Nightmare Range

by Martin Limon

  “Why didn’t you notify me?” he said. “This case belongs under our jurisdiction.”

  Ernie piped up. “You weren’t doing nothing.”

  Crane glared at him and then turned back to Austin. He took a green walkie-talkie off his belt and fiddled with it until it beeped. Thirty seconds later, two MPs came into the printing plant at a brisk walk.

  Crane looked at Austin. “You’re under arrest. Clean off your hands and step over here against the wall.”

  Austin did as he was told, and soon the MPs had him trussed up and Crane entered into a feverish conversation with the plant manager.

  We left. I was happy to be outside in the fresh air and away from the noise of the churning machinery.

  Back at the Blue Dragon Club we sat at a table nursing a couple of wets, waiting for Miss Kwon and her girlfriends to come back from the bathhouse. When they came in, they were wearing only T-shirts and short pants and had towels wrapped around their hair, and their clean, fresh faces bubbled with laughter. When they saw us, they surrounded our table.

  Miss Kwon said, “You come back.”

  “Sure,” Ernie said. “We’re not number ten GIs. We came back to say goodbye.”

  They went upstairs to change, we ordered another round of beers, and Miss Kwon was the first one back.

  I fiddled with my wallet, looking for the first sergeant’s number, thinking of calling him so we wouldn’t get in too much trouble. The photograph of the GI I had found in Yu Kyong-hui’s hooch fell out. Miss Kwon snatched it up.

  “Where you get this?”

  “From Miss Yu’s hooch.”

  “She taaksan crazy about this GI. He’s infantry, but he was stationed here before. He almost married Miss Yu, but he ran out of time to get an extension and had to go back to the States.”

  “Well, she kept his picture for a long time.”

  “Not so long. Maybe two years. She still gets letters from him, and she told everybody that he got orders and he will be coming back soon.”

  “If she was waiting for him to come back to Korea, why would she leave here so suddenly?”

  Miss Kwon shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Then it clicked. The whole thing. I slammed my palm on the table. Ernie jumped.

  “What the …”

  “We’ve been idiots, Ernie. If VonEric needed money to pay off gambling debts, where would he get it?”

  “Well …”

  “Sure. I’m going to call the first sergeant right now and let him know that we’re going to be here a while longer. We have some paperwork to do.”

  Ernie frowned. While I was on the phone behind the bar trying to get through to Seoul, he made sure to finish all the beer.

  Word of our snooping would spread quickly, so I waited until Waitz was off duty to start going through the records of the Army Support Command Replacement Detachment. I compared some of the entries to the notes I had pilfered from VonEric’s desk. As we went over the assignments for the last few months, Ernie started to see the pattern.

  “Waitz has been diverting guys to posts in Korea where their specialty is not required.”

  “Right.” I stood up and reached for my coat. “Let’s get off base and find a taxi.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To Inchon.”

  “What the hell do you want to go there for?”

  “They have a nice place there I want to visit. The Olympos Hotel …”

  “You don’t need a room. Miss Kwon will put you up.”

  “I don’t want a room. It’s the other half of the title I’m interested in.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Olympos Hotel and Casino.”

  The cab driver swerved rapidly through the countryside, and I kept telling him to slow down so we wouldn’t slide off the slick roads. When we came over the crest of the hills surrounding Inchon, the huge harbor spread out below us like rippling green glass. Rusty merchant ships nodded lazily on the gentle waves like drunken sailors sleeping against lampposts. At the edge of the water, on a slight hill above the rest of the city, stood the Olympos Hotel. Half of its square eyes twinkled in the sunset.

  Chandeliers, plush red carpet, beautiful women flashing brightly colored cards across green felt tables.

  “Let’s get out of this dump,” Ernie said.

  “I just want to see if he’s here.”

  “Who?”

  “Waitz.”

  There was not much of a crowd, since it was Monday night. A few Japanese tourists, a couple of high-rollers from Hong Kong at the baccarat table, and a smattering of bewhiskered merchant marines. Although there wasn’t much foliage for camouflage, I didn’t have to take any extra precautions to conceal myself from Waitz. He was humped over one of the blackjack tables, jabbing his finger into the green felt when he wanted a hit, waving his hand from side to side when he wanted to stay. His small pile of chips dwindled and then disappeared before our eyes. Without looking up from his cards, he reached back into his wallet and pulled out another short stack of twenty dollar bills. The dealer arrayed them like a fan on the table, counted them quickly, and then made a pencil calculation converting them to won. She pushed two small stacks of chips out to him, and Waitz dropped almost half of them into the betting circle.

  We waited outside the hotel. I figured it wouldn’t take long.

  He walked through the lobby rubbing his face, and the red-coated attendant opened the door for him. I couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders were still hunched and he stumbled as he walked. We put down the beers we had been drinking in the small garden overlooking the bay and followed.

  His cab pulled up in front of Whiskey Mary’s, one of the oldest establishments in Inchon’s nightclub district. I told our driver to cruise by, and we watched Waitz walk in.

  By the time Ernie and I peeped through the beaded doorway, Waitz was already too busy arguing with a Korean woman to notice us.

  “Who is she?” Ernie asked.

  “Miss Yu Kyong-hui.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Waitz and VonEric were both gambling. One out here at the casino, the other on football, placing bets with Austin. When Waitz got in too deep, he started taking bribes to give GIs choice assignments.”

  “If VonEric was in on it,” Ernie said, “how did he get in so deep to Austin?”

  “From checking the records, it looks like he wasn’t taking bribes. Maybe he figured he’d rather be in trouble with an illegal bookmaker than get caught by the army for abusing his official position and thereby face a court-martial. But he worked in the same room with Waitz, so eventually he must have realized what Waitz was doing, or maybe Waitz told him, figured to enlist him as a collaborator. Who knows? Then when VonEric wouldn’t go along with the program, it made Waitz nervous. Maybe real nervous. And maybe VonEric even threatened to turn him in. The records were there, the ones we saw this afternoon. Enough to convict him, or at least build a hell of a case against him. If anybody knew about it.”

  “So Waitz decided to kill VonEric.”

  “Right.” I jerked my thumb toward the entranceway to Whiskey Mary’s. “And he knew that Miss Yu Kyong-hui had jilted him, so he talked to her. It turned out they had something in common. Miss Yu’s old boyfriend was infantry. He had probably just gotten lucky on his last tour to Korea and been assigned down here, maybe to the Special Forces detachment on the ASCOM compound. But he wouldn’t be so lucky again. It would be the DMZ for him. Miss Yu might not be able to see him for weeks on end.”

  “And Division isn’t real big on helping GIs get their marriage paperwork through.”

  “Right. So Waitz made a proposition to Miss Yu. Just take VonEric home with her, loosen a crack in her floor that was already there, and her boyfriend would receive a choice assignment away from the DMZ.”

  A shriek rippled through the beaded entranceway to the club. Ernie was first in. I pushed my way through a gaggle of sweet-smelling business girls and found Ernie wrestling a
bloodied knife away from Miss Yu.

  Waitz was already pushing through the back door. I ran toward him but had to dodge sloshing beer and broken bottles from the cocktail tables he’d turned over behind him. When I made it outside, I spotted him down the street hopping into a taxi. There were no others around, so I couldn’t follow him. I returned to the club.

  Miss Yu was screeching and clawing at Ernie’s face, like some great warrior bird.

  “He’s got to fix the assignment!” she said. “I don’t care about MPs. I don’t care about CID. I did what he want me to do, now he must help me!”

  “What is it you did for him?” I asked.

  Miss Yu glanced around at the business girls and the handful of merchant sailors. They all stared at her. Suddenly, she realized that she’d said too much.

  “Nothing,” she replied. “I did nothing.”

  It took us half an hour to get her booked into the Inchon Korean National Police Station. I briefly explained what the charge was but told them that Ernie and I had to leave in order to arrest the American who’d been her accessory.

  When we reached the main gate of the Army Support Command, red lights flashed. We piled out of our jeep and showed our badges to the first MP we saw.

  “What happened?”

  “He opened up with a weapon.”

  “Who?”

  “Waitz, that’s what everybody’s saying. The guy at the Repo Depot.”

  “A rifle?” Ernie asked. “A forty-five? What?”

  “A forty-five. Johnson tried to card him, check his ID and pass, but instead Waitz shot him.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “They say it’s just a wound to his leg, no arterial bleeding. The MedEvac chopper is on the way.”

  “Where’d Waitz go?”

  The MP pointed toward the flashing neon of ASCOM City.

  Ernie and I trotted through the narrow alleys.

  “Where would he go?” Ernie asked. “He can’t get away.”

  “I think he knows that.”

  “Then what the hell is he doing?”

  “He’s toast and he knows it. Unless he destroys the evidence and finds a way to silence Miss Yu.”

  “How’s he going to do that?”

  As if in answer to Ernie’s question, a tongue of flame shot over the tiled rooftops. When we reached Miss Yu’s hooch, it was already engulfed in flame.

  “He can’t get away with this” Ernie said.

  “He’s panicked,” I replied. “Not thinking clearly.”

  “Which makes him dangerous.”

  “Very.”

  “Where to now?” Ernie asked.

  “Back to the next thing he needs to eliminate.”

  “Miss Yu?”

  “Right.”

  During the five-mile drive to Inchon, Ernie broke every speed limit in the books. At Whiskey Mary’s the girls were hysterical. I convinced one of them to calm down and she told us that Waitz had returned, this time with a gun, and he’d threatened to kill them all if they didn’t tell him where he could find Miss Yu. They told him she’d been arrested.

  Minutes later, we screeched up in front of the Inchon Police Station, just as a GI in civvies trudged up the stone steps, a pistol hanging at his side. Ernie didn’t even slow down. He slammed the jeep into low gear and the vehicle thumped up the steps. Waitz turned in horror but before he could bring his weapon into play, the front bumper of Ernie’s jeep sent him flying.

  A dozen Korean cops streamed out of the building, some of them with their weapons drawn. Ernie and I stood with our hands straight up in the air and I started shouting that we were American MPs and here to arrest the man who lay injured on the steps. When everyone calmed down, I turned Waitz over and clamped the cuffs on him. His left leg had suffered a compound fracture so Ernie pulled off his belt and used it as a tourniquet. Waitz screamed when Ernie pulled it tight.

  “You ran me over,” Waitz said. “On purpose.”

  “I should’ve stepped on the gas,” Ernie replied.

  “Why’d you kill VonEric?” I asked.

  Waitz stared at me, his eyes wide with glazed panic. “I didn’t kill nobody.”

  Ernie slapped him, and then slapped him again. Finally, I had to make him stop. We tossed Waitz in the back of the jeep and drove him, howling all the way, back to ASCOM City. It wasn’t easy but I managed to keep the MPs there from killing him before we even had a chance to book him for murder.

  The MP Johnson survived. While she rotted in jail, Miss Yu’s case made its slow and painful way through the intricacies of the Korean judicial system. At Waitz’s preliminary court-martial hearing, there was so much evidence piled up against him that he and his military attorney copped a plea. The result: twenty years’ hard labor at Fort Leavonworth, Kansas. He’d probably be out in five.

  NIGHT OF THE MOON GODDESS

  Outside the main gate of Osan Air Force Base the narrow lanes of Songtan-up wind off in three directions. Each alleyway is crammed with brightly painted signs touting the best in leather goods or the tastiest in beer or guarantees as to which bar offers the greatest prospects for romance. At night the place is lit up as brightly as the spangled posterior of an overage stripper. In the morning it looks quiet and sad, especially when a low-lying mist crawls through the damp cobbled streets.

  “How we ever going to find this joint?” Ernie asked.

  I pulled the note I had made out of my pocket. “Kim’s Tailor Shop and Brassware. It should be easy. I even have the address.”

  Ernie snorted. “Addresses don’t mean nothing in this mess.”

  It turned out that he was right. It wasn’t so easy. Each little number hand-brushed in white paint over a doorway was covered with tote bags and running shoes and jogging outfits hanging from every available rafter. While we were searching, an old woman approached us and offered herself as a guide to that particular nirvana that all young GIs seek. I shooed her away and held Ernie back, reminding him that we had a job to do. He stared straight ahead and chomped more viciously on his clicking wad of gum.

  Ernie and I had jumped at this case because it gave us a chance to get out of Seoul. Osan is the largest US air base in the country, situated about thirty miles south of the capital city of Seoul and about fifty miles from the Demilitarized Zone that slashes like a knife through the heart of the Korean Peninsula.

  We were on what’s called a “SOFA case,” a claim made against the US government by Korean civilians under a treaty known as the Status of Forces Agreement. A young woman, Miss Won Hei-suk, had committed suicide. The family contended that she had been driven to it by an American serviceman who had taken advantage of her youth and gullibility and promised her—among other things—marriage. The monetary figure they came up with included not only her projected productivity and value to the family in the future but also the price of their emotional suffering. How they figured that one I didn’t know.

  The US Army pays out millions of dollars in claims each year. In Germany it might be the price of an apple tree mowed down by a tank on maneuvers, in the Philippines income lost from rice churned up by the navy construction battalions. In Korea, it’s the loss of a daughter.

  Of course, the army didn’t want to pay, so it was our job to find out if the story of this sordid little love affair was valid or bogus. A copy of Miss Won’s family register had been submitted to 8th Army along with the claim, and it proved that she was clearly underage. One way out for the military was to find the GI, court-martial him for statutory rape, and force him to pay the claim. But finding him could be a problem. Not only were there a couple of thousand airmen stationed on Osan itself but the place was also a popular vacation spot for Marines from Okinawa and Japan. They caught military flights over here—at government expense—and they stayed in billeting facilities on post for four or five dollars a day. While here, they shopped for the cheap brassware and leather goods and textile products that the village offered in abundance and shipped tons of junk back to the States. Th
ey also enjoyed the more ephemeral charms of Songtan-up, when the sun went down and the neon began to sparkle.

  We found Kim’s Tailor Shop and Brassware in a side alley. The sign was painted in English with the small Korean translation below. The back walls were hung with drapes of gray and blue material. The front of the shop was lined with brass vases, urns, and sculptures, the most prominent of which was a fist displaying a stiff upward-thrust index finger.

  When we walked in, a man rose from a small leather sofa.

  “Welcome,” he said. “If you want suits, Kim’s Tailor number one in Songtan Village.”

  He was a sturdy looking Korean man, a few years older than us, maybe thirty, with short cropped black hair brushed neatly back along the geometric lines of his big square head. His leathery brown face was trying to smile, but it couldn’t get past the lines of concern folded just beneath his eyes. When I pulled out my badge, he sighed and deflated, as if he had been expecting customers rather than cops.

  “Are you Mr. Kim?”

  “Yes. I’m Mr. Kim. I already tell everything to Korean police.”

  He plopped back down on the sofa and folded his short, bulging forearms across his knees. I sat down in a wooden chair across from him. Ernie wandered around the shop, running his fingers lightly over the contours of a brass female nude.

  “The Korean police didn’t find out much,” I said. “Not even the name of the GI.”

  “Sure. I show them.”

  He reached across the coffee table, grabbed a large dog-eared book covered with red cardboard, and thumbed through the onionskin sheets. After flicking the pages back and forth a few times he jabbed a stubby finger at one of the receipts and turned it toward me.

  “Here. These are the names.”

  “There were more than one?”

  “Sure. GI never come from Okinawa alone. They all come in here buy some brassware. Two of them bought suits.”

  I stared at him for a moment.

  “Only one of them went out with Miss Won,” he said. “This guy here. The Cheap Charlie.”

  “He’s the one who didn’t buy a suit?”