Our next stop was the home of someone who we suspected was Dubrovnik’s accomplice. A clerk who worked at the U.S. Army’s Port of Inchon Transportation Office. His name was Lee Ok-pyong, a Korean national. Although he worked for 8th Army, Lee fell squarely under the jurisdiction of the Korean National Police. Not us.
Technically, we shouldn’t have been talking to him. Our original plan was to arrest Dubrovnik, interrogate him on compound, gather all the information we could, and then, accompanied by the Korean National Police, arrest Clerk Lee and assist in the KNP’s interrogation. The more information we could gather first, the more productive that interrogation would be. But now, with Dubrovnik on the fly, our plan had changed.
“We shouldn’t even be doing this,” I told Ernie.
“Screw it. If Dubrovnik makes it over here and him and this guy Lee compare notes, they’ll be able to get their stories straight. We’ll never bust anybody.”
The crime was diversion of U.S. Government property. PX property to be exact.
The way the scam worked was that Clerk Lee Ok-pyong filled out two bills of lading. One with the actual amount of imported scotch and cigarettes and stereo equipment to be delivered, and the other with a larger amount that would actually be loaded onto the truck. For security reasons, each truck was escorted by an armed American military policeman. But since both Dubrovnik and the Korean driver were in on the scam with Lee, there was nobody to complain about the phony paperwork.
Near the outskirts of Inchon, they would pull the truck into a secluded warehouse and unload the excess PX property. Then they’d continue on their merry way to the main PX in Seoul. Before leaving the Port of Inchon, each truckload was padlocked and sealed with a numbered aluminum tag. If the tag was tampered with, the receiving clerk on the other end of the line could tell. Supposedly. I wasn’t sure if the receiving clerk was in on the scam or whether Dubrovnik had somehow managed to figure a way to reseal the load. That was one of the things we’d hoped to discover during his interrogation.
However they were doing it, the scam was working well and might have gone on forever if an audit in the States hadn’t identified the discrepancy between what was being shipped to the Port of Inchon and what was actually arriving in the Main PX inventory. Once 8th Army CID was notified of the leakage, Ernie and I were given the assignment. A couple of days later we had figured out which M.P. and which driver were in on it. Finding the clerk who supplied the phony paperwork took a little longer but now we had him. Everything would’ve gone smoothly if Dubrovnik hadn’t eluded us at the Yellow House.
The lane leading to the home of Lee Ok-pyong was not as well paved as the one leading to the Yellow House. A stone-lined gutter ran down the center of a muddy walkway. Brick and cement walls loomed over us on either side, most of them topped by barbed wire or shards of glass stuck into cement. If you don’t protect yourself against thievery, the Koreans believe, you deserve to be robbed.
Using our flashlight, I found Lee’s address etched into a wooden doorway: 175 bonji, 58 ho, in the Yonghyon District of the city of Inchon. A light glimmered behind the wall, flickering because of the still-falling rain. Ernie rang the doorbell. Two minutes later a door creaked open behind the wall and someone padded out in plastic slippers across the small courtyard.
When the gate opened a face stared out at us. Ernie tilted the beam of the flashlight. I could see that the face was beautiful.
She was a Korean woman in what must have been her late twenties. Her features were even and her skin was so smooth that I had to swallow before stammering out the lines I’d mentally rehearsed in Korean.
“Is Mr. Lee Ok-pyong in? We’re here on official business.”
“Who are you?” she asked.
As I answered I noticed that her hair was black and thickly luxurious and tied back by a red ribbon behind her oval-shaped face.
“We work on the American compound,” I said. “It’s important.”
She opened the door a little wider. Ernie pushed past her, sloshed over flagstone steps, and slid back the oil-papered door that led into the sarang-bang, the front room of the home. A thin man with thick-lensed glasses looked up at us. He wore only a T-shirt and pajama bottoms and had been studying a ledger. A lit cigarette dangled from his lips.
“Mr. Lee Ok-pyong?” Ernie asked.
“Yes.”
“With all the money you made ripping off foreign hooch, seems you could afford a better place than this dump.”
I’m not sure if Clerk Lee understood, but without being invited in, Ernie slipped off his shoes and stepped up onto the warm vinyl floor. I followed. The beautiful woman stood by the open doorway, not sure if she should run and notify the police or if she should stand here by her husband.
“Your wife is very beautiful,” Ernie said.
Clerk Lee was fully alert now. He sat upright and stubbed out his cigarette. “What do you want?”
“We want you to tell us about Dubrovnik,” Ernie said. “Have you seen him tonight?”
“Who?”
“Sergeant Two,” I said. That’s what the other M.P.’s and the Koreans in the transportation unit called Dubrovnik rather than trying to pronounce his full name.
Clerk Lee’s glasses started to cloud and the color drained from his face. His wife stepped into the room, knelt, and wrapped both arms around her husband’s shoulders. She turned to us.
“Get out,” she said in Korean. “No one wants you here. Get out!”
Ernie understood that.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll get out. Just make sure you don’t let any other G.I.’s in here tonight.”
As we left, Mrs. Lee stared at us with the face of an ice goddess. Her husband looked as if he were about to vomit.
At this time of night, the local police station was a madhouse. The Korean National Police had arrested three prostitutes and two Greek sailors for drunk and disorderly. A fight at Whiskey Mary’s we were told. They also had taken into custody one pickpocket and two fellows who’d tried to break into an old brick warehouse near the port.
“Busy?” I asked the Korean cop.
He looked at me as if I were nuts. Ernie and I both flashed our badges. In a few minutes we were talking to the night shift desk officer. We explained that we wanted Clerk Lee Ok-pyong taken into custody immediately, so he wouldn’t be able to talk to his cohort and thereby ruin our case against him. The khaki-clad officer listened patiently and when I was done he lifted his open palms off the top of his desk.
“Nobody,” he said in English. “No cops.”
Sure, he was short staffed but the real reason he didn’t want to help us was that he didn’t want to bust a fellow Korean without orders from on high. Who knew who the man was connected to?
Ernie argued with the desk officer for a while but finally gave up. When the Korean National Police don’t want to do something, they don’t do it. I pulled him out of there.
Outside, the night was completely dark. And the rain drifting in off the Yellow Sea was colder than ever.
The next morning, Ernie and I rose early from the warm ondol floor in the room we’d rented in the Yong Param Yoguan, the Dragon Wind Inn. After we washed and dressed and pushed through the double wooden exitway, Ernie said, “The place even smells like dragon wind.”
“It was cheap,” I said.
“So’s pneumonia.”
Without stopping anywhere for chow, we headed straight to the police station. This time the commander was in, and he introduced himself as Captain Peik Du-han. We shook hands.
“I understand you were in last night requesting an arrest,” he said in English.
Briefly, I explained the situation to him. He nodded his head. His expression was calm, but I noticed that his fists were beginning to knot.