to hit as many bars in Itaewon as we could until we passed out.
In the morning I unraveled the package. It was a jade medallion. A little circle with one Chinese character in the middle.
The character was ai, which means love.
Riley met us at the snack bar and after getting himself a big cup of coffee, and loading it with about half a cup of cream and four spoonfuls of sugar, he took a sip and started filling us in.
“Bohler’s on his way back to the States, in disgrace. They’ve lined him up with a training job down in Georgia and it’s understood that he’s supposed to set himself up for retirement in Florida and be out of the Army within six months.”
“What about the Koreans?”
‘That was a little more tricky. They wanted to cooperate but they had a complicated public-relations problem on their hands. The Itaewon fire marshall reopened the investigation and came to the conclusion that although Miss Pak Ok-suk might have been having sex with someone earlier that evening, they believe that the man, whoever he was, left and that then Miss Pak, under the influence of alcohol and drugs, attempted to change the yontan charcoal by herself and dropped one of the flaming briquettes in the center of the floor. Possibly she thought that there was a metal pan there to hold it. And then she lay down on her bed and went to sleep.”
“What about the abuse to her body?” Ernie said.
“Never mentioned in too much graphic detail in the Korean papers. They ignored it.”
“And Spec-4 Watkins?”
“Charges against him were dropped. He’s down at Osan Air Force Base right now, under MP escort, being sent back to the States.”
“Are they kicking him out of the Army?”
“Not right away. They assigned him to The Presidio of San Francisco. Better to keep him on active duty, so they’ll have him under jurisdiction of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, until this thing blows over.”
“So it’s all just going to blow away, huh?”
“Except for you guys. They discussed sending you up to the DMZ-discussed it very seriously-but decided against it right now because if they do, you’re liable to start mouthing off to the wrong people.”
“Like our congressman.”
“Or a reporter,” Ernie said, looking encouraged.
“Right.” Riley sipped his coffee. “So they’re going to keep you here, keep an eye on you, and give you an attitude check. Your prospects around here, though, are not too bright after being foolish enough to lower the hammer on the chief of staff of the Eighth United States Army. But the one ray of hope is that they’ve definitely taken you off the shit list.”
“What? You’re kidding.”
“No. Seriously. They’ve taken you off it. And put you on a whole new list that they’ve created just for this situation. They’re calling it the disembowel-as-soon-as-possible list. You’re both tied for first place.”
“Anybody else on it?”
“No. Just you two.”
“You’ve been a great help to us, Riley.”
“Glad to be of service.”
19
The monks kept their vigil for two days and finally they took Kimiko’s body away, back to the mountains.
The landlady seemed relieved and had a couple of young men helping her clear the remains of Miss Pak’s apartment while she got Kimiko’s little closetlike room in shape for a new tenant. When she saw me she stopped what she was doing, tensed, and just waited. I nodded, turned around, and went away.
She didn’t nod back.
Palinki wasn’t the type to hound me about the. 45, so I held on to if for a while, keeping it in my wall locker, checking the cold steel and counting the cartridges every day, just to make sure they were still there.
I wasn’t sure why but it was important to me.
Ernie and I went on a huge drunk, reeling from bar to bar, starting early in the morning, sometimes taking a nap in the afternoon, and then getting drunk again at night. When we went back to work Monday, we were just going through the motions on the black-market detail and found plenty of time to slip away to little isolated draft- beer halls out in Itaewon and have a few cold ones for lunch. We went on like this for quite a while. I can’t say how long now. The time faded into a dismal blur.
Ernie never once mentioned the Nurse.
Finally one morning I woke up and was sick about how I’d been acting. I made a special effort to get over to the gym and see Mr. Chong for the noon tae kwon do workout.
“Where have you been, Georgie?”
“Busy.”
“You should not get so busy. It is dangerous.”
I sobered up, worked out steadily, and my midsection started to firm up again. It was as if my body had taken hold of my fate and slowly its resolve started to become apparent to me.
Mr. Kwok, meanwhile, had made more and more inroads into the economic life of the village. A couple of his competitors had closed down and a couple more had sold out to him. He closed their clubs down for a while, remodeled them, and reopened the doors with big, flashy grand openings. I started hanging out in the ville, supposedly for the black-market detail, but mostly watching his comings and goings. I kept particular track of his thugs, sipped on Coke, and somehow stayed sober.
The winter should have been over but a last flurry of cold, ice-laden air whistled through Seoul. The snow wasn’t heavy but just enough to make the roads slick and life a little uncomfortable. I loved the long overcast days and the freezing crispness that seemed to tighten and enflame my body.
I started carrying the. 45.
My Spartan regimen had kept me a long time without a woman, and one late afternoon, while slogging through my black-market rounds, I turned-without thinking about it much-down the alley that led to the hooch where the girl lived, along with her sisters, in the brothel behind the Sloe-eyed Lady Club.
She was wary. I had cut out on her before, without giving her any money, and made her lose face. This time I gave her the money up front and went into her hooch to relax while she got a pan of hot water ready.
She was very young, very small, and I was very excited. When I finished, I got dressed and went back to the latrine. Most of her sisters were out, or sitting quietly in their rooms, gossiping, playing cards. I found a toehold in the fence and climbed over.
Kwok was usually in his office this time of day. He got up late so the afternoons were like mornings for him. Time for the mundane things in life. Paperwork. Bills. The Hamboyance came after the sun went down.
His thugs were rarely around during the daytime. They slept even later than he did. Sometimes he had late- night things for them to do.
I climbed the rickety metal staircase on the outside of the building, unable to keep completely quiet but trying to keep my advance as rhythmic and as calm as I could.
One of the things that had bothered me from the first was the pair of straight metal tongs in the middle of Miss Pak’s room. Someone had found the half-submerged heater outside and then used the tongs to pull out one of the flaming briquettes and bring it inside and put it on the vinyl floor. Maybe Miss Pak had done it herself, if she was very drunk or very loaded on drugs. But that seemed unlikely because if she was that far gone she would have just passed out and not paid any attention to the underground heating system. If, however, she had actually tried to change the charcoal briquettes in the heater, it would have been second nature to her to replace one of the flaming briquettes with a new one and leave its red-hot embers in a metal pan outside near the stove. She was a farm girl, she knew how to do these things, and for her to have started the fire herself seemed unlikely.
Major General Bohler, however, had little knowledge of the workings of Korean households. This was his first tour in Korea-they didn’t need underground heating systems in Vietnam-and since he’d been here, his servants had
