The Wandering Ghost (24 page)

The hostess who had scurried away returned, this time with two burly young Korean men in suits. One glance told me that they were weightlifters. By the light of the overhead bulb, I could also see that the one standing closest to me had noticeable calluses on the knuckles of his right hand. Martial arts. No doubt.

I nodded toward the two men who stared at me impassively. Without showing fear—or at least hoping I wasn’t showing fear—I stepped forward and pulled out my credentials. I told them in Korean that I was from 8th Army CID, here as part of a criminal investigation.

Down the hallway, someone shouted.

I turned and ran, the two weightlifters right behind me.

Ernie stood inside the private room. It was about twelve tatami mats square. A low rectangular table occupied the middle of the room with eight or nine businessmen seated around it.
Bulkogi
and bottles of Scotch and boiled quail eggs overflowed the table. The businessmen had taken off their coats, which were hung on the wall behind them.
Kisaeng
sat next to them. Beautiful Korean women, most of them dressed fashionably, in Western skirts and blouses, as opposed to the traditional clothing of the two girls who had greeted us at the front door.

The faces of the Korean businessmen were flushed with booze. And maybe something else. Shock at the fact that some big
yangnom
, foreign lout, had barged his way into their private party. The oldest of the businessmen, the only one with streaks of gray in his hair, stood toe-to-toe with Ernie, shouting at him, waggling a short finger at Ernie’s pointed nose. For his part, Ernie yelled at the man in English while the man shouted back in Korean.

“
Yoja
,” Ernie was saying. “Woman. You know,
Miguk
woman.” He made wavy motions with his hands. “You
arra
?” You understand? “American MP woman.”

What the red-faced businessman shouted back was too rapid for me to decipher, but I do know that it was filled with invective. I grabbed Ernie by the elbow. “Come on.” When he seemed reluctant to leave, I said, “There are more rooms down the hallway.”

He shot a withering look of contempt at the enraged businessman and backed out of the room. Ernie proceeded down the long corridor, sliding open every oil-papered door, revealing groups of businessmen and other wealthy gentlemen drinking and enjoying themselves. Some of the
kisaeng
were dressed smartly in Western clothes, others wore the full traditional silk
chima-chogori
. But what we didn’t find, and what everyone denied knowledge of, was a
Miguk
yoja.
An American woman.

The weightlifters had stayed close to us but so far they hadn’t made a move. I’m sure they were held back out of their respect—and fear—of my badge. But by now the entire Koryo Forest Inn was in an uproar and
kisaeng
and customers stood in the halls shouting. Ernie ignored them. He paraded up and down the corridor as if he owned the Koryo Forest Inn, the city of Byokjie, and the entire province in which it sat.

Finally, when he started to check the rooms out back, the weightlifters became fed up. One of them started to speak to Ernie in Korean, as if he wanted to reason with him, convince him to stop this disconcerting search through their little establishment. When the weightlifter reached out to touch Ernie’s arm, Ernie swiveled and shot a straight punch at the man’s nose. Within seconds, Ernie was flat on his back. Instead of jumping in to wrestle with the guy, I backed off a few steps, pulled my .45, and aimed it at the two burly martial arts experts. They froze.

Down the corridor, the hubbub of outrage ceased, changing to a stunned silence. Ernie rose to his feet, dusted off his pants, and shot a long hard stare at the man who’d dropped him on his butt. For a moment, I was afraid he was going to repeat his stupidity. Instead, he regained his self-control. Before he lost it again, I motioned to him and he and I walked toward the front entrance. In Korean, I told everyone to stay put. Quickly, Ernie inspected the upstairs area and the empty side rooms that we hadn’t looked into yet and finally the gazebo out back that was used during the spring.

“Nothing,” he said when he returned.

“I guess that does it then.”

Speaking in Korean, I thanked everyone for their cooperation. Ernie and I backed out of the Koryo Forest Inn. The chauffeurs stopped smoking when we passed by. Together, we hustled down the gravel road.

“They’ll call the KNPs,” Ernie said.

“Yeah. Thanks to you.”

“Well, what did you want me to do? They weren’t answering your questions.”

“I hadn’t started asking questions.”

“Same difference.”

The time was ten minutes until midnight. Ten minutes until the midnight to four curfew. Ernie and I sat in the jeep in a cleared area next to Reunification Road that was normally used as a bus turnaround. For the last twenty minutes we’d been observing a steady stream of expensive sedans—Hyundais, Volvos, BMWs—streaming south, back toward Seoul.

Nobody was driving north.

“There must be a million of them,” Ernie said.

“Yeah. Which means a big demand for
kisaeng
.”

“Some of those gals back at the Koryo Forest Inn were good-looking hammers.”

“You noticed.”

“I did.”

The traffic in front of us started to thin. The vehicles that continued south were routinely breaking the speed limit, in a hurry to make it back to Seoul and get off the street before curfew.

“Here we are,” Ernie said. “Cold as shit, we haven’t uncovered anything new, and curfew’s about to descend on the entire world.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is that I don’t want to sit here in this freaking jeep all night long.”

I thought about that for a minute. “Good point.”

“Glad you concur.” He waited for the silence to lengthen and then he raised his voice and said, “So what in the hell are we going to do about it?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was thinking about the case.”

“The case? But we didn’t learn anything new tonight.”

“Sure we did.”

“Like what?”

“Like Jill Matthewson has never worked at the Koryo Forest Inn.”

“Great. That narrows down our search.”

“And during the hubbub you created, one of the
kisaeng
was holding on to another
kisaeng
’s arm, whispering to her.”

“Sweet. Whispering what?”

“Whispering ‘
Chil Un Lim
.’”

“What does that mean?”

“Forest of Seven Clouds, I think. But I’d have to see the Chinese characters to be sure.”

“You and your Chinese characters. So what do you make of it?

“The girl knew we were looking for an American woman, she whispered the name of a
kisaeng
house to her girlfriend. What do
you
think that means?”

“It means that she heard that a
Miguk
woman was working at that
kisaeng
house.”

“Exactly.”

“She might be right; she might be wrong.”

“That’s true.”

“So where is this place?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“That helps.”

“At least you’re becoming more optimistic.”

“Yeah. Now if I don’t freeze my spleen tonight, my attitude will perk up even more.”

“Wouldn’t want to dampen your attitude.”

We drove off toward the nearest village, searching for a place to flop. We found it. In a
yoinsuk
, a Korean flophouse with an outdoor toilet and communal sleeping rooms. A half-dozen Korean trucks drivers were snoring so loudly that I thought the tile roof would fall off. That part didn’t bother Ernie. He can sleep through anything. What did bother him was their kimchee breath.

“If I had a knife,” he told me, “I could cut the stink up into bricks and package it.”

As soon as he said that, one of the truck drivers farted. Ernie groaned and rolled over on his sleeping mat.

An hour before dawn, the proprietress provided—for a small fee—towels and pans of hot water and black-market shaving equipment. After we washed up, she provided us with a complimentary bowl of rice gruel and
muu maleingi
, slices of dried turnip. Thus refreshed, Ernie and I started our search for the Forest of Seven Clouds.

Or at least I thought we were going to start our search for the Forest of Seven Clouds.

11

E
rnie balked. He’d been more than willing to come up here during our time off and take the risk of playing cat-and-mouse with the Division MPs, but he wasn’t willing to directly defy 8th Army.

“In two hours,” he said, “we’re going to be AWOL.”

We sat in the jeep, parked next to the wood-slat wall of the
yoinsuk
. In front of us, at the end of a gravel access road, the paved Tongil-lo highway, Reunification Road, sat on its earthen foundation elevated above the rice paddies that spread through the valley. A blanket of fog lay on the land. Our breath formed clouds on the windshield of the jeep.

“You’re wrong, Ernie,” I replied. “Failure to repair. That’s the most they can slap us with.”Missing mandatory formations is punishable, but it’s not AWOL.

Ernie looked at me as if I were out of my gourd. “Failure to repair, AWOL, either way we’re in line for an Article Fifteen. It’s now zero-six-hundred on Monday morning, Sueño, in case you forgot. We have two hours to show up for work—clean shaven, shoes shined, smiles on our chops—at the Criminal Investigation Detachment on Yongsan Compound. That’s by direct order of the Eighth United States Army provost marshal. If we leave now, and the Seoul traffic’s not too bad, we just might make it.”

“Your shoes aren’t shined.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not changing the subject. We go back now, they’ll never let us return to Division. The honchos will stick together and not one of them will be willing to take responsibility for making a decision that directly contradicts the 2nd Division request to have us recalled.”

Ernie kept his arms crossed. “Not my lookout,” he said. “When we get back we tell them what we know. If the provost marshal sees it our way, he’ll send us back up here to finish the job.”

“By then,” I said, “it might be too late.”

Ernie studied me, his eyes squinted. I explained.

Whoever had snuffed Pak Tong-i at the office of Kimchee Entertainment in Tongduchon most likely had obtained an excellent lead on the whereabouts of Corporal Jill Matthewson by stealing Pak’s file on the stripper Kim Yong-ai. Chances were good that the file contained either her new address or the location of her new job or some other information that could lead to Kim Yong-ai and, from there, to Jill Matthewson. Maybe they’d already found her. Maybe they were still looking. But after a fitful night’s sleep, an idea had come to me. I explained it to Ernie.

“Camp Howze,” I told Ernie. “We check there. They’ll know if someone’s been looking for Jill. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

Ernie cursed but in the end he started up the jeep and, when we hit Tong-il Lo, he turned north.

Camp Howze clung to the edge of a steep hill, overlooking the squalor of Bongil-chon. The morning fog had started to lift but the entire GI village looked raunchy and raw. Unlit neon signs advertised nightclubs: the SEXY LADY and the SOUL BROTHER and the PINK PUSSYCAT. Above the village, rows of Quonset huts perched on a craggy ridge looking down on the fertile invasion route of the Western Corridor. Other than the fur-capped guards at the gate, there seemed to be no life on Camp Howze. And no life in the ville. And no
kisaeng
houses.

Two MPs manned the guard shack at the front gate. Ernie drove up to them and, as I’d instructed, turned the jeep around and kept the engine running, prepared for a quick getaway. I hopped out of the front seat.

I flashed my CID badge to the MP but within milliseconds I’d folded it and stuck it back inside my jacket.

“Bufford,” I told the MP. “MPI Warrant Officer from Camp Casey. He been around?”

The MP look surprised, almost as if I’d woken him up. There wasn’t much traffic here at the main gate of Camp Howze. Only an occasional jeep or army deuce-and-a-half and no civilian traffic at all. It wasn’t allowed.

The MP glanced back at another MP sitting at a wooden field table reading a comic book. There were a stack of alert notifications next to his elbow but they looked untouched. One of them, I figured, mentioned me and Ernie. Out here, at this sleepy little outpost, who really paid attention to such things?

“Jonesy?” the MP asked. “You ever heard of some investigator from Casey named Bufford?”

Jonesy looked up from the dog-eared comic. “The one with the big nose? Skinny?”

“That’s the one,” I said.

“He’s been
living
out here,” Jonesy replied, disgust filling his voice. “Him and that sidekick of his. What’s the name? Earwax?”

“Weatherwax,” I said.

“Yeah. He’s an arrogant asshole, too.”

“Why do you say that?”

“They always want Camp Howze MPs to do their legwork for them. They’re hunting some big important fugitive, according to them.”

“They say who?”

“How would I know? They don’t tell me nothing. I work the gate.”

“Is Bufford still here?”

The MP shrugged. “Ain’t my day to watch him.”

I thanked the two MPs, told them to take it easy, and ran back to the jeep. Before either MP had a chance to give us much thought, Ernie and I were zooming toward Tongil-lo. After I briefed him, Ernie started honking his horn, forcing kimchee cabs to swerve out of our way. We understood now that speed was everything. And compared with the fact that Corporal Jill Matthewson was being hunted—now—by Mr. Fred Bufford and Staff Sergeant Weatherwax, our bureaucratic troubles with 8th Army really didn’t mean much.

I only hoped we weren’t too late.

We started our search by heading toward Seoul. I wanted to locate on my map every
kisaeng
house between Seoul and the DMZ and since we were closest to Seoul, it was easier to start on the southern end. However, after five minutes of driving, Ernie and I reached the dragon’s teeth, the rows of concrete monoliths that were designed to stop the North Korean communist armored divisions from invading Seoul. This marked the southernmost edge of the 2nd Division area of operations. Ahead, about a hundred yards away, stood the concrete bunker that was the Division checkpoint in the Western Corridor, manned by American MPs and Korean
honbyong
.

Ernie pulled over to the side of the road. “We don’t want to go there,” he said.

“No, we don’t.”

He waited until the traffic cleared and performed a U-turn on Reunification Road. We were heading back north and now I knew for sure that the first
kisaeng
houses north of Seoul were in Byokjie. When we reached the Byokjie intersection, we turned east on the road heading toward Uijongbu. It took us about a half hour to finish mapping the few remaining
kisaeng
houses in the area. All of them were shuttered and closed but I was able to read their names on the signposts. None of them were called the Forest of Seven Clouds, or anything close to it.

We returned to Tongil-lo, turned right, and continued north toward the Demilitarized Zone. After passing Bong-il Chon again, we were able to mark the positions of about a half-dozen more
kisaeng
houses along the road, none of which was named the Forest of Seven Clouds. We came to the turnoff for Kumchon. Kumchon is the largest town between Seoul and Munsan, and the county seat of Paju, the agricultural county through which we were now traveling. We’d reached about halfway along our planned route.

“There must be plenty of
kisaeng
houses over there,” Ernie said.

“Must be. Let’s try it.”

To be fair, Ernie and I were using the term
kisaeng
very loosely. During the Yi Dynasty, girls of intelligence and beauty were taken from their families and taught the gentle arts: calligraphy, the playing of musical instruments, dancing, drumming, even how to write a form of short lyric poetry called
sijo
. Once trained, they were sent off to the royal or provincial courts to entertain aristocracy. Sometimes they were even transported to remote military outposts. The advantage they received over normal women was education. The disadvantage was that they were forced to leave their families and never marry; their lives were unbearably lonely. Some of the greatest Korean poetry has come from
kisaeng
, usually dealing with longing and loss.

The women we were seeing in the modern, so-called
kisaeng
houses were, for the most part, poorly educated country girls. And their work was only one step above that of common prostitutes. Still, they were called
kisaeng
, women of skill, and that gave them status. A rock upon which to rebuild their pride.

The town of Kumchon sat two kilometers west of Tongil-lo. Already we’d seen two or three signs pointing up gravel roads that led into the hills, advertising establishments with elaborate Chinese characters in their names. Characters like “dream” and “cloud” and “flower” and “palace” and “peony.”
Kisaeng
houses all. But not the one we were looking for.

When we reached the outskirts of Kumchon, Ernie slowed the jeep to about five miles an hour. A two-lane road passed through the center of town. Shops framed of weathered wood lined either side of the road and farmers pushed carts laden with sacks of grain or piled high with glimmering winter cabbage. Old men in jade-colored vests and billowing white pantaloons, holding canes and wearing the traditional Korean horsehair stovepipe hat, strolled unconcerned across the road, expecting vehicular traffic to make way for their venerable personages. It did. Even impatient young truck drivers refused to honk their horns at the elderly. The entire city of Kumchon reeked of fresh produce and raw earth.

“Like going back in time,” Ernie said.

On the shops, handwritten signs advertised their wares: hot noodle eateries, fishmongers, silk merchants, porcelain vendors, even a little shop with a glowing acetylene torch advertising ironworks. One of the names of the shops was slashed with red Chinese characters:
Kongju Miyongsil
. Princess Beauty Shop. It caught my eye:

We reached the end of town which tapered off into smaller buildings and then empty lots and finally we were cruising, once again, through endless fields of fallow rice paddies. No signs for
kisaeng
houses out here. After about a half mile, we turned around.

It was almost ten in the morning and I realized that Ernie and I were two hours AWOL, although I didn’t mention this to him. In fact, I tried to banish the thought from my own mind, but without much success.

As we were driving back through Kumchon, I noticed that someone had switched on a light inside the Princess Beauty Shop.

“Pull over,” I told Ernie.

“Why? No
kisaeng
houses around here.”

“No. But that beauty shop’s open. I want to ask some questions.”

“What beauty shop?”

“Never mind. Just find a place to park.”

He did. At the edge of town near an eatery that catered to cab drivers. We chained and padlocked the jeep’s steering wheel and hoofed our way into downtown Kumchon.

I rapped twice on the door of the Princess Beauty Shop and entered, poking my nose in first.

“
Anyonghaseiyo?
” I asked. Are you at peace?

One young woman sat in a chair with a pink cloth draped over her body, her hair in curlers, gaping at this strange creature—me— who’d just entered her world. A middle-aged woman wearing a white beautician’s smock stood behind her. In Korean, I said, “Sorry to bother you. Do you think it would be too much trouble if I use your telephone?”

Involuntarily, both women glanced at a counter in the waiting area. On a knitted pad sat a clunky black telephone. Telephones are status symbols in Korea. Not everyone has them, not by a long shot. The phone company, which is a government monopoly, demands a costly security deposit—often well over a thousand dollars—before it will entrust anyone with phone equipment. But it figured that a going concern like the Princess Beauty Shop would have a telephone because they had to be able to make appointments with the wealthy ladies who were their clients.

The two women sat in stunned silence. Another two women in the back room had apparently heard my voice. Both wore beautician’s smocks and peered out through a beaded curtain. Ernie entered the beauty shop and this gave the women even more to gawk at.

I strode over to the phone saying, “I’m sorry but I have to make a call to Seoul.”

The eldest beautician started to say something in protest, but I pulled out a five hundred
won
note, a little more than a buck, and laid it on the counter next to the phone. That shut her up. Pretending to ignore her, I dialed the number for the 8th Army exchange.

Ernie strolled around the shop, smiling, studying the color photographs of beautiful women with beautiful hairdos. I stared at the photos, too. Korean women of unearthly beauty. I listened to clicking sounds and various pitches of dial tone.

Phone systems in Korea in the seventies are primitive. Lines are easily overloaded, and it isn’t unusual to wait twenty minutes just to be able to get through to the 8th Army operator. As I waited, I watched the beauticians. The two young ones had emerged from the back room and pretended to be busy preparing their work areas. Ernie smiled at them. They smiled back. Amongst themselves they whispered.