“Yes.”
Auntie Mee reached into the folds of her thick red robe and pulled out a yellowed piece of paper. She handed it to me. I unfolded it. There, written in hangul script, were two words.
“I wrote it down,” Auntie Mee said, “in the middle of the night, while he was bothering me.”
“What was he doing?”
“Touching me,” she said, squirming beneath her robe. “Everywhere.”
I stared at her, keeping straight-faced, wondering if she was serious. She was. So were Doc Yong and Miss Kwon. They accepted her statement as if it were the most natural thing in the world. An American G.I. in bed with a Korean woman, what else would he do?
By guttering candlelight, I read the two words. The first was mori. This can mean either “head” or “hair” in the Korean language. The next word was di. This meant nothing in Korean. Perhaps the spirit was referring to the letter d as in the English alphabet.
“Does this name have any meaning?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m asking you,” Auntie Mee replied. “He’s an American; that’s his name. I thought you would understand.”
“There’s no such name as Mori Di. And no such word in English.”
I gazed at the script again and then held the paper up to the flickering candlelight, turning it over to make sure I hadn’t missed something. Maybe it was the absurdity of the situation or maybe I was just peeved at Auntie Mee’s sense of assurance, but I felt impish.
“Is the American G.I. here now?”
“No. Not now.”
“Could you call him?”
“Why?”
“I have questions for him.”
“Never question the dead,” she said. “What they want you to know, they will tell you.”
“You asked him his name.”
“Yes. And he didn’t answer me until he was good and ready.”
I turned to Doc Yong. My incredulity must’ve shown on my face. She nodded, encouraging me to accept the assignment, no matter how odd I thought it might be.
Auntie Mee sensed my hesitancy. “The reason Miss Kwon was upset a few minutes ago, and why Doctor Yong was angry on her behalf, is that they don’t like bad news about the future. But the fault doesn’t lie with me! It lies with the codex and with Mori Di.”
“The codex?”
“Yes. This.” She pointed to the pile of tattered pages. Now I could make out the title on the front page. Chom, which means “fortune-telling” or “divination”, was the first word. The second character was sketched in eleven precisely printed strokes. I didn’t recognize the character but I committed the lines to memory and made a mental note to look it up later. Ki was the last word, an ideograph meaning “narrative” or “account.”
“What does Miss Kwon have to do with any of this?” I asked.
Auntie Mee shrugged again. “Who’s to say? The fates of the living, and sometimes the dead, are intertwined in mysterious ways. If the bones of Mori Di are not found soon, and consecrated in a holy shrine then, unfortunately, Miss Kwon will meet an unpleasant fate.”
“What sort of fate?”
“Not good. Most likely she’ll die.”
This enraged Doc Yong. She leapt out of her crouch, stomped across the wood-slat floor and kicked the table in front of Auntie Mee. Candle and codex and votive urn flew straight up in the air. Before they landed, Doc Yong grabbed a chunk of the fortune teller’s thick black hair and yanked as if she wanted to rip it out of her skull. The two women grappled, screeching, and throwing ineffectual punches, but Doc Yong wouldn’t let go of her grip on Auntie Mee’s hair.
I bulled my way between the two women, trying to break it up. Doc Yong cursed like a Korean sailor. As the three of us struggled, Miss Kwon curled into a ball in her dark corner, her shoulders heaving. From what I could understand between screams, Doc Yong was telling Auntie Mee that she shouldn’t have brought Miss Kwon into this; she shouldn’t have frightened her by letting her know that if I failed in my mission to find Mori Di-or if I refused to accept the mission-Miss Kwon would die.
Auntie Mee, for her part, said that it wasn’t up to her. It was foreordained by the codex.
Finally, I broke them apart. Doc Yong was still fuming. Auntie Mee straightened her robe, acting like a queen who’d been rudely offended.
Once they calmed down, Doc Yong returned to the whimpering Miss Kwon, comforting her, cooing, apologizing. Auntie Mee relit a couple of candles that had sputtered out, repinned stray hairs in her coiffure, tidied up her table and codex, and resumed her place of power in the center of the room.
“Mori Di,” she told me, pointing at my nose, exasperated. “You find?” she asked. “No find?”
I glanced at Doc Yong. She was still angry but, reluctantly, she nodded.
Maybe it was Doc Yong’s encouragement. Maybe it was the curiosity that had been aroused in me, both by the passion of these two women and by the oddness of the assignment. Maybe it was the pitiful whimpers of Miss Kwon who still huddled in her dark corner. Maybe it was the nagging worry that maybe-just maybe-the fortune teller was correct and Miss Kwon would die if I didn’t find Mori Di’s sbones. But more likely my decision was based upon a feeling of kinship with a man Auntie Mee called Mori Di, a young American who’d traveled halfway around the world to a country he’d probably never heard of before and somehow, for some reason lost now to time, had met a cruel fate.
I found myself turning back to Auntie Mee and telling her, “I’ll do what I can.”
Doc Yong, still breathing heavily, hugged Miss Kwon, stared directly into my eyes, and smiled her fabulous smile.
2
“Your black-market stats are for shit,” Staff Sergeant Riley growled.
He tossed a printout to Ernie Bascom, my partner, who caught it on the fly.
“So what else is new?” Ernie replied and tossed the printout into the trash.
“You’d better retrieve that,” Riley said. “The First Shirt has a case of the ass and later this morning he’s going to be reviewing your lack of performance.”
“Screw the First Shirt.” Ernie grabbed Riley’s issue of today’s Pacific Stars and Stripes and snapped the pages open.
The three of us sat in the headquarters of the 8th United States Army Criminal Investigation Detachment on the first floor of Building 306-A on Yongsan Compound Main Post. Riley, his skeletal body lost in the starched folds of his khaki uniform, glared at Ernie. As the Admin NCO, it was Riley’s job to make sure that our statistics looked good in the reports that wound their way up the labyrinthine corridors of 8th Imperial Army. But in the day-to-day grind of criminal investigation, not everything can be quantified. I had little patience for Riley’s reports. Ernie had none.
Miss Kim, the statuesque Admin secretary, did her best to ignore the three of us. She pecked away at her hangul typewriter, theoretically translating documents from English to Korean. Actually, I believed most of her attention was on Ernie. They’d been close once but after reading some of my reports, which often included Ernie’s dealings with the fair sex, she’d begun to pull away from him.
He didn’t seem to mind. Ernie Bascom was just over six feet tall, slender, with short sandy blond hair and green eyes behind round-lensed glasses and for some reason he drove women mad. I’m not sure why. I could only guess that it was because he was unpredictable; no woman ever knew if he was going to take a flying leap off a fast moving train or kneel and present her with a bouquet of spring roses. Ernie kept women guessing and once he had them confused he took his gratification where he found it.
Miss Kim had realized this and the realization made her furious at both of us. I tried to mollify her by being
