seoul, where she stayed for five years, until war again came.

  “During the war, not so bad,” Kimiko said. “I had to move a lot but there were many soldiers and they gave me food or soap or cigarettes. Other people were very hungry, but I did okay.”

  “And after the Korean War, you came back to Seoul?”

  Kimiko spat on the floor. “No. I was sick of Seoul people. Too cold heart. I stayed up in the country. North. In the Second Division.”

  “What made you come back?”

  “I got in some trouble. Went to the monkey house. So after, I come back here.”

  By then she was too old to compete with the young girls farmed out to the Second Division area. Guts and sheer hustle could get you further in Seoul.

  It was almost curfew. Nobody else was left in the club. I sent Kimiko home in a taxi and walked halfway back to camp before I hailed one myself.

  9

  When we gave our report on Lindbaugh, Ernie did most of the talking: “We sat in the parking lot behind the Officers’ Club while he got a steam job and a blow bath. Then he bought a bunch of groceries and a cock book and went back to his hooch.”

  “What time did you end the surveillance?”

  “Close to nine.”

  Seven thirty is close to nine—not very close, but close.

  “Our man Kurtz,” the first sergeant said, “is keeping an eye on him during the day but I want you guys to hang loose in case Lindbaugh decides to go anywhere unusual. Tonight, be at his hooch before five. Stay with him at least until curfew. It’s Friday night so he might have someplace to go.”

  So did we. But my stomach was churning too violently to mouth off.

  The first sergeant rubbed a speck from the gleaming surface of his immaculate desk. “I want you out at the parking lot at KPA watching his sedan during the lunch hour and then back at his hooch before he gets off work. Any questions?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What’s for chow?”

  “Get out of here, Sueño.”

  We got up.

  “Keep an eye on him, Bascom. He’s going to kill himself out there running the ville.”

  Was I that obvious?

  Ernie drove me back to the barracks. He said he’d be back at about ten thirty to pick me up for the noon surveillance. I went to my room, took off my coat and tie, and lay down on my bunk. Carefully, so as not to wrinkle the synthetic material of my suit pants too much.

  It was good to lie down. Mr. Yi, the houseboy, brought two pairs of glistening black low quarters into the room and placed one pair under my bunk and the other pair under the bunk of my roommate, Pederson.

  Pederson worked rotating shifts at the communications center, had a lot of hobbies, and hung out mostly at the arts and crafts center. I didn’t see much of him. He was cagey, though. On the weekends he’d strap a camera over his shoulder, take a bus down to Ewha Women’s University on the outskirts of Seoul, and ask the best-looking young ladies he could find to take photos of him standing by a fountain. This often led to conversations in a coffee shop and occasionally much more.

  Freebies.

  Pederson was smart and also thrifty. He let them buy the coffee and didn’t bother to put any film in the camera.

  I tried to go over the Pak Ok-suk case but it was a struggle. There were so many people involved. Something was missing but maybe whatever was, was only something that I had failed to notice. Maybe all the pieces were there but what was left out was my ability to put it all together.

  I had yet to see a photograph of Miss Pak but I had acquired a picture of her in my mind. She was lovely, with soft round thighs and long black hair, and every time I thought of her she was dancing for me and smiling. I reached out to her and something shook me. My eyes popped open. Ernie.

  “Time to hat up, pal.”

  I washed my face in the latrine and then we jumped in Ernie’s jeep and drove over to the KPA compound. We found a little parking spot in the shade of one of the big red-brick buildings and waited. Ernie looked me over.

  “What’s happening, man?”

  “Not much.”

  “Did you spend the night with Kimiko?”

  I turned and stared him down.

  “We talked.”

  “That’s one worry off my mind,” Ernie said.

  “What’d you do last night?”

  “Hit a few bars. Then I went back to the compound. On the way in I checked Lindbaugh’s sedan. Cold. Hadn’t been moved.”

  “And then you went back to the barracks?”

  Ernie’s hands squeezed the bottom of the steering wheel. He looked straight ahead and for a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me.

  “Naw. I went to see the Nurse.”

  I let out a whoop. “I knew
it! You can’t stay away.”

  Ernie grinned a sheepish half-moon filled with well-brushed canines. “It’s the tears. They do it every time.”

  We heard a door slam and a heavy rhythmic pounding as someone raced down the metal stairwell. Lindbaugh.

  “Here he comes.”

  Lindbaugh zigzagged his big frame through the parking lot, reached deep into his suit pocket for a wad of keys, and piled into the green Army sedan. He screeched off in a cloud of slush. Ernie started the jeep and we followed, about thirty yards behind at first. Steadily Ernie closed the gap to about ten. There were still two or three kimchi cabs between us at any given time as we threaded our way through the rushing flow of traffic.

  Instead of turning right at the Camp Coiner intersection, Lindbaugh turned left, towards the sedate, leafy neighborhood of Huam-dong. About two blocks down the road he took another left into a narrow alley and parked. We continued up the main road, Ernie made a U-turn, doubled back, let me out just in front of the alley, and continued down the street, hung another U, and positioned himself across the street where he could see as far down the alley as possible.

  Shops lined the narrow lane: a bicycle repair shop, a small fish market, a florist. Down the road a few yards a huge red banner waved in front of a small restaurant. The banner said po SHIN TANG, “Body Protection Soup.” A nice way of saying dog meat.

  Lindbaugh’s car was parked a few yards down from the restaurant but he was gone. I pretended to look at some of the flowers at the open-air florist. An old man, in rolled-up gray slacks and sleeveless T-shirt, shuffled over towards me. I smiled and waved him off. He seemed convinced that I was harmless and returned to his chores.

  I walked a little farther down the street, until I could see through the window of the restaurant. It was dark but I could make out the big girth of Lindbaugh and the outlines of two Korean men sitting across from him at a table. I went back to the florist and waited.