“Maybe not killed. Maybe he killed himself.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“No. But the excuse to bring him on base was that the Division suicide rate is too high. Had to make it look like an accident.”
“Bufford didn’t want Division to look bad.”
“Not him,” Otis said. “Somebody higher.”
“How high?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I listen,” he said. “And I think.”
“So they don’t confide in you?”
“I don’t know which ‘they’ you’re talking about but no, they don’t.”
“Where was Druwood killed?”
“You don’t know that he was killed.”
“Okay. Where was his body found?”
“In the ville, that’s what I heard. Where the black-market honchos operate. An off-limits area.”
“Which one?” In Seoul there are numerous areas designated as off-limits to United States Forces personnel. Sometimes they’re placed off-limits for health reasons because of poor sanitation or disease. Sometimes because there’d been altercations between GIs and the local populace and 8th Army didn’t want a repeat. I assumed the same was true in Tongduchon, that there were many off limits areas. I was wrong.
“There’s only one off limits area,” Sergeant Otis said. “The Turkey Farm.”
I’d heard of it. Almost as if it were a footnote in history. The Turkey Farm was an old brothel district that during and after the Korean War had been infamous. Infamous for the number of desperate business girls the area housed, for the amount of venereal disease that was spread, and for something neither the U.S. military nor the Korean government liked to talk about: child prostitution.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“There’s a map at the PMO. In the MP briefing room. Every nightclub and bar and chophouse is listed.”
“How do you know that it was Bufford who had Private Druwood’s body driven back on post?”
“I don’t. Not for sure. But he does everything else.”
“Everything else? Like what?”
A group of MPs stormed into the Gateway Club. A couple of them glanced our way.
“You ruined my dinner,” Otis told me. “It’s time for you to leave.”
I knew he meant it. Still, I had one more question for him. “Matthewson. Where is she?”
“Don’t know.”
“Why’d she leave?”
“You would too if you had to put up with the shit she put up with.”
“Like what?”
“What do you think?”
I waited, my arms crossed, knowing that he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with an 8th Army CID agent sitting across from him at his table. He sipped on his iced tea and then set the glass down, hard.
“She was white pussy,” he told me. “Everybody was after her, from the top honchos to the bottom maggot E-1 privates. And then she gets involved in that traffic case, the one where the middle school girl was run over.”
“Chon Un-suk.”
“Yeah. That one. Matthewson couldn’t handle the pressure. She left.”
“What pressure?”
Otis shrugged. “The usual pressure.”
“The pressure not to make Division look bad.”
He shrugged again.
“You know this for a fact?” I asked.
“I don’t know nothing for a fact. You want testimony under oath, you ain’t getting it from me.”
“Why not?”
Sergeant First Class Otis lay down his fork and stared at me as if I were the biggest idiot in the world.
“For one thing,” he said, “because I finish my twenty in less than two years. And for another, I’ve slept out in the snow and the rain on field maneuvers and put up with white officers and drunken GIs and their slut girlfriends for so many years that I’m not going to jeopardize my retirement check just so Eighth Army can feel good about itself for five minutes. An Eighth Army that been ignoring Division for all the three tours I spent up here. An Eighth Army that let the Division commander run his area of operations as if he were the king of the world and all the rest of us be slaves, and nobody get out of line because if they do they be subject to humiliation and the loss of everything they been working for.”
Otis’s right hand clutched his butter knife; his knuckles were pale brown, heading to white. Also, his language was losing its precise military cadence, returning to the rhythms of the streets.
“Now get the hell outta here,” he told me. “Build your own case and leave me the hell alone.”
I figured that was enough. For the moment. If Ernie and I ever broke this case wide open-if it turned out as bad as I was afraid it might-we’d corner Otis, read him his rights, and force him to make a formal statement under oath. But I wasn’t ready for that yet.
I rose to my feet, snapped Sergeant First Class Otis a two-fingered salute, and left.
The more Ernie and I talked about it, the angrier we became.
Sure, we knew Division PMO was dragging their feet. We’d been expecting that since we came up here. But Mr. Fred Bufford- with the probable collusion of his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Alcott-had withheld information that bordered on being a criminal obstruction of justice. To wit, the involvement of Corporal Jill Matthewson in the case of the accidental death of Chon Un-suk and the true nature of the facts concerning the death of Private Marvin Druwood.
When we walked through PMO’s reception area, the swing-shift desk sergeant looked surprised. We veered to the right, before he could say anything, and entered the MP briefing room. Behind us a phone jingled and a dial turned. The MP briefing room was a small auditorium with a narrow stage in front. Overhead lights shone down on rows of metal chairs, providing dim light. The map Sergeant Otis had told me about hung from the back wall, next to posters warning of the danger of venereal disease. An overhead bulb shone directly on the map. Bright colors formed an intricate mosaic that seemed to pulsate.
It was an ingenious design. Right away, just by the style, I guessed that a Korean graphic artist had created it. It looked Asian. That is, not precisely realistic, not precisely to scale. Not scientific. Everything about it was slightly off kilter. But in many ways it conveyed the confusion and teeming life of Tongduchon better than any machine-manufactured topographical map could.
The background was a polished cherrywood panel of about four feet by four feet, hanging from thick brass hooks. Etched onto the right side of the panel was the main gate of Camp Casey fronted by the north-south running Main Supply Route. On the left was the East Bean River with various of the vehicle and pedestrian bridges depicted, some of which Ernie and I had already walked over. Beyond that, farmland. In the center, between the main gate of Camp Casey and the sinuous flow of the East Bean River, stood the bar district of Tongduchon.
The streets were drawn with black lines while the buildings of Tongduchon were moveable, held by thumbtacks, and depicted by various colored symbols. Gold stars for nightclubs, red hearts for brothels, circular targets for suspected black-market operations. The stores, factories, living establishments, and markets were just various covered rectangles with Chinese symbols painted onto them. The MPs couldn’t understand those symbols of course, but they did understand where the bars and the brothels and the black-market operations were. That’s where the GIs hung out and that’s all the MPs really needed to know. Ernie stepped back to better study the huge mosaic.
“It’s breathing,” he said.
“I’ll say.”
The teeming jumble of life in Tongduchon was somehow conveyed in the glowing map. We pointed out details to one another: the Tongduchon City Market; the street where Pak Tong-i’s office could be found; the
