G.I. Bones (13 page)

“Isang hei,”
Olive said. Strange.

Olive frowned. She entered the storeroom first and switched on the overhead bulb. Trash was piled by the rear door, ready to be taken out.

The 8th Army KNP liaison officer, Lieutenant Pong, had also tagged along. Since the commanding general of the 8th United States Army had shown such an interest in this case, KNP headquarters in downtown Seoul wanted a full report. He stood back, out of the way, and crossed his arms.

At Ernie’s instruction, the four burly MPs started hoisting crates of beer. Soon the brick wall was exposed. So were the piles of dried mortar on the floor and the loose bricks that Ernie and I had stuck back into the wall.

Olive gasped. “Who do?” she asked, pointing.

I shook my head and didn’t answer. Then Ernie and I knelt on the floor and started pulling the bricks out. Even before we were finished, I could smell it. A fleshy smell, as if someone had been sitting in a sauna bath too long.

What the hell was this all about? I hadn’t noticed any such odor last night. Or had I just been too nervous?

When the opening in the brick wall was large enough, I switched on my flashlight and poked my nose in. This time I couldn’t hold back.

I screamed.

While waiting for the KNP Liaison Office to come up with our search warrant, Ernie and I drove downtown to the Beikhua Hospital. Doc Yong was there, in a room with Miss Kwon. The little chipmunk-looking erstwhile business girl was snoring heavily. Doc Yong gave us a wan smile and bade us to sit down next to her on wooden stools.

I figured she’d paid for Miss Kwon’s medical care, in advance, which is the way Korean hospitals usually want it. And, judging by her disheveled appearance, the good doctor had probably been here all night. I sat down next to her and took her hand. To my surprise, she squeezed my palm.

“Thank you,” she said, to both Ernie and me, “for helping last night.”

“We weren’t much help,” Ernie said, nodding toward Miss Kwon.

“You tried,” Doc Yong answered, “and we’re lucky she’s not dead.”

She described the prognosis. Not bad, considering. The doctors speculated that Miss Kwon’s wild flailing, grabbing instinctively onto anything that would break her fall, had, in fact, saved her life. Miss Kwon had no internal injuries. That was the important thing. Her left ankle had been sprained badly but not broken and the only other injuries were a pomegranate-sized lump on her noggin and scratches and bruises both on her legs and on her hands, fingers, and forearms, where she’d tried so desperately to slow her plunge to the dirty pavement. After internal injuries, what the doctors were most worried about was concussion but she seemed to be in the clear. Now, after being heavily sedated, all she’d need was rest and recuperation. Not something Itaewon business girls were usually allowed.

“You need rest too,” I told Doc Yong.

She nodded her head slowly. “And the clinic—”

“The clinic can wait,” I said.

I pulled her to her feet, guided her out to the jeep, and Ernie and I drove her home.

It was the first time I’d seen where she lived. It was a small room, she told us, on the third floor of a rundown apartment building, shoved into a crowded slot in a tightly packed neighborhood known as Oksu-dong. She left me at the first floor and, although I offered to help her to her door, she shook her head negatively and trudged alone up the squeaking wooden stairs.

When I poked my head through the hole in the brick wall of the basement of the Grand Ole Opry Club, I normally would’ve been embarrassed about screaming except that all the MPs—and Ernie too—were as scared shitless as I was. Especially when they took their turns peering inside. Even Lieutenant Pong, who normally had a ferocious expression on his face, appeared a little green around the gills.

We had to pull the body out from behind the wall because it was no longer a skeleton. It was a big, fleshy corpse, full of blood and mucous and other bodily fluids, and it was wrapped in a flowery pink dress and its dyed black hair was damp and strung around its ears and neck like snakes uncoiling from the skull of Medusa.

Once we dragged her through the hole and plopped her on the floor and searched back inside the opening, we discovered that the bones of Mori Di, every last one, were now gone. Along with the tattered uniform and the combat boots and the rusty old pair of handcuffs and the cotton swabs and the woolen gag. Mori Di had once again been spirited away—to points unknown, by person or persons unknown. And in his place had been left the rotund, no longer breathing body of Two Bellies.

Her mouth was open in horror. Her throat cut. Blood covered everything.

One of the MPs vomited. Then the rest of us did. Olive ran for a mop. Lieutenant Pong disappeared into the back alley.

8

T
he Korean National Police insisted on taking over the investigation into the death of Two Bellies. We tried to retain jurisdiction but they wouldn’t hear of it. She was a Korean citizen, murdered on Korean soil and, at this point, there was no reason to believe that an American had been involved. That is until they interrogated the night bartender, and the other employees who’d been working the late shift at the Grand Ole Opry.

Lieutenant Pong was assigned to the case, personally, which surprised everybody because his job at 8th Army as the ROK–U.S. liaison officer centered around the political and diplomatic rather than the investigative. But once he sank his teeth into police work he was thorough. Maybe that was because he wanted to prove that he was a real cop and not just a paper pusher. He even interviewed Kimchee Kitty, the beautiful female lead singer of the Kimchee Kowboys and I was flattered that she’d noticed me—but not Ernie—entering and leaving the club. I was further flattered that she watched me proceed to the back hallway that led to the latrines and she noticed that even after her third number, I had not emerged. During the second set of the evening, while she was backstage, she peered through the curtains to watch the crowd and saw me emerge from the latrine area and leave the club. My winter jacket was still wrapped around me, she told Lieutenant Pong, and my short hair was moist and in disarray, as if I’d been working. And there appeared to be smudges on my knees and the sides of my blue jeans from dirt or dust of some sort.

Had I known Kimchee Kitty was watching me that closely, I would’ve asked her for a date a long time ago.

Ernie, for his part, was slightly offended that she hadn’t noticed him. But the bartender had and so had a couple of the other employees. And at least one of them, the bartender, had noticed that during the entire time we’d been in the Grand Ole Opry Club, we hadn’t bought a drink.

Unusual for us.

The evidence recovery team working in the basement discovered some threads that appeared to come from American-made blue jeans. They also searched the crypt where Two Bellies’s body had been found and discovered that the dirt below had been thoroughly sifted. They found no combat boots, no dog tags, no bones, no tattered remnants of a twenty-year-old U.S. Army uniform. In short, they found nothing that would indicate the presence of Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti’s remains. They did find Two Bellies. And they found that her throat had been slashed with a very sharp knife; so sharp that she probably didn’t have time to whistle, much less scream, before her windpipe was severed. And Lieutenant Pong also discovered that we’d been seen around Itaewon with Two Bellies a couple of nights before her death, having her show us the sights.

The result of this evidence was that, instead of recovering the twenty-year-old remains of Tech Sergeant Flo Moretti, Ernie and I were taken into custody by the Korean National Police. All this happened quickly. Before the midnight curfew, Ernie and I were downtown, under harsh lights, being sweated.

The interrogation wasn’t as bad as I feared. No bamboo shoots up the fingernails or acetylene torches singeing my private parts. Maybe the KNPs were saving all that for later. Mainly, the interrogation consisted of Lieutenant Pong trying to trick me into admitting that I’d somehow sneaked Two Bellies into the basement of the Grand Ole Opry and, while down there, I’d slit her throat.

“If I did that,” I asked him, “why would I request a search warrant to go back to the scene of the crime?”

He had no answer for that. Despite his scowl, he didn’t believe for a minute that Ernie or I had murdered Two Bellies. This was all a sham. He knew it, I knew it, but of course he’d never admit it. The point was to cast suspicion on Ernie and me and then, if the real killer of Two Bellies turned out to be someone important, Ernie and I could be charged in order to protect the powerful.

I was in a dangerous position and I knew it. Some sort of chess game was being played behind the scenes and Ernie and I had been turned into pawns. What had triggered the start of the game? Our inquiries into the death of Mori Di. Who was behind these machinations? Probably the Seven Dragons but could someone else be involved? And what were the stakes? Old grudges? Or something more?

Ernie and I had probably been watched all along. Maybe from when we first talked to Two Bellies. Maybe earlier. Whoever had taken Two Bellies down there and slit her throat was demonstrating to us how much power they had. Enough power to make anything, no matter how improbable, happen. And there was nothing that Ernie or I could do about it.

Lieutenant Pong kept hammering away at the time I’d spent with Two Bellies. Trying to build a timeline to be able to show that if nothing else I’d had the opportunity to murder her if I’d wanted to. I answered his questions honestly, knowing that Ernie would too. Being near somebody, talking to them, is not a crime. I knew that even though Lieutenant Pong might be able to establish the means and opportunity for murder, he’d never be able to establish a motive. Neither Ernie nor I had any reason to kill Two Bellies. In fact, I pitied the old gal, lying there in that brick-lined pit. Whoever had done that to her had dispatched her without remorse. A blade sliced expertly through her throat—a lot of blood, a little twitching—and
fini.
No more Two Bellies.

Lieutenant Pong was intelligent enough to know that Ernie and I had no possible reason to murder Two Bellies but, apparently, his bosses wanted him to build as much of a case against us as he could.

And build a case he would.

* * *

The provost marshal’s reaction was not good. He’d authorized a search warrant, expecting to recover the remains of a long-dead American G.I. and instead he was told that we’d stumbled onto the freshly slaughtered corpse of an overweight, middle-aged ex-prostitute with the charming name of Two Bellies. He was embarrassed. So was the entire command.

The next morning, as he sat on a short wooden stool outside my cell in the third-level subbasement of the Korean National Police headquarters in downtown Seoul, the first sergeant of the Criminal Investigation Detachment took great delight in telling me all this.

“You’re on the shit list,” he said.

“How’s Ernie?” I asked.

The first sergeant looked up toward a ceiling of jagged rock. “He’s on the second level. Beat up pretty bad. He shouldn’t have resisted.”

“Resisted when?”

“During the interrogation. He punched Lieutenant Pong.”

I sighed. “They had no call to take us in,” I said.

The first sergeant’s eyes widened. “You led them to a basement claiming ancient remains would be found and the night before you were mucking around in the selfsame basement with no legal authorization whatsoever. And then a body is found. And you’d been seen on the street, repeatedly, with the victim. What the hell else were they going to do?”

“Question us, sure,” I replied. “But they didn’t have to handcuff us and take us downtown.”

The first sergeant thought about that one. “Yes, they did. You’re the logical suspects. Besides, the KNPs are being careful. As long as they’re tough with you, they’re more likely to save face no matter how this turns out.”

Reluctantly, I decided that the first sergeant was probably right. If the Seven Dragons were behind the murder of Two Bellies—and I had every reason to believe they were—then they’d be pulling strings at the top levels of the ROK government to make sure the blame was diverted elsewhere. Like towards Ernie and me. Furthermore, whoever murdered Two Bellies had gone to great lengths to abscond, once again, with the remains of Mori Di. Finding those remains now would be impossible, unless I acted quickly.

“I have to get out of here,” I said.

“You and everyone else.”

Down the hallway, men groaned. Curses were shouted. Mostly in Korean. One or two in broken English, as if trying to get our attention.

“What’s JAG say?” I meant the military lawyers at 8th Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Office.

“They’re working on it,” Top replied. “The SOFA committee is holding an emergency meeting this afternoon.”

Under the Status of Forces Agreement between the ROK and U.S. governments, the joint U.S.–ROK steering committee decides who takes jurisdiction over cases involving American servicemen and Korean civilians. And, more important to me at the moment, they decide who—the Americans or the Koreans—should have physical custody of prisoners.

“The good news,” Top said, “is that the ROKs haven’t charged you with murder. Not yet.”

“When will I know?”

“I’ll be back tomorrow morning. First thing.”

He stood and left. I watched him walk down the long corridor and step through a thick wooden door opened by an armed Korean cop. When the door slammed shut, the voices around me howled even louder. I squatted on the stone floor, listening to the words being shouted, trying to decipher them. Pain and agony is all they said, although I doubted that my Korean-English dictionary would explain them quite that way, or even contain them, for that matter.

A half hour after Top left, four Korean cops approached my cell, rattled keys, and popped the door open. They motioned for me to join them in the hallway. I did. Then they grabbed me by the arms and shoved me down the corridor toward the main holding cell. It was an enormous cage made of metal bars; there must’ve been thirty men inside. I hesitated. Americans, according to the SOFA agreement, are supposed to be kept segregated from the general prison population. It seemed these cops hadn’t read the agreement. They pushed me roughly forward, opened the door of the main cell and shoved me inside. I stood staring at over thirty Korean prisoners from teenage hoodlums to old papa-san reprobates and every age of scoundrel in between. I was frightened, of course, but did my best not to show it. Still, I felt as if I were a side of meat flopped down in front of hungry wolves. As if to confirm my fears, some of the prisoners surrounding me, literally, began to howl.

The big holding cell had a cement slab floor and raised above it about two feet was a rickety wooden platform upon which the prisoners lived and slept. A huge metal tub sat near the front door, reeking of filth. No flush toilet here.

All the men stared at me—silent now after the initial howling— studying this strange foreign fish shoved into their midst. Every square inch of the wooden platform was occupied. There was no place for me to sit. I felt awkward, not knowing what to do with my body, so I stood and stared back at the men, trying to keep my face impassive, keep my body still, and fake bravery. Life had taught me that if you can fake bravery—even when you’re scared shitless—you can go a long way toward protecting yourself. Finally, one of the men rose to his feet, stepped into rubber slippers, and hobbled toward me. His face was scarred, square, weather beaten. I loomed over him by a full foot but he seemed not one whit afraid of me.

He squinted up at me and said, “You got cigarette, G.I.?”

I shook my head negatively, not trusting myself to speak.

He frowned and cursed.

“They take from you?” His head gestured toward the cops down the hallway.

I shook my head again. “No. I don’t smoke.”

“No smokey?” He started to laugh. Actually, it sounded more like a rasping cough. Then he turned back to the men behind him and repeated what I’d said in Korean. They laughed again. He turned back to me and said, “You cherry boy?”

I didn’t bother to answer. I just stared at him. The smile left his face.

“You lie to Charley Lee?”

Again, I didn’t answer. I’d been through this kind of interrogation before, on the streets and playgrounds of East L.A. The bully will ask you questions that befuddle you and he’ll keep asking questions until eventually the questions become impossible to answer. The best thing to do, usually, is stare him down and not answer his questions and start the fight as soon as possible. It’s inevitable anyway. Might as well get it over with.

Charley Lee started cursing in Korean. It was a long diatribe and he kept looking me up and down as he spoke. I didn’t understand most of it but I understood enough. He was insulting me, questioning my manhood, talking about how useless and soft Americans were. All the while the men behind him were smiling, enjoying the spectacle. Most of them, anyway. A few looked away, uncomfortable about what was going on but powerless to do anything about it.

I waited for the right moment and then I shouted,
“Shikuro!”
Shut up!

Charley Lee stared at me, his eyes wide, and behind him all the men held their breath. His face became inflamed with anger. He stepped closer to me, so close that I could feel his hot, fetid breath rising up my chest until, like a clammy hand, it caressed my chin and poked its dirty fingers into my nostrils. Now he was shouting so loud that spittle splashed on my neck. In one quick move, I shoved him backwards.

The crowd exploded in outrage. Like a Siberian tiger, Charley Lee regained his balance and sprang at me. Other men joined him. I landed a solid left to Charley Lee’s skull and as I did so I backed up to the metal bars behind me. As the men came in, I winged punches to my right and left. A few landed but within seconds I was being pummeled from all sides and I found myself kneeling on the floor. Someone was down there with me. I couldn’t be sure but I believe it was Charley Lee. His arm was wrapped around my neck and his mouth pressed against my ear.