The Wandering Ghost (26 page)

“Everybody like,” Blue Orchid said, switching to English. “Many men come from Seoul. Want to see
Miguk kisaeng
.”

The
Miguk kisaeng
. The American woman of skill.

Ernie was becoming antsy. Still, I didn’t rush Blue Orchid. She’d stopped using Korean now and had switched almost exclusively to English. This told me that during those years of hardship during and after the Korean War, before she’d landed this gig at the Forest of Seven Clouds, she’d made her living not as a
kisaeng
but as a business girl—for GIs. As I hoped, Blue Orchid finally reached the point in her narrative where something went wrong.

“Two days ago, man come.” Blue Orchid’s face crinkled in disgust. “American man. GI. He drive up in jeep, have another GI with him. They both wear uniform. Everything dirty. Clothes dirty, boots dirty, even GI teeth dirty.”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“Tall. Almost like you. But skinny, like him.” She pointed at Ernie. “But more skinny than him.”

“An MP?” Ernie asked.

“Yes. He wear black helmet with “MP” on front.”

Warrant Officer Fred Bufford. Had to be.

“And the driver?”

“Black man. Small guy. Skinny, too. He don’t say much.”

Maybe Staff Sergeant Weatherwax.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“He walk in wearing boots. Same like you.” The cardinal sin. “Then he find
Beik-jo
.”

“She sit in room with customers. Important customers. They drink much whiskey. Buy
taaksan anju
.”

Anju
means “snacks.”
Taaksan
is Japanese for “much.” English, Japanese, and Korean all in one sentence: Buy
taaksan anju
. Blue Orchid was slipping back into GI slang.

“Tall GI find Jill, he pull his gun.” Blue Orchid mimicked a man pointing a .45 automatic pistol. “He tell Jill she gotta go back compound. She say, hell no! He try to grab her. Then Jill knuckle-sandwich with him.” Blue Orchid waved a small fist through the air. “Tall, skinny GI go down, drop gun, Jill pick it up. Point it at GI, take him back outside, make him and black GI
karra chogi
.” Go away.

“And she kept the pistol?” Ernie asked.

Blue Orchid nodded vigorously.

“Bold,” Ernie said, once again impressed with the exploits of Corporal Jill Matthewson.

“What’d she do next?” I asked.

“She . . . how you say?”

Blue Orchid mimicked grabbing things and placing them in a container.

“She packed her bags?” I said.

“Right. Pack bags. She and Kim Yong-ai. Right away, they go.”

“Kim Yong-ai was working here, too?”

Blue Orchid nodded. “Not
taaksan
popular like Jill. But she good woman.”

“Where’d they go?”

Blue Orchid shrugged her narrow shoulders. “
Moolah
me.” I don’t know. “They cry, they thank everybody for helping them, they so sorry they gotta go but, anyway, they gotta go.”

“They left that same night?”

“Yes. They leave same night. After they go, maybe one hour, GI come back. This time he have many jeeps and many MPs. They search every room, make our customer
taaksan
angry. They ask anybody where Jill go but nobody tell them nothing because nobody know.”

“Were there any KNPs with them?”

Blue Orchid shook her head. “None.”

“But they searched your premises. Did you report them to the KNPs?”

“No. We no call. Later, when KNP honcho come drinkey, I tell him. He
taaksan kullasso
.” Very angry. Blue Orchid was using English, Japanese, and Korean again.

“Did he do anything about it?”

Blue Orchid shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

Probably not. For the local boss of the Korean National Police to admit that 2nd Infantry Division MPs had taken it upon themselves to search a legitimate business enterprise without a warrant, an enterprise over which they had no jurisdiction, would be a tremendous loss of face. The KNP boss would never report the breach of legal procedure officially but, you can bet, he’d be waiting for his chance to take revenge.

We asked if we could see Jill Matthewson’s room. Blue Orchid not only agreed but escorted us there herself. I was disappointed. It was just a little cubbyhole with a vinyl-covered
ondol
floor and cherry tree wall paper furnished with a down-filled sleeping mat and a plastic armoire. It had been totally cleaned out. Nothing was left to indicate Jill Matthewson’s brief residence. Kim Yong-ai’s room was the same.

I grabbed Blue Orchid by her silk-covered shoulders and swore to her that Ernie and I weren’t here to harm Jill Matthewson. I told her of the letter from Jill’s mother and I even showed it to her. After she’d read it—or pretended to read it—I asked her to tell me anything she knew that could help me find Jill, and find her before she was located by her enemies.

Blue Orchid shook her head. “Jill Matthewson smart woman. She know that if she tell us anything, someday we tell somebody else. So she no tell us nothing. I swear.” Blue Orchid raised her right hand. “
Beik-jo
didn’t tell us where she go.”

I believed her.

As a group, the
kisaeng
of the Forest of the Seven Clouds followed us out to the exit. I thanked them for their cooperation. As one body, they bowed as we left.

“Zippo,” Ernie said. “
Nada
. Not a goddamn thing. That’s what we have to show for all these days of work. She’s gone. She’s in the wind and we don’t have a clue as to where she might’ve gone.”

Ernie was right. I didn’t want to admit it, but he was right.

We were in the jeep, driving back toward Kumchon.

“And furthermore,” he continued, “we now have one day of AWOL on our record. One day of bad time.”

By “bad time” Ernie meant that any days of absence without leave do not count toward earning a twenty-year military retirement.

He was right again. Our gamble hadn’t paid off. Bufford had reached Jill Matthewson before us. But how? Then I remembered the body of Pak Tong-i; I remembered how he’d been tortured, systematically strangled. He’d probably revealed information before he’d been stricken down by a heart attack. The timing was right. Bufford had learned the whereabouts of Jill Matthewson and Kim Yong-ai and then he and Staff Sergeant Weatherwax had hot-footed it over to the Forest of Seven Clouds.

What had he planned to do with Jill? Was he just going to arrest her and return her to 2nd Division custody? Somehow, I thought not. Pak Tong-i was dead; Druwood was dead. If Warrant Officer Fred Bufford was in any way responsible for their deaths, bringing Jill Matthewson back to Camp Casey would be too dangerous. My guess was—and judging by Jill’s reaction it was probably her guess, too—that Bufford intended to kill her. That’s why she’d threatened his life with his own .45. And that’s why she’d left no word with the women of the Forest of the Seven Clouds as to where she was going.

“For all we know,” Ernie said, “she went to Seoul and we’ll never find her.”

He was becoming gloomier by the minute. I was fighting the feeling but gloom was overwhelming me, too. No matter how I turned it over, all the things we’d learned since arriving in Division gave us no clue as to where Jill might’ve gone.

Additionally, it now looked as if our work concerning the black-market activities of the 2nd Division honchos and the suspicious circumstances of Private Marvin Druwood’s death might come to naught. Once we were back in Seoul, even if Staff Sergeant Riley managed to come up with those classified ration control records, any anomaly they showed would be handled through regular channels. That is, the Division provost marshal himself, Colonel Alcott, would be notified immediately. Any covering up he had to do he could handle at his leisure. The same with the death of Private Marvin Druwood. Alcott would be asked to investigate his own MPs. The worst that could happen is that there would be some embarrassment on the 2nd Division commander’s part and Alcott would be relieved and transferred back to the States.

One thing you could be sure of is that Ernie and I would be kept strictly away from the investigation. When the integrity of honchos in positions of power is threatened, investigations are handled with the utmost delicacy. And delicacy isn’t what Ernie and I are known for.

Would Jill Matthewson eventually be hunted down and murdered? Possibly. Along with her friend, Kim Yong-ai. If their bodies were dumped in a ditch, or tossed into the fast-flowing Imjin River, they’d never be heard from again. And Ernie and I would still be working the black-market detail down in Seoul, busting the Korean wives of enlisted men for selling maraschino cherries and dehydrated orange drink. Standing around with our thumbs up our butts while a good soldier was stalked and murdered.

Ernie’s thoughts must’ve been running parallel to mine. His face was twisted in anger and his knuckles on the steering wheel were white. He raced faster than he should have through the city of Kumchon, passed the Princess Beauty Shop without slowing down, and when we reached Reunification Road, without a word to me, he turned south toward Seoul.

I sat with my arms crossed, brooding. It was late afternoon now; the sun was lowering, cold and damp, behind enormous banks of gray clouds.

At Bongil-chon Ernie threw the jeep into low gear. He turned off the main road and drove under the overpass toward the compound that sat on the craggy peaks. Before reaching the road that led up to the compound, he turned into the narrow lanes of the village and gunned the engine, letting it whine. Like a crazed road-race driver, he roared through the narrow lanes, splashing mud everywhere. People jumped out of his way. He zigzagged back and forth, up and down, until he located the central road of the village. It was lined with nightclubs.

Along the main drag, he found a place to park the jeep. He chained and padlocked the steering wheel, turned to me, and said, “Let’s go get drunk.”

As if to help me with my decision, one of the neon signs blinked to brilliant life. YOBO CLUB, it said. I pondered my decision for about three seconds, finding no flaw in Ernie’s plan.

“We ain’t there yet?” I asked.

The time was about an hour and a half before midnight. Ernie and I were so drunk that we were starting to hold on to the edge of the bar to steady ourselves. We must’ve hit every dive in Bongil-chon and of all of them, this one was probably the worst. The Bunny Club, they called it. It was full of half-dressed business girls and half-crazed GIs with pockets full of spending money and access to more cheap booze and rock and roll and women than they’d ever seen in their lives.

Ernie and I loved it.

We’d spotted the local ville patrol a couple of times; it was composed of an MP from Camp Howze and a Korean MP from a nearby ROK Army compound and, of course, a surly Korean National Policeman. They hadn’t bothered us or seemed to notice us in any way. Ernie and I were just two more drunken GIs wasting their money as far as the ville patrol was concerned. Even though the Division was looking for us—and these MPs had probably been notified—it’s not the type of thing that a busy MP spends a lot of time worrying about. Two 8th Army CID agents, how dangerous could they be? Besides, even if Division managed to distribute photos that quickly, nobody pays any attention to that stuff. A cop on patrol has other things to worry about.

Tomorrow, Ernie and I would return to Seoul to face the music. Tonight, we were partying. At least we were trying to. Actually, though, we were just drowning our sorrows. For whatever drunken reason, Ernie and I decided to leave the Bunny Club and stagger to another bar. It was a good thing we did because just as we pushed our way through the swinging doors of the Bunny Club, an MP jeep rounded the corner. Ernie and I kept walking at our normal pace. I grabbed Ernie by the elbow.

“What?” Ernie asked.

“MPs.”

“So?”

“So look.” I pointed a shaky finger. MPs climbed out of either side of the jeep, one of them tall and skinny, the other not quite as thin but shorter.

“Bufford,” Ernie said. His fists knotted.

Before I could stop him, he was staggering back toward the Bunny Club, leaning forward at the waist, his entire posture one of determination. Ernie Bascom had decided to kick some ass.

By now, Bufford and the other MP were approaching the front door of the Bunny Club. In the overhead light, I could see that the other MP was indeed the man we’d surmised had accompanied Bufford to the Forest of the Seven Clouds: Staff Sergeant Rufus Q. Weatherwax. The left side of his nose was still a dark purple from that night in TDC when Ernie had punched him. Both MPs drew their .45s, all their attention riveted on the entranceway of the Bunny Club, and together they pulled back their slides.

Under normal MP procedure, a weapon is drawn only when you know that your life is in danger. These guys looked not as if they were worried about being hurt, but as if they’d already decided to go in firing.

I ran after Ernie, trying to pull him away.

Startled by our footsteps, Bufford and Weatherwax turned. They were about ten yards away. I grabbed Ernie’s shoulders and yanked him backwards. Just as I did so, a round was fired. I felt hot air pass above Ernie’s arm, and then we were both tumbling backward, somehow keeping our feet. Another round blasted into the night, but by now we’d slid into one of the narrow alleys running alongside of the Bunny Club. Ernie’d forgotten about kicking Bufford’s ass and he’d regained his balance—and regained his sobriety. The two of us were running shoulder to shoulder, bumping into one another, down the narrow alley. Ernie dodged to his left at the next alley, me with him, and as we did so another round blasted out, this one exploding into a brick wall behind us where we’d just been standing.

Our feet turned into flying machines. Bufford and Weatherwax stayed close. I could hear the pounding of their boots and their occasional shouted commands to one another. Ernie and I twisted and turned and dodged and since Bufford and Weatherwax had to slow occasionally to see which way we had gone, we were starting to lengthen our lead.

I wanted to keep running. Even though Ernie and I were both armed, I didn’t want to turn and fight. If, and when, Ernie and I returned to 8th Army headquarters in Seoul, we’d have enough explaining to do. I didn’t want to add two dead MPs to our list of indiscretions. Not if I could help it.