As we walked out of the Lucky Seven Club, the amplified instruments on the bandstand clanged to life and the ballroom began to whirl with multicolored light. People jumped up from their tables and chairs and soon the dance floor was packed with gangly GIs and sweet young girls just in from the lush green valleys of Korea, all dancing to Motown.
GIs bounced up the main road of Itaewon, hands in their pockets, breath and laughter billowing from their mouths, ignoring the slippery ice as they headed for the neon.
The village was a huge web of brightness, shrouded in snow. Nightclubs lined the main road, and alleys branched off, up steep stone steps, to smaller, cozier clubs. Old women lurked in the darkness ready to lead any willing GI to a brothel if he didn’t have the time or the temperament for the dancing and the booze and the laughter.
Ernie took a deep breath of the biting air and let it out slowly. “It’s good to be back.”
“After forty-eight hours away?”
“Entirely too long.”
We popped into the King Club, elbowed our way through the crowd, and asked a few questions. No one had seen Kimiko. We got some strange looks. Normally people tried to avoid her.
At each club the answer was the same. No one had seen her.
“Sort of like the dog that didn’t bark,” Ernie said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, normally when you come to Itaewon there’s three things you can count on-cold beer, women, and Kimiko bugging the shit out of you. So if we come out of here one night, get all the cold beer we want, have to push our way through bunches of sweet young girls, but still we can’t find Kimiko no matter how hard we look, there’s got to be something wrong.”
“What’s that got to do with a dog that didn’t bark?”
“Like in Sherlock Holmes. If a burglar breaks into a place and the dog didn’t bark, that’s got to mean that maybe a burglar didn’t break into the place.”
“Not in East L.A. The mutts just snarl and attack.”
We decided to hit up Ginger at the American Club. It would be good to get in out of the cold. Relax, have a beer, and maybe learn something.
When she saw us, she pounded down the planks behind the bar, squealing all the way.
“Georgie! Ernie! Long time no see! Short time how you been?”
Ginger made a point of making all her customers feel welcome.
She was a big girl. Round. Maybe not chubby but definitely husky. She was Korean through and through but her bobbed hair was light brown and her face was dotted with freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. All the old NCOs and retirees who hung out at her place kidded her about it: “A little Miguk in the woodpile, eh, Ginger?” Meaning, she was half Caucasian-a mixed blood.
She called herself Ginger because it was a spice used in a lot of Korean cooking. When she found out that Americans used it too and it was a woman’s name, she couldn’t resist.
She took pains to be the sauciest gal at any gathering and she was the smartest woman in Itaewon, as far as I was concerned. The only one to own a club outright, and not part of a family-run operation.
We ordered a couple of beers. The place was full, with quite a few nice-looking women, but most of them escorted. No heavy-handed hustle in Ginger’s place. A row of beer bellies, belonging to middle-aged American men, lined the bar. Luckily, the country-western band was on break.
Ginger poured our beers, made change, and then propped her elbows on the bar.
“I got a problem, Ginger,” I said. “We can’t find Kimiko.”
Her eyes widened and then set back into their normal position.
“Information?”
We laughed. “How’d you know?”
“You guys can’t be looking for a woman that old for sex. Not unless you’re getting kinky on me. And you’re not looking for her for black market. Nobody does black market with Kimiko, except for a newbie. So you must be looking for her for some sort of information. Hot information. Like maybe something to do with that poor little girl who was murdered last night.”
“Don’t stop now, Ginger,” Ernie said. “We’ll just drink beer and listen.”
“In Itaewon during the day, when the GIs are at work, the main thing everybody does is wait for beer deliveries and gossip. Today there was only one subject, Kimiko and Pak Ok-suk. Kimiko had been running that girl around, making money off of her, and she must have got her involved with some mean guys.”
“Anybody know who they are?”
“Not that I’ve heard. Kimiko always took little Miss Pak out of the village, away from Itaewon. Nobody knows who they were seeing. Everybody expects Kimiko to disappear for a while. Eventually she’ll come back and try to find a new girl.”
“Has she done this before?”
“Yeah. The last one wasn’t killed, at least not that I know of. She just disappeared.”
“Do you know who she was?”
“No. But I can find out for you. Check back tomorrow.”
Nothing like a little murder to convince people to support law enforcement.
We ordered a couple more beers just before the band started and if we hadn’t I probably would have left before the first song was over. They were young, Korean, and enthusiastic but that didn’t make up for their lack of skill. Of course, I’m not too crazy about country music even when it’s played well. The old guys at the bar didn’t seem to mind. Already anesthetized. And at least it wasn’t rock and roll.
Ginger had jumped into an intimate conversation with a woman down the bar. She was elegantly dressed, tall, with a big shining rock on her finger. Ernie pointed his nose at a few of the girls on the dance floor and finally one of them walked over to him and stood leaning against his bar stool, his legs spread-eagled around her.
Ginger brought me another beer and leaned over to talk in my ear so I could hear her above the dulcet sounds of ‘The Orange Blossom Special.”
‘This is from her. She wants to talk to you.”
I glanced down the bar for a second. The woman was older than I usually liked, closing in on thirty. Her eyes were cast demurely down.
“No sweat,” Ginger said. “She’s my friend, here from the States. On vacation.”
I walked down the bar and she smiled when I took the seat next to her. Ernie got lost and, by the time the band was ready to start another break, so did we, scooting out the front without even saying goodbye to Ginger.
Her name, she told me, was Miss Lim and she claimed she owned one of those hostess bars in Honolulu that cater to Japanese tourists and mainlanders looking for something exotic. What it meant, probably, was that she was married to a GI, worked in one of those bars, and made more in tips during one good weekend than he made for the entire month.
She told me about how she prepared the puupuus, the free snacks, for her customers every night. What she didn’t tell me about were the handjobs under the table. When I asked, she just laughed.
She’d been here in Seoul, staying with her mother, for a few days and had to leave Korea in another week or so. I figured she could afford a nice hotel room but she didn’t think much of the idea.
“You man,” she said.
Since I was paying for it, we went to a rundown yoguan.
She didn’t want to wash me like the business girls do and she balked when I asked her for a particularly intimate sexual favor.
“It’s only our first date,” she said.
They go to hell fast when they go to the States.
At dawn, gray light filtered through the tattered cloth curtain covering the small window. Miss Lim lay next to me, naked. Thanks to Miss Lim I was not too hung over and I lay still in the bed, trying to put myself in Kimiko’s place and imagine where she might have gone.
Kimiko was old enough to have been born during the Japanese occupation of Korea. That’s probably why she used a Japanese woman’s name, Kimiko, as her working name. She had seen Korea transformed from an Oriental
