if I were married?”
“You are so beautiful. You must have many men ask you-many men in love with you.”
“No.” She frowned and shook her head slightly. “Nobody likes me. Nobody wants me.”
“But you must have a boyfriend, a GI boyfriend.”
“No. I have no boyfriend.”
“No special lover?”
“No. Aigu, I told you. I have no special lover or boyfriend.”
“Well, I was worried.”
“About what?”
“I thought your boyfriend would walk in here and see us and be very jealous.”
“Aigu, aigu, aigu.” She rolled her eyes up toward me and shook her head again. “No one would be jealous about me.”
“I would,” I said. “I already am.”
She leaned back and laughed aloud.
“Kimiko,” I said. “I have a secret. But if I tell you, you must tell no one else.”
‘Yes,” she said. “I promise.”
I reached out my hand to hers and we hooked our small fingers together in the Korean gesture of affirmation.
‘There will be more Miss Paks, more girls who will suffer, unless you give me the thing you have.”
She was stone white. Silent. “Yes,” she said, finally. “I know. I got what I wanted. A burial place for Miss Pak, and a little money for myself. But they will tire of this arrangement soon.”
“Where do you keep it? Where is it hidden?”
“Here,” she said, and rose to her feet. She padded over to the improvised shelf on which Mama Lee had stacked a cache of her bounty, and from among dozens of green and white little boxes she took one. Back at the table, she extended it to me and I accepted the box of Fuji film.
“Anyongbikeiseiyo. Stay in peace,” I said to her in Korean. “I will see you next time.”
“Anyongbikaseiyo. Go in peace,” she replied.
12
At the Moyer Recreation Center on Yongsan Compound I signed some paperwork for the middle-aged doughnut dolly working the front desk and she gave us the key to one of the darkrooms and a thick tome of instructions on how to develop film. We had to buy the various chemicals from the supply room and the entire procedure was almost as difficult as the time Mrs. Aaronson taught me how to bake unleavened bread when I was twelve.
After we figured we had everything mixed right and we were waiting for the first prints to come out, Ernie got antsy.
“I’ll go next door to the snack stand at the bus station and get us a couple of beers.”
“Not supposed to open the door. It could expose the film.”
“You stand in front of the tray. I’ll just crack the door quick and slide out.”
“You sure they got cold ones?”
“Positive.”
“I’ll take two.”
I held my coat open around the film tray and Ernie slid out. The prints were gradually starting to come alive with images.
By the time Ernie got back the prints were clear. We popped our Falstaffs and admired them.
“Holy shit. The old creep.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
Miss Pak Ok-suk was tied up, and the naked Major General Clarence T Bohler was performing various acts upon her body. Miss Pak’s face looked variously worried and twisted in pain. She was withstanding the abuse like a trouper, though: part of the price she figured she had to pay.
There was one shot where the look of resignation had left her eyes and had been displaced by panic. Bohler was bent over and manipulating something down near her backside. His forearm was around her neck. The photo was slightly blurred; she must have been struggling. From the grip he held her in, it appeared that she was having trouble getting air.
A couple of the photos showed some sort of medallion around Miss Pak’s neck. I went to the front desk, talked to the doughnut dolly, and managed to scrounge up a magnifying glass. Once my eyes had readjusted to the light in the darkroom, I took another look at the print. The chain appeared to be made of gold and the medallion of carved jade. It was a circle surrounding a Chinese character. Ok-jade. Part of her name.
In all, there were nineteen photographs. The rest of the film was blank. Three of them were so blurred as to be useless. The other sixteen were clear. Something had gone wrong. She had died.
There was no way of dating the photos. They could have been taken prior to the night of her death but I doubted it. Bohler’s driver could place him in the vicinity of Itaewon, and these photos would prove his intimate, abusive relations with Miss Pak Ok-suk.
We had enough to arrest him. And once formal proceedings were started, I knew we could get the evidence that would nail the case down. Kimiko would have to testify. It would be the only way for her. Her only chance was to take away the rationale for Bohler needing to silence her.
Ernie finished his beer and opened a second. “So now we know why Kimiko’s been so well paid lately, and getting all those fancy jobs.
“Sure. Probably through Bohler.”
“And the night she went to the Officers’ Club, that was to let him know what she had on him?”
“And to give him a kick in the balls for good measure.”
“Now we know why he didn’t press charges.”
I popped my second can of beer and we hung the prints up to dry. Using some wrapping paper and an envelope I folded the negatives away and put them into my coat pocket.
We finished our beers, put the eight-by-twelve glossies into a manila envelope, and returned all the equipment we had checked out to the front desk.
The woman said, “I’m glad you boys are getting yourselves a hobby. Every soldier needs one.”
Milt Gorman’s residence wasn’t very far from The Roundup. The fortress he called home was illuminated by the glare of a floodlight. A ten-foot-high stone and mortar wall framed a huge metal gate and the entranceway to a small garage, locked tight behind a roll-down shutter made of corrugated metal.
Ernie rang the buzzer and shouted, “Bobby obma!” A few seconds later someone opened the front door of the house.
“It’s George,” I yelled “Here to see Milt.” The front door closed and a pair of slippers shuffled toward the gate. A metal bar slid free and an old Korean woman held the gate open as we entered. She relocked it and led us toward the house.
We took off our shoes in the entranceway and Milt ushered us into a big warm living room equipped with everything money could buy from the PX. Bulbs blinked at us from mounds of stereo equipment. A huge blank faced Japanese-made TV was mercifully turned off. Four or five kids in an adjacent bedroom were watching cartoons on another TV set. One of the boys was bigger and chubbier than the others but somehow he looked younger. His hair was light brown and his nose slightly pointed but his eyes were heavily lidded ovals.
“Some of the neighborhood kids like to come over and watch cartoons with Bobby,” Milt said. “Hell, I enjoy the damn things almost as much as they do.”
The old woman had disappeared into the kitchen. “Ajima!” Milt yelled. “Mekju seigei.” He held up three fingers to no one in particular. We sat down in the comfortable armchairs and in a moment three frosted cans of Falstaff and a large bowl of mixed nuts were in front of us on the coffee table. It and all the other furniture was done in black lacquer with inlaid mother-of-pearl designs. Traditional Korean stuff.
