I asked a couple of the business girls where the Cherry Girl Club was. They shook their heads, confused.
“It must be new,” Ernie said.
I nodded. And if it was new, it wouldn’t be here in the heart of the GI village. It would probably be somewhere on the outskirts. “Maybe across East Bean River,” I said. There were a few bars over there, mostly frequented by the older non-commissioned officers. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
“She’s no spring chicken,” I told Ernie, “if the other gals who work at the Star Mountain Club are any indication.”
“So she’ll be across the bridge, where the lifers hang out.”
“Lifer” is the derogatory term young GIs use for the older NCOs who’ve made the army their career.
“Worth a shot,” I said.
We left the neon behind and made our way through muddy lanes to the footbridge across the East Bean River. Lights spread up and down the water, flickering from the backs of hovels and dilapidated two-story buildings that housed the working-class families who made their livings off the meager economy that Camp Casey provided. During the day, acres of laundry fluttered on lines like the flags of a Mongol army. But now, at night, back windows were lit up in a checkerboard pattern and the steady buzz of radios and television sets was interspersed with the occasional shouts of children, the clang of pots and pans and the wailing cries of infants.
On the far side, we turned north toward the branch of the Military Supply Route that ran west from Camp Casey. Eventually the road would cross the small mountain range dividing the Eastern and Western Corridors.
Finally we hit neon. Not as much as on the main drag of TDC, but enough to make us feel at home.
“There it is,” Ernie said, pointing to a sign about fifty yards ahead: the cherry girl club.
We walked quickly, our hands buried deep in our coat pockets. The night was becoming colder.
We decided not to take the direct approach. Better to play it low-key and check out the lay of the land. A few NCOs in civvies sat at the bar. We steered away from them, settled into a booth, and ordered a pitcher of OB. Ernie splurged for a plate of daegu-po, strips of dried cuttlefish with a dip of red pepper paste.
“You’re hungry,” I said after the waitress brought our beer and snacks.
“So are you,” he said.
Our server was a husky woman who wore short yellow pants and a pullover sleeveless blouse. She could get away with such skimpy attire because the Cherry Girl Club had an Army-issue diesel space heater on either side of the twenty-yard long barroom. Her nameplate read miss noh.
“We’re hungry,” Ernie told Miss Noh as he paid her for the beer and daegu-po. “Where’s a good place to eat?”
“Sell hamburger here,” she said.
“What kind of meat?”
She crinkled her round nose. “Maybe not good like compound.”
“You’ve been on the compound?” Ernie asked.
“Sure. My yobo take me.”
“You have a steady yobo?”
“Of course. Supposed to.”
“Is that a rule here?”
She grew exasperated. “What you mean?”
“I mean a friend of mine back Stateside, he used to steady a woman here. A woman who works at the Cherry Club.”
Miss Noh sat down, mildly interested. “What her name?”
Ernie told her. “Miss Lee,” he said.
Miss Noh held up three fingers. “We have three Miss Lee work here.”
“Three? Damn. Where are they?”
“Most tick they come. Early now. Most GI, they get off work, eat in mess hall, take shower, change clothes. Maybe they get here seven o’clock. Maybe eight.”
“And that’s when the other waitresses come in?” I asked.
She pondered what I’d said, processing the English. “Yeah. Most girl come in eight o’clock.” She turned back to Ernie. “What’s your chingu name?”
Ernie didn’t want to say Arenas. It might ring alarm bells. “Schultz,” he replied.
“Schultz?” Miss Noh pronounced carefully. Ernie nodded.
“When they come, I ask,” she said.
Most of the hostesses and waitresses and business girls knew each other by either their family name or a nickname they used at the club. Seldom would their first name be offered, because that was considered to be private, almost sacred, and not something to be spread around. So it wasn’t unusual that Miss Noh knew three Miss Lees but didn’t bother asking for a first name, since she wouldn’t recognize it anyway.
We ordered the hamburgers Miss Noh had mentioned. They were as bad as implied. But the fries were okay, as was the sliced cucumber.
As we sat in the booth, I studied the Arenas file. The case against him had been based primarily on the testimony of his yobo, Miss Lee Suk-myong, and that of a black marketeer named “Nam,” who’d allegedly introduced Arenas to an unnamed North Korean agent. Nam, when used as a family name, is usually represented by the Chinese character for “south”-pretty ironic, for someone doing business with a North Korean agent. Quite a few things were strange about the Arenas case. First and foremost was that the 501st had busted Arenas early on, when normal procedure would’ve been to observe and follow him, waiting patiently for the opportunity to take down his handler and this mysterious North Korean agent. As it turned out, the agent never appeared, and they couldn’t even find Nam and take him into custody. Only Miss Lee and Staff Sergeant Arenas had been arrested. The paperwork indicated that Miss Lee had made a deal with the Korean prosecutor and gotten off with time served in exchange for her testimony against her former yobo.
“Bullshit case,” Ernie said. “If we brought something like that to the Provost Marshal, he’d kick us out of his office.”
“Especially since they didn’t arrest the most important person in this whole drama. The still-anonymous North Korean spy.”
Ernie poured himself more beer.
I wasn’t worried about him getting wasted-I didn’t figure we’d be doing any more driving tonight. When the time came, we’d just find a cheap room in a yoguan, a Korean inn, or even more economically, a couple of sleeping mats in a community room of a traditional establishment known as a yoin-suk. I’d spotted a few on the way over.
“What did Arenas give up?” Ernie asked.
“You mean, what classified information was compromised?”
“What’d I just say?”
Ernie was getting irritable. I flipped through the pages in the file. “Staff Sergeant Arenas worked at the Camp Red Cloud Communications Center. As such, he had access to classified information all the way up to Secret. He occasionally hand-carried Top Secret documents to and from the I Corps Headquarters, since he was cleared for that.”
“But he wasn’t supposed to read them,” Ernie said.
“No. Just determine where the document should be routed, then deliver it.”
“But he could’ve read them because he had his hands on them.”
“Sure. If he was careful, he could’ve even made a copy. Not authorized, but there’s one of those big Xerox machines in the Commo Center.” I pointed at the paragraph I was scanning. “Says so right here.”
“Okay, so he had access to Top Secret information. How do they know he stole any of it?”
“Testimony of his girl.”
“The woman we’re waiting for.”
“Right.”
“That’s it? They didn’t have anything else?”
“She says this guy Nam showed up, all good looks and nice clothes and personality, and started taking Arenas out to those kisaeng houses down south on the outskirts of Seoul.” Kisaeng are female entertainers, typically skilled in the art of catering to wealthy clientele. “According to her, Arenas went along with it and even spent nights away from home.”