Ernie thought about it a moment. “Haggler Lee.” Then he smiled and said, “We ain’t there yet?”
An alley not much wider than the width of my shoulders led up a steep hill. We followed it and took a right and then a left and another left. No electric lights shone behind the ten-foot-high stone and brick walls that lined the narrow lane. Orienting ourselves by moonlight, we finally stopped and pounded on an ancient wood-plank door.
We kept pounding for ten minutes, taking turns when our knuckles grew raw. After another five minutes, the big door squeaked open.
An old woman wearing a traditional Korean dress bowed to us and motioned for us to follow her across the narrow courtyard. She shoved open a heavy wooden door that squeaked on rusty wheels and then closed it behind us. Ernie and I entered a vast, two-story-high warehouse. In the center of the warehouse, guttering like a fading ghost, flame flickered from a fat wax candle.
Haggler Lee sat cross-legged on a kang, a platform raised about two feet off the floor and covered with thickly layered oil paper. After wending our way around mountains of crated goods, Ernie and I took off our shoes, stepped up onto the platform, and sat across from Haggler Lee. Between us stood a foot-high round table with mother-of-pearl dragons inlaid in its black lacquer surface.
Haggler Lee smiled.
Two teeth poked out of red gums, both of them brown. Haggler Lee had been a youngish-looking man, probably in his mid to late forties, but lately he’d been sick. In the flickering candlelight, his skin looked yellow, shading toward orange. Nobody knew exactly what disease he was suffering from but my guess was something endemic to Korea, like hepatitis.
“Paco Bernal,” Haggler Lee said, without any hint of weariness in his voice. “He’s a good boy.”
I did my best not to show surprise. But when I thought about it, I shouldn’t have been startled that Haggler Lee already knew why we were here. People watch everything G.I. s do in Itaewon, especially two G.I. s who happen to be agents for 8th Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. Through his black-market business, Haggler Lee would have dealings with business girls and cocktail waitresses and bartenders and just about everyone else who keeps the nightclub district of Itaewon humming. What else did Haggler Lee know? Did he know about Colonel Tidwell and Jessica? I’d soon find out.
“Does Paco work for you?” Ernie asked.
“He run errand sometimes.”
“What kind of errands?”
“On compound.” Haggler Lee shrugged his narrow shoulders. The hand-stitched white cranes embroidered onto his silk tunic made a rustling sound, as if flapping feathered wings. “Deliveries,” Lee said.
“Of dope?”
The flushed skin of Haggler Lee’s face grimaced in pain. “Not dope. Only natural product.”
“Like marijuana?”
“What grows from the earth no can hurt body.”
Also, it can’t get you in trouble with the Korean National Police. The Korean authorities are much more tolerant about mildly hallucinogenic plants that grow from the soil. Korea is an ancient agricultural country. Farmers need to supplement their income between harvests. If G.I. s want to smoke some weed, what harm could it do?
I pushed the candle-holder forward, trying to throw more light on Haggler Lee’s face. “Did Paco make a big buy recently?” I asked. “Like a thousand bucks?”
Haggler Lee looked pained again, as if his small stomach were churning razor blades.
“Paco has some problems,” Haggler Lee replied.
That was the understatement of the week.
“What kind of problems?”
“Like bad people hear about thousand dollars stolen on compound,” Lee said. “Same bad people also hear that good boy, Paco, he the one stole thousand dollars.”
“So Paco’s money is gone,” I said, “stolen by hoodlums. And he never had a chance to make the deal he was going to make.”
Haggler Lee splayed his bony hands. “So sad story.”
“Yes,” I answered. “So sad story.”
“Where is Paco now?” Ernie asked.
“He run away. With that American girl. She come to get him tonight. She have some more money so Paco can hide.”
“Where’d they go?”
Haggler Lee breathed deeply and then let the air out slowly between clenched teeth, a traditional sign of painful indecision. When he didn’t answer, Ernie rapped his knuckles on the inlaid mother-of-pearl table.
“What do you want, Lee?” he asked.
Haggler Lee’s eyes shone. “Who on black-market detail now?”
“Burrows and Slabem,” Ernie answered.
Jake Burrows and Felix Slabem, our fellow agents at 8th Army CID, not friends of ours.
“Can you make sure,” Haggler Lee asked, “that they no visit me tomorrow?”
Although they had no direct jurisdiction over Haggler Lee, Agents Burrows and Slabem routinely showed up to scare G.I. s away and disrupt Lee’s black-market operation, costing him money. Ernie and I seldom did. He was too valuable a source of information.
“What time?” Ernie asked.
“Noontime until four o’clock.”
“We’ll make something up,” Ernie said. “Our case is top priority. We’ll tell the first sergeant we need their help to research something.”
Lee nodded in agreement. “Good. Then I tell you where Paco and colonel’s daughter go.” He clawed his long fingernails on the edge of the small table. “But you no like.”
“We like, no like. No make difference,” Ernie said. He was beginning to sound like a Korean himself.
“Paco Bernal go someplace hide. Nobody know where. But before he go, colonel’s daughter say goodbye to Paco. Say she go back to American compound. But she no go compound. She go Golden Dragon Travel Agency.”
“To buy tickets to leave the country?” I asked.
“No.” Lee said. “To earn one thousand dollars. To give back to her father. To get Paco out of trouble.”
Ernie’s eyes widened. “How in the hell is she going to make a thousand bucks at a travel agency?”
Lee waited for us to figure it out. I already had. A few seconds later, so did Ernie.
“Japanese tourists,” he said.
Lee nodded. The pain in his stomach must’ve hurt something fierce. His wrinkled face twisted in anguish.
“Not good,” Lee said. “Eighth Army, any honcho, my friend. They loose face, Haggler Lee loose face.”
I believed he meant it. Haggler Lee had grown rich off of the 8th United States Army and anything that cut them down a notch, cut him down a notch too.
My gut wasn’t feeling too good at this news. If something awful happened to Jessica Tidwell, if she wasn’t saved from hurting herself, the lowest-ranking enlisted men standing near the disaster would be blamed. In this case, that would be myself and Agent Ernie Bascom.
I asked Haggler Lee about Two Bellies. He recoiled at the name and claimed he knew nothing about her murder. Ernie started to ask follow-up questions but within seconds the maid came back in and the candle was snuffed out. By the light of a flashlight, we were ushered out of the warehouse.
We could’ve raised hell, tried to force more information out of him, but I knew from experience that Haggler Lee, despite his frail appearance, couldn’t be intimidated. But if you remained on his good side, and played the game the way he expected it to be played, he’d parcel out information the same way he parceled out money: one coin at a time.
With nothing more to go on, Ernie and I returned to the MP Station on Yongsan Compound and reported that, so far, we’d been unable to find Jessica Tidwell. I did my best to catch a couple of hours sleep before reveille.
Shortly after the morning bugle sounded, Ernie and I were up, hunched over our favorite table at the 8th Army snack bar, slurping on bitter coffee and munching bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. The big question we faced was whether or not to report what we’d learned from Haggler Lee up the chain of command. Plenty of waste had already hit the fan but now even more of that waste was liable to splatter back on us.