Korean man.’”
She sat up in bed and lit a cigarette. I made her sit by the open window.
“My mother was ashamed at first but then she thought about our future. Two women, alone in Korea, my father dead for three years. Our money was almost gone. I couldn’t go to the university and, if I didn’t go to the university, I would not be able to find a good Korean husband. So I married an American. So we could get to the States.”
I covered myself with the shaggy comforter.
“What’s his name?”
“My husband?”
“Yeah.”
“Parkington. Enoch Parkington. He sells houses in Cincinnati. After I got my green card, I worked for a little while, saved up some money, and flew to Hawaii.”
“Has he divorced you?”
“No. Not yet.”
“If he does, you’ll lose your visa and have to move back to Korea.”
She shrugged her slender shoulders and exhaled a huge puff of smoke. Moonlight glistened across her black hair.
“No sweat. If he divorces me. I will pay some guy in Hawaii to marry me, so I can keep my green card.”
She stubbed out the cigarette and walked into the small tile-covered bathroom. When she returned, we resumed.
6
Riley is one of those drunks who is superefficient during the day. His fatigues are neatly pressed, his hair spiffily greased back into an old fifties-style pompadour, and he never stops moving, pivoting his head around, the pencil behind his ear constantly threatening to fly off. Maybe he thinks he’s fooling people. Or maybe the concentration he puts into churning out all those neatly paper-clipped stacks of official correspondence helps him keep his mind off the rancid juices that are rotting his gut.
Back in the barracks he keeps a couple of bottles of Old Overwart in his locker, the cheapest stuff they sell in the Class VI store. He hits the vending machine in the hall for cans of Coke and usually by seven or eight in the evening he’s completely blotto. He has a girlfriend who shows up in the barracks from time to time, and he’s been known to stay up until as late as four o’clock in the morning, chasing her around the showers, trying to lather her down. I don’t know if he ever catches her.
Occasionally Ernie and I take him out, usually on the weekends, and try to get him to eat something, listen to music, have a couple of drinks without getting destroyed.
When we suggest dinner he acts as if we’re abusing him. I think he eats about one greasy cheeseburger a week. And even then he opens up the burger and grimaces as if he were fighting back vomit, and finally wolfs it down as if hoping that, if he’s fast enough, somehow his stomach won’t notice it. Skinny isn’t the word for him. He makes broom handles look robust.
Riley’s from Philly. And he’s always going on and on about the tough old Irish neighborhood he grew up in. He uses all the racist jargon: wops, spooks, spics, and a few others I’ve never heard of. He respects the Italians, though, because they’re rich. But for all his bluster, face to face, he’s about the sweetest guy you’d ever want to meet. When people come to him with a problem, he adopts them as if they were stray puppies, regardless of their race, creed, or national origins.
When I point out the inconsistency in his position he looks at me as if I’m mad. “Of course I don’t like spooks,” he’d say. Then I’d say, “Well, what about that time you helped Ricky Hairston get that compassionate reassignment when his mother got sick?” Riley would shrug. ‘That’s different. Ricky’s a fine human being. You just don’t understand, George.” And then he’d launch into a long, detailed story about how he and his buddies back in Philly used to kick slope ass. Just your typical American abroad.
Riley’s position in the CID Detachment was one of great responsibility. He was the personnel sergeant. As such, he was responsible for not only all the personnel actions for the people assigned to the detachment but he also had the additional duty of running the Admin Section. Which meant he had to log in and distribute all incoming messages and he was responsible for maintaining all classified documents. It was a hell of a job. But with Riley’s manic dose of daytime energy, he somehow handled it. His only help was Miss Kim.
Miss Kim was one of the finer acquisitions the CID had ever made. She was so fine that guys from other offices throughout the thirty- or forty-acre headquarters complex would make a special trip just to say good morning to her. Ernie always found time to sit on her desk and look at her for a while, and usually he offered her a stick of gum, which she gratefully accepted. For some reason she put up with him. She wasn’t so tolerant of Burrows and Slabem although she was always polite and efficient in her official dealings with them.
Maybe she resented Burrows’s birdlike gawking or Slabem’s sly little porcine eyes. I couldn’t tell. I have a policy with gorgeous women. I leave them alone. When business calls for me to deal with them, I don’t flirt, I just get the job done. That’s not to say I’m grim. When the time is appropriate, I smile and say good morning or good evening or whatever. But I don’t harass them. I don’t believe in it. I know I wouldn’t like fending off a bunch of clumsy oafs all day, not on the pay Miss Kim receives. Besides, if a woman likes you, she’ll let you know. No sense pressuring her.
The way she reacted to Ernie added a somewhat demented corollary to my theory. He didn’t speak to her much at all, he didn’t touch her, and he didn’t pressure her in any way. He just stared at her, with pure unadulterated appreciation. Miss Kim seemed to come alive under his attention, like one of those plants that blooms when you think good thoughts at it. Ernie’s version of charm.
Riley treated her as a colleague. A full partner in the mission they had to accomplish. During working hours he didn’t seem to notice her attractiveness, only her mind. When we mentioned to him that he was lucky to be working with such a fox all day, he nodded agreement. But it was an intellectual acknowledgement, not visceral. A woman just didn’t have all that much appeal to him if he couldn’t lather her down and chase her around the latrine.
‘Top’s been looking for you guys,” Riley said, as we sauntered in.
“Isn’t he always?”
“It’s about this KPA bullshit again.”
Ernie wandered over to Miss Kim’s desk. She stopped typing and looked up, smiling. He sat down on the edge of the desk and looked at her. Then he offered her a breath mint. She accepted it, smiled, and turned back to her typing. Ernie just stayed there, staring at her. Sometimes I wondered if they weren’t autistic.
Riley shuffled through some papers and handed me one.
“It’s one of those guys from KPA. He put in this written complaint and now he wants to talk to the first sergeant. Top wants you and Ernie to sit in.”
“He’s here now?”
“Yeah. His appointment’s in ten minutes.”
I sat down to read the complaint. The Korean Procurement Agency is the civilian arm of the Eighth Army that uses American taxpayer money to buy local goods and services. Stuff that we were not going to go to the trouble of shipping over. Anything from a head of lettuce to a new command bunker extending three stories down into the ground. It was a huge operation with millions of dollars’ worth of contracts flowing through it every year. Most of the monitoring was done by accountants sent out by the Army Auditing Agency, but corruption and influence peddling was not always reflected in the credit and debit ledgers.
The guy who was making the complaint was an American, of course, hired from the States, and judging from his manic drive to get everything straightened out, he probably was on his first tour in the Far East.
I figured Top mainly wanted Ernie and me in the office as witnesses, so the guy wouldn’t make any accusations against him later. Most of this sort of work was done by Burrows and Slabem, but they were out at the Yongsan District Police Headquarters, monitoring the ROK activities on the Pak Ok-suk murder case. They were the experts at handling this KPA kind of situation. Not me and Ernie.
