Taggard’s cheeks bulged with anger. Ernie held the. 45 aimed at his face, although I knew the charging handle hadn’t been pulled back. Ernie couldn’t have shot Taggard if he’d wanted to. Fortunately, Taggard didn’t know that.
“I’m going to ask you some questions, Private Taggard,” Ernie said. “After each one you’re going to give me an answer. Understand? You’re not going to give me any bullshit or any excuses about why you don’t know. You’re just going to give me an answer. Got that?”
When Taggard didn’t reply, Ernie clanged back the charging handle of the. 45, pressed it hard up against Taggard’s nose, and repeated the question, pronouncing each word slowly.
“Do you understand that?”
Reluctantly, Taggard nodded. Beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead.
I considered jumping on Ernie, wrestling the. 45 away from him. But that might cause the gun to go off. Would he really shoot Taggard? From the look on Ernie’s face, I couldn’t be sure. He was enraged. In Inchon, when we gazed at the wounded Han Ok-hi in her oxygen tent, and at the Yellow House, when we examined the cigarette burns along Mi-ja’s arm, and then, in Songtan, when we saw the blood exsanguinated from the body of Jo Kyong-ah, Ernie had acted as if he were just a cop doing a job. No emotion showed on his face. But now his face was a mask of rage. He’d caught someone in the act of committing a crime: having sex for pay with an underage girl. What worried me most was that he was going to take all his rage and frustration out on a miscreant GI named Taggard. Maybe Taggard deserved to have his ass kicked. He probably even deserved time in the stockade, but he didn’t deserve to be shot dead.
“Boltworks,” Ernie said. “Rodney, K., Private First Class. Talk!”
“Asshole,” Taggard said.
“Explain!”
“He was an asshole, that’s all. Always messing with people. When he lost his ration control privileges, he started pestering everybody else-Let me use your ration card for this; let me use it for that. He beat up a few of the wimpy dudes in the battery and made them buy some shit out of the PX for him, but he knew better than to mess with me.”
“I’ll bet,” Ernie said. “How long has he been gone?”
“Ask mama-san. She knows.”
The old woman and her girls slid back even further into the grass. I told her in Korean to stay right where she was.
“What do you mean?” Ernie asked Taggard.
“Bolt was the first one out here.”
“Bolt?”
“Yeah. That’s what we called Boltworks. Every time we were in the field, he’d find mama-san and her girls. Had a nose for pussy until he smelled the wrong kind.”
Ernie shoved the tip of the. 45 back toward his nose. “Go on,” he said.
On the other side of the wall of grass, I noticed some movement of lights. Probably just the perimeter guards.
“Why you want me to tell you?” Taggard said. “Ask mama-san.”
“I’m asking you,” Ernie replied.
Taggard sighed. A gentleman, hugely inconvenienced.
“Boltworks came out here for one particular girl.”
“Pretty?”
“Better than these pug-nosed bitches. Boltworks was greedy. Kept her all to himself, alone, way over there in the grass all night.”
Taggard pointed vaguely into the distance.
“Didn’t Boltworks have guard duty?”
“He didn’t mess with that shit. Told somebody else to pull it for him.”
“Paid them?”
“Hell no. Boltworks was crazy. Guys’d pull his guard duty just so he wouldn’t mess with them. Not me though.
I wasn’t afraid of him.”
“Tell me about the girl.”
“He used to take her every time we came out to Nightmare Range. Give mama-san here some tambay or something.” Cigarettes. “And then one night we heard a lot of noise. Not screaming or crying or anything like that, but fighting. A couple of the other guys went over, and they found the girl bloodied up. She was too pretty, almost blonde, you know. She crazy though. Still smiling. That big smile of hers she always had no matter what.”
I felt dizzy for a moment. The smiling woman, the one who’d sat at a table with me in the King Club in Itaewon, the woman who’d drugged me, the woman who’d escorted the dark GI onto the train at Inchon Station-that’s who he was talking about.
“So what happened to Boltworks?” Ernie asked.
“Mama-san here wanted more money, for the blonde girl’s hospital bills and shit like that, but Boltworks told her to go screw herself. Then she took her girls and left and the next time we came out to Nightmare Range, she and her little bitches weren’t out here. Everybody was pissed, but nobody said nothing to Boltworks.”
“Too scared?”
“They were. Not me.”
“And that’s it?” Ernie said.
“I told you, ask the mama-san.”
“I’m asking you.”
Taggard shrugged. “You going to turn me in, or what?”
“Depending,” Ernie said. “Talk.”
“So we come back to Nightmare Range and suddenly mama-san’s back, with new girls and everything, and the blonde girl, she back, smiling as usual and she takes Boltworks by the hand and leads him out into the high grass and… ”
As if a bolt of lightning had struck, the world was suddenly full of light. I covered my eyes, cursing myself for not staying alert.
“Freeze!” a voice shouted.
Shading my eyes from the glare of a half-dozen beams of light, I could still make out dark shadows standing in front of us. A few of them held long, dark objects. Rifles.
Ernie lifted his. 45 straight up in the air.
“Set it down, mister,” a voice said. “Slow and easy.”
He did.
Something poked me in the arm.
With an effort, I opened my eyes. Something was pressing against my hip, my elbow and shoulder, and my neck was twisted at an awkward angle.
I looked up to find a stern-faced Korean man glaring at me. Wearing khaki. I sat upright.
Where was I?
Then I remembered. We were in the police station in the village of Uichon. Was I locked up? No. This was the police station lobby, in front of the desk sergeant’s counter. Both Ernie and I had passed out on the wooden benches against the front wall. There were no hotels in Uichon; not even a yoguan, a Korean inn. So the local KNPs had allowed us to sleep here rather than in our open-topped jeep.
Ernie sat up and rubbed his eyes. The Korean cop stared, making sure we were awake. He was a slightly cross-eyed young man and the dull curiosity in his eyes made me understand how a gorilla in a cage at the zoo must feel when being stared at by tourists. The young cop turned and walked back behind the partition, where his desk overlooked the public entrance. Cold air poured in through open doors. Outside, the barest glimmer of gray appeared at the edges of a dark sky.
“I feel like shit,” Ernie said.
“Don’t ask me how you look.”
Last night, while we were busy interviewing Private Taggard in the tall grass, the perimeter guards around the Charley Battery encampment had noticed something amiss. They’d alerted their commander, one Captain Floyd Lewis, and he’d organized a detail of men and surrounded us before we knew what was happening. After taking Ernie’s. 45, Lewis marched us back inside the Charley Battery area and sat us down on folding stools inside the ten-man tent that served as temporary Command Post.
I tried to tell him that the business girls outside the wire were getting away, but all he said was, “What business girls?”
Typically, he pretended he hadn’t seen the women, and he also pretended that he didn’t know what was going on outside his concertina wire. The brass monkey act: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. The road to advancement in the United States Army. Captain Lewis was much more concerned with the fact that Ernie had pulled a gun on one of his soldiers.
We showed him our identification and told him why we were here. When Ernie mentioned General Armbrewster’s name, Captain Lewis fired up his communications equipment. After a few minutes, he received confirmation via radio that he was to provide us with full cooperation. Butt first, Lewis handed Ernie his gun back.