Captain Kim nodded. He already knew this. For him, keeping cards close to his vest was a lifetime habit.
“Why,” he asked, “is the American army so interested in an old case?”
Ernie glanced at me but held his tongue. I hadn’t told Captain Kim that our interest was unofficial. If I had, he wouldn’t have cooperated at all.
“Long story,” I said. “Are you going to tell us how to find Lieutenant Kwang or not?”
Captain Kim sighed, reached into his top drawer, and pulled out a slip of brown pulp paper folded neatly in half. He slid it toward us, his fingers still pressing it into the desk. “Before you make your report, will you talk to me?”
“Yes,” I promised.
He handed me the slip of paper.
“You must be nuts,” Ernie said.
He was driving the jeep and we were wearing civvies, faded blue jeans and sports shirts. It was Saturday.
“On our day off,” Ernie continued, “chasing around the Korean countryside after some murder case that happened twenty years ago all because you’ve got the hots for your Korean teacher.”
“It’s not just that,” I said.
Ernie swerved around a wooden cart pulled by an ox. Rice paddies spread into the distance, fallow now after the autumn harvest.
“Then what is it?”
“You read Moretti’s folder.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, I told you what was in it. His murder was never solved.”
“He’s been dead twenty years. What difference does it make now?”
“He was a GI, Ernie. One of us.”
That shut him up for a while. After a few minutes, he resumed cursing softly beneath his breath.
The village of Three White Cranes sat in a bowl-shaped valley about halfway between Seoul and the Eastern Sea. Most of the world refers to the Eastern Sea as the Sea of Japan but the Koreans aren’t particularly fond of that nomenclature.
After two hours of winding roads and narrow country highways, Ernie slowed the jeep and rolled past clapboard hovels that lined the main street of downtown Three White Cranes. The largest building was made of whitewashed cement and the flag of the Republic of Korea waved proudly from a thirty-foot-high pole out front. The Three White Cranes Police Station. Two cops inside had already been alerted by Captain Kim in Itaewon and they drew us a map to a pig farm about two clicks outside of town.
An old man stood in front of a straw-thatched hut. He wore a tattered khaki uniform of the Korean National Police that hung on him like a loose sack. When I climbed out of the jeep and approached him, he waved his bamboo cane in the air.
“Kara,” he said. “Bali kara!” Get lost!
Ignoring rudeness is an important skill for any investigator. I approached the old man and started shooting questions at him in Korean about his involvement in the Moretti case.
Ernie stood by the jeep, staring over at a pen full of hogs. The fence was so rickety that he was worried some of them might break out.
“You go,” the old man told me, using broken English now. “Long time ago. No use now. You go.”
“Who murdered Moretti?” I asked the former Lieutenant Kwang.
“You go. No use now.”
I kept at him, badgering him with questions, sometimes in English, sometimes in Korean.
“Why you cause trouble?” he asked me finally. A watery film covered the old man’s eyes. “He dead now. Life hard in Korea that time. You no ask question.”
“You know who killed Moretti,” I said.
“No. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Just like before. I don’t want to know.”
I started to ask more questions but the old man hobbled quickly toward the pigpen. Using his bamboo cane, he knocked loose two supporting beams and the rickety wooden fence collapsed. A herd of hogs charged out. I ran toward the jeep and jumped in. The huge animals swarmed around us, snorting and pawing and trying to climb into the vehicle.
Ernie started the jeep and backed down the dirt road. The hogs followed.
“If I had my forty-five,” Ernie said, “I’d land us some pork chops.”
Instead, he turned around, slammed the gear shift into first, and sped away.
When I looked back, the old man was still waving his bamboo cane.
An oil lamp guttered in the small office adjacent to Haggler Lee’s warehouse.
Although he might’ve been the richest man in Itaewon, Haggler Lee had a habit of keeping expenses to a minimum. Electricity was seldom used in his place of business. He wore traditional Korean clothing, a green silk vest and white cotton pantaloons, and didn’t believe in wasting money on haircuts. Instead he kept his black hair tied above his head and knotted with a short length of blue rope. We sat on the oil-papered floor in his office.
“Moretti,” Haggler Lee said. “Nineteen fifty-four. Only one person I know of was in business back in those days.”
“Who?” I asked.
Ernie sipped on the barley tea that Haggler Lee’s servant had served shortly after we arrived. The entire room smelled of incense. A stick glowed softly in a bronze burner.
Haggler Lee rubbed his smooth chin. “Why would two famous CID agents be interested in a case so old?”
“What do you care?” Ernie said. “Your operation is safe. We’re not after you.”
“Thanks to my ancestors watching in Heaven,” Lee replied. “Still, nineteen fifty-four. Unusual, is it not?”
“Unusual,” I said. “Who was in operation then?”
“The black market was small in nineteen fifty-four. Koreans were so poor they could afford few of your imported American goods.”
“Who is it, Lee?” Ernie asked.
“Whiskey Mary.”
“Whiskey Mary? What’s her Korean name?” I asked.
“I don’t know. She’s been called Whiskey Mary so long even we Koreans call her that.”
“Where can we find her?”
“Last I heard she worked at a yoguan in Munsan-ni. An unsavory place.”
Haggler Lee gave us the name of the inn, the Kaesong Yoguan. Ernie finished his tea and we left.
Munsan is a small city about thirty kilometers north of Seoul, near the DMZ. Ernie and I cruised through the narrow main road. This was Sunday morning so Korean soldiers were everywhere, elbowing their way past farmers pushing carts full of turnips and grandmothers balancing pans full of laundry atop their heads.
The Dragon Eye Yoguan sat in an alley just off the main drag. It was a ramshackle building, two stories high, made of old varnished slats of wood. When Ernie and I slipped off our shoes and stepped up into the musty foyer, a woman wearing a long wool skirt and wool sweater emerged from a sliding, oil-papered door.
“Andei,” she said. No good. “Migun yogi ei, andei.” American soldiers aren’t allowed here.
Ernie didn’t understand and I didn’t bother to translate. It was understandable that the woman wouldn’t want American GIs staying here. If her main clientele were Korean soldiers, that would be asking for trouble.
I ignored her remark, showed her my badge, and spoke to her in Korean. When I mentioned the name Whiskey Mary, her eyes widened.
“No trouble,” I said quickly. “We just want to ask her some questions.”
Shaking her head, the woman led us down a long narrow hallway. Sliding doors were spaced along the walls every few feet, some of them open, showing rumpled blankets and porcelain pots inside. The aroma of charcoal gas and urine filled the hallway. Occasionally Ernie and I had to duck to avoid bumping our heads on overhanging support beams.
Out back was a muddy courtyard with a few skinny chickens behind wire and two neatly spaced outdoor latrines made of cement blocks. The woman motioned with her open palm, turned, and left.