“All the way to Mapo? he asked. “What the hell for?”
“This guy ran,” I replied. “That means he knows something that he doesn’t want to tell us.”
“What about the Tidwell girl?”
“Don’t tell Top anything, or the provost marshal, but we might have a lead on her tonight.”
“And you’ll be back in time to follow it up?”
“Sure.”
“You been listening to the weather report?”
“Not lately.”
“Maybe you’d better.”
The Armed Forces Korea Network is a television station that broadcasts from a small hill in the center of Yongsan Compound. During duty hours there is no programming but at night they broadcast reruns of Stateside shows, whatever they can buy cheaply.
AFKN also, of course, does plenty of news and weather. The news show comes on in black-and-white and is pretty bland. A couple of uniformed G.I. s sit behind desks and read wire service reports. Things pick up when the weatherman comes on. He’s a zoomie, a sergeant in the air force, and as such he’s zany-at least when compared to the army automatons who read the regular news. He points at a huge map of Korea and moves cutouts around the board representing a shining sun or a storm cloud or wind blowing in the shape of an arrow.
Exciting stuff.
But hold on to your hat because next comes sports, the only part of the news that G.I. s pay attention to. It doesn’t matter how monotonously the latest sports statistics are droned out, G.I. s focus all of their attention on such things as batting averages and yardage gained and historical rates of fielding errors. This information is reported in minute detail and soldiers absorb these facts with the intense concentration of actuarial accountants.
But for the last few days the air force weatherman had been in his glory, outshining even the sports announcer. According to his map of Korea, a huge front was bubbling out of Manchuria, from deep within unclimbed mountains and uncharted forests. The front had begun rolling south down the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang, in North Korea, had already been swallowed up by every storm cloud cutout the airman had. And he kept shoving those storm clouds south, in a jumble that looked like an invasion of chubby snowmen. But the report was no joke. Barometric pressure was dropping, the temperature was dropping, precipitation was increasing, and within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours the capital city of Seoul could expect anywhere from six to fifteen inches of precipitation, in the form of thick, slushy snow.
The worst storm the republic had experienced in over ten years.
Electricity would go out, roads would be closed, tree branches would snap, power lines would be sheathed in tubes of ice, heating fuel would become difficult if not impossible to obtain, and water pipes would most likely freeze. Finally, once the storm hit full force, food shipments would stop.
The airman predicted the cold front would linger over the peninsula for three to four days before it moved slowly out to sea. And then he grinned a big toothy grin and pulled out a fur-lined cap and slipped it on over his head.
“Gonna be cold, folks,” he said into the microphone.
Off-camera, a stagehand barked a laugh.
Military humor.
What the airman hadn’t mentioned was that the last time a cold front of this size moved in from Manchuria over three hundred people, most of them elderly citizens or children not yet in school, had died within the city limits of Seoul. Despite the attempt at levity, a few score people were now marked for death-in Seoul, in Itaewon, and throughout the country.
The only question was who, when, and how painfully.
We were making good time. The engine of Ernie’s jeep purred like the well-oiled machine it was and the little heater under the metal dashboard was churning out a steady flow of warm air. I sat in the passenger seat, my nose pressed against the plastic window in the jeep’s canvas canopy, watching rice paddies roll by. Out here, most of the farmhouses were thatched in straw. President Pak Chung-hee’s New Village Movement had yet to provide tile roofs for all the families that tilled the soil.
“What if we don’t find him?” Ernie said. “We could get stuck out here.” Snow covered the countryside like a sheet of white silk.
“Not if we hurry,” I said. “The zoomie on AFKN claims that the worst of the storm won’t hit until tomorrow morning.”
Ernie snorted. AFKN weather reports were notoriously wrong. When we’d departed through the main gate of Yongsan Compound, the MP shack had already taken down the yellow placard, meaning “caution, dangerous road conditions” and replaced it with red for “emergency vehicles only.”
Luckily, our CID Dispatch qualified us as an emergency vehicle. Or maybe not so luckily, depending on how you looked at it.
“Maybe he’s not even here,” Ernie said.
I didn’t bother to reply. Ernie was becoming increasingly morose. Maybe it was the fact that the KNPs still considered us to be suspects in the murder of Two Bellies. Whatever the reason, I figured it would be best to get our business over with and return to Seoul as quickly as possible.
On the outskirts of Mapo, a policeman in a yellow rain slicker stood on a circular platform directing traffic. Ernie pulled the jeep right up next to him and I climbed out and showed him my badge. Then I asked him in Korean if he could guide us to the address Doc Yong had provided.
He crinkled his nose, giving it some thought. Then he pointed with his gloved hand and told me, “The Small Stream District is on the northern edge of town, near the Gold Mountain Temple.”
That was as close as he could come.
We drove on. I glanced back at the young cop and pitied him, standing there exposed to the elements, snowflakes drifting down on his slickly clad shoulders.
Gold Mountain Temple was easy enough to find, an old stone edifice dedicated to Buddha. Once there, I stopped a couple of housewives on their way back from the open-air Mapo Market and showed them the address I’d written in hangul. They conferred for a moment and pointed me toward an alley that led up a hill behind the temple. Ernie locked the jeep and together we trudged up the steep lane.
At the top of the hill, I asked a man working inside a bicycle repair shop if he could direct me to the address and this time he was even more specific.
“The next alley,” he told me. “Turn left. About twenty paces beyond.”
The bicycle shop guy stared after us, as did everyone we met here in the Small Steam District of Mapo. There were no American military compounds within thirty miles and this was a working-class agrarian area. No reason for foreigners to come out here. Judging by the stares directed our way, you would’ve thought Ernie and I were two men from Mars. And at the moment, that was exactly how we felt.
I knocked on the front gate. The wood was rotted and old. The brick wall also appeared to be ancient but it had been built solidly. No answer to my knock. I pounded again. Finally, from the other side of the wall, plastic sandals slapped against cement. The small door in the wooden gate creaked open. A face peeked out. The face of an elderly woman. Her eyes widened so much that the creases on her forehead scrunched up like an accordion.
I said the bartenders name. “Noh Bang-ok isso-yo?” Is he here?
The old woman screamed.
Ernie figured that must mean we had the right address so he barged through the open door. The courtyard was small and barren except for a row of earthenware kimchee pots lining the inside of the brick wall. Footsteps pounded from within the darkened hooch.
“Nugu siyo?” a man’s voice said. Who is it? Then, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and pajama bottoms, he appeared at the open sliding door of the hooch. Ernie and I both recognized him immediately, the bartender from the Grand Ole Opry, sans white shirt and bow tie. At first, he flinched, as if preparing to run. But Ernie was across the courtyard in three steps and Noh must’ve realized the futility of trying to flee. Instead, his shoulders slumped and then he squatted on his haunches, staring at us thoughtfully, wondering what he was in for.