“The provost marshal, Colonel Stoneheart, has already gotten the word from the commanding general. Pull out all the stops. Take all needed investigators off all other details, get to the bottom of this murder, and bring the culprit to justice. ASAP.”
The first sergeant set the paperwork down, positioned it perfectly, and looked at us.
“I know I’ve been on you guys lately, what with keeping you on the black-market detail and keeping the pressure on to get as many arrests as possible, but that’s what the colonel wanted. And you’ve got to remember some of the shit you’ve gotten into before, like overstepping your jurisdiction. You, Sueсo.” The first sergeant pointed his finger at me.
“We got that all cleared up, Top.”
He shook his head at the memory. “But, anyway, it’s over. The Army likes things to proceed in orderly fashion. You need to remember that. You, too, Bascom.”
The first sergeant put his big hands flat on the desk. “Still, after all is said and done, I’ve got to admit that you two are the best ville rats I’ve got. Nobody can go out there, work with the Koreans, and come back with the goods like you guys.”
A compliment, the first one in months. And it obviously hurt him to say it, judging from his rictus grin. He was setting us up for a big one.
‘That’s why I’ve called you into this one. I need you to get out there and find out all you can about this Miss Pak Ok-suk. Who she knew, what she was up to, and how she ended up the way she did. l’m taking you off the black-market detail effective immediately. You can consider yourselves on this case twenty-four hours a day. Just report back to the office every morning prior to zero eight hundred hours. You got that?”
“What about our expense account?” Ernie said.
“Sixty dollars a month.”
“Make it a hundred.”
The first sergeant gazed at Ernie for a moment and then at me.
“Okay. But I want results. And I want ’em fast. And if I find that you’re out there screwing off on me, you’ll be cleaning grease traps from here to Pusan.”
We lifted ourselves out of our chairs and strode out into the hallway.
Ernie stopped in the Admin Section to shoot the breeze with Miss Kim, the fine-looking secretary. I found Riley, the CID Detachment’s personnel sergeant, hair greased back, working away frantically on a pile of paperwork.
“So what’s the deal, Riley?”
He looked up at me through thick square glasses. “It’s hitting the fan, George. Find out who dorked that girl and you’ll be a hero.”
“And if I don’t?”
Riley jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Back to the DMZ.”
“I’ve walked the line before.”
“Yeah,” he said, disinterested.
Ernie and I walked out into the cold wind of Seoul. Snow crunched beneath our feet, left over from the off- and-on fall we had had the night before. We jumped into the old motor-pool jeep and Ernie brought it coughing to life.
“Where to, pal?” he said.
“Where else?” I said. “Itaewon. The home of my fevered dreams.”
They say that Seoul is not as cold as other parts of Korea. Particularly not as cold as up north in the hills near the Demilitarized Zone or down south in the flat, unprotected plains of Taegu. But it’s cold enough. The Chosen peninsula has all four seasons; the summer almost tropical, the spring and autumn achingly beautiful. This was a big change for me. I was used to the flat, unrelenting sunshine of East Los Angeles, with the only variable being the thickness of the smog layer.
The streets I grew up on were mean but they never became part of me. Primarily because I kept moving. From one foster home to another. My mother died when I was two. Some people say she was killed. And then my father disappeared into Mexico, the ancient land whence he had come.
I don’t know the truth of how my mother died or why my father disappeared. As a child I had no choice but to accept it, and just before I was scheduled to graduate from high school, I joined the Army. I’ve thought a few times since then of going back, talking to some of my cousins and my uncles and aunts scattered around the city. After all, I’m a trained investigator now, but I’ve been busy and I’ve been overseas and maybe you could say that I’m afraid to find out the truth.
The foster homes I lived in were grim, a child always knows when he’s not wanted, but there was one bright spot. Mrs. Aaronson, one of my foster mothers and the one I lived with the longest, took a special interest in my schoolwork when she realized that the math and reading weren’t sinking in. She showed me what they really are- puzzles. She made sure I brought my books home and made sure I did some homework, whether it was assigned or not, every night. And after a while she didn’t have to check very close because the thrill of surprising the teachers and my fellow students with a perfect test score became my incentive to work on my own.
It didn’t last long, though. After I left Mrs. Aaronson, I climbed into the rebellious shell of all adolescents, and soon I was looking for a way out of high school other than the car washes or factories that swallowed whole legions of Mexican-American kids.
I dropped out and joined the Army. My high test scores landed me a clerical job and for a couple of years I kicked around in the States, my newly found buddies spinning off occasionally to Vietnam, spit out like tickets from a rotating drum in a lottery drawing. With a little more than a year left on my enlistment, I got orders to Korea. At first I couldn’t believe my luck. No getting shot at. And then they bused me and about a hundred other guys over to an Air Force base, strapped us into a chartered jet, and we were on our way. Hours later I saw Mount Fuji through the clouded porthole. We refueled and another couple of hours later we landed at Kimpo Air Field.
Like rats we wound though a maze of partitions, getting shots, having papers stamped, exchanging our greenback dollars for Military Payment Certificates, and then they put us on a bus for the Army Support Command Replacement Depot. I saw my first stern-faced Korean soldiers manning sandbagged machine gun emplacements.
I loved Korea. It was a whole new world of different tastes and smells, and a different, more intense way of looking at life. People here didn’t take eating and breathing for granted. They were fought for.
I got a job at Eighth Army Headquarters in Seoul and I did a lot of typing and filing and driving and standing for hours in the sun with an M-14 rifle that I never used, waiting to be inspected. I started taking classes in the Korean martial arts, tae kwon do, and the Korean language, and I got twisted into knots by Suki, one of the greedier girls out in the village of Itaewon.
When my year was up, I went back to the States reluctantly and figured I had to get out of the Army. Everybody else was. I started drawing on the GI Bill, attended Los Angeles City College for one semester, and then, just after I bought my books for my second term, I decided to hell with it all, and I went down to see the local recruiter and made his day by signing up as fast as he could fill out the reup forms.
I got assigned to the military police but I was a college boy now, so after a brief stint at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, I got sent to the Criminal Investigation School. My good study habits got me through, and I kept my mouth shut rather than ask the instructor why someone who steals some communications equipment, say, should be seen as a criminal while a colonel who leads his troops into combat from a helicopter three thousand feet in the air should be seen as a hero.
This was the Army, after all. You can question the Green Machine but don’t expect answers. And then I got orders to go back to Korea. Actually, I had pestered my local personnel sergeant until he called up a buddy at the Department of the Army and got me the assignment. At first they sent me down to Taegu and that’s where I met Ernie.
Ernie’s my kind of guy. Completely devoid of emotion. Unless they lock him out of the NCO Club on a Sunday. Ernie’s one of those who pulled a lottery ticket to Vietnam. He was in a transportation company there, driving a big deuce-and-a-half, rolling through thatched-hut villages in mile-long convoys at fifty miles per hour. Spikes in the road. Not stopping to change the tires until you got back to the base camp at Chu Lai. Nights in dugout bunkers, waiting for the random rockets to drop in. Pure heroin sold by children outside the wire for two bucks a pop.
After they sent him back to Fort Hood, he volunteered to return to Vietnam. One more year at the same base
