I froze, averting my eyes toward the alleyway.
He stared at me for a moment. “Sueno?” he asked.
I nodded.
“What the hell you doing up here?”
I didn’t answer, considering whether or not to call for backup and try to cordon off the neighborhood and maybe trap the man with the iron sickle. But it was too late. Such an effort would take at least a half hour to set up. He had too much of a head start and the catacombs of Seoul were vast. Instead, I sighed and answered the MP’s question. “It’s a long story.”
“Better be a good one. The Staff Duty Officer has a case of the big ass.”
“So do I,” I said. “Do you mind helping me check out that alley?”
I pointed to where I’d seen the man with the iron sickle. He aimed his flashlight. It was empty now, nothing but ancient brick and string-like cobwebs.
“You spot something down there?”
“Yeah. Come on.”
He followed me into the maze. We spent a half hour chasing our tails. No sign of anything.
“What the hell are we looking for?” the MP asked.
I could’ve told him I saw the man with the iron sickle but I’m not sure he would’ve believed me. Every MP craves glory. If I claimed to have seen the most wanted man in 8th Army and had no evidence to back it up, I would be thought of as either hallucinating or, more likely, making up stories to make myself seem important. And I’d be asked the most embarrassing question of alclass="underline" why didn’t you take him down?
“Forget it,” I said. “I thought I saw something. Guess I was mistaken.”
We returned to the compound.
“Abandoning your post,” the Staff Duty Officer said. “Absent without leave. Disobeying a general order. Need I go on?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Well, do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“A call came in just before midnight,” I told him, “an MP under attack, bleeding, no one else was available.”
“Burrows and Slabem were on call.”
“By the time we got through to them and woke them up and they got dressed and found their vehicle and drove out to the ville, whatever was happening would’ve been all over.”
“It was all over when you got there,” he told me.
Not quite. The Korean MP was still alive and on his way to the hospital, and, as I found out later, the man with the iron sickle was still haunting the area. But instead of explaining, I kept quiet. When a military officer is angry, proving to him he’s wrong just makes matters worse.
First Lieutenant Wilson was the 8th Army Staff Duty Officer for the evening. A leather armband designating him as such was strapped around his left shoulder. He kept rubbing his forehead and pushing his garrison cap backward over his cropped hair, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“The Provost Marshal has been informed,” he told me. “Burrows and Slabem are out there right now at the Itaewon Police Station.”
“Waiting for the police report,” I said.
He studied me, suspicious of the insolence in my voice. “That’s their job,” he told me.
At their core, the Korean National Police are a political organization; their main reason for existence is to support the military dictatorship of President Park Chung-hee. Despite this fact, the honchos of 8th Army allow the KNPs to translate their own police reports into English. That’s what CID agents Jake Burrows and Felix Slabem were waiting for now, the KNP English translation of the police report concerning the attack at the pochang macha. I doubted either Burrows or Slabem could read even one word of Korean. In the past, I’d gone to the trouble of comparing the Korean version of a KNP police report to the English version. Often the English version was watered down even more than the Korean version. Important information was left out in an effort not to upset 8th Army or in any way damage the special relationship between the US and Korea.
I considered explaining all this to Lieutenant Wilson, explaining the need for first hand information, the need for American cops capable of interviewing Korean witnesses, but I was too tired to go into it. Instead, I said, “Yes, sir.”
Lieutenant Wilson pushed his cap back even further and rubbed his furrowed brow. “I’ll let the Provost Marshal decide what to do with you. For now, I want you to finish your shift as sergeant of the guard.” He checked his watch. “Two more hours until morning chow. I expect you out there, on patrol, until then. When you’re properly relieved, report back here to the desk sergeant. He’ll log you out.”
Lieutenant Wilson asked me if I understood what he’d just told me, and I said I did. He was treating me like an idiot, and maybe there was some justification. In the army an experienced NCO who risks reprimand in order to do the right thing is suspected of either not understanding the situation or, more likely, of having gone mad.
I was starving by the time I was relieved from guard duty, but instead of making a beeline to the chow hall, I went back to Itaewon to search for Ernie. When I reached Miss Ju’s hooch, I knew I must’ve found Ernie because the sliding latticework door in front of her room was hanging halfway out of its frame.
“Ernie?” I said, rapping on the edge of the wooden porch. A bleary-eyed Korean woman peered out from behind strips of shredded oil paper that had once been part of the door. She realized who I was and her eyes popped open. She raised her knee and stomped behind her at something. A man grunted. Ernie.
I reached into the hooch, sliding forward on my knees, and shook him.
“Reveille,” I said. “The Provost Marshal wants to talk to us at zero eight hundred.”
Ernie sat up and rubbed his eyes. As he got dressed, Miss Ju said, “You owe me money!”
“Money?” Ernie repeated in mock outrage. “I thought you rubba me too muchey.”
She slipped on a robe and stood leaning against the broken door as Ernie slid into his trouser and tucked in his shirt. “Not that,” she said. “Last night you come here, you punch Bobby, you break door. You gotta pay!”
“No, sweat-ida,” Ernie said. “I’ll get your money.”
Miss Ju was a slender woman with permed black hair twisted in jumbled disarray. Still, she looked cute when she frowned. “When?” she asked. “When you get money?”
“As soon as I find Bobby,” Ernie replied.
“You make him pay?”
“Sure. He’s the one who broke the door, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, because you push.” She mimed a two-handed shove.
Ernie shrugged. “He shouldn’t have complained when I told him to karra chogi.”
“He don’t wanna go. Why he gotta go just because you say he gotta go?”
“You wanted him to go, didn’t you?”
“No. I want him stay. He not Cheap Charley like you.”
“Women,” Ernie said, turning to me, “who can understand them?” He finished lacing up his combat boots and stood up and grinned. “Life was simpler in Vietnam.”
“You mean you just took women when you wanted them.”
“Yeah. Later, they’d ask for money but the two things weren’t associated, you know what I mean?” He shook his head. “Koreans are so mercenary.”
As we left, Miss Ju stood with her cloth robe wrapped tightly around her slender torso, glaring at us. A few yards down the road, Ernie stopped and told me he forgot something, and he’d be right back. Before he left, he paused and said, “You wouldn’t have twenty bucks you could loan me, would you?”
I did. I pulled out two blue ten-dollar military payment certificates and handed them to him.
“Thanks.” He shoved the MPC in his pocket and returned to the hooch. He didn’t want me to see him reimburse Miss Ju for the damage to her room. When he came back, he shrugged. “Don’t want no hard feelings out here in the ville.”
I slapped him on the back. “You did the right thing.”