Words were exchanged. The men told Moretti that the girl was their property and ordered him to stand away from her. Moretti refused. Within seconds, they were at it. Moretti threw his metal first-aid kit at them, kicking, punching, and clawing for his life. Other residents of Itaewon alerted the three G.I. truck drivers and they ran to the scene to join the melee, trying to pull Moretti to safety.
MPs were alerted. After a few minutes they arrived, sirens blaring, along with the Korean National Police. According to the first MP on the scene, seven men, just dark shadows, fled the moment their jeep rounded the corner. The MPs gave chase but lost them in the maze of dark passageways behind the main drag of Itaewon.
The three truck drivers had been hacked and stabbed and pummeled and sawed and beaten until there would’ve been nothing left to save if the MPs hadn’t arrived when they did. They were lucky to be alive. The injured truck drivers were driven back to Yongsan Compound and checked into the emergency room of the 121 Evacuation Hospital.
But Moretti was missing. The seven thugs had taken him with them.
That night, the MPs started kicking doors in.
The KNPs protested. Eighth Army law enforcement had only limited jurisdiction in Itaewon; they could arrest G.I. s only. But by now dozens of MPs had seen how badly the three G.I. truck drivers had been beaten and they were enraged. And they knew who they were looking for: the Itaewon Chil Yong.
The MPs forced their way into all the usual haunts that the Seven Dragons frequented: nightclubs, bars, brothels, the black-market warehouses. But Snake, Horsehead, and Dragon’s Claw Number One, along with their four brethren, were nowhere to be found.
Neither was Moretti.
Judging by the shape they’d found the three truck drivers in, the MPs thought that Moretti was probably dead. The Seven Dragons must have taken his body because they wanted to eliminate all evidence of the crime. Without a body to prove that a murder had been committed, and without weapons to prove how the murder had been perpetrated, the likelihood of the Seven Dragons being indicted- much less convicted-was virtually nil.
The reaction at 8th Army headquarters was outrage. Not at the men who’d perpetrated this crime but at the MPs who’d gone on their midnight rampage in search of Mori Di. The Korean newspapers were flooded with reports of Korean citizens being ripped cruelly from their homes in the middle of the night, of innocent black-market entrepreneurs being interrogated and slapped around by long-nosed foreigners, and of the Korean National Police being shamed in their own precincts by burly American MPs who showed no regard for the sanctity of Korean law.
All of the responding MPs were brought up on charges.
The civil affairs operation that Moretti had run in Itaewon was curtailed. His headquarters building was decommissioned by 8th Army and turned over to the ROK Ministry of the Interior. Construction operations, financed by American money, were no longer run by 8th Army Engineering but shifted to Korean subcontractors approved by the ROK government. This was supposed to help strengthen the Korean economy. But the real reason was to insure that there was not another Itaewon Massacre.
After a hearing conducted by the judge advocate general, the MPs who responded to Moretti’s distress call that night were formally reprimanded though not brought up on court-martial charges, and all of them were shipped back to the States.
When the dust settled, the hunt for Moretti had been forgotten. As was the hunt for the seven men who had assaulted him. Forgotten by everybody, that is, except for an MP investigator named Cort.
The progress report I turned into Staff Sergeant Riley at the 8th Army CID office indicated that our search of Itaewon the previous night for Corporal Paco Bernal had turned up negative results.
“You mean he’s not there?” Riley asked us.
I shrugged. Ernie was busy fixing himself a cup of coffee poured from the big silver urn behind Miss Kim’s desk.
“I can’t tell the first sergeant this shit,” Riley said, “that you didn’t find nothing.”
“Why not? That’s what happened.”
“So you don’t have any leads on the whereabouts of this guy?”
I shrugged again. “We’re working on it,” I said.
“The provost marshal wants positive, measurable progress,” Riley said. “Estimates of when a goal will be attained. Not just ‘we didn’t find nothing.’”
“If they want positive,” I said, “they’ll just have to wait.”
“No, they won’t,” Riley said, grabbing a pencil. He spoke as he wrote. “Ongoing searches of the areas the suspect was known to frequent are expected to turn up results prior to the next reporting period.”
“Bullshit.”
Riley looked up from his work. “What do you think we do here?”
Ernie finished his coffee.
The two of us left the CID office and drove over to the barracks at the 21 T Car motor pool. According to the head houseboy, Paco Bernal had not returned to his room. A couple of the G.I. s who knew him couldn’t provide any new information and, moreover, they didn’t seem concerned about Paco’s fate.
As we walked back to the jeep, Ernie said, “They really watch out for one another in this unit, don’t they?”
As we left 21 T Car and drove out Gate 9, heading toward Itaewon, I surprised Ernie by telling him to turn left on the road leading toward Namsan Tunnel.
He swiveled his head and asked, “We going downtown?”
I nodded.
“What the hell for?”
“You’ll see.”
I’m not sure why I hadn’t told Riley that we had thought we had actually seen Paco Bernal-although only fleetingly. Something told me it wasn’t going to be easy to catch Paco until he wanted to be caught.
At the tollbooth I tossed a hundred won into the tin basket. Ernie gunned the jeep’s engine and slid through the milling field of kimchee cabs. Namsan means literally “South Mountain” and it hovers on the southern edge of Seoul like a sentinel monitoring the life of the entire city. The tunnel that was recently carved through it is the technological pride of the country. It’s open mouth loomed before us.
We cruised into its cold depths.
Ernie and I must have been the only Miguks to enter the big cement block building of Seoul City Hall in quite a while judging by the stares we received. None of the signs were in English and some of the Korean was beyond my capacity so I ended up stopping men in suits carrying briefcases and asking them tomfool questions. Since I didn’t know the technical jargon, I described what I needed in broad terms. Cute young secretaries stared at Ernie and me as if we were animals escaped from the zoo. Ernie grows antsy in these situations and I was worried he’d do something ill-considered. After we were directed to the third wrong office in a row, a kindly elderly woman finally directed us to what I later found out was the Office of Building Plans for the Southern Districts of Seoul.
The original plans to the seven buildings Moretti had built were still on file. Not blueprints. Nobody had time for something so time consuming after the war. Buildings had to be built and they had to be built now. Most of the plans were nothing more, really, than glorified sketches done on pulp paper with pencil and ruler, notations in Korean and English made in the margins. Then, after a number of erasures, the broad outlines of the structure had been recopied, right over the pencil lines, in blue ink.
I paid for photocopies to be made of each set of plans. I counted out the won and the grim-faced clerk handed me the plans in a brown envelope along with a receipt. Ernie and I walked back out into the broad hallway.
“What are you going to do with these things?” Ernie asked.
“Some comparison shopping.”
“You really are nuts, Sueno.”