“In the buildings they own.”
“They didn’t own the buildings on paper but they controlled them.”
“Same-same,” she said.
I agreed. “Same-same.”
In her agitation, Doc Yong was stooping to using business-girl slang. It figured she’d pick some up, working with them all the time. Probably she had picked it up unconsciously, what with the empathy she felt for those downtrodden women.
I’d already told Doc Yong about Miss Kwon packing up and leaving Itaewon. She took the news stoically but asked me to continue to check out the details of the complaint that had been filed against the young woman. I promised her I would.
She riffled through the photocopies of the old building plans, as if airing them out, and then slid the pile back to me.
“So where are you going to look?”
“Moretti’s headquarters,” I said, pointing on the drawing to the southwest corner of what is now the basement of the Grand Ole Opry Club. “Here. In the basement, where they make the beer deliveries.”
I looked into her black eyes. I longed to reach out and take her hand in mine but that would be inappropriate in this formal setting. Instead, I cleared my throat and said, “On your day off, when you’re not working, can I see you? We could go somewhere. We could talk.”
At first Doc Yong seemed puzzled, as if she was having trouble translating my words, mentally, from English into Korean. And then, once my full meaning sank in, she looked alarmed. Regaining control of herself, she smiled.
“That’s very nice of you,” she replied. “But I’ve been very busy.”
“We can go where you feel comfortable,” I said. “On the compound, if you like.”
I knew that being seen in public with a foreigner was not what most respectable Korean women wanted. On 8th Army compound we’d be away, if not from all gossips, at least from the Korean ones. She hesitated, thinking things over.
“Maybe some day,” she said finally. “But not now. Many things are happening.”
The disappointment knotted in my gut. I hoped my face showed nothing.
“When things quiet down,” she said, smiling.
But we both knew that in Itaewon things never quiet down.
The Yongsan Compound Facilities Command is located in a cement-walled building with Roman pillars out front that looks vaguely like the home of an old southern cotton plantation owner. However, it was built by the Japanese Imperial Army during the three-and-a-half decades after 1910 when they forcibly colonized what had been the Kingdom of Korea. The 8th Army Equal Employment Opportunity Office was one of the many bureaucracies housed here.
When Ernie and I walked into the EEO Office, a black female soldier at the front studying some paperwork didn’t bother to look up to greet us and ask, “Can I help you?” She kept her eyes glued to the paperwork.
She was an attractive young woman, a private first class. Her name tag said Wallings. Her shoulders were tense and she clutched the paperwork as if she were afraid it might make a break for freedom.
“Is Sergeant Hilliard in?” I asked.
She didn’t look up. Instead she said, “Who wants to know?” Racial tension was high in the early seventies in the army just as it was throughout American society.
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 naive 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 Sueno?”
“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.
