I took the news with what I hoped was stoicism. And I tried to reassure her that I understood. Actually, I supposed I did. Her parents were everything to her. If I had parents, I’d probably feel the same way. Still, that didn’t mean that her decision didn’t hurt. Since then, I hadn’t been to class and we hadn’t met socially. The temporary assignment to the 2nd Division area had, in fact, come as a relief. A chance to be by myself. A chance to think.
“All that?” Ernie said, responding to my silence.
“Yeah.” I sipped on my coffee. “All that.”
I didn’t feel guilty about having spent the night with Jeannie. Miss Ryu and I were no longer an item. I was a free man. Free as a pigeon flying over the DMZ. With GIs taking potshots from below.
The man who booked the entertainment in the Tongduchon area worked days only. It was already half past nine in the morning but in the cold winter air, the morning fog that blanketed the alleys of Tongduchon had not yet burned off. We turned down one narrow walkway and then another until finally I found it: 21 bonji, 36 ho. The sign above the door said KIMCHEE ENTERTAINMENT in English. KUKCHEI UMAK, in Korean: International Music. That’s not unusual for Korean companies. They’ll have one name that sounds good in English and another that sounds good in Korean. The two don’t necessarily have to match.
The door was open and we walked in.
His name was Pak Tong-i. He was a wrinkled Korean man who wore a French beret atop his round head and as we spoke, he continued to puff on a Turtle Boat brand cigarette through an ivory holder. Yes, he knew all about Kim Yong-ai.
“One of my best strippers,” he said. The English was accented but understandable. “GI love her too much. You know, big geegee.” He cupped his hands in front of his chest.
“So who did she owe money to?” Ernie asked.
“Stripper always owe money,” he said. “That’s why they get into business. Maybe their mom owe money, maybe their daddy owe money, maybe they have younger brother who want to go to school. Very expensive, how you say, hakbi?”
“Tuition,” I told him.
While Pak Tong-i shook his head, thinking about the high cost of tuition, I asked another question.
“So when Kim Yong-ai ran away, somebody must’ve been very angry that she ran away without paying what she owed.”
Pak’s eyes widened. “Nobody angry.”
“Why not?”
“When she run away, she don’t owe money.”
“Wait a minute,” Ernie said. “I thought you just told us that she owed a lot of money.”
“She did. But before she left, same day, she pay all.”
Now it was our turn to be stupefied.
“She come in here,” Pak continued, “that morning. With big American woman. They have big pile of GI money. They pay all.”
“How much?”
“Miguk money?” Pak asked himself. American money? He puffed on his cigarette while he thought about it. Finally he said, “Peik man won. Maybe two thousand dollar.”
Ernie whistled.
I showed Pak the photograph of Jill Matthewson.
“That her,” he said. “She make great stripper.”
“Where did this Miss Kim find the money to pay you off?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I no ask.”
“Did they tell you they were leaving Tongduchon?”
“Yes. Miss Kim say she no workey for me no more.”
“Where’d they go?”
“I don’t know,” Pak answered. “I no ask.”
We pressured him for a while but finally gave up. If he knew where they’d gone, he wasn’t talking.
Later that morning, I reviewed Corporal Jill Matthewson’s bank records. Eighth Army can do these things. The banks that do business on base camps in Korea are chartered under military regulation and sign away most of their stateside rights. Anyway, that’s the way it was explained to me. True or not, the Office of the Judge Advocate General says it’s legal. But of course JAG says it’s legal mainly because the 8th Army commander says it’s legal. I perused the records carefully. No major withdrawals before she disappeared. Mainly because there was nothing to withdraw. Her balance was less than ten dollars. Most of Jill Matthewson’s military paycheck had been forwarded by allotment to her mother in Terre Haute, Indiana. The rest was what you’d expect for a young woman to spend on herself, for clothes and other personal items. About a hundred dollars a month. Jill had only been in country a little over five months. In that amount of time, she certainly hadn’t saved two thousand clams by being thrifty.
Theoretically, Jill could’ve raised the two thousand dollars to pay off Kim Yong-ai’s debts from black-marketing. U.S.-manufactured goods are shipped by the boatful from the States to the military PXs in Korea-all at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. No customs duties are paid so the goods are cheap. For example, a GI can buy a portable tape recorder in the PX for say, forty bucks and turn around and sell it out in the ville for 40,000 won, the equivalent of eighty dollars. In other words, double his money. Of course, black-marketing is strictly illegal and GIs are prosecuted for it all the time. Still, it’s widespread, the temptation being too much for ordinary mortals. But Jill Matthewson’s ration control record was clean. She’d purchased very little out of the PX, only what she needed for what the army likes to call “personal health and welfare.”
So where had the two thousand dollars come from?
Certainly, Miss Kim, a poor Korean stripper, couldn’t come up with that much money. “Peik man won,” Mr. Pak had told us. Literally, “One hundred ten thousand won.” By our way of counting, a million won. By today’s exchange rate, equivalent to roughly two thousand dollars U.S. Taaksan tone, in the GI parlance. A lot of dough. How in the world had either Corporal Jill Matthewson or the stripper Kim Yong-ai come up with it? I set the question aside for now. Instead, I concentrated on the other tip that the owner of Kimchee Entertainment had provided.
“Corporal Jill very famous in Tongduchon,” he told us.
“Famous? Why?”
“She help Chon family.” I stared at him blankly. “You arra.” You know. “Chon family daughter run over by GI truck.”
Then I understood. The case had made news even down in Seoul. Two GIs, driving a two-and-a-half-ton truck near Camp Casey, had struck a young Korean girl. The accident happened early in the morning while she was on her way to middle school. The girl, they say, bounced twenty yards and, according to the eyewitness reports, died just minutes after impact. There had been demonstrations calling for the GIs to be punished, but a 2nd Division court-martial determined that the death was accidental. The two GIs were transferred back to the States. More demonstrations ensued. 8th Army’s attitude was that the Koreans were being ungrateful. After all, we are here defending their country and accidents do happen.
The price of freedom you might call it.
According to the booking agent, Pak Tong-i, Corporal Jill Matthew-son had been the first MP on the scene. She’d provided first aid- futile, as it turned out-and later she’d done everything she could to help the family of the deceased girl. As far as the citizens of Tongdu-chon were concerned, Jill was the only American who had tried to do the right thing. The rest of the American reaction-trying the GIs in a secret tribunal on Camp Casey, not calling all relevant witnesses, and finally acquitting the GIs and sending them back to the States-had been totally unacceptable. Demonstrations outside the main gate of Camp Casey were the result. And if it hadn’t been for the brutal intervention of the Korean National Police, those demonstrations might’ve turned into anti-American riots.
The missing woman’s connection to the Chon matter was news to us. Why hadn’t the 2nd Division mentioned Jill Matthewson’s involvement in this case in their report of her disappearance? Did they consider it to be irrelevant? Maybe it was. Still, I needed to know for sure. It just seemed like a heck of a big thing to leave out.
After checking Jill’s account at the bank, Ernie and I drove over to the Division motor pool.