Nightmare Range (9 page)

“You took up a collection, didn’t you, Freddy?”

“Not me.” Freddy put his hand to his chest and took a step out of the cashier’s cage. “I don’t know nothing about it.”

“Or maybe you didn’t want to know nothing about it.”

“What the employees do with their own money is up to them. I had nothing to do with it.”

Ernie snorted.

Freddy turned and fled back to his office.

Talk about standing up for your staff.

The situation didn’t look too serious. Apparently what had happened was that Miss Pei noticed that the football pool money was missing from the brandy snifter, informed the new assistant manager, and he told the 8th Army chief of staff, who is also head of the Club Council. The chief of staff got on the horn and told the CID to get down here right away. Hot stuff. Money missing from the Army-Navy football pool—some of it his.

Meanwhile, Freddy and the club employees got wind of the situation and for some reason decided to take up a collection in
won
, the Korean currency; change it into US dollars at the cashier’s cage; and replace the money in the brandy snifter. Why they did this I didn’t know. One reason could have been to keep the heat off the club. Those bar inventories looked too precise to account for normal human activity. Bartenders sometimes spill liquor or open the wrong can of beer, or a customer sends a drink back because it isn’t what he ordered. Inventories shouldn’t come out even down to the last ounce of liquor and the last can of beer. Not real inventories. But when you’re pulling a scam, you might decide to make everything balance perfectly so you don’t attract attention. So you won’t have a couple of nosy CID agents wandering around your club.

Or maybe the employees collected the money for some other reason. I didn’t know. But most important, I couldn’t figure who had stolen the money in the first place.

I looked at the cashier. “Who took the money out of the brandy snifter?”

She stared at the floor. Slowly she began to shake her head. I tried again.

“Where did all this extra
won
come from? Did you take up a collection?”

Still she said nothing, as if she were tremendously ashamed, and just kept shaking her head.

I stood up. I knew I wasn’t going to get anything here. Ernie stood up and threw his empty beer can into the wastebasket. We walked out into the hallway.

Ernie said, “They’re trying to cover something up.”

I said, “You got that right.”

Two cute young Korean girls, bundled in sweaters and scarves, bounced down the hallway toward the main exit. Lunch hour waitresses, heading home. I stopped them and spoke in Korean.

“Young lady. Who is the head of the union here?”

They both stopped abruptly, breathless and wide-eyed.

“Mr. Kwon. The bar manger.”

I thanked them; they giggled and continued on their way.

Ernie looked after them. “Nice legs.”

“That’s all you could see of them.”

“That was enough.”

We wandered down the red carpeted hallway, took a couple of lefts, and found the bar manager’s office. Mr. Kwon stood up when we walked in. He was a tall man, close to six feet, maybe in his mid-fifties, and he had the scholarly air of someone who works with books and ledgers—not like most of the bartenders I was used to back in the States. He wore slacks and a white shirt with a black tie. His hair was oiled and combed straight back. I tried to imagine him in the white pantaloons and tunic of the ancient Korean with the hair long and knotted on the top. He looked like a Confucian scholar caught in modern times.

His eyes widened slightly. “Yes?”

“It’s about the money you collected,” I said, “to replace what was missing from behind the bar. Why?”

Mr. Kwon sighed and indicated the chairs across the small cubicle. “Have a seat.”

We sat.

“This morning,” he said, “when Miss Pei came to me and told
me the money was missing, we decided to take up a collection and replace it.”

“We?”

“The Korean employees here. It is not good to leave something shameful like the disappearance of money unattended to. This is our home. We take care of it.”

“But Miss Pei had already told one of the Americans, the assistant manager.”

“A mistake. We should not have bothered you about this matter.”

“Who took the money?”

Mr. Kwon looked down for a second then up at me. “The money is back now. There is no reason to worry about who took it.”

“Maybe not. But I need to know. Otherwise, I won’t know whether to worry or not.”

“And besides,” Mr. Kwon said, “now that the chief of staff is interested in this matter, you are nervous and if you don’t find out the truth it could be bad for you.”

Bingo. I was hardly admitting it to myself. If this had been the Enlisted Club and the money had been returned and none of the 8th Army honchos had known about it, I wouldn’t have bothered to look any further. As it was, the first sergeant would be breathing fire if we didn’t wrap this thing up.

Ernie jumped in. “Don’t you worry about the chief of staff. You just tell us who stole that damn money.”

Mr. Kwon looked at him steadily. “One of our waitresses stole it. Miss Lim.”

Ernie said, “Why haven’t you turned her in?”

“We will take care of it. Our own way.”

There was something about this situation that was bothering me. If the Korean staff had a bad apple among them who was embarrassing everybody by stealing the Army-Navy football pool money, I could understand their trying to get rid of her quietly in order to save face. But what I couldn’t understand
was why they would donate their hard-earned money to cover for her. Their chances of recouping their donations were nil. So why not just admit the thievery, run her out of town, and forget it? Were they that embarrassed that they’d shell out cash to avoid the wrath of the 8th Army chief of staff? I knew I wouldn’t. Of course, years of doing without in East LA had taught me to be somewhat parsimonious. And the Koreans had risen from the ashes of a devastating war less that two decades ago. They were even thriftier than I was. It didn’t make sense.

“What is it about this Miss Lim,” I said, “that makes you want to protect her?”

Mr. Kwon shifted in his seat and then looked back at me. Maybe he decided that we weren’t going to give up so he might as well lay it on the table.

“We know why she stole the money,” he said. “She has a baby and the baby is sick and she had to take it to the hospital.”

“What about her husband?”

“She’s not married.”

I waited. Mr. Kwon continued.

“There was an officer here. Not a good man. I warned her. She stayed with him while he spent his year in Korea. He told her that he would divorce his wife and return for her and the baby. After he left for the States, he wrote to her maybe two or three times, sent her some money, and then stopped writing. I’ve seen it many times. I’ve seen many young Korean girls with their hopes too high. They are blinded by their love for the United States.”

“Not their love for the GI?”

“No.” Mr. Kwon’s face didn’t move.

Ernie pulled out a stick of chewing gum, unwrapped it, and after a few chomps got it clicking. He didn’t believe that line any more than I did. Shooting for sympathy. With a half-American baby.

“Where does this Miss Lim live?”

Mr. Kwon sighed again. He lifted the phone on his desk,
dialed, barked a question, and then wrote something on the notepad in front of him. After he hung up the phone, he ripped the paper off the pad and handed it to me.

“Do you read Korean?”

“If you write clearly.” It was an address. “This is where Miss Lim lives?”

“Yes.”

I thanked him. We stood up and left the room. He looked after us as we walked down the long hallway. Maybe it was his resigned manner. Maybe it was the ancient cast of his features. But something told me that he’d been through this before.

Unlike the lush gentility of the 8th Army compound, Itaewon was alive with milling people and rows of produce, chickens, hogs, and fish wriggling in murky tanks. Miss Lim’s alley was right off the Itaewon Market, but the noise of commerce shut off abruptly as we slid into the narrow walkway. Ten-foot-high brick and stone walls loomed over us. I checked the number on the gateways to the homes. They didn’t seem to be in order, as if things had changed too much over the centuries for a simple one, two, three, four. Finally I found the gateway to 246-15 and pounded on a splintered wooden gate. Hens squawked as an old woman put on her slippers and shuffled toward us.

“
Yoboseiyo
?” she said.

“Miss Lim,” I said. “We’re looking for Miss Lim.”

The old woman opened the door. Trusting. We were Americans, not thieves.

“
Ae Kyong-ah!
” She called for someone. I thought it would be Miss Lim but it turned out to be an interpreter. A woman, about thirty, in blue shorts and a red T-shirt emerged from her hooch.

“Are you Miss Lim?” I said.

“No. She went to the hospital. Her baby is very sick.”

“Which hospital?”

She spoke to the old woman in rapid Korean and then turned back to me. “The MoBom Hospital in Hannam-dong.”

“Which room does she live in?”

“The one on the end. There.”

Ernie and I walked over. It was just a hovel. Raised foundation, little plastic closet in the corner, folded sleeping mats on a vinyl floor, and a small pot-bellied stove in the center of the room with rickety aluminum tubing reaching to the ceiling. An American officer in dress greens stared at me out of a framed photograph. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, maybe twenty pounds over his fighting weight, with curly brown hair and a big jolly smile. Gold maple leaves on his shoulder glittered along with his white teeth.

I turned back to the women. “How long has Miss Lim been gone?”

“She came home from work late last night. The baby never stopped crying. She waited until the curfew was over and then left for the hospital.”

“Before dawn?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s been there ever since?”

“Yes.”

The old woman waited patiently, not understanding. I smiled at her, thanked them both, and we turned to go. The woman in the blue shorts and red T-shirt called after me.

“Hey!”

We stopped and turned around.

“Why you GI always make baby and then go?”

I didn’t have an answer for her. Ernie stopped clicking his gum. We turned around and left.

The waiting room of the MoBom Hospital was packed. An attractive young Korean woman with a snappy white cap pinned to her black hair sat behind a counter near the entrance. Behind her was a list of basic fees. It was ten thousand
won
, up front, to see a doctor. Fourteen bucks.

I told her about Miss Lim and her sick baby and asked where
we could find her. She thumbed through a ledger but kept shaking her head. She wanted to know Miss Lim’s full name. I told her she was the woman with the half-American baby. She perked right up.

“Oh, yes. She is in Room three fourteen. The stairway is over there.”

The room held about thirty tiny beds with plastic siding on them. Next to one of them, Miss Lim sat on a wooden chair, her face in her hands. I showed her my identification.

“Hello, Miss Lim. We’re from the CID.”

It seemed that her face was about to burst with redness. She was a plain woman, young and thin with a puffy face that looked even more bloated from crying.

“Is your baby going to be all right?”

“The doctor is not sure yet. I must wait.”

Ernie didn’t like it here. He fidgeted with the change in his pocket and then drifted toward the door. My signal to wrap it up quickly.

“The money you took from behind the bar, it has already been replaced. I will talk to everyone. Explain your situation. I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

Her head went back into her hands, and this time she clutched her red face as if she were trying to bury it in her palms. I couldn’t be sure, but I think her shoulders convulsed a couple of times. I looked down at the baby. It was scrawny. Unconscious. Sweat-soaked brown hair matted against its little head.

We left.

Neither one of us spoke as the sloe-eyed stares followed us out of the hospital.

Ernie zigzagged his jeep through the heavy Seoul traffic as if he were in a race to get away from the devil.

“Well,” he said. “We wrapped up another one.”

“I’m sure they won’t do anything to her,” I said. “I’ll type up
the report to make her look as good as possible. Even the Eighth Army chief of staff has got a heart.”

Ernie didn’t say anything. I turned to him.

“Right?”

He shrugged. “If you say so, pal.”

The chief of staff didn’t want to prosecute, but in his capacity as the president of the Officers’ Club Council he did demand that Miss Lim appear before the next board meeting and explain her actions. The word we got was that he was upset because she could have come to the Club Council at any time, explained the nature of her financial emergency, and they would have helped out. Thievery wasn’t necessary, according to him.

When Ernie heard that, he snorted. “Nobody likes a person with a problem until that person has already solved the problem.”

Also, the Club Council could have set up a mechanism to help employees with emergency medical expenses at any time in the past, but they never had. Better, apparently, to make them come begging for it.

Ernie and I went to the Enlisted Club that night for Happy Hour and paid thirty-five cents for a tax-free beer and forty cents for a shot of bourbon.

The stripper had eyes like a tigress.

“She was a real trouper,” Freddy said. “Appeared before the Club Council looking sharp, standing up straight, and didn’t bat an eye when they told her that she’d been suspended for thirty days.”

“How have the other Korean employees taken it?”

“The place has been like a morgue. They do their jobs all right, but they won’t look at me and they won’t say anything. The laughter’s gone.”

“It’ll come back.” Freddy looked skeptical, but I knew it would. I’d learned that in East LA.