G.I. Bones (9 page)

I pulled out my CID badge, opened it, and lowered it until it was between her nose and the paperwork she was still reading. She snorted, twisted her face, but still didn’t look up at us. “You gonna have to wait,” she said.

Ernie’d had enough. He slammed his open palm down on her desk. “Hilliard!” he said. “Now!”

The young woman rose from her desk and started cursing. Ernie cursed back. While they shouted at one another, I walked back toward a room with a nameplate that said: Sergeant Firs t Class Quinton A. Hilliard , 8th Army EEO NCO-in-char ge.

PFC Wallings shouted at me. “Get your ass back here, damn you!”

I went through the door to Sergeant Hilliard’s office. He was on his feet—Afro a little too wide for his head, green fatigues neatly pressed, a belly just slightly protruding over his highly polished brass belt buckle.

“Why you messing with my secretary?” he shouted. He rushed past me out into the front room and pointed a finger at Ernie. “You keep your damn white-ass hands to yourself.”

Ernie hadn’t touched anyone, not yet, and he told Hilliard to get bent.

Hilliard stepped toward Ernie and I rushed forward and placed my body between them. PFC Wallings was still shouting and waggling her finger, her pretty face contorted in rage. Suddenly, from down the hallway, about a half-dozen more people joined us. One of them was a second lieutenant, a white female with short-cropped blonde hair, doing her best to be heard amidst the yelling, beseeching Sergeant Hilliard to calm down, asking PFC Wallings to take her seat behind her desk.

Ernie had vented as much as he wanted to and now he was grinning, arms crossed. I kept my face straight, standing protectively in front of Ernie, not because I was worried that either Wallings or Hilliard would hurt him but because I was worried that they might try and then Ernie would be in trouble for knocking them out.

The second lieutenant rushed back and forth between Wallings and Hilliard, pleading for calm. Hilliard never would’ve confronted Ernie like this out in the ville. Only here where he felt safe, with plenty of witnesses and plenty of co-workers to protect him, was he a tiger. PFC Wallings, however, was truly angry—and ready to fight. A real hellion, with pent-up anger, the cause of which I could only begin to imagine. The young lieutenant, whose name tag said Beresf ord , kept most of her attention on Wallings. Smart girl. Finally, Lieutenant Beresford convinced PFC Wallings to stop shouting and take her seat.

Whatever happened to giving orders? Second Lieutenant Beresford was acting more like a social worker than a commanding officer. A young female lieutenant, that’s why she’d been assigned to this office. EEO had no real power in 8th Army except the power to occasionally embarrass the command. No officer who was ambitious would accept an assignment to EEO. Beresford was either too naïve to realize that or, more likely, she had no plans to make the military her career.

When things calmed down, Lieutenant Beresford turned to Ernie and me and asked to see our credentials. We flashed our CID badges.

“Is this an official visit?” she asked.

“That’s the only reason we’d be here,” Ernie replied.

Hilliard glowered at him.

I spit out what we were after, mentioning the King Club and Miss Kwon’s name.

“Yes,” Beresford said. “I remember that one. We have a copy of the complaint here, don’t we Sergeant Hilliard?”

“We gonna turn it over to
them?”

“Why not?”

“Don’t they have to subpoena it or something?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary. They just want to look at it. Isn’t that so, Agent Sueño?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Hilliard crossed his arms. “Well, I don’t like it.”

Beresford looked dismayed and her face reddened. Her complexion was pocked from teenage acne and she wore thick-lensed glasses. She seemed like a nice woman; probably recently graduated from college, she was trying to do her best here although, with our long history of racial tension at 8th Army, I believed she was in over her head. Fights between black and white soldiers were common, hard feelings ubiquitous.

“Well, I ain’t giving them nothing,” Hilliard told Lieutenant Beresford, “If you want to turn one of our reports over to them, that’s your lookout. I’m leaving.” Hilliard grabbed his garrison cap and stormed toward the exit. “Hold my calls,” he told PFC Wallings on the way out. It didn’t make any sense but I suppose he thought it sounded good.

Ernie grinned again. “On his way over to the NCO Club for a shot and a beer.”

Lieutenant Beresford’s face turned even redder. Misconduct on duty reflected poorly on a soldier’s immediate supervisor. Or at least it should.

“What was the name again?” Beresford asked.

“Miss Kwon,” I replied. “At the King Club.”

PFC Wallings sat at the front desk, her back to us, fuming. Lieutenant Beresford didn’t ask her to retrieve the file. Instead, she walked over to a row of gray metal filing cabinets, rummaged through the green folders inside until she found what she was looking for. The complaint was a typed, onionskin sheet, three pages long. She disappeared down the hallway and two minutes later she returned with a photocopy.

“Here you are,” she said.

We thanked her. PFC Wallings was so angry that she rapped the heels of her combat boots rhythmically on the floor

Once we were outside the building, Ernie said, “Nuthouse.”

I didn’t argue.

In the Serious Incident Report concerning the Itaewon Massacre, Cort never revealed his thoughts on what might’ve happened to Moretti’s body. But despite being taken off the case, he continued to interview everyone he could locate with knowledge of the incident. Even the Buddhist nuns.

Once the Seven Dragons took over as the new landlords, the Buddhist nuns, and the orphans, were run out of Itaewon. Someone had written, in Korean, the name of the Buddhist order that the nuns belonged to. The same person also had written down the area of Kyongki Province where their nunnery was located. I could tell it was the same person because the note was still in the file and the handwriting matched perfectly. On a Sunday afternoon about a month after the Itaewon Massacre, Cort signed out a jeep from the 21 T Car motor pool, filled it with mogas and, using an army-issue map, drove out to a Buddhist temple known as the Temple of Constant Truth.

When the nuns greeted him, they were confused at first as to why a G.I. had driven all the way up to the slopes of Yongmun Mountain. Then, Cort showed them the black-and-white photograph he had retrieved from Moretti’s military personnel file. They understood immediately and soon Cort was sitting cross-legged on a warm floor drinking tea with a half-dozen, bald-headed female Buddhist nuns. He came to understand through sign language and some broken English that these nuns had been the cadre assigned to operate the Itaewon orphanage and take care of the children.

Cort asked them where the children were.

The nuns didn’t want to talk about it but some of them started crying and then apologized for their unseemly display of emotion. Cort assumed that because of lack of funds, the nuns had been forced to turn the kids over to one of the many international organizations which were actively saving children all over South Korea. Being a polite kind of guy, Cort didn’t press the issue. Instead, he sipped on his tea and waited for them to calm down.

Then Cort asked them about the night of the Itaewon Massacre.

6

W
e found Sergeant First Class Hilliard at the 8th Army NCO Club, sipping on a bourbon and Seven and dropping coins into a pinball machine. In the cocktail lounge, a Korean go-go girl danced on a well-lit stage to music blaring from a jukebox. G.I.s ate their lunch and drank beer, mostly ignoring her. As soon as Hilliard sensed our presence, he took his hands off the machine and turned slowly.

“Didn’t you get everything you want?”

“Not everything. I wanted to talk to you about this report.” I waved the copy of the three typed pages in front of him.

“Nothing to talk about,” Hilliard replied.

He turned back to the pinball machine and launched a metal ball into play. Lights lit up and bells clanged as the tiny silver sphere bounced back and forth. Finally, the ball slipped past Hilliard’s flippers and dropped, exhausted, into a dark hole. Hilliard was ready to launch another ball when Ernie placed his hand over Hilliard‘s knuckles.

“Talk to the man, Sarge,” Ernie said, leaning close. Then he grinned.

Hilliard turned again, anger flaring in his eyes. “I told you, there ain’t nothing to talk about.”

“You’re the one who filed this complaint,” I said.

“Yes. I filed it but on behalf of the brothers.”

“It’s your name as complainant.”

“Only because I was there at the time. They be racist out there at the King Club. They discriminate. When a black soldier want to talk to a woman, want to get to know her, she move away from you fast. Just ’cause you black. They be racist out there because the white G.I.
taught
the Korean woman how to be racist.” Now he was waggling his forefinger at us, preaching. “It ain’t enough that you racist yourself but you have to export it to every country you go to.”

Ernie rolled his eyes.

I kept my face impassive. Koreans are smart enough to form their own opinions about people and they don’t need any help from American G.I.s. Instead of arguing with him, I pointed at the report. “It says here that you requested Miss Kwon’s company and she refused. When you asked her why, she told you that it was because you were black.”

Hilliard thrust his shoulders back. “That’s what she said.”

I shook my head.

“Why you shaking your head?” Hilliard asked. “You calling me a liar?”

“Miss Kwon,” I replied, “doesn’t speak English.”

“How you know? You the one taught her to be racist?”

“I didn’t teach her nothing. She’s shy, just in from the country, she’s afraid of G.I.s. All G.I.s. Black or white.”

“She friendly enough with the white ones.”

Now we were getting down to it. Hilliard was jealous that Miss Kwon had been going with other G.I.s but not with him.

“Maybe they were kind to her,” I said. “Maybe they took it slow and easy.”

“Maybe they be white and maybe they told her if they saw her with a black man, they wouldn’t talk to her no more.”

“Maybe,” I said. He seemed surprised at me agreeing with him. I continued. “But maybe she’s also just a frightened young girl from the countryside and it takes time for her to get to know someone.”

“You trying to make this complaint go away. Well, it ain’t going to happen. Black G.I.s got a
right
to be treated like anybody else. Whether it be here on compound or out there in Itaewon. And the King Club is racist. Whites only. They might as well put up a sign. And this Miss Kwon, she going along with the program.” He crossed his arms, thinking it over. Then he said, “What makes the CID so interested in all this anyway?”

“I’m worried about putting Miss Kwon under too much pressure. Her family’s poor, she needs the job. She’s just trying to get by.”

Hilliard’s eyes narrowed. “Snake sent you, didn’t he?”

“Snake?” The name electrified me.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know. You kissing his butt.” Hilliard was smiling now, sure he was on to something. “He sent you out here to make sure that my complaint don’t go through. To make sure that the King Club ain’t put off-limits for being racist.”

Hilliard slugged down the last of his bourbon and Seven, checked the coin return of the pinball machine to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, and then pulled his cap from his belt.

“You can tell Snake,” he said, “that if he wants this complaint pulled, he gonna have to deal with Q himself.”
Q
for Quinton, Hilliard’s first name. “And tell Snake not to send out anymore whitey CID agents to try to push
this
black man around.”

“You’re a moron, Hilliard,” Ernie said.

Once again, Hilliard waggled his forefinger at Ernie’s nose. “You mess with Q, you find out who be a moron.”

Ernie slapped his hand.

The motion was so fast and the crack of flesh on flesh so loud, that for a moment Hilliard just stood there, stunned. Then he said, “You keep your hands off me, you understand? You keep your damn hands off me!”

But he was no longer waggling his forefinger.

The morning after the Itaewon Massacre the nuns searched the ville.

“We want to prepare his body,” they told Cort. “For cremation or for return to America.”

“Why did you think he was dead?”

“Everybody say.”

They used their contacts in the ville, which were extensive, to ask questions. Most of the business girls were Buddhists and virtually all of them prayed and burned incense at the shrine atop the hill overlooking Itaewon. Many of them were there that morning, praying for the soul of Mori Di.

Rumors were flying. Most of them centered around Mori Di’s condition after his beating. Some said he was already dead when the Seven Dragons took him away, others said he was still breathing but just barely. No one had any doubt about why the Seven Dragons had absconded with the corpse. They wanted to avoid a criminal prosecution.

In addition to being concerned about Mori Di’s welfare, many of the families in Itaewon were concerned about Mori Di’s bank.
Unheing
is the word the nuns used. Literally, “silver storage.”

Cort was taken aback by this, suddenly on the alert for an illegal activity that Moretti might have been conducting. Was he changing money from
won
to U.S. currency? Possession of greenbacks was illegal both for G.I.s and Korean civilians and yet U.S. currency was highly prized and worth much more than either the G.I. Military Payment Certificates or the struggling Korean
won
. A healthy profit could be made on such transactions. Or was Moretti being paid by desperate Koreans to buy U.S. postal money orders on compound and mail them off to some relative living overseas? Also illegal, but profitable.

As it turned out, Mori Di’s silver storage was none of these things.

“Everybody robbed all the time in Itaewon,” was the way one of the nuns put it to Cort. There was no security. War refugees, of which there were millions, had long since taken to carrying their most precious possessions on their persons. But this was cumbersome. Especially once a family had stopped in Itaewon, set up a ramshackle home and maybe opened some sort of business. They couldn’t keep family heirlooms tied around their waist or taped to an inner thigh forever. So when people saw a trustworthy man like Mori Di, living in a solid building protected by himself and Buddhist nuns and three G.I. truck drivers, they started to ask him to store their valuables.

At first Moretti hesitated. He already had too many responsibilities: the construction operations, the orphanage, and the soup kitchen. He had more than enough to do. But people kept begging him and, finally, he set up a system whereby people could turn over family heirlooms to him, have them boxed up and numbered and a receipt would be provided. After that, Moretti stashed them somewhere, presumably in his headquarters building.

“Seven Dragons kick us out,” one of the nuns told Cort. “All orphans outside too. Winter that time. Cold. We have no money, no food. Seven Dragons no care. We take children, beg money, beg food, and ride on bus, train, whatever we can find and walk back up here in mountains to Temple of Constant Truth.”

Cort waited for what he knew would come next.

“After leave Itaewon, five children die. Two lose foot. One lose hand.”

Despite these hardships, the rest of the children, and all the nuns, arrived safely at the temple.

“The families,” Cort asked, “that left valuables with Moretti, what did they do?”

“They fight,” one of the nuns replied. “Nobody see. No American MPs, no Korean police. Only poor people of Itaewon and Seven Dragons.”

Then she raised her forefinger to her neck and sliced it across her neck.

“Chukin-da,”
she said. Kill.

I explained to Ernie the options the Seven Dragons had when deciding how to dispose of Tech Sergeant Moretti’s body. Their ability to cover things up only extended to the cops the Seven Dragons had on their payroll in and around Itaewon; it didn’t extend to a mobile ROK Army surveillance patrol. Cort monitored U.S. and ROK Army blotter reports every morning but nothing had been reported. The remains of Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti had vanished. They might be interred in one of the buildings.

“Do you think there might still be old treasures there?” Ernie asked. “Family heirlooms, things like that.”

“No. I’m sure that’s all long gone. But the body is different. Nobody would want to touch that. As long as it was well hidden, they’d leave it where it was. I believe that it’s right here.”

I pointed to a spot on the building plans. Ernie studied the sketch.

Two Bellies had told us that within days of the Seven Dragons kicking out the nuns and orphans, Mori Di’s headquarters had been transformed into a bar and brothel. And since at least one of the Seven Dragons seemed to like American country-western music, they’d renamed the place The Grand Ole Opry Club.

“They slicky beer,” Two Bellies told me. Slicky, G.I. slang for steal.

Military two-and-a-half-ton trucks, laden with pallets of American-made beer, had backed down the alley behind the Grand Ole Opry Club. They unloaded case after case of beer, all of it imported at U.S. taxpayer expense and pilfered directly from the PX supply line. To streamline the delivery process, the Seven Dragons knocked a hole in the wall through which they shoved a ramp and slid the cases down from the back of the trucks into the basement for storage. The work had been expertly done. Bricks lined the delivery chute. To support the ramp, a portion of the wall had been extended out, forming a narrow room with an angled roof. There was no opening into that room. It had been walled-in using bricks. The entire construction had been the first modification made to the original building, the plans of which Ernie stared at intently.

“You think Moretti’s in there,” he said, pointing to the angled space beneath the loading ramp.

“I think it‘s possible. It would make sense for the Seven Dragons to hide him there. It would be safe, away from prying eyes, and they wouldn’t have to take the chance of transporting the corpse out of Seoul.”

“Wouldn’t it stink?”

I shrugged. “Not so much. Not sealed behind brick.”

I imagined a desiccated corpse, sitting in the darkness, fading away to bones.

Then Ernie looked up at me. “Oh, no. I know what you’re thinking.”

We had no jurisdiction in Itaewon. Officially, everything we did had to be done with the approval of the Korean government. Years ago an agreement had been signed so American MPs could police the ville but our jurisdiction extended only to our own personnel: G.I.s, the occasional American dependent, or U.S. civilian workers who happened to wander out there. But we couldn’t promulgate our own search warrant.

“You’re nuts, Sueño,” Ernie said.

“It could be done.”

One thing I’d learned here at 8th Army is that if you really want to do something, don’t ask for permission. If we presented a proposal to search the Grand Ole Opry Club to the provost marshal he would almost certainly say no. If we went ahead anyway, we’d be not only searching without a warrant but we’d also be directly violating an order. If, on the other hand, the PMO liked the idea of us searching the Grand Ole Opry Club, he would forward our request up the chain of command. There, it would be staffed to the ROK–U.S. governmental affairs committee, reports would be filed, questions answered, and great minds would cogitate. After a few weeks, if we were lucky, we’d receive an answer. Almost certainly no. But if by some chance the answer were yes, it would already be too late. By then, the rumors about a pending search of the Grand Ole Opry would have leaked out of 8th Army headquarters like rice wine from a broken
soju
bottle. Nobody keeps a secret for long in 8th Army headquarters. And if any hint reached Itaewon concerning a search, what we sought would either be moved or, more likely, destroyed.

Ernie kept staring at me. “You’re nuts,” he said again. “This is just a hunch. You don’t know for sure there’s anything there.”

“You’re right. But it makes sense, you have to admit that.”

“Maybe.” Ernie kept shaking his head, jiggling the copies of the building plans. And then he began to laugh. “Sueño, you never cease to amaze me. Why can‘t you just worry about getting your twenty years in like everybody else?”