Innocent people could get hurt. But what choice did I have? Doc Yong was being held hostage I needed this information to get close to Snake. Once on the inside, Ernie and I would attack. Our backup? Captain Kim.
Ernie crossed a ridge and the city of Seoul lay spread before us.
Far on the other side of the valley, beyond a range of hills, a red sun set slowly into the Yellow Sea. Seoul itself was bathed in a darkening blue light. Streetlights twinkled on, as did lamps in the windows of hotels and high rises downtown. And then, more abundantly, millions of small lights in homes and storefront businesses blinked to life and spread out like a great spangled fan radiating from Namsan Mountain in the middle of the shining city.
Even Ernie seemed impressed. And excited. Going downhill, he must’ve been exceeding the speed limit by about twenty kilometers.
A front moved in from the Yellow Sea, sliding over the red-tinged hills in the distance. Clouds of billowing gray enveloped the peaks and crept toward Seoul, like a great angry beast ready to devour everything in its path. Lightning flashed. Thunder cracked. Seoul shuddered beneath the onslaught.
Ernie chuckled to himself as he drove down the narrow highway.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Just thinking about somebody.”
“Who?”
“Somebody sweet. Somebody I met last night.”
“On compound?”
Ernie twisted his head slightly and gave me a sly look, as if to say, “Are you out of your mind?”
“You went off compound last night,” I said.
Ernie shrugged and then smiled again. “Not to Itaewon,” he told me. “I knew the place would be crawling with MP patrols.”
It was.
“But I got to thinking about Jessica Tidwell.”
Oh, oh. That’s when I started holding my breath.
“I got to thinking,” Ernie continued, “about the deal that Paco Bernal had set up. He had to be working with somebody powerful to come up with a thousand dollars worth of product, no matter what the product was. And then he has Jessica steal the greenbacks from her dad and Paco takes the money out to the ville and the first thing that happens to him is he’s robbed.”
I nodded. So far we knew all this.
“So I asked myself,” Ernie said, “‘how often are G.I. s robbed in Itaewon?’ Not often. G.I. s might end up with no money but it’s usually through trickery, or more often seduction. Not out-and-out robbery. The Koreans don’t work that way. Not usually. Of course somebody must’ve known that Paco had that much money. We’ve been sort of assuming that he’d flashed the wad to a business girl or he’d bragged about the money to the wrong person but we don’t know for sure that’s what happened. And I got to thinking that whoever helped Paco set up the deal in the first place was the most likely candidate for knowing he had the cash and then sending some thugs over to take it from him.”
Ernie glanced over at me. I nodded and turned my eyes back to an ox-drawn cart on the side of the highway. At the last moment, Ernie swerved around it.
“So I thought,” Ernie said, “ ‘who’s powerful enough to set all this up?’ Obviously, one of the Seven Dragons could pull it off. Which one? Any of them, but do circumstances point to any one in particular? And then I remembered that it was Horsehead who’d shown up Johnny-on-the-spot and whisked Jessica Tidwell away from the White Crane Hotel.”
I remembered, all too well.
“So,” Ernie said, “I decided to do a little investigating. You remember Jenny over at the 007 Club?”
I nodded. Ernie was referring to a cocktail waitresses he’d once spent some time with.
“She works over at the Salon Bar in Myong-dong now so I jumped in a cab and rode downtown to talk to her,” Ernie told me. “I remembered her telling me once about Horsehead’s second wife.”
His mistress.
“So I asked her how the second wife was doing now that Horsehead was dead and Jenny told me that she was still working over at the Tower Hotel nightclub. So I waved down another cab and went over there.”
During all this travel, Ernie would not have had to worry about American MPs. They only patrol Itaewon and he was miles from there.
“Her name is Hei-myong,” Ernie said, “and she was all teary-eyed over Horsehead and asked me a lot of details about his death that she claimed the Korean National Police were withholding information from her. So I made a lot of stuff up, hoping I’d make her feel better.”
I knew that over the next ridge of hills, we’d start to encounter the heavier traffic leading into Seoul; I hoped Ernie would hurry up with his story.
“Anyway,” Ernie said, “she told me where I could find Jessica Tidwell.”
My jaw dropped. I stared at him.
“You talked to her?”
Ernie grinned and nodded his head.
He kept smiling and I said, “You son of a bitch.”
He shrugged, still grinning.
“You didn’t do anything you shouldn’t, did you?”
Ernie looked offended. “Me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“Of course not.”
“So what did you do?”
“She had a room in one of those Western-style hotels in Hannam-dong that aren’t fancy enough to be called ‘tourist hotels’ but are a step up from a yoguan.” I knew the ones he meant; they were used mostly for sexual encounters. “Horsehead had set her up in a room but she was bored and tired of sitting there, and tired of smoking Turtleboat cigarettes.” A Korean brand.
“So she was happy to see you?”
“Not hardly. She took the bayonet to me.”
The same one Paco had almost killed Ernie with.
“Yeah. After I took it away from her and slapped her a couple of times, she settled down. We talked. She asked if I had any word on Paco and I told her that, as far as I knew, his condition hadn’t changed since she’d made her visit to the 121.” I waited while Ernie savored the memory. “So after letting her rant for a while, about you not having to shoot him and all, I told her she was under arrest.”
“How’d she take it?”
“I reached around to lock a handcuff on one of her wrists but she stood up and turned toward me and leaned into me and then she started crying.” Ernie shrugged. “You know, I sort of felt sorry for the kid and she was leaning into me and pressing her face against my chest and then she started breathing on my neck and…”
“You got a hard-on.”
Ernie shrugged.
“She’s just a kid,” I told him. “Seventeen years old. Didn’t your conscience bother you?”
“Seventeen years old but built like she’s twenty-five. Even Jiminy Cricket would’ve had a woody.”
“Oh, shit, Ernie,” I said. “Statutory rape. Are you out of your mind?”
“I was at the time,” he said, “until she was kind enough to bring me back to my senses.”
“How’d she do that?”
“You’re not going to tell anybody, are you?” Ernie was more embarrassed about whatever he was preparing to tell me than he was about admitting that he was fully prepared to have sexual relations with a minor.
“I won’t tell anybody,” I told him.
Ernie turned away, took a deep breath, and said, “She kneed me in the balls.”
I groaned. “And while you were bent over, holding onto yourself, she ran.”
“And a lot faster than I would’ve expected.”
“She took the bayonet with her?”
“That and her purse. I think she had it all planned from the minute I walked in the door.”
