Otherwise, where will she go? What will she do?” Doc Yong shook her head. “You can’t believe what these girls go through. Many of them are the sole support of their families, putting their younger brothers and sisters through school.”
Yes, I could imagine what they went through but I didn’t interrupt.
Doc Yong stared into my eyes. “Will you look into it?”
How could I say no? I nodded. She smiled, reached out, and squeezed my hand.
On the way out of the clinic, the women in the waiting room stared at me. But all I could feel was the warmth where Doc Yong’s hand had touched mine.
Although I’d questioned Doc Yong’s motives for searching for the remains of Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti, I was beginning to develop motives of my own. Moretti had been murdered. Cort, the on-the-scene investigator, had strong suspicions as to who had murdered him but the body had gone missing and, after that, Cort had been hampered by both the Korean and the 8th Army powers that be. At the time, right after the war, Korea was still in turmoil. There was even talk that the Communists might make a comeback. In fact, the starving Korean populace would’ve followed just about anyone who promised to put food in their bellies and into those of their children. So the South Korean government and 8th Army wanted to squash, as quickly as possible, any sort of incident that portended discord between the U.S. and Korea, including the incident known as the Itaewon Massacre.
But those days were long gone and Ernie and I were new to the case-fresh eyes looking at the evidence. I was beginning to wonder if, in addition to finding his bones, we couldn’t breathe life back into the search for the killer of Mori Di.
After all, Moretti had been a man of principle. A man who’d traveled thousands of miles from his hometown in New Jersey to a country on the far side of the world. He’d put everything on the line, including his life, to help people he didn’t know. And, as Ernie said so succinctly, Tech Sergeant Moretti had been a fellow G.I.
That, in itself, was enough to keep us investigating.
Starting on the morning after the assault on Moretti, Cort had interviewed everybody he could find-both G.I. s and Koreans- who’d been present the night of the Itaewon Massacre. The evening had started routinely enough. The Buddhist nuns fed about a hundred people-men, women, children, and old folks-from the soup kitchen set up behind Moretti’s headquarters building. Moretti had overseen the food preparation, taken inventory personally, and prepared the next day’s ration order for the driver whose turn it was to make the pickup. Then he’d listened while the nuns told him about the various things that were needed for the orphans, including more diapers, soap, and textbooks for the older children who would be starting school as soon as the first one in the area reopened in February.
Where Moretti planned to find this stuff, Cort didn’t know but he’d found entries concerning these items in Moretti’s loose-leaf notebook.
What changed Moretti’s routine that night was a group of business girls banging on the front door of his headquarters. According to their breathless report, another business girl, a friend of theirs, had been beaten up. She was laying in an alley just off the main drag, bleeding profusely.
As of yet, there wasn’t an emergency medical service set up in the city of Seoul. And even the phone lines, what there were of them, were constantly overloaded and not much use when you had to get through to an ambulance. So, Moretti grabbed his army-issue first-aid kit and followed the business girls outside into the cold night.
He’d done this before, Cort found out. And when first aid had not been enough, he’d arranged for one of his trucks to transport a sick or injured person to the one functioning Korean hospital about four miles away in downtown Seoul.
On the way to the scene, Moretti was informed by the babbling women that a policeman had beaten the girl for nonpayment of the commission she owed to the Seven Dragons on a particularly large windfall-twenty dollars, they said-which the girl had earned in a secret assignation with some big-shot American. Moretti asked the girls who the American was but they claimed they didn’t know. At the scene, Moretti used his army-issue flashlight and determined that the girl had been beaten badly but the external bleeding was not arterial. He cleaned and stanched the various flows as best he could but whether or not she had internal bleeding, only time would tell. The girl was conscious now and Moretti asked her who’d done this to her. She wouldn’t talk. And then Moretti realized that the girls who’d brought him here had disappeared. The injured girl’s eyes widened as she stared at the village’s one streetlamp casting its amber glow on the main drag. Moretti turned. Approaching him were seven men, all of them wielding clubs.
Words were exchanged. The men told Moretti that the girl was their property and ordered him to stand away from her. Moretti refused. Within seconds, they were at it. Moretti threw his metal first-aid kit at them, kicking, punching, and clawing for his life. Other residents of Itaewon alerted the three G.I. truck drivers and they ran to the scene to join the melee, trying to pull Moretti to safety.
MPs were alerted. After a few minutes they arrived, sirens blaring, along with the Korean National Police. According to the first MP on the scene, seven men, just dark shadows, fled the moment their jeep rounded the corner. The MPs gave chase but lost them in the maze of dark passageways behind the main drag of Itaewon.
The three truck drivers had been hacked and stabbed and pummeled and sawed and beaten until there would’ve been nothing left to save if the MPs hadn’t arrived when they did. They were lucky to be alive. The injured truck drivers were driven back to Yongsan Compound and checked into the emergency room of the 121 Evacuation Hospital.
But Moretti was missing. The seven thugs had taken him with them.
That night, the MPs started kicking doors in.
The KNPs protested. Eighth Army law enforcement had only limited jurisdiction in Itaewon; they could arrest G.I. s only. But by now dozens of MPs had seen how badly the three G.I. truck drivers had been beaten and they were enraged. And they knew who they were looking for: the Itaewon Chil Yong.
The MPs forced their way into all the usual haunts that the Seven Dragons frequented: nightclubs, bars, brothels, the black-market warehouses. But Snake, Horsehead, and Dragon’s Claw Number One, along with their four brethren, were nowhere to be found.
Neither was Moretti.
Judging by the shape they’d found the three truck drivers in, the MPs thought that Moretti was probably dead. The Seven Dragons must have taken his body because they wanted to eliminate all evidence of the crime. Without a body to prove that a murder had been committed, and without weapons to prove how the murder had been perpetrated, the likelihood of the Seven Dragons being indicted- much less convicted-was virtually nil.
The reaction at 8th Army headquarters was outrage. Not at the men who’d perpetrated this crime but at the MPs who’d gone on their midnight rampage in search of Mori Di. The Korean newspapers were flooded with reports of Korean citizens being ripped cruelly from their homes in the middle of the night, of innocent black-market entrepreneurs being interrogated and slapped around by long-nosed foreigners, and of the Korean National Police being shamed in their own precincts by burly American MPs who showed no regard for the sanctity of Korean law.
All of the responding MPs were brought up on charges.
The civil affairs operation that Moretti had run in Itaewon was curtailed. His headquarters building was decommissioned by 8th Army and turned over to the ROK Ministry of the Interior. Construction operations, financed by American money, were no longer run by 8th Army Engineering but shifted to Korean subcontractors approved by the ROK government. This was supposed to help strengthen the Korean economy. But the real reason was to insure that there was not another Itaewon Massacre.
After a hearing conducted by the judge advocate general, the MPs who responded to Moretti’s distress call that night were formally reprimanded though not brought up on court-martial charges, and all of them were shipped back to the States.
When the dust settled, the hunt for Moretti had been forgotten. As was the hunt for the seven men who had assaulted him. Forgotten by everybody, that is, except for an MP investigator named Cort.
The progress report I turned into Staff Sergeant Riley at the 8th Army CID office indicated that our search of Itaewon the previous night for Corporal Paco Bernal had turned up negative results.
“You mean he’s not there?” Riley asked us.
I shrugged. Ernie was busy fixing himself a cup of coffee poured from the big silver urn behind Miss Kim’s desk.
