Nightmare Range (24 page)

All these complications flashed through my mind in the few seconds it took to stride toward the body lying on the cold cement.

As I said, I had always thought of myself as the exception—the guy who would leap out of the crowd to assist. But when I tried to imagine myself trudging down a road on a bustling Seoul morning with a lifeless mendicant draped over my shoulder, I just stepped over him, lengthened my stride, and plowed ahead toward the compound.

By the time I changed clothes and met Ernie at the snack bar, regret had overcome me. I described the situation. He gulped the last of his coffee, stood up, and said, “Let’s go.” I followed him out to the jeep. When we reached the long empty stretch of sidewalk, the boy was still there.

I was relieved. A chance for redemption.

We took him back to the barracks, and under the pulsing warm water in the shower room, he came to. He was frightened at first but then realized that he was no longer cold and he was getting a bath, so he accepted the soap from my hands and in short order had himself pretty well cleaned up. After he dried off, Ernie gave him some of his underwear, which was very baggy on the boy but at least was clean and helped him resemble a human being more than he had all morning. Back in the room he wolfed down a can of beans and made quick work of the soda Ernie bought him out of the vending machine.

After a brief chat in Korean I told him to lie down and rest and we’d be back to see him after work. Mr. Yim, the houseboy, wasn’t too keen on the idea of having this stranger lurking about his wing of the barracks, but the boy went to sleep immediately. Anyway, he didn’t have any clothes, since we had thrown his rags away—after I had determined that he was indeed as poor as he seemed.

On the way back to the CID detachment headquarters I was filled with that warm glow a good deed can give you, but I was puzzled about what the boy had told me. About his aunt, the one who had been murdered.

We were late for work, and the first sergeant didn’t particularly want to hear that we were helping a boy passed out on the sidewalk.

“You guys have a job to do,” he said. “There are agencies to take care of orphans. I want you to contact one of them and have him turned over today, but first you have some black market arrests you owe me.”

We hadn’t busted as many people as we should have in the last couple of weeks, and the provost marshal had been embarrassed when he’d briefed the commanding general.

“Who has their finger in the dike, colonel?” the CG asked. “Or are we allowing the whole country to be flooded with scotch whiskey and American cigarettes?”

Actually, it wasn’t the damage the black marketing did to the Korean economy that bothered him, it was the Korean wives of GIs shopping in the commissary and getting in his wife’s way. That was what bothered him. That and the hell he caught when he went home.

The first sergeant told us he wanted three arrests, minimum, before the close of business. No sweat. We had two of them before noon. Then we took the rest of the day off.

No sense spoiling him.

The St. Francis orphanage was an austere little cluster of shoebox-like buildings. It reminded me of boot camp except it was filled with smiling faces bursting with happiness. Father Art was a burly man with thick forearms, a pug nose, and a bald spot shaped like a heart atop his head.

“This must be the little fellow you called about,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” The boy was dressed in the smallest set of gym clothes we could find in the PX. “We brought him here as soon as we could get off work.”

Father Art knelt and spoke in rapid Korean. Soon the boy was nodding to Father Art and had taken his hand. They spoke for almost ten minutes, and at times I thought the boy was going to
cry. I could follow most of the conversation but a little of it was beyond me. Father Art’s mastery of the Korean language, to me, seemed as good as any Korean’s.

Father Art stood up and looked at us. “Did you follow any of that?”

“A little.”

“He say that his aunt was murdered, after he’d only been living with her for about two weeks. Prior to that he had lived with his father, a tenant farmer out in the country near Anyang. When his father died, he inherited his life’s savings: two hundred thousand
won
and a gold watch, an heirloom from his grandfather. He wrapped it all up and tied it around his waist and then took the train to Seoul to find his aunt.”

“What happened to the boy’s mother?”

“She died in childbirth, having him. The boy’s name is Yun Chil-bok. His aunt’s name is Ahn Chong-ai.”

“And he says she was murdered?”

“Yes. She owned a
pochang ma-cha
, a vending cart, in downtown Seoul. In Myongdong. Do you know the area?”

Ernie and I looked at each other. “Yeah. We know it.”

It was the biggest nightclub district in Seoul. GIs mostly stayed down in their own little set-aside, Itaewon, near the 8th Army headquarters, but some of the more adventurous amongst us prowled the streets of Myongdong from time to time.

I knelt down and asked the boy to tell me where his aunt set up her
pochang ma-cha
each night. He said it was always in the same place, in Myongdong near the Oriental Brewery Draft Beer Hall. Myongdong is a big district. I asked him to narrow it down a little more, but the best he could do was to tell us that it was about a five-minute walk from the Cosmos department store.

The boy said that he had helped his aunt in preparing the food, serving the customers, and replacing the perforated charcoal briquette that fired the little stove. At night they slept under the draped cart, on wooden boards, or when it got particularly
cold and his aunt could afford it, they stayed in the common room of a
yoinsuk
, a Korean inn.

“Did you have any friends or relatives in the area?”

“No relatives, but everyone who came into her
pochang ma-cha
was her friend.”

“How old was your aunt?”

“Very old. Maybe thirty.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

“Maybe. One man used to come around and bother her all the time. She would be very upset after he left. I’m not sure why.”

“What was his name?”

“Cruncher Chong.”

“Cruncher?”

“Yes.”

“Why did they call him that?”

“Because he was always chewing on something.”

“What happened to your aunt?”

“One morning I woke up, and there was only the board beneath me. The cart was gone, and so was my aunt.”

“Somebody had rolled the cart away while you slept?”

The boy hung his head. “Yes.”

“And your aunt was gone?”

“Yes. I checked with everyone in the neighborhood, but no one had seen her leave and no one knew where she had gone. I waited there five days. Finally I was just too hungry, and I wandered off.”

“How long did you roam around Seoul until we found you?”

“I’m not sure. Two or three weeks.”

“What makes you so sure that your aunt was murdered?”

“She wouldn’t have given up her cart without a fight, and I knew she wouldn’t have allowed us to be separated, for any reason, unless she was dead.”

“What happened to your two hundred thousand
won
?”

“She has it. I gave it to her when I arrived, as my father had told me to.”

“And the gold watch?”

“Yes. And the gold watch too.”

We thanked Father Art and left a package of goodies from the PX that we hoped the kids could use: soap, powdered milk, cookies. Then we said goodbye to Yun Chil-bok. I told him to listen to Father Art and we’d return to visit him this weekend. He thrust his shoulders back and looked me straight in the eye.

“You are policemen,” he said. “Will you find out who killed my aunt?”

“We will talk to the Korean police about it,” I said.

“But I don’t know them. I only know you.”

Ernie shuffled his feet. He often surprised me with how much Korean he could understand.

“We’ll look into it for you,” I said.

“I will be waiting.”

As we climbed into Ernie’s jeep, I looked back at the boy. Father Art held his hand, but Yun Chil-bok stared straight at us, as if he were trying to evaluate our trustworthiness.

He didn’t seem grateful for what we had done. But maybe he felt that at the age of eight years he had a right to be picked up off the pavement and fed and taken care of.

I agreed with him.

Lieutenant Pei, liaison officer for the Korean National Police at the 8th Army provost marshal’s office, didn’t hold out much hope.

“I spoke to the captain of the Myongdong Police Station. He said that the woman who ran the
pochang ma-cha
in the area you describe has indeed disappeared, and her cart along with her. But there’s no reason to believe that she was murdered. If she had an unwanted nephew on her hands, maybe she decided that just packing up and leaving would be the best of all concerned. After all, he did end up in an orphanage.”

“But the boy says she was murdered.”

“We have no reports of any killings in the Myongdong area in many months. The captain was insistent on that.”

We thanked him and walked out of his office. Ernie surprised me by bringing up the subject first.

“We haven’t been to Myongdong in a while. Wouldn’t hurt to stop by the OB Beer Hall tonight and have a few wet ones.”

I looked at him. “You’re right about that. It couldn’t hurt nothing. Nothing but our livers.”

The OB Beer Hall hummed with customers, most of them Korean businessmen just off work, standing at the counters chatting with friends. Blue-suited girls with jet black hair tied snugly under white bandanas ran back and forth to the tap, refilling huge mugs of beer. The hefty young woman behind the stick wore a red and white nameplate with the OB Beer logo pinned above her breasts.

After our second refill I spoke to her in Korean.

“Miss Kim, do you ever get a customer in here known as Cruncher Chong?”

“Cruncher? Oh, yes. He comes in here often.”

“Is he here now?”

The young lady scanned the room. “No. I haven’t seen him.
You
know him?”

“No. Not yet. But we’re looking for him on behalf of a boy named Yun Chil-bok.”

The girls looked at us blankly. “Well, if Cruncher Chong is not here, he is usually at the Black Dragon nightclub.”

“Where’s that?”

She pointed. “Two blocks down and turn right past the Teahouse of the Seven Virgins.”

Two more uniformed young women popped through swinging doors carrying freshly washed mugs and more snacks to put on display. Ernie stared at them, and for a moment I thought he was going to drool. Over the mugs or the girls, I wasn’t sure which. I said thank you to Miss Kim and pulled Ernie out of there.

The Black Dragon nightclub had a long bar with upholstered bar stools and cocktail tables peeking out from behind planters and aquariums full of tropical fish. When our eyes adjusted, I saw that the joint was only about half full. The crowd was younger than at the OB Beer Hall. And full of hustle.

A tall, slender man with a heavily greased pompadour stood at the bar. He was talking, and the bow-tied bartender kept smiling and nodding. He stared at us when we walked in, as most of the people in the place did, and then he reached in his pocket and pulled out something long and gnarled. He stuck the tip of it into his mouth. At first I thought it was a carrot, but as my eyes refocused I realized it was a piece of ginseng root.

They say that true ginseng grows only in the soil of the Korean peninsula. It has been known since ancient time for its medicinal powers, but most men saw it as an aphrodisiac.

As I passed him, I could almost see my reflection in his big white teeth. I fought off the urge to say, “What’s up, doc?”

Only Ernie would have gotten away with it.

We took a seat at a table, and after a while a heavily made-up waitress in a tightly wrapped dress came over to serve us. We ordered two beers and a plate of dried cuttlefish. When she delivered the wets, Ernie smiled and made her promise to come back and talk after taking care of a few more orders.

The tall man at the bar continued to drink, but I didn’t see him forking over any money. Four more sleazy types paraded into the Black Dragon and joined him. They laughed at his jokes and backed off when he playfully poked them with his ginseng root.