The girls beamed as if a host from heaven had just floated down from the sky. Soon the place was crammed with sailors and every girl was on somebody’s lap, being pulled and tugged and handed around.
The bartender was too busy to even refill our beer mugs. We tossed down the last of the suds and left.
Texas Street was like what I imagined Rio de Janeiro must be like during the Carnival season. Except nobody was half naked because it was too cold, and almost all the men wore the uniforms of the U.S. Navy. They traveled in packs. The doors to the clubs were wide open and music and screaming roiled out onto the street and every seat inside was taken and so was every girl.
There weren’t any Hialeah Compound GI’s around. They had a tendency to stay away when a big ship was in port, resenting the squids for running up the prices.
Since we weren’t in uniform and wore only our blue jeans and nylon jackets, we were a little conspicuous ourselves. We stayed in the shadows. Scanning the road for anyone who looked like Shipton.
A couple of times we thought we spotted him, but when we got close we realized it was someone else. We bought bottles of beer from street vendors and drank under awnings, protected from the sporadic rain, keeping an eye on the street scene.
As curfew approached, things didn’t seem to be slowing down, but a phalanx of a dozen burly guys with batons and Shore Patrol arm bands plowed through Texas Street, warning everybody to get off the streets or back to the ship by midnight.
We were going to have to find shelter, too. There weren’t any girls available so we faded back a few blocks from Texas Street until we stumbled into a little place that advertised sleeping accommodations. The Koreans call it a yoin-suk, not as high-class as a yoguan and not nearly as luxurious as a hotel.
The woman who owned it said she had one private room left and Ernie and I could have it for only seven thousand won. About ten bucks. I thought it was a little steep for this kind of joint, but the Kitty Hawk was in, so what the hell. We paid her and told her we had to go back out for a few minutes, and she promised to keep the front gate open for us as long as we weren’t out too late after curfew. I told her we wouldn’t be.
Back on Texas Street the crowds were beginning to thin. Sailors wandered down to the pier and caught launches that were lined up to take them back to the ship.
Back in the bar district there was nothing new. No sign of anybody who looked like Shipton.
Korean National Police had now joined the Shore Patrol and were helping to shoo everyone off the street in the last ten minutes before the world shut down. Bars closed their doors and shuttered their windows.
When the Shore Patrol reached us, I showed my badge to the guy in charge and asked if he’d seen anyone who looked like the mug in the photograph. He shook his head, but showed it to the other Shore Patrol guys. Nobody remembered Shipton.
The Korean policemen I asked hardly glanced at the photograph. With a city teeming with foreigners they weren’t likely to be able to tell one from the other-unless he had three arms and horns.
But they were curious as to why we were looking for him. I told them that he was a deserter, which seemed to satisfy them. Koreans take desertion a lot more seriously than we do. In fact, you can be executed for it.
When the streets were almost empty, we wound our way through the dark alleys back to our little yoin-suk. Anywhere from six to ten workingmen and poor women lay on the floor of each room sleeping, their possessions jumbled nearby.
Being rich foreigners, we were ushered into our private accommodations in the back. The old woman even handed us our own porcelain pee pot.
We rolled out the sleeping mats. After folding my clothes and setting my wallet and badge and pistol under the bead-filled pillow, I turned off the bulb. The room was stuffy but warm, and we were both too exhausted to do anything but go straight to sleep.
I awoke with a start.
“Ernie.” I nudged his shoulder. “Wake up.”
“Huh?”
He tried to pull the cotton comforter over his head.
“Wake up. We have to go.”
He propped himself up on his elbow. “Go? What’re you talking about? It’s still dark.”
I looked at the fluorescent dots on my wristwatch. “It’s almost four-thirty. A lot of sailors will be up and on their way back to the Kitty Hawk.”
“So what?”
“So I finally realized what Shipton’s doing here in Pusan.”
“I’m glad you figured it out, because apparently he wasn’t getting laid.”
“No. He has bigger plans in mind.”
“George, I wish I knew what in the hell you were talking about.”
“No time now.” I turned on the bulb. “Come on. Get dressed. We have to get down to the waterfront.”
“Oh, Jesus. You really are nuts.”
“No arguments.”
In less than five minutes we were up and out into the hallway. The mama-san heard us and emerged from her room and unbolted the front door for us.
She bowed as we left but I didn’t have time for formalities. I just plowed into the shadows, Ernie close on my heels.
34
Mistlaced with salt rushed in from the sea, slapping the warm flesh of my face and waking me up with each step we took down the dark streets.
I wasn’t sure if it was a dream I had or just some sort of sudden brainstorm. Whatever it was, it pushed its way up from my unconscious and screamed at me to get up and do something! Ernie was still grumbling, so as we emerged from the alley and turned down Texas Street, I started to explain.
“It’s always bothered me,” I said, “Strange’s accusation that somebody’d been tampering with classified documents. And right there in J-two, at the same time that Whitcomb was stealing office equipment. But it didn’t seem logical. Whitcomb was a petty crook, not some sort of foreign agent. And even if he had been an agent, why steal a typewriter?
“Maybe Strange and his buddies are just hysterical, I thought. They get together, exchange suspicions, and work each other up into a frenzy. But still the coincidence bugged me.”
Ernie snorted through his nose, head down, not saying anything. We walked quickly past the shuttered shops and nightclubs.
“Remember the note Miss Ku gave us?” I said. “There was something in there about ‘I haven’t told anybody yet’or something like that. As if whoever wrote the note knew something incriminating about Whitcomb. What would anyone know that was incriminating?
“At first I thought it was that Whitcomb was messing with an innocent girl. Well, that’s out now.’ But there’s something else the person who wrote the note might’ve known. He might’ve known about the only real crime Whitcomb committed. Namely, that he stole typewriters. How would he know that? If he was a fence, he might know, but a fence would be making money from Whitcomb-he wouldn’t be threatening him. So maybe it was somebody who was there when he stole the typewriters. Somebody who caught him red-handed.”
“Why wouldn’t he have turned Whitcomb in?”
Ernie was starting to wake up now. We reached the end of the row of dark nightclubs and started down the long slope that led to the pier. A few shadows were clustered on the quay. Sailors waiting for the next launch to take them out to the Kitty Hawk. In the distance the harbor was pitch-black. Shrouded by mist. I could see nothing.
“He wouldn’t turn Whitcomb in,” I said, “because he was there in the J-two office in the middle of the night for no good reason himself.”
“He was the one after the classified documents,” Ernie said. “Whitcomb’s killer.”
“Exactly. And he stumbled into Whitcomb.”
