switched on the light they were cursing and laughing. They grabbed crates of beer and carried them upstairs, making two trips, and then they switched off the light and left us alone in the dark. Evidently, they weren’t concerned about the padlock and they made no effort to lock the outside door. It figured that on a busy night they’d just as soon leave the door open. When the Kimchee Kowboys started up again, Ernie and I resumed hammering.
After a few minutes, the opening wasn’t quite as large as I wanted but it was large enough. Besides, we were both tired of this bone-jarring work. Ernie switched on his flashlight and pointed it into the hole. With his open palm, he invited me to enter. I stuck my head in as far as I could, twisting my neck as I did so. My shoulders stopped my progress.
“Twist the flashlight over here,” I said.
Ernie tried but I could only make out the wall on the far end of the narrow opening. Nothing to be seen. I needed more room to maneuver.
We started hammering again. After three more songs, we’d removed four more bricks and I tried again. This time, I could just barely squeeze my shoulders in. Ernie stuck his forearm in beneath my chest and twisted his flashlight around at my command.
“Hold it there,” I said. He did. “Twist it down farther.” Ernie complied. The light swept slowly across ancient dust.
That’s when I saw him. A scream started in my throat but somehow, before it erupted, I held it back. I pulled my head out of the opening, breathing heavily.
“What’s wrong?” Ernie asked.
I just pointed my thumb at the wall. He leaned past me and stuck his head inside all the way up to his shoulders. Within seconds, he’d pulled out again too.
Not talking, we loosened a few more bricks. Then, with enough space to stick my upper torso in and my forearm, I made a more careful examination and then grabbed what I wanted. I held it in my open palm. In the light of the flashlight, Ernie squinted, reading the embossed print. Tears came to his eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen Ernie weep-about anything. Angrily, with dirty knuckles, he rubbed the moisture out of his eyes.
It was a dog tag. The metal had rusted a reddish brown but the imprinted name was clear enough: Moretti, Florencio R. The blood type too: O-posi tive. And the religious preference: Roman Catholic.
As I’d promised Aunite Mee and Miss Kwon and Doc Yong, I’d found Mori Di.
I was sure it was him. The tattered remains of a uniform and even combat boots lay near the skeleton. The garment Cort had bought over twenty years ago in the Itaewon Market must have been amongst Moretti’s extra clothing stuffed into his duffle bag, not the uniform he was wearing. Whoever had done this hadn’t stripped him. Circling the still intact neck bones was a stainless steel chain looped through one dog tag and a smaller chain looped through a second dog tag. There was a reason for this duplication. The dog tag on the big chain, according to army policy, would be left with the corpse. The other dog tag, the one on the smaller chain, would be collected by soldiers of the body recovery unit to make a complete accounting of casualties. That’s the one I unfastened, the small chain, the one the body recovery unit normally would collect when cleaning up after a battle.
All the while, Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti was grinning at me. At least his skull was. It sat in the dust as if it had been waiting a long time and now it was happy that someone had finally stumbled into this tiny brick ossuary. By the light of Ernie’s flashlight, I studied the bones. I even reached in and touched one of them, turning it this way and that in the harsh beam of the flashlight, making sure that I wasn’t imagining what had jumped out at me when I first saw the skeleton.
The bones had been sliced with what appeared to be a sharp-edged knife. Not everywhere. Only on the fingers and the toes, as if someone had purposely tormented Moretti while he was still alive. One of the fingers, the large middle finger, was not only sliced but it had been forced backward so far that it had finally snapped between the big middle knuckle and the joint where the finger joined the hand. Even now, gazing at the wound some twenty years after the fact, I winced.
And then I studied the tip of another finger. It appeared discolored. I lifted the bone into the beam of the flashlight. No doubt. The tip of the bone was darker than the rest of the skeleton, as if it had been singed by fire. The fingertips are the most sensitive parts of the human body. Moretti’s fingertip, at least one of them, had been burnt off.
When the Seven Dragons spirited him away from the scene of the original attack on the night of the Itaewon Massacre, they’d hidden him from the American MPs and later nursed him back to-if not health-consciousness. Then they’d begun questioning Moretti as to the whereabouts of the gold and silver and ancient family heirlooms that the residents of Itaewon had left in his safekeeping. Maybe Moretti thought the MPs would rescue him any minute. Maybe he thought that the Seven Dragons were a bunch of punks and he could bluff them. Whatever he thought, he resisted. And when the answers weren’t forthcoming, the Seven Dragons had tortured him. How long had it lasted? How long had it taken for Mori Di to break? I would estimate quite a while. Maybe even a few days. But as bad as the torture was, there was something else that bothered me even more.
Handcuffs, laying in the dirt near Moretti’s hands. G.I. issue. I recognized them because exactly the same type of metal cuffs were still in use today. And near his neck, dried wads of cotton and a narrow cloth sash. A gag.
Why would anyone gag a dead man?
The answer: they wouldn’t.
My conclusion seemed inescapable. So far, I hadn’t discussed it, even with Ernie, but all the evidence pointed toward one thing. Once the Seven Dragons tortured Moretti and he’d either told him where he’d hidden the valuables-or the Seven Dragons had discovered the hiding place on their own-they had no further use for Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti. He was a liability. They couldn’t let him go free. And it wouldn’t have been easy to transport him anywhere, not in a city swarming with military patrols. So they decided to hide him in the basement of the Grand Ole Opry Club. In this narrow opening not much larger than a coffin. And once they had him inside, handcuffed and gagged, they bricked the opening closed.
Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti, a man who’d tried to help the impoverished people of Itaewon, had watched the Seven Dragons do their work. He’d watched a gang of punk gangsters wall him up, brick by brick, until the final glimmer of light was covered by mortar.
He could scream inside his little brick tomb but no one could’ve heard those screams, except himself.
When I marched alone into the main ballroom of the Grand Ole Opry Club, I still wore my winter jacket with the tools stuck into the inner pockets, making me feel twenty pounds heavier than I actually was. I received some funny looks from the old retirees. It was the Korean employees I was most worried about. But none of them, neither bartenders nor waitresses, stopped their work to pay any attention to me.
I headed straight for the door and pushed through out into the fresh air of the cold Korean night.
A few minutes later, Ernie popped out after me. We hurried down the street.
We’d replaced all the bricks and repositioned the stacked cases of beer in the basement as best we could, to camouflage our activities. I hoped this would give us a couple of days before someone discovered what we’d done. Once someone took the time to look, it would be obvious as to what had happened. Would one of the Korean employees investigate? I was hoping that, what with the place being frantically busy, they wouldn’t notice the two guys who’d walked in, disappeared for an hour and a half or so, and then walked back out. That they’d just write off our behavior as the weirdness that they were used to in American G.I. s.
Still, we didn’t have much time until someone discovered that we’d broken through the brick wall in the storeroom. Before then, somehow, I had to convince 8th Army to wrangle us a search warrant so we could take full advantage of the evidence we’d discovered. We needed it to make our activities retrospectively legal.
I was filthy. So was Ernie. Brick dust salted my hair. It was still early, only half past eight, so we headed toward the far side of the nightclub district and entered an alley near the open-air Itaewon Market. The stalls were dark and shuttered at this hour, canvas flapping in the cold evening breeze. Hidden in a dark alley, lit only by a half-dozen green bulbs, lurked the last Korean bathhouse still open. At the entranceway, I plopped down a five thousand won note-about ten bucks-and the proprietress smiled a toothy grin, happy for the unexpected business.
The middle-aged woman assigned to scrub my hair clawed with the ferociousness of a lioness. Then she slipped her hand into a coarse red mitten and started in on my back. It felt as if she were systematically peeling my flesh. Oily pellets of black dirt emerged from every pore of my skin, like tiny insects searching for light. By the time
