Ping-Pong Heart

by Martin Limon

  “You two are to go nowhere,” Riley said. “As soon as the Colonel returns from the briefing, he wants to chew your butts personally.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “For not making progress on the Schultz case and for interfering with counterintelligence operations.”

  “Interfering? How did we do that?”

  “You questioned Captain Blood, didn’t you, at the Five Oh First?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Without the Provost Marshal’s approval?”

  “We didn’t arrest him, for Christ sake, we just tried to ask him a few questions. None of which he answered, by the way.”

  I was about to add that he’d threatened me but thought better of it. The fewer people who knew about Il-yong’s mother being a fugitive from ROK authorities, the better.

  “Max nix,” Riley said. “The Colonel doesn’t want you questioning field grade officers without first receiving his express permission.”

  Ernie returned with a mug of coffee. “He’s not a field grade officer. He’s a captain.”

  “But he’s in charge of the Five Oh First, which is a battalion, so he’s operating at a field grade level.”

  We both shook our heads. Forcing us to ask permission to talk to people was a clear indication that the PMO didn’t approve of where our investigation was heading. It also indicated the elevated status that Captain Blood enjoyed amongst the 8th Army Officer Corps. Why? Was it the force of his personality? Or another, more unsettling reason? I suspected it had something to do with the almost inquisitorial power Blood had managed to accumulate. He could accuse anyone of espionage. Or if not that, of somehow being a dupe for North Korean Communist agents. Such an accusation would ruin an officer’s career, or worse, send him to the federal pen.

  “Fine, if we can’t ask him,” I said, “we’ll ask you. Did you find out anything else about Captain Blood?”

  Last night, while we were polishing off his bottle of rye, Riley’d agreed to make inquiries with his 8th Army contacts in Personnel.

  “I called Smitty,” he told me.

  Sergeant Smith was another workaholic, like Riley, who invariably arrived at the 8th Army Personnel Office at least an hour early each morning.

  “What’d he say?”

  “Blood is overdue for a promotion. It’ll be up-or-out for him at the next promotion board.”

  Up-or-out was the shorthand term for the US Army’s policy of getting rid of officers, or enlisted men, who didn’t receive their next promotion in a reasonable period of time. Once an officer was promoted to captain, he was not eligible for promotion for three years. After that, he was considered for promotion to major in each annual promotion board, held in the Army Personnel Headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. If he was passed over for promotion three times, he’d be asked to leave the service. This meant Captain Blood had been passed over twice; this year was his last chance. Which possibly explained how uptight he’d been about me and Ernie asking questions. A bad mark on his personnel record at this point would mean he’d be toast on the next promotion board, then tossed out of the army and back onto the street as a “silly-vilian,” which maybe doesn’t mean much to non-military people. But when you’ve been in command of over forty soldiers and overseen a budget of tens of thousands of dollars, it’s not easy to go hat in hand to an employment agency, seeking work as a temp. Sure, maybe he could build himself a new life as a civilian—many GIs who’ve been forced out of the service had—but with his temper and his arrogance, it didn’t seem likely that Captain Blood would resign himself to pounding the pavement and begging for a job.

  “By the way,” Riley said, “Smitty told me Blood had a legal name change. When he joined the service as a private-E-nothing, his name was Vladimir Bludovsky, from Buffalo, New York.”

  Ernie slurped his coffee. “Cold up in Buffalo.”

  “That’s what they tell me,” Riley said. “And not too many guys named Lance.”

  I rose from my chair, walked over to the coffee pot and pulled myself a cup. Black. When I returned, I glanced at Miss Kim’s desk for the first time this morning. Her vase was gone, as was its flower, and the adjacent box of tissue.

  “Where’s Miss Kim?” I asked.

  Riley shook his head and studied the paperwork in front of him. He didn’t answer.

  Ernie looked at her desk too. “Everything’s gone,” he said. “No more Black Dragon tea.”

  We both loomed over Riley. “What is it?” I asked.

  His voice came out garbled, as if he were choking back tears. I don’t believe I’d ever seen him so emotional. Maybe the one time he accidentally dropped his bottle of Old Overwart and it shattered all over the barracks floor, but that was it.

  “She quit,” Riley said.

  “What?” Then I said, “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “Not to me. The Colonel took her into his office and had a long talk with her. He didn’t want to lose her, she was the best admin assistant we’ve ever had.”

  For once, Riley didn’t use the word “secretary.”

  “So what did the Colonel say?” Ernie asked. “Why’d she quit?”

  Riley shook his head more vehemently this time. “He told me that she wouldn’t tell him. She just said that she had to leave the job.”

  If anybody was responsible for us losing Miss Kim, it had to be Ernie. Both Riley and I stared at him. Finally, I said it. “You followed her onto the bus.”

  “Hey, don’t blame me,” he said, pointing at his chest. “I didn’t do nothing. I caught up with her after her stop and she didn’t want to talk to me, but I finally convinced her to have one cup of coffee with me at a teahouse. We just talked. I was a perfect gentleman.”

  We continued to glare at him.

  “Honest!” he said. For the first time since I’d known him, Ernie Bascom was on the defensive. “She told me she wouldn’t go out with me. I accepted that.” He glanced back and forth between me and Riley. “It’s not my fault,” he said. “Or at least it’s not anything I did to her.” He thought about it. “Not lately, anyway.”

  I turned to Riley. “Do you have her address of record?”

  Without hesitation, he pulled out a five-by-eight card with all her pertinent data, even her Korean National Identification Number.

  “Can I keep this?”

  “I wrote it out for you.”

  I slipped the card into my jacket pocket.

  “Go talk to her,” Riley said. “Tell her we need her here.”

  “A little late for you to admit that,” I told him.

  Riley’s face turned red. He didn’t make a rude retort, which is what I’d expected. For the first time since I’d known him, I almost felt sorry for him. Not quite, but almost.

  -19-

  Maybe it was to take our minds off of Miss Kim. But mainly, we knew it was time, so Ernie and I drove downtown to KNP headquarters. We wanted to check in with Mr. Kill concerning their progress on the investigation into Major Schultz’s death and the whereabouts of Miss Jo Kyong-ja. I also had a few other questions for him.

  After we checked in at the front desk, Officer Oh appeared almost immediately. She escorted us upstairs to Kill’s office. He sat stone-faced at his desk, his jacket hanging on a hook behind him. “No progress,” he told us. “No hint of the location of Miss Jo Kyong-ja, even though every KNP station in the country has been notified. Mokpo tells me you paid them a visit.”

  “We wanted to see her mother’s home,” I said.

  He cocked an eyebrow. “What did you think?”

  “Dirt-poor,” Ernie replied.

  Kill sighed. “For my country, it’s been a long, slow fight out of poverty. Many tragedies.”

  “And no one’s found an unidentified female body?” I asked.

 
He shook his head.

  “So she still might be alive?”

  “She might.”

  Officer Oh brought in a stainless steel tray with a bronze pot of hot water, three cups, a box of Lipton tea bags and a squat jar of Folger’s Instant Crystals, plus some creamer and sugar. She set it on the long coffee table in the center of Mr. Kill’s office, and he came out from behind his desk and joined us, serving himself. Officer Oh asked if he needed anything else, and he told her no, that she could leave. On her way out, I thanked her. Her face impassive, she nodded back.

  Once the three of us were alone, Ernie said, “You know that crime scene is phony.”

  Kill didn’t reply. He just stirred coffee crystals into hot water and ladled in a heaping spoonful of sugar. “Phony in what way?”

  Ernie explained how there really wasn’t enough blood, and that the blood that had been there looked as if it had been purposefully splashed. And that there wasn’t a big enough mess. Not enough broken bottles or smashed wooden crates.

  “Major Schultz was a husky guy,” Ernie said. “If he’d been fighting for his life, there would’ve been more damage.”

  Kill sipped on his coffee. Then he set the cup down, looked at Ernie and then looked at me. “Yes, that’s what I thought, too. And after our analysis, that conclusion is confirmed. There’s little doubt that the body was transported from somewhere else and left behind the Dragon King Nightclub. Probably sometime during the midnight-to-four curfew.”

  “Meaning it couldn’t have been done with a civilian vehicle,” I said.

  “No,” Kill agreed, “to be out after curfew, it would have to be a military or police conveyance. Something on official government business, anyway.”

  “Or he could’ve been carried there,” Ernie said.

  “Yes. Even during the curfew, our foot patrols can only cover so much territory. A couple of thugs could’ve carried the corpse there, dumped it, and done their best to replicate a murder scene. However, if that’s what happened, they couldn’t have carried him far.”

  “Too heavy and too high a chance of being spotted.”

  “Exactly. So I had a dozen officers canvass the area, checking for evidence, asking questions of nearby residents. I even have them checking trash-collector pushcarts for traces of blood. The circle around the crime scene keeps growing, but so far they’ve found nothing.”

  “So transport of the corpse by motor vehicle seems most likely.”

  Kill nodded.

  We sat silent for a minute. Then I said, “Who?”

  “That’s the question,” Kill replied. “So what do we ask next?”

  He was treating us like students. Personally, I didn’t mind. He’d been a homicide investigator for over twenty years, the best Korea had, and I was more than willing to learn. I’m not so sure Ernie was thrilled with us receiving the subordinate treatment, but he kept quiet.

  “Motive,” I said. “That’s what we have to look at next.”

  “Miss Jo had a motive,” Inspector Kill said. “He had accused her of being a thief and her landlady, backed up by the Itaewon police, was making her life hell.”

  KNPs can literally run a business girl out of town if she makes trouble and embarrasses them, especially when it has to do with the US military.

  “She could’ve just moved to another GI village,” Ernie said.

  “Without her clothes? Without money? You saw what she already had to do, start work in a brothel. Maybe it doesn’t seem like much to us, but to her it must’ve been a hideous shame. And she must’ve blamed Major Schultz for losing what little she had.”

  “Not to mention,” Ernie added, “she claims he beat her up.”

  “Or his accomplice did.”

  “So she had a motive,” I said, “but physically, I don’t see how she could’ve done it. Yes, maybe if she’d surprised him with a knife or a hatchet, she might’ve been able to kill him, but how would she then have transported the body to the Dragon King Nightclub?”

  Kill shrugged. “Someone could’ve helped her. Like the men who attacked you and made possible her escape.”

  My head pulsed painfully at the thought.

  “Seems too elaborate,” Ernie said. “Who wants to risk their life for a business girl?”

  “Yes,” Kill agreed. “But this involves international politics. An American field grade officer has been killed, and the Korean government is extremely embarrassed. If there’s some way to wrap the case up quickly and make it seem like nothing more than a straightforward criminal matter, they’ll do it. They’re already pressuring me to find her and close the case.”

  “If you find her,” I asked, “will you charge her with the murder?”

  “I will have no choice,” he told us. “The decision will be made, how do you say, above my pay grade.”

  “She’ll be convicted and thrown in jail, and the embarrassment will be over.”

  Kill poured more hot water into his cup. “Exactly,” he said. “Unless you two figure out who else might’ve had a motive to kill Major Schultz.”

  “We’re working on that,” Ernie said.

  “You’d better work fast. Once we find Miss Jo Kyong-ja, she’ll be on trial within days.”

  “How long do you figure the trial will last?” I asked.

  Mr. Kill grimaced. “Maybe past noon,” he said. “Probably not.”

  Ernie dropped me off at the 121st Evac Hospital on Yongsan South Post. He drove away to top off the jeep, and we would rendezvous at the barracks in an hour. We had a plan, but in order to implement it, we had to stay away from the Provost Marshal for as long as possible.

  I made my way to the officers’ lunchroom.

  Inside the double doors, a steam table stretched along a serving line, and to the left were rows of about two-dozen Formica-topped tables. I wore the civilian coat and tie required of a CID agent on duty so no one questioned my presence. She was there, sitting alone at a table in the far corner. I zigzagged my way through the boisterous crowd of nurses in their starched white uniforms and absentminded doctors with stethoscopes still hanging around their necks. When I approached, she looked up. Her eyes were large and moist, and when she saw me she dropped her spoon and looked away. Before she could object, I sat down opposite her.

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “No need,” she said.

  “Of course there’s a need.” There was no one in earshot, but nevertheless I lowered my voice. I didn’t wait for her permission, and just started talking fast, so she couldn’t interrupt; something I don’t normally do. I told her about my childhood, about my mother dying when I was small and being abandoned by my father, and what it was like growing up in one foster home after another.

  “It wasn’t all bad,” I told her. “Many of my foster parents were good people, but at a certain age I would be shuffled to another home, ripped away from the other foster kids, who’d become like brothers and sisters to me. It was confusing. And as soon as I became a teenager, I grew as tall as a man, and stronger, and suddenly my presence made people nervous. As soon as I could, I joined the Army.”

  Captain Leah Prevault listened patiently, staring at her unfinished bowl of navy bean soup.

  “My greatest fear,” I told her, “was to have a child I couldn’t take care of. And now, because of this oppressive South Korean regime, that’s the situation I’m in. If I could’ve rectified that, if it had ever become possible for Yong In-ja and me to get back together and raise our son, that’s always what I would’ve done. Regardless of how my feelings for her might’ve evolved, I’d have done it for him.”

  She finally looked up at me. “And you’d do it now.”

  “You’ve changed everything,” I said.

  She studied me, gauging my sincerity. “But you can’t be sure.”

  I broke from her gaze. “Right now it’s impos
sible for me to see Il-yong’s mother. She’s a fugitive. If the Korean CIA catches her, they’ll interrogate her, torture her, and probably execute her without a trial. So planning our future is moot. But politics are funny. There could be a revolution tomorrow, Pak Chung-hee could be overthrown and suddenly she’d be able to come out in the open. That’s why I’m hesitant.”

  “As unlikely as that is,” she said, “you don’t want to bet against the chance that it might happen.”

  “I never want to mislead you.”

  She sat quietly for a moment, then said, “So what do you want to do?”

  I really, honestly searched for an answer. I detest people who default to saying they don’t know the answer to a question because it involves something as difficult as thought. Or something more complex, like reflecting on your own emotions. But finally, I had to give her my honest answer. “I don’t know.”

  “And me?” she asked. “What am I supposed to do?”

  When I didn’t reply, she pushed her soup away. “I have to think about this,” she told me.

  Helplessly, I watched her make her way through the crowded lunchroom, ignoring the few people who greeted her. One of the nurses a few tables away had been watching us. She glared at me as if I’d done something wrong. I probably had.

  -20-

  “Where the hell is this address, anyway?” Ernie asked.

  We were in the Taehyon-dong district of Seoul, which was packed with bean curd eateries, bicycle repair shops and small stationery stores on the main road, and homes stacked one atop another like tile shingles leading up the sides of the steep hills.

  “Slow down,” I said, “I can’t read the signs.”

  Behind us, impatient kimchi cabs and three-wheeled trucks honked as they swerved around us. Pedestrian crossings were packed with men pushing carts and old women balancing impossibly huge bundles atop their heads.