The Line
Page 14
Ernie thought for a moment. “I’ve got it,” he said.
“Where?”
“Where they’ll never look.”
“Where?”
“The heart of Eighth Army headquarters.”
“What?”
“The main ventricle.”
Then it dawned on me. “You mean Strange.”
“Right. The Classified Documents vault. What could be safer?”
“And if they inspect his vault?”
“When’s the last time they did that?”
“Years ago, probably. They’re afraid of what they might find.” I thought about it, considering the risk, and then said, “But what if it’s due for a search?”
“Then Strange is just the man who’ll know where to shove it,” Ernie said. “A three-foot-long entrenching tool should fit just about right.”
The next morning we caught Strange just as he left his quarters and told him what we wanted him to do.
“Why me?” he asked.
“Because you’re our favorite Classified Documents honcho.”
“I’m the only Classified Documents honcho you know.”
“That too.”
He pondered our request, or pretended to. Strange fancied himself a James Bond type, an international man of mystery.
“What do I get out of the deal?” he asked.
“Health,” Ernie replied.
“Health?”
“Yeah. I don’t beat the crap out of you.”
He agreed to do what we asked.
We gave him a ride over to the 8th Army headquarters building. As Ernie drove, I leaned back and casually asked, “What do you know about Colonel Peele over at the MAC?”
“Everything,” Strange replied. “What do you want to know?”
“Why’s he hate the North Koreans so much?”
“You didn’t know?”
“Know what?”
“He was one of the guys who drafted that phony apology to the North Korean people and the Great Leader himself.”
“So?” Ernie said. “He was just doing his job. Somebody had to get the Pueblo crew out of there.”
“But he took it hard,” Strange said. “A lot of the officers did. That was the first time the United States ever apologized to a foreign government—and the charges they were apologizing for were a lie. Peele started drinking. They told me the constant reek of booze pissed off his wife. The Army promoted him to full colonel, but that was more or less compensation for what he’d had to do.”
“But doesn’t that put him in pretty good standing?”
“Word is that nobody involved in that fiasco will ever make it to general officer rank—they’re ‘tainted.’ You know how the Army is. They get you to do something, then hate you for it. I suppose Peele could’ve lived with never pinning a star on his shoulder, but then his son was turned down for West Point.”
“A lot of people are turned down for West Point,” Ernie said.
“Not when you’re a straight-A student through high school and your dad’s a regular Army colonel.”
I shifted in my seat. “So Peele’s ‘taint’ affected his son, too.”
Strange shrugged. “Who knows? The Academy claimed it was just the unusual number of highly qualified applicants that year. But I imagine Colonel Peele assumed otherwise. Still, he’s a tough old bird. He could’ve survived that, too. It was his son who didn’t take it too well.”
“What happened?”
“He committed suicide. Left a note. Considered himself a disgrace, a failure to his father and to his country. Shortly after they buried the kid, Peele’s wife filed for divorce; hired a good lawyer and scored half of Peele’s military retirement in the process.”
“How do you know all this?” Ernie asked.
“Keep your eyes and ears open,” Strange said, “and you can learn things too.”
Especially if you worked cheek-by-jowl with the gossip-prone officers of 8th Army headquarters, evidently.
“So now Peele’s returned to the scene of the crime,” Ernie said. “The Military Armistice Commission.”
“And this time,” Strange said, “with a silver eagle on his shoulder and a hard-on in his pants.”
“A hard-on for who?”
“The Great Leader himself.”
When we arrived at the back entrance of the headquarters building, Strange climbed out of the backseat of the jeep, Fusterman’s entrenching tool tucked under his arm.
“You owe me,” he said, pointing to the tool. “And for the information. I don’t give it out for free.” He turned and waddled off into the building, the self-closing door shutting behind him.
“There goes a dedicated soldier,” Ernie said.
“And a prime gossip.”
“Wish there were more like him,” he replied.
At the 8th Army CID office, Staff Sergeant Riley gave his usual cheerful welcome.
“Where in the hell you guys been?”
“Investigating,” Ernie replied.
“Fooling around is more like it.”
The coffee urn in the back was perking, and Ernie pulled himself a cup.
“It’s not done yet!” Riley shouted.
“How do you tell the difference?”
Ernie returned to Riley’s desk, plucked a pristine copy of today’s Stars and Stripes out of Riley’s inbox, and sat down in a chair with padded gray vinyl. Miss Kim hadn’t arrived yet.
“You’re at work early,” Riley said, eyeing us suspiciously. “You’re up to something.”
“Dedicated soldiers,” Ernie replied, flipping to the comics.
“You find Evelyn Cresthill yet?”
“We’re working on it.”
“I can see that.” Riley pulled a stack of memos toward the center of his desk blotter.
“We need a favor, Riley,” I said.
“Don’t you always.”
“Who’s handling the prosecution at JAG?”
“You mean for Fusterman?” When I nodded, he said, “You’re off that case. Didn’t you read the statement you signed yesterday?”
“Yeah. We’re off. So who’s handling it?”
“Who do you think? Hot shit herself. First Lieutenant Peggy Mendelson.”
“They gave her a murder case?”
“Yeah. She’s moving up fast.”
“And who’s on the defense?”
He rummaged through some paperwork. “I’ve got it here somewhere.” Finally, he said, “Hughes, Patrick C., Captain. Some officer in transit between assignments.”
“A dud,” Ernie said. An artillery round that didn’t fire.
“Maybe,” Riley replied. “At least, that’s who JAG appointed. But he might not be working alone. Apparently, Fusterman’s parents are hiring a Stateside lawyer.”
Ernie lowered the newspaper. “A Stateside lawyer?” He whistled. “They must be loaded.”
“I don’t know about that, but they’re going all-out to save their son.”
An unexpected stab of anguish flashed through me, wrenching the flesh from my throat to the pit of my stomach. I realized I was jealous. What must it be like to have parents who loved you so much? To have parents at all. My mother had died when I was very young, so I harbored no blame for her, but my father had run off to Mexico, never to return. I’d grown up in foster homes financed by the Supervisors of the County of Los Angeles. A few of my foster parents had been fine; some, not so much. Like the guy who’d locked me in a closet for making too much noise. I don’t remember exactly how long I’d been in there, but to a seven-year-old, it had seemed like an eternity. I’d eventually fallen asleep. As a teenager, I grew quickly, and by the age of fourteen I was taller than most grown men. I made my foster fathers nervous. And well I should have. I was through taking
crap from them, through being locked in closets. And I would force them to back off whenever they tried to scream at the younger kids.
As soon as I turned seventeen, I dropped out of high school and said my goodbyes to Mrs. Aaronson, my last foster mother and maybe the best. She’d made sure that I’d done my homework every night, and she’d even reviewed it to make sure it was correct. She was the woman who’d helped me to get as far as I had. Once I joined the US Army, the military became my family. A dysfunctional one, to be sure, but my family nonetheless.
“Sueño,” Riley said, calling me out of my reverie. “You want the contact information?”
“Whose contact information?”
“The Stateside defense lawyer. Who else we talking about?”
“Oh, yeah.” I pulled out my notebook and a pen.
He gave me the information, and without interrupting him, I jotted it down. When he finished, I said, “A she?”
“Yeah. They’re allowed to be lawyers now. Ever since they got the right to vote.”
“And she’s coming all the way to Korea?”
“Yeah. Bold, I know. But she’s on her way. Arrives at Kimpo this afternoon.”
“You have the flight number?”
Riley sighed and gave me the information. “Don’t tell anyone I told you. You’re off this case. You got it?”
“Got it. But who knows, Evelyn Cresthill might be out at Kimpo International Airfield even now, as we speak.”
“She could pop up anywhere,” Ernie said.
Riley looked at us each in turn, shook his head, and turned back to his memos, muttering, “Hopeless.”
I was about to start typing my report on what we’d done yesterday when Miss Kim walked in. I stood and greeted her, and she smiled and returned the greeting. Just as she sat at her desk, stashed her purse in a drawer, and pulled the cover off her hangul typewriter, the cannon went off. Zero eight hundred, the start of the business day.
Shrilly, Miss Kim’s phone rang.
Miss Kim answered in a high, lilting voice. “Yoboseiyo.” She listened and switched to English. “Just a moment.” With the receiver covered, she motioned toward me. I stepped to her desk and took the phone.
“Sueño,” I said.
“Get your ass over here. Now.”
I recognized the voice. It was Staff Sergeant Grimes, one of the MPs working the Yongsan Compound detachment.
“You at the MP Station?” I asked.
“Where else?”
“What have you got?”
“You’ll see when you get here. You better bring that psycho partner of yours too. Something tells me you’re gonna be busy today.”
“What is it, Grimes?” I asked again, impatient now.
“You were looking for that broad Evelyn Cresthill, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well we’ve got a Korean national who says he saw her.”
“Where?”
“Like I said, come ask him yourself.”
He hung up the phone.
The 8th Army MP Station was a low, ramshackle building made up of Quonset huts hooked together by wooden hallways, interspersed with the occasional cement-block addition. It housed a warren of law enforcement activities, including the ration control and traffic sections, not to mention interrogation rooms and a fairly extensive row of holding cells.
At the front entranceway, Ernie and I shoved through the double swinging door and marched toward the Desk Sergeant. He was bent over fiddling with a field radio, but when he heard our footsteps, he swung his swivel chair around to face us.
“Okay, Grimes,” Ernie said. “What’ve you got?”
Grimes pointed to the wooden bench along the wall behind us.
“Talk to him yourself. I can’t make out his gibberish.”
Sitting in a slump-shouldered heap, still in his black pants and his white shirt and his red vest from the previous night, sat the waiter who’d spoken to us. His collar was torn now, and his bow tie gone, probably ripped off and thrown away. His face was severely bruised.
“What’d I tell you?” Ernie said, sotto voce.
The young man sat up straighter, staring at me. I sat next to him on the bench and turned slightly to face him.
“Weikurei-yo?” I said. Why this way?
“I talk to you, big trouble,” he said.
“Who hit you?”
He lowered his head, glaring darkly at his hands. I noticed they were cut and bleeding in spots. He didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry we caused you trouble,” I told him in Korean.
He shrugged. I waited patiently for him to speak.
“Those women who come in with the Korean lady, everyone else knows they’ll end up working for her. Maybe the women don’t know it yet. At first, she treats them well. Good drink, good food, good music. When I serve them, I always bow, always smile. But I know that soon they’ll be stuck.”
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” I told him.
“No. I’m a small bird in a big flock.” He rubbed sore knuckles, then continued. “So when I talked to you last night, everybody was furious. I told them I hadn’t said anything important, but of course they didn’t believe me. Now they think you know everything.”
“Know what?”
He took a deep breath, holding it for a while as he put his hands to possibly damaged ribs, and slowly let it out. Then he sat up suddenly, doing his best to keep his back straight. “The Korean woman who brought in the American woman,” he said. “Do you know what we call her?”
“No. What?”
He leaned toward me and whispered the word into my face. At first, all I could think about was his foul breath, full of cigarette smoke and stale kimchi.
“Gampei,” he said. Gangster.
“The one who brings in the young women, she’s part of a gang?”
“Not her, but she works for gangsters.”
“Do you know which gang she works for? Has she ever named anyone?”
“No. I just know her bosses are high up. They own many nightclubs, many kisaeng houses.”
“High up in the government?”
“Who knows?” he said. “High up. That’s all I know.”
“What do they do with these women?”
“Make them work,” he replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Are they paid well?”
He barked a laugh. “Women work,” he said, “the gangs keep the money.”
The waiters of Myong-dong changed employment often, he told me, sometimes working two or even three jobs, and were used to seeing young women plying their trade. After pouring drinks and lighting cigarettes for and laughing at the jokes of the wealthy businessmen, the young women were more often than not expected to return with them to their hotel rooms. There were even books of photographs of the young hostesses offered by agents to businessmen in advance of their visits so they could select what best suited their tastes.
“And an American woman,” I asked, “would men pay extra for her?”
He nodded. “Some, yes.”
“Are the women forced into this?” I asked.
“They’re poor. And once they’re in, it’s very hard to get out.”
“So why did the other waiters beat you up? It’s not their business, is it?”
He shrugged again. “Because I talked to an American about a shameful thing. I made Korea look bad.”
“And made them look bad for not saying anything.”
“Yes. We serve these businessmen and their women, we smile and bow to them, but maybe we don’t like them either.”
“Will you be able to get your job back?”
“I’ll go somewhere else. Maybe far away.”
“So where is she now? The American woman?”
He asked me if I had a cigarette. I told him I didn’t smoke. Ernie, who’d been listening in, understood the word tambei and stepped across the wood-slat floor to the Desk Sergeant’s counter. After borrowing two smokes from Staff Sergeant Grimes, he brought them over. The young waiter stuck one cigarette in his breast pocket, pulled a lighter out of his vest, and fired up the remaining cancer stick. He took a deep puff. As he allowed smoke to run out of his nostrils, his face crinkled. It seemed as if the pain of being beaten and ostracized by his friends, of losing his job, had suddenly caught up with him. Slowly, without making a sound, tears rolled down his face.
Before he left the compound, Ernie and I chipped in and gave him a few dollars.
-16-
By the time we reached Kimpo Airfield, the only flight from the States scheduled for the day had just landed. We parked the jeep in the military section of the lot and trotted toward the two-story cement-block terminal. From the second floor we looked down through the plate-glass windows onto passengers descending the staircases that had been rolled up to the side of the planes. A line of them made their way onto the tarmac.
“We won’t be able to tell which one she is,” Ernie said.
“A woman alone,” I told him. “Can’t be many.”
Some twenty years after the devastation of the Korean War, the tourism industry in Korea was virtually nonexistent, except for Japanese businessmen flooding in on package-deal sex tours. So the only Americans who arrived in country were either missionaries or Peace Corps volunteers, or more likely those associated with the US military, either dependents or civilian contract workers. Since the vast majority of civilian workers who arrived alone would be men, an American woman traveling to Korea by herself was not something you saw every day.
And we didn’t see one. Even after the last passenger had balanced himself carefully down the stairs, we hadn’t seen anyone who looked like an American female lawyer by herself. I glanced at my notes. “Riley said her name is Corrine Fitch.”
We hurried downstairs to the big double glass doorway that was the exit from Korean customs inspection. The first passengers emerged.