“Wei kurei?” he asked. Why are you doing this?
The other kids had been sleeping in the vinyl booths. Some were up now, searching through a jumble of clothing on the red-carpeted floor. One girl lay still in her booth, a thin comforter pulled up over her nose, her black eyes sparkling with fear.
In Korean, I asked the oldest boy if the owner was here. He shook his head.
“What time does he come in?”
Again, a negative shake of the head.
Ernie took two quick steps and shoved the kid’s back up against the wooden bar.
I walked over to Ernie. He knew I didn’t like him getting rough with youngsters. He held his grip on the kid’s collar and glared fiercely. I knew it was an act, the kid didn’t. This gangly boy and the other children in the bar were frightened half to death. Who knew how many drunken GIs had come in here, terrorizing anyone they thought wouldn’t fight back?
Still, if we were going to find Boltworks we needed information and quickly. ASCOM City is a small village and word of our arrival would spread fast. Once Bolt heard, he’d be gone. So we had to find out what this kid knew, and now. Every interrogator knows that there’s only one effective tool to extract answers from people who don’t want to talk: fear.
The kid tried to shove Ernie’s fist away, but he wasn’t strong enough.
I spoke in rapid Korean: “There was a fight here the night before last, between a Korean woman named Pak Mi-rae and an American GI. Tell me about it. Now!”
The kid started with the same disclaimer every witness uses. “I don’t know. I didn’t see anything.”
Ernie tightened his grip and leaned into the kid’s face. And the boy proceeded to tell us what he’d seen. I asked a few follow-up questions and was answered immediately. Ernie let him go.
The incident at the Asian Eyes Bar had been routine. A Korean woman claimed a GI had cheated her out of money she’d fronted him in a black-market deal. He claimed he didn’t owe her anything, and she attacked. The GI, smart enough to know that he’d be in big trouble if he hit back, held her off. After about ten minutes of wrestling, he managed to escape the enraged woman’s grip. Then he ran. Another smart move. No, they didn’t know the soldier’s name, but he’d been coming in for months. Therefore, the guy couldn’t be our quarry.
Private Boltworks, before he went AWOL, was assigned to a field artillery base thirty miles north of here.
The other youngsters were up now, in various stages of undress. They lined up in front of the glowing aquarium. I pulled the three sketches out and held them to the light. One by one, I asked the children if they’d ever seen these three people. The eyes of two of the girls lingered on the sketch of the smiling woman. But in the end they shook their heads.
I believed them. They were too frightened and in too much awe of our supposed authority to lie. The oldest boy didn’t recognize the sketched faces either.
Ernie sighed, frustrated at this waste of time and effort. He reached into his pocket and slapped a ten-dollar MPC note on the bar, not looking at any of the kids. He was ashamed of what he’d done, but he had to be certain that information would be surrendered quickly and accurately. With a killer on the loose, we had no time for niceties.
He was about to leave when I stopped him.
“Maybe these kids can help us another way,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“The woman involved in the altercation, she’s a black marketeer.. just a minute.”
In Korean, I asked the kids if they knew where the woman who had been in the fight lived. All stood dumb except for one chubby girl. Almost imperceptibly, she nodded her head.
I asked again. “You know where she lives?”
“We all do,” she answered.
The oldest boy frowned. I crossed the carpeted floor and slipped my arm around his narrow shoulders.
“Bali kaja,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Sullenly, he nodded. He slipped on a wool sweater to ward off the cold, and then Ernie and I and the boy left out the back door of the bar.
The sky had taken on a slightly lighter hue. As we wound through fog-shrouded alleys, Ernie leaned into me. “Why do you want to talk to this black-market woman? What’s she got to do with all this?”
“Boltworks is on tilt. He’s making purchases out of the PX. He knows eventually we’ll cancel his Ration Control Plate. The time to buy is now. And if he buys, he has to sell. And quickly. Probably at bargain rates. The black market mama-sans in ASCOM City will be on him like vultures. The woman who started the fight at the Asian Eyes Bar is a black mar-keteer and a feisty one. And she has enough pull in the village to be released by the KNPs with nothing more than a warning. She’ll probably know about a new GI in the village making beaucoup black- market buys. I’m willing to bet on it.”
Ernie thought it over. “Maybe,” he said.
The boy turned down a crack between two buildings. We angled in, emerging onto another alley. The boy stopped. He pointed at a wooden gate in a granite wall.
“Yogi,” he said. Here.
Nimbly, he hopped back, and then he disappeared. Ernie almost went after him, but I grabbed his elbow.
“Don’t,” I said. “The kid’s not lying. He knows we can find him.”
Ernie shrugged and stared at the gate. There was a black button with a wire running back into the hooch. Ernie reached to press it. Again, I stopped him.
I said, “Let’s not knock.”
Ernie’s eyes widened, then narrowed. He nodded.
I checked for a brass nameplate embedded in the wall; there was none. Only two numbers on the door in black paint: “201 bonji, 36 ku.” The address, but no name.
We searched around until we found a wooden trash crate. We set it on its end against the wall. Ernie was armed, his. 45 snug in his shoulder holster, so he climbed up first and went over the top. He leapt, and I heard him grunt when he hit the ground. Then I was on the crate and atop the fence. I leapt down into a cleanly swept courtyard. The hooch was silent, its oil-paper sliding doors shut.
At the lip of the raised wooden floor, Ernie and I slipped off our shoes and stepped up onto the immaculate surface. A gleaming hallway led through an opening between the first few hooches. It emptied onto a courtyard, a well-tended garden paved with flagstone. The surrounding hooches faced inwards. All were silent. Sliding doors closed.
From behind, footsteps. I swiveled.
She wore a flower-print robe. Her feet were bare, her black hair ratted up in a sweaty disarray.
“What’s the matta you?” she snarled.
Ernie and I stared. She must’ve been fifty, at least, with a wrinkled face and a round button nose that would’ve been cute when she was young. “Pak Mi-rae?” I asked.
“How you know?”
“You were in a fight at the Asian Eyes Bar the other night.”
“Yeah. So what? GI owe me money. I knuckle sandwich with him.”
A few of the doors around the courtyard slid open. Women lying on down-filled mats peeked out with sleep- filled faces. All were young, as Pak Mi-rae had once been.
Ernie grinned, looking around. He placed his hands on his hips. We were in a brothel, and he felt right at home.
I turned back to Pak Mi-rae. “Can we talk? You have coffee?”
She snickered. “You come my hooch, climb fence, wake up me, wake up all girls. Now you want kopi?”
“Yes,” Ernie said, grinning broadly. “That’s what we want. Part of what we want anyway.”
He approached Miss Pak and pulled out his CID badge.
She stared up at him. “CID. Don’t mean shit.”
“Good. Then you won’t mind fixing us some coffee.”
She snorted, stared at Ernie for a moment, then swiveled and walked back toward her hooch. We followed.
