Then this grandfather was gone and a few minutes later another spirit took possession of the perspiring body of the Widow Po.
The kut continued like this for over an hour. Ernie was growing restless but the women surrounding him read him like a book and kept pouring him small glassfuls of soju and stuffing sweet pink rice cakes down his throat.
Ernie must’ve already polished off a liter and a half of soju by the time the Widow Po growled.
Her eyes were like a she-wolf. She stalked toward Ernie. He stared up at her, half a rice cake in his mouth, dumfounded.
“Choryo!” she shouted. Attention!
Ernie didn’t understand but the women around him shoved him to his feet.
“Apuroi ka!” the Widow Po commanded. Forward march!
Again the women pushed Ernie forward and he marched to the center of the floor.
“Chongji!” the Widow Po told Ernie. Halt!
Ernie understood that one. “Halt” was the one Korean word that 8th Army GI’s were taught, so they wouldn’t be shot by nervous Korean sentries. Ernie stopped, standing almost at the position of attention, a half-empty bottle of soju loose in his hand.
Miss Choi leaned toward me. “The soldier,” she said. “The one I told you about.”
Ernie reached for the Widow Po, thinking she was going to start rubbing her body against his again, but she would have none of it. She slapped his hand away and stepped forward, her hands on her hips, screaming into Ernie’s face. The words were coming out so fast and so furious-in a deep, garbled voice-that I could understand little of it. Miss Choi translated.
“He’s angry. ‘Why have you kept me waiting so long?’ he says.”
“Who’s kept him waiting?”
“You,” she said. “Mi Pal Kun.” The 8th United States Army.
“Waiting for what?”
“To talk to him. To let him explain.”
“Who is he?”
Miss Choi listened to the rant for a few more seconds and then said, “I’m not sure. The name sounds like mori di.”
Mori means “hair” or “head” in the Korean language. Di meant nothing, unless the spirit was referring to the letter “d” as in the English alphabet.
Ernie was becoming impatient with being screamed at. He lifted the soju bottle and took a drink. The Widow Po slapped the bottle from his lips and it crashed against the belly of the bronze god. Then the Widow Po leapt at Ernie, throwing left hooks and then rights, punching like a man.
The matronly women bounded to their feet and grabbed the Widow Po and held her on the floor, writhing and spitting. Ernie wasn’t damaged badly, just a bruise beneath his left eye.
The Widow Po kept shouting invective in garbled Korean, her burning eyes focused fiercely on Ernie.
“What’s she saying?” I asked Miss Choi.
“He,” she corrected. “Mori Di, the spirit who possesses her. He says that you must start your work immediately. There must be no further delay.”
“What work?”
“I thought you understood.”
“No. The Widow Po is speaking much too fast for me to follow.”
“Mori Di was an American soldier,” Miss Choi explained. “He died more than twenty years ago. He wants you to start an investigation and find the person who did this.”
“Find the person who did what?”
“Find the person who murdered him.”
The Widow Po let out one more guttural screech and her eyes rolled up into her head until only the whites showed. Then she let out a huge blast of rancid air and passed out cold.
Ernie slapped dust mites away from his nose.
“This is bull,” he said.
I tried to ignore him. Instead I continued down the row in the dimly lit warehouse, shining my flashlights on walls of stacked cardboard. We were looking for the box marked SIRs, FY54. Serious Incident Reports. Fiscal Year 1954.
Exactly twenty years ago.
The NCO in charge of 8th Army Records Storage hadn’t been happy to see two CID agents barge in unannounced. He pulled his boots off his desk, hid his comic book, and had to pretend that he’d been working. When I told him what I wanted, he was incredulous.
“Nobody looks at that stuff.”
But when we flashed our badges he complied and escorted us into the warehouse. After he showed us where to look, the phone rang in his office. He used that as an excuse to hand me the flashlight and return to the coziness of his cramped little empire.
When we were alone, I turned to Ernie. “You sort of liked that Widow Po, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Ernie responded. “Nice body.”
“So we do her a favor. That’s all. See if any GIs were murdered twenty years ago. Any GIs named Mori Di.”
I stopped at a row of boxes. There, up at the top, Fiscal Year 1954. Grabbing a handhold, I started to climb on the boxes below. Ernie helped hoist me up.
“You don’t believe any of that stuff, do you?” he asked. “Good show, but it’s all an act.”
I grabbed the box, blew dust off the top, and studied it. Bound with wire, no chance to check the contents up here.
“Pretty convincing act,” I replied.
“But still nothing more than an act.”
I slid the box down to Ernie. He broke its fall but it was still heavy enough to land on the cement floor with a thump.
“Wire cutters,” I said.
Ernie returned to the office and brought back a pair.
“The Sarge says we’ll have to rebind it ourselves.”
“Screw him.”
“That’s exactly what I told him.”
Ernie snipped the thick wire, pulled the top off, and then held the flashlight while I crouched down and thumbed through the manila folders.
I pulled a few out.
Fascinating stories. About GIs assaulting, robbing, and maiming other GIs. About GIs assaulting, robbing, and maiming Koreans. Very few about Koreans assaulting, robbing, or maiming GIs. The Korean War had ended only a few months before. The Koreans were flat on their back economically. GIs, comparatively, were as rich as Midas. Still, Confucian values dictated that the Koreans use their wiles, not their brawn, to obtain a share of US Army riches. I could’ve spent hours here studying these cases but we didn’t have time. We were on the black market detail and this was our lunch break. The CID First Sergeant would be checking on us soon.
Then I spotted a thick manila folder.
“What is it?” Ernie asked.
I pointed.
There, typed neatly across the white label affixed to the folder was a name and a rank: Moretti, Charles A., Private First Class (Deceased).
We’d found Mori Di.
That evening, Ernie and I repaired to Itaewon, the red light district in southern Seoul that caters to GIs and other foreigners. But this time we didn’t hit the nightclubs. Instead, we walked into the Itaewon Police Station. Captain Kim, the officer in charge of the Itaewon Police district, was waiting for us. I’d called him earlier that afternoon. Sitting behind his desk, he stared at us from beneath thick eyebrows. The square features of his face revealed nothing.
“No one remembers Mori Di,” he told us. “Too long ago.”
“Surely you have records.”
“Most burn. Before Pak Chung-hee become President.”
There were serious civil riots in Seoul and other major cities of South Korea when the corrupt Syngman Rhee government was overthrown in the early Sixties.
“Still,” I said, “the murder happened only twenty years ago. There must be some cop somewhere who remembers the case.” I glanced at the notes I’d taken while reading Moretti’s case folder. “An officer named Kwang. A lieutenant. The given name Bung-lee. Most of the Korean National Police reports were attributed to him.”