The Ville Rat

by Martin Limon

  “What’s the message say?” Ernie asked.

  “Nothing much. We’re ordered back to Seoul immediately.”

  “It doesn’t say if we’re off the case or not?”

  “Not specifically.”

  Ernie started the jeep and we rolled out of the NAF compound, waved to the gate guard who was smoking happily in his shack, and turned west on the two-lane road. We passed the Camp Pelham gate on our left. Austin and gate guard Kim seemed to be hunched down in their shack. The MP patrol had disappeared and the bar girls were back at their stations, standing beneath neon, waving and cooing to potential customers. The village of Sonyu-ri, and the universe, rolled on.

  We had almost reached RC-4 when a dark shape darted into the road. Ernie slammed on his brakes.

  “What the . . .”

  A man stood in front of us, holding both hands out. He was young, Caucasian, about five-foot-eight and extremely thin. He was wearing a collared shirt, brightly colored like something designed to replicate a psychedelic dream. His hair was reddish and curly and worn in a bouffant that was beyond what was allowed by military regulation. He had a scraggly mustache that drooped around the corners of his mouth, and he seemed not to have shaven for a couple of days. When he saw that we’d come to a full stop, he approached Ernie’s side of the jeep. Ernie shoved the canvas door open.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “I had to stop you,” the man said, breathless. His voice was hurried. Green eyes darted from side to side. “He shouldn’t have done it,” he said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  It was as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “She just wanted her freedom, that’s all.”

  “Who are you talking about?” I shouted.

  “The red dress,” he said, nervously gathering the front of his shirt in his hand and glancing toward the village. “It wasn’t even hers. He gave it to her. She was forced to wear it.”

  Ernie switched off the engine and started to get out of the jeep, but the small man was quick. He backed away and darted in front of our headlights. By then I was opening my door, but we were parked next to a line of kimchi cabs, some of them with Munsan license plates, and many of the drivers were standing outside of their cabs, smoking, and watching the little display in front of them.

  The man slid deftly between two of the cabs.

  “You can talk to us,” I shouted. “We’ll listen!”

  “You were there,” he shouted back. “You were almost there!”

  And then he disappeared into one of the narrow alleyways.

  Ernie and I glanced at one another, coming to an unspoken agreement, and as Ernie padlocked the jeep, I leapt out of the passenger side and gave chase. But there wasn’t much lighting in the alleyway, and by the time Ernie had grabbed his flashlight from the jeep and caught up with me, I’d come to a complete stop because I couldn’t see a foot in front of me. He switched on the “flash,” as Koreans call it, but the narrow pathway in front of us was empty. We followed it five yards back, where it split into three more passageways. We followed one, but it wound through the backs of tightly packed hooches. All we heard was the shouts of mothers berating their kids and pots being clanged and radios blaring the songs of Patti Kim. We returned to where we’d started and checked another passageway but found nothing.

  “He knew where he was going,” Ernie said, “even in the dark.”

  “Right. He stopped us at that spot so he could say what he wanted to say and then get away.”

  We walked back to the jeep. The cab drivers stared at us curiously. In Korean, I asked loudly if anyone had seen that skinny American guy before. Uniformly, they all shrugged. One of the drivers chomped a wad of gum, grinning at us. I asked him specifically if he’d ever seen that American. “Mullah nan,” he replied. Don’t know, me. The other drivers smiled more broadly, enjoying our discomfort, and enjoying the disrespectful way the driver was speaking to us.

  Ernie and I climbed back into the jeep.

  We drove off slowly, checking the side of the road, half expecting the skinny guy with the red Afro to appear again at the side of the road. About a mile on we reached the MSR. A sign pointing right said jiayu tari, freedom bridge, 2 km. It led across the Imjin River and on into the Demilitarized Zone. The sign pointing left said seoul, 27 km. Ernie turned left.

  As we rolled down the MSR, Ernie said, “Who was that guy anyway? A civilian?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And what was he trying to tell us?”

  I tried to remember his exact words. “He said it wasn’t right that ‘he’ had killed her. That she had been forced to wear the red dress she was wearing when we found her.”

  Ernie nodded. “And that she wanted her freedom. But he said something else.”

  “He said we’d been close.”

  “Yeah. I wonder if this means we missed something today.”

  I gazed out the window. Dark rice paddies rolled by. About fifteen klicks farther south, we rolled to a stop at the last 2nd Division security checkpoint. The American MP checked our dispatch.

  When he handed it back, he said, “Been waiting for you guys.”

  “Why?” Ernie asked.

  “I guess somebody’s anxious to make sure you depart the area.” Apparently, the word had been put out via field radio.

  “Well, we did,” Ernie snapped.

  He gunned the engine as we headed for the distant lights of Seoul. It felt good being away from Division, as if a burden had been lifted from our shoulders. As if we were free.

  Seoul was empty, the streets filled with nothing but howling ghosts riding the backs of swirling winds. It was past midnight, during the nationwide midnight-to-four curfew. Nothing moved during these hours. No vehicular traffic, no pedestrians. And if you were by some circumstance on the street, you were not only subject to arrest and prosecution but, more importantly, if you didn’t halt when a soldier or curfew policeman told you to halt, you were subject to being shot on sight. The supposed reason for such draconian measures was to stop any infiltration into the country by North Korean Communist agents. That’s what the ROK government told the world. But I believed the real reason was because the military government of President Pak Chung-hee wanted to demonstrate its iron-fisted control over the general populace—and to make it clear, on a nightly basis, that no dissent would be tolerated.

  We passed through Seoul and reached Yongsan Compound on the southern edge of the city. The Korean gate guard checked our dispatch. It was an 8th Army Criminal Investigation Division emergency dispatch and, as such, we were amongst the elect who were authorized to be out during curfew hours. He waved us through.

  The barracks were dark and quiet, but as I walked down the long hallway I heard someone talking in a deep baritone voice. When I opened my door I realized what it was. My roommate, Ricky Harrison, had left his stereo system on full blast. It was an inspirational speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. I closed the door behind me, walked through the small room, and switched off the stereo set. Harrison didn’t move. He was sound asleep.

  What a lullaby.

  I took off my clothes and climbed into my rack. The sheets were crisp and clean because my houseboy, Mr. Yim, was paid to keep them that way; along with doing my laundry and shining my shoes and performing additional errands like taking my clothes in for alteration or having unit patches sewn on, all of which I paid him extra for. As I leaned back and relaxed, I thought that life for a GI in 8th Army wasn’t bad, unless you were on night patrol along the DMZ. Before I could contemplate that difference, exhaustion overtook me.

  ■ ■ ■

  “Where the hell you guys been?”

  Staff Sergeant Riley hunched over his desk, a sharpened pencil behind his ear, the padded shoulders of his green dress uniform sticking out from his rail-thin body like the wings of Icarus. In
the back of the office, a stainless-steel coffee urn pumped steady blasts of fragrant steam.

  Ernie plopped down in the chair in front of Riley’s desk and grabbed the morning edition of the Pacific Stars and Stripes. As he snapped it open, he said, “We got your twixt, we came back.”

  Riley pulled the pencil from behind his ear. “I sent it at fifteen hundred hours. You shoulda been back here by close of business.”

  “Are you nuts?” Ernie asked. “We would’ve never made it through the Seoul traffic.”

  “Besides,” I added, heading for the coffee urn, “we didn’t receive it until that night.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Ernie slammed the paper down. “Because we were out in the ville doing our jobs and not sitting on our asses inside the MP station, like some other investigators around here do.”

  Riley jabbed his pencil toward Ernie’s nose. “Some other investigators around here know how to follow the provost marshal’s orders.”

  “And they know how to brownnose.”

  Riley shoved his pencil back behind his ear and stared down at the stack of paperwork in front of him. “There’s that,” he said.

  As I walked toward the coffee urn, Riley shouted at me, “It’s not done yet.”

  “Close enough for field soldiers,” I said and drew myself a mug.

  Riley grunted. “Some field soldiers.”

  I sipped on the coffee. He was right; lukewarm and insipid. Still, I didn’t want to let him know he’d been right, so I drank it down.

  Miss Kim, the statuesque admin secretary, busied herself checking a list and pulling files out of grey metal cabinets. When she had what she wanted, she returned to her desk and sat down in front of her hangul typewriter. I set my coffee down and approached her.

  “Anyonghaseiyo?” I said.

  She smiled, nodded and said, “Nei. Anyonghaseiyo.”

  She wore her hair short and businesslike, just below her ears. Her heart-shaped face was pale and unblemished, and her figure was well-respected enough that MPs occasionally made excuses to come into the CID office just to ogle her. It was difficult for her because she was shy and the attention embarrassed her. On her way to work, she usually scurried from the main gate to the office and seldom ventured outside during the duty day; too many foreign eyeballs caressing her. She and Ernie had been an item for a few months, but when she found out his affections weren’t directed toward her exclusively, she dropped him flat. The fact that they still worked together didn’t seem to bother Ernie. When I brought it up, he didn’t understand what I was getting at. But Miss Kim was tormented by the almost daily proximity; I could tell by the way she glanced at him furtively, her face turning red as she did so, and the fact that she always found something to do as far away from him as possible. Still, she couldn’t quit her job. In the early seventies, the Korean economy was still flat on its back from the devastation of the Korean War, and employment opportunities for a young woman were few and far between.

  I tried to be friendly to her. Not pushy. I even occasionally left her a small gift, like hand lotion from the PX or a jar of instant coffee, which I knew her mother liked. I’d never asked her out, and I believed she appreciated that too.

  Riley treated Miss Kim with indifference. She was just a working colleague to him. Prim and proper wasn’t his style. He liked ’em raunchy and drunk. Where he found his girlfriends I wasn’t quite sure since he worked long hours, but find them he did. I’d get my first hint of a new Riley girlfriend by seeing her scurrying from the men’s latrine to Riley’s room at about two in the morning. He would hide her there, in the barracks, along with a bottle of Old Overwart. That’s all he needed to attain nirvana. At least temporary nirvana, until morning came and the hangover kicked in.

  But he was a workhorse, Staff Sergeant Riley was. He kept the office running, even if he was a constant thorn in Ernie’s—and my—side. He completely identified with the provost marshal and with the United States Army. To him, their pronouncements were the revealed word of God, and 8th Army regulations were holy scripture. Ernie and I, he was certain, were apostates and thereby destined for military hell. To us, 8th Army was self-serving and run by careerists who only wanted to safeguard their own paths to promotion. Of course, we usually didn’t say that to Riley. There was no point. We wouldn’t change his mind, and besides, sometimes we needed him.

  Like right now.

  “Who’s Lieutenant Phillips?” Riley asked.

  Ernie turned the page of the newspaper. “Some asshole from Division,” he said.

  “Well,” Riley said, “it looks like this asshole from Division has made a formal complaint. Says you assaulted him in front of witnesses.”

  “If I’d ‘assaulted’ him,” Ernie said, “he wouldn’t have been able to make a complaint.”

  “He says you headbutted him in front of the main gate of Camp Pelham.”

  “He headbutted me,” Ernie said.

  Riley glanced at me. “Which was it?”

  I strode away from Miss Kim’s desk back toward the coffee urn that had stopped brewing. “Like Ernie says,” I replied, “Lieutenant Phillips headbutted him.”

  Riley wrote some notes that I knew would be relayed to Colonel Brace, the 8th Army provost marshal. “You’re gonna have to sign a statement,” he said, “both of you.”

  “Write it up,” Ernie said, still studying his paper.

  “Second Division pukes,” Riley said, muttering beneath his breath. Then he said, “Zero nine hundred. Mandatory formation in the JAG conference room. Be there.”

  “Bite me,” Ernie said.

  “Mandatory,” Riley said, glaring at him. His favorite word.

  -4-

  “Attention to orders!”

  All the JAG officers and the clerks and the MPs and the Criminal Investigation agents stopped their milling about and snapped to attention. Colonel Walter P. Brace, the 8th Army provost marshal, stood at the front of the judge advocate general’s conference room, and next to him were two of our fellow CID agents, Jake Burrows and Felix Slabem. Margaret Mendelson, a female second lieutenant, read the citation, mimicking perfectly the slow drawl of 8th Army officialese. I’d seen her before, a new JAG officer. She had long, reddish-brown hair that she tied atop her head when she was in uniform. She wore the knee-length skirt and tight green jacket of the US Army female dress-green uniform and most of the men in the room were happy to watch her rather than the Sad Sacks who were being honored.

  Burrows and Slabem were brownnosers from the word go. Everybody knew it, but their career strategies seemed to be paying off. What they’d done was spend the last three months auditing 8th Army’s Non-Appropriated Fund activities—NAF, for short—in a comprehensive review required by an act of Congress every ten years. They’d looked at the records covering the post exchange, the commissary, the Central Locker Fund, the Defense Youth Activities center, and both the 8th Army officers’ club and the half-dozen or so NCO and enlisted clubs.

  “Mainly they audited the steam and cream,” Ernie whispered to me. He was referring to the on-base massage parlors also run by Non-Appropriated Funds, but he said it loud enough for a few frowning faces to turn and glare at us.

  The DPCA, the Director of Personnel and Community Activities, stepped up to present the award: the Meritorious Service Medal. Not bad for a couple of junior enlisted men. Although as CID agents our ranks were technically classified, everyone knew that both Burrows and Slabem were staff sergeants, the same rank as Ernie. But Burrows and Slabem had been slated for promotion to sergeants first class, something that pissed Ernie off royally.

  “All they do is shuffle paper,” Ernie’d told me, “and make sure they get the results the honchos want.”

  And in their review of what amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of NAF activity, the only anomaly Agents Jake Burrows and Felix Slabem had found
was the misappropriation of the football pool by one of the part-time bartenders at the officers’ club. The total dollar value of which was less than seventy-four dollars.

  “For this they get an award?” Ernie asked.

  I elbowed him to shut up. Reluctantly, he did, scowling around the room as if he wanted to choose somebody to pop in the nose. Lieutenant Mendelson’s voice droned on. When she was done, the DPCA pinned the medals first on Jake Burrows and then on Felix Slabem. Then he shook their hands. When the ceremony was over, most of the attendees stood in line to congratulate the two honorees. We didn’t. I caught Riley outside and told him what I needed.

  “A civilian?” he asked.

  “I think so.” I described the guy to him. About five-foot-eight or nine, one hundred and thirty-five pounds, reddish hair that he wore in some sort of Afro bouffant.

  “How long?”

  “How long ago did we see him?”

  “No. How long was his hair?”

  “Only a couple of inches.”

  “But too long for him to be military.”

  “Right.”

  “So maybe he’s a DAC.” A Department of the Army Civilian.

  “Right. Or maybe he’s not affiliated with the military at all.”

  “Then what would he be doing up in the Division area?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I want to ask him.”

  The few civilians who ventured to South Korea on business stayed mainly in Seoul or the other large cities. They seldom ventured toward the DMZ. Especially since the North Korean Commando raid on the presidential palace a few years ago and the taking of the USS Pueblo crew. And tourism to the Republic of Korea was almost nonexistent. Too many people around the world still remembered the newspaper photos that depicted the death and suffering during the Korean War and the millions of refugees. Nobody thought of the ROK as a fabulous vacation spot.