by Martin Limon
The snow that was left on the ground looked like lumps of stale icing on mass-produced pastry. A thin sprinkling of soot lay atop it.
The frozen snow and the evergreen trees and the naked elms began to disappear as the sun went down. Soon all we could see were a few pale yellow bulbs serving as porch lights.
We waited an hour. Nothing. So we decided to shake things up. We got out of the jeep and walked up the steep winding driveway. I carried my clipboard again. The two gate guards were smoking and joking but got quiet when they spotted us.
“Where’s Mr. Jung?”
“Just a moment.” The radio squawked.
Within about thirty seconds a stout, middle-aged Korean man in neatly pressed khakis appeared. We flashed our IDs.
‘The report of inspection on the day shift is not going to look very good. So far, your men are doing somewhat better.”
“We are particularly alert at night.”
“The day shift is important, too.”
“Yes.”
“Would you please show us around the perimeter?”
“Yes.”
We followed him along the chain-link fence but I kept my eyes on the house. The big Lincoln sedan was gone. The old sarge must have the night off. Inside, no one seemed to be moving.
The perimeter guards snapped to attention as we approached.
“What time do you expect the general to go out tonight?”
“He’s already left.”
“What?”
“Yes. He got off early from work today. Very unusual for him. He changed clothes and was gone before the sun went down.”
“Where was he going? Do you know?”
“No.”
“Was he alone?”
“Yes. And on foot.”
The security chief didn’t seem to be too worried about it. There is no terrorism in Korea. No kidnappings. No Red Brigades. The society is too well controlled. What they are worried about is a direct attack on specific targets by North Korean commandos. Thus, the heavy security at the general’s quarters and the Eighth Army Headquarters itself.
“What time did he leave?”
“Just a few minutes before the sun went down.”
We walked back down the hill to the jeep. I cursed myself for not getting here earlier. But who would have thought that a workaholic would cut out early from work?
Unless he had some more work to do.
We went to Itaewon but it was no dice. Kimiko was gone, she wasn’t in her hooch or at any of the clubs. We just checked the main ones but it would have taken forever to check every little hole in the wall. Mr. Kwok’s office was dark and he wasn’t downstairs in the Sloeeyed Lady Club.
Major General Bohler had disappeared.
“Why don’t you go back to the compound?” Ernie said. “Get some rest. I’ll hang around here until curfew to see if any of them show up and in the morning you can pick up on Bohler again. It’s better to work in shifts.”
Ernie was right. Trying to get something on Bohler could take a long time. Besides, there was something I wanted to do.
“Okay. You gonna see the Nurse tonight?”
“No. No way.”
“Why not? You guys just had a big fight and then you made up. What is it this time?”
“She doesn’t want to see me. She told me not to come to the hooch tonight.”
There were lines on Ernie’s face that I had never noticed before. I wondered if the Nurse had found a new boyfriend. He was wondering the same thing. I decided to drop it.
I said, “Don’t worry about getting up early. I’ll check out those security guards in the morning and find out what time Bohler got back tonight. Then we’ll compare notes at the office.”
“Okay.”
I left Ernie standing in front of a dark alley with both his hands stuffed into the pockets of his nylon jacket. A girl approached him. He shrugged her off.
I caught a cab and was back at the main gate of the compound in about three minutes.
“You tell anybody I’m doing this and they’ll have my ass.”
“Don’t worry, Jones,” I said. “Nobody’d want it anyway. Been had too often.”
“No, I’m serious. Youknow I’m notsupposed to let anybodyinhere.”
I said, “You’re not supposed to black-market either.”
He said, “You’re an asshole, George.” But he got out his keys.
“An asshole? I didn’t turn you in, did I?”
“Well… hell, George. Everybody does it.”
“But not everybody lets themselves get caught.”
“Who would’ve thought you and Ernie’d be at Mama Lee’s in the middle of the afternoon?”
“Anybody who knows us. Now get out of here.”
The door to the chapel was open. So was the door to Hurchek’s office. I closed it behind me, pulled down the shade to the single window, and sat down at his desk. I pulled out my little flashlight and went through the logbook of the marriage packets that had passed through the Eighth Army chapel for the last few months. Taking my time. Getting it right.
I doublechecked to made sure there were no entries signed out to “KMH” that I had missed. There were only the two: Li Jin-ai and Pak Ok-suk.
I found the marriage paperwork for Johnny Watkins and Miss Pak Ok-suk on Hurchek’s desk in a box marked HOLD.
Talk about an understatement.
I thumbed through the folder carefully. The marriage application was on top, giving all the basic data on Johnny and Miss Pak: names, Johnny’s Social Security number, Miss Pak’s National Identification number, dates of birth, places of birth.
I made quick notes on a pad of paper I found on the desk.
An extract of Johnny Watkins’s personnel record was also inside. Basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; advanced individual training at Fort Lee, Virginia; transferred to Korea eight months ago. Routine.
Somebody had typed out the security questionnaire on Miss Pak. It was signed and stamped with the chop of one of the offices down in Itaewon that did a good business helping GIs and Korean girls wade through the paperwork required by the Korean government and the Eighth Army.
Beneath that was a photostat copy of Miss Pak’s family register. It told who her mother had been and nothing else. Not brothers and sisters and the usual information about everybody’s place and date of birth. A family register in Korea was like their birth certificate. If you were born outside of a family, you were nothing. Miss Pak hadn’t had much going for her.
Stapled to the back of the document was her picture. Her eyes seemed faded, protected, as if she didn’t quite trust the man behind the camera. Permed hair covered her ears, more hair on one side than on the other.
Her cheekbones were high and prominent, the nose flat but not too wide, and her mouth small but full, making it almost seem as if she were pouting.
If the blow-by-blow description of her didn’t sound too hot it was because the individual parts of her probably wouldn’t measure up to Madison Avenue’s idea of true beauty. And the quality of the black and white photo was lousy, too. But still, the spirit of Miss Pak Ok-suk shone through.
All the strange little parts of her face, thrown together, behind those sultry and challenging eyes, added up to a beautiful and desirable woman.
She was a knockout.
I pried the photo loose from the staple and slipped it into my wallet.
There was more paperwork. Her health certificate seemed to be clean. No TB. No abortions. No recorded cases of VD. That was unusual. The odds were that any girl who worked in Itaewon for just a few weeks would come down with some sort of venereal disease. But she hadn’t. Maybe that said something about her clientele: older maybe, more cautious.
I shuffled the paperwork back into the same order I had found it in and placed it back into the hold box.
There was a stack of new marriage packets in Hurcheck’s in box. They hadn’t been logged in yet. I went though them. One of them was missing, repl
aced by a yellow eight-and-a-half-by-eleven Department of the Army sign-out/in sheet. The name of the soldier and the prospective bride were printed in Hurchek’s neat hand. The Korean woman’s name was Yoon Un-suh, which didn’t mean anything to me at first, but the initials of the person who had signed for the packet did. KMH.
So did the name of the GI. He was my partner, Ernie Bascom. Yoon Un-suh… the Nurse.
14
Palinki was the armorer at the MP Station. A big Samoan, his smile seemed to fill the sky. So did his shoulders.
“No problem, brother. Keep it for as long as you want.”
“Just for training,” I said. “But I’d feel better if the First Sergeant didn’t know about it. He gets antsy when we check these things out.”
“Hey, you did me a favor before, George, and I haven’t forgotten.” He pointed to his big square head. “Nobody will know about this but you and me.”
“Been staying out of the ville?”
“Yeah. And I haven’t been drunk since it happened.”
Palinki had nearly killed three GIs he caught harassing a couple of high school girls who were on their way home through the Itaewon market. Ernie and I managed to get him out of the way before the MP patrol arrived. The girls were frightened but unhurt and the GIs recovered after some hospital time. They just slunk around the compound nowadays, staying out of Palinki’s way, and not going to the ville much anymore.
I looked around to make sure no one was watching. “I need one more thing, Palinki. You got any, you know, extra ammo?”
During peacetime the U.S. Army accounts for every weapon and every piece of ammunition with fanatical precision. But with so much of it floating around, a smart armorer can always squirrel some away for that rainy day when some ammunition is lost and he has to cover himself by replenishing inventory.
Palinki looked at the. 45 in my hand. It was gray and had a big white number 3 stenciled on the grip.
“I can spare a little. How much you need?”
“Six rounds.”
Palinki rummaged among the green metal ammo boxes, stood up, and held out six cartridges. They looked like bits of candy in his gigantic paw.
“Bring ’em back if you don’t use them.”
“Will do.” I put them in my pocket. “Thanks.”
“You got it.”
He sat back down and hunched over the comic book that he had been reading. It looked like a brightly colored doily between his two thumbs.
Ernie had gassed up the jeep, and I told Riley that we’d be out all day trying to pump up our black-market statistics. We just drove.
“So what’s the big mystery, pal?” Ernie said.
“I found out about your marriage paperwork.”
Ernie looked at me, took a quick swig of coffee.
“I broke into the chaplain’s office.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I found your paperwork and the paperwork of Miss Yoon Un-suh.
Ernie looked straight ahead.
“It wasn’t any of my business, you got a right to your privacy, and I shouldn’t have been poking around in there. Somebody signed out your paperwork.”
“For what?”
“Shopping for companions.”
“I don’t like it, George. We ought to just go grab Bohler’s ass and slap him with an assault charge.”
“If he had a little less rank I’d agree with you.”
“What do you mean?”
‘This is a two-star general, the chief of staff to boot. They’re not going to take the word of some low-level enlisted scum CID agents against his and they’re definitely not going to even consider the testimony of some slut Itaewon bar girl.”
“She’s not a slut.”
“Yeah. I know. Just trying to make my point.” I shook my head in resignation. ‘The commanding general would probably put out the word and have the Korean National Police arrest us for pandering-for trying to corrupt the morals of some poor innocent two-star general.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Yeah. And we’d not only lose our jobs for bringing those kinds of accusations without proof, but we’d also stand a chance of getting court-martialed ourselves.”
“For what?”
‘The Uniform Code of Military Justice has a clause concerning the willful defamation of an officer’s reputation. You can’t call him a scumbag and you can’t spread rumors about him that could hurt the morale of the troops by exposing the man in charge, who might lead us into combat someday, as the scrotum that he really is.”
‘They wouldn’t charge us with anything,” Ernie said.
I looked at him. He looked back at the road.
“All right. Maybe they would.”
“You’re damn right they would.”
“So how do we nail this dick?”
“Get the goods.”
It was nearly dark by the time I got to her place. I didn’t knock but just slid the door back. The Nurse tilted her face slowly upward and looked at me as if she’d been expecting me.
She wore a tight black sweater and dark corduroy pants. The room was empty except for her purse and a coat and a broken mirror on the wall. I slipped off my shoes, stepped in, and slid the paneled door shut behind be. I sat cross-legged on the floor and faced her.
‘Tell me about the General.”
She looked down at her lap.
‘That night,” I said, “the last time you saw Bohler, did you bring him back here?”
She looked up, suddenly angry. ”I never bring man back here! Only one man. Ernie.”
“What was the marriage application for?”
“Ernie wanted to marry me.” She threw her long hair back off her shoulder. “I thought about it. Maybe he was the first one who made me think about it. But I can’t.” She looked away. “I can’t leave Korea.”
“Why not?” I said. “What has Korea ever done for you?”
“I have to stay,” she said.
“What about Ernie?”
“You don’t understand. Me and my little brother, we need money. Nobody help. We have to get money. But we didn’t want to hurt Ernie. Just for money. Ernie young. He’s GI. He doesn’t need money.”
She took a slow breath and looked down at her lap. “I had done… it before. Some GIs… I don’t know why.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss something. ‘They like me. They all the time want to steady me, they all the time want to marry me. But they want do strange things. So I tell them I need money, bring money, and maybe then we can do.”
“What about Bohler?” I said.
She looked down again. “I have to do.”
“Have to do?” Who says you have to do?”
“Everybody,” she answered. “Policeman say, Korean man say. Everybody say General number-one honcho. I have to do.”
“How did you meet him?”
“With Korean men.”
“Who?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. They all same.”
“What happened?”
“Korean man say I have to eat with him at party house. I pour him drinks, I laugh at what he say.” She shrugged again. “He like me.”
“And then he started coming to your place every night?”
“Not every night,” she said matter-of-factly. “Maybe two, three times one week.”
“And then you realized that he’s not a normal man.”
“Yes.” She said it very softly. “He’s not normal.”
She got very tense, and very red, and very quiet.
She had been coerced by the local powers into assuaging the needs of the chief of staff of the Eighth Army. Despite the shame, it had given her a strange sort of power. No one would hassle her. In fact, they could probably count on a certain amount of protection by the local police. As long as they were taking care of the General, the police and the mayor and the local businessmen were all happy. Everyone was happy. Except Miss Pak.
“What are you going to do now?” she
asked. “You tell Ernie?”
“No,” I said. “No.”
“I don’t know, Geogi.” She looked sad.
“What about Bohler?”
“I don’t ever want to see him again.”
“Bohler will look for you,” I said. “He might even send the Korean National Police after you. There are two of them outside now pretending to be neighbors.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “But they won’t find me or my brother.” She didn’t seem too sure of that, however.
“What about the police outside? Aren’t you worried about them?” I said.
“No. They want the film. They are looking for you, Geogi,” she said.
15
One of the things they teach you in the training course for the Criminal Investigation Division is that when you’re getting chased by the bad guys never run into a dead end. Funny how that dictum stuck so well in my mind as I careened through the crowded streets of downtown Itaewon. But every time I turned a corner I prayed it wasn’t a dead end.
The policeman kept blowing his whistle, which was sort of convenient because I could tell that he was falling a little behind. It stood to reason. The streets were crowded with pedestrians, carts, and vendors of all sorts. I knew which way I was going at each turn. He had to stop at every intersection and check which way I had gone.
I was heading in the general direction of the compound, away from the downtown. I turned down one road and it turned out to be a small outdoor market. Stalls on either side of the road were covered with canvas awnings supported by wooden poles. There were clothes and fish and produce but I didn’t have to admire any of the goods. I was very rude pushing my way through the crowd. I’m afraid a few people were probably knocked to the ground but, like Satchel Page, I didn’t look back or listen for footsteps. I was afraid something might be gaining on me.
I estimated when the policeman behind me would hit the intersection and start looking. At that moment I crouched down low but kept moving, trying to make myself less of a conspicuous target.
As I plowed through the crowd, wave after wave of startled Korean faces came at me, like trodden grass rising to retake its shape. What they saw was a huge, crouching, wild-eyed Caucasian charging at them from out of the night. The Koreans fell back and opened a small path for me in the sea of humanity.
