“Yoboseiyo?” she said.
“Miss Lim,” I said. “We’re looking for Miss Lim.”
The old woman opened the door. Trusting. We were Americans, not thieves.
“Ae Kyong-ah!” She called for someone. I thought it would be Miss Lim but it turned out to be an interpreter. A woman, about thirty, in blue shorts and a red T-shirt emerged from her hooch.
“Are you Miss Lim?” I said.
“No. She went to the hospital. Her baby is very sick.”
“Which hospital?”
She spoke to the old woman in rapid Korean and then turned back to me. “The MoBom Hospital in Hannam-dong.”
“Which room does she live in?”
“The one on the end. There.”
Ernie and I walked over. It was just a hovel. Raised foundation, little plastic closet in the corner, folded sleeping mats on a vinyl floor, and a small pot-bellied stove in the center of the room with rickety aluminum tubing reaching to the ceiling. An American officer in dress greens stared at me out of a framed photograph. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, maybe twenty pounds over his fighting weight, with curly brown hair and a big jolly smile. Gold maple leaves on his shoulder glittered along with his white teeth.
I turned back to the women. “How long has Miss Lim been gone?”
“She came home from work late last night. The baby never stopped crying. She waited until the curfew was over and then left for the hospital.”
“Before dawn?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s been there ever since?”
“Yes.”
The old woman waited patiently, not understanding. I smiled at her, thanked them both, and we turned to go. The woman in the blue shorts and red T-shirt called after me.
“Hey!”
We stopped and turned around.
“Why you GI always make baby and then go?”
I didn’t have an answer for her. Ernie stopped clicking his gum. We turned around and left.
The waiting room of the MoBom Hospital was packed. An attractive young Korean woman with a snappy white cap pinned to her black hair sat behind a counter near the entrance. Behind her was a list of basic fees. It was ten thousand won, up front, to see a doctor. Fourteen bucks.
I told her about Miss Lim and her sick baby and asked where we could find her. She thumbed through a ledger but kept shaking her head. She wanted to know Miss Lim’s full name. I told her she was the woman with the half-American baby. She perked right up.
“Oh, yes. She is in Room three fourteen. The stairway is over there.”
The room held about thirty tiny beds with plastic siding on them. Next to one of them, Miss Lim sat on a wooden chair, her face in her hands. I showed her my identification.
“Hello, Miss Lim. We’re from the CID.”
It seemed that her face was about to burst with redness. She was a plain woman, young and thin with a puffy face that looked even more bloated from crying.
“Is your baby going to be all right?”
“The doctor is not sure yet. I must wait.”
Ernie didn’t like it here. He fidgeted with the change in his pocket and then drifted toward the door. My signal to wrap it up quickly.
“The money you took from behind the bar, it has already been replaced. I will talk to everyone. Explain your situation. I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
Her head went back into her hands, and this time she clutched her red face as if she were trying to bury it in her palms. I couldn’t be sure, but I think her shoulders convulsed a couple of times. I looked down at the baby. It was scrawny. Unconscious. Sweat-soaked brown hair matted against its little head.
We left.
Neither one of us spoke as the sloe-eyed stares followed us out of the hospital.
Ernie zigzagged his jeep through the heavy Seoul traffic as if he were in a race to get away from the devil.
“Well,” he said. “We wrapped up another one.”
“I’m sure they won’t do anything to her,” I said. “I’ll type up the report to make her look as good as possible. Even the Eighth Army chief of staff has got a heart.”
Ernie didn’t say anything. I turned to him.
“Right?”
He shrugged. “If you say so, pal.”
The chief of staff didn’t want to prosecute, but in his capacity as the president of the Officers’ Club Council he did demand that Miss Lim appear before the next board meeting and explain her actions. The word we got was that he was upset because she could have come to the Club Council at any time, explained the nature of her financial emergency, and they would have helped out. Thievery wasn’t necessary, according to him.
When Ernie heard that, he snorted. “Nobody likes a person with a problem until that person has already solved the problem.”
Also, the Club Council could have set up a mechanism to help employees with emergency medical expenses at any time in the past, but they never had. Better, apparently, to make them come begging for it.
Ernie and I went to the Enlisted Club that night for Happy Hour and paid thirty-five cents for a tax-free beer and forty cents for a shot of bourbon.
The stripper had eyes like a tigress.
“She was a real trouper,” Freddy said. “Appeared before the Club Council looking sharp, standing up straight, and didn’t bat an eye when they told her that she’d been suspended for thirty days.”
“How have the other Korean employees taken it?”
“The place has been like a morgue. They do their jobs all right, but they won’t look at me and they won’t say anything. The laughter’s gone.”
“It’ll come back.” Freddy looked skeptical, but I knew it would. I’d learned that in East LA.
At first the Korean National Police Liaison Officer tried to keep it from us but Yongsan Compound is like a small town plopped in the middle of the huge metropolis of Seoul and word spreads quickly. Especially amongst the MPs and the CID.
Ernie didn’t chew gum on the way to Itaewon, and he drove carefully.
Neighbors clogged the narrow alleyway leading to Miss Lim’s hooch, but we pushed our way through them and at the gate we flashed our identification to the uniformed Korean policeman. Captain Kim, commander of the Itaewon Police Station, was there. He didn’t say anything when we steeped to the front of Miss Lim’s room.
The baby looked pretty much the way I’d seen her before. Thin. Still. But she wasn’t sweating any more. She lay on the vinyl floor as if she’d rolled away from her mother’s bosom. Miss Lim’s mouth was wide open and so were her eyes. They were white. Without pupils.
When I turned around, Captain Kim stood right behind us.
“Carbon monoxide poisoning,” he said.
I looked at the aluminum tubing above the heater. There was a hole in it, as if someone had punctured the thin metal with a knife, and twisted.
The photograph of the brown-haired major lay face up on the floor. Smiling at me.
THE WOMAN FROM HAMHUNG
We wound through the jumbled alleyways of Seoul’s East Gate Market, past freshly washed fish in packed blue ice and mounds of Chinese cabbage glowing green in the canvas-covered darkness. In the heart of the catacombs a few large spools of industrial copper wire waited for a buyer. Ernie wrote down the case lot numbers.
“Hot off the compound,” he said.
The black market had been going strong here since the end of the Korean War, primarily because of the lack of indigenous industry and the exorbitant import taxes levied on foreign goods. Guarding the plethora of US-made building supplies on army compounds were always a few GIs willing to go after some easy money.
At least sometimes the money was easy.
Our job was to stanch the flow of these supplies. Some of them. At least for a while.
A wrinkled forehead over a big red dress waddled toward us. She shrieked and waved her arms. Ernie put his notepad away, snapped his gum between his front teeth, and stalked off in the general direction of the rushing traffic on the main street.