A herd of footsteps pounded down the hallway. The front door clanged open and men began shoving and shouting. I stayed kneeling on the cement floor, curled up, doing my best to protect my head and other sensitive body parts.
Charley Lee rolled away and within seconds Korean cops were grabbing my shoulders and pulling me backward toward the door. I kicked out as best I could and then I was on my feet and outside of the cell, my vision blurred by blood. A few seconds later I was in some sort of dispensary, being washed and tended by a male nurse. Patched up, I was returned to my cell.
Alone this time.
I groaned, held my stomach, and tried to sleep on the cold cement floor.
If the Seven Dragons wanted to send me a message, they could’ve used Western Union.
When the first sergeant returned the next morning, and the door to my cell was opened, his eyes widened.
“What the hell happened to you?”
I shrugged. “Walked into a door.”
“The door to a meat grinder?” When I didn’t answer he said, “Do you want to put in a complaint?”
“Have I been released?”
“Yeah. To the custody of Eighth Army.”
“Then I don’t need to complain.” Ernie was released too, although he was in somewhat better shape than I was.
Silently, we all rode back to Yongsan Compound in the first sergeant’s green sedan. He didn’t ask us any questions. And we didn’t feel like answering any.
The first thing the provost marshal did was take us off the case.
The KNPs warned 8th Army that, pending further investigation into the murder of the woman known as Two Bellies, we might be formally charged at any time. Therefore, Colonel Brace had no option but to suspend us from all law enforcement duties. We were reduced to being put under the supervision of Staff Sergeant Riley and he had us sitting in his office, catching up with some clerical duties that had backlogged over the months.
Miss Lee, the statuesque secretary of the Admin office, seemed bemused by this turn of events because it had been some weeks since she and Ernie had last gone out on a date. But Ernie was on his best behavior and she was adapting well. He even brought her a fresh flower in the morning to replace the old one in the little glass vase on her desk. She accepted it with a snort. But really, as hard to figure as women are, my guess was that she was pleased.
Corporal Paco Bernal hadn’t been caught yet. And since the regular MP patrols out in Itaewon hadn’t uncovered any hint of him, it was assumed that he’d moved on elsewhere in country. He was still on the watch list at all international points of embarkation and every military law enforcement officer in the country-from Munsan to Pusan-was keeping an eye out for him.
The most important thing, as far as Ernie and I were concerned, was that we weren’t restricted to compound. Once the flag was lowered and the cannon went off at the end of the duty day- as it did every day at seventeen hundred hours with military precision- we were free to do whatever we wanted to do. And what we wanted to do, more than anything else, was head out to the ville.
I was asleep in my bunk when the MP desk sergeant shook me awake. I shielded my eyes from the glare of his flashlight.
“You Sueno?”
“Yeah. What happened?”
“The J-2’s daughter escaped.”
“Huh?”
“Colonel Tidwell. His daughter, Jessica, she escaped.”
I shoved the army blanket away and sat up. “What do you mean ‘escaped’?”
“She climbed out of the window of her bedroom at Colonel Tidwell’s quarters and made her way to the main gate. A guard there spotted her leaving the compound but he was too stupid to stop her. He did see her waving down a kimchee cab. She headed toward Itaewon.”
“And the provost marshal wants me to get out of bed and look for her, is that it?”
“That’s it. You and your partner, what’s his name.”
“Did you wake up what’s his name yet?”
“Yeah. He took a swing at me when I did. Good thing he missed. Otherwise I’d have written him up on charges.”
At least I could be sure that he’d woken up the right guy.
I climbed out of my bunk, opened my wall locker, and started putting on my clothes. The beam from the MP desk sergeant’s flashlight disappeared down the hallway.
9
It was oh-dark-thirty, right smack dab in the middle of the midnight-to-four curfew, when Ernie and I arrived back in the red-light district of Itaewon.
“Seems like we just left,” Ernie said.
“Yeah.”
Itaewon was a different world. A dark world, all the flashing lights shut off, windows shuttered tight, swinging double doors padlocked and barred from the inside. Unlit neon drooped from dirty brick walls like cheap earrings dangling from a prostitute’s ear.
Only law enforcement personnel and emergency vehicles are allowed to operate during the midnight-to-four curfew. A couple of times “white mice”-the white-clad curfew-enforcement police- stopped us and inspected our CID badges. Each time I spoke in Korean and asked if they’d seen a young American woman in the area. They shook their heads.
Jessica Tidwell had arrived in Itaewon just before the midnight-to-four curfew took effect.
“We’re not going to find her out here now,” Ernie said.
“Maybe not,” I answered. “If you were her, where would you go?”
Ernie thought about it. “To see Paco.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s what I thought to. So maybe Paco Bernal didn’t leave Itaewon after all. Maybe he’s been hiding here the last few days and maybe he found a way to get word to Jessica Tidwell.”
“And as soon as she had a chance, she flew the coop.”
“Right again.”
“So they’re together. And Paco found a hideout in or near Itaewon that we haven’t been able to snoop out. A lot of good that does us. We still don’t know where they are.”
“There’s one other thing.”
“What?” Ernie asked.
“Paco has some business to conduct, remember? With that thousand dollars.”
“Sure,” Ernie said. “he was going to buy some drugs in bulk, move them quickly, make a profit, and return the thousand dollars to Colonel Tidwell’s safe.”
“Maybe.”
“No maybe about it. The perfect plan, other than a few minor factors. He didn’t know that when Jessica stole the money she’d leave the safe unlocked and the door to her father’s den open just to piss off her mom. Only thing he hadn’t counted on, the dumb shit. But other than drugs, what else could he buy and make a quick profit? Had to be drugs.”
Paco could have bought expensive items at the PX-like imported cameras or stereo equipment-to sell at a profit. The problem was that all such items are recorded by 8th Army Data Processing and at the end of each G.I.’s tour you have to either produce the item or, more often, produce a receipt that it is being shipped back to the States in your hold baggage. Paco would want something untraceable. Therefore it had to be something illicit, like drugs.
“So if he were going to do that,” I said, “in Itaewon, who would he see?”
Ernie thought about it a moment. “Nobody deals drugs in the open in Itaewon. Not if we‘re talking something other than marijuana.”
In Korea, the penalty for dealing in hard drugs-heroin or cocaine-is death. And it’s strictly enforced. More than one culprit, foreign and Korean, had been hanged for the offense. The military government of Pak Chung-hee was trying, by force of will, to pull Korea out of poverty and they weren’t going to allow drug dealers to corrupt its youth and thereby hold the country back.
“So if Paco’d set up some sort of exchange,” I said, “it was probably a one shot deal with somebody who was willing to take a big chance. Who would that be?”
“Somebody desperate,” Ernie said.
“Which, in Itaewon, doesn’t narrow it down much.”
“No.”
“So when it comes to money, who knows everything that goes on in Itaewon?”