“I can’t tell the first sergeant this shit,” Riley said, “that you didn’t find nothing.”
“Why not? That’s what happened.”
“So you don’t have any leads on the whereabouts of this guy?”
I shrugged again. “We’re working on it,” I said.
“The provost marshal wants positive, measurable progress,” Riley said. “Estimates of when a goal will be attained. Not just ‘we didn’t find nothing.’”
“If they want positive,” I said, “they’ll just have to wait.”
“No, they won’t,” Riley said, grabbing a pencil. He spoke as he wrote. “Ongoing searches of the areas the suspect was known to frequent are expected to turn up results prior to the next reporting period.”
“Bullshit.”
Riley looked up from his work. “What do you think we do here?”
Ernie finished his coffee.
The two of us left the CID office and drove over to the barracks at the 21 T Car motor pool. According to the head houseboy, Paco Bernal had not returned to his room. A couple of the G.I. s who knew him couldn’t provide any new information and, moreover, they didn’t seem concerned about Paco’s fate.
As we walked back to the jeep, Ernie said, “They really watch out for one another in this unit, don’t they?”
As we left 21 T Car and drove out Gate 9, heading toward Itaewon, I surprised Ernie by telling him to turn left on the road leading toward Namsan Tunnel.
He swiveled his head and asked, “We going downtown?”
I nodded.
“What the hell for?”
“You’ll see.”
I’m not sure why I hadn’t told Riley that we had thought we had actually seen Paco Bernal-although only fleetingly. Something told me it wasn’t going to be easy to catch Paco until he wanted to be caught.
At the tollbooth I tossed a hundred won into the tin basket. Ernie gunned the jeep’s engine and slid through the milling field of kimchee cabs. Namsan means literally “South Mountain” and it hovers on the southern edge of Seoul like a sentinel monitoring the life of the entire city. The tunnel that was recently carved through it is the technological pride of the country. It’s open mouth loomed before us.
We cruised into its cold depths.
Ernie and I must have been the only Miguks to enter the big cement block building of Seoul City Hall in quite a while judging by the stares we received. None of the signs were in English and some of the Korean was beyond my capacity so I ended up stopping men in suits carrying briefcases and asking them tomfool questions. Since I didn’t know the technical jargon, I described what I needed in broad terms. Cute young secretaries stared at Ernie and me as if we were animals escaped from the zoo. Ernie grows antsy in these situations and I was worried he’d do something ill-considered. After we were directed to the third wrong office in a row, a kindly elderly woman finally directed us to what I later found out was the Office of Building Plans for the Southern Districts of Seoul.
The original plans to the seven buildings Moretti had built were still on file. Not blueprints. Nobody had time for something so time consuming after the war. Buildings had to be built and they had to be built now. Most of the plans were nothing more, really, than glorified sketches done on pulp paper with pencil and ruler, notations in Korean and English made in the margins. Then, after a number of erasures, the broad outlines of the structure had been recopied, right over the pencil lines, in blue ink.
I paid for photocopies to be made of each set of plans. I counted out the won and the grim-faced clerk handed me the plans in a brown envelope along with a receipt. Ernie and I walked back out into the broad hallway.
“What are you going to do with these things?” Ernie asked.
“Some comparison shopping.”
“You really are nuts, Sueno.”
Across the street from city hall, we found a teahouse with waitresses wearing blue uniforms and white gloves. Ernie convinced one of the girls to slip off her gloves and started fondling her fingers, all the while- supposedly-teaching her how to count in English. While the waitresses giggled, I sipped on ginseng tea and studied the plans, comparing them to what I’d seen in Itaewon last night.
There had been a lot of changes made since the buildings were originally erected. Rooms added, walls torn down, electrical wiring installed. And, of course, the Yobo Club had been completely demolished and replaced by a brand new structure, not a nightclub but a shopping emporium: trinkets, T-shirts, sporting equipment.
After the Itaewon Massacre, the ROK Army and the Korean National Police had clamped down on the entire area. For the better part of a month, Itaewon had been put off-limits to all civilians. The only people allowed to enter were those who could prove, by the address on their national identity card, that they were residents. All vehicles leaving the village were searched, either by the ROK Army at roadblocks or by the KNPs. Cort searched Itaewon himself, assisted by two armed MPs. They concentrated on the bars and brothels controlled by the Seven Dragons and any places likely to hide a corpse, including icehouses and electrical refrigeration units. They came up with nothing.
The Han River was about two miles away but the KNP roadblocks had been slapped on so fast after the fight that it was unlikely the killers could have made it out of there in time to dump the body. And even if they had, the corpse probably would’ve been spotted when it rose to the surface a few miles downstream near the Han River Estuary.
Of course, the Seven Dragons could’ve buried Moretti’s body in an empty field. But the southern edge of Seoul-and, indeed, the entire city-was so crammed with refugees after the war that there weren’t any empty fields to be found. Squatters were everywhere. Someone would’ve spotted men burying a corpse. The squatters would have been afraid to report it to the KNPs. Still, rumors would’ve spread. Someone would’ve heard something. And no such rumor had ever come to light.
Maybe the Seven Dragons had chopped up Moretti’s body and disposed of it. This was a possibility so grim I didn’t like to think about it. As vicious as the Seven Dragons were, they had never been known to resort to anything quite so macabre, according to Cort. The Seven Dragons would have been subject to the same superstitions as other Koreans and chopping up someone’s body is the perfect way to insure that their spirit will come back to haunt you.
In fact, when no sign of Moretti’s corpse surfaced, Investigator Cort started to suspect-or maybe hope-that Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti was still alive.
5
That night, Ernie and I caught a kimchee cab out to the ville and then entered into the den of iniquity known as the King Club. We were wearing our running-the-ville outfits: blue jeans, sneakers, sports shirts and nylon jackets with fire-breathing dragons embroidered on the back. In other words, we looked like two typical G.I. s out to spend a mindless evening of drinking beer and playing pinch-butt with as many Korean business girls as we could get our hands on.
During the duty day, Ernie and I are required to wear a white shirt with a tie and a sports jacket. Not uniforms. That getup, coupled with our short haircuts, fairly screams that the two guys you’re looking at are 8th Army CID agents. But that’s the military mind. They want us in civilian clothes in order to blend in with the civilian population but they don’t want us wearing the clothes that civilians actually wear.
At least now, after work, we could dress like two regular G.I. s. Not that we were fooling many people. Itaewon is a small village and most everybody knew who we were.
Miss Kwon hadn’t arrived at work yet and the all-Korean rock-and-roll band on the stage was still tuning up so I started talking to the middle-aged woman behind the bar, Mrs. Bei. She managed the place for the real owner.
“Who’s the G.I. who complained about Miss Kwon?” I asked.
Mrs. Bei frowned. She didn’t know his name. She only knew that he was a black man, that he wasn’t a
