Nightmare Range (28 page)

When we reached the main gate of the Army Support Command, red lights flashed. We piled out of our jeep and showed our badges to the first MP we saw.

“What happened?”

“He opened up with a weapon.”

“Who?”

“Waitz, that’s what everybody’s saying. The guy at the Repo Depot.”

“A rifle?” Ernie asked. “A forty-five? What?”

“A forty-five. Johnson tried to card him, check his ID and pass, but instead Waitz shot him.”

“Is he dead?”

“They say it’s just a wound to his leg, no arterial bleeding. The MedEvac chopper is on the way.”

“Where’d Waitz go?”

The MP pointed toward the flashing neon of ASCOM City.

Ernie and I trotted through the narrow alleys.

“Where would he go?” Ernie asked. “He can’t get away.”

“I think he knows that.”

“Then what the hell is he doing?”

“He’s toast and he knows it. Unless he destroys the evidence and finds a way to silence Miss Yu.”

“How’s he going to do that?”

As if in answer to Ernie’s question, a tongue of flame shot over the tiled rooftops. When we reached Miss Yu’s hooch, it was already engulfed in flame.

“He can’t get away with this” Ernie said.

“He’s panicked,” I replied. “Not thinking clearly.”

“Which makes him dangerous.”

“Very.”

“Where to now?” Ernie asked.

“Back to the next thing he needs to eliminate.”

“Miss Yu?”

“Right.”

During the five-mile drive to Inchon, Ernie broke every speed limit in the books. At Whiskey Mary’s the girls were hysterical. I convinced one of them to calm down and she told us that Waitz had returned, this time with a gun, and he’d threatened to kill them all if they didn’t tell him where he could find Miss Yu. They told him she’d been arrested.

Minutes later, we screeched up in front of the Inchon Police Station, just as a GI in civvies trudged up the stone steps, a pistol hanging at his side. Ernie didn’t even slow down. He slammed the jeep into low gear and the vehicle thumped up the steps. Waitz turned in horror but before he could bring his weapon into play, the front bumper of Ernie’s jeep sent him flying.

A dozen Korean cops streamed out of the building, some of them with their weapons drawn. Ernie and I stood with our hands straight up in the air and I started shouting that we were American MPs and here to arrest the man who lay injured on the steps. When everyone calmed down, I turned Waitz over and clamped the cuffs on him. His left leg had suffered a compound fracture so Ernie pulled off his belt and used it as a tourniquet. Waitz screamed when Ernie pulled it tight.

“You ran me over,” Waitz said. “On purpose.”

“I should’ve stepped on the gas,” Ernie replied.

“Why’d you kill VonEric?” I asked.

Waitz stared at me, his eyes wide with glazed panic. “I didn’t kill
nobody
.”

Ernie slapped him, and then slapped him again. Finally, I had
to make him stop. We tossed Waitz in the back of the jeep and drove him, howling all the way, back to ASCOM City. It wasn’t easy but I managed to keep the MPs there from killing him before we even had a chance to book him for murder.

The MP Johnson survived. While she rotted in jail, Miss Yu’s case made its slow and painful way through the intricacies of the Korean judicial system. At Waitz’s preliminary court-martial hearing, there was so much evidence piled up against him that he and his military attorney copped a plea. The result: twenty years’ hard labor at Fort Leavonworth, Kansas. He’d probably be out in five.

O
utside the main gate of Osan Air Force Base the narrow lanes of Songtan-up wind off in three directions. Each alleyway is crammed with brightly painted signs touting the best in leather goods or the tastiest in beer or guarantees as to which bar offers the greatest prospects for romance. At night the place is lit up as brightly as the spangled posterior of an overage stripper. In the morning it looks quiet and sad, especially when a low-lying mist crawls through the damp cobbled streets.

“How we ever going to find this joint?” Ernie asked.

I pulled the note I had made out of my pocket. “Kim’s Tailor Shop and Brassware. It should be easy. I even have the address.”

Ernie snorted. “Addresses don’t mean nothing in this mess.”

It turned out that he was right. It wasn’t so easy. Each little number hand-brushed in white paint over a doorway was covered with tote bags and running shoes and jogging outfits hanging from every available rafter. While we were searching, an old woman approached us and offered herself as a guide to that particular nirvana that all young GIs seek. I shooed her away and held Ernie back, reminding him that we had a job to do. He stared straight ahead and chomped more viciously on his clicking wad of gum.

Ernie and I had jumped at this case because it gave us a chance to get out of Seoul. Osan is the largest US air base in the country,
situated about thirty miles south of the capital city of Seoul and about fifty miles from the Demilitarized Zone that slashes like a knife through the heart of the Korean Peninsula.

We were on what’s called a “SOFA case,” a claim made against the US government by Korean civilians under a treaty known as the Status of Forces Agreement. A young woman, Miss Won Hei-suk, had committed suicide. The family contended that she had been driven to it by an American serviceman who had taken advantage of her youth and gullibility and promised her—among other things—marriage. The monetary figure they came up with included not only her projected productivity and value to the family in the future but also the price of their emotional suffering. How they figured that one I didn’t know.

The US Army pays out millions of dollars in claims each year. In Germany it might be the price of an apple tree mowed down by a tank on maneuvers, in the Philippines income lost from rice churned up by the navy construction battalions. In Korea, it’s the loss of a daughter.

Of course, the army didn’t want to pay, so it was our job to find out if the story of this sordid little love affair was valid or bogus. A copy of Miss Won’s family register had been submitted to 8th Army along with the claim, and it proved that she was clearly underage. One way out for the military was to find the GI, court-martial him for statutory rape, and force him to pay the claim. But finding him could be a problem. Not only were there a couple of thousand airmen stationed on Osan itself but the place was also a popular vacation spot for Marines from Okinawa and Japan. They caught military flights over here—at government expense—and they stayed in billeting facilities on post for four or five dollars a day. While here, they shopped for the cheap brassware and leather goods and textile products that the village offered in abundance and shipped tons of junk back to the States. They also enjoyed the more ephemeral charms of Songtan-up, when the sun went down and the neon began to sparkle.

We found Kim’s Tailor Shop and Brassware in a side alley. The sign was painted in English with the small Korean translation below. The back walls were hung with drapes of gray and blue material. The front of the shop was lined with brass vases, urns, and sculptures, the most prominent of which was a fist displaying a stiff upward-thrust index finger.

When we walked in, a man rose from a small leather sofa.

“Welcome,” he said. “If you want suits, Kim’s Tailor number one in Songtan Village.”

He was a sturdy looking Korean man, a few years older than us, maybe thirty, with short cropped black hair brushed neatly back along the geometric lines of his big square head. His leathery brown face was trying to smile, but it couldn’t get past the lines of concern folded just beneath his eyes. When I pulled out my badge, he sighed and deflated, as if he had been expecting customers rather than cops.

“Are you Mr. Kim?”

“Yes. I’m Mr. Kim. I already tell everything to Korean police.”

He plopped back down on the sofa and folded his short, bulging forearms across his knees. I sat down in a wooden chair across from him. Ernie wandered around the shop, running his fingers lightly over the contours of a brass female nude.

“The Korean police didn’t find out much,” I said. “Not even the name of the GI.”

“Sure. I show them.”

He reached across the coffee table, grabbed a large dog-eared book covered with red cardboard, and thumbed through the onionskin sheets. After flicking the pages back and forth a few times he jabbed a stubby finger at one of the receipts and turned it toward me.

“Here. These are the names.”

“There were more than one?”

“Sure. GI never come from Okinawa alone. They all come in here buy some brassware. Two of them bought suits.”

I stared at him for a moment.

“Only one of them went out with Miss Won,” he said. “This guy here. The Cheap Charlie.”

“He’s the one who didn’t buy a suit?”

“Yes.”

The names were scribbled in
hangul
, the Korean script, and I sounded them out haltingly.

“Tom-son. Jo-dan. Pok-no.”

“That’s him. Pok-no. He’s the one who went out with Miss Won.”

The first two names were easy enough—Thompson and Jordan—although there must be a few hundred Marines on Okinawa with those last names. The last name, Pok-no, I couldn’t figure. Mr. Kim had no idea how to spell it in English.

Could it be phony? It didn’t seem likely that he would have passed off a false name with his buddies hanging around. Unless they were all in on some sort of plan. I figured it was more a translation problem than anything else. Some of the sounds of English don’t work all that well in Korean.

Mr. Kim offered us cigarettes. I refused, as did Ernie. Kim wrinkled his eyes shut as he lit up, and with the free side of his mouth he started to talk.

“They were three happy GIs, always talk too much and play around, and they made Miss Won laugh. I told her not to go out with GI. I told her many times, but you know young girl. They no listen nobody.”

“Had she been out with GIs before?”

“Never. He first one. Maybe I should’ve fired her.” He blew a smoke ring toward the wall-papered ceiling. “If I told her I fire her, then maybe she don’t go out with GI. She was a good girl. Send all her money home to her family.”

“What was her job here?”

“Help with receipts, clean up shop, wrap orders for GIs who want to mail things back Stateside. Not much. Everything I can do myself, but shop must have flower if shop want to bring in bees.”

During the Korean War, the country was completely flattened.
In the twenty years since, the economy had improved, but not much. Attractive young women are an expendable commodity. Their main job is to work in factories or shops and save money for a dowry so they can get married. A woman doesn’t have any real status until she’s old and has a slew of grandchildren running around.

“How often did she go out with Pok-no?”

“Only once.”

“Once?”

“Yes. He was here from Okinawa for only a few days, but every day he come here and talk to Miss Won and after second day I let him take her to lunch. On third day he took her to dinner, but she come back after eat to work night shift.”

“What time did she get off?”

Kim’s eyes widened. “She don’t get off. After work she sleep here. Someone must protect shop from slicky boys. Me, I go home.”

“But you said she only went with Pok-no once.”

“I wasn’t counting lunch or dinner. I give her one day vacation each month. She was like little girl, very excited each time her day off come. She always go to country to visit her parents or to visit her sister at temple. She’s a …” He snapped his fingers. “How you say?
Suknyo
?”

He said the word in Korean, but I didn’t know it either. We looked it up in his Korean-English dictionary.

“Nun,” I said.

It wasn’t vocabulary that was often used in Songtan-up.

Ernie quit fiddling with the brassware, grabbed a folding chair, straddled it, and leaned forward at Mr. Kim.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “On their one date this Miss Won takes some Marine from Okinawa with her to her family in the countryside or to visit her sister who is a nun and then she comes back here the next day alone and that night kills herself?”

“Yes.” Mr. Kim nodded somberly. “She worked all day and that night. After I left, she locked up the shop and went out.”

“And the next morning the police found her body on the railroad tracks.” Ernie leaned back on his chair.

Kim nodded and smoke drifted out of his nostrils toward the soot-stained paper above.

Before we left, I jotted down an address, and Ernie bought one of the brass fists. Kim wrapped it up awkwardly with the paper wadded too tightly around the hard, pugnacious digit.

The jeep purred along the ribbon of asphalt that wound through the acres of wavering green rice paddies. Straw-hatted farmers, their pant legs rolled up past their knees, bobbed through rows of sprouting shoots. Long-billed white cranes lifted gently from the muck and mire and flapped serenely into an endless blue sky.

“Don’t they have any bars out here?” Ernie asked.

“Not for GIs,” I said. “Besides, you’re driving.”

“I won’t be for long if I don’t get a cool one.”

After we slowed to read the signs at a crossroads, I motioned for him to turn right, and three kilometers later the village of Chunhua loomed ahead of us. The cluster of straw-thatched huts sat on a rocky promontory like a crown of thorns amidst the spreading wet fields.

Ernie jammed the jeep into low as we chugged up the one dirt road that led into the village. Pantless toddlers and flapping-winged chickens scurried out of our way. We stopped in the center of the cluster of huts and stepped out of the jeep. Old men in hemp cloth tunics and women cowled in white linen stared at us curiously.

As I turned my back on the dying roar of the engine, I felt for a moment as if we’d stepped back in time. Bright eyes peered at us from within mud brick walls. Then I spotted a rusty Coca-Cola sign and I snapped out of it. I flashed my badge to the proprietor of the open-stalled store and told him who I was looking for, and he yelled at a boy who went scurrying off toward the fields. While we waited by the jeep, a crowd of children too young for
school surrounded us, and Ernie horsed around with them and broke apart his last few sticks of gum trying to make sure that no one was left out.