“Then send someone else.”
“I’ll notify the Provost Marshal,” I told her.
She studied my face. “But you don’t think he’ll do anything, do you?”
I shrugged. “We’re short on manpower.”
She pointed to the silver eagle rank insignia on her lapel. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.
Her face reddened. When I made no further comment, she said, “My husband’s going to hear about this. There’s no excuse for this. None whatsoever!”
She’d stormed away, marching resolutely down the aisle, bumping into two Korean women who were so busy fumbling through the frozen ox-tail that they hardly noticed. As it turned out, I never heard about the incident again. Nor did I hear from Mrs. Wrypointe. Not, that is, until today.
“Has Colonel Wrypointe discussed this with the Provost Marshal?” I asked.
“Not yet. He’s getting his ducks in a row. Two clerks in his office are working overtime putting charts and graphs together, all pointing to the fact that black marketing has been exploding. He’s going to brief the Commander, explain the OWC concern, and put the pressure on the Provost Marshal to allocate more manpower to the black market detail.”
“Thereby giving us less time to investigate real crime.”
“They don’t care about real crime,” Strange said, “unless it happens to them.”
“When is this briefing going to be held?” I asked.
“Tomorrow. Zero eight hundred. Prepare for heavy swells.”
After devouring the second marshmallow, Strange seemed to be finished with his hot chocolate. He turned to Ernie, waiting patiently for his dirty story. Ernie told him one, making it up as he went along.
I stood up, walked back to the serving line, and pulled myself another mug of hot coffee. All I could think about was the rape case we’d been working on. Sunny, an innocent business girl out in the ville, beat up, tortured, and then raped by three American GIs who were still at large. And so far we had no leads.
When I returned to the table, Strange was gone.
“Where’d he go?” I asked Ernie.
“Who the hell knows? He thinks I screw half the women on Yongsan Compound.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not yet.”
That night, Ernie and I ran the ville.
We strolled past neon and the open doors of nightclubs where mini-skirted young women cooed with pouting lips and crooked painted fingers, beckoning us to enter. At the top of Hooker Hill we hung a right and then a left until we were strolling through a dark alley lined on either side with ten-foot-high walls made of brick and cement. At one opening we paused and Ernie pounded on the double wooden gate. Rusty hasps rattled.
“Nugu seiyo?” someone said from inside. Who is it?
“Na ya,” Ernie replied. It’s me.
His Korean was getting better. The door opened.
We stepped into a floodlit courtyard of flagstone circling a garden of scraggly rose bushes. An old woman closed the door behind us and then padded on plastic sandals up to the raised wooden porch that led into the complex of hooches. We slipped off our shoes, stepped up onto creaking wood, and walked down the dimly lit hallway. The place was quiet. Most of the young women who lived here had already left for the night, for their jobs as waitresses or hostesses in the dozens of bars and nightclubs and dance halls that comprised the red light district of Itaewon. The sliding paper door of the third room shone with golden light. The old woman slid it open.
Like a cloud, the odor of urine and rubbing alcohol rolled out of the room. On the floor, amidst a rumpled comforter, lay Son Hei-suk, or Sunny, as the GIs called her. She was a young woman, maybe eighteen, but she seemed younger because of her open smile and her naïve way of laughing at anything a GI said. Most of the American soldiers treated her gently, teasing her like a younger sister, but two nights ago while she was pulling a shift as a hostess at the Lucky Seven Club, three Americans who nobody recognized coaxed her outside the club, apparently to help them buy some souvenirs at the local Itaewon Market, supposedly to send back to their families in the States.
Sunny never returned.
A farmer pushing a cart full of turnips found her the next day before dawn, near the Han River, unconscious, bleeding, barely alive. The Korean National Police were called, a surgeon at the Beikgang Hospital reset her broken left arm, shot her full of antibiotics, and used twenty-three stitches to sew up tears in her vaginal and anal areas. The waitresses and hostesses and whores who lived in this hooch had chipped in to pay her hospital bill and have her carted back here by taxi. No family members had been notified. Sunny, when she regained consciousness, begged that they not be.
Ernie set the PX bag full of painkillers and antibiotic cream and an electric heating pad on the floor. The old woman said she’d take care of it for us. We sat on the warm vinyl floor and watched Sunny. She snored softly. Gently, the old woman poked her shoulder. Slowly, Sunny roused herself awake. Groaning, she rolled over. Big brown eyes popped opened. She focused on us and raised her head slightly. A pink tongue licked soft lips and then she said, “You catch?”
Ernie shook his head. “Not yet, Sunny.”
“I told you,” she said, “one GI big, curly brown hair. ’Nother GI skinny, short white hair …”
“Shush, Sunny,” Ernie said. “Don’t get excited again. We have your description. We wrote it all down.”
“Then why you not catch?”
Ernie looked down. “It’s not that easy.”
Her eyes widened. She looked at me and then back at Ernie. “But they GI. You GI. You supposed to catch.”
“We’re trying,” I said. When she continued to stare at me, I said, “They’re new here in Itaewon. Nobody we talked to at the Lucky Seven recognized them. Not the Korean women working, not the GIs we found who’d been there that night. Everybody agrees on one thing, they’re not stationed in Seoul. One girl said one of them had a jacket with ‘Second Division, Second to None’ embroidered on the back. So far, that’s all we have to go on.”
Ernie spread his hands. “There are twenty-seven compounds and thirty thousand GIs in the Second Infantry Division,” Ernie said. “We’re looking but we thought maybe you’d remember something more.”
Sunny’s stared at the ceiling, not at us, as if seeing something far beyond this little room. Although her facial features didn’t move, moisture, like water welling up from a spring, started to ball in her eyes. One by one, the tears fell.
We waited a little longer. The old woman brought in some seaweed soup and tried to coax Sunny to eat. She refused.
Ernie and I rose to leave. As we stepped out onto the porch, Sunny called after us.
“Smoke.”
We turned.
“One GI call ’nother one,” she said. “ ‘Smoke.’ ”
“Anything else, Sunny?” I asked.
She shook her head. And then the tears were flowing again. The old woman scowled at us and slid shut the door.
The next morning, Colonel Brace, the 8th Army Provost Marshal, called us into his office. He let us stand, completely ignoring us, while he puffed on his pipe and studied the folder in front of him-an old ploy that lifers use to let you know that, compared to them, you’re lower than dog shit. Finally, he looked up at us.
“Your black market statistics are abysmal,” he said.
“A lot of crime out in the ville, sir,” Ernie said. “It’s been taking up most of our time.”
“I know what you’ve been working on,” Colonel Brace said. “And I know how much time you’ve spent on the black market detail and it hasn’t been enough. From today forward, you drop all other investigations and concentrate on black market activities.”
“We’ve got a woman out in the ville who was raped and beaten,” Ernie replied, “by a gang of Division GIs who we haven’t been able to identify yet.”