“Didn’t you get everything you want?”
“Not everything. I wanted to talk to you about this report.” I waved the copy of the three typed pages in front of him.
“Nothing to talk about,” Hilliard replied.
He turned back to the pinball machine and launched a metal ball into play. Lights lit up and bells clanged as the tiny silver sphere bounced back and forth. Finally, the ball slipped past Hilliard’s flippers and dropped, exhausted, into a dark hole. Hilliard was ready to launch another ball when Ernie placed his hand over Hilliard‘s knuckles.
“Talk to the man, Sarge,” Ernie said, leaning close. Then he grinned.
Hilliard turned again, anger flaring in his eyes. “I told you, there ain’t nothing to talk about.”
“You’re the one who filed this complaint,” I said.
“Yes. I filed it but on behalf of the brothers.”
“It’s your name as complainant.”
“Only because I was there at the time. They be racist out there at the King Club. They discriminate. When a black soldier want to talk to a woman, want to get to know her, she move away from you fast. Just ’cause you black. They be racist out there because the white G.I. taught the Korean woman how to be racist.” Now he was waggling his forefinger at us, preaching. “It ain’t enough that you racist yourself but you have to export it to every country you go to.”
Ernie rolled his eyes.
I kept my face impassive. Koreans are smart enough to form their own opinions about people and they don’t need any help from American G.I. s. Instead of arguing with him, I pointed at the report. “It says here that you requested Miss Kwon’s company and she refused. When you asked her why, she told you that it was because you were black.”
Hilliard thrust his shoulders back. “That’s what she said.”
I shook my head.
“Why you shaking your head?” Hilliard asked. “You calling me a liar?”
“Miss Kwon,” I replied, “doesn’t speak English.”
“How you know? You the one taught her to be racist?”
“I didn’t teach her nothing. She’s shy, just in from the country, she’s afraid of G.I. s. All G.I. s. Black or white.”
“She friendly enough with the white ones.”
Now we were getting down to it. Hilliard was jealous that Miss Kwon had been going with other G.I. s but not with him.
“Maybe they were kind to her,” I said. “Maybe they took it slow and easy.”
“Maybe they be white and maybe they told her if they saw her with a black man, they wouldn’t talk to her no more.”
“Maybe,” I said. He seemed surprised at me agreeing with him. I continued. “But maybe she’s also just a frightened young girl from the countryside and it takes time for her to get to know someone.”
“You trying to make this complaint go away. Well, it ain’t going to happen. Black G.I. s got a right to be treated like anybody else. Whether it be here on compound or out there in Itaewon. And the King Club is racist. Whites only. They might as well put up a sign. And this Miss Kwon, she going along with the program.” He crossed his arms, thinking it over. Then he said, “What makes the CID so interested in all this anyway?”
“I’m worried about putting Miss Kwon under too much pressure. Her family’s poor, she needs the job. She’s just trying to get by.”
Hilliard’s eyes narrowed. “Snake sent you, didn’t he?”
“Snake?” The name electrified me.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know. You kissing his butt.” Hilliard was smiling now, sure he was on to something. “He sent you out here to make sure that my complaint don’t go through. To make sure that the King Club ain’t put off-limits for being racist.”
Hilliard slugged down the last of his bourbon and Seven, checked the coin return of the pinball machine to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, and then pulled his cap from his belt.
“You can tell Snake,” he said, “that if he wants this complaint pulled, he gonna have to deal with Q himself.” Q for Quinton, Hilliard’s first name. “And tell Snake not to send out anymore whitey CID agents to try to push this black man around.”
“You’re a moron, Hilliard,” Ernie said.
Once again, Hilliard waggled his forefinger at Ernie’s nose. “You mess with Q, you find out who be a moron.”
Ernie slapped his hand.
The motion was so fast and the crack of flesh on flesh so loud, that for a moment Hilliard just stood there, stunned. Then he said, “You keep your hands off me, you understand? You keep your damn hands off me!”
But he was no longer waggling his forefinger.
The morning after the Itaewon Massacre the nuns searched the ville.
“We want to prepare his body,” they told Cort. “For cremation or for return to America.”
“Why did you think he was dead?”
“Everybody say.”
They used their contacts in the ville, which were extensive, to ask questions. Most of the business girls were Buddhists and virtually all of them prayed and burned incense at the shrine atop the hill overlooking Itaewon. Many of them were there that morning, praying for the soul of Mori Di.
Rumors were flying. Most of them centered around Mori Di’s condition after his beating. Some said he was already dead when the Seven Dragons took him away, others said he was still breathing but just barely. No one had any doubt about why the Seven Dragons had absconded with the corpse. They wanted to avoid a criminal prosecution.
In addition to being concerned about Mori Di’s welfare, many of the families in Itaewon were concerned about Mori Di’s bank. Unheing is the word the nuns used. Literally, “silver storage.”
Cort was taken aback by this, suddenly on the alert for an illegal activity that Moretti might have been conducting. Was he changing money from won to U.S. currency? Possession of greenbacks was illegal both for G.I. s and Korean civilians and yet U.S. currency was highly prized and worth much more than either the G.I. Military Payment Certificates or the struggling Korean won. A healthy profit could be made on such transactions. Or was Moretti being paid by desperate Koreans to buy U.S. postal money orders on compound and mail them off to some relative living overseas? Also illegal, but profitable.
As it turned out, Mori Di’s silver storage was none of these things.
“Everybody robbed all the time in Itaewon,” was the way one of the nuns put it to Cort. There was no security. War refugees, of which there were millions, had long since taken to carrying their most precious possessions on their persons. But this was cumbersome. Especially once a family had stopped in Itaewon, set up a ramshackle home and maybe opened some sort of business. They couldn’t keep family heirlooms tied around their waist or taped to an inner thigh forever. So when people saw a trustworthy man like Mori Di, living in a solid building protected by himself and Buddhist nuns and three G.I. truck drivers, they started to ask him to store their valuables.
At first Moretti hesitated. He already had too many responsibilities: the construction operations, the orphanage, and the soup kitchen. He had more than enough to do. But people kept begging him and, finally, he set up a system whereby people could turn over family heirlooms to him, have them boxed up and numbered and a receipt would be provided. After that, Moretti stashed them somewhere, presumably in his headquarters building.
“Seven Dragons kick us out,” one of the nuns told Cort. “All orphans outside too. Winter that time. Cold. We have no money, no food. Seven Dragons no care. We take children, beg money, beg food, and ride on bus, train, whatever we can find and walk back up here in mountains to Temple of Constant Truth.”
Cort waited for what he knew would come next.
“After leave Itaewon, five children die. Two lose foot. One lose hand.”
Despite these hardships, the rest of the children, and all the nuns, arrived safely at the temple.
“The families,” Cort asked, “that left valuables with Moretti, what did they do?”
“They fight,” one of the nuns replied. “Nobody see. No American MPs, no Korean police. Only poor people of Itaewon and Seven Dragons.”