After slipping the. 45 into his shoulder holster, Ernie pulled out the three sketches and laid them on the wooden field table.
Taggard flinched. “What the hell did he do?”
Instead of answering, Ernie said, “You know him?”
“That’s Bolt.”
Taggard pointed at the sketch of the man we’d been calling “the Caucasian GI.” We now had a name to go with the face: Private First Class Rodney K. Boltworks, absent without leave from Charley Battery, 2nd of the 17th Field Artillery.
“How about her?” Ernie asked Taggard studied the sketch of the smiling woman.
“She looks a little more cleaned up now,” he said. “But that’s her. The blond bitch who used to work outside the wire.”
“She’d been one of them?” Ernie asked.
“Yeah,” Taggard answered. “Same crew. Same mama-san. Everything.”
“What happened to her?”
Taggard shook his head slowly. “Bolt liked her. Used to hog her, matter of fact, like I was telling you. Not give the rest of us a shot. Got so bad he started beating on her when she complained about not making enough money. Then one night a couple months ago, he took her out in the bushes, and while he was out there, somebody started beating on him.”
Taggard grinned at the memory. One of his front teeth was missing.
“Who?” I asked.
“Don’t know. But Bolt was bruised up pretty bad. Must’ve been a good fight. Wouldn’t tell us who did it to him.”
“And the girl?”
“She disappeared. Later that night, so did Bolt.”
Captain Lewis stood with his arms crossed, rocking on his heels, not liking this testimony at all. He was a tall, lean man with a short crew cut.
“How about it, Captain?” Ernie asked. “Is that when Rodney Boltworks disappeared?”
“Almost two months ago. July seventeenth,” he said. “While we were camped in this area. Haven’t seen him since.”
I spoke to Taggard. “So Boltworks goes out in the bush with this business girl. He gets in a fight with somebody who wastes him pretty bad. He limps back to the encampment and, later that night, he disappears?”
“Exactly what happened.”
“Why?” I said.
Taggard grinned again.
“Why?” Taggard repeated. “I don’t know for sure, but I think he liked it.”
“Liked what?”
Taggard’s grin grew wider. “I think he liked the ass-kicking he got.”
Ernie and I glanced at one another, not sure how to proceed on that line of questioning. Ernie pointed at the sketch of the dark man with the curly brown hair.
“Do you know who this guy is?”
Taggard shook his head. So did Captain Lewis.
I wasn’t surprised. The sketch was pretty vague. A dark man with an oval-shaped face and opaque sunglasses covering his eyes. He could’ve been a Korean, an American. He could’ve been a lot of things.
We prevailed on the good captain to bring every soldier in Charley Battery into the Command tent, one at a time. We paraded them past the three sketches. To a man, everyone knew Boltworks. A handful recognized the smiling woman, but not one recognized the dark man with the curly brown hair.
Afterwards, Ernie and I drove back to Uichon and asked the night duty officer at the Korean National Police Station to help us find the mama-san and the girls who worked the encampments in this area. The guy was adamant. He would give us no information, not without clearing it with his superiors. And since it was already past the midnight curfew, we would have to wait until morning to talk to the commander of the Uichon police station.
There was no place else to go, so Ernie and I sat down on the wooden benches and waited. And slept, until just before dawn.
Twenty minutes after we’d been woken up, the police station commander walked in. He was a young lieutenant named Cheon, rail thin, his khaki uniform pressed to a sharp crease. Most likely college educated. Probably a graduate of one of Korea’s military academies. As he listened to Ernie and me explain what we wanted, he was even less happy than Captain Lewis had been. No Korean cop likes to admit that, right under his nose, underage Korean girls were being herded out into the bushes to have sexual relations with American GIs. We asked him about the mama-san and where we could find her. She was the only lead we had to the smiling woman and the AWOL GI known as Bolt.
Cheon pondered our request, probably trying to decide if he should just kick us out of his office. But if he did that, we would go to our superiors, they would contact his superiors, and then the shit would roll downhill, soiling both him and his little fiefdom. Less embarrassing to deal with the situation here, at our level, cop to cop. I had already worked through this line of reasoning but I waited for Lieutenant Cheon to figure it out.
He did.
Cheon grabbed his cap and told the desk sergeant he’d be back in a few minutes. Ernie and I followed him out the front door of the Uichon police station.
The sky was brighter now, though still gray. The air was clean and sharp and cold, laced with the tang of growing things, sliced, and piled and festering in green sap.
Somehow, amidst all this open countryside, the people of Uichon had constructed a slum. Arable land in Korea has always been precious. Although the peninsula is fertile and blessed with many lush river valleys, it is also ridged with mountain ranges and spotted with hills. Land that can be used for farming is scarce and conserved fiercely, even here in Uichon. Living space for humans is packed into constricted areas. The main drag of Uichon, with the two-lane MSR running down the middle, only stretched a block and a half. Behind that front line of buildings, the alleys dropped off into muddy pedestrian lanes. We tromped through one that headed downhill.
Lieutenant Cheon led the way, stepping across mud puddles, hopping deftly from a flat stone to a leftover slat of lumber, keeping his highly polished boots as clean as possible. Ernie and I tried to follow in his footsteps, but we were less successful. Soon, my trousers were spattered with mud.
A man pushing a cart filled with hay trundled past us, smiling a gap-toothed smile and bowing to Lieutenant Cheon. It was still too early for children to be up and about and on their way to school, and many of the homes behind the rickety wooden outer walls were dark. Occasionally we heard the scratch of wooden matches or the clang of a metal pot or the growl of an old man rising, clearing his throat.
Lieutenant Cheon stopped at a wooden gate that had been stained black with grease. He pounded his fist and shouted, “Irrona-ya!” Wake up!
He pounded repeatedly, until the splintered gate opened a crack.
A woman wrapped in a heavy wool sweater, so frail she looked made of sticks, peered up at us. I recognized the eyes. The same phlegm-filled orbs we’d seen last night while crouching in the reeds outside the concertina wire that surrounded Charley Battery. Those eyes looked worried when she saw Ernie and me. More worried when she recognized Lieutenant Cheon.
She pulled the wooden gate open. We entered.
This hooch was more like what we were used to in Itaewon. Muddy courtyard with nothing but a rusty pump handle. A chicken coop with no chickens, and three hooches on a raised platform, the wood rough and rotting. One of the oil-papered sliding doors was open and inside lay a jumbled pile of blankets. One naked foot stuck out from beneath the coverings.
“Better tell them to wake up,” I told the old woman in Korean. “We’re going to talk to everybody.”
Ernie and I found two wooden stools. We sat on the flagstone edge of the courtyard beneath a tile-roofed overhang. The business girls came out, looking younger than ever. In the gray morning light, their naked faces showed pocks and blemishes invisible in moonlight. One of the girls had a milky eye, another a lame left foot. Gradually, this home for wayward girls was beginning to seem more like a hospice for the handicapped rather than a brothel for our brave American soldiers.