So who had been living here in Itaewon twenty years ago? There must be somebody. The only way to find out would be to start asking questions. One person would lead to another person and eventually we’d find somebody who’d been witness to the events of 1953. But that might take a while. I needed to find some way to short-circuit the operation.
We stopped in front of the King Club, staring down the main drag of Itaewon at the Seven Club and the Lucky Seven Club and the UN Club. Ernie winked at the business girls who squealed and waved, and then he said, “How about Two Bellies?”
He was right. I hadn’t thought about her. Two Bellies was plenty old enough. She’d lived and worked in Itaewon for as far back as anyone remembered, at least anyone I knew. And at this time of night we could guess, pretty reliably, where we’d be able to find her.
“We ain’t there yet?” I asked.
We turned and trudged up the hill. Beyond the neon, at the darkest alley, we turned left into the night.
According to the testimony of Auntie Mee’s spirit lover, the body of Mori Di was buried somewhere in Itaewon. Koreans believe that the remains of the dead should be buried with proper Confucian ceremony and then periodically honored so the ancestors can rest peacefully in heaven. Mori Di was not being so honored. A restless spirit can cause problems for those in the neighborhood who are still living and Auntie Mee, whether she was delusional or not, had problems. I saw it as just insomnia or nightmares brought on by stress but, in her mind, she was being haunted by a dead G.I. Finding Mori Di’s Serious Incident Report hadn’t been so difficult. Finding his burial place would be more challenging.
According to Cort, there’d been what amounted to a gang war in Itaewon in the winter of 1953. Moretti, and the Koreans who supported him, had been forced to defend themselves against organized toughs who were claiming the entire red-light district of Itaewon as their own. This gang-led by a group of hooligans with exotic names like Snake, Horsehead, and Dragon’s Claw Number One- were extorting money from the prostitutes and black-marketeers who huddled in makeshift tents and lean-tos made of scrap metal and rotted boards. They called themselves the Seven Dragons.
As Moretti constructed new buildings and turned them over to the Ministry of the Interior, the buildings were occupied by legitimate investors. However, within hours, the gang of hoodlums known as the Itaewon Chil Yong, the Seven Dragons, would become, through extortion and coercion, the true power behind these legitimate businesses.
Cort reserved bitter words for the Korean National Police who were blind to this activity. He’d not only accused them of being corrupt but, in effect, part of the gang. And this criminal activity was far from benign. Cort mentioned one young woman who had been bought by a procurer and trafficked into Itaewon about two days before the end-of-month G.I. payday. Cort wasn’t sure of her age but he estimated her to be either fourteen or fifteen. Sixteen tops. After being raped by all the gangsters, on G.I. payday they put her out for sale, cheap, to the droves of American G.I. s flooding into the ville. She suffered bleeding and internal damage and within a week she was dead. Cort wasn’t sure what happened to her body. It probably was buried in a pauper’s grave. Her family out in the countryside would’ve only known she was dead when the money stopped arriving.
But despite all the corruption and suffering that swirled around him, Moretti managed to keep his bearings. He was no chump. He and the three truck-driver G.I. s living with him in the ville saw what was going on. Instead of turning over buildings to the Ministry of the Interior, they switched their efforts to smaller projects. They started building on land already occupied by squatters. If someone was selling warm chestnuts from a shack made of scrap lumber, Moretti laid a cement foundation, built walls, and slapped on a roof. He classified this in his records as “repairs and upkeep” rather than as new construction. Therefore, he didn’t have to turn it over to the Ministry of the Interior. As a tactic it had been worth a try but the Seven Dragons hadn’t been fooled. As soon as a business started to prosper-and in this world “prosperity” meant a shop owner was able to feed his family-the Seven Dragons demanded their cut.
It was the orphanage that brought Moretti and the Seven Dragons into direct conflict. It was the biggest building in Itaewon, four stories high. When it was finished, Moretti commandeered the first floor of the building as his own headquarters. This meant that, technically, the building was under the jurisdiction of the 8th United States Army and, therefore, Moretti didn’t have to turn it over to the corrupt ROK government. In the upper three stories, he allowed a group of Buddhist nuns to provide food and shelter for homeless children. The 8th Army Corps of Engineers backed Moretti on this and, in recompense, promised the Ministry of the Interior that the next three buildings constructed would be theirs. But the gangsters didn’t want an orphanage in their midst. The Buddhist nuns were revered by the destitute business girls and soon the nuns were counseling them and even feeding them and encouraging them to return to their families. After praying at the little temple that was set up on a hill behind the ville, some of the girls ran away, breaking their contracts with the mama-sans who were their procurers. They stopped producing income, most of which would’ve gone to the Seven Dragons of Itaewon.
Moretti hustled a deal with 8th Army’s Ration Breakdown Point, procuring a daily allotment of army chow for himself and his three troops. After the honcho at the breakdown point heard what Moretti was trying to do, he supplemented the daily ration with enough food to feed the entire orphanage. This wasn’t as much chow as one might assume since both the orphans and the nuns ate like birds, mostly grain and green vegetables. Later, the 8th Army honchos signed off on yet another 30 percent supplement to Moretti’s food allocation because he’d set up a soup kitchen that began operating out of the back door of the building. Soon he was feeding over a hundred people a day; just rice gruel and beans and sliced turnip but it was enough to keep them alive. And the people of Itaewon started to feel better about themselves, more confident about the future. And people who are well fed are less vulnerable to the demands of petty tyrants like the Seven Dragons of Itaewon.
This was too much. According to testimony Cort had gathered, Snake, Horsehead, and Dragon’s Claw Number One called a confab of the Seven Dragons and after much cursing and posturing, they did what they’d been wanting to do for quite a while.
They declared war on Mori Di.
“Wei kurei, nonun?” What is it with you?
Two Bellies looked up from the huatu, flower cards, she was slapping on the warm vinyl floor, clearly wishing that Ernie and I would go away. She sat with her legs folded beneath her, at the edge of an army blanket which was piled in the middle with brass coins and the hard rectangular plastic flower cards. A half dozen other women sat around the same blanket. All of them rotund, all of them wearing loose housedresses, the skin sagging beneath their cheeks. They were maids or mama-sans for the business girls.
The open oil-papered door faced a dark courtyard surrounded by more hooches, all locked and silent. They were rented by the business girls who were now at the nightclubs or walking the streets. At this hour, the old women who were the mentors to these mostly teenagers, finally were allowed a few minutes of peace and quiet that would be disrupted as soon as the midnight curfew approached and the girls started dragging half-drunk American G.I. s home with them. Then for a while, until everyone passed out, there’d be enough noise and drama to provide plots for twenty daytime soap operas.
I told Two Bellies what we wanted.
“How much you pay?” she asked.
“No pay,” Ernie said. “If you don’t help, we’ll check your hooch and bust you for black-market.”