“Okay.”
I left Ernie standing in front of a dark alley with both his hands stuffed into the pockets of his nylon jacket. A girl approached him. He shrugged her off.
I caught a cab and was back at the main gate of the compound in about three minutes.
“You tell anybody I’m doing this and they’ll have my ass.”
“Don’t worry, Jones,” I said. “Nobody’d want it anyway. Been had too often.”
“No, I’m serious. Youknow I’m notsupposed to let anybodyinhere.”
I said, “You’re not supposed to black-market either.”
He said, “You’re an asshole, George.” But he got out his keys.
“An asshole? I didn’t turn you in, did I?”
“Well… hell, George. Everybody does it.”
“But not everybody lets themselves get caught.”
“Who would’ve thought you and Ernie’d be at Mama Lee’s in the middle of the afternoon?”
“Anybody who knows us. Now get out of here.”
The door to the chapel was open. So was the door to Hurchek’s office. I closed it behind me, pulled down the shade to the single window, and sat down at his desk. I pulled out my little flashlight and went through the logbook of the marriage packets that had passed through the Eighth Army chapel for the last few months. Taking my time. Getting it right.
I doublechecked to made sure there were no entries signed out to “KMH” that I had missed. There were only the two: Li Jin-ai and Pak Ok-suk.
I found the marriage paperwork for Johnny Watkins and Miss Pak Ok-suk on Hurchek’s desk in a box marked HOLD.
Talk about an understatement.
I thumbed through the folder carefully. The marriage application was on top, giving all the basic data on Johnny and Miss Pak: names, Johnny’s Social Security number, Miss Pak’s National Identification number, dates of birth, places of birth.
I made quick notes on a pad of paper I found on the desk.
An extract of Johnny Watkins’s personnel record was also inside. Basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; advanced individual training at Fort Lee, Virginia; transferred to Korea eight months ago. Routine.
Somebody had typed out the security questionnaire on Miss Pak. It was signed and stamped with the chop of one of the offices down in Itaewon that did a good business helping GIs and Korean girls wade through the paperwork required by the Korean government and the Eighth Army.
Beneath that was a photostat copy of Miss Pak’s family register. It told who her mother had been and nothing else. Not brothers and sisters and the usual information about everybody’s place and date of birth. A family register in Korea was like their birth certificate. If you were born outside of a family, you were nothing. Miss Pak hadn’t had much going for her.
Stapled to the back of the document was her picture. Her eyes seemed faded, protected, as if she didn’t quite trust the man behind the camera. Permed hair covered her ears, more hair on one side than on the other.
Her cheekbones were high and prominent, the nose flat but not too wide, and her mouth small but full, making it almost seem as if she were pouting.
If the blow-by-blow description of her didn’t sound too hot it was because the individual parts of her probably wouldn’t measure up to Madison Avenue’s idea of true beauty. And the quality of the black and white photo was lousy, too. But still, the spirit of Miss Pak Ok-suk shone through.
All the strange little parts of her face, thrown together, behind those sultry and challenging eyes, added up to a beautiful and desirable woman.
She was a knockout.
I pried the photo loose from the staple and slipped it into my wallet.
There was more paperwork. Her health certificate seemed to be clean. No TB. No abortions. No recorded cases of VD. That was unusual. The odds were that any girl who worked in Itaewon for just a few weeks would come down with some sort of venereal disease. But she hadn’t. Maybe that said something about her clientele: older maybe, more cautious.
I shuffled the paperwork back into the same order I had found it in and placed it back into the hold box.
There was a stack of new marriage packets in Hurcheck’s in box. They hadn’t been logged in yet. I went though them. One of them was missing, replaced by a yellow eight-and-a-half-by-eleven Department of the Army sign-out/in sheet. The name of the soldier and the prospective bride were printed in Hurchek’s neat hand. The Korean woman’s name was Yoon Un-suh, which didn’t mean anything to me at first, but the initials of the person who had signed for the packet did. KMH.
So did the name of the GI. He was my partner, Ernie Bascom. Yoon Un-suh… the Nurse.
14
Palinki was the armorer at the MP Station. A big Samoan, his smile seemed to fill the sky. So did his shoulders.
“No problem, brother. Keep it for as long as you want.”
“Just for training,” I said. “But I’d feel better if the First Sergeant didn’t know about it. He gets antsy when we check these things out.”
“Hey, you did me a favor before, George, and I haven’t forgotten.” He pointed to his big square head. “Nobody will know about this but you and me.”
“Been staying out of the ville?”
“Yeah. And I haven’t been drunk since it happened.”
Palinki had nearly killed three GIs he caught harassing a couple of high school girls who were on their way home through the Itaewon market. Ernie and I managed to get him out of the way before the MP patrol arrived. The girls were frightened but unhurt and the GIs recovered after some hospital time. They just slunk around the compound nowadays, staying out of Palinki’s way, and not going to the ville much anymore.
I looked around to make sure no one was watching. “I need one more thing, Palinki. You got any, you know, extra ammo?”
During peacetime the U.S. Army accounts for every weapon and every piece of ammunition with fanatical precision. But with so much of it floating around, a smart armorer can always squirrel some away for that rainy day when some ammunition is lost and he has to cover himself by replenishing inventory.
Palinki looked at the. 45 in my hand. It was gray and had a big white number 3 stenciled on the grip.
“I can spare a little. How much you need?”
“Six rounds.”
Palinki rummaged among the green metal ammo boxes, stood up, and held out six cartridges. They looked like bits of candy in his gigantic paw.
“Bring ’em back if you don’t use them.”
“Will do.” I put them in my pocket. “Thanks.”
“You got it.”
He sat back down and hunched over the comic book that he had been reading. It looked like a brightly colored doily between his two thumbs.
Ernie had gassed up the jeep, and I told Riley that we’d be out all day trying to pump up our black-market statistics. We just drove.
“So what’s the big mystery, pal?” Ernie said.
“I found out about your marriage paperwork.”
Ernie looked at me, took a quick swig of coffee.
“I broke into the chaplain’s office.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I found your paperwork and the paperwork of Miss Yoon Un-suh.
