Across the street from city hall, we found a teahouse with waitresses wearing blue uniforms and white gloves. Ernie convinced one of the girls to slip off her gloves and started fondling her fingers, all the while-supposedly-teaching her how to count in English. While the waitresses giggled, I sipped on ginseng tea and studied the plans, comparing them to what I’d seen in Itaewon last night.
There had been a lot of changes made since the buildings were originally erected. Rooms added, walls torn down, electrical wiring installed. And, of course, the Yobo Club had been completely demolished and replaced by a brand new structure, not a nightclub but a shopping emporium: trinkets, T-shirts, sporting equipment.
After the Itaewon Massacre, the ROK Army and the Korean National Police had clamped down on the entire area. For the better part of a month, Itaewon had been put off-limits to all civilians. The only people allowed to enter were those who could prove, by the address on their national identity card, that they were residents. All vehicles leaving the village were searched, either by the ROK Army at roadblocks or by the KNPs. Cort searched Itaewon himself, assisted by two armed MPs. They concentrated on the bars and brothels controlled by the Seven Dragons and any places likely to hide a corpse, including icehouses and electrical refrigeration units. They came up with nothing.
The Han River was about two miles away but the KNP roadblocks had been slapped on so fast after the fight that it was unlikely the killers could have made it out of there in time to dump the body. And even if they had, the corpse probably would’ve been spotted when it rose to the surface a few miles downstream near the Han River Estuary.
Of course, the Seven Dragons could’ve buried Moretti’s body in an empty field. But the southern edge of Seoul-and, indeed, the entire city-was so crammed with refugees after the war that there weren’t any empty fields to be found. Squatters were everywhere. Someone would’ve spotted men burying a corpse. The squatters would have been afraid to report it to the KNPs. Still, rumors would’ve spread. Someone would’ve heard something. And no such rumor had ever come to light.
Maybe the Seven Dragons had chopped up Moretti’s body and disposed of it. This was a possibility so grim I didn’t like to think about it. As vicious as the Seven Dragons were, they had never been known to resort to anything quite so macabre, according to Cort. The Seven Dragons would have been subject to the same superstitions as other Koreans and chopping up someone’s body is the perfect way to insure that their spirit will come back to haunt you.
In fact, when no sign of Moretti’s corpse surfaced, Investigator Cort started to suspect-or maybe hope-that Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti was still alive.
5
That night, Ernie and I caught a kimchee cab out to the ville and then entered into the den of iniquity known as the King Club. We were wearing our running-the-ville outfits: blue jeans, sneakers, sports shirts and nylon jackets with fire-breathing dragons embroidered on the back. In other words, we looked like two typical G.I. s out to spend a mindless evening of drinking beer and playing pinch-butt with as many Korean business girls as we could get our hands on.
During the duty day, Ernie and I are required to wear a white shirt with a tie and a sports jacket. Not uniforms. That getup, coupled with our short haircuts, fairly screams that the two guys you’re looking at are 8th Army CID agents. But that’s the military mind. They want us in civilian clothes in order to blend in with the civilian population but they don’t want us wearing the clothes that civilians actually wear.
At least now, after work, we could dress like two regular G.I. s. Not that we were fooling many people. Itaewon is a small village and most everybody knew who we were.
Miss Kwon hadn’t arrived at work yet and the all-Korean rock-and-roll band on the stage was still tuning up so I started talking to the middle-aged woman behind the bar, Mrs. Bei. She managed the place for the real owner.
“Who’s the G.I. who complained about Miss Kwon?” I asked.
Mrs. Bei frowned. She didn’t know his name. She only knew that he was a black man, that he wasn’t a youngster, and then she held her splayed fingers at the side of her head to show me that his hair stuck out farther than army regulation allowed.
There are over 1,500 American G.I. s stationed at 8th Army headquarters on Yongsan Compound. After you’ve been here awhile, and especially when you’re in my line of work, you get to know quite a few of them. In fact, 8th Army is much like a small town, full of gossip and backbiting, and everyone knows all about everyone else‘s business.
Back at my barstool, I told Ernie what Mrs. Bei had said.
Without hesitating, Ernie said, “Hilliard.”
He was referring to Sergeant First Class Quinton A. Hilliard, the NCO-in-charge of the 8th Army EEO Office. Equal Employment Opportunity.
I agreed. It sounded like Hilliard.
After the “race riot” in Itaewon in 1972, the 8th Army honchos finally acquiesced to setting up what other government agencies already had: a staff to monitor race relations within the command. Prior to 1972, Itaewon had been segregated. White soldiers, and other “honorary” whites like Chicanos and Asians, frequented the red-light village of Itaewon. The black soldiers had their own smaller ville on the other side of Yongsan Compound, in a district of Seoul called Samgakji. Samgakji is still there, and still thriving, but now black soldiers can venture into Itaewon without fear of reprisal, for the most part. However, when Ernie and I had occasionally gone to Samgakji on an investigation, we’d never once seen a white G.I.
Ernie and I ordered beers and sat through the rock band’s first set. After a half hour, when the club was almost full, Miss Kwon still hadn’t shown up. We decided to look for her. I asked around amongst the business girls and received directions to her hooch which was, as I suspected, located in the maze of dark alleys behind the nightclub district. We pushed through the double doors of the King Club and stepped out into the street. After some searching through narrow pedestrian lanes and knocking on doors, we found the hooch the King Club business girls had described. It was a three-story building behind a high brick wall.
I pounded on the wooden gate. When a cleaning woman opened up, I explained who we were and who we wanted to talk to. The bent-over old woman nodded and shuffled off slowly and led us to Miss Kwon’s hooch on the top floor. She slid open the oiled-paper door. Darkness. Ernie stepped into the room and switched on the single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.
The room was just a ten-foot-by-twelve-foot square with flowered paper peeling off the walls and yellow vinyl pasted to the floor, empty except for a few scraps of newspaper crumpled at the bottom of a plastic armoire.
“Domang kasso,” the cleaning woman said. Miss Kwon had run away.
I was happy for the shy young woman. Maybe she could escape from this life, escape from doing things that she hated to do.
Ernie was less optimistic. “She’ll be back,” he said.
Cort was reassigned to other investigations; the usual ones that came up back in those days, thievery-of heating oil, food, medical supplies- anything that could alleviate the unrelenting poverty the Koreans were living in, being the most prevalent. At that time G.I. s weren’t allowed to wear civilian clothes. They were ordered to be in uniform at all times, on and off compound. In spring and summer, they wore puke green army fatigues. But in the autumn, when the leaves turned red and yellow and brown and the nights became longer and colder, G.I. s started to wear their woolen winter fatigues. The tailor shops in Itaewon specialized in sewing a silk lining inside them and, if a G.I. popped for the money, he enjoyed the luxury of wearing a very comfortable set of clothes-smooth on the inside, warm on the outside.