“Yes. Mom’s ashes.”
“She took a box filled with her mom’s ashes and never came back?”
“Never.”
“Who was the man who attacked her?”
“I don’t know. She no tell. She very ashamed.”
“Ashamed? Why should she be ashamed?”
Fanny shook her head. She didn’t know.
“But this man,” I asked, “this man who attacked her, it was someone who knew her?”
Fanny nodded emphatically. “Yes. Someone who knew her.”
I showed Fanny the sketches of PFC Rodney K. Boltworks and the smiling woman’s younger brother. “Was the man who attacked her one of these men?”
Fanny couldn’t be sure since the attacker wore a ski mask and gloves. But her impression was that he was Korean. She also told me that he was not tall, but average height, and he’d attacked just after the midnight curfew, after all GIs had left the Half Half Club. He didn’t have a weapon, but was brutal. He shoved Fanny toward the top of the stairwell, and she lost her balance and reeled backward.
“How can you be so sure,” I asked, “that this man was after Yun Ai-ja?”
“I don’t know. She know. She so frightened she crawl out window, almost naked, how you say… nei yi?”
“Underwear.”
“Yes. In underwear. When man see Yun Ai-ja not here, he leave.”
“And you?” I asked.
“Take go hospital. Stay two days. When no can pay more, Half Half women, they bring me back here.”
There is no disability or workman’s compensation in Korea. No welfare or food chits or universal health insurance. Fanny told me that her mother was dead, her father a GI whom she’d never known. Since she didn’t have a family, this half-American woman was on her own.
At midnight, I carried Fanny back upstairs to her room and lay her down on the cotton-covered sleeping mat. I was about to leave when she grabbed my hand and asked me to stay.
The next day, I rose early. Before she woke, I left all my travel pay-about seventy dollars worth of MPC-stacked in a pile on the dresser next to her bed.
Ernie and I didn’t pull into the parking lot of the CID headquarters in Seoul until noon. Two-story red brick buildings, built by the Japanese Imperial Army before World War II, rose above us. Ernie and I ran up cement stairs. When we entered the CID Admin Office, we discovered that the First Sergeant and the Provost Marshal were out to lunch. Lucky for us. Who needed them anyway? All they’d do is pester us for a preliminary report that, if our assumptions didn’t pan out, they’d hammer us with later. Better to keep pushing on the investigation and report to them when we were sure of what we had.
Miss Kim sat behind her typewriter, a new pink carnation sticking out of a narrow vase on her desk. When she saw Ernie, she lit up, but then remembered how he’d been ignoring her lately and pretended to pout. Ernie strode across the room, plopped down in the chair in front of her desk, grabbed a copy of today’s Stars amp; Stripes, and pretended to read. Furiously, Miss Kim rolled paper into her typewriter and banged away on the keys, turning sideways from Ernie, pretending to be absorbed in her work.
Both a couple of frauds. But I had to hand it to Ernie, he was playing her like a violin. Or at least he thought he was.
I sat down next to the Admin NCO, Staff Sergeant Riley.
Miss Kim skipped lunch to watch her figure. Riley skipped lunch because the wasted lining of his stomach no longer tolerated food. He’d been boozing heavily since he was a teenager, and now, in his mid-thirties, he looked like a skinny old man two steps away from the intensive-care ward. Sometimes I worried about him, keeping a bottle of Old Overwart in his locker back at the barracks, hitting it hard every night. But he was an adult and the decision was his. And the honchos at 8th Army CID didn’t care, because during the day, Riley worked like a Siberian tiger. Gathering information, nurturing contacts throughout 8th Army headquarters, handling all our pay and personnel needs with only the help of the diligent Miss Kim.
12
Riley stared at me balefully, withered lips pursed around a crooked front tooth.
“Where you been?”
“Up north,” I said.
“The Provost Marshal’s about to shit a brick.”
“Why?”
“Because the Koreans are shitting a brick over the death of Han Ok-hi.”
He handed me this morning’s edition of the Hankuk Ilbo, the Korea Daily. Some of the big block Chinese characters in the headline, I recognized. The name, Han Ok-hi; the name of the city, Inchon; and finally sa, the character for death.
“The head shed wants answers,” he said. “What can I tell them?”
“We’re working on it,” I said.
“That’s not good enough, Sueno. Don’t mess with their minds. The Provost Marshal is already pissed off enough about you and Ernie being granted special access to General Armbrewster.” Riley shook his head. “Going over their heads.”
“We didn’t go over their heads,” Ernie said. “Armbrewster called us.”
Riley shrugged. “Same difference. When this shit is over, you’re going to be just a couple of no-rank CID maggots again. Nobody to protect you. Better tell the Provost Marshal something. Make him at least feel like he’s in charge.”
“Screw him,” Ernie said. “And the First Sergeant.”
I finished my coffee in silence. Riley had given up on Ernie, but he was still waiting for me to say something. I told Riley that Ernie and I were going to find some chow, and then we were going out to follow some leads.
“Give me more than that, Sueno,” Riley replied. “I have to feed them some sort of line. Even if it’s bullshit.”
I paused at the door. “Tell them we’re going out to Itaewon,” I said, “to search for a woman who might be able to crack this case wide open.”
Riley almost smiled. “You’re that close?”
“We’re close,” I replied. “The only problem is, for the last four or five years, the woman’s been dead.”
Maybe it was his stomach. Maybe it was my answer. For whatever reason, Staff Sergeant Riley’s mug turned sour again.
Ernie and I were wearing our “running the ville” outfits: blue jeans, T-shirts, sneakers, and jackets with an embroidered dragon on the back. My dragon embraced a map of Korea and said: “Frozen Chosun, Land of the Morning Calm.” Ernie’s dragon coiled itself around a beautiful Asian woman and said: “Served my Time in
Hell, Korea, 1971–1973.”
Without coats and ties, Ernie and I felt free again. That, along with being fed and rested and, most importantly, back on our home turf: Itaewon, the greatest GI village that ever was.
It was late afternoon, the sun setting red and angry behind the western hills. We were checking yak bangs. The literal translation would be “medicine shops.” The more accurate translation would be “pharmacies.” Pharmacies in Korea, however, are different from pharmacies in the States. For one thing, customers don’t need prescriptions. In fact, you don’t necessarily need a doctor’s advice at all. Many people, especially those who can’t afford to see a Western-style doctor, simply stand in the yak bang and describe their symptoms. The man behind the counter probably isn’t medically trained, and might not have even finished middle school.
That’s what was happening now. A portly middle-aged Korean woman was grabbing her back in the lumbar region, ranting about the pain she suffered daily. She crouched, stood up, bent over, moved her arms as if swimming, all in an effort to make the Korean man behind the counter fully understand the pain she was experiencing.
The Korean behind the counter rubbed his chin and sucked in air and tilted his head, agonizing over his decision. He said something in Korean that I couldn’t understand, and his wife, who had been standing patiently beside him, brought forth from the stacks in the rear of the shop a large brown bottle filled with pills. The three of them chatted loudly for a couple of minutes, and finally a dozen pills were poured onto a sheet of paper and the wife deftly folded the paper into the shape of a fat envelope. The middle-aged woman handed a short stack of wrinkled won notes across the counter. Then the pharmacist and his wife bowed to their customer, and the woman turned and slid open the door of the shop and walked out, the overhead bell tinkling after her.