The Line

by Martin Limon

  “No,” I said. “She might be something worse. Something Evelyn Cresthill hadn’t bargained for.”

  -14-

  The Blue Heaven Nightclub was only two blocks in from the mouth of the narrow road that branched off from the Shinsegae Department Store. Ernie and I had already hit almost a dozen joints, all full of painted ladies hired to seduce men into opening their wallets. We doubted they were the types of places Evelyn Cresthill would feel comfortable.

  “If the Korean woman took her into one of those,” Ernie said, “Evelyn probably would’ve backed out and gone home.”

  “I hope so.”

  We kept searching and eventually stumbled through the front door of the Blue Heaven.

  “This is more like it,” Ernie said.

  It was an expansive ballroom with plush red carpeting and a stage hidden behind blue drapes, surrounded by a small sea of tables with white linen tablecloths and flickering candles exuding a seductive glow. In front of us, an elegant Korean couple was greeted by a tuxedoed maître d’ who offered, with his open palm, to escort them to a table. He pulled a chair back for the lady—an unusual gesture in Korea.

  “Western courtesies,” I said.

  “Probably better than Quincy showed her,” Ernie replied.

  “Or her husband.”

  As the maître d’ schmoozed with the couple, the curtains opened onto the stage, swishing silently. Lights clicked on, and a twenty-piece, all-male orchestra in white dinner coats launched into a Korean song. I vaguely recognized the melody.

  “Class,” Ernie said. “Shitty music, but class.”

  “Evelyn would’ve liked this,” I said.

  “Yeah. What’s not to like? Being catered to by a guy in a tuxedo, swanky surroundings. Heaven for the bored housewife.”

  “Except for the expense,” I said.

  “Not to worry. The Korean broad would find some sucker to pay for their drinks.”

  Around the ballroom, about half the tables were occupied. A good crowd of about fifty people, and it was still early. I pulled the photograph Major Cresthill had given us from my pocket. Evelyn Cresthill smiled at me. She was nice-looking—not a great beauty, but definitely presentable.

  The maître d’ finally finished with the couple at the table and walked toward us. As he approached, I saw his beaming expression droop, then crumble.

  Ernie sneered. “They’re only happy to see GIs when we’re standing between them and a communist invasion.” He pulled the bottle of soju from his pocket and took a quick sip.

  When the maître d’ arrived, I spoke to him in Korean and showed him the photograph of Evelyn Cresthill. He shone a small flashlight on it, and something flickered across his face. Recognition. Still, he shook his head. I slipped the photo back into my pocket and pulled out my badge.

  “I want to speak with your waiters,” I told him. “I need to show this photo to all of them.”

  “I will show,” he offered.

  “No,” I replied. “We want to talk to them ourselves.”

  Ernie sipped more soju. “This asshole’s trying to get rid of us,” he said in an audible half-whisper.

  Several people were now lined up behind us at the entranceway.

  The maître d’ motioned for us to step aside. “Jomganman kidaryo,” he said. Please wait.

  Ernie understood that and shook his head. “No wait. We talk to your waiters now. You arra?”

  Two men emerged from the darkness on either side. They weren’t waiters, that was for sure. They were easily burly enough to be weightlifters, and the dim light from the lamp over the maître d’s counter illuminated huge calluses bulging from their knuckles.

  “All right,” Ernie said, chugging more soju. “Here comes the muscle. I’m so scared.”

  His expression purposefully grim, one of the big guys motioned us aside with an open palm.

  “No,” Ernie said. “We’re not going anywhere. Not until you take us to the waitstaff. My partner here would like to speak to them.”

  Flustered, glancing between us and the increasingly impatient customers, the maître d’ spoke in rapid Korean to the bouncers. I caught part of it: Take them to the waiters. Let them talk.

  The lead bouncer’s face seemed to carry traces of disappointment amidst its impassiveness, but he bowed to the maître d’ and gestured with his palm once again and spoke to us in English. “Waiter. We go.”

  I nodded and we followed. One bouncer in front of us, the other behind.

  In a busy, well-lit serving area, thin-hipped young men in tight black trousers and white shirts and red vests grabbed glasses and bottles of sparkling wine and shouted food orders to a half-dozen white-capped cooks behind a stainless steel counter. The bouncer motioned for Ernie and me to enter. Then he and his partner stood, rough hands across broad chests, bookending the doorway.

  “Frick and Frack,” Ernie said.

  “What’s that mean, anyway?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Frick and Frack? I hear it all the time for two guys who look alike. But where’s it come from? Who’s Frick, and who’s Frack?”

  “Who gives a shit, Sueño? You’re too damn curious.”

  I turned my attention back to the busy waiters. The young men, running back and forth between the kitchen and the service bar, projected barely controlled chaos.

  “What’s it like when they get busy?” Ernie asked.

  “Must be like this, except more so. How are we supposed to get their attention?”

  Ernie uncapped his soju and took a swig. He plucked a napkin from the bar, wiped off the rim, and gave the bottle to me. I made too large a swallow, coughed, wiped my mouth on my sleeve, and chugged another mouthful before handing the bottle back to him.

  “You ready now?” he asked.

  “Almost.” Working the resulting air up through my chest, I burped. “Okay,” I said. “Ready.”

  Some of the waiters had started to glance at us warily. They knew we were up to something, but weren’t sure if it was their concern. I hesitated until another waiter pushed through the swinging double doors into the serving area and shouted out a food order. As he stepped toward the bar, I blocked his path.

  “Yoboseiyo,” I said, an all-purpose greeting. I showed him the photograph of Evelyn and asked him in Korean if he recognized the woman in it. He brushed past me, bemused as he looked back, shaking his head and smiling to himself, almost laughing. Then he shouted in Korean, “E sikki weigurei?” What’s wrong with this so-and-so?

  Ernie understood the vulgar part of the sentence. He stepped forward, grabbed the waiter by the arm, and jerked him back. “Look!” he shouted, pointing at the photo. “You see? You tell us about her!”

  The waiter pulled away, and then they were struggling. Ernie pushed forward and the waiter reeled backward, trying to twist his body away and smashing into a short tower of precariously stacked tableware. The delicate porcelain teetered, leaned, and tipped over, crashing into thousands of pieces on the tiled floor. Curse words flew and everyone rushed forward, including the two bouncers.

  I tried to tell everyone to remain calm, but before I could get even a few words out, one of the bouncers grabbed me from behind. I dropped to a crouch, elbowed him in the groin, and then rose abruptly, cracking the top of my skull against his thick jaw. He reeled away, and then one of the waiters smacked me in the head with his tray. When I swiveled, the second bouncer ran full force into me and tackled me to the ground. I rolled atop scattered shards of expensive china. The bouncer leapt off me, and in the swirling mass of faces and arms and cutlery, I spotted Ernie swinging something around that resembled a frozen leg of lamb. He clunked the bouncer upside the head, and the man went down. Ernie helped me to my feet, pulled me toward the swinging doors, and we were out of the kitchen, stumbling between linen-covered tables, women screaming as we passed. From
behind his podium, the maître d’ pulled what looked like a sawed-off shotgun. He pointed it at us and said, “Umjiki-jima, sikkya!” Which even Ernie could figure out meant: Don’t move. With an off-color reference to our maternal ancestors thrown in for good measure.

  We held up our hands.

  “See,” Ernie said, “I told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  “They have a bias against Americans.”

  “And here we were, on our best behavior.”

  Five minutes later, the KNPs arrived.

  I tried to explain to the officer in charge that it was all a misunderstanding, and that we were there to conduct witness interviews for an important case, but he wasn’t buying it. Not until I showed him the calling card for Mr. Kill; that is Inspector Gil Kwon-up, Chief Homicide Inspector for the Korean National Police, or Mr. Kill. The card was printed in English on one side and Korean on the other. As the cop read it, he blanched. Within seconds he was on the phone, and a few minutes later, he was murmuring deferential responses to the person on the other end, who seemed to be barking orders at him. Each time he said, “Yes, sir, I understand,” in Korean, he bowed as if his superior was standing right in front of him. Finally, he hung up, face red. His voice deepened and he barked orders at his fellow cops.

  “We’re in,” I whispered to Ernie.

  All the customers had been chased out of the nightclub, and now the employees sheepishly approached the officer in charge. He motioned for me to show them the photograph. I did. As it passed from waiter to waiter, everyone kept their face impassive, including the maître d’, who was last to study the photo. The head cop took it back and returned it to me. Then he asked if anyone recognized the foreign woman. Everyone kept their heads bowed and their mouths shut.

  The KNPs weren’t exactly trusted by the general populace. Cops in Korea, like everywhere else, were overworked and underpaid. So underpaid, in fact, that if they ever planned to make a house payment or save money so their kids could go to university, they were forced to make a little extra on the side. Bribes were routine. A traffic citation could be avoided by paying the “fine” up front. If you were about to be dragged into the station for a one-off incident like brawling in public, a bow, an apology, and a small wad of folded bills could usually prevent the embarrassment and paperwork. Sometimes the KNPs were used by the authoritarian Park Chung-hee government to round up dissidents or other enemies of the regime. As such, people were wary of the police. Cooperation from the public was seldom forthcoming. At least, voluntary cooperation. When no one answered, the cop pounded his fist on a table, cursed, walked up to the stylish maître d’, and slapped him across the chops. The sound reverberated through the empty ballroom. “Iyagi hei!” Talk!

  The man grabbed his cheek and focused his gaze on the ground. “An boasso,” he said. I didn’t see.

  Ernie and I knew how brutal the Korean National Police could be, and we weren’t happy with this tactic of group intimidation, but it was too late to do anything about it now. If we intervened, the Korean cop would lose face and things would get even worse.

  The cop went to the next man in line and slapped him even harder. Again, a denial of having seen the foreign woman. The cop worked down the line, growing progressively more enraged, and pulling his arm back farther and making each slap ring out louder until he reached a slender young man who seemed to be the youngest of the lot. Most of these waiters were tough, cynical, inured to abuse. This one seemed like someone who’d never quite resigned himself to the cruelty in the human heart, never formed the hard outer shell of his colleagues, and thus stood before us raw as a nerve. Before the cop even hit him, the terrified young man was already crying.

  “Iyagi hei!” the cop said.

  When the man didn’t answer, but just stood there quivering, the cop said, “Boasso? Anboasso?” Did you see her? Didn’t you see her?

  His answer was just a whisper.

  “Muol?” the cop said. What?

  “Boasso,” the young man said. I saw her.

  The cop leaned forward and said “Odi?” Where?

  The young waiter pointed toward a booth by the back wall.

  We pulled him to the side and told the rest of the waiters and the maître d’ and bouncers and cooks to wait in the kitchen. The cop then sat the young man down at a table and had some barley tea brought to him. The whimpering slowed, and the cop offered him a Kobukson cigarette. Soon, the two of them were puffing away on the Turtleboat-brand tobacco like old friends. Then the interrogation began in earnest.

  I sat at the table with them and listened to everything, taking notes as I did so. Ernie, meanwhile, wandered outside with his bottle of soju. When the cop had asked all the questions he could think of, he turned to me and said. “Munjei issoyo?” Do you have anything to ask?

  I did. They both seemed surprised that I could speak Korean. However, when the young man answered, he prattled away too fast, and I had to slow him down and ask him to explain certain words and expressions. “Kandanhan-mal heijuseiyo,” I said. Please speak simply.

  The woman who’d brought Evelyn Cresthill into the Blue Heaven Nightclub was well known to the wait staff. I asked if she usually came in alone or with other people.

  “Always someone else,” he told me. “Another woman.”

  “Was this one at a time, or in groups?”

  “One at a time. Never more than one. But different women over time.”

  “What kind of women were these?”

  “Nice ladies.”

  “Rich ladies?”

  He shook his head. “No. Nice ladies. Not rich ones.”

  “These women she came in with, were they Koreans or foreigners?”

  His mouth twisted. “I can’t be sure. They didn’t usually talk.”

  “But some looked Korean?”

  He nodded. “And others were Chinese,” he said.

  “Any Japanese?” I asked.

  “No Japanese.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “I know.”

  I paused. “How do you know?”

  “Clothes,” he said. “And the way they talked.”

  “They had accents?”

  “Yes, the Korean ones weren’t from South Korea. I’m sure.”

  “Where were they from? North Korea?”

  “No. North Korean women are small. Skinny. These women were healthy, but spoke Korean with strong accents.”

  “Maybe from America?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “From China.”

  Millions of Koreans lived in what was now the People’s Republic of China. There had been small enclaves of ethnically Korean people in the northern provinces of Manchuria for centuries, but many more had joined them during Imperial Japan’s brutal colonization of Korea between 1910 and 1945. More recently, in the early 1950s, many had fled to China to escape the massive slaughter of the Korean War.

  “So she brought in Chinese and Korean women from China. Had she ever brought in an American or European woman before?”

  “No,” the waiter replied. “This lady first kocheingi.” Big nose. He pointed at the photograph of Evelyn Cresthill, which lay on the table.

  “Was the American woman happy to be here? Was she enjoying herself?”

  “Yes, very much. They drank and ate snacks. Sliced fruit.”

  These joints in Myong-dong charged plenty for the drinks and even more for what the Koreans called anju—de rigueur plates of either fruit or dried peanuts or the higher-class shrimp and assorted seafood.

  I asked the waiter how long they’d stayed and whether they’d been joined by anyone else. He told me they’d only spent about an hour in the Blue Heaven Nightclub, no men had approached them, and they’d left together.

  I felt a partial sense of relief. Evelyn hadn’t been picked up by some guy out to hurt w
omen, at least not here. This left her female companion as the primary suspect. But where had the pair gone after striking out? The waiter said he had no idea.

  When I was done with the nervous young man, I told the KNP officer in charge that I wanted to speak to the nightclub’s owner. He said he’d already checked on that angle and told me that the owner was no longer on the premises. When I pressed him, he flatly denied me permission to contact the proprietor on my own.

  “You talk to Gil Kwon-up,” he said. Inspector Kill. “He talk to owner. Not you.”

  I knew I was lucky to have received as much cooperation as I had. Without Inspector Kill’s help, I would’ve gotten nowhere. There was no sense pushing it further. Not tonight. This door had been shut in my face, and would remain so unless I found the leverage to pry it open.

  After we left, Ernie said, “The other waiters are going to beat the crap out of the guy who talked.”

  “Why?”

  “For being a snitch.”

  “What’s it to them? We’re searching for a missing woman.”

  Ernie scoffed. “Working-class people don’t talk to the cops. He broke ranks. The odd bird in the flock—they’ll peck him to death. It’s the way of the world.”

  -15-

  When we returned to the 8th Army headquarters Yongsan Compound, it was dark except for yellow streetlamps and the flashing red light atop the commo tower. The occasional duty vehicle cruised by.

  “What the hell we gonna do with this entrenching tool?” Ernie asked.

  “We can’t send it to Camp Zama,” I replied, referring to the official Army lab in Japan. “We’re supposed to be off the case.”

  “We have to hide it somewhere. At least until Fusterman is assigned a defense attorney. Then we can turn it over to him.”

  “Hide it where?” We both knew that the barracks wouldn’t be secure. The company commander could inspect our rooms anytime he wanted—even pry open our wall lockers if he felt like it. “The safe in the CID office won’t work either,” I continued. “Riley pokes his nose in there all the time.”