Ping-Pong Heart

by Martin Limon

  “So she’ll be across the bridge, where the lifers hang out.”

  “Lifer” is the derogatory term young GIs use for the older NCOs who’ve made the army their career.

  “Worth a shot,” I said.

  We left the neon behind and made our way through muddy lanes to the footbridge across the East Bean River. Lights spread up and down the water, flickering from the backs of hovels and dilapidated two-story buildings that housed the working-class families who made their livings off the meager economy that Camp Casey provided. During the day, acres of laundry fluttered on lines like the flags of a Mongol army. But now, at night, back windows were lit up in a checkerboard pattern and the steady buzz of radios and television sets was interspersed with the occasional shouts of children, the clang of pots and pans and the wailing cries of infants.

  On the far side, we turned north toward the branch of the Military Supply Route that ran west from Camp Casey. Eventually the road would cross the small mountain range dividing the Eastern and Western Corridors.

  Finally we hit neon. Not as much as on the main drag of TDC, but enough to make us feel at home.

  “There it is,” Ernie said, pointing to a sign about fifty yards ahead: the cherry girl club.

  We walked quickly, our hands buried deep in our coat pockets. The night was becoming colder.

  ■ ■ ■

  We decided not to take the direct approach. Better to play it low-key and check out the lay of the land. A few NCOs in civvies sat at the bar. We steered away from them, settled into a booth, and ordered a pitcher of OB. Ernie splurged for a plate of daegu-po, strips of dried cuttlefish with a dip of red pepper paste.

  “You’re hungry,” I said after the waitress brought our beer and snacks.

  “So are you,” he said.

  Our server was a husky woman who wore short yellow pants and a pullover sleeveless blouse. She could get away with such skimpy attire because the Cherry Girl Club had an Army-issue diesel space heater on either side of the twenty-yard long barroom. Her nameplate read miss noh.

  “We’re hungry,” Ernie told Miss Noh as he paid her for the beer and daegu-po. “Where’s a good place to eat?”

  “Sell hamburger here,” she said.

  “What kind of meat?”

  She crinkled her round nose. “Maybe not good like compound.”

  “You’ve been on the compound?” Ernie asked.

  “Sure. My yobo take me.”

  “You have a steady yobo?”

  “Of course. Supposed to.”

  “Is that a rule here?”

  She grew exasperated. “What you mean?”

  “I mean a friend of mine back Stateside, he used to steady a woman here. A woman who works at the Cherry Club.”

  Miss Noh sat down, mildly interested. “What her name?”

  Ernie told her. “Miss Lee,” he said.

  Miss Noh held up three fingers. “We have three Miss Lee work here.”

  “Three? Damn. Where are they?”

  “Most tick they come. Early now. Most GI, they get off work, eat in mess hall, take shower, change clothes. Maybe they get here seven o’clock. Maybe eight.”

  “And that’s when the other waitresses come in?” I asked.

  She pondered what I’d said, processing the English. “Yeah. Most girl come in eight o’clock.” She turned back to Ernie. “What’s your chingu name?”

  Ernie didn’t want to say Arenas. It might ring alarm bells. “Schultz,” he replied.

  “Schultz?” Miss Noh pronounced carefully. Ernie nodded.

  “When they come, I ask,” she said.

  Most of the hostesses and waitresses and business girls knew each other by either their family name or a nickname they used at the club. Seldom would their first name be offered, because that was considered to be private, almost sacred, and not something to be spread around. So it wasn’t unusual that Miss Noh knew three Miss Lees but didn’t bother asking for a first name, since she wouldn’t recognize it anyway.

  We ordered the hamburgers Miss Noh had mentioned. They were as bad as implied. But the fries were okay, as was the sliced cucumber.

  As we sat in the booth, I studied the Arenas file. The case against him had been based primarily on the testimony of his yobo, Miss Lee Suk-myong, and that of a black marketeer named “Nam,” who’d allegedly introduced Arenas to an unnamed North Korean agent. Nam, when used as a family name, is usually represented by the Chinese character for “south”—pretty ironic, for someone doing business with a North Korean agent. Quite a few things were strange about the Arenas case. First and foremost was that the 501st had busted Arenas early on, when normal procedure would’ve been to observe and follow him, waiting patiently for the opportunity to take down his handler and this mysterious North Korean agent. As it turned out, the agent never appeared, and they couldn’t even find Nam and take him into custody. Only Miss Lee and Staff Sergeant Arenas had been arrested. The paperwork indicated that Miss Lee had made a deal with the Korean prosecutor and gotten off with time served in exchange for her testimony against her former yobo.

  “Bullshit case,” Ernie said. “If we brought something like that to the Provost Marshal, he’d kick us out of his office.”

  “Especially since they didn’t arrest the most important person in this whole drama. The still-anonymous North Korean spy.”

  Ernie poured himself more beer.

  I wasn’t worried about him getting wasted—I didn’t figure we’d be doing any more driving tonight. When the time came, we’d just find a cheap room in a yoguan, a Korean inn, or even more economically, a couple of sleeping mats in a community room of a traditional establishment known as a yoin-suk. I’d spotted a few on the way over.

  “What did Arenas give up?” Ernie asked.

  “You mean, what classified information was compromised?”

  “What’d I just say?”

  Ernie was getting irritable. I flipped through the pages in the file. “Staff Sergeant Arenas worked at the Camp Red Cloud Communications Center. As such, he had access to classified information all the way up to Secret. He occasionally hand-carried Top Secret documents to and from the I Corps Headquarters, since he was cleared for that.”

  “But he wasn’t supposed to read them,” Ernie said.

  “No. Just determine where the document should be routed, then deliver it.”

  “But he could’ve read them because he had his hands on them.”

  “Sure. If he was careful, he could’ve even made a copy. Not authorized, but there’s one of those big Xerox machines in the Commo Center.” I pointed at the paragraph I was scanning. “Says so right here.”

  “Okay, so he had access to Top Secret information. How do they know he stole any of it?”

  “Testimony of his girl.”

  “The woman we’re waiting for.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s it? They didn’t have anything else?”

  “She says this guy Nam showed up, all good looks and nice clothes and personality, and started taking Arenas out to those kisaeng houses down south on the outskirts of Seoul.” Kisaeng are female entertainers, typically skilled in the art of catering to wealthy clientele. “According to her, Arenas went along with it and even spent nights away from home.”

  “She was jealous that he was out with Nam all the time.”

  “Maybe. Or jealous of the money Arenas was spending on some kisaeng instead of her.”

  “But what about the actual leak of classified info? What does the file say about that?”

  I thumbed through it, twisting the pages as I read in order to catch more of the words in the dim light. I went through the file once, then back through it again.

  “It doesn’t say anything about that. It only has testimony from one of the GIs who worked for Arenas, who talked about how he
would sometimes sneak off to the copy room by himself, then bring back pages and not show them to anyone.”

  “Sounds pretty flimsy to me.” Ernie glugged back more beer. “Did Arenas build up a lot of cash in his bank account, or buy money orders and mail them home?”

  “If he did, it doesn’t appear here.”

  “So the main thing is that at least one of his subordinates didn’t like him, which isn’t unusual, and his girlfriend was jealous that he had a rich buddy who took him to party with a bunch of kisaeng.”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  Ernie shook his head. “No wonder they keep these proceedings in camera. Who’d want that out in the world? Did Arenas hire a Stateside lawyer?”

  I flipped back to the appendix. “No. He was represented by military counsel.”

  “Mistake,” Ernie said.

  “The biggest thing that the prosecution harped on was that there were Top Secret documents not properly logged in and out. This happened right in the middle of Sergeant Arenas’s shift—he was the NCO in charge.”

  “Did other GIs have access to the login and logout register?”

  I studied the statements. “Yes.”

  “But Arenas was the man in charge.”

  “For that shift, yes. He was the ranking man in the Commo Center during the hours the documents in question were supposed to have been logged in and logged out.”

  Ernie polished off his beer and ordered another. “So somebody was taking shortcuts and not following procedure. Christ, we could put away half the US Army if that’s the standard. Does the file say why the counter-intel pukes didn’t go after this guy Nam?”

  “Not a word,” I said.

  “Figures. They didn’t want to embarrass themselves. Maybe because he doesn’t exist.”

  After about twenty minutes, a half-dozen hostesses entered the Cherry Girl Club. Three were named Miss Lee. Miss Noh wasted no time. She cornered them all as they were taking off their coats, speaking rapidly, and once she had their attention, she pointed toward us. After a quick trip to the ladies’ room, two of the women came over and sat down next to us. We didn’t want to waste time buying them drinks if we didn’t have to, so I immediately asked if either of them was Lee Suk-myong. My abruptness was rude, but I could tell by their baffled reaction that neither was the woman we were looking for.

  I watched the far side of the bar, and from the ladies’ room emerged the third Miss Lee. Her head was down and her coat was back on. She shuffled quickly back toward the door she’d first entered through.

  “Come on,” I said to Ernie, and started to get up.

  The Miss Lee next to me pouted and grabbed my wrist. I ripped my hand away and almost dumped her out of the booth, though at the last minute she managed to keep on her feet. Then I hurried across the barroom and hit the far door, and outside I saw our prospective Miss Lee Suk-myong hail a cab. She climbed in, and before I could position myself in front of the cab to block it, it sped off, drenching my blue jeans with water. I ran after it, glimpsing part of the license plate.

  “Damn!” Ernie said, sprinting up to my side.

  But I was already waving my arms frantically, and another taxi emerged out of the night. We hopped in and I yelled the Korean equivalent of “Follow that cab!”

  He did. And then I told him to step on it, which in Korean is bali, bali. Quickly, quickly.

  -23-

  When Miss Lee Suk-myong climbed out of her cab, she was not in front of a yoguan, a yoin-suk or even a hooch, but rather the one place in town that was reminiscent of a Western-style hotel: the Tower Hotel. Six stories high and easily the tallest building in Tongduchon, it held preeminence of place. It sat across the street, and only a quarter mile south from the main gate of Camp Casey. Many of the guests at the Tower Hotel were military officers on temporary duty from elsewhere in Korea or from the United States. As such, the Tower Hotel billed the US government directly for rooms. The hotel lobby had a Western-style coffee shop, which provided food and coffee of poor quality and was therefore usually empty. The Americans who stayed at the Tower seldom ate or drank there, since they could just take a short walk across the street and enter the pedestrian gate to Camp Casey, where they could find much better, more reasonably priced food and drink at the 2nd Infantry Division Officers Club.

  But the hotel also had an elegant bar called the Tower Lounge. It was carpeted and softly lit, with comfortably upholstered chairs and waitresses in short skirts, all providing an air of American-style elegance. As such, it was extremely popular not with Americans, but with upwardly mobile young Koreans.

  Miss Lee paid the cabbie and entered the front door of the Tower Hotel.

  We ordered our driver to cruise past slowly.

  “She can’t afford to live here,” Ernie said.

  “No.”

  “So what’s she up to?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  I told the driver to pull over about ten yards past the hotel entrance. Ernie paid him and we emerged from the cramped kimchi cab into the cold night.

  “Maybe only one of us should go in,” I said. “She knows two guys are looking for her. If she only sees one, that might throw her off.”

  I slipped out of my jacket and handed it to Ernie. Beneath, I wore a long-sleeved blue sports shirt with a buttoned-down collar. “If I’m not wearing a jacket,” I said, “she might think I’m staying at the hotel.”

  “Unless she took a real good look at us at the Cherry Girl Club.”

  “I don’t think she did,” I said. “At least, I hope not.”

  Ernie pointed to a yakbang, a pharmacy, on the other side of the street. “I’ll go get the jeep,” he said, “it’s not far from here. I’ll be waiting in front of that pharmacy.”

  “Good.”

  Ernie trotted off and quickly faded into darkness. After he was gone, I turned, walked up the street, and pushed through the large glass front doors of the Tower Hotel.

  Our goal was to prove what Major Schultz’s inspection report implied: that the 501st Military Intelligence agents were jerry-rigging investigations to make themselves look effective, and to expand both the unit’s budget and the reputation of its Commander, Captain Blood. Given the paranoia of the military officers who sat on court-martial juries—men who saw Commies behind every bedpost—it wasn’t too far-fetched to think that they would set aside their better judgment and go along, at least sometimes, with the counterintelligence “experts” of the 501st. No officer wanted to be seen as soft on Communism, not if he had any ambition in this man’s army.

  The case against Staff Sergeant Hector Arenas seemed, thus far, to meet all the criteria of a sham trial. A guy who worked with classified documents, whose yobo was angry with him, and who had somehow become friends with a mysterious Korean named Nam. Money, sex, glory, and anti-Communism can all become a jumble in the fevered military mind. Under those conditions, a miscarriage of justice can occur. And I could see Captain Blood and the agents who worked for him panicking when Major Schultz threatened to expose them. But did it amount to murder?

  It seemed like something was missing. There had to be more in order to push someone to hacking a field grade officer to death. But what was that something? If I could establish a motive in the Provost Marshal’s mind, we might receive clearance to investigate further. But to establish that motive, I needed one last thing: the testimony of Arenas’s girlfriend, Miss Lee Suk-myong. Not the official testimony she’d given to the court-martial, but her real testimony, right here in the center of Tongduchon, with no counterintelligence agents to protect her and no lawyers to promise her immunity.

  I wanted to hear it straight. In Korean, English, or any other language she wanted, as long as she didn’t lie.

  The Tower Hotel Lounge was dimly, tastefully lit and true to form; about a half-dozen tables were occupied, mostly by Korean men in sui
ts, and in some cases, well-attired ladies accompanying them. But mostly it was men—discussing business, I imagined, although I couldn’t make out much amidst the jumble of conversation.

  At a two-person table against the far wall, the woman I believed to be Lee Suk-myong sat across from a Korean man in a dark suit who blended in perfectly with the crowd. I took a closer look at her. She projected elegance, with a smooth complexion and a narrow face that tapered to a round chin. She also dressed better than I would’ve expected for a night’s work at a joint like the Cherry Girl Club. She wore a silk dress, beige with a light blue and pink flower pattern. She appeared to be in her late twenties, maybe her thirties, but she was a woman whose delicate features held aging at bay, at least for a half-decade or so longer than her contemporaries.

  The man across from her was youngish, clearly in his thirties, and sported a well-tailored suit. He leaned his elbow on the white linen tablecloth, his palm up and a cigarette balanced between his fingertips. As Miss Lee spoke, he puffed on the cigarette, narrowing his eyes to avoid the fumes.

  I sat at the far end of the bar with my back to the couple, as close as I could get without attracting attention. I ordered a Heineken, and a young Korean man wearing a black vest and matching bowtie opened it and poured frothing hops into a frosted pilsner. Suddenly, I realized that I didn’t have any Korean money, but when I pulled out a single US dollar, he looked at it, frowned, and told me I’d need another. I pulled out the second bill, trying to hide my outrage. In my entire life, I’d never paid two dollars for a beer, not in the US or in Korea. I reminded myself I was on an expense account and tried to calm down. The kid brought me two hundred won in change, which meant that I’d paid about a dollar sixty-five for the beer. A record for me.

  Up-and-coming Koreans, especially those who fancied themselves to be in business, loved nothing more than to be spotted at an expensive place, paying too much for something—anything—especially if it was imported. The Tower Hotel Lounge—and the overpriced Heineken—fit the bill.