by Martin Limon
“Yoboseiyo,” she said again. “Yoboseiyo.” She wouldn’t let go.
Footsteps of police were coming down the alley. I stopped. Her head lolled down on my injured arm, but her grip was still tight. There was no time to fight her off and, if I did, the KNPs would have me. I grabbed her hair and tilted her face up to mine.
“Agashi,” I said. “We go Key Club, I buy you drink, then we go short time most tick.”
Her face brightened. “Short time?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, as I pulled her toward the door. She nodded happily and followed, leaning into my side as we walked up into the club, never releasing my arm from her vice-like grip. I could hear the KNP coming as the swinging doors slammed shut.
We staggered towards the bar and I realized that her death grip was making the pain in my arm a whole lot worse. There were a few GIs playing pool and about fifty girls scattered around the place. They all stared at us as we hobbled across like two survivors of the Bataan Death March.
The women looked younger than any group I had seen before. The legal age for prostitution in Korea is eighteen. I didn’t believe that most of these girls were that old.
I sat down at the bar. She just stood at my side, still clinging to my arm. She seemed to be struggling to stay awake. I ordered a beer for myself and a drink for her. Hers came in a cocktail glass, was colored bright red, and had no alcohol in it. The cost was three times what I paid for my beer.
The barmaid pushed the brown OB bottle in front of me. “You want a glass?” she asked. I said yes. She seemed surprised.
The glass had dust on it and I had to pour the beer myself. Not as much class as the Lucky Seven Club.
I managed to get her to sit down on the stool next to me and held up my beer glass for a toast. Her eyelids opened a little bit. She was trying to figure out what I was doing. The barmaid was standing there, watching us, and said something to her in rapid Korean. The girl just leaned down and slurped some of the liquid out of the glass.
I said, “Cheers,” smiled at the barmaid, and took a long drink.
“1 go banjo,” I said. The girl just sat there, staring at the bright red liquid in her glass. I looked at the barmaid. She nodded and I crossed the floor to the small door marked WC.
I didn’t have to take a leak but I was checking for windows. There was a small one with bars across it, but it only lead to a cement wall.
This latrine had toilet paper; the Key Club did have some things going for it. I ripped off a little and dabbed at the fresh blood seeping from my left hand. I threw that in the commode and then wadded up a bunch of toilet paper and stuffed it into my jacket pocket. Now the Key Club was out of ass wipe, too.
I walked out and, instead of returning to the bar, headed directly for the front door. I didn’t open it, but the swinging doors were a little off center and there was a slight opening with a cold draft coming through.
I could see a KNP standing outside. He reached toward someone, probably a partner, and traded cigarettes and matches, performing the ritual of lighting up and preparing for a long wait.
The back door was already covered by the other policemen. I was trapped.
I returned to my seat at the bar and woke up my girlfriend. She opened her eyes as wide as she could get them and asked reflexively, “We go short time?”
I took another pull of my beer and looked at her for the first time. She was wearing exceedingly tight hot pants that seemed to be molded like plastic wrap to her. Her legs were bare, no nylons, and a few bruises spotted the otherwise creamy brown skin. Inscribed on her T-shirt above the nipples was an advertisement for American Express travelers’ checks. Her cheeks were a little pudgy and her straight black hair was cut short, accenting the roundness of her face. She was actually very cute and would have been an attractive young lady had it not been for all this.
I didn’t answer but reached out, took her arm, and pulled it toward me to look at her wrist. She came awake immediately.
“Whatsamatta you?” She yanked her arm back and became shrill. “You no touchey Judy, okay?” She wagged her finger at me and stood up. I half expected her to punch me. The she looked over at her cherry red drink, reached for it, and downed it in one gulp. She turned back to me, fully coherent now.
“You wanna catchey Judy, get short time now, or you wanna catchey ‘nother girl?” She waved her arm around the room.
“Where’s your room?”
“Upstairs,” she said.
I finished my beer. “Let’s go.”
On the way up I watched her pretty backside sway back and forth-soft, youthful. And I thought of the raised scars on her wrist, like high mud rows between rice paddies, and the neat circular burn marks from flaming cigarette butts put out on her skin.
When we got to her room, we took off our shoes and entered. There was nothing but a rolled-up mat on the floor and a small table covered with cosmetics and a little mirror. Some of her clothes were hanging from nails in the wall and the rest were wadded up and piled in the corner.
She started to unroll the mat but I walked to the window. We were on the second floor and there was a drop of twenty feet to the alley below. I turned to her. “How can I get out of here?”
She just looked at me.
I said, “I no can go. Korean policemen front door and back door. How I get out?”
“No can do,” she said.
I reached in my pocket, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and handed it to her. She folded it and stuck it inside her hot pants.
“Let’s go,” she said.
I followed her down the hallway and up another flight of stairs until we came out on the roof.
“Which way?” I asked.
She just waved to the buildings on either side. Both were almost the same height as our building but there was about a ten-foot space between each.
“How?” I said. She shrugged. I looked around. There were no fire escapes or footholds to use to get down.
I weighed going back to her room and waiting them out. But that wouldn’t work. After curfew, when most of the GIs had left, the police would make short work of finding me.
There was an iron grating that had been left up on the roof to rust. I paced it off but it wasn’t nearly long enough to cover the gap to the next rooftop. There was nothing I could use to span the space. Actually, it was about twelve feet and, looking across, it looked very close. A twelve-foot jump. I could make it. It’s just that if I missed, it would be a three-story drop. Just a matter of confidence, I told myself. If it were twelve feet paced off on the ground, it would be no big problem. It was just the fear of the abyss below.
I got back against the far side of the building, ran across the roof as fast as I could sprint, pushed off from the top of the cement parapet, and leapt into space.
The parapet had been higher than I thought, and rising up the three feet or so to breach it had taken away most of my forward momentum. I was hurtling through the air, halfway between the two buildings and the edge still seemed a long way away. I hit the ledge of the opposite building flush on my stomach.
I thought it had killed me and I almost blacked out, even as my body began to slide down the side of the building. I grabbed on to the ledge with my elbows and stopped myself. It bit into my chest, and I kicked and found a toehold, pushed up with my foot, and managed a better grip so I could pull up. Struggling for every inch, I shimmied up onto the roof.
I lay there for nearly a minute but still couldn’t breathe. After a while I was getting some air. My hand was bleeding again.
I found the stairwell in the center of the roof and walked carefully down the steps. It was a small apartment house, and the pungent aroma of kimchi and fish became stronger as I descended toward street level. I encountered no one. When I got to the front door, I lay prostrate and peered around the corner. The policemen were still standing in front of the door but Judy had just walked out of the club into the cold night, still in hot pants and T-shirt. She started talking
rapidly to the police. I prepared to make a run for it, but by then the policemen were laughing. One of them came forward and offered her a cigarette. The other one good-naturedly lit it and, while they were enjoying themselves, I walked out of the building, down the alley, and onto the large road.
I was glad I had taken that toilet paper. I had the entire wad gripped tightly in my left hand inside my jacket pocket. I felt some blood seep slowly out and I gripped the soggy paper harder trying to stanch the flow.
Along the road, past rows and rows of clubs and bright lights, GIs swarmed everywhere. I became less worried about the KNPs. As long as the blood didn’t seep through my jacket-I wanted to go on the compound, to the dispensary, and get some stitches in my hand. I didn’t think the MPs were looking for me. I was pretty sure it was just the KNPs. As far as the Army was concerned, my only offense was being AWOL, and that probably hadn’t even been reported yet. Even if it had, nobody wastes any time looking for U.S. Army deserters in Korea. There’s nowhere for them to go. Eventually they’ll either turn themselves in or come to no good end. But the KNPs were looking for me pretty hard. I had to figure it was to protect General Bohler. The mayor and the chief of police must have put out the word that I had to be apprehended, prevented from snooping around anymore.
If I told my story, no one would believe me. Just another jealous enlisted man trying to make an officer look bad. But the powers in Itaewon definitely didn’t want me out here unattended. Or maybe they knew about the film and figured I had it.
There was a steady stream of military vehicles going in and out of the post’s main gate. The defense of Korea never stops. I stood and watched them and decided against going on to the compound for medical treatment. The way things had been going lately I decided to play it safe and check on my status later.
More important, the guard mount at the gate, like the roving MP patrols, was composed of an American MP, an ROK Army MP, and a Korean National Policeman. He could finger me and have his buddies waiting for me when I came out.
An ROK Army jeep, with a cab made of sheet metal instead of canvas, roared out of the gate and turned. I ran out into the street and waved it down with my good hand. They pulled over and the soldier on the passenger side slid one pane of the divided window forward.
I spoke to them in Korean. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I have to get back to my post right away. Can you help me?”
“We are going to Seoul,” the young man said. He was a ROK Army lieutenant.
‘There is an emergency in my unit. They need a translator right away.”
“Have they caught an intruder?” The lieutenant sat up, suddenly interested.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I can’t talk about it.”
“Get in,” he said, and opened the door for me.
The ROK sergeant shifted into the back to make room for me in the passenger seat. I ducked into the front seat, hiding my hand in my pocket.
Then I felt it. A dull thud behind my left ear. Dazed, I just sat there, wondering what it was. Then I felt it again, this time to the back of my head.
A bystander moved away from the jeep and cowered against an old woman who had just been putting up her soup cart for the night. Suddenly she turned green and faded into the mist.
16
“These guys aren’t too happy with you.” It was the first sergeant.
‘That’s funny,” I said. ”I thought we hit it off quite nicely.”
We were talking through an iron grating.
I was in the holding cell in back of the Itaewon Police Department. It was a charming place really. The room was about thirty feet square with a cement floor and two huge wooden platforms, the living quarters for the inmates, elevated about three feet high on either side of the central aisle. Broadcasting its presence from the rear was the byonso.
They say learning is best accomplished when the tactile senses are employed. The fetid waves of aroma pulsating out of the byonso left the meaning of the word indelibly impressed on my cerebral cortex.
Earlier that morning an old man had sloshed a bucketful of water onto the cement floor. I had been sitting on the edge of the platform and he had unceremoniously doused my shoes and my socks. My cold feet reeked of the stale water and disinfectant. I was hungry, I was dirty, and a series of fresh bruises arrayed about my torso added their drumbeat to the huge aching knot on my head.
Other than that I was fine.
One of the blue-suited policemen came up beside the sergeant, pulled out a large ring of keys, and opened the iron door. I stepped out quickly and took a deep breath. At the front desk they gave me an envelope with my identification, my keys, and my mallet. I checked to make sure it was all there.
I slipped my Army ID card and my Criminal Investigation Division badge into my hip pocket. “What about an apology?” I said.
Top looked at me. “An apology?”
“Yeah,” I said, “from Captain Kim. His boys got a little rough. While I was conducting an investigation.”
‘That’s not the way they see it.”
“Well how the fuck do they see it?” My neck stiffened and made the pain from my head pulse louder. The sullen eyes of the half-dozen Korean policemen around the room were on us.
Top faced me directly. “Let’s go, George.”
I straightened my jacket out, looking around the room at each policeman in turn.
“They charged you with resisting arrest for one thing,” Top said.
Standard police procedure. The first thingyou do is coveryour ass.
“And then they charged you with breaking and entering.”
“But I didn’t break anything,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “something’s probably broke now.”
I couldn’t argue with logic.
“I was on a goddamn investigation.”
“I claimed you were on an investigation,” Top said. “I told them that. And I told them that you’re in the CID, at the moment.”
“So they dropped the charges?”
“No. They told me to get you out of town.”
“They don’t have any jurisdiction to tell me to get out of town.” I said it but I didn’t believe it. It was their town and their country. “What happened to cooperation between Korean and U.S. Investigative agencies? What about the KNP Liaison Office?”
“It’s your own fault,” he said. “You know what we were supposed to do here. It’s obvious to everybody that no one else was going to get murdered and the whole thing could be forgotten.”
‘That’s not the way I saw it,” I said.
“No,” he said, “You got to go and start investigating all this shit again, get people all in an uproar, and end up with the whole fucking world down on your ass.”
“I was just trying to earn my pay,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”
A Korean doctor approached. He wore a black suit and a black tie and black horn-rimmed glasses. So as not to clash with his jet black hair, I thought. The man nodded to Top and then to me. He took off his coat, handed it to a cop, opened his bag, and went right to work. He made me open my hand on a countertop and used water and a washcloth to rinse off the dried blood in a plastic basin. After the wound was cleaned to his satisfaction, he pulled out a bottle of peroxide and with a cotton swab drenched the open gash in the fiery solution.
I tried not to let the pain show on my face. Top sat quietly off the side and looked at me without expression. Every time I twitched, the cop grinned a little wider. I was impressed that so much pain could come from such a small part of my body.
The doctor pulled out a syringe and a small vial and deftly filled the syringe with a clear fluid. The cop’s feverish interest seemed to be growing. By the time the doc reopened my reluctant hand and stuck the needle flush into the middle of the open wound, the policeman was in rapture. My arm convulsed with the pain. We all stood there silently while the doctor waited for the Novocain to take effect. Then he p
ulled out a needle that looked like an oversized flshhook and laced some black nylon string through it. He took my hand again and pushed the needle through my flesh, across the wound, and under the flesh edging the other side. The string followed the needle through and he quickly laced up the largest parts of the gash. His hand movements were quick and sure but he kept having to tell the officer to get out of his light. His nose was almost in my palm.
When the doctor finished, he knotted off the string neatly and pulled a small pair of scissors out of his bag and cut off the loose ends. It looked as if the black fossilized remains of a primordial sardine were resting in my palm.
He stood up, Top helped him put on his coat, and I nodded my thanks to him.
When we got outside, Top laid into me.
“Sergeant Sueсo,” he said, “these are not people you want to be in bad with. I won’t be able to help you if you keep pushin’ on this.” He paused. “I’m not hearing you say what I need to hear you say.”
I didn’t say anything.
The first sergeant shook his head, sighing, and went on ahead to the jeep.
The security guards at the gate remembered us as the guys who had been doing the inspecting lately and waved us right through.
“Is the general in?”
“Yes. He just got back from work.”
It had already been dark a couple of hours.
We parked the jeep, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell. An elderly Korean woman in traditional dress opened the door. We told her we wanted to see General Bohler. She looked confused for a moment and then a voice rang out from the back room.
“Let them in.”
She led us to a large room, a study, I guess you would call it. A fire crackled. Plaques and photographs hung on all the walls. In the center of the room was a carved statue of a nude African woman. General Bohler sat in a large leather lounging chair, wearing only sandals and a bathrobe. He set a book down when we walked in. Something thick and nonfiction: The Enemies of Security.
“Evening, boys.”
Slowly, he put his glasses back on. He seemed completely relaxed. Too relaxed.
