“She was jealous that he was out with Nam all the time.”
“Maybe. Or jealous of the money Arenas was spending on some kisaeng instead of her.”
“But what about the actual leak of classified info? What does the file say about that?”
I thumbed through it, twisting the pages as I read in order to catch more of the words in the dim light. I went through the file once, then back through it again.
“It doesn’t say anything about that. It only has testimony from one of the GIs who worked for Arenas, who talked about how he would sometimes sneak off to the copy room by himself, then bring back pages and not show them to anyone.”
“Sounds pretty flimsy to me.” Ernie glugged back more beer. “Did Arenas build up a lot of cash in his bank account, or buy money orders and mail them home?”
“If he did, it doesn’t appear here.”
“So the main thing is that at least one of his subordinates didn’t like him, which isn’t unusual, and his girlfriend was jealous that he had a rich buddy who took him to party with a bunch of kisaeng.”
“That’s what it looks like.”
Ernie shook his head. “No wonder they keep these proceedings in camera. Who’d want that out in the world? Did Arenas hire a Stateside lawyer?”
I flipped back to the appendix. “No. He was represented by military counsel.”
“Mistake,” Ernie said.
“The biggest thing that the prosecution harped on was that there were Top Secret documents not properly logged in and out. This happened right in the middle of Sergeant Arenas’s shift-he was the NCO in charge.”
“Did other GIs have access to the login and logout register?”
I studied the statements. “Yes.”
“But Arenas was the man in charge.”
“For that shift, yes. He was the ranking man in the Commo Center during the hours the documents in question were supposed to have been logged in and logged out.”
Ernie polished off his beer and ordered another. “So somebody was taking shortcuts and not following procedure. Christ, we could put away half the US Army if that’s the standard. Does the file say why the counter-intel pukes didn’t go after this guy Nam?”
“Not a word,” I said.
“Figures. They didn’t want to embarrass themselves. Maybe because he doesn’t exist.”
After about twenty minutes, a half-dozen hostesses entered the Cherry Girl Club. Three were named Miss Lee. Miss Noh wasted no time. She cornered them all as they were taking off their coats, speaking rapidly, and once she had their attention, she pointed toward us. After a quick trip to the ladies’ room, two of the women came over and sat down next to us. We didn’t want to waste time buying them drinks if we didn’t have to, so I immediately asked if either of them was Lee Suk-myong. My abruptness was rude, but I could tell by their baffled reaction that neither was the woman we were looking for.
I watched the far side of the bar, and from the ladies’ room emerged the third Miss Lee. Her head was down and her coat was back on. She shuffled quickly back toward the door she’d first entered through.
“Come on,” I said to Ernie, and started to get up.
The Miss Lee next to me pouted and grabbed my wrist. I ripped my hand away and almost dumped her out of the booth, though at the last minute she managed to keep on her feet. Then I hurried across the barroom and hit the far door, and outside I saw our prospective Miss Lee Suk-myong hail a cab. She climbed in, and before I could position myself in front of the cab to block it, it sped off, drenching my blue jeans with water. I ran after it, glimpsing part of the license plate.
“Damn!” Ernie said, sprinting up to my side.
But I was already waving my arms frantically, and another taxi emerged out of the night. We hopped in and I yelled the Korean equivalent of “Follow that cab!”
He did. And then I told him to step on it, which in Korean is bali, bali. Quickly, quickly.
– 23-
When Miss Lee Suk-myong climbed out of her cab, she was not in front of a yoguan, a yoin-suk or even a hooch, but rather the one place in town that was reminiscent of a Western-style hoteclass="underline" the Tower Hotel. Six stories high and easily the tallest building in Tongduchon, it held preeminence of place. It sat across the street, and only a quarter mile south from the main gate of Camp Casey. Many of the guests at the Tower Hotel were military officers on temporary duty from elsewhere in Korea or from the United States. As such, the Tower Hotel billed the US government directly for rooms. The hotel lobby had a Western-style coffee shop, which provided food and coffee of poor quality and was therefore usually empty. The Americans who stayed at the Tower seldom ate or drank there, since they could just take a short walk across the street and enter the pedestrian gate to Camp Casey, where they could find much better, more reasonably priced food and drink at the 2nd Infantry Division Officers Club.
But the hotel also had an elegant bar called the Tower Lounge. It was carpeted and softly lit, with comfortably upholstered chairs and waitresses in short skirts, all providing an air of American-style elegance. As such, it was extremely popular not with Americans, but with upwardly mobile young Koreans.
Miss Lee paid the cabbie and entered the front door of the Tower Hotel.
We ordered our driver to cruise past slowly.
“She can’t afford to live here,” Ernie said.
“No.”
“So what’s she up to?”
“We’ll find out.”
I told the driver to pull over about ten yards past the hotel entrance. Ernie paid him and we emerged from the cramped kimchi cab into the cold night.
“Maybe only one of us should go in,” I said. “She knows two guys are looking for her. If she only sees one, that might throw her off.”
I slipped out of my jacket and handed it to Ernie. Beneath, I wore a long-sleeved blue sports shirt with a buttoned-down collar. “If I’m not wearing a jacket,” I said, “she might think I’m staying at the hotel.”
“Unless she took a real good look at us at the Cherry Girl Club.”
“I don’t think she did,” I said. “At least, I hope not.”
Ernie pointed to a yakbang, a pharmacy, on the other side of the street. “I’ll go get the jeep,” he said, “it’s not far from here. I’ll be waiting in front of that pharmacy.”
“Good.”
Ernie trotted off and quickly faded into darkness. After he was gone, I turned, walked up the street, and pushed through the large glass front doors of the Tower Hotel.
Our goal was to prove what Major Schultz’s inspection report implied: that the 501st Military Intelligence agents were jerry-rigging investigations to make themselves look effective, and to expand both the unit’s budget and the reputation of its Commander, Captain Blood. Given the paranoia of the military officers who sat on court-martial juries-men who saw Commies behind every bedpost-it wasn’t too far-fetched to think that they would set aside their better judgment and go along, at least sometimes, with the counterintelligence “experts” of the 501st. No officer wanted to be seen as soft on Communism, not if he had any ambition in this man’s army.
The case against Staff Sergeant Hector Arenas seemed, thus far, to meet all the criteria of a sham trial. A guy who worked with classified documents, whose yobo was angry with him, and who had somehow become friends with a mysterious Korean named Nam. Money, sex, glory, and anti-Communism can all become a jumble in the fevered military mind. Under those conditions, a miscarriage of justice can occur. And I could see Captain Blood and the agents who worked for him panicking when Major Schultz threatened to expose them. But did it amount to murder?