Jade Lady Burning (21 page)

“This one’s gotta be Ida up at Protocol. That old bitch likes to get into everybody’s business. No reason for her to be signing out marriage packets. And this is Major Hardy from the G-2 office.”

“Security?”

“Yeah. Some of these guys must have clearances.”

I stepped further into the stall, almost completely blocking the light.

“What about these entries here?” I pointed to the letters behind Pak Ok-suk and Li Jin-ai. “Do you know whose initials these are?”

“KMH. It doesn’t jerk my chain.”

“Maybe if you looked at some of the signatures back at your office you’d be able to find it.”

Reluctantly Strange got up from the commode and waddled out of the latrine and down the hallway. We waited outside the barred window as he shuffled through various ledgers and logs and piles of paperwork. He came back to the window shaking his head.

“KMH. I can’t find anyone in the headshed here with the initials KMH. Nobody who picks up distribution anyway.”

“Do you have a complete list of employees?”

“No. No reason to break it down that way. The Civilian Personnel Office would have a complete list but that would be of all the employees at the Eighth Army Headquarters. The whole complex. Not just this building.”

“People from other buildings sign stuff out here?”

“Sure. A lot of them.”

“Will you keep looking for this KMH for us?”

“Yeah. But don’t expect me to stay here late. I got to go out tonight and find some strange.”

Ernie gave Strange his card and told him to call if he figured out who this KMH was. We left the building. The brisk air outside seemed life-giving after the claustrophobic tension that pervaded the Eighth Army Headquarters.

“He seemed awfully helpful,” I said. “He’ll do anything for me.”

“Why?”

“Because I tell him about the strange that I get.”

“What strange?”

“I just make it up. He lives in a fantasy world anyway.”

We strode back to our own little dreamland at the Eighth Army CID Detachment.

Investigators Burrows and Slabem were in the first sergeant’s office. Slabem had his shirt off and Burrows was taping wire to the soft flesh of his pink body.

“I know,” Ernie said. “Don’t tell me. You’re going to pop out of a cake at an electronics convention.”

The first sergeant growled. “Knock off the bullshit, Bascom. Slabem here’s going to get the goods on this guy Lindbaugh so we can bust him for taking kickbacks from this Mr. Kwok out in the village.”

Burrows finished the taping job and Slabem put on his shirt. The first sergeant told them to leave and then he glared at us.

“If you guys got something against Burrows and Slabem I want you to just keep it to yourselves.”

“All they care about is statistics, Top,” Ernie said. “So they’ll look good at the briefing and have a better shot at getting their next promotion.”

“Which you two guys probably won’t get.”

“I didn’t join the Army to get rich,” I said. Actually, I joined to eat regular, but I didn’t tell him that.

“Well, you’re off the Lindbaugh case now. Burrows and Slabem will wrap it up.”

“You mean, make sure it doesn’t explode and involve too many people.”

The first sergeant’s face twisted, as if something rotten had suddenly decided to take possession of his intestines. He held his breath for a while and then slowly exhaled, getting it under control.

His voice was calm and precise: “I’m putting you guys back on the black-market detail. Eight to five. Get out there and get me some arrests.”

“Mayonnaise and instant coffee,” Ernie said and shrugged. “Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.”

Beneath the dingy, unlit neon, a beaded curtain drawn across the open door, stood Mama Lee’s.

It was a nightclub, but there were a series of rooms in the back. The girls who worked here lived here, on display in the front but making their real living out back.

I clattered through the beads into the large main room. The bar was against the far wall and there were about twenty cocktail tables arranged neatly around the room. I went through the back door toward the hooches and heard some murmuring. Mama Lee was in the first room.

Sitting on the floor, she was ensconced comfortably next to a twelve-inch-high table heaped with PX goods. The inventory was typical: freeze-dried coffee, Carnation creamer, Nestle’s hot chocolate, Tang, Jergen’s lotion, almond butter facial cream, maraschino cherries, olive oil, honey, strawberry jam, peanut butter, four bottles of Jim Beam, two cases of Falstaff, and eight cartons of Kent cigarettes.

Two old ladies sat across the table from her, puffing madly on American-made cigarettes, bargaining and waving their hands.

They stopped talking and looked around when I appeared.

“Oh, Geogi,” Mama Lee said, looking relieved. “It’s you.”

The women were well-known black marketeers and old enough to be my mother. I had occasionally been involved in raids in which they had been arrested by the Korean National Police. The raids were just a face-saving gesture for the police. The old women would open up shop in a new location the next day—after splitting some of their profits with the KNPs. Only the GIs caught doing business with them would be shafted: courtmartialed, fined, kicked out of the service.

“She back room
isso
,” Mama Lee said, waving her thumb toward the rear of the hooches. “You try new girl?
Taaksan
number one.” She beamed at me with a gold-toothed grin and held her thumb straight up in the air.

“No,” I said, looking at the pile of goods.

The old woman cackled and stared at me. Smoke rushed through her craggy teeth.

“Number ten no sweat,” I said. “All GI
taaksan
number ten.”

“Yeah,” Mama Lee said, leaning back in mirth and slapping both her knees. “You right, Geogi. You right.”

I winked at the old women and walked down the hallway to the last room, where Kimiko waited. As Mama Lee had promised when I called, she was there.

We sat on the woven mats, a small table between us.

“You must have spent all your money on the funeral,” I said.

“It was important.”

“Yes,” I said. “It was very important.”

There was an awkward silence. I nodded.

“Miss Pak have no family. Like me. When little, other children make fun sometimes, because we didn’t have …” Kimiko looked at me and groped for the word. “Old people?”

“Ancestors,” I said.

“Yes, ancestors,” she said. “We didn’t have graves of ancestors to visit on holidays. My mother made me promise that someday I would return to the graves of our ancestors in North Korea. When everyone else is with their ancestors, I will visit with Miss Pak.”

“That will be good,” I said in Korean.

Kimiko smiled.

“Kimiko,” I said. “I have a secret. But if I tell you, you must tell no one else.”

“Yes,” she said. “I promise.”

I reached out my hand to hers and we hooked our small fingers together in the Korean gesture of affirmation.

“There will be more Miss Paks, more girls who will suffer, unless you give me the thing you have.”

She was stone white. Silent. “Yes,” she said, finally. “I know. I used it to get what I wanted from them. A burial place for Miss Pak, a nice funeral, and a little money for myself. But they will tire of this arrangement soon. They will demand it from me.”

“That’s why they’ve been following you.”

“Yes.”

“Where do you keep it? Where is it hidden?”

“Here,” she said, and rose to her feet. She padded over to the improvised shelf on which Mama Lee had stacked a cache of her bounty, and from among dozens of green and white little boxes she took one. Back at the table, she extended it to me and I accepted the box of Fuji film.

“You’ll be on your own now,” I told her.

“Yes. I know.”

“
Anyonghikeiseiyo
,” I said to her. Stay in peace.

“
Anyonghikaseiyo
,” she replied. Go in peace.

12

A
t the Moyer Recreation Center on Yongsan Compound I signed some paperwork for the middle-aged doughnut dolly working the front desk and she gave us the key to one of the darkrooms and a thick tome of instructions on how to develop film. We had to buy the various chemicals from the supply room and the entire procedure was almost as difficult as the time Mrs. Aaronson taught me how to bake unleavened bread when I was twelve.

After we figured we had everything mixed right and we were waiting for the first prints to come out, Ernie got antsy.

“I’ll go next door to the snack stand at the bus station and get us a couple of beers.”

“Not supposed to open the door. It could expose the film.”

“You stand in front of the tray. I’ll just crack the door quick and slide out.”

“You sure they got cold ones?”

“Positive.”

“I’ll take two.”

I held my coat open around the film tray and Ernie slid out. The prints were gradually starting to come alive with images.

By the time Ernie got back the prints were clear. We popped our Falstaffs and admired them.

“Holy shit. The old creep.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

Miss Pak Ok-suk was tied up, and the naked Major General Clarence T. Bohler was performing various acts upon her body. Miss Pak’s face looked variously worried and twisted in pain. She was withstanding the abuse like a trouper, though: part of the price she figured she had to pay.

There was one shot where the look of resignation had left her eyes and had been displaced by panic. Bohler was bent over and manipulating something down near her backside. His forearm was around her neck. The photo was slightly blurred; she must have been struggling. From the grip he held her in, it appeared that she was having trouble getting air.

A couple of the photos showed some sort of medallion around Miss Pak’s neck. I went to the front desk, talked to the doughnut dolly, and managed to scrounge up a magnifying glass. Once my eyes had readjusted to the light in the darkroom, I took another look at the print. The chain appeared to be made of gold and the medallion of carved jade. It was a circle surrounding a Chinese character.
Ok
—jade. Part of her name.

In all, there were nineteen photographs. The rest of the film was blank. Three of them were so blurred as to be useless. The other sixteen were clear. Something had gone wrong. She had died.

There was no way of dating the photos. They could have been taken prior to the night of her death but I doubted it. Bohler’s driver could place him in the vicinity of Itaewon, and these photos would prove his intimate, abusive relations with Miss Pak Ok-suk.

We had enough to arrest him. And once formal proceedings were started, I knew we could get the evidence that would nail the case down. Kimiko would have to testify. It would be the only way for her. Her only chance was to take away the rationale for Bohler needing to silence her.

Ernie finished his beer and opened a second. “So now we know why Kimiko’s been so well paid lately, and getting all those fancy jobs.”

“Sure. Probably through Bohler.”

“And the night she went to the Officers’ Club, that was to let him know what she had on him?”

“And to give him a kick in the balls for good measure.”

“Now we know why he didn’t press charges.”

I popped my second can of beer and we hung the prints up to dry. Using some wrapping paper and an envelope I folded the negatives away and put them into my coat pocket.

We finished our beers, put the eight-by-twelve glossies into a manila envelope, and returned all the equipment we had checked out to the front desk.

The woman said, “I’m glad you boys are getting yourselves a hobby. Every soldier needs one.”

Milt Gorman’s residence wasn’t very far from The Roundup. The fortress he called home was illuminated by the glare of a floodlight. A ten-foot-high stone and mortar wall framed a huge metal gate and the entranceway to a small garage, locked tight behind a roll-down shutter made of corrugated metal.

Ernie rang the buzzer and shouted, “Bobby
ohma
!” A few seconds later someone opened the front door of the house.

“It’s George,” I yelled. “Here to see Milt.” The front door closed and a pair of slippers shuffled toward the gate. A metal bar slid free and an old Korean woman held the gate open as we entered. She relocked it and led us toward the house.

We took off our shoes in the entranceway and Milt ushered us into a big warm living room equipped with everything money could buy from the PX. Bulbs blinked at us from mounds of stereo equipment. A huge blank faced Japanese-made TV was mercifully turned off. Four or five kids in an adjacent bedroom were watching cartoons on another TV set. One of the boys was bigger and chubbier than the others but somehow he looked younger. His hair was light brown and his nose slightly pointed but his eyes were heavily lidded ovals.

“Some of the neighborhood kids like to come over and watch cartoons with Bobby,” Milt said. “Hell, I enjoy the damn things almost as much as they do.”

The old woman had disappeared into the kitchen. “
Ajima
!” Milt yelled. “
Mekju seigei.
” He held up three fingers to no one in particular. We sat down in the comfortable armchairs and in a moment three frosted cans of Falstaff and a large bowl of mixed nuts were in front of us on the coffee table. It and all the other furniture was done in black lacquer with inlaid mother-of-pearl designs. Traditional Korean stuff.