“Yoboseiyo?” she said.
“Miss Lim,” I said. “We’re looking for Miss Lim.”
The old woman opened the door. Trusting. We were Americans, not thieves.
“Ae Kyong ah!” She called for someone. I thought it would be Miss Lim, but it turned out to be an interpreter. A woman, about thirty, in blue shorts and a red T-shirt emerged from her hooch.
“Are you Miss Lim?” I said.
“No. She went to the hospital. Her baby is very sick.”
“Which hospital?”
She spoke to the old woman in rapid Korean and then turned back to me. “The MoBom Hospital in Hannam-dong.”
“Which room does she live in?”
“The one on the end. There.”
Ernie and I walked over. It was just a hovel. Raised foundation, little plastic closet in the corner, folded sleeping mats on a vinyl floor, and a small potbellied stove in the center of the room with rickety aluminum tubing reaching to the ceiling. An officer in dress greens stared at me out of a framed photograph. He looked in his mid-thirties, maybe twenty pounds over his fighting weight, with curly brown hair and a big jolly smile. Gold maple leaves on his shoulder glittered along with his white teeth.
I turned back to the women. “How long has Miss Lim been gone?”
“She came home from work late last night. The baby never stopped crying. She waited until the curfew was over and then left for the hospital.”
“Before dawn?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s been there ever since?”
“Yes.”
The old woman waited patiently, not understanding. I smiled at her, thanked them both, and we turned to go. The woman in the blue shorts and red T-shirt called after me.
“Hey!”
We stopped and turned around.
“Why you GI always make baby and then go?”
I didn’t have an answer for her. Ernie stopped clicking his gum. We turned around and left.
The waiting room of the MoBom Hospital was packed. An attractive young Korean woman with a snappy white cap pinned to her black hair sat behind a counter near the entrance. Behind her was a list of basic fees. It was ten thousand won, up front, to see a doctor. Fourteen bucks.
I told her about Miss Lim and her sick baby and asked where we could find her. She thumbed through a ledger but kept shaking her head. She wanted to know Miss Lim’s full name. I told her she was the woman with the half-American baby. She perked right up.
“Oh, yes. She is in Room 314. The stairway is over there.”
The room held about thirty tiny beds with plastic siding on them. Miss Lim sat next to one of the tiny beds on a wooden chair, her face in her hands. I showed her my identification.
“Hello, Miss Lim. We’re from the C.I.D.”
It seemed that her face was about to burst with redness. She was a plain woman, young and thin with a puffy face that looked even more bloated from crying.
“Is your baby going to be all right?”
“The doctor is not sure yet. I must wait.”
Ernie didn’t like it there. He fidgeted with the change in his pocket and then drifted back towards the door. My signal to wrap it up quickly.
“The money you took from behind the bar. It has already been replaced. I will talk to everyone. Explain your situation. I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
Her head went back into her hands, and this time she clutched her red face as if she were trying to bury it in her palms. I couldn’t be sure, but I think her shoulders convulsed a couple of times. I looked down at the baby. It was scrawny. Unconscious. Sweat-soaked brown hair matted against its little head.
We left.
Neither one of us spoke as the sloe-eyed stares followed us out of the hospital.
Ernie zigzagged his jeep through the heavy Seoul traffic as if he were in a race to get away from the devil.
“Well,” he said. “We wrapped up another one.”
“I’m sure they won’t do anything to her,” I said. “I’ll type up the report to make her look as good as possible. Even the 8th Army chief of staff’s got a heart.”
Ernie didn’t say anything. I turned to him.
“Right?”
He shrugged. “If you say so, pal.”
The chief of staff didn’t want to prosecute, but in his capacity as the president of the Officer’s Club council he did demand that Miss Lim appear before the next board meeting and explain her actions. The word we got was that he was upset with her because she could have come to the Club Council any time and they would have helped her out. Thievery wasn’t necessary, according to him.
When Ernie heard that, he snorted. “Nobody likes a person with a problem until that person has already solved the problem.”
It also occurred to me that the Club Council had had years to set up a mechanism to help employees with emergency medical expenses, but they never had. Better to make them come begging for it.
We went to the Enlisted Club that night for Happy Hour and paid thirty-five cents for a tax free beer and forty cents for a shot of bourbon to go with it.
The stripper had eyes like a cat.
“She was a real trouper,” Freddy said. “Appeared before the Club Council looking sharp, standing up straight, and didn’t bat an eye when they told her that she’d been suspended for thirty days.”
“How have the other Korean employees taken it?”
“The place has been like a morgue. They do their jobs all right, but they won’t look at me and they won’t say anything. The laughter’s gone around here.”
“It’ll come back.” Freddy looked skeptical, but I knew it would.
I’d learned that in East L.A.
At first the Korean National Police Liaison Officer tried to keep it from us but Yongsan Compound is like a small town in the huge metropolis of Seoul and word spreads quickly. Especially amongst the MP’s and the C.I.D.
Ernie didn’t chew any gum on the way out to Itaewon, and he drove carefully.
Neighbors clogged the narrow alleyway leading to Miss Lim’s hooch, but we pushed our way through them and flashed our I.D.’s to the uniformed Korean policeman at the gate. Captain Chong, commander of the Itaewon Police Box, was there. He didn’t say anything when we stepped to the front of the room.
The baby looked pretty much the way I’d seen her before. Thin. Still. But she wasn’t sweating any more. She lay on the vinyl floor as if she’d rolled away from her mother’s bosom. Miss Lim’s mouth was wide open and so were her eyes. They were white. Without pupils.
When I turned around, Captain Chong was standing right behind us.
“Carbon monoxide poisoning,” he said.
I looked at the aluminum tubing above the heater. There was a hole in it, as if someone had punctured the thin metal with a knife and twisted.
The photograph of the brown-haired major lay face up on the floor. Smiling at me.
The Witch of Wilton Falls
by Gloria Ericson
As I scanned the rest of my mail, I absentmindedly opened the one letter my secretary had left sealed, thinking it might be personal. Absorbed as I was, I failed to notice the return address, so its message came as rather a shock: Since we could find no evidence of next-of-kin, and you seemed to be her only correspondent and visitor, we thought you would want to know that Miriam Winters passed away quietly in her sleep on the 25th.
The sun pouring through the Venetian blinds of my office seemed suddenly chilled. I had been standing while I opened the letter, but now I sat, swung the big leather chair around, and gazed out the window. So she had died — at last. Her only visitor. I wasn’t even that. When was the last time I had seen her — five years ago? Six? I remembered receiving a card from her this past Christmas and making sure Meg sent one in return. How lonely she must have been these last years. Suddenly I was filled with the worst kind of remorse — the kind you feel when someone’s gone and it’s too late to make up any neglect.