The Ville Rat

by Martin Limon

“That’s what they tell me, and if he wasn’t so weird with the silences and explosive at other times, the Koreans would give him a lot of respect. But they don’t, because they don’t trust him. He’s too erratic.”

  “What exactly do you suspect him of?”

  “I’ll deny it if anyone asks officially, but I’ve suspected him for a long time of moving stuff on the side.”

  “Off the books?”

  “Yes. He takes long trips to the Port of Inchon. I believe he’s developed a contact there.”

  “Someone who can get the stuff through customs.”

  “Yes. Easy enough as long as the inspector can at least pretend that it’s military materiel.”

  “What’s he been moving?”

  “I don’t know for sure.”

  “What do you suspect?”

  Mills paused. “Malt liquor,” he said.

  “Colt 45?”

  “Right. And California brandy. Stuff that can be substituted for cognac.”

  “Do you have proof?”

  “I haven’t looked for proof.”

  “You want to keep your fingerprints off it,” I said.

  Mills didn’t answer.

  “Where does Demoray live?” I asked.

  “Supposedly at the Nineteenth Support Group senior NCO barracks. But I’ve heard he has a place off-post.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Maybe somewhere in Itaewon.”

  ■ ■ ■

  Ernie and I drove to the Itaewon Police Station. A sleepy-looking desk officer looked up at us as we entered, surprised at first, but his face then returning to resigned resentment. I showed him Inspector Kill’s calling card. It was printed in English on one side and hangul on the other. I told the duty officer to call him. He stared at me wide-eyed, disbelieving. I showed him my badge and told him again. He lifted the phone. After many rings somebody answered. I could hear the word yoboseiyo. Hello. When the duty officer started talking, I realized that he hadn’t called Inspector Kill at all, but rather Captain Kim, the commander of the Itaewon Police Station.

  I snatched the receiver from his hand.

  “Captain Kim,” I said, “we have to find someone here in Itaewon. Lives are at stake.” His English was not nearly as good as Mr. Kill’s, so I repeated what I’d said in Korean. He asked what I wanted him to do. “We have to go through rental records,” I told him, “find a GI named Demoray who rented a home here in Itaewon.”

  There was a long silence. Then he asked me in English, “Do you know what time it is?”

  Actually, I didn’t. All I could think of since I’d stared into the barrel of Rick Mills’s shotgun was death. My own death and the death of Miss Hwang on the banks of the Sonyu River and the death of the little kisaeng. I looked around. It was dark outside. No traffic.

  “Myotsi?” I asked the duty officer. He looked at his wristwatch. “Yoltu-shi iship oh-bun.” 12:15 a.m.

  “Okay,” I said into the phone. “This morning, at first light, I need a detail hitting every bokdok-bang, Korean real estate broker, to check their records and find the hooch rented by a GI named Demoray.”

  And then it dawned on me. He might’ve rented the place using a false name. The Korean real estate agent wouldn’t care, as long as he was paid in cash.

  Captain Kim didn’t commit himself. He said we’d talk about it when he came in to work this morning. Suddenly, I felt foolish. We didn’t have time to find Demoray the regular way, with shoe leather and traditional police work. I had to figure out a way to find him now.

  Ernie and I walked up the main drag of Itaewon, now lined with dark neon: The UN Club, the Lucky Seven Club, the Seven Club, the King Club. A few yards off to our left, I knew, up Hooker Hill, was the Grand Old Opry Club, Sam’s Place, and beyond that, down the steps in front of the movie theater, the 007 Club. Lonely yellow street lamps guided our way.

  “He’s out here somewhere,” Ernie said.

  “Yeah, and if you were a demented son of a bitch with plenty of money and you wanted to rent a place where you could hide women you’d purchased from human traffickers, where would you go?”

  “I’d go to someplace isolated.”

  Itaewon was the opposite of isolated. It sat in a southern suburb of a city of eight million people. Behind the main drag of nightclubs, the hooches were jammed up like poker chips in a pile.

  “So if you don’t have isolation,” I said, “where else can you hide?”

  “I don’t get you,” Ernie replied.

  “Think of Edgar Allen Poe. ‘The Purloined Letter.’”

  “You read too much,” Ernie said in disgust.

  “If you can’t hide something away from others of its kind, you hide it in the midst of a multitude of its kind.”

  “So you hide abused women,” Ernie said, “amongst other abused women.” He thought about it. “In a whorehouse.”

  “Not just any whorehouse. But the worst of the worst.”

  We turned up Hooker Hill.

  We walked through the lonely back alleys of Itaewon, searching for lights inside windows, but there weren’t any. Occasionally we paused and listened. No shouts, no whimpering, just silence. Methodically we walked up and down the hills, turning toward the whorehouses we’d heard about, realizing that we didn’t know where they all were, but still everything was silent.

  Finally, we stopped.

  “Maybe he doesn’t live in Itaewon,” Ernie said.

  “Maybe not. In the morning we’ll ask Inspector Kill to organize a task force to search for Demoray.”

  “What did Mills say about Sonyu-ri again?”

  Before we left, I had the presence of mind to ask him about his Non-Appropriated Fund operation up north near Camp Pelham, outside of Sonyu-ri. He told me that for years some of the Korean businessmen in the area had been hosted at the meikju changgo, the beer warehouse near Camp Pelham, to a poker game sponsored out of the illicit funds from the Central Locker Fund.

  “That was Demoray’s job?”

  “Yes. He transported kisaeng up there to serve the food and drinks.”

  “One of them escaped,” I told him, “and was killed for her effort.”

  Mills shook his head, truly repentant. “It’s gotten out of hand,” he said. “I knew it would one day.”

  By the time we left, I almost felt sorry for him, but not enough to stop me from deciding to turn him in. Rick Mills had known what was going on and could’ve saved a life if he’d reported it.

  Ernie studied the quiet Itaewon night. “Let’s try one more alley. If we don’t find anything, then we might as well go back to the compound.”

  I agreed with him. We stalked up the narrow pedestrian lanes, brick and stone walls on either side, observing the moonlit night, listening for any sound. Nothing.

  Finally, we gave up and returned to Ernie’s jeep and drove slowly toward Yongsan.

  “There’s one last place we can try,” I said.

  Ernie groaned again.

  “Eighth Army Billeting,” I told him.

  The duty NCO wasn’t happy to be rousted out of his cot. He was a thin man with a heavy five o’clock shadow and a sweat-stained green T-shirt behind the dog tags chained to his neck. We flashed our badges. He rubbed his eyes.

  “Somebody rob a bank?” he asked.

  “Demoray, Master Sergeant,” Ernie said.

  The guy looked up at him and silently turned and pulled out a metal drawer from a filing cabinet that lined the back wall. He shuffled through folders and asked, “D-E-M?”

  “Right,” Ernie replied.

  They guy stopped, pulled out a folder, and said, “Building N402, Room Five.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “On Main Post. In the row behind the JUSMAG Headquarters.” Joint US Military Advisory Group.
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br />   “Thanks.”

  We ran back to the jeep.

  As we suspected, Demoray wasn’t in his room. We pounded on the door so loudly that one of the NCOs down the hall, still dressed in skivvies and a T-shirt, creaked opened his door and asked what the hell we thought we were doing.

  “Do you have a key to Room Five?” I asked, flashing my badge.

  “No. The maid keeps ’em around.”

  “Where?”

  He barged past us to the small kitchen, sparingly but routinely equipped with a refrigerator and gas stove. From a cabinet above the sink, he pulled down an MJB coffee can and tossed it to us.

  “You figure it out,” he said, and stormed down the hallway back to his room.

  The can was jammed with keys. Ernie handed them to me as I tried each one, and finally the door to Room 5 creaked open. I switched on the light.

  The bunk was regulation size and tightly made up with an army blanket with the embroidered “U.S.” centered neatly. There were no dirty clothes on the floor and no dust atop the wall locker; I would’ve thought Demoray was a fastidious guy if I didn’t know that 8th Army senior NCOs paid only thirty bucks a month for laundry and maid service. I used the keys Palinki had given me to pop open the wall locker and Ernie searched under the bunk and in the foot locker, but we found nothing that could give us a hint as to Demoray’s whereabouts. Only neatly pressed uniforms, highly polished footgear, and a drawer full of green army socks.

  “Waste of time,” Ernie said.

  I didn’t argue with him. There was a photo propped atop the dresser drawer. It was of a much younger Demoray, still sporting hair, wearing his Class A uniform and staring blankly into a camera. I showed it to Ernie.

  “His basic training graduation photo. Why would he keep that?”

  “Maybe it reminds him of a time when he was innocent.”

  I slipped the photo out of its frame and folded it into my jacket pocket. We left the room, closing the door and not bothering to lock it behind us.

  “I hope somebody rips him off,” Ernie said.

  “He can afford it.”

  Halfway down the dark hallway, I stopped.

  “What?” Ernie asked.

  I shone my flashlight on a bulletin board covered with pins and squares of multicolored paper of various sizes. They were duty rosters and notes to people who might stop by and a safety announcement from the 8th Army Fire Station. In the upper left corner, a neatly printed three-by-five card had been pinned in a prominent position.

  I took it down. “Look at this one,” I said.

  “Yeah, what about it?” Ernie replied.

  “Brush strokes. Not written with a pen like the rest of these.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “It’s an ad for some stereo equipment. Cheap. ‘See Demoray in Room 5.’”

  “Not much of a clue.”

  “Except for the writing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look how neat it is.”

  Ernie studied the card closer. “Yeah, pretty clean.”

  “Almost artistic,” I said.

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “Did you see any writing brushes in his room?”

  “No. Maybe we missed them.”

  “We didn’t miss them.”

  “So he keeps them someplace else.”

  “At his hooch off-post.”

  “Right.” Ernie thought about that. “A lot of good it does us. It doesn’t tell us where his hooch is.”

  “No, but it does tell us something—he’s our calligrapher.”

  After a few hours’ sleep, we were back at the 8th Army CID Office.

  “You’re late,” Riley said. “The provost marshal wants to talk to you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Already gone to the morning chief of staff briefing. But he’s mad as hell about you two barging in on the Eighth Army Comptroller’s Office like that. He wants you both standing tall, right here, when he returns.”

  “Can’t,” I told Riley.

  “What the hell do you mean, can’t?”

  “We have a murder investigation to conduct. Somebody’s life could be in danger.” Like the little kisaeng. But I didn’t tell him that. The less Eighth Army knew, the better. Less of an excuse for them to micromanage. Ernie and I started walking away.

  “Where the hell do you two think you’re going?” Riley shouted, red-faced.

  “To see Mr. Kill,” I told him.

  He waved his forefinger at us. “Your ass will be in the wringer.”

  “It’s been there before,” Ernie said, not looking back.

  When we arrived, the Itaewon Police Station was swarming with cops. Mr. Kill was already in conference with Captain Kim. After a few minutes, Mr. Kill came out and said, “No luck at the bokdok-bangs.” The local real estate brokers who routinely dealt in the rental of apartments and small hooches.

  I showed him the photograph of Demoray.

  “This will help,” he said. I explained that Demoray was much younger then and completely bald now. He handed the photograph of Officer Oh, who marched away with it toward the detail of cops waiting outside.

  “There’s one person who knows where Demoray lives—the Ville Rat. Ernie and I are going to look for him.”

  “He’s elusive.”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  Before we left Itaewon, we stopped at Haggler Lee’s. He confirmed what I suspected: on Thursday, the Ville Rat would be making his largest delivery of the week to the numerous all-black clubs outside of the 2nd Infantry Division headquarters at Camp Casey, in the city known as Tongduchon. East Bean River.

  After spending an hour fighting our way north through Seoul traffic, it took another hour to reach the outskirts of Tongduchon; not because of the road conditions, but because of the long waits at the three ROK Army checkpoints. As you left Seoul and approached the Demilitarized Zone, they became more prevalent, but each time our CID emergency dispatch got us through. When we reached the sign that said welcome to tongduchon, Ernie found a parking spot on the edge of the bar district and we hoofed it the rest of the way.

  Ernie and I’d been to the Black Cat Club before. Nobody remembered us fondly, least of all the few black GIs playing pool in the dimly lit main hall. They glared at us, as if we only had bad news to bring. When we sat at the bar, Ernie ordered a brown bottle of OB. I asked the barmaid for a Colt 45.

  She popped open Ernie’s bottle and then stared at me quizzically. “You white GI. Why you order Colt 45?”

  “A friend of ours made a delivery. Maeul ui jwi.”

  “Oh, he told me most tick you come.”

  “He told you we would come?”

  She reached in the cooler and pulled out the Colt 45. “Yeah,” she said, “two white GIs from Seoul.”

  “When did he bring this in?” Ernie asked, pointing at the Colt 45.

  “Maybe one hour ago,” she said.

  “Where is he now?”

  She shrugged her slender shoulders. “How I know?”

  A few of the GIs were staring at us, realizing we were interrogating the barmaid. Since they were eavesdropping now, I flipped through my mental rolodex until I found a safe topic. A possible mutual acquaintance.

  “Where’s Brandy?” I asked.

  Her eyes widened. “You know Brandy?”

  “Yes. Yeitnal chingu,” I said. Old friend. We’d met Brandy on a previous case we had up here in Tongduchon. She’d been a lot of help to us and, in return, we later helped her out of a jam she’d gotten herself into concerning a jealous GI. Anyone who looked at her would realize immediately why the GI was jealous. Brandy was one of the finest-looking women in the village.

  Three GIs approached, two of them with pool cues in their hands. “Yo! You messing wit
h our girlfriend? You messing with the Black Cat Club?”

  “Nobody’s messing with nobody,” I said.

  “The hell you ain’t. You be asking a bunch of dumbass questions.”

  “Like I said, nobody’s messing with anybody.”

  “Then why don’t you take your honky-ass selves outta this place where you ain’t wanted?”

  Like a brown missile, a beer bottle flew past my ear. It missed me and smashed into the face of the guy talking. Ernie shot past me on my left and rammed the heavy barstool into the raised forearms of the guy who’d thrown the bottle. I leapt forward and jerked a pool cue from the hands of one of the surprised GIs and started swinging. The two guys still standing backed off. The few other customers in the bar just stared.

  “Where’s Brandy live?” I shouted back at the barmaid.

  She fiddled with the locks behind the bar and said in Korean, “Out back. I’ll show you.”

  The three enforcers of racial purity didn’t follow.

  Brandy slid back the oil-papered door and stared at us in surprise. Her hair still radiated from her head in a dark bouffant Afro, but her eyes were even wider than I remembered. Since we’d last seen her, she must’ve handed over more of her hard-earned money to a plastic surgeon.

  “Geogie,” she said. “Ernie. Long time no see, short time how you been?”

  “Yeah, long time, Brandy. You still sexy.”

  She struck a pose with her hand on her hip and said, “Gotta be.” Then her round face turned serious. “You look Ville Rat.”

  “Yes,” I answered. “Is he still here?”

  “No. He go.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. But he say you gotta go someplace.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Inchon.”

  “Inchon? Where in Inchon?”

  “I don’t know. Anyplace. He say you figure it out.”

  “Inchon’s a big city,” I said.

  Brandy nodded. “No soul brothers there.”

  “So the Ville Rat won’t be able to sell Colt 45.”

  She nodded again.

  “So what’s special about Inchon?” Ernie asked.

  “How I know?” Brandy was impatient now, fiddling with a pack of PX-purchased cigarettes. “You go find out.” She waved her hand dismissively.