“What about Pruchert?” I asked him. “Bobby Pruchert.”
“The monk?”
I nodded.
“He all the time go same place.”
That’s when we haggled over a price, settling on four thousand won. I handed him the money.
“He go to Taegu.”
“The train station?”
Kwok’s eyes widened. “No. Never go train station.”
“Then where?”
“Mekju house,” he said. “G.I. mekju house.” Mekju is beer.
“Where is this mekju house?” I asked.
“Outside G.I. compound.”
There was more than one American compound in Taegu: Camp Henry, Camp Walker, and, equidistant between them, an aviation compound.
“Which one?” I asked.
Kwok scratched his head. “I don’t know. I forget how you say.”
“What district of Taegu is it in?”
That he knew. “Namgu,” he said.
Namgu means the southern ward. With a map, I should be able to figure out which compound it was. But outside of both Camps Henry and Walker there were dozens of joints catering to G.I. s.
“What was the name of the mekju house?” I asked.
Again Kwok scratched his head, and when he was done with that he rubbed his chin. I handed him another thousand-won note. He grinned and stuffed it in his shirt pocket.
“Migun Chonguk,” he said.
“Did it have an American name?”
“Maybe. But I couldn’t read it.”
It is common for nightclubs or chophouses catering to G.I. s to have two names; one in English, the other in Korean. Often, the two names have no relationship to one another. I didn’t bother to thank Mr. Kwok. He’d been well compensated for his trouble. In fact, he’d been paid too much. Five thousand won was the equivalent of ten US dollars.
As we walked away, Ernie said, “He held you up.”
“At least we know where Pruchert went.”
“Maybe. Unless he’s lying to us.”
“He’d better not be.”
“Why? What could you do to him?”
I didn’t answer.
“You’re not the type,” Ernie said, “to come back and punch him in the nose.”
We climbed in the sedan and Ernie started the engine. He’d been intrigued by his own question and wouldn’t let it go. We pulled out on the two-lane highway and Ernie peeled off down the road, anxious to reach Taegu before we caught the brunt of the late-afternoon traffic.
“So if it turns out that this cab driver, Kwok, is lying to us, what are you going to do?”
“I’ll tell Kill.”
Ernie turned his attention back to the road, satisfied with my answer. “Right,” he said. “That would do it.”
What we both knew, without talking about it, was that if we told Inspector Kill that someone had information that might lead to the Blue Train rapist, and that person had lied to us, they’d be spending quite a few uncomfortable hours sweating it out in a Korean National Police interrogation room. Ernie and I wouldn’t have to lift a finger.
Ernie was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Who do you suppose is on this ‘checklist’?”
We both knew that whoever it was might not have much time left to keep on breathing.
“So far,” I said, “the only people who’ve been on the list have been two Korean women with children.”
“On trains,” Ernie added.
“Yes. Passengers on the Blue Train.”
“So you think he’ll stick with that?”
“Maybe not. The KNPs have increased their presence not only on the Blue Train but also on local lines with both uniformed officers and plainclothes. Whoever this guy is, he’ll probably figure that out.”
“So he’ll branch out?”
“Maybe.”
“To what?”
“Don’t know,” I replied. “It depends on what his obsessions are.”
“Obsessions?”
“Yeah. Obsessions.”
“That could be anything,” he said.
“You’re right. That’s why the best bet is to catch him. Then he can tell us himself what his obsessions are.”
“That should be fun listening to.”
Ernie slowed at a railroad crossing but after checking that no train was coming, stepped on the gas again. We bounced across the tracks. On the far side, he said, “So, what was the name again of that mekju house?”
“Migun Chonguk.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You don’t know? Here, break it down. The first word is migun. What does that mean?”
Ernie thought about it a moment. “G.I.,” he said.
“Right. Literally, ‘American soldier.’ And what does chonguk mean?”
Ernie thought about this one a little longer. Finally he gave up. “I’ve heard the word. It’s just not coming to me right now.”
“It means ‘heaven,’” I told him. “Literally, ‘heavenly country.’”
Ernie slammed the sedan in low gear, slowed for a truck ahead of us, and when the road was clear, he slid the automatic shift back into drive and sped around the slow-moving truck.
“I get it now,” he said. “This signal site refugee, pretending to be a Buddhist monk, sneaks away from the monastery, stops in the Chonhuang Teahouse for a little refreshment and female companionship, and then he takes a cab ride all the way to G.I. heaven.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Why did he go to all that trouble?” Ernie asked. “Why not just check out on leave from the Horang-ni signal site, catch a ride to Hialeah Compound, and then take the bus to Taegu?”
“Alibi,” I said. “He was trying to establish one that might hold up.”
Ernie nodded, thinking it over. “As if we’re going to believe that he was meditating for ten days.” Then he chuckled. “G.I. Heaven. This place, I’ve got to see.”
It turned out that the district of Taegu that the cab driver, Kwok, told me about was the same district in which the U.S. Army’s 19th Support Group headquarters at Camp Henry was located.
“We finally caught a break,” Ernie said.
“What do you mean?”
“Camp Henry is where Marnie and the girls are playing tonight.”
After finishing up their performances near the Demilitarized Zone, the Country Western All Stars had been systematically working their way south. Last night Waegwan, tonight Camp Henry.
The Korean countryside is beautiful this time of year, with trees covered in red and brown and yellow, distant mountains capped with white, and miles of rice paddies dotted with piled straw. But we were both tired of driving all over hell and gone, and sick of taking leaks on the side of the road, finding nothing to eat other than a bowl of hot broth from a roadside noodle stand.
Camp Henry was about three miles south of the East Taegu Train Station, the place where Pruchert might have bought a ticket and climbed aboard the Blue Train. Ernie drove slowly through town, following my directions as I studied our army-issue map. Old ladies hustled across streets with huge piles of pressed laundry atop their heads. Children in school uniforms marched across intersections in military-like formations, finally heading home after their long school day. Empty three-wheeled trucks made their way back to the countryside, and taxicabs with their top lights on cruised slowly by, searching for passengers heading home after the end of the workday.
Ernie rolled down the window. “Garlic,” he said. “The whole city reeks of it.”
“A lot of agriculture around here,” I told him. “Pork bellies, rice, cabbage, garlic. It’s what makes the world go round.”
The front gate of Camp Henry was protected by a guard shack and a stern-looking American MP. We continued past the gate and then turned around, drove back past the gate again, and turned east across the railroad tracks. There were a few nightclubs we could see from the main road: the Princess Club, the Pussycat Lounge, the Half Moon Eatery. But most of the joints lurked back in the narrow pedestrian alleyways inaccessible by car.