youngster, and then she held her splayed fingers at the side of her head to show me that his hair stuck out farther than army regulation allowed.
There are over 1,500 American G.I. s stationed at 8th Army headquarters on Yongsan Compound. After you’ve been here awhile, and especially when you’re in my line of work, you get to know quite a few of them. In fact, 8th Army is much like a small town, full of gossip and backbiting, and everyone knows all about everyone else‘s business.
Back at my barstool, I told Ernie what Mrs. Bei had said.
Without hesitating, Ernie said, “Hilliard.”
He was referring to Sergeant First Class Quinton A. Hilliard, the NCO-in-charge of the 8th Army EEO Office. Equal Employment Opportunity.
I agreed. It sounded like Hilliard.
After the “race riot” in Itaewon in 1972, the 8th Army honchos finally acquiesced to setting up what other government agencies already had: a staff to monitor race relations within the command. Prior to 1972, Itaewon had been segregated. White soldiers, and other “honorary” whites like Chicanos and Asians, frequented the red-light village of Itaewon. The black soldiers had their own smaller ville on the other side of Yongsan Compound, in a district of Seoul called Samgakji. Samgakji is still there, and still thriving, but now black soldiers can venture into Itaewon without fear of reprisal, for the most part. However, when Ernie and I had occasionally gone to Samgakji on an investigation, we’d never once seen a white G.I.
Ernie and I ordered beers and sat through the rock band’s first set. After a half hour, when the club was almost full, Miss Kwon still hadn’t shown up. We decided to look for her. I asked around amongst the business girls and received directions to her hooch which was, as I suspected, located in the maze of dark alleys behind the nightclub district. We pushed through the double doors of the King Club and stepped out into the street. After some searching through narrow pedestrian lanes and knocking on doors, we found the hooch the King Club business girls had described. It was a three-story building behind a high brick wall.
I pounded on the wooden gate. When a cleaning woman opened up, I explained who we were and who we wanted to talk to. The bent-over old woman nodded and shuffled off slowly and led us to Miss Kwon’s hooch on the top floor. She slid open the oiled-paper door. Darkness. Ernie stepped into the room and switched on the single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.
The room was just a ten-foot-by-twelve-foot square with flowered paper peeling off the walls and yellow vinyl pasted to the floor, empty except for a few scraps of newspaper crumpled at the bottom of a plastic armoire.
“Domang kasso,” the cleaning woman said. Miss Kwon had run away.
I was happy for the shy young woman. Maybe she could escape from this life, escape from doing things that she hated to do.
Ernie was less optimistic. “She’ll be back,” he said.
Cort was reassigned to other investigations; the usual ones that came up back in those days, thievery-of heating oil, food, medical supplies- anything that could alleviate the unrelenting poverty the Koreans were living in, being the most prevalent. At that time G.I. s weren’t allowed to wear civilian clothes. They were ordered to be in uniform at all times, on and off compound. In spring and summer, they wore puke green army fatigues. But in the autumn, when the leaves turned red and yellow and brown and the nights became longer and colder, G.I. s started to wear their woolen winter fatigues. The tailor shops in Itaewon specialized in sewing a silk lining inside them and, if a G.I. popped for the money, he enjoyed the luxury of wearing a very comfortable set of clothes-smooth on the inside, warm on the outside.
That was the type of uniform Moretti was wearing on the night of the Itaewon Massacre.
During his off-duty time, Cort searched the Korean open-air markets looking for Moretti’s uniform. It was a long shot, he knew, but what Cort was counting on was that in Korea at that time, nothing was wasted, not even a wool uniform stolen from a dead G.I.
Cort knew Moretti’s uniform size and, of course, Moretti would’ve had his name tag sewn onto the front of his fatigue blouse but that could’ve easily been removed. But what might’ve been overlooked by the person selling the garment would be the laundry tag, a strip of white cloth with the G.I.’s initials written on it, attached to every piece of clothing a G.I. owned so that during the massive laundry operation conducted each morning in the 8th Army barracks, each item could be identified. Even socks.
The old women dealing in salvaged clothing at the canvas lean-to stalls in the Itaewon Market must’ve thought Cort was a very careful shopper. In the weeks following the Itaewon massacre, Cort sorted through mountains of used clothing. Finally, his diligence paid off. He found a pair of wool pants with the silk lining ripped out, but with a small white patch sewn on the inside of the left cuff bearing the initials FRM.
Three spots of crusted blood had dried into the material.
Cort made a show of bargaining with the proprietress. In the end he paid too much for the garment but he didn’t mind. He immediately had the blood tested at the 121 Evacuation Hospital. The result was O-positive, the same blood type as Moretti. That didn’t prove it was his, not for sure, but it was indicative.
Cort indicated in his notes that this discovery gave him a certain sense of accomplishment. It also gave him a sense of sadness. Now hope of finding Moretti alive was all but gone.
Based on the new evidence, Cort asked for permission to upgrade the Moretti case from absent without leave to murder. Eighth Army thought it over but without a body, they wouldn’t upgrade the case. And furthermore, Cort was ordered to lay off. If he didn’t, his investigative specialty would be pulled from his personnel records and he’d be sent back to where he came from. The infantry. That meant walking the DMZ in three feet of snow in the freezing Korean winter.
In his notes, Cort speculated as to why 8th Army had refused. To him, the answer was obvious. For public relations reasons they wished the Itaewon Massacre had never happened. And if they ignored it, it would go away.
Cort saluted, said nothing, and, on his own time, continued to investigate the death of Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti.
The next morning, I sat in a teahouse in the Namyong-dong district of Seoul and watched as Doctor Yong In- ja studied the copies of the building plans I’d purchased from Seoul City Hall. She immediately absorbed the meaning of what I was trying to do.
“You compare these,” she said, pointing to the short stack of papers, “to the buildings today and see if you can find some place where they might have, a long time ago, buried Mori Di.”
“Exactly.”
“But they might’ve buried the body some other place.”
“Maybe not,” I said. I explained my theories of how crowded Seoul was in those days-and still is-and how digging a grave and dropping a body in it wouldn’t likely go unnoticed. And the culprits couldn’t take the chance that someone might spot them, report them, and an honest cop might be called. Or at least a cop who would then blackmail them for more money than they wanted to pay.
Doc Yong frowned at my implication that the Korean cops in those days were corrupt.
“Everybody was poor at that time,” she said.
I nodded in agreement. People were poor now too but, thankfully, not as desperate as they were then.
“Maybe they took the body to mountain,” Doc Yong said. By “mountain” she meant the countryside. Korea is a mountainous country and every square inch of arable land is either cultivated or used for human habitation. So when Koreans refer to the wilderness they often use the word mountain because only on craggy peaks does any sort of wilderness still remain.
“There were too many roadblocks in those days,” I replied. “Some by the Korean army, some by the American army. Everybody was looking for North Korean Communist agents. It would be too dangerous for the killers to rent a truck and take the body out of Seoul. If they were stopped by 8th Army MPs, they’d be toast.”
“Toast?”
“It means they’d be burned, like a slice of bread.”
She nodded, not quite sure what I meant. I also explained why I didn’t believe the Han River was a good place to dispose of a body. And no unidentified G.I. bodies, floating or otherwise, had been reported any time after the Itaewon Massacre. Cort had checked.
“So they bury him someplace safe,” she said.
“Exactly.”
