An odd promise, I’ll admit. But like any promise I’d ever made, I was determined to keep it.
5
After leaving the Chon residence, Ernie and I wandered aimlessly through the narrow pedestrian lanes of the western edge of Tongduchon. Men on bicycles piled high with layered shelves of dubu-Korean tofu-jangled their bells and shouted for people to make way. Old women pushed carts laden with glimmering green cabbages through crowds of pedestrians; young women carried infants strapped to their backs; toddlers wearing heavy sweaters but no pants gazed up at us and peed innocently by the edge of the road.
After a few minutes, Ernie and I reached a twenty-foot-wide cement bridge that stretched across the East Bean River. A narrow trickle of water ran below down the center of a broad, muddy riverbed. The backs of homes and apartment buildings lined either bank of the Tongdu River: kimchee jars on balconies; laundry hanging from wire lines fluttering in the morning breeze; an occasional housewife leaning out a window to toss the contents of a porcelain pee pot onto the muddy banks below. A few dozen yards beyond the bridge, back in the city proper, a large wooden archway announced the entrance to TONGDUCHON SICHANG. The East Bean River City Market.
Ernie and I entered. A canvas roof held in place by twenty-foot-high bamboo poles sheltered acres of produce stands. Behind the piled vegetables, women in white bandannas waved their arms and shouted at customers. Housewives with plastic baskets hooked over their elbows browsed along the lanes, seemingly ignoring the chanting vendors. Warm air reeking of green onions and garlic and Napa cabbage freshly plucked from verdant earth suffused the entire market.
Ernie breathed deeply and a broad grin spread across his face. We both felt it. The tactile caress of human life, unsullied by advertising and corporate greed. This is what our lives had once been on this planet. What they should be now. Everywhere.
We wound our way past the produce until we reached walls of shimmering glass tanks holding wriggling mackerel, eels, and octopi. Beyond the tanks a cloud of dust advertised the poultry, flapping smelly wings and cackling, within handmade wooden crates. Finally, like an oasis of calm, the dry goods. Hand-embroidered silk comforters, leather gloves, umbrellas, plump cotton-covered cushions, and then the porcelain: china dolls; effigies of Kumbokju, the chubby god of abundance; pee pots; tea cups with no handles; and tiny drinking glasses made for jolting back shots of soju, the fierce Korean rice liquor.
At last, our search was rewarded. We found what we were looking for. Noodle stands. Billowing steam announced their environs and Ernie and I found a tall, round, rickety table made of splintered wood and shouted our order to an elderly proprietress: “Ramyon, tugei”. Spicy noodles, two.
The other customers were all Koreans and they studiously ignored the two Miguks in their midst. They inhaled noodles or chatted with their neighbors in rapid sentences or gazed intently at books, studying for the exam that always seemed to be looming on the Confucian horizon.
A pig-tailed teenage girl with a solid physique and a blank expression brought us chopsticks and spoons and two cups of barley tea. She must’ve been about the same age that Chon Un-suk would’ve been except her parents weren’t rich. Not fortunate enough to attend middle school, she was forced to work. Ernie started to say something to her-probably something flirtatious-but then thought better of it. What was the point? He wasn’t going to be able to change her fate. Ever. As the quiet girl plodded away I thought she probably had a rough life ahead of her. But at least, unlike Chon Un-suk, she had life. Breath. Feeling.
When the noodles came, Ernie lifted a clump with his chopsticks and slurped them into his mouth. Still chewing, he started to talk.
“So far,” he said, “we don’t know shit.”
“That’s not true,” I replied. “We’re making progress.”
Ernie snorted. “Yeah. Like a snail. What we gotta do is beat the crap out of somebody.”
“Anybody in particular?”
Ernie shrugged. “Kuen-chana.” It doesn’t matter.
“Why should we beat somebody up?” I asked. “To gather information? Or just for the hell of it?”
“For both. I wouldn’t want to beat somebody up just for the hell of it.”
Instead of continuing down this road, I recapped what we knew so far, starting with motive.
According to PFC Anne Korvachek, Jill Matthewson’s roommate, Jill had been fed up with the stereo sexual harassment that women at the 2nd Division live with day in and day out, hour by hour. It came from men of low rank and men of high rank. All-pervasive. Complaining about it was about as useful as complaining about the weather. Still, when you don’t like the weather in the place you live, you move.
That’s what Jill Matthewson had done.
But there were other motives. Her friend, the Korean stripper Kim Yong-ai, owed a ton of money. To pay it off she and/or Jill had raised the Korean won equivalent of two thousand dollars. Exactly how they’d done that, we didn’t know. What could either one of them do to earn that kind of money? Crime, of course, came to mind. Had Jill ripped somebody off-or assisted in the ripping-off- and then fled Tongduchon?
Maybe.
The next possible motive was her disgust with the court-martial of the two GIs who’d run down Chon Un-suk. The fact that they’d been tried by American military judges-and not a Korean judge- had enraged the Korean public. But what had enraged Jill most was that, as the first MP on the scene, she’d never been called as a witness and that the two perps had been let off so easily.
Ernie and I resolved to check into the trial more thoroughly.
The final motive was that, according to Madame Chon, Jill had actively participated in the demonstrations held outside the main gate of Camp Casey. That, in itself, was a violation of 8th Army regulations and-I wasn’t sure-might even be a court-martial offense. Had Corporal Jill Matthewson’s politics become so radicalized that she’d decided she’d had enough of the U.S. Army?
By the time I laid all this out for Ernie, he’d finished his noodles, drank down the remaining broth directly from the bowl, and ordered another cup of barley tea from the poker-faced teenage waitress.
“So we have a lot of possible motives for going AWOL,” Ernie said. “All of them might be true; none of them might be true. We don’t know. But what we do know is that if Jill Matthewson is still alive, somebody had to facilitate her escape.”
I whistled softly.
“What?” Ernie asked.
“ ‘Facilitate?’ ”
Ernie grabbed his crotch. “Here. Facilitate this.”
“Okay. I’m just impressed by your vocabulary. Go ahead.”
“Where was I?” Ernie gulped down the last of his barley tea and slammed the bottom of the cup on the rickety wooden table. “Oh yeah. So if somebody facilitated Corporal Matthewson’s unofficial resignation from the Second Infantry Division, they would have had to help her find a place to stay, a source of income, and maybe even a way to avoid the scrutiny of the Korean National Police.”
“That’s a lot to provide,” I said. “A tall, good-looking, Caucasian woman in Korea would be sort of conspicuous.”
“ ‘Conspicuous?’”
“Okay, Ernie. Can it. So what you’re saying is instead of fretting about motives, what we should be working on is who helped her leave, who’s providing her income, who is offering her a safe place to hide.”
“By Jove, I think he’s got it.”
I finished the last of my noodles and the waitress came by and poured us both more barley tea from a large brass urn.
“If I were an American female MP,” I said, “and I wanted to leave the Division, and I knew I needed Korean help, who would I talk to?”
“The people you’d been talking to,” Ernie replied. “Your friends.”