by Martin Limon
The great socialist leader sat back down at his desk. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?”
“It’s about Spec-4 Watkins. He’s just been arrested under suspicion of murder. He also has a marriage packet in with Miss Pak Ok-suk, the woman who was killed the night before last out in Itaewon.”
Sturdivant’s sloe eyes closed and then opened slowly.
“Watkins. Watkins.” He thumbed through a box jammed with three-by-five index cards. “I don’t remember him. I should. There’s just so many of them.” He stopped riffling through the box and pulled out a card. “Here it is. Watkins, John B. And Miss Pak Ok-suk. The paperwork’s already been logged in, the interview conducted, and the packet briefed at the chief of staff meeting. It should be on its way to personnel.” He looked up at us. “If it’s not there already. For that you’ll have to check with PFC Hurchek.”
“Do you remember anything specific about your interview with Specialist Watkins and Miss Pak?”
“Oh God, no. There’s just so many I have to conduct. It seems like half of the young GIs who come to Korea are getting married. They’re just so impressionable. So easily fooled.” Chaplain Sturdivant shook his head. “You can’t believe some of the cases I’ve had. Just last week a young boy, twenty-one, was set to marry an old Korean business girl. Thirtyseven, she said. I wondered if the family register hadn’t been tampered with, because she looked older. And the report from the Korean National Police! She’s had seven abortions. Seven! When I told this young man about it, he didn’t even blink. He just said, ‘Oh yeah, she told me.’ Can you believe it.”
We believed it. Sturdivant went right on.
“When they got in here I did everything I could to slam her, make her ashamed of what she was doing, but do you think it had any effect? None. And the simpleminded trooper just sat through the whole thing with his mouth open. It had no effect on him. He’s going to take that hideous old creature home to his parents. To his mother! It just never ceases to amaze me. And we’ve got stacks of paperwork. Poor Hurchek has to stay here late at night just to make sure that all the packets get out to personnel in some sort of timely fashion.”
Sturdivant’s hands clenched one another; back and forth, back and forth. He sighed.
“And the command briefings. I usually take a whole box of packets over there, brief the chief of staff on the statistics, and show them some of the more unusual cases. I get more attention at my briefing than even your boss, the provost marshal, gets when he briefs the black-market statistics. Like when I told them about that thirtyseven-year-old whore. I asked her what her real age was and she said, ‘Me thirtyseven. No bullshit.”’
The chaplain paused, pleased with his anecdote. His grin fell when he saw me and Ernie just staring back. He sat up straighter. I got back to business.
“Would looking at the packet help jog your memory about Watkins and Miss Pak?”
“Miss? Why do you keep calling her Miss? As if she’s not just a business girl?”
Ernie leaned forward. “You know, Chaplain Sturdivant, with all due respect to your rank, you’re just about the tightest little asshole I’ve ever met.”
The chaplain turned red and stood up. So did Ernie. I grabbed my partner and walked him towards the door. ‘Thanks for your help, sir. We got all the information we need.”
Later that afternoon I slid in the side door of the chapel and found Hurchek alone in his office. He showed me the packet on Watkins and Miss Pak and I leafed through it quickly. There was a tag on it, a routing slip, with some scribbled initials. I asked him about it and he checked his log.
The packet had been signed out a week and a half ago and then returned a couple of days later. The signature was illegible but it had happened after the weekly command briefing. The recipient was someone on the Eighth Army staff.
As he was talking and checking the ledger, I wrote down the names of the people whose packets had been signed out during the last few months, the dates they were signed out, and the initials of the person who signed them out. It took me a while and it was mainly a dodge to make casual conversation while I pumped Hurchek for information. Mostly I got an earful about Chaplain Sturdivant.
He wasn’t married, didn’t go out much, and the only hobby he had, as far as Hurchek knew, was schmoozing with the general staff and raking marriage applicants over the coals.
On the way out, I heard a woman crying. The door to the chaplain’s office was open. Sturdivant, behind his desk, glared at a nervous young GI in soiled fatigues and a young Korean woman. The young woman was bowed as far forward as possible in her chair, her face in her hands, trying to hide her shame.
After work, I changed clothes and went straight to Ginger. She hadn’t seen Kimiko and didn’t have any new information about Pak Ok-suk. What she did have was the phone number of Miss Lim from Honolulu. Ginger called for me.
Maybe it was the chase that morning or the thumbing through all the names of the young Korean women getting ready to marry GIs, but for some reason I was particularly excited. Miss Lim and I met and only had a couple of drinks and went right to the yoguan. This time she washed me and I washed her and everything seemed permissible on the second date.
Outside, the hooting and honking subsided and the city shut down for midnight curfew. She told me about her husband, finally, and her life in the States, and about the person she had been before she got involved with Americans.
“1 was a good student, one of the best, and when I decided to marry an American all my girlfriends shook their heads. ‘You are too good to marry an American,’ they said. ‘We thought you would marry a high-class man. A Korean man.’”
She sat up in bed and lit a cigarette. I made her sit by the open window.
“My mother was ashamed at first but then she thought about our future. Two women, alone in Korea, my father dead for three years. Our money was almost gone. I couldn’t go to the university and, if I didn’t go to the university, I would not be able to find a good Korean husband. So I married an American. So we could get to the States.”
I covered myself with the shaggy comforter.
“What’s his name?”
“My husband?”
“Yeah.”
“Parkington. Enoch Parkington. He sells houses in Cincinnati. After I got my green card, I worked for a little while, saved up some money, and flew to Hawaii.”
“Has he divorced you?”
“No. Not yet.”
“If he does, you’ll lose your visa and have to move back to Korea.”
She shrugged her slender shoulders and exhaled a huge puff of smoke. Moonlight glistened across her black hair.
“No sweat. If he divorces me. I will pay some guy in Hawaii to marry me, so I can keep my green card.”
She stubbed out the cigarette and walked into the small tile-covered bathroom. When she returned, we resumed.
6
Riley is one of those drunks who is superefficient during the day. His fatigues are neatly pressed, his hair spiffily greased back into an old fifties-style pompadour, and he never stops moving, pivoting his head around, the pencil behind his ear constantly threatening to fly off. Maybe he thinks he’s fooling people. Or maybe the concentration he puts into churning out all those neatly paper-clipped stacks of official correspondence helps him keep his mind off the rancid juices that are rotting his gut.
Back in the barracks he keeps a couple of bottles of Old Overwart in his locker, the cheapest stuff they sell in the Class VI store. He hits the vending machine in the hall for cans of Coke and usually by seven or eight in the evening he’s completely blotto. He has a girlfriend who shows up in the barracks from time to time, and he’s been known to stay up until as late as four o’clock in the morning, chasing her around the showers, trying to lather her down. I don’t know if he ever catches her.
Occasionally Ernie and I take him out, usually on the weekends, and try to get him to eat something, listen to music, have a couple of drinks without getting destroyed.<
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When we suggest dinner he acts as if we’re abusing him. I think he eats about one greasy cheeseburger a week. And even then he opens up the burger and grimaces as if he were fighting back vomit, and finally wolfs it down as if hoping that, if he’s fast enough, somehow his stomach won’t notice it. Skinny isn’t the word for him. He makes broom handles look robust.
Riley’s from Philly. And he’s always going on and on about the tough old Irish neighborhood he grew up in. He uses all the racist jargon: wops, spooks, spics, and a few others I’ve never heard of. He respects the Italians, though, because they’re rich. But for all his bluster, face to face, he’s about the sweetest guy you’d ever want to meet. When people come to him with a problem, he adopts them as if they were stray puppies, regardless of their race, creed, or national origins.
When I point out the inconsistency in his position he looks at me as if I’m mad. “Of course I don’t like spooks,” he’d say. Then I’d say, “Well, what about that time you helped Ricky Hairston get that compassionate reassignment when his mother got sick?” Riley would shrug. ‘That’s different. Ricky’s a fine human being. You just don’t understand, George.” And then he’d launch into a long, detailed story about how he and his buddies back in Philly used to kick slope ass. Just your typical American abroad.
Riley’s position in the CID Detachment was one of great responsibility. He was the personnel sergeant. As such, he was responsible for not only all the personnel actions for the people assigned to the detachment but he also had the additional duty of running the Admin Section. Which meant he had to log in and distribute all incoming messages and he was responsible for maintaining all classified documents. It was a hell of a job. But with Riley’s manic dose of daytime energy, he somehow handled it. His only help was Miss Kim.
Miss Kim was one of the finer acquisitions the CID had ever made. She was so fine that guys from other offices throughout the thirty-or forty-acre headquarters complex would make a special trip just to say good morning to her. Ernie always found time to sit on her desk and look at her for a while, and usually he offered her a stick of gum, which she gratefully accepted. For some reason she put up with him. She wasn’t so tolerant of Burrows and Slabem although she was always polite and efficient in her official dealings with them.
Maybe she resented Burrows’s birdlike gawking or Slabem’s sly little porcine eyes. I couldn’t tell. I have a policy with gorgeous women. I leave them alone. When business calls for me to deal with them, I don’t flirt, I just get the job done. That’s not to say I’m grim. When the time is appropriate, I smile and say good morning or good evening or whatever. But I don’t harass them. I don’t believe in it. I know I wouldn’t like fending off a bunch of clumsy oafs all day, not on the pay Miss Kim receives. Besides, if a woman likes you, she’ll let you know. No sense pressuring her.
The way she reacted to Ernie added a somewhat demented corollary to my theory. He didn’t speak to her much at all, he didn’t touch her, and he didn’t pressure her in any way. He just stared at her, with pure unadulterated appreciation. Miss Kim seemed to come alive under his attention, like one of those plants that blooms when you think good thoughts at it. Ernie’s version of charm.
Riley treated her as a colleague. A full partner in the mission they had to accomplish. During working hours he didn’t seem to notice her attractiveness, only her mind. When we mentioned to him that he was lucky to be working with such a fox all day, he nodded agreement. But it was an intellectual acknowledgement, not visceral. A woman just didn’t have all that much appeal to him if he couldn’t lather her down and chase her around the latrine.
‘Top’s been looking for you guys,” Riley said, as we sauntered in.
“Isn’t he always?”
“It’s about this KPA bullshit again.”
Ernie wandered over to Miss Kim’s desk. She stopped typing and looked up, smiling. He sat down on the edge of the desk and looked at her. Then he offered her a breath mint. She accepted it, smiled, and turned back to her typing. Ernie just stayed there, staring at her. Sometimes I wondered if they weren’t autistic.
Riley shuffled through some papers and handed me one.
“It’s one of those guys from KPA. He put in this written complaint and now he wants to talk to the first sergeant. Top wants you and Ernie to sit in.”
“He’s here now?”
“Yeah. His appointment’s in ten minutes.”
I sat down to read the complaint. The Korean Procurement Agency is the civilian arm of the Eighth Army that uses American taxpayer money to buy local goods and services. Stuff that we were not going to go to the trouble of shipping over. Anything from a head of lettuce to a new command bunker extending three stories down into the ground. It was a huge operation with millions of dollars’ worth of contracts flowing through it every year. Most of the monitoring was done by accountants sent out by the Army Auditing Agency, but corruption and influence peddling was not always reflected in the credit and debit ledgers.
The guy who was making the complaint was an American, of course, hired from the States, and judging from his manic drive to get everything straightened out, he probably was on his first tour in the Far East.
I figured Top mainly wanted Ernie and me in the office as witnesses, so the guy wouldn’t make any accusations against him later. Most of this sort of work was done by Burrows and Slabem, but they were out at the Yongsan District Police Headquarters, monitoring the ROK activities on the Pak Ok-suk murder case. They were the experts at handling this KPA kind of situation. Not me and Ernie.
I read over the complaint. Routine. Korean businessmen were turning in bids on U.S. government contracts. Okay so far. But the Americans required three bids from three different companies on each contract. The businessman making the bid, of course, already had a connection with one of the Korean career bureaucrats within KPA so he knew exactly how much money was budgeted for a particular project. What he did was get three different stationery letterheads and put in three bids, ostensibly from different companies, and each signed by a different executive, with all three bids hovering right at or just below the budgeted appropriation.
The bidding was open to competitors, but through the network of Korean power brokers they would be warned off if they seriously tried to butt in. It was a syndicate, in effect, milking the American government. Nothing new. They’d been doing it for years.
And the work they did was not shoddy. It was efficiently produced and, for the most part, brought in on time. That’s why the U.S. Army lived with the system. It got results. Of course, they still went through the charade of all the regulatory purchasing requirements. The Koreans didn’t mind this. They liked paperwork: It produced jobs. And they understood the need to save face. Over the years there’d been a number of attempts to reform the system but in the end the Koreans had always patted the petulant American reformer on the head as he headed back to the States.
The American who was complaining this time only knew that someone was turning in three bids under three different cover companies and that the guy was buddies with one of the Koreans in the agency who let out the contracts. He saw only what looked like corruption to him. He didn’t see the cultural machinery that had evolved over four thousand years that kept disputes to a minimum and allowed for the smooth running of a society.
I had no plans to explain all this stuff to the bean counter or to the first sergeant. I would just keep my mouth shut and go through the motions, which was all, I figured, Eighth Army really wanted me to do. Mainly, I wanted to get back to the murder of Miss Pak Ok-suk and I didn’t need to waste a lot of time on some silly diversion.
The first sergeant plodded down the hallway in his big wingtips and peeked in the door of the Admin Section.
“Bascom. Sueсo. Come on down to my office.”
Miss Kim stopped her typing and gave Ernie a goodbye look. He got up, adjusted the buttons on his jacket, and marched down the hallway after the first sergeant. I followed.
In his office, the first sergeant introduced us to Mr. Tom Kurtz. We all sat down: the first sergeant behind his desk, me and Ernie sort of off to the side, looking at Mr. Kurtz, seated in front.
“What can we do for you, Mr. Kurtz?” the first sergeant said.
“I thought Inspectors Burrows and Slabem would be here.”
‘They’re on a high-priority case and I’m afraid I couldn’t pull them off it.”
“Ah, well. They were so helpful and so concerned about getting to the bottom of the corruption at KPA.”
Kurtz was young, like maybe just out of college, with curly brown hair and a tailored blue suit covering his frail body. He kept pushing his glasses back up his pug nose.
He bent forward, as if to confide in us. “You know I can’t stand working with people who aren’t totally honest. I don’t know how Eighth Army could have allowed the situation to deteriorate so much. I’ve recommended that a few of the people who work for me be fired, but all that happens is they get transferred, sometimes into better jobs, and the people who take their places are no better than the ones that left.”
Kurtz sat up in his chair. “But I’m not here to complain. Not this time. I’m here to thank you for all your help. Since I put in my complaints and your investigation started, things have really changed for the better at the Korean Procurement Agency.”
I had been starting to doze off but this woke me up. A little anyway.
“For the first time we’re getting real competition during the bidding for contracts. Just last week an entirely new company won a major contract to build a recreation center at Camp Carroll down in Waegwan. And it wasn’t just one of those shifting-letterhead deals either. I met the man who got the contract. He was delighted to be doing work, for the first time, for the U.S. government. What convinced me that the whole thing wasn’t some sort of sham was how upset my Korean employees were at the whole thing. And that’s not the only contract that has gone to new vendors. The winds of change are sweeping through KPA and I have you gentlemen to thank for it.”
