“I see you’ve found your usual fan club.”
“They can’t stay away from me.”
Without taking his eyes off me, Ernie lunged to his right and caught one of the girls by the wrist. As she squealed with delight, he pulled her close, turned her around, and swatted her firmly on her round butt. Then he let her go with a warning, waggling his finger at her. She bounced away laughing, pretending to pout.
“You give me money, GI,” she said, rubbing her rear end. “Apo.” It hurts.
“I’ll show you apo,” Ernie replied. “A whole world of apo.”
Most of the girls on Hooker Hill were teenagers, not much younger than the American GIs. The reason they lurked back there in the darkness was so they could escape into the narrow pedestrian lanes if any Korean cops came by. They were under eighteen, the legal age to apply for a “VD card” in Korea. And without an updated VD card, stamped and approved by the Itaewon Health Service, they couldn’t enter the brightly lit bars and nightclubs that lined the main drag of Itaewon.
“What’d you find out?” I asked.
“I’ve been talking to business girls all night,” Ernie said, “here and in the clubs, and to the bartenders and the waitresses. So far, nothing. Nobody saw a Korean man in a black suit, holding something under his coat, with a puffed lower lip and the sniffles, and a funny walk.”
Unless they worked there, the bars and nightclubs of Itaewon were off limits to Korean civilians. The ROK government had designated them as for “foreign tourists” only. Since Korea had little or no tourism, the “tourists” were all Amercian GIs.
“We know he passed through here,” I told Ernie, “maybe on his way to the pochang macha and almost certainly during his escape. If he stopped, he would’ve been noticeable.”
“Apparently he didn’t stop,” Ernie said. “He just kept moving.”
Many people who aren’t hookers or nightclub workers or American GIs do pass through Itaewon-little old ladies walking with canes, commuters on their way to work, kids on their way home from school wearing black uniforms with huge book bags strapped to their backs-but like Ernie said, they just keep moving. If that’s what the man with the iron sickle did, it’s possible no one noticed him.
I was quiet, thinking over the possibilities, when Ernie said, “How was your date with Captain Prevault?”
“It wasn’t a date.” He raised an eyebrow. “We went to a mental sanatorium, north of the city.” I told him who we’d talked to and what we’d done.
“Did you walk her home?” Ernie asked.
“No. She got off at Gate Five. She insisted she was fine and she’d make her way back to the BOQ on her own.”
“You should’ve walked her to her room. Who knows? Maybe she would’ve invited you in. A medical doctor over here on a thirteen-month tour-must get lonely for her sometimes.”
I was trying to think of a retort, but I gave up and pulled the drawing out of my pocket. I handed it to Ernie.
“What’s this?” he asked, twisting it to catch the dim light. “The dead rat?” he asked. “The one we saw tied to that contraption in the Itaewon Market?”
“The same.”
“Who drew this?”
“I did.”
“Not bad.”
“It took a lot of tries.”
I took the drawing back from him and showed it to the business girls who had wandered over, curious. One of them crinkled her nose. “Igot myoya?” What the hell is this?
“An boasso?” I asked. You never saw it before?
“An boasso.” They all shook their heads. Patiently, I described the man in the black coat, but they claimed never to have seen anyone matching the description.
We had about a half hour left before curfew. In that time, Ernie and I canvassed the area in front of the road that leads to the Itaewon Market and beyond that the spot where the pochang macha was still parked. All we got for our work were negative responses. On the way back to the compound I showed Ernie the alleyway where I’d seen someone who matched the description of the man with the iron sickle.
“Maybe it wasn’t him,” Ernie said.
“Maybe not.” But I didn’t really believe that.
We kept walking. The Main Supply Route was almost deserted, metal shutters pulled down and locked in front of all the shops. On the road that veered off toward Namsan Tunnel, a white military jeep cruised slowly by.
“White mice,” Ernie said.
They were the branch of government security that patrolled the city from midnight to four, making sure no one violated the national curfew. During that time, they had the authority to stop and arrest anyone on the streets, and if the person tried to flee, they had the right to shoot to kill. After the white mice passed, I turned and gazed back down the road toward Itaewon. A dark sedan, its lights off, sat on the edge of the road across from the Hamilton Hotel.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
Ernie turned around. “Don’t know. A government sedan of some sort or they wouldn’t be out this late.”
We hoofed it all the way to Gate Five and once there had to flash not only our military identification to the guard but also our Criminal Investigation badges. It was already fifteen minutes past midnight. CID agents are allowed to break the curfew. If we were regular GIs, we would’ve spent the night in the MP station.
Once inside the gate, I glanced back through the chain link fence. The same sedan, or one that looked very much like it, cruised past.
I was up early the next morning, even before the chow hall opened its doors. I slipped into the big military kitchen through the back loading dock and talked one of the cooks into letting me fill my canteen cup with coffee from the big metal urn. He waved me away, too busy dumping potatoes into a greased pan to argue. With my hot java, I walked downhill in the darkness through the quiet, tree-lined streets of the 8th Army headquarters compound. The air was cool and calm and the world seemed fresh. I love mornings, especially in this country the ancients had called the land of the morning calm.
At the 8th Army CID office, I used my key to get in and switched on the overhead fluorescent lights. While they were still buzzing, I walked down the hallway to the Provost Marshal’s conference room. Records from the Claims Office were stacked on a huge table.
I pulled up a chair, set my tin of coffee down, and started going through them. The CID agents in charge of the search had been thorough. They’d created a master list of the various claims sorted by date, type, and resolution. They were most interested in the claims processed in the last few years that were amongst the twenty or so percent that had been denied. Almost all of the denied claims had been appealed to the full Status of Forces Committee, the final arbiter in 8th Army Claims cases. The vast majority of those appealed had been denied again. I read that stack first, the failed claims, the ones most likely to have left the initially optimistic claimants frustrated, stymied, and maybe outraged.
The claims read like Greek tragedies, almost all of the suffering caused by the collision of cultures between 8th Army GIs and Korean civilians. There were complaints about straw-thatched roofs set on fire by stray mortar rounds, crops flooded by breached irrigation channels, farmers injured by careening American jeeps, underage school girls becoming pregnant at the hands of Americans, old men being assaulted and robbed by bands of rogue US soldiers. And these were the ones that hadn’t been sustained. The evidence wasn’t there to substantiate the claims so they were turned down. It figured these people would be the most aggrieved, that they would be the most likely to seek revenge. There must’ve been fifty cases in the pile.
The list was being turned over to the KNP Liaison office. They would further task local KNP precincts to hunt down these frustrated claimants and investigate them to see if they had any participation in the murder of the 8th Army Claims Officer or the throat slashing of Corporal Collingsworth. I riffled through the files, each and every one of them. Nothing jumped out at me.