G. I. Bones gsaeb-5

by Martin Limon

  We stared down the dark cobbled lane. Liquid trickled through an open drain, reeking of ammonia. Ernie ran one way, I ran the other. More intersections, more narrow pathways. Lights peeped out from homes behind high walls. Pots and pans clanged; radios blared; children laughed. Charcoal smoke wafted out of underground flues, irritating me like smelling salts up the nose. Periodically, I stopped and listened. No sound. No footsteps.

  Finally, I returned to the hooch across from the Grand Ole Opry. Ernie was waiting. Moonlight glistened off the perspiration on his forehead.

  “Paco?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  The frightened business girls didn’t know the G.I.’s name but said he was dark, like me, except darker. We showed them the photo. Curled fingers rose to trembling lips. They were afraid they’d be in big trouble. I told them to relax.

  Did they know where he was now?

  They shook their heads negatively.

  Did they know his name?

  No.

  Had they ever seen him before?

  Again they shook their heads.

  How long had he been watching us?

  Since we’d arrived with Two Bellies.

  Ernie and I weren’t new to Itaewon. We knew a lot of people and were aware of the obvious hiding places. G.I. s had tried to hide from us before and hadn’t been able to pull it off. Yet, after three hours of searching, we hadn’t found Paco Bernal. Most likely, someone was helping him. Someone who had the means and connections to keep him hidden from us and that someone, almost certainly, was a Korean.

  Ernie and I returned to the Grand Ole Opry to check it out.

  It was like most of the nightclubs in Itaewon except not quite so rowdy. Most of the customers were older G.I. s, career noncommissioned officers: lifers. When Ernie and I were sitting at the bar, I heard a lot of words dragged out in slow country drawls.

  “This place is dead,” Ernie said. He swiveled on his barstool, stared at the half-empty ballroom in disgust, and tossed back some more suds from his brown beer bottle.

  The business girls who occupied the rooms upstairs worked in the more lively nightclubs along the strip-the nightclubs that specialized in live bands and rock and roll and go-go girls. None of which could be found here at the Grand Ole Opry Club.

  Surreptitiously, Ernie and I slipped into the back hallway, past the latrines, and climbed the cement stairs. Although we received some surprised looks from the occasional startled resident, we searched the building from top to bottom. Afterward, we examined the other clubs: The King Club, the Seven Club, the Lucky Seven, the UN, and the 007. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for exactly; I was just looking.

  Two hours before the midnight curfew, we climbed the highest hill overlooking Itaewon. A full moon rose red into a black sky. According to the lunar calendar, this was the time of year the Koreans call Sohan, the small cold. A storm cloud crossed the moon. A few splats of snow fell on the ground and then a few more on my forehead. At the top of the hill, we reached a small Buddhist shrine that had been here as long as anyone remembered, since before the Korean War, since the ancient days when the village of Itaewon had been nothing more than cultivated fields of rice and cabbage and turnip. A tile roof, upturned at the eaves, sheltered a bronze bell. I switched on my flashlight and examined the shrine, the stone foundation, and even the raked gravel surrounding it. With bent knuckles, Ernie bonged the bell.

  “What the hell we doing up here, Sueno?”

  “Looking for likely burial spots,” I said.

  “Like a needle in a freaking haystack?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “I don’t have time for this. I have people to see and things to do.”

  Ernie started walking down the hill, away from the temple.

  I watched him go. It wasn’t like him to leave while we were in the middle of an investigation but this wasn’t an official investigation-not yet-so I couldn’t really blame him.

  “Stay out of trouble,” I shouted after him.

  Without looking back, Ernie waved his hand in the air. As if on cue, snowflakes began to pelt the roof above me; I turned back to my work.

  After searching the temple and finding nothing, I started back down the hill toward the bright lights of Itaewon proper. The snow was falling a little thicker now and started to stick in the mud beneath my feet, creating a sheet of white lace. In two weeks we’d experience Daehan, the big cold; traditionally, the coldest day of the winter. So far this year, the weather had been unseasonably warm. It looked like that was about to change.

  4

  I sat in front of Doc Yong’s desk, a warm earthenware cup of barley tea in my hands. She stared at me with a black-eyed intensity that I found so enticing.

  “What have you found?” she asked.

  She wore a white lab coat and a stethoscope hung from her neck. Outside in the waiting room a few pregnant women and a half-dozen business girls waited patiently for her attention. Each month, the business girls of Itaewon invaded Doc Yong’s clinic to be inspected for venereal disease and, if they passed, their “VD card” was stamped with red ink and they were good for another month. The clinic was mostly funded by American dollars, which was why Doc Yong cooperated so closely with 8th Army health officials.

  “Why is it so important to you, Doc,” I asked, “this business about Mori Di? Sure, Auntie Mee helps you with the girls. Helps them keep a positive outlook on life. I understand that. But you know and I know that Auntie Mee hasn’t been visited by the ghost of Mori Di nor by the ghost of anybody. She wants me to find his bones because she’s nuts. But you’re not. So why are you backing her up?”

  Doctor Yong In-ja studied me as if I were a patient with curious symptoms. I loved the square shape of her face, the high cheekbones, the unblemished skin. But mostly I loved the full richness of her lips. Unrouged. No slime slathered on her face. Just flesh. Just woman.

  She must’ve read my thoughts for her eyes shifted. She took her elbows off her desk and sat back in her wooden chair.

  “I understand your concern,” she said. She thought for a moment, composing herself, and then started once again. “The women I work with, especially the business girls, are mostly uneducated and mostly from rural areas. If Auntie Mee says she’s being bothered by the ghost of a dead American, the word spreads quickly and, in no time, they believe it. And they all believe that this ghost will cause trouble in Itaewon. Bad luck. That adds to their depression. Depression leads to despair. Despair leads to illness or, worse, suicide. As a physician, I must try to prevent that.”

  Suicide was a fairly common event amongst the business girls of Itaewon. The Korean government didn’t allow Doc Yong, or anybody, to keep statistics-not officially. But those of us who worked out here knew that at least three or four girls per year died by their own hands.

  “But even if I locate the bones of Mori Di,” I said, “and have them shipped back to the States, the business girls and Auntie Mee will just find something more to be depressed about.”

  “Yes. Of course. It’s always something.” She leaned toward me. “Someone’s been complaining about Miss Kwon,” Doc Yong continued. “An American G.I.”

  “A G.I. complaining about Miss Kwon?”

  “Yes.”

  I was flabbergasted. Even before Doc Yong introduced me to Miss Kwon, I’d taken note of her while Ernie and I worked our regular rounds. She was a hostess at the King Club: a small, cute, country girl with chubby cheeks who kept to herself. Why would any G.I. complain about her?

  “What sort of complaint?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. But the owner is concerned and there’s even talk that Miss Kwon might lose her job. Not that losing that kind of work would be bad for her but I know the pressure these girls are under. She needs the money. Otherwise, where will she go? What will she do?” Doc Yong shook her head. “You can’t believe what these girls go through. Many of them are the sole support of their families, putting their younger brothers and sisters th
rough school.”

  Yes, I could imagine what they went through but I didn’t interrupt.

  Doc Yong stared into my eyes. “Will you look into it?”

  How could I say no? I nodded. She smiled, reached out, and squeezed my hand.

  On the way out of the clinic, the women in the waiting room stared at me. But all I could feel was the warmth where Doc Yong’s hand had touched mine.

  Although I’d questioned Doc Yong’s motives for searching for the remains of Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti, I was beginning to develop motives of my own. Moretti had been murdered. Cort, the on-the-scene investigator, had strong suspicions as to who had murdered him but the body had gone missing and, after that, Cort had been hampered by both the Korean and the 8th Army powers that be. At the time, right after the war, Korea was still in turmoil. There was even talk that the Communists might make a comeback. In fact, the starving Korean populace would’ve followed just about anyone who promised to put food in their bellies and into those of their children. So the South Korean government and 8th Army wanted to squash, as quickly as possible, any sort of incident that portended discord between the U.S. and Korea, including the incident known as the Itaewon Massacre.

  But those days were long gone and Ernie and I were new to the case-fresh eyes looking at the evidence. I was beginning to wonder if, in addition to finding his bones, we couldn’t breathe life back into the search for the killer of Mori Di.

  After all, Moretti had been a man of principle. A man who’d traveled thousands of miles from his hometown in New Jersey to a country on the far side of the world. He’d put everything on the line, including his life, to help people he didn’t know. And, as Ernie said so succinctly, Tech Sergeant Moretti had been a fellow G.I.

  That, in itself, was enough to keep us investigating.

  Starting on the morning after the assault on Moretti, Cort had interviewed everybody he could find-both G.I. s and Koreans-who’d been present the night of the Itaewon Massacre. The evening had started routinely enough. The Buddhist nuns fed about a hundred people-men, women, children, and old folks-from the soup kitchen set up behind Moretti’s headquarters building. Moretti had overseen the food preparation, taken inventory personally, and prepared the next day’s ration order for the driver whose turn it was to make the pickup. Then he’d listened while the nuns told him about the various things that were needed for the orphans, including more diapers, soap, and textbooks for the older children who would be starting school as soon as the first one in the area reopened in February.

  Where Moretti planned to find this stuff, Cort didn’t know but he’d found entries concerning these items in Moretti’s loose-leaf notebook.

  What changed Moretti’s routine that night was a group of business girls banging on the front door of his headquarters. According to their breathless report, another business girl, a friend of theirs, had been beaten up. She was laying in an alley just off the main drag, bleeding profusely.

  As of yet, there wasn’t an emergency medical service set up in the city of Seoul. And even the phone lines, what there were of them, were constantly overloaded and not much use when you had to get through to an ambulance. So, Moretti grabbed his army-issue first-aid kit and followed the business girls outside into the cold night.

  He’d done this before, Cort found out. And when first aid had not been enough, he’d arranged for one of his trucks to transport a sick or injured person to the one functioning Korean hospital about four miles away in downtown Seoul.

  On the way to the scene, Moretti was informed by the babbling women that a policeman had beaten the girl for nonpayment of the commission she owed to the Seven Dragons on a particularly large windfall-twenty dollars, they said-which the girl had earned in a secret assignation with some big-shot American. Moretti asked the girls who the American was but they claimed they didn’t know. At the scene, Moretti used his army-issue flashlight and determined that the girl had been beaten badly but the external bleeding was not arterial. He cleaned and stanched the various flows as best he could but whether or not she had internal bleeding, only time would tell. The girl was conscious now and Moretti asked her who’d done this to her. She wouldn’t talk. And then Moretti realized that the girls who’d brought him here had disappeared. The injured girl’s eyes widened as she stared at the village’s one streetlamp casting its amber glow on the main drag. Moretti turned. Approaching him were seven men, all of them wielding clubs.

  Words were exchanged. The men told Moretti that the girl was their property and ordered him to stand away from her. Moretti refused. Within seconds, they were at it. Moretti threw his metal first-aid kit at them, kicking, punching, and clawing for his life. Other residents of Itaewon alerted the three G.I. truck drivers and they ran to the scene to join the melee, trying to pull Moretti to safety.

  MPs were alerted. After a few minutes they arrived, sirens blaring, along with the Korean National Police. According to the first MP on the scene, seven men, just dark shadows, fled the moment their jeep rounded the corner. The MPs gave chase but lost them in the maze of dark passageways behind the main drag of Itaewon.

  The three truck drivers had been hacked and stabbed and pummeled and sawed and beaten until there would’ve been nothing left to save if the MPs hadn’t arrived when they did. They were lucky to be alive. The injured truck drivers were driven back to Yongsan Compound and checked into the emergency room of the 121 Evacuation Hospital.

  But Moretti was missing. The seven thugs had taken him with them.

  That night, the MPs started kicking doors in.

  The KNPs protested. Eighth Army law enforcement had only limited jurisdiction in Itaewon; they could arrest G.I. s only. But by now dozens of MPs had seen how badly the three G.I. truck drivers had been beaten and they were enraged. And they knew who they were looking for: the Itaewon Chil Yong.

  The MPs forced their way into all the usual haunts that the Seven Dragons frequented: nightclubs, bars, brothels, the black-market warehouses. But Snake, Horsehead, and Dragon’s Claw Number One, along with their four brethren, were nowhere to be found.

  Neither was Moretti.

  Judging by the shape they’d found the three truck drivers in, the MPs thought that Moretti was probably dead. The Seven Dragons must have taken his body because they wanted to eliminate all evidence of the crime. Without a body to prove that a murder had been committed, and without weapons to prove how the murder had been perpetrated, the likelihood of the Seven Dragons being indicted-much less convicted-was virtually nil.

  The reaction at 8th Army headquarters was outrage. Not at the men who’d perpetrated this crime but at the MPs who’d gone on their midnight rampage in search of Mori Di. The Korean newspapers were flooded with reports of Korean citizens being ripped cruelly from their homes in the middle of the night, of innocent black-market entrepreneurs being interrogated and slapped around by long-nosed foreigners, and of the Korean National Police being shamed in their own precincts by burly American MPs who showed no regard for the sanctity of Korean law.

  All of the responding MPs were brought up on charges.

  The civil affairs operation that Moretti had run in Itaewon was curtailed. His headquarters building was decommissioned by 8th Army and turned over to the ROK Ministry of the Interior. Construction operations, financed by American money, were no longer run by 8th Army Engineering but shifted to Korean subcontractors approved by the ROK government. This was supposed to help strengthen the Korean economy. But the real reason was to insure that there was not another Itaewon Massacre.

  After a hearing conducted by the judge advocate general, the MPs who responded to Moretti’s distress call that night were formally reprimanded though not brought up on court-martial charges, and all of them were shipped back to the States.

  When the dust settled, the hunt for Moretti had been forgotten. As was the hunt for the seven men who had assaulted him. Forgotten by everybody, that is, except for an MP investigator named Cort.

  The prog
ress report I turned into Staff Sergeant Riley at the 8th Army CID office indicated that our search of Itaewon the previous night for Corporal Paco Bernal had turned up negative results.

  “You mean he’s not there?” Riley asked us.

  I shrugged. Ernie was busy fixing himself a cup of coffee poured from the big silver urn behind Miss Kim’s desk.

  “I can’t tell the first sergeant this shit,” Riley said, “that you didn’t find nothing.”

  “Why not? That’s what happened.”

  “So you don’t have any leads on the whereabouts of this guy?”

  I shrugged again. “We’re working on it,” I said.

  “The provost marshal wants positive, measurable progress,” Riley said. “Estimates of when a goal will be attained. Not just ‘we didn’t find nothing.’”

  “If they want positive,” I said, “they’ll just have to wait.”

  “No, they won’t,” Riley said, grabbing a pencil. He spoke as he wrote. “Ongoing searches of the areas the suspect was known to frequent are expected to turn up results prior to the next reporting period.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Riley looked up from his work. “What do you think we do here?”

  Ernie finished his coffee.

  The two of us left the CID office and drove over to the barracks at the 21 T Car motor pool. According to the head houseboy, Paco Bernal had not returned to his room. A couple of the G.I. s who knew him couldn’t provide any new information and, moreover, they didn’t seem concerned about Paco’s fate.

  As we walked back to the jeep, Ernie said, “They really watch out for one another in this unit, don’t they?”

  As we left 21 T Car and drove out Gate 9, heading toward Itaewon, I surprised Ernie by telling him to turn left on the road leading toward Namsan Tunnel.

  He swiveled his head and asked, “We going downtown?”

  I nodded.

  “What the hell for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I’m not sure why I hadn’t told Riley that we had thought we had actually seen Paco Bernal-although only fleetingly. Something told me it wasn’t going to be easy to catch Paco until he wanted to be caught.