by Gus Lee
He faced off, nose near mine. “I'm happier than shit. I'm married.” His eyes went through me. “Hell, I'm learning how to cook and like it. I'm a lawyer now, so I won't see any more HQ Infantry cluster fucks.” He squinted. ” I'm like real glad you can bar-fight, but if I call Immigration, they'll probably send your ass back to China. So I'm big-time happy. Got it?”
“I'm real pleased for you.” I pointed at him. “Stay close to her. She's your partner.”
At the door, I saw Magrip say something to Willoughby, who quickly moved his chair away from Levine. Magrip spoke again and Willoughby nodded emphatically and changed tables.
Meat wagons were hauling off perps like midtown taxis on a rainy day. I stuck my fists in the snow, cooling my torn and offended knuckles, turning the snow a light, candied pink. I had trouble sliding the class ring on my swollen finger.
Time to find Major Nagol, the Wizard's right-hand man and poster boy for dust, disease, disorganization and the ambush bashing of IG investigators.
10
PIG BREATH AND GHOUL
Officers and a third of the Second Infantry's enlisted men—five thousand souls—had passes into the Strip. Fellini could have set the stage through which I walked. Troops cursed excessively and drank too much. They played craps, poker and pool, argued over fees and bargained with the devil while cold, underdressed squadrons of unlicensed street hookers counted money, taunted, flirted, invited, cackled and waved. One hailed me by jumping on my back, I pulled her off.
Later, there were footsteps—a man. I chased footfalls into an empty alley. Nothing. My short military hair felt electric, my adrenaline up with nowhere to go.
The lights in the office of the staff judge advocate burned brightly across the fields of snow. Casey's chief prosecutor was still in the library, daydreaming of mass Sunday hangings.
“Hello, Miles Altman. I'm Jackson Kan.”
He kept writing, irritated. He didn't point his mouth at me, showing that diplomacy was alive on the DMZ. “Screw off.”
“I need to see Major Nagol. Where's his hooch?”
He snorted at me but I didn't faint. “He's an idiot. Wears a gun. Bigger asshole than me, king of all gaping assholes.”
“There's a closing argument to live by.” He faced me. Baby-blue eyes in an unpleasant face, the nose and chin looking like they had been punched by experts.
“Hear you're an IG now and you brought Butt Kicker Magrip with you. The freaking odd couple. What are you after, Kan? The Wizard?”
I coughed, hating to lie. “Race relations.”
His lips fluttered. “Yeah? I hate Asians and Medal of Honor winners. Your mission's done. What crap! Fix claims and recruiting and make the cops do their job!” Spittle flew.
I blinked, my eyes watering. “Duly noted.” I made the note. “So eat me.”
“You're too kind.” I gave him the Richelieu letter that proclaimed I had the powers of the Pope, and backed up.
“You asshole. Shitting Pentagon turds on my desk.” He sighed, surrendering. “Dogface's world-class super-snatch clap boiled up. Grounded at the CG's mess.” He exhaled. “You owe me now, Kan.”
I wiped my watering eyes. “You're right, Pig, I do. Be patient.”
His ears perked. “You sonofabitch—you got something cooking?” He smiled, caressing his pen, exuding swamp gases, smelling blood. Pig stank like hell's death, but he had the heart of a prosecutor, loving to bust the bad and the strong.
The sentry was a scar-faced British Army Gurkha with a curved kukri dagger in his cummerbund. The UN was here. He stopped us. “Sorry, sir, only field-grade officers” —majors and above. He had a charming accent, cold eyes and a stone mouth.
“Chief of justice to see Major Nagol,” said Pig Breath in his face. The Gurkha staggered back, blinking desperately. I flashed the CG letter before his watering eyes and we went in.
A pistol belt hung from the coatrack. A lawyer was here.
I knew bars. They beckoned darkly to proud liars, shameless confessors, the great, cantankerous adult orphanage of the military. Army watering holes served warriors, alkies and chair jockeys. There, officers who fought staple removers rapped in the hard patois of killers, and at the bar, “fucking” modified some verbs, many nouns and most thoughts.
I had never fit in the O Club subculture, where booze lured waste from guts and souls and summoned men to spend years of sour eves in oblivious communion. When I had been a practicing drunk, I had gone to the Club for the gin.
The commanding general's mess was a low stone cottage with a mirrored, mahogany bar, a tablecloth dining room and white-jacketed Korean waiters. Picture windows showed snow, a frozen pond and a flood-lamp-illuminated white-out. We were leaving the lights on at Pearl Harbor. I imagined what a hard-hearted North Vietnamese sapper could do to the mess and our command staff.
This was Korea, beyond the conscience of families. A woman could be purchased for pocket change, the weather was lethal, North Koreans could slit your throat and a large number of men drank for a living.
Dogface Nagol looked like Dracula in the morning, his sallow, ghoulish features troubled by the challenge of unkind bar lighting. I halfway expected the mirror to not reflect his image, but it was there. Broomstick arms, sunken chest, bony shoulders, the effect of malnutrition interrupted by a bowling-ball gut that shadowed thin hips and scrawny legs. He wore sharp civvies, looked half dead and faced six whiskey sours.
Two obese majors bracketed him, working cheap cigars. There was a time when the sound of gin hitting the bottom of a greasy glass could have invited me to stay for a week.
Pig Breath coughed; a chubby major gasped, elbow slipping. “Sir, this is Captain Kan, IG on race problems.”
Nagol flinched; I was supposed to be battered in the Ville. The majors turned, too fat so close to the enemy.
Nagol slowly rotated the stool, conserving energy on low internal batteries. He had a cadaverous face. Death had taken his pitted complexion; his eyes were shrouds for things that go bump in the night. His hair was brush-cut and clumps of it were missing, leaving in their place greasy pink patches of necrotic flesh. His lips were thin and purple, highlighted by four bright-pink and gray pustules rising from a stubby field of poorly shaved whiskers; the nose was a pockmarked, burst-veined, puce-hued exhibit for temperance. His nails were dimpled and broken and he smelled bad. He was a ghoul who made Pig Breath Altman look like Robert Redford.
I felt sorry for him, but that wouldn't help either of us. He had charted his course, taken chronic blows and passed the point where he could recognize kindness or respond to it. Looking at him made my teeth ache. I wondered if he shaved with a mirror.
Narrow, shadowed eyes squinted as if he saw me through shimmering heat waves. I expected visible formaldehyde fumes, and avoided looking at any single facial feature.
I smiled brightly, knowing he would hate mirth. “Good evening, sir.”
He shirked. “What the hell do you want?” Each word a physical pain. “Stud Book says you're a Sixth Army trial counsel with dual U.S. attorney duties.” The Stud Book registered all JAGCs by assignment. “What the hell you doing here for the IG?”
I smiled charmingly. “I'm a race expert.”
He grimaced as if my jump boots were stomping his bare feet. “Then go fuck yourself, expert,” he snarled in his busted voice, hampered by booze, tobacco and the wages of vices. “Report at 0800 or you're under arrest. You're a JAGC in Casey, so you report to the SJA. He's top lawyer. Captains aren't allowed in here. Fart off.”
“Here, here,” burbled the quartermaster officer.
“Sir,” I said, “the IG outranks you. You persist, it'll draw attention, and then you will get spanked until it hurts. Not like that amateur job at the Las Vegas. We do it right. We use judges, juries and the UCMJ.”
He turned back to the bar and downed another, cigar ashes floating. So the law didn't work in Korea. Oink, oink.
It'd be fun to play poker with him. You could knock down
gin and ask him how he had come to attract heart failure, alcoholism, nicotine addiction and tertiary relapsed Indochinese syphilis in the same lifetime. I forgave him the alcoholism; I wanted a drink. I went to the latrine and washed my hands in scalding hot water.
I sensed Jimmy had met that man. Jimmy was missing.
I listened and watched for phantom trailers or flankers on the way back to the Q. Nothing. It was midnight of our first day.
Drunks crashed into walls, playing the Doors too loudly and heaving in the shower so others could use the heads. I entered the Q, bone tired. Someone had moved a second bunk bed into the room.
Levine was at the desk in bulky white sweats, emblazoned with black letters: MEN ARE NOT POND SCUM. POND SCUM IS A HIGHER LIFE-FORM. She bit from a candy orange slice, looking at me.
I was as happy to see her as a canker sore. I thought, at first, it was because I couldn't belch, spit or walk about with equipment uncovered. I realized, with instant nausea, the truth: here, at the DMZ, where someone had taken down Jimmy the Bee, Captain No First Name Levine could get blown away.
“Hello, Kan.”
“Hello, Levine.”
She offered candy. I declined. Magrip, fully dressed, snored like a busted lawn mower on the unmade cot, hands crusted in dried blood.
I started making the other lower cot. She stood. I wondered if she was okay after the riot. She'd tell me. I wondered where she was going to sleep. She'd tell me that, too.
“No quarters for women,” she said. “May I crash here?”
I sat heavily on the cot. I knew Tongducheon didn't have a Ramada; I hadn't foreseen that nothing could be made available.
Without quarters, she'd be tuna in a shark pool.
“Yeah.”
“There's a warm and toasty welcome.” Magrip's snoring rattled the bad paint.
I coughed. “Which bunk do you want?”
“In a lower one, I could hang a curtain and change behind it.”
I nodded and started making the upper bunk. “Take one of us when you use the latrine.” I folded a hospital sheet corner. “Levine. Why'd Carlos send you?”
“What do you mean, exactly?”
“We're supposed to be covert and you show up like Goldie Hawn at Fleet Week. You got something worth the attention.”
“I speak Korean and know computers.” She took a breath, speaking to herself. “I will be nice.” She looked up and took another bite. “Captain Kan, my skill is the ability to endure men. In real short bursts.” She brushed sugar from her fingers. “You should know: dogs are smarter and more loyal.”
“Ha ha,” I said. Cara's thoughts about me, now. She sensed blood in my laugh, and liked it, her eyes bright.
“Levine, claims looks sour. I want a full historical claims printout from Eighth Army in Seoul. Can do?”
“Roger that.” She crossed her arms. “Three things: I don't lie. I don't plea-bargain. The third is classified. Colonel Murray directed me not to reveal the skill. He did not tell me to conceal its existence.”
The mission was undulating like rope from a sunken ship. I liked tight knots. “I don't like playing twenty questions. Give me an idea of what you're talking about.”
She smiled. “I'd have to kill you.”
Against my will, I smiled back.
“Kan, can you sleep with me here?”
I rubbed my chin. “That's classified; if I told you, I'd have to kill you.” I looked at her flatly. She laughed with great honks, making Magrip moan and making me grin.
“Levine, sleep's overrated and we stand guard. I don't want Willoughby coming in here any more than you do.”
She shuddered. “Willoughby! God forbid! Kan, I asked not because I'm attractive or anything. It's because I'm a woman and you're men and you have control problems. Your reproductive impulse puts male rabbits to shame.”
Magrip said something that sounded like “Gnorffph?”
“What's our plan?” She stretched, then rolled up her sleeve to look at the time. It didn't matter. We were in Asia, and all we would do is work against Eastern odds until the job was done.
“We presume the Wizard knows we're after him, so shields up. Someone's been following me.” I took the automatic from the nylon bag and slid the magazine home, racked a round, safetied it, and slipped it into my belt. “I'll take first watch, to two. You got two to three. Best time for the Wizard to do us is from three to five. That's Magrip's. Wake him easy.”
Levine's look: anticipation, excitement, anxiety.
“Tomorrow, study the trash I got from the Wizard's workshop.” I pointed at it. “Magrip'11 check out the vehicles on the gate log that could've taken Jimmy out of Casey.”
“Roger that,” she said.
“We got a ROK Army driver, a KATUSA—Korean augmentee to the U.S. Army—named Corporal Oh-shik Min. Kamikaze driver. Something about him…. Anyway, I'll ask him to wire a phone so you can call in your computer run. Then I see the Wizard.”
“And follow the yellow brick road. For a heart, brain, courage, or ruby shoes for a trip back to Kansas?”
“I get Jimmy or the Wizard goes to jail.” I left, toothbrush loaded, Browning in belt, knife in boot, with ther-mals, field jacket and an old gym towel.
I turned out the hall light. I brushed my teeth and pulled glass from my hands and my head. The towel around my neck, I put on the winter forage field cap and stepped outside. I moved from the building and walked the Q perimeter, shivering in the wind, listening, all my antennae up.
Nothing but frostbite and a hollow, absorbent silence. I walked a wider perimeter. Something moved and I sprinted to a low hill, the automatic out and safety off…. No one. Medium-sized boot prints in the snow.
I had left Levine.
I raced back, banging doors. Levine was breathing softly behind a makeshift curtain. I turned off the ceiling light and sat in a bad chair, the Browning on my lap, my muscles relaxing, my heart still slugging. I felt every blow I had taken and given in the Vegas, my back aching from the brawl and the poultry odyssey.
Cara would have called both my Presidio SJA, Jonas Brent, and Walter Reed Army Hospital, where I would be declared unavailable. Under a flashlight, I wrote poetry to her, the crossouts louder than the composing. I changed into sweats. At two, I awoke Levine, gave her the gun and flashlight. She was tired, emotionally vulnerable in the cot and slowly alert.
I lay down and closed my eyes. There was no sleep for me. I thought of Cara's darkened bedroom.
I had imagined it as a room unlike any other, a kind pastel, rich with flora, a sumptuous bed, a table with fruits and wines. A space of doves and hushed beauty.
I had carried her easily to the bed, one hand near her breast, holding her legs. Her eyes were the colors of my heart, and I lifted her beautiful face close to mine. Say yes.
“Yes,” she said. The heat in her eyes flowed into me, a balm. Our lips met and I moaned with the opulence, the strength and draw of her mouth, full of wings and songs as it opened for me. The kiss was without measure, free of margins. The loveliness of her, breathing as if we had escaped death and stepped into the first mist of mythic paradise, a gentle dew already on our skin. I put her down and kissed her neck, finding a sweet place, and she helped me, twisting, “Yes. Oh yes. Oh Jackson, oh caro, caro”
I kissed more, wanting more as I followed her hints, our fires licking at each other in a warming room. Her honeyed mouth, her reckless heat, her beauty, my need. She touched a switch and light came from small ceiling lamps, casting soft light on a table with oranges and nectarines, shining on her as if it were of the moon. I was in a place of which I had dreamed.
I wanted everything to move like an eastern sail in a summer breeze, wanted to remember all of it, to absorb this time into deepest memory, into the levels of recollection that embrace the scrolls of old emperors and the poetry of the Sung. In this way I loved her, undressed her, adored her, held her face, kissed her long, deep and knowingly, sensing the possibility of all. I touched, care
ssed and trembled. In her bed I marveled at the impossibilities of her beauty and I gazed at her face above the pillows, knowing I would always remember this, my soul in her heart, there, never to be retrieved. I kissed her as if life itself were in her mouth. “Now, caro” she breathed.
Not yet. Let me pleasure you. It was not what she wanted, but she indulged me.
Later, she pulled me to her with words and movements, short and hissing. There was neither memory nor future, only the closeness, the oneness, the hot dance of circles and lines of spreading, urging, caressing, beckoning, rising, lifting, cradling, entering, retreating, all fury, love, heaven and languor.
Cara. How many times did I kiss her? The sands of Egypt. How close were we? Too close to ever leave. How much did I love her? I could not say. We kissed, our eyes open in nameless petitions, Cara guiding with her hands, crying as I licked and bit, my patience swept away in her currents, her shuddering sob more than I could bear as we soared and cried and coasted in sweet demise above salt waves, intimate, one, trembling, joined, her face wet with my tears.
“Never leave me,” she had whispered. “Promise.”
I had. In a play of whispers and admissions, I held her, caressed her face, her hair, her neck, squeezed her hands. She smelled of peaches and salt and was more delectable than the greatest foods of China. She wanted me to remain awake with her, to call her “Cara” with an Italian trill on the “r,” to talk into each other's mouths until the sun replaced the moon. But I faded, sleeping dreamlessly as in youth, bathed in her scents while the river caressed the boat hull and the gaudy orange-berobed gwei yu, Mandarin fish, waited lazily at the bend of the river.
I awakened to find her gazing at me as she traced raised, finger-wide scars on my abdomen. The scars itched and were prone to sunburn.
She touched my ear, the scars on my back. “Baby, what happened to you?”
I smiled. “I was in a knife fight. Only the docs had knives.”
“No, caro. Tell me.”
The buzz of the rain forest, the click of carrion. I closed my eyes and held her, trying to make her reality greater than my past.
