Her face was a slightly flared oval, her skin smooth as a dark olive, lips full, hair glossy black, curled tightly, exploding straight out from the skull.
She moved like a cobra ready to strike.
Ernie sucked in his breath.
She reached the bottom of the stairs, turned, and sashayed across the ballroom floor toward us, staring right into my eyes.
Brother Andrew was right, she appeared to be half white. The eyes were blue. As blue as light gleaming from a block of glacial ice.
We couldn't move. Even Ernie kept his mouth shut. She stopped a few feet from me. Her scent enveloped us in a cloying hug.
'You look for Sister Julie?' she asked.
I nodded.
She ran red-tipped fingers from her waist down toward her thighs, stuck out her hip, and sneered.
'You lucky today, T-shirt,' she said. 'Sister Julie be here.'
Her accent was perfect. The ultimate soul sister.
'Where's Hatcher?' I asked.
Her lined eyes widened into mock innocence. 'I don't know. I no see. Two, maybe three days.'
She breathed in and breathed out, letting us enjoy the full magnificence of her warm brown flesh.
Ernie looked but shook it off. He slipped behind Sister Julie and stepped quietly up the stairs.
Sister Julie spun her head. 'Where he go?'
'He has to use the byonso.'
'Byonso downstairs.'
I shrugged. 'He'll find it eventually. Why'd you hook up with Bro Hatch?'
'He hook up with me. All man want to hook up with Sister Julie.'
I didn't argue with that. 'Why'd you choose him?'
'He big. Strong. Before, I have 'nother boyfriend. Bro Oscar. He be fine dude, but not strong like Bro Hatch.'
'What happened?'
Sister Julie allowed herself a smile. 'Bro Hatch knuckle sandwich with Bro Oscar.'
'Who won?'
'Be cool, T-shirt. You know who won.'
Sister Julie looked and talked and moved like an American black woman. Close enough, anyway, for being seven thousand miles away from the nearest American ghetto. Smears of dark makeup clung to the folds of her neck just above the collarbone.
Under the dim barroom light, once she was fully made up, cooing into the ear of some lonely black GI, who would know the difference? Who would care?
If this woman wanted to be black, the soul brothers would allow her to be black.
Not an attitude shared by their white compatriots.
I had trouble keeping my eyes off her low-cut blouse. With an effort, I gazed into her eyes, shocked again by the startling clarity of their blue light.
'You're half American, aren't you?'
She shrugged her elegant shoulders. 'So what?'
'But not half black. Half white.'
'The white rapist been doing evil to black women for long time.'
The line was memorized. Like propaganda.
'I'm not a T-shirt,' I said. 'I'm Mexican. And nobody in my family ever raped anybody.'
'So?'
'So nothing. Why don't you like white GIs?'
'Before I work T-shirt club. White GI all the time bother me. All the time want to touch jiji.' One hand slithered up toward a breast. 'All the time no want to pay. Complain about Korea all the time. Act like little boy. I no like.'
'And it's better here in Samgakji?'
'Black GI like Sister Julie. Sister Julie like them.'
'And your white father, he left you?'
Sister Julie's eyes flared with anger. 'Of course he leave me! And my mother. And my brother. You think I work here if my daddy take care of me?'
One of the rules of interrogation is to keep the conversation moving in one direction, preferably an emotional one, then switch directions when your subject least expects it. Sister Julie was about to slash my face with her crimson nails. Time to change direction and spring the question.
'Why did you tell Hatcher to beat up that nun?'
For the first time creases appeared on her brow. 'What you talk about, T-shirt?'
'I'm talking about how you took Bro Hatch out to Itaewon and told him about all the money the Buddhist nun would collect from the business girls. The nun's purse would be full, you told him. And she's just a small woman. No Korean thief would ever touch a nun. Easy money, you told him.'
Her eyes crinkled in anger. 'You got a big mouth, T-shirt. Too damn big.'
Something crashed upstairs. A door slamming shut. Or slamming open. I heard a grunt. Pounding footsteps and then Ernie hollering. Cursing.
Sister Julie's hand was back on her hip and she was smiling again.
'Sounds like some white boy be getting his ass kicked.'
I grabbed her shoulders. 'Hatcher's upstairs,' I said. 'You lied!'
'What lie?' She smiled even more broadly. 'Maybe he come back. Looking for Sister Julie.'
I shoved her away and ran up the stairs.
Metal clanged on metal, something else crashed, and I heard the wrenching, ripping sound of wood splintering like toothpicks.
Ernie lay flat on his butt, a flimsy wooden door beneath him. The latticework paneling fronting someone's bedroom had been smashed open. Tattered strips of oiled paper fluttered like the tentacles of a squashed squid.
Ernie shook his head, still dazed, a disoriented look in his eyes. I stretched out my hand to help him to his feet.
'Let me refresh your memory,' I told him. 'You were looking for Hatcher. All hell broke loose and somebody shoved you through that wall.'
Suddenly, Ernie came back to his senses. His head whipped back and forth. 'Come on!'
He sprinted down the hallway and shot down a stairway that emerged onto the alley running behind the Black Cat Club.
Walls made of stone and wood and ancient lumber lined the gloom. Water trickled down the center of a cobbled lane, reeking of human waste. But no sign of Hatcher.
Ernie glanced around, turned completely, and then looked up. I followed his eyes.
Like a huge bird, something floated from the rooftop of the Black Cat Club over to the red brick of the next building. With a great thump, the raven landed.
'He went upstairs,' Ernie said.
We ran into the back door of the brick building next to the Black Cat Club.
It was a series of hooches. A nightclub downstairs. Broad cement hallways and rooms full of business girls upstairs. One woman wore shorts and a light green T-shirt and was bent over filling a pail of water from a rusty spigot. Ernie almost plowed into her.
'How do we get to the roof?' he shouted.
The girl turned, her face pocked, her eyes wide. 'Mullah gu?' What did you say?
'Shit!' Ernie tore off down the corridor. At the end he found a stairway and charged up, taking three steps at a time. I followed.
The stairway narrowed and ended at a wooden door. Ernie kicked it open.
