Her eyes widened and she started to laugh. Soon we were speaking Korean together and I bought her a Coke. GIs walked in and she got busy but after the first flush of business there was a lull and she came back to us and I asked her about the woman named Pak Ok-suk.
I expected reticence, a closing of ranks against a foreigner. What I got was a girl who wouldn’t shut up, a girl who seemed proud that Itaewon had finally hit the Korean equivalent of the tabloids.
Everyone had heard about the murder and the manner in which it was done and “Mangnei” was as fascinated by the grotesquerie as anyone. Other girls walked over and started to add their embellishments and before long I had more information than I really wanted.
Pak Ok-suk had drifted into Itaewon from the countryside, cast off by a family that could no longer afford to keep her. Not that they couldn’t afford to feed her. They could manage that. What they couldn’t manage were her eccentricities-her demands for new clothes, her willfulness in going out at night with her friends, and her refusal to take her father’s word as law. The cramped quarters of the Korean rural home got tighter each day until the walls were about to explode and the family lashed out at her for being the source of their shame, for being a grown daughter yet unmarried.
The young men her age were in the Army, manning a fighting force almost as big as America’s in a country one-sixth the size. The country was crammed with armaments and soldiers that pushed up against the Demilitarized Zone, threatening to burst across.
Her choices included the textile mills and the factories, filled with white-bandannaed female automatons churning out high-tech equipment for the world’s consumers. Or collecting tokens, sweeping out buses, jamming the passengers in the door, straddling the exit to keep anyone from falling out, shielding them with her body.
Instead she chose Itaewon.
At first she was just a barmaid’s helper, doing lowly work: the sweeping and the cleaning and the washing of the bar rags. She hid from the GIs but watched them with her big round eyes and, as time went by, she became more bold. She poured Cokes for them or popped open beers, saving the more complicated highballs for her wiser sisters. And she even went so far as to collect money from them and hand it over to the old crone who guarded the cashier’s box, receiving change from gnarled hands.
And she loved the music and the dancing and the clothes and the hairdos and she longed to have nice things of her own.
She slept in the bar, on chairs pulled together after the Lucky Seven Club closed for the evening, before the midnight curfew. And at first she couldn’t sleep because she was too wound up by all the things she had seen. And she listened to the young men who were the ushers by night and the janitors by day, as they crept from their rickety multilegged beds and crawled in with some of the older girls who rated soft vinyl-covered booths for their boudoirs. And she listened to their giggles and then their grunts, but none of the young men crawled in with her. There wasn’t room.
And she dreamed of home and how warm it had once been and how it would never exist for her again. When she met Kimiko, everything changed.
Kimiko hadn’t frequented the Lucky Seven Club much in the last few years. They hadn’t let her in since the spitting and scratching contest she’d had with a girl she found with one of her GI boyfriends. When she got through with the girl, she punched out the GI and two of the young ushers. Soon whistles were blowing and the Korean National Police joined the fray. Snarling and clawing and kicking, she had fought them off until one of the cops whipped out his baton and ended the altercation with one clean swipe to her head.
But time has a way of draining rancor, and Kimiko was eventually allowed back into the club again. All the young help had changed, maybe two or three times, and no one was too anxious to tell her to leave anyway. The old crone, hunched over the cash box, remembered her and kept an eye on her but didn’t say anything when she started a restrained and civil conversation with the young little Pak Ok-suk.
Kimiko was known to all the GIs of Itaewon and some of them called her Short Time, a reference to the way she financed her life.
She freelanced, strictly, rolling from bar to bar searching for GI prey, getting them to buy her drinks. Not those overpriced sweetheart drinks, with hardly any liquor in them, but beer and straight shots of bourbon. And she held her liquor well. But sometimes her heavy makeup would get smudged or her skintight dress would seem a little twisted, off center, and she would look like some demented doll that had been dressed by a clumsy child. Hemline riding high over spindly legs, neckline bursting with bosom.
Kimiko had been around long enough to know GIs. She knew about the problems they had getting an overnight pass, she knew that they’d get shafted if they were caught on the street after the midnight curfew, and she knew that some of them would do anything to get promoted and others didn’t care. Some of them just wanted to do their time and get out and some of them had much more money at home than the U.S. Army could ever pay them. And she kept looking for that one starry-eyed young GI from a rich family who would flip for her. She was like an old sourdough in the desert, pulling her old burro along, searching for that last shining vein of boyish El Dorado.
When she came back into the Lucky Seven Club after such a long absence, she was prim and proper. She behaved herself. And she didn’t get drunk. She sat at the bar, sipped on a Chilsung Cider, and left early. She didn’t hang around for those last few GIs who were too drunk to walk-her normal clientele-but instead held a polite conversation with the one person behind the bar who seemed to have some sort of respect for her age and her experience: Pak Ok-suk.
None of the girls remembered exactly when they had started talking together. It was something that just happened. Kimiko would pontificate, waving an American-made cigarette in the air and punctuating her discourse with sips of beer, while Pak Ok-suk leaned across the bar, a devotee at the feet of a guru.
Some of the girls tried to warn her: Stay away from Kimiko. But they couldn’t give concrete reasons. Kimiko had never messed with the other girls in the village unless she caught them with one of her boyfriends, one of her sources of livelihood. Mainly she was just aggressive about making her living.
The girls were unanimous in not blaming her for that. After all, who else would take care of her? But they knew that Kimiko was bad news for Miss Pak, yet Miss Pak didn’t listen, and now all their dire warnings had come to pass.
“Did Kimiko kill Miss Pak?”
Mangnei pulled her head back, her eyes and mouth rounding. “Of course not.”
‘Then who did?”
She didn’t know. But Kimiko had probably gotten Miss Pak involved with a man she couldn’t handle. Who?
She didn’t know that either. She only knew that Miss Pak had quit her job behind the bar and started wearing nice clothes and getting her hair done and learning how to dance, until she was the sexiest girl in Itaewon. Often she had left the club in the company of Kimiko. On important missions. And each day she seemed to have more money and more clothes and soon had her own hooch. After a while she stopped talking to any of the girls who worked in the Lucky Seven Club.
“What about her boyfriend, Johnny?”
“He was crazy about her and used to follow her all the time.”
“Has he been in lately?”
“Every night. He sits over there, same table.” She pointed. “Waiting for Miss Pak. But she didn’t have time for him. She talk to him for few minutes and then goes with Kimiko.”
“Was he here last night?”
“Yes. Early. But then left.”
“What time?”
“Maybe ten o’clock.”
“Where does he work?”
The girls buzzed amongst themselves on that one. They mentioned some other names-Freddy and Sammy- friends of his, and one of the girls seemed certain that they worked at the motor pool.
I turned to her. “How do you know?”
She blushed. The other girls laughed. She’d spent the night there.
We didn’t bother to ask the girls where we could find Kimiko. She could be anywhere and then turn up where you least expected her. We’d find her ourselves. Or she’d find us.
