I thought of laying my cards on the table, seeing what he had to say, but decided against it. Tomorrow morning, Jessica Tidwell was scheduled to meet up with the Japanese gangster, Ondo Fukushima, somewhere many miles south of here. And after spending the day with him, she would be returning to Seoul to the White Crane Hotel. I didn’t want Horsehead to know that I’d be there, ready to pounce, or the venue would be changed and then it would be much more difficult to find Jessica.
But there was another reason I decided not to discuss things with Horsehead: I was angry.
Being pushed around was becoming a little old. I didn’t like the Seven Dragons. And I particularly didn’t like this tough guy Horsehead, with his three or four henchmen standing behind him and his too-expensive suit and his gaudy jewelry and his ill-gotten money and his attitude that he could bump into me and intimidate me into standing out of his way.
I bumped him back.
He reached out and shoved me and actually I was glad he did. I was released from the restraint of being a good cop. Now I could say I was defending myself. Maybe Horsehead saw the look in my eyes and maybe he realized that, if he was going to go up against me, he needed solid footing. He retreated down the steps.
When I reached the ground floor he popped a right at my nose. I dodged it, hooked him in the ribcage, and then we were wrestling back the few feet toward the bar. A waitress was in the way and we bumped into her tray of drinks and the glassware and ice flew straight up in the air and then crashed to the floor; women screamed. Ernie jumped past me and started pummeling Horsehead’s pals because Horsehead didn’t travel alone. They, in turn, started pummeling Ernie. Other G.I. s jumped in. Waitresses, swearing their allegiance to Korea, bonged stainless steel cocktail trays on the heads of the G.I. s, trying to get them off of Horsehead. Horsehead, for his part, seemed to be having a wonderful time, punching and wrestling and kicking and spitting.
And then the boy at the door started screaming.
“MP!” he shouted. “MP coming!”
I had backed up to the safety of the bar and Ernie was still jostling with Horsehead but most of the customers pushed past us like a horde of panicked cattle, everybody heading for the front door. Horsehead staggered backward, cursing.
By now his men had surrounded him. He pointed a thick finger at me.
“You, Sueno!” he said. “Chukiyo ra!”
I stepped forward but Horsehead’s men grabbed him and pulled him through the front door of the UN Club.
By now, the police whistles were shrill and we could hear their boots pounding on the pavement outside. Ernie dragged me through the back storage room and out into the street. Neither Horsehead nor his boys followed.
“Asshole,” Ernie said. “What did he say?”
“He said he’s going to kill me.” By now we had emerged through an alley onto the main drag. “But never mind about that. Look up the street, at the King Club.”
There was a much larger fight going on up there and that’s where a half dozen MPs were headed, nightsticks drawn.
“Riot.”
He was right. Even from this distance we could tell that the men fighting one another were American G.I. s-about half of them white, half of them black.
“That damn Hilliard,” Ernie said.
And then we were running toward the center of the fray.
Less than ten minutes remained until the midnight curfew and Ernie and I were becoming more nervous by the second. Maybe the bartender had slipped out the front door. But that seemed unlikely because I knew from previously casing the Grand Ole Opry Club that they barred the front door from inside at night. It made sense for the employees, after cleaning up, to leave via the back door and emerge into this dark alley lined with trash cans and wooden crates of empty brown beer bottles. But if the bartender had gone out the front door, Ernie and I were wasting our time. I shivered in the cold night air. A few more wisps of snow swirled in front of my nose, falling to the ground and mostly melting away, except for clumps that collected in corners and on the edges of brick walls.
I wanted to talk to the Grand Ole Opry Club bartender because on the night Ernie and I found Moretti‘s remains, he would’ve been the man in charge. Someone in Itaewon-maybe the Seven Dragons-had been aware of what Ernie and I were up to. After we left that night they sent someone down there to see what we’d discovered. Sometime during the night they cleared out Mori Di’s remains, brought Two Bellies down there, and executed her. The bartender, the man on the scene, must have some knowledge of what happened. Probably he’d been paid, or more likely intimidated, into keeping his mouth shut. The statement he made to the KNPs was innocuous: he claimed he locked up that night, went home, and saw nothing. The strange part is that the KNPs let him get away with that statement. They didn’t arrest him, they didn’t lock him up in a cell, they didn’t sweat information from him with hours of brutal interrogation. Instead, they took his statement and thanked him and sent him on his way.
They were happy to let the suspicion linger that Ernie and I had taken Two Bellies down there and executed her. Of course they knew it was ridiculous but it served the vital purpose of deflecting attention away from the “person or persons unknown” who’d gone to all the trouble of removing Mori Di’s remains. The person who’d been vindictive enough to murder Two Bellies for having talked to us.
The KNPs seemed satisfied to let this case drift. Why were they completely unconcerned about finding the people who’d really murdered Two Bellies? The answer that seemed most likely was not an answer I was happy with. The local KNPs were under the thumb, and probably in the employ, of the syndicate known as the Seven Dragons.
While we shivered, waiting in the cold night for the bartender to appear, I thought about the fight we’d just witnessed outside the King Club. It had been predictable enough. As more black soldiers arrived at the King Club, Sergeant First Class Hilliard’s harangue took effect. Some of the black G.I. s demanded that the Korean rock band play soul music: Curtis Mayfield, Jackie Wilson, the Temptations. But the little band’s repertoire included only a handful of songs and all of them were either rock or country-western. When they launched into them, Hilliard complained bitterly and the black G.I. s started hooting at the hapless band and some of the white G.I. s told them to lay off and then the insults started being hurled. Before long everyone was out in the street hurling knuckles.
The MPs broke up the fight and ferried a couple of the guys who needed stitches back to the compound, but they didn’t arrest anybody. They shooed everyone off the street and it was pretty close to the midnight curfew by the time the situation returned to normal.
The MPs didn’t arrest anybody because the desk sergeant who was communicating with the MP patrols by radio from the station back on Yongsan Compound didn’t want to have to write up a racial incident. All hell would break loose-bureaucratically anyway-and everyone involved would have to be interviewed formally, under oath, and the reports would have to be filed in triplicate and be staffed up the chain of command and those reports would be personally reviewed by the 8th Army judge advocate general and eventually by the commanding general himself.
In other words, 8th Army was making it so cumbersome to report a racial incident that it was unlikely anyone would actually go to the trouble of doing so. Good for the stats. Then the honchos could claim that there were no racial incidents in their command.
Sergeant Hilliard was the joker in the deck. While fists had been flying, he’d been nowhere to be found. I know because I looked. And he’s lucky Ernie didn’t find him. But the big question was, would Hilliard raise hell tomorrow morning at 8th Army? Would he file a complaint and accuse the MPs of a cover-up?
I didn’t believe that there were no racial problems in 8th Army. I’d been in the service long enough to know that black soldiers were discriminated against. I’d seen it happen with my own eyes; racist sergeants whispering about who would get the shit detail or miscreant officers scratching out the names of black soldiers when it came time for promotion. As a Mexican-American myself, I knew that sometimes those whisperings were directed at me. So the problems were real, the solutions elusive. But what I disliked about Sergeant First Class Hilliard was that he wasn’t really searching for solutions. Rather he was using racial tensions to elevate himself above the crowd and stroke his own ego. And, not incidentally, to wriggle his way into the panties of a certain teenage business girl by the name of Miss Kwon.