she was done, I felt completely clean but my skin flamed red. She rinsed me off, dried me, and then oiled me with some sort of lotion. After slipping my clothes back on, I sat in the waiting room chatting with the bathhouse women, sipping on a can of cold guava juice. Ernie took a lot longer than I did. More than an hour longer. When he finally emerged he looked, for once in his life, subdued. And as limp as a freshly washed rag.
There was less than an hour left until the midnight curfew. We made our way back to the Grand Ole Opry Club and waited out front, watching as the band loaded their equipment onto a flatbed truck.
Kimchee Kitty, the lead singer for the Kimchee Kowboys emerged. Her lush hair was piled high atop her head and she was wrapped in a long cloth coat with a fur collar that she held tightly beneath the soft flesh of her face. Our eyes met and she smiled at me. I almost asked for her autograph but decided at the last minute not to. Too shy.
Ernie mingled with the half-looped retirees in the street who’d stayed until the end of the show. I sauntered around inside and casually listened to the conversations of the bartender and the waitresses. There was no indication that anyone had noticed the hole Ernie and I had knocked in the brick wall of the basement. This was good. It meant we’d have time to obtain our search warrant and retrieve the bones of Mori Di and any still existing evidence of who had murdered him.
The truck carrying the Kimchee Kowboys had departed and most of the customers had left when I emerged from the club. A couple of business girls were tugging on Ernie’s sleeve. They weren’t propositioning him, not this time. Instead there was terror in their eyes.
One of them said, “You CID, right?”
“Right,” he answered. No sense trying to keep it a secret. Everyone in the ville knew anyway.
“You go King Club,” she said. “Bali bali.” Quickly.
“Why?” Ernie asked.
“You look at roof. Some yoboseiyo up there.”
In Korean, yoboseiyo means “hello.” In G.I. slang, it means a person, usually a Korean person.
Ernie didn’t bother to question them further. He started to run, swerving left on Hooker Hill, heading for the King Club. I followed him.
A crowd had gathered in front of the King Club.
People were looking up, pointing, and that’s when I saw her. She wore a short skirt, its hemline above her knees and I noticed that her calves were round and sturdy. Her hair was cropped short, like a middle-school girl’s but shaggier. This was a common cut amongst the business girls of Itaewon since many of them had left school only weeks-or days-before starting work here.
Her blouse, long-sleeved and white, was made of a flimsy material that billowed in the cold wind blowing across the roof of the King Club. She had already climbed over the parapet and stood with the heels of her flat shoes dug into a ledge that was only three or four inches wide. Her arms were spread-eagled, holding onto drainpipes on either side of her.
“It’s Miss Kwon,” I said to Ernie.
“Who?” Ernie had never met her.
“The one Hilliard complained about.”
Ernie’s head swiveled. “I thought she went home.”
“Apparently,” I said, “she’s back.”
I ran through the entryway of the King Club, still clutching my winter jacket tightly around my waist, wishing like hell I didn’t have a mallet and chisel stuck inside my belt. The main ballroom was empty, no band, no G.I. s, no business girls. They were all out on the street gawking up at the suicidal Miss Kwon. Some of the G.I. s were already chanting, “Jump!” in mocking voices as if they were kidding. But I knew they weren’t kidding. That’s what they wanted her to do.
I shoved through the back door, found the steps, and climbed. Ernie was right behind me. We reached the top floor and spotted a wooden ladder at the end of the hall that had been pulled down from the roof. We climbed as fast as we could. On the roof I found Mrs. Bei, the manager of the King Club. Standing near her was a young man in black slacks, white shirt and bow tie-her bartender-and three or four waitresses. They all clutched the edge of the parapet, looking down, shouting at the person who clung to the outside of the wall. One elderly man, the janitor, stood farther away, leaning over the edge of the roof, staring at Miss Kwon with an embarrassed smile on his face.
I took off my jacket, dropped the chisel and mallet atop it, and peered over the edge of the roof.
I was only ten feet from Miss Kwon but she wasn’t looking my way. She was staring down at the street below, perspiration pouring off the soft cheeks of her sweet face. I turned and grabbed Mrs. Bei.
“She come back,” Mrs Bei said in English. “Family no want. They need money. Snake say she gotta sleep with any G.I. She no want.”
Ordering Miss Kwon to spend the night with Hilliard was the only way for Snake, the owner of the King Club, to avoid having Hilliard press his complaint. Since the race riot out here less than two years ago-white American G.I. s fighting black American G.I. s-8th Army was phobic about even the slightest appearance of racial conflict. That riot had hit the Stateside newspapers and caused the 8th Army commander to be relieved. The current commander wanted no repeat. To keep Hilliard from raising a stink there was an even chance that the 8th Army honchos would put Snake’s nightclub off-limits. Fifty-fifty wasn’t good enough odds for Miss Kwon to maintain her personal moral standards. She had to give it up.
Ernie was ready to climb over the parapet.
“Hold it,” I told him. “Even if you grab her, she could fall and pull you over with her.”
“We gotta do something.”
That was Ernie. Without thinking, he’d already decided that somebody he didn’t know had to be saved, even at the risk of his own life. But Agent Ernie Bascom never calculated risk. He just did what seemed right at the time.
I thought of speaking to Miss Kwon in Korean, but I was worried that just the voice of an American G.I. might cause her to jump. Mrs. Bei kept up a steady, soothing, harangue and it must’ve been doing some good because Miss Kwon hadn’t jumped yet.
Finally, four stories below us, two uniformed Korean cops made their way through the crowd. They looked up, saw Miss Kwon on the edge of the roof of the King Club and spoke together rapidly. One of them took off in the direction of the KNP station. The other moved the crowd back, away from Miss Kwon’s probable point of impact.
Mrs. Bei said something about respecting one’s parents.
This made Miss Kwon look away from the street below. She stared directly at us. “My parents want me to make money,” she said in Korean. “That’s all I’m good for. No better than a cow. They hate me.”
“They don’t hate you,” Mrs. Bei replied. “They are poor. They have no choice.”
“Narul miyo!” Miss Kwon shouted. They hate me!
Instinctively, Mrs. Bei reached out to the girl and Miss Kwon flinched. One of her heels slipped off the ledge. She started to fall forward but her grip on the drainpipes held her back. Still, within seconds, the added weight made one of the pipes groan and then bend. Miss Kwon’s right hand lost its grip.
With one heel still on the ledge and her left hand still gripping one of the drainpipes, Miss Kwon’s right foot swung out into the open air in a wide arc. The movement was slow and graceful and as she rotated, the crowd below, involuntarily, let out a loud gasp. The gasp coincided with Miss Kwon’s pirouette and then stopped abruptly when Miss Kwon slammed face first into the wall to her left. Scrabbling with her right foot, she managed to gain another toehold and with her right hand she clutched an outcropping of brick. Now she clung to the wall, facing dirty mortar, looking as if she were hugging the indifferent brick edifice.
I moved to my left and stared down at her.
Her soft check was pressed up against the wall. The cheek was wet with moisture. I could see her features clearly because directly below red and blue neon flickered: the King Club sign. Beyond the glow, I spotted a familiar figure shoving her way through the gawking crowd.
“Jom kanman,” I told Miss Kwon in Korean. Wait a moment. “A friend of yours is on the way.” She seemed to be listening, so I continued. “Doctor Yong In-ja. She’ll be here any second.”
Miss Kwon hugged the building tighter.
Doc Yong reached the roof and approached me as if swimming through moonlight. Her face was contorted in
