The Line

by Martin Limon

  “What the hell!” Ernie said.

  A combat jeep usually had a canvas-covered bench-like seat in back. But some months ago, Ernie’d splurged at the motor pool and paid the dispatcher two quart-sized bottles of imported Johnny Walker Black to have the rough Army-issue canvas replaced with black vinyl tuck-and-roll upholstery. This luxury, coupled with daily washing and first-class maintenance, which Ernie also paid for, meant he probably had the classiest jeep in 8th Army.

  “Money talks,” he always told me.

  “So does imported scotch.”

  “That too.”

  Ernie gazed at the seat in horror. “Who in the hell would do this?”

  Somebody had slashed the tuck-and-roll. Thick, deep cuts, maybe two or three dozen of them, where white cotton puffed out of the vinyl. And then we both smelled it. Ernie recoiled.

  “Piss,” he said. “That son of a bitch pissed all over my seat.” Even if he could get the vinyl repaired, the smell might not wear off for months.

  In the wooded area behind us, something rustled as a clump of bushes wobbled. Ernie swiveled in time to see it and yelled, “You bastard.”

  Before I could stop him, he took off running, covering the length of the parking lot in about ten strides and plowing headfirst into the thick shrubbery. There was a hill here, fairly steep, that was undeveloped and covered in trees. On the far side were more individual officer quarters, and beyond that Gate Seven, which led off of Yongsan Compound South Post. I ran after Ernie, wishing he’d at least slow down. Whoever had done this to his jeep had a cutting implement—a sharp one, we could be sure—and in that thick shrubbery without any ambient light from the O’Club, Ernie was running blind. I shouted at him to stop, but he ignored me.

  By the time I reached the edge of the shrubbery, I began to navigate cautiously through leaves and under branches. Ahead of me Ernie grunted, plowing through the greenery enveloping him. I wanted to stop and allow for my vision to adapt to the darkness, but there was no time. Instead I forged ahead, my hands in front of my face, pushing aside what seemed like acres’ worth of massed foliage. I’d only made it about ten yards into the thicket when I heard a zing, a whoosh, and another grunt. A loud one this time, filled with pain.

  On the far edge of the copse of trees, Ernie lay on the ground, both his hands stuck between his legs, curled up, moaning and writhing in agony. I looked around; light came in from all directions, from the small barracks below to the surrounding perimeter fence, which made it clear to me that we were alone. Whoever he’d been chasing was either still lurking somewhere in the small Sherwood Forest behind us or far enough ahead to be beyond our reach. I knelt down next to Ernie.

  “What happened?”

  Through gritted teeth, he said, “Booby trap.”

  I checked. A low hanging branch swung freely but upon closer inspection, I saw that it had been partially denuded of leaves in one spot where a hemp rope tied it to a wooden peg. I groped around and found an almost invisible strand of piano wire. The branch had been tied back, and when Ernie tripped the wire, the peg had been released, allowing the branch to swing forward at crotch level.

  Well, at least there’d been no explosive device attached to it.

  Ernie’s forehead was slathered in sweat. I helped him sit up.

  “Looks like somebody wanted your attention,” I said.

  “Whoever this psycho is,” Ernie replied, “he has my attention now.”

  When Ernie was feeling better, I told him to sit for a few more deep breaths until he was able to clamber back to his feet. Once he was up and moving, we scoured the area and found nothing. The perp was long gone. I suggested calling for an MP patrol to expand the search, but Ernie nixed the idea.

  “I just got hit in the balls,” he said. “If you think I’m going to let every MP in 8th Army know that, you’re sadly mistaken.”

  Instead, we trudged back to the jeep to find that whoever had slashed and urinated onto the tuck-and-roll had doubled back while we were on the other side of the hill and slashed all four tires.

  Ernie’s supply of four-letter words failed him. He leaned against the hood of the jeep, rubbed his crotch again, and squeezed his forehead with his free hand.

  Finally, he said, “I’ll find this kei-nom sikki.” Born of a dog. “I guarantee, I’ll sure as hell find him.”

  -10-

  I used the phone in the Officers Club to call for a motor pool tow truck. It took them the better part of an hour to show up, and I didn’t believe the guy on duty was exactly sober. But he managed to tow us back to the motor pool, where we left the jeep and hiked back to the barracks—a march of about two miles.

  In my bunk, I thought for a while about who might’ve sabotaged Ernie’s jeep, and a whole array of faces flashed before me. Some from past cases, but most of the enemies we’d made had received transfers back to the States, and a few had made the duffle-bag-drag off this mortal coil. Whoever it had been had to have followed us or known where we were going—could it have to do with the Cresthill case, or Corporal Noh’s murder? Before I reached any conclusions, exhaustion overtook me.

  The next morning at the 8th Army CID office, Staff Sergeant Riley issued more bad news. “Fusterman’s court-martial has already been scheduled.”

  “They’re moving fast.”

  “Yes. It’s two weeks from today.”

  “For a capital murder case?” Ernie said. “What are they, nuts?”

  “Hey,” Riley responded. “You chop a guy in the back of his head with your entrenching tool, how complicated is that?”

  Ernie snatched Riley’s copy of the Pacific Stars and Stripes out of his hand. “Hey,” Riley said, “what do you think you’re doing?”

  “You have work to do,” Ernie said. “Get busy.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m on break.” Ernie sat down and opened the paper.

  He’d already called the 21 T-Car dispatcher and arranged for new tires. As to the slashed seat, the dispatcher said he’d have the whole thing removed and try to find a replacement, although it might take a while to get the parts.

  I greeted Miss Kim and took a seat next to her admin secretary desk, breathing in the scent of the fresh mugunghua flower, Rose of Sharon, she kept on the corner in a glass vase. Then I grabbed the magazine-sized US Forces Korea phone book, looked up a number, and asked her to make a call for me.

  “To who?” she asked.

  “The PX Taxi Dispatcher’s Office,” I replied, pointing at the number. I explained what I wanted to find out.

  I often asked Miss Kim to make calls for me because her sweet voice and pleasant demeanor—especially in Korean-to-Korean conversations—usually received cooperation that I couldn’t have enlisted on my own. I would simply listen in as she spoke. On this call, the first person to answer transferred her to someone up the line. Jibei-in was the word I heard. Manager. She spoke for a while, he responded with a long string of words, and Miss Kim thanked him in a high, lilting voice and hung up. She jotted something on a slip of paper and handed it to me.

  “Mr. Rhee. Go to his office. He will be waiting for you.”

  “Did you tell him what we’re looking for?”

  “No. Just some records from a few days ago.”

  I thanked her and slipped the note with Rhee’s name and direct phone number in my pocket. She stopped me before I left.

  “This American woman you’re looking for,” she asked. “Is she married?”

  I nodded.

  “And she has a daughter?”

  I nodded again.

  “Ohttokei?” A term that translates to “How?” but a bit stronger. As in, how could Evelyn Cresthill have abandoned her child?

  I didn’t have an answer for her, but I knew it was possible.

  Ernie and I called a military taxi, one of the ones that were for official us
e only and operated strictly on base. We did it without asking Riley because Ernie was adamant that having his backseat slashed and pissed on, not to mention his balls being busted by a booby trap, was too humiliating to tell anyone, much less the blabbermouthed Sergeant Riley.

  Mr. Rhee met us at the door of the PX Taxi Dispatch office and led us past a row of a half-dozen employees wearing headphones, all rapidly poking metal probes into telephone consoles with blinking red lights. They were speaking English for the most part, but a few spoke to Korean customers. In my experience, if a person who spoke Korean called for a PX taxi, the service was faster. Why? Because some Americans had a tendency to be overbearing, too demanding. They treated Korean phone operators and drivers like their personal servants. Servants who just couldn’t do anything right.

  Rhee led us down a short hallway into a records room that smelled of musk. In the center, a narrow, six-foot-long table was piled with stacks of paper that had been clipped together by metal hasps. “Last week’s records,” he told us. “They haven’t been filed yet.”

  Ernie groaned.

  “How many cabs do you have, anyway?” I asked.

  “Almost fifty. We provide service for USFK personnel, military and civilian, in the entire Seoul area. All told, almost ten thousand customers.”

  Most of who didn’t have their own cars, since 8th Army allowed only the command-sponsored elite to ship their vehicles over. I took off my jacket, sat down on a wooden chair, and got to work.

  PX taxis were imported Ford Granadas, much larger than the Hyundai “kimchi cabs” that operated outside military gates. Kimchi cabs weren’t allowed onto American bases, so the PX taxis picked up the slack. All the PX taxi drivers were Korean. They fell under the FOEU, the Foreign Organizations Employees Union—the only union legally permitted to exist in South Korea. All other unions had been outlawed by the Park Chung-hee regime; this stricture was ruthlessly enforced. When overworked and underpaid coal miners had gone on strike recently, President Park sent an infantry brigade to quell their protest. The miners armed themselves. The shootout lasted the better part of two days and in the end what had become a violent insurrection was put down. The exact number of casualties was never released.

  Every PX taxi driver had a clipboard with a stack of forms. On it, he was supposed to record the time and place he picked up a passenger, plus the destination and time of arrival. Rhee explained that about four dozen PX taxis had been operating the day Evelyn Cresthill disappeared; it was our task to isolate those records and peruse every line of every entry to see if we could find out which driver had picked her up and where she’d been dropped off.

  We started by narrowing down the timeframe. According to the employees at the 8th Army Officers Club, Evelyn had been there from late afternoon to early evening on the night of her disappearance. So Ernie and I skipped all the morning and late-night pickups and concentrated on entries from between 5 and 8 p.m. We were also scanning for starting points from the Officers Club. Korean drivers were required to make their entries in English, but usually weren’t too careful about their handwriting. And they used abbreviations: “8O” was most common for the 8th Army Officers Club. We found numerous entries for the O’Club, but most had gone to rather mundane destinations. Quarters addresses on South Post, the Niblo Barracks in Hannam-dong, or the UN Compound about four miles from Yongsan. It took us less than an hour of going through the records line-by-line before Ernie found an interesting entry.

  “Here,” he said, handing the sheaf to me. The driver had departed the O’Club at 7:45. On the column for number of occupants, he had written the number two. Next to that, although it wasn’t a required entry, he had scribbled something in hangul. I moved the form into the light and peered at it carefully.

  “Yo,” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Yoja. Women.”

  “So he picked up two women at the Eighth Army Officers Club at seven forty-five,” Ernie said. “Where’d he take them?”

  Again breaking regulation, the driver had written his entry in Korean. It was scribbled hastily, so I had to study it for a while before I’d deciphered it. I sat up.

  “Where?” Ernie asked.

  “Myong-dong,” I replied. A name that translated to Bright District.

  “Bingo,” Ernie said. “They arrived a little after eight in Myong-dong, the fanciest party district on the peninsula. Perfect time for the nightclubs, especially for two broads on the make.”

  “Yeah,” I said, unhooking the sheet from its hasp. “No surprise there. Evelyn Cresthill wanted adventure in her life. A classy Korean woman promised to show her around. Show her a little excitement.” I carefully folded the sheet and stuck it in my pocket. “But what sort of excitement were they after? And once she had her fun, why didn’t Evelyn Cresthill go home?”

  Ernie nodded. “That’s the question.”

  We found Manager Rhee and showed him the handwritten record, and in seconds he was speaking into a shortwave radio mic, ordering a driver named Young Kim to return immediately to the Dispatch Office.

  Rhee turned to us, his expression grim. “Young Kim is delivering a passenger now. He will be here in twenty minutes.”

  We waited. When he walked in, we were mildly surprised. Young Kim was half African-American.

  During and after the Korean War, many children were born to Korean mothers and GI fathers; fathers who, for the most part, abandoned their new families. The children were often turned over to orphanages, who endeavored to find homes for them overseas. Some mothers kept their half-American children. While they faced harsh discrimination in school and by the broader Korean society, most of these young people managed to find their niche by the time they reached adulthood. More than a few gravitated toward American military compounds, perhaps because they felt accepted there. Or perhaps because they were looking to make up for missing relationships with fathers they’d never known.

  Young Kim wore the high-collared black tunic standard for all PX cabdrivers. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, staring at us with bright, wide eyes; completely guileless. I showed him the dispatch.

  “Do you remember them?” I asked, pointing toward the entry. “The two women you picked up at the Eighth Army Officers Club?”

  He studied the entry for a moment and said, “Oh, yes. Two beautiful ladies.”

  “Where did you take them?” Ernie asked.

  “Myong-dong,” he replied without hesitation.

  “Where in Myong-dong?”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Near Shinsegae.” He meant the Shinsegae—New World—Department Store, a landmark in Seoul. “Maybe one block past.”

  Ernie turned to me, rolling his eyes. The area Young Kim was describing just might be the busiest business district in the entire country. High-rises lined the main road of Myong-dong, pocked with lavishly expensive spas and boutiques. Behind the line of modern buildings, narrow pedestrian lanes spread, lined with neon, into a massive spider’s web of restaurants and bars and nightclubs and kisaeng houses where modern-day courtesans catered to the whims of very wealthy men.

  “All right, Mr. Kim,” I said. “Thank you for that. You let them off in Myong-dong. Do you know where they were going? Did they mention a specific shop or nightclub or restaurant?”

  “Specific?” he asked.

  I held up my forefinger. “Yes, one place where they wanted to go. One specific place.”

  He pulled out a small spiral notebook from the breast pocket of his tunic, along with a pen, and prepared to jot the word down. “Spelling, please?” he asked.

  I told him.

  When he was finished, Young Kim put the notebook and pen away and considered my question.

  “Not specific,” he said slowly. “They didn’t say name of one place. But the Korean woman, I think she speak English very well. She told American woman about a pl
ace with music and singers. A beautiful place. They were going to go there.”

  “But they didn’t mention the name?”

  He shook his head. “If they say, I don’t remember.”

  The alleys where most of the Myong-dong nightclubs were located were too narrow for a big Ford Granada to squeeze through. It was standard in the area for even the smaller kimchi cabs to let off passengers on the main drag so they could walk to their destination.

  “Do you remember which shop you let them off in front of?”

  “No. Too many shops,” he said. “I only remember Shinsegae.” It was hard for the huge, multilevel department store not to overwhelm its surroundings in the eyes of an observer.

  “Who paid?” I asked.

  “Korean woman.”

  “The American woman didn’t offer to split the fare?”

  “She offer.” Young Kim seemed certain. “But Korean woman say she’ll pay. She very kind to American woman.”

  “What do you mean, ‘kind’?”

  “She so happy to have American woman with her. Maybe, how you say? Proud.”

  “Proud of having an American woman with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know why?”

  Young Kim shrugged and shook his head.

  “On the ride down there,” Ernie asked. “What did the two women talk about?”

  “They speak English too fast. Seoul traffic very bad. I can’t listen.”

  “You didn’t understand?”

  “No.”

  “Were they laughing or serious or angry?”

  “Laughing.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Korean woman mentioned man’s name. Rich man. She say something, they both laugh, but I don’t understand much.”