Shin seemed about to do something, to punch Ernie, but indecision danced in his glistening black eyes. Finally, he sighed and stepped back, making way for Ernie and me. Grumbling, his pals made way too.
We ran the ville.
Shots, beers, business girls on our laps. Ernie was enjoying the rock music and the girls and the frenzied crowds and gave himself over to a night of mindless pleasure. Me, I sipped on my drink, barely heard the music, and ignored the caresses of the gorgeous young women who surrounded me.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Ernie asked.
I shook my head.
“Come on,” he coaxed. “What could possibly be wrong? We’re away from the headshed, on temporary duty, we have a pocket full of travel pay, and we’re surrounded by booze and bands and business girls. What more could you possibly want?”
“A clue,” I answered.
“A clue?”
“A clue as to who murdered Miss O Sung-hee.”
Ernie shrugged. “Maybe the KNPs were right all along. Maybe it was Rothenberg.”
And maybe not.
When the midnight curfew came along, GIs either scurried back to Camp Colbern or paired up with a Korean business girl. Ernie found one for me and the four of us went to their rooms upstairs in some dive. In the dark, I lay next to the girl, ignoring her. Finally, I slept.
Just before dawn, a cock crowed. I sat up. The business girl was still asleep, snoring softly. I rose from the low bed, slipped on my clothes and, without bothering to wake Ernie, walked over to the Korean National Police station.
The sun was higher when I returned. After gathering the information I needed at the police station, I’d walked over to Camp Colbern. There, in the billeting room assigned to me and Ernie, I’d showered, shaved, and then gone to the Camp Colbern Snack Bar. Breakfast was ham, eggs, and an English muffin. Now, back in Paldang-ni, I pounded on the door to Ernie’s room. The business girl opened it and let me in. Ernie was still asleep.
“Reveille,” I said.
He opened his eyes and sat up. “What?”
“Time to make morning formation, Sleeping Beauty.”
“Why? We don’t know who killed Miss O so what difference does it make?”
“We know now.”
“We do?”
I filled him in on the testimony I’d received this morning from Private First Class Everett P. Rothenberg. When I finished, Ernie thought about it. “You and your Korean customs. Why would that mean anything to anybody?”
“Get up,” I told him. “We have someone to talk to.”
Ernie grumbled but dressed quickly.
We wound our way through the narrow alleys of Paldang-ni. Instead of American GIs and Korean business girls, the streets were now filled with children wearing black uniforms toting heavy backpacks on their way to school and farmers shoving carts piled high with garlic or cabbage or mounds of round Korean pears. We passed the Dragon Lady Teahouse and just to be sure, I checked the doors, both front and back. Locked tight. Then we continued through the winding maze, heading toward the hooch of Miss Kang.
What I’d questioned Rothenberg about this morning concerned his friendship with Miss Kang. How they’d both sat up nights in the hooch waiting for Miss O. But Miss O would stay out after curfew and then not come home at four in the morning and often Rothenberg had to go to work before he knew what had happened to her. But sometimes she’d be back early with some story about how she stayed at a friend’s house and how they were having so much fun talking and playing flower cards that the time had slipped by and she hadn’t realized that midnight had come and gone and she’d been trapped at her friend’s house until after curfew lifted at four in the morning.
“You knew it was all lies, didn’t you?” I asked.
Rothenberg allowed his head to sag. “I guess I did.”
“But Miss Kang knew for sure.”
“Yeah,” Rothenberg said. “Miss O had a lot of boyfriends. I realize that now.”
Private Everett P. Rothenberg went on to tell me that sometimes Miss O made both him and Miss Kang leave the hooch completely.
“She’d tell us that family was coming over for the weekend. And she didn’t want them to know that a GI like me was staying in her hooch. So Miss Kang helped out, she took me to her father’s home near Yoju. It was about a thirty-minute bus ride. When we arrived at her father’s home they were real friendly to me. I’d take off my shoes and enter the house and bow three times to her father like Miss Kang taught me. You know, on your knees and everything.”
“You took gifts?”
“Right. Miss Kang made me buy fruit. She said it’s against Korean custom to go ‘empty hands.’ ”
“And you prayed to her ancestors?”
“Some old photographs of a man and a woman.”
“And you went to their graves?”
“How’d you know? To the grave mounds on the side of the hill. We took rice cakes out there and offered them to the spirits. When the spirits didn’t eat them, me and Miss Kang did.” He laughed. “She always told me that food offered to the spirits has no taste. Why? Because the spirits take the flavor out of it and all you’re left with is the dough.”
“Is that true?”
“It was for me. But I never liked rice cakes to begin with.”
I stared at Rothenberg a long time. Finally, he fidgeted.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “If you think there was something between me and Miss Kang, you’re wrong. Sung-hee is my girl. Miss O. I was faithful to her.”
“You were,” I said softly.
His head drooped. “Right,” he said. “I was.”
Miss Kang wasn’t in her hooch.
“She go pray,” the landlady told us.
“At the shrine at the top of the hill,” I said, pointing toward the Namhan River.
Her eyes widened. “How you know?”
I shrugged. Ernie and I thanked her, walked back through the village and started up the narrow trail that led out of Paldang-ni, over the hills, and eventually to the banks of the Namhan River. On the way, we passed the bronze bell. It still hadn’t been moved and sat amongst a pile of rotted lumber.
At the top of the hill, we found her. She squatted on the stone platform of the shrine, just below where the bell would’ve been. Ernie walked up to her quickly, shoved her upright, pressed her against one of the wooden support beams, and frisked her. He tossed out a wallet, keys, some loose change and, finally, an Army-issue bayonet.
Miss Kang squatted back down, covering her face with her hands. Narrow shoulders heaved. She was crying.
Ernie backed away, rolling his eyes, exasperated.
After she shed a few more tears, maybe she’d open up to us. I was about to whisper to Ernie to be patient when, behind me, a pebble clattered against stone. Ernie was too busy staring at the quivering form of Miss Kang to notice. As I turned, something dark exploded out of the night.
Ernie shouted.
For a moment, I was gone. Darkness, bright lights, and then more bright lights. I felt myself reeling backward and then I hit something hard and I willed my mind to clear. The darkness gave way to blurred vision. Ernie slapped me on the cheek.
“Sueño, can you stand?”
I stood up.
“Come on. He hit you with some sort of club and when I lunged at him I tripped on this stupid stone platform. He and Kang took off.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Shin.”
I followed Ernie’s pointing finger. Fuzzy vision slowly focused. The early morning haze had lifted and more sunlight filtered through bushes and low trees. In the distance, two figures sprinted down the pathway, heading back toward Paldang-ni.
“Come on!” I shouted.
“My sentiments exactly,” Ernie said. “But watch out. She took the bayonet.”
And then we were after them.
A crowd had gathered in the central square of Paldang-ni. It was like a small park, surrounded on either side by produce vendors, fishmongers, and butcher shops. No lawn but a few carefully tended rose bushes were ringed by small rocks. Under the shade of an ancient oak tree, old men-wearing traditional white pantaloons and blue silk vests and knitted horsehair hats-squatted on their heels, smoking tobacco from long-stemmed pipes. Groups of them gathered around wooden boards playing changki, Korean chess.