“Where is she, Jimmy?” Ernie asked.
“Who?”
“The redhead Horsehead was trying to pimp. Jessica Tidwell.”
Jimmy Pak frowned as if acid were pumping out of his stomach.
“That’s all you want?” he said.
“That’s it.”
“After all the trouble you cause, you only worry about her?”
“We don’t give a shit about you,” Ernie told him.
“Why I help you?” Jimmy asked. “You do nothing but cause me trouble.”
I leaned forward on the leather seat.
“You’re going to help us,” I told him, “because if you don’t, we’re going to return to Eighth Army and tell the honchos there that Jimmy Pak has Jessica Tidwell. We’re going to tell the honchos that Jimmy Pak is pimping one of their daughters and we’re going to tell them that if they’re smart, Eighth Army will never do business again with Jimmy Pak or with his asshole buddy, Snake.”
Jimmy’s round paunch seemed to convulse and even more acid rumbled up his throat, causing him to swallow with a sour frown on his usually jolly face. He sat still for a moment, considering what I’d said. Then, without saying another word, he reached across his desk and grabbed a pen and scribbled an address on a piece of paper. He handed it to me.
“You go find,” he said. “She small potatoes. Horsehead dead. Water Doggy dead. Nobody care about her now. You go find up.”
I stuffed the address in my pocket.
With manicured fingers, Jimmy Pak waved us away.
When I stood up, I said, “You gonna beat the charges, Jimmy?”
I was referring to the murder charge for the death of Mori Di.
“Of course I beat,” he said.
“Too bad,” I replied. “If Korea was still under Eighth Army martial law, I’d pull out my. 45 and shoot you right now.”
Jimmy Pak stared at us, calculating how serious I was, calculating how far away his bodyguards were and how close we were.
Before his calculations were finished, Ernie and I walked out.
The joint was called Myong Lim Won, the Garden of the Shining Forest, a kisaeng house in the downtown Mugyo-dong district of Seoul. Kisaeng are fancy hostesses, similar to Japanese geisha but in modern Korea they seldom wear the traditional gowns or pluck the strings of the kayagum or perform the traditional drum dances that they once performed during the Yi Dynasty. Pouring scotch, lighting cigarettes and laughing at businessmen’s jokes, in these modern days, are enough skills to entitle a woman to be called a kisaeng.
We flashed our badges and pushed past a doorman into a room lit by low red lights and filled with about ten large booths encased in leather upholstery. In the largest booth, a half-dozen Korean businessmen, all wearing suits, and three kisaeng, celebrating whatever in the hell it was they were celebrating. Just being rich, I suppose. One of the kisaeng had a long nose, red hair and fair skin: Jessica Tidwell. As we approached, she stood, reaching as she did so into a leather purse at her side. The red blouse she wore was low cut and the skirt barely reached halfway down her thigh. She bowed to the Korean gentlemen and excused herself and stepped out on the carpeted flooring.
An old woman wearing a floor-length dress and heavily made up, scurried out from the back room. She waved her open palm from side to side and said, “G.I. no! No can do! Bali kara!” Go away.
Ernie stepped in front of her and turned his side to the old woman to block her way. She plowed into him, grabbed his coat, and kept shouting, “G.I. no! G.I. no!”
Businessmen from various booths around the room were standing up now, murmuring curse words that had something to do with “base foreign louts.”
The old woman jerked on Ernie’s coat and he jerked back and then shoved her. He miscalculated a tad. The heavily painted old crone reeled back and crashed into a cart that held a bucket full of ice and a half-full bottle of Johnny Walker Black. The woman and the cart and the ice and the booze all crashed to the carpeted floor.
Kisaeng screamed. The Korean men were up now, surrounding Ernie and me, some of them pointing and shouting, others being held back by their brethren.
Ernie held his palm out and said, “Back off!”
Jessica Tidwell pushed through the crowd. Some of the Korean men made way for her. She stepped in front of me, reached into her purse, and whipped out a bayonet. As one, the crowd gasped at the gleaming metal blade and everyone took a half step back.
Koreans argue in public often-they aren’t called the Irish of the Orient for nothing-but they seldom get violent. Everyone shoves and pushes and grabs coats but only occasionally does the altercation devolve into fisticuffs, and virtually never into assaults involving a weapon as deadly as a sharpened bayonet.
Still a half-an-arm’s length away, Jessica Tidwell pointed the tip of the blade at my throat.
“I ought to cut you,” she said.
She might try but she wouldn’t make it. Not only was I ready to deflect her lunge but Ernie had turned his back on the stunned Koreans and stood less than a step away. The Korean customers and female hostesses sat immobile, barely breathing, watching a tableau involving the exotic rituals of three long-nosed foreign barbarians.
“You shot Paco!” Jessica shouted.
I stared at her, not bothering to offer a defense. She’d been there. She’d seen what happened. She knew that Paco Bernal had attacked Ernie with the very bayonet she now held in her hand. She knew that I had no choice but to shoot. We stood like that for what seemed like a long while but was, in reality, probably only a few seconds; she staring directly into my eyes, me staring back.
Finally, she twisted the bayonet with her narrow fingers until the handle was pointing toward me. “Here,” she said. Ernie snatched it out of her hand.
The Koreans surrounding us let out a sigh of relief. The stepped back even further-not so far that they couldn’t observe, but far enough so they wouldn’t be hurt by the crazy foreigners.
Jessica swept red bangs from her forehead. “So now you have the bayonet,” she said. “The ‘assault weapon’ I guess you’d call it. So why don’t you get out of here and leave me alone?”
“No way,” Ernie said.
Jessica screamed. “What do you want from me?”
“You’re coming with us,” Ernie said.
“The hell I am.” Jessica’s green eyes flashed in the dim light and she rummaged back in her leather purse. I almost expected her to pull out a pistol this time but instead a laminated card emerged. She flipped it at Ernie. He grabbed it in midair.
He twisted the card toward the light, read it, and then handed it to me.
“What of it,” Ernie said. “We’ve seen it before. Your dependent ID card.”
I studied the card. The same military dependent identification we’d seen when we first found the sleeping Jessica Tidwell in Corporal Paco Bernal’s room in the barracks at 21 T Car.
“Check the date of birth,” she told me.
I did. Then I did the math.
“That’s right, Einstein,” she said. “I’m eighteen years old now. No longer a minor.” She grinned a lascivious grin. “You can’t touch me.”
She was right. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, once a military dependent turned eighteen years old we could no longer take her into custody and turn her over to her parents. Not legally.
“Eighth Army doesn’t give a shit about that legal crap,” Ernie said.
“My ass,” Jessica replied. “I’ll hire a civilian lawyer and burn both of you and sue the freaking fatigues off the provost marshal and the commanding general of Eighth Army if I have to.”
Jessica Tidwell grew up as an army brat. She knew all the ins and outs of how to strike terror into the heart of a military bureaucrat. And she was right. She was no longer a minor. Ernie and I couldn’t take her into custody.
I handed the ID card back to her.
“So what do you plan to do, Jessica?” I asked. “Work here, lighting cigarettes and pouring scotch, for the rest of your life?”
I glanced around at the half-drunk businessmen and the startled kisaeng. Mouths hung open, some of them twisted in sneers of disgust. But one thing they all had in common is that they were all tremendously interested in what we had to say and they were all straining to understand our English.