Ernie stepped to his right, into the darkness. I stepped to my left.
The oil-paper door slid open.
Yellow light flooded into the courtyard. Ernie and I tensed. A face peeked out, the same woman who’d peeked out earlier. This time, I caught a good look at her. She was cute, young, maybe in her early twenties, with a bemused expression and braided pigtails hanging down from either side of her round head.
Ernie stepped forward, grabbed the edge of the door, slipped off his shoes and stepped into the hooch. The woman screeched. Ernie shoved her aside.
I followed him into the hooch.
Ernie searched the kitchen and the tiny storeroom out back.
“Nobody here,” he said, returning to the main room.
Nobody except a little girl who was squatting next to an inlaid mother-of-pearl armoire. She had a face and hairstyle just like her mother’s, except for her coloration. She was very light-skinned and her hair was dirty blonde.
“This must be Jeannie,” I said.
The little girl’s eyes widened. Blue fading to green. Her mother stepped away from us and clutched her arms in front of her ample breasts. She wore only a set of PX thermal long johns, no bra underneath. The woman reached into the armoire, pulled out a winter coat, and wrapped it around herself. She squatted down next to Jeannie and placed a protective arm around her.
“Weyworth not here,” she said.
“Weyworth?” Ernie said. “Don’t you call him Nick?”
The woman didn’t answer.
“Where’d he go?” I asked.
“He go someplace,” she said, waving her free arm. “I don’t know. All the time big deal, he gotta do. Business, he say. Where, I don’t know.”
“You moolah?” Ernie asked. Moolah is the Korean word for “I don’t know” or “I don’t understand.”
“Yeah,” she replied. “I moolah.”
“What time does he come back?” I asked.
“Now?” she replied. “Maybe don’t come back until morning time. After curfew.”
“He catchy girlfriend?” Ernie asked.
The woman knotted her slender fist. “He catchy girlfriend, then most tick he catchy knuckle sandwich.”
“So he’s doing business?” I said, more gently.
She nodded warily, worried now that she might have revealed too much.
Ernie knelt to the warm ondol floor; I did the same. He smiled at the woman and then he smiled at Jeannie. Both of them were still nervous. I guessed from the age of the girl-about four-that Weyworth wasn’t the father. G.I. s pull a one-year tour in Korea. There hadn’t been time for him to sire this beautiful four-year-old child.
“Who’s Jeannie’s daddy?” Ernie asked.
The woman didn’t get angry. “Long time ago,” she said, “’nother G.I.”
“Picture isso?”
I knew what Ernie was doing. He was trying, in his own way, to relax Jeannie and her mother. And showing pictures was something few Korean business girls could resist. Especially pictures of old boyfriends, and especially if those boyfriends had left them with a child.
She rummaged beneath silk-covered comforters in the bottom of the armoire and pulled out a thick photo album. She set it on the floor and flipped quickly through the pictures. Jeannie slid closer to her mother. Finally, Jeannie’s mother found a photo of Jeannie on Beikil, her Hundredth Day celebration. In ancient times, so many infants succumbed to childhood diseases that it was thought wise to wait a hundred days, until their chances of survival looked somewhat promising, before welcoming them into the human family.
Jeannie’s mother turned the photograph toward Ernie and then me. The infant Jeannie was dressed in a brightly colored silk suit, surrounded by ripe fruit and fat dumplings. Ernie and I oohed and aahed and told Jeannie what a beautiful baby she’d been. Jeannie buried her face beneath her mother’s armpit, embarrassed by the attention. Then Jeannie’s mother flipped the pages to a photo of herself, a few years younger, wearing a colorful chima-chogori, the traditional Korean dress with a high-waisted skirt and a short vest. She looked beautiful, and I told her so.
“Ipuh-da,” I said. She beamed with happiness.
Some Koreans are trained to hide their emotions, but not all. By now, Jeannie’s mother was delighted, and all thought of Weyworth had been banished from her mind. Ernie and I studied the photograph, paying particular attention to the G.I. standing next to her. He wore a dress green uniform with three yellow stripes sewn on a well-pressed sleeve. A buck sergeant. His nameplate said Bermann.
“Did you get married?” Ernie asked.
She shook her head. “Supposed to. But he change mind. Go back States.”
An old story.
Jeannie’s mother filled the silence by saying, “The only thing he teach me is how to smoke, how to drink… ” Then she hugged Jeannie, adding, “And how to make baby. Tambei isso?” she asked. Do you have a cigarette?
Ernie and I both shook our heads.
“Next time I’ll buy some,” Ernie said.
She smiled at that.
“Where is Weyworth now?” I asked.
“Somewhere,” she said, reaching for a pack of cigarettes in the armoire. “Somewhere, I don’t know. Maybe down on Texas Street.”
Texas Street was the notorious bar-and-red-light district along the Pusan waterfront. This late, there’d be no time for him to return from Texas Street before the midnight curfew hit.
“Why is he staying on Texas Street all night?” Ernie asked.
“Business,” she said.
“Business with who?”
“I don’t know. Not G.I. How you say? Shi-la.”
“Greek,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, nodding vigorously. “Greek.”
“In a Greek bar?” Ernie said.
What with so many merchant marines flooding Texas Street-many of them from Greece-there were special bars set aside for them so they wouldn’t have to mingle with Americans or other English-speaking sailors.
Jeannie’s mother lit her cigarette, puffed, and snuffed out the wooden match. “Yeah,” she said. “Someplace he call some funny name. Mean ‘makey-love’ in Greek language.”
“Eros,” I said.
Jeannie’s mother’s eyes lit up. “Yeah. That’s it.”
An MP patrol gave us a ride to Texas Street. Ernie and I sat crouched in the back of the jeep, our knees almost touching our faces. The two MPs sat in the spacious seats in front. One of the MPs remembered me.
“Hard-to-pronounce name. Sueno, right?”
“You got it.”
He’d made the n sound correctly, like the ny in canyon. “I should’ve thought of that before.” He popped his forehead with his open palm.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The MP’s name was Norris, and he’d been on duty when Ernie and I made an arrest on that previous trip down here about a year ago.
“A guy asked about you,” Norris said. “Or at least I think he was asking about you. He mispronounced your name.”
Rain spattered against the windshield as we rolled over the broad, deserted Pusan roads. I leaned forward as far as the cramped space would allow. “So, who was this guy who came looking for me?” I asked.
Norris turned his face toward me slightly so I could hear better over the sound of the swishing tires. Mistladen wind slapped against the canvas sides of the jeep.
“A sailor,” he told me. “Some sort of foreigner. I don’t remember his name; I have it written down in one of my old notebooks, because he went so far as to show me his passport.”
“How’d you know he was looking for me?”
“He described you. Tall. Dark hair. And an investigator. He said he had a message for you.”
“Did he tell you what the message was?”
“No. He approached us one night while we were out on patrol, just sitting in the jeep smoking and shooting the shit. Not many ships in port that night. Still, he’d lurked around in an alley, watching us, and when he thought no one was paying attention, he came up and started talking.”