G.I. Bones (5 page)

Itaewon.

Ernie and I hit Itaewon fast and hard.

Our plan was to start our search with the brothels and business-girl hooches farthest away from the main drag, the ones most well hidden, where a G.I. who’d just stolen a thousand dollars worth of greenbacks might feel safe.

Itaewon was somewhat more cosmopolitan than the other G.I. villages in Korea. That is, neither the 21st Transportation Company nor the 121st Evac nor the 8th Army Honor Guard had their own nightclub or bar staked out for them and them alone. G.I.s from various units mingled freely, if not always harmoniously, and unlike the compounds out at Kunsan or up north at Tonduchon or just south of the DMZ at Munsan, the various infantry or artillery or combat engineer units didn’t have their own little enclaves. So Corporal Paco Bernal could be anywhere in Itaewon. Our strategy was simple: cover as much ground as possible before Paco Bernal became aware that we were in the village looking for him.

Of course, our entire search could be futile. Paco Bernal could be halfway to Pusan by now. But I was betting that he’d stay on familiar ground. Not only to be near his home turf and contacts— and to make whatever deal he’d planned—but also because G.I.s, although they won’t admit it, are afraid of traveling in Korea. For the most part they don’t speak Korean and don’t understand Korean customs and can’t read the street signs and when they wander too far from military compounds, they feel lost. So I believed that Paco Bernal was here in Itaewon—somewhere.

Itaewon was alive at this hour, preparing industriously for the busy evening to come. The front gates of the courtyards were mostly open; business girls coming and going from the local bathhouses or gathering around a low table in the mama-san’s hooch, chatting, chopsticks flashing, stuffing rice and vegetables into their mouths as sustenance for the long night’s work ahead. The smell of fermented kimchee and soap suds and hairspray was everywhere: in the open hooches, wafting from the balconies of upstairs apartments, and emerging from behind the sliding wooden doors of closetlike rooms. When Ernie and I approached the business girls, it was the same story: headshakes, denials that they knew Paco Bernal after gawking at the black-and-white photo from his personnel records that I held in front of their curious eyes.

Had they seen him before? Yes, around the village.

Did he have a girlfriend out here? Not that they were aware of.

Did they know where he was now? Heads shook vehemently. They hadn’t a clue.

Ernie and I kept prowling through the back alleys of Itaewon, down narrow pedestrian lanes, around sharp corners defined by ten-foot-high brick and stone walls. The sun started to go down. Sodium streetlamps, spaced every twenty yards or so, switched on. Still, no sign of Paco Bernal.

Finally, at one hooch, a business girl stood up from scrubbing her face above a metal pan beneath a running faucet in the middle of a stone-paved courtyard. She turned to us and said, “You looking for Paco?”

“Yeah,” Ernie replied. “You seen him?”

“No, but anybody say. Two MP in Itaewon lookey-lookey everywhere for some G.I. called Paco. We hear. Anybody know.”

She squatted back down and resumed scrubbing her face.

Ernie stuck another stick of ginseng gum in his mouth and chomped viciously. “So much for the element of surprise,” he said.

The bars and brothels and nightclubs of Itaewon—and the people who work in them—have an intelligence system that beats 8th Army’s hands down. Once word of our quest leaked out, it spread and kept spreading until the news was traveling so fast through the village that Ernie and I could not possibly hope to keep up. Paco Bernal, wherever he was, would be alerted—if he hadn’t been already—and he’d probably
kara chogi,
take off.
Bali bali,
quickly.

The sun was completely down now and along the main drag, neon flashed to life.

Ernie took defeat stoically. “He’ll show up eventually. Where the hell’s he going to go?”

For a wanted G.I., there’s no escape from the Korean Peninsula. Not with Communist North Korea guarding the DMZ to the north and the South Koreans guarding every port of international embarkation. Ernie figured Paco would squander the thousand bucks he’d stumbled into and then, after a few days, come crawling back to the army compound begging for mercy. We’d seen it happen before; G.I.s committing a crime, living big in the village, and then—when the money ran out—finally coming to their senses. And probably that’s what would happen to Paco. Maybe. But one thing worried me. Why had he taken his bayonet—eight inches of sharpened steel—off compound with him?

What was Paco Bernal afraid of?

Now that we’d searched for Paco above and beyond the call of duty, Ernie wanted to find booze, broads, and excitement—not necessarily in that order. I agreed. There was no point in searching any further. Paco Bernal, wherever he was, would have been alerted. The better strategy now was to prowl the village and wait, like two coyotes watching a rabbit hole. We sauntered downhill toward the nightclub district.

Itaewon on this winter evening fairly sparkled with neon: red, blue, yellow, and green. Some of it spinning, some of it flashing, but all of it calling sweetly to the young American G.I., like the song of an ancient siren, beseeching him to enter an abode of pleasure, to spend his money, to enjoy the secret delights that make the nerve endings of a young man’s skin tingle, like slender fingers with long red nails scratching gently across his chest.

Business girls stood in the shadows, shivering in skimpy dresses and short skirts, their eyes lined with black, their red lips pouting, calling to every man who passed; they stood in shoes with platforms so high that you were worried they’d fall over, their faces seeking, always seeking, for some strange creature to rescue them from the frigid night.

I wanted to find someone who’d been here in Itaewon back in the winter of 1953, someone who’d lived through the events recorded in Cort’s Serious Incident Report, and maybe, with luck, someone who’d actually known Mori Di, the G.I. who ended up in the bed—at least spiritually—of a lovely Korean fortune teller by the name of Auntie Mee.

I mentioned my thoughts to Ernie. He chomped pensively on his ginseng gum. “Who in the hell’s been here in Itaewon long enough to know about all that Mori Di stuff? It’s been twenty years, ancient times.”

“The winter of 1953,” I said. “Not so ancient.”

“Ancient enough.”

Ernie waved to some of the business girls who giggled madly in response.

I thought about his question. Who
had
been here in Itaewon for twenty years or more? Certainly some of the club owners must’ve been here that long. And even a few of their employees: night managers, cashiers. But all the young waitresses and bartenders and pimps and whores came and went; they turned over regularly, every few months, if not every few weeks. None of them had been here that long ago. In the winter of 1953, many of them hadn’t even been born.

Had any cops been here that long? No, the KNPs rotated assignments from station to station regularly; the military government of President Pak Chung-hee didn’t want any one group staying together long enough to form a cohesive power base.

How about G.I.s? There were a few old military retirees around and most of them were veterans of the Korean War. But according to the stories I’d been told at tedious length, they hadn’t been in Itaewon at the time. They’d been assigned to combat units up north near the DMZ, or on the road to the Yalu, or fighting Joe Chink at the Chosin Reservoir. Nobody admitted to being a rear-echelon support troop. Every veteran I’d ever talked to had been only one combat operation short of forcing Hollywood to forget about Audie Murphy.

So who had been living here in Itaewon twenty years ago? There must be somebody. The only way to find out would be to start asking questions. One person would lead to another person and eventually we’d find somebody who’d been witness to the events of 1953. But that might take a while. I needed to find some way to short-circuit the operation.

We stopped in front of the King Club, staring down the main drag of Itaewon at the Seven Club and the Lucky Seven Club and the UN Club. Ernie winked at the business girls who squealed and waved, and then he said, “How about Two Bellies?”

He was right. I hadn’t thought about her. Two Bellies was plenty old enough. She’d lived and worked in Itaewon for as far back as anyone remembered, at least anyone I knew. And at this time of night we could guess, pretty reliably, where we’d be able to find her.

“We ain’t there yet?” I asked.

We turned and trudged up the hill. Beyond the neon, at the darkest alley, we turned left into the night.

According to the testimony of Auntie Mee’s spirit lover, the body of Mori Di was buried somewhere in Itaewon. Koreans believe that the remains of the dead should be buried with proper Confucian ceremony and then periodically honored so the ancestors can rest peacefully in heaven. Mori Di was not being so honored. A restless spirit can cause problems for those in the neighborhood who are still living and Auntie Mee, whether she was delusional or not, had problems. I saw it as just insomnia or nightmares brought on by stress but, in her mind, she was being haunted by a dead G.I. Finding Mori Di’s Serious Incident Report hadn’t been so difficult. Finding his burial place would be more challenging.

According to Cort, there’d been what amounted to a gang war in Itaewon in the winter of 1953. Moretti, and the Koreans who supported him, had been forced to defend themselves against organized toughs who were claiming the entire red-light district of Itaewon as their own. This gang—led by a group of hooligans with exotic names like Snake, Horsehead, and Dragon’s Claw Number One— were extorting money from the prostitutes and black-marketeers who huddled in makeshift tents and lean-tos made of scrap metal and rotted boards. They called themselves the Seven Dragons.

As Moretti constructed new buildings and turned them over to the Ministry of the Interior, the buildings were occupied by legitimate investors. However, within hours, the gang of hoodlums known as the Itaewon
Chil Yong,
the Seven Dragons, would become, through extortion and coercion, the true power behind these legitimate businesses.

Cort reserved bitter words for the Korean National Police who were blind to this activity. He’d not only accused them of being corrupt but, in effect, part of the gang. And this criminal activity was far from benign. Cort mentioned one young woman who had been bought by a procurer and trafficked into Itaewon about two days before the end-of-month G.I. payday. Cort wasn’t sure of her age but he estimated her to be either fourteen or fifteen. Sixteen tops. After being raped by all the gangsters, on G.I. payday they put her out for sale, cheap, to the droves of American G.I.s flooding into the ville. She suffered bleeding and internal damage and within a week she was dead. Cort wasn’t sure what happened to her body. It probably was buried in a pauper’s grave. Her family out in the countryside would’ve only known she was dead when the money stopped arriving.

But despite all the corruption and suffering that swirled around him, Moretti managed to keep his bearings. He was no chump. He and the three truck-driver G.I.s living with him in the ville saw what was going on. Instead of turning over buildings to the Ministry of the Interior, they switched their efforts to smaller projects. They started building on land already occupied by squatters. If someone was selling warm chestnuts from a shack made of scrap lumber, Moretti laid a cement foundation, built walls, and slapped on a roof. He classified this in his records as “repairs and upkeep” rather than as new construction. Therefore, he didn’t have to turn it over to the Ministry of the Interior. As a tactic it had been worth a try but the Seven Dragons hadn’t been fooled. As soon as a business started to prosper—and in this world “prosperity” meant a shop owner was able to feed his family—the Seven Dragons demanded their cut.

It was the orphanage that brought Moretti and the Seven Dragons into direct conflict. It was the biggest building in Itaewon, four stories high. When it was finished, Moretti commandeered the first floor of the building as his own headquarters. This meant that, technically, the building was under the jurisdiction of the 8th United States Army and, therefore, Moretti didn’t have to turn it over to the corrupt ROK government. In the upper three stories, he allowed a group of Buddhist nuns to provide food and shelter for homeless children. The 8th Army Corps of Engineers backed Moretti on this and, in recompense, promised the Ministry of the Interior that the next three buildings constructed would be theirs. But the gangsters didn’t want an orphanage in their midst. The Buddhist nuns were revered by the destitute business girls and soon the nuns were counseling them and even feeding them and encouraging them to return to their families. After praying at the little temple that was set up on a hill behind the ville, some of the girls ran away, breaking their contracts with the mama-sans who were their procurers. They stopped producing income, most of which would’ve gone to the Seven Dragons of Itaewon.

Moretti hustled a deal with 8th Army’s Ration Breakdown Point, procuring a daily allotment of army chow for himself and his three troops. After the honcho at the breakdown point heard what Moretti was trying to do, he supplemented the daily ration with enough food to feed the entire orphanage. This wasn’t as much chow as one might assume since both the orphans and the nuns ate like birds, mostly grain and green vegetables. Later, the 8th Army honchos signed off on yet another 30 percent supplement to Moretti’s food allocation because he’d set up a soup kitchen that began operating out of the back door of the building. Soon he was feeding over a hundred people a day; just rice gruel and beans and sliced turnip but it was enough to keep them alive. And the people of Itaewon started to feel better about themselves, more confident about the future. And people who are well fed are less vulnerable to the demands of petty tyrants like the Seven Dragons of Itaewon.

This was too much. According to testimony Cort had gathered, Snake, Horsehead, and Dragon’s Claw Number One called a confab of the Seven Dragons and after much cursing and posturing, they did what they’d been wanting to do for quite a while.