The Wandering Ghost (9 page)

How long had the Yi Dynasty lasted? From the fourteenth century right up to modern times, when the Japanese Imperial Army annexed Korea as a colony in 1910.

Carved wooden poles on either side of the pathway represented
Chonha Daejangkun
, the General of the Upper World, and
Jiha
Yojangkun
, the Goddess of the Underworld. The walls of the Chon compound were made of lumber slats faded to a deep amber. The buildings behind were topped with tile roofs upturned at the edges. Clay beasts perched along the ridges, protecting the family from evil spirits.

Ancient shamanistic traditions still exist in Korea. Everywhere.

The big wooden entrance gate stood wide open. From within floated the muffled snicker of girlish laughter. Ernie and I stepped through the gate. The courtyard was well kept. Gravel raked, naked rose bushes knotted with strips of white cloth, tiny cement pagodas flanking blue ponds shimmering with golden koi.

An open area in the center of the courtyard held a shrine: A stone foundation with wooden stanchions supporting a tile roof that was a replica of the tile roof that covered the entire home. Bolted into the stanchions was a framed photograph, bordered with black silk, of a young Korean girl. Her face was unsmiling. She stared straight ahead, almost as if she were cross-eyed, trying to focus. Her jet black hair was pulled back and braided into two plaits and she wore the immaculately pressed white blouse of a middle-school student. Directly in front of the photograph was another stone stand, this one holding an ornate bronze urn. From the urn, three sticks of incense smoldered. Pungent puffs of smoke rose past the photograph, wafting their way to the gray-skied heavens above.

Two teenage girls, wearing the white blouses and long black skirts of middle-school students, knelt in front of the shrine. Nervously, they kept trying to light additional sticks of incense but as one of the girls fumbled with the match, the other berated her for her clumsiness. They both worked hard at stifling their giggles.

Ernie and I stopped and stared at the photograph for a moment. Quietly. Waiting for the two girls to finish their homage. They did. They stood and bowed. When they saw us, their eyes widened in surprise. Both smooth faces flushed red, the girls snatched up their school bags, nodded to us as they passed and, holding hands, they hustled out the main gate and down the pathway heading back toward Tongduchon.

“Cute kids,” Ernie said. “Must’ve been friends of the dead girl.”

“Maybe,” I answered. “Or just schoolmates. Koreans are very reverential of the dead. There’s an old saying my language teacher taught us.”

“Here we go.”

I pressed on. “‘A man needs three wives,’ the Koreans say. ‘A Chinese wife for his kitchen, a Japanese wife for his bed, and a Korean wife to tend his grave.’ ”

Ernie stared at me, amused. “I like the Japanese part.”

“You would. Come on.”

We walked across the courtyard to the front of the Chon residence.

The home featured a traditional elevated wood-slat floor, varnished and sparkling with cleanliness. Ernie and I slipped off our shoes and, in our stocking feet, stepped up onto the slick surface. I knocked on the edge of the oil-papered door. We waited. No answer. I knocked again and then again. Finally, I shouted, “
Yoboseiyo
!”

When there was still no answer, I looked at Ernie. He shrugged and I leaned forward and slid back the sliding, latticework door. Together, we entered the Chon family living quarters.

The
ondol
floor was covered with padded vinyl instead of a rug. Against the wall, mother-of-pearl tables, varnished chairs, cabinets. Artwork everywhere. Traditional Yi Dynasty paintings, both framed and embedded into standing silk screens.

“
Yoboseiyo
,” I said again. Still no answer.

Something was burning.

We followed the smell down a long a hallway: jasmine. More latticework sliding doors lined either side. Finally, we entered a wood-floored hall. Candles flickered, more incense burned, and a bronze Buddha held his left hand upright, thumb to forefinger, pinkie sticking straight out. Indicating, by this simple sign, that the universe is one.

A middle-aged Korean woman sat cross-legged on the floor. Her black hair hung down in greasy strings and she wore loose pantaloons and a blouse made of sackcloth, the traditional Korean garb of mourning. In front of her sat a short-legged serving table bearing a photograph of Chon Un-suk, the same picture as outside but smaller. A pair of chopsticks, a spoon, and a metal bowl of rice gruel had been carefully placed in front of the photograph, as if in offering. Breakfast for a spirit. In the guttering candlelight I could see that the woman’s skin was cracked and tight. Her features looked similar to the girl in the photograph. Chon Un-suk’s mother, without a doubt. Calmly, she stared at us, a look of perplexity on her face.

I knelt on the floor. So did Ernie.

“
Anyonghashimnika
,” I said. The formal greeting. Are you at peace?

She stared at me a long time. Confused. Finally she said, “
Nugu
?” Who?

“
Nanun Mipalkun
,” I said. I’m from 8th Army. Then I launched into my standard explanation of being an investigator, giving my name and Ernie’s name and then briefly flashing my badge.

The woman seemed totally uninterested.

I told her I was sorry about her daughter’s untimely death.

“Sorry?” she said in English. “You sorry?”

“Yes,” I replied.

She turned her head and barked a sardonic laugh. “You Americans kill her, then you sorry?”

She barked the laugh again.

Ernie started to say something but I waved him off.

“Jill Matthewson,” I said. “The woman MP at the accident. She tried to help. She tried to save your daughter.”

Madame Chon gazed into the darkness of the incense-filled hall. Before answering, she grabbed the bowl of rice gruel, pushing it forward slightly, mumbling something indecipherable as if speaking to a presence sitting across the table from her. Satisfied, she turned her attention back to me.

“Yes,” she said. “Jill try. She no understand. She no understand we want to bring Un-suk-i back home. We want Un-suk-i die here. So she no lose.” She gazed at me with a quizzical expression, realizing that her English was faltering. “How you say?”

“So Un-suk-i wouldn’t get lost.”

“Yes. That right. So she no get lost.”

Ernie coughed, shuffling uncomfortably, not used to kneeling on a hard wooden floor.

“Is that why you’re continuing these ceremonies?” I asked. “Because Un-suk-i is lost?”

“Yes. If Jill not stop my husband, he bring Un-suk-i back here, we perform . . . how you say?”

She placed her palms together and bowed rapidly.

“You’d perform ceremonies,” I said.

“Yes. Ceremony for people pretty soon going to die. And then Un-suk-i’s spirit happy. Un-suk-i spirit know she at home. Know mama and daddy take care of her. No have to wander around, looking for food, looking for smell.”

She cupped her right hand and waved it toward her nose, indicating the smoke from the incense.

“Un-suk-i no have to wander,” she continued, “all over place looking for someone to pray for her. She come home, mom and dad help her, and she go to heaven.”

Madame Chon pointed toward the roof and then dropped her hand and bowed her head. She sat silent for a long time. Then, softly, she spoke.

“I know. Jill feel bad. That’s why she go
demo
.”

Demo
. The Korean word for a political demonstration.

Ernie sat up straight. Electrified.

I leaned forward and spoke English as clearly as I could. “You mean,
ajjima
, that Jill Matthewson went to the demonstrations that happened after Un-suk-i died?”

She looked up at me and her eyes widened slightly. “You don’t know?”

“No. Nobody told me.”

“Jill feel bad. She come here, bow to me, bow to Un-suk-i’s daddy, she say she sorry many times. She no understand Korean custom. But now GI get . . . how you say?”

She pounded her fist into her palm as if banging a gavel.

“Court-martial,” I said.

“Yes. GI get court-martial. Jill angry, she no can speak at court-martial. Jill angry because GI drive truck too fast but GI no get punishment. Just go back to States. Jill very angry. She go
demo
. Many Korean people there, only one American. Jill. How you say her last name?”

“Matthewson.”

“Yes. Jill Matthewson.”

I allowed the silence to stretch and then I asked the question I’d come to ask.

“Madame Chon, where is Jill Matthewson now?”

“Where? I don’t know. Many times I look, I no find.”

“
You
searched for Jill Matthewson?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

Un-suk’s mother, Madame Chon, stared at me as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Because I want her to help find Un-suk-i. Show Un-suk-i how to get home.”

Ernie and I glanced at one another.

“You mean,” I said, “pray to Un-suk and help guide her spirit home to you?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you think Jill Matthewson can do that?”

Again, she stared at me and then Ernie as if we were both a little dense.

“
Mudang
say.”

Mudang
. A Korean sorceress. A female shaman.

Madame Chon continued. “
Mudang
say Jill last person Un-suk-i saw, then Jill can find Un-suk-i. Bring her home.
Mudang
dance, sing, drink
mokkolli
.” Rice beer. “Help Jill find Un-suk-i. No problem.
Mudang
show Jill how to do.”

It took me a moment to puzzle out exactly what she was saying. Then it became clear. The sorceress would teach Corporal Jill Matthewson how to travel to the land of the dead, commune there with spirits, find Chon Un-suk, and convince the wandering ghost of Chon Un-suk to return with her to the home of her parents.

“Sort of like TDY,” Ernie whispered. The military acronym for traveling on temporary duty away from your home compound.

Excited now by the idea, Madame Chon brushed her hair back and scooted across the lacquered wooden floor until she sat cross-legged directly in front of me. Then she reached out and grabbed both my hands in her cold grip.

“You find Jill,” she said. “You find, bring back here.”

She wouldn’t let go of my hands until I promised to bring Jill Matthewson back for an interview with the
mudang
. Then Madame Chon slid across the floor to her left, grabbed Ernie’s hands, and made him promise the same thing.

After we’d both promised, she told me what she could about the demonstrations held outside the Camp Casey main gate. About how many people had participated. About the anger directed at the 2nd Infantry Division. And, more gruesomely, what the Korean National Police had done to break up the demonstration. And what they’d done to the demonstrators they’d managed to catch. It wasn’t a pretty picture. But Madame Chon recited it all as if she were revealing her family recipe for winter
kimchee
.

So far, Ernie and I’d managed to gather more information about Corporal Jill Matthewson than the 2nd ID had during their entire investigation. Why? Maybe they’d been sloppy. Or maybe they hadn’t actually wanted to gather information on her disappearance. Maybe. But my theory was that they were unable—or unwilling—to gather information from Koreans. There’s an arrogance that infects Americans in Korea and it often transcends their common sense. They begin to believe that only people who speak English can be trusted, that any American who believes otherwise is simply naïve. Why exactly they believe this is beyond me, but they do. Also, it’s laziness. They conduct their investigations amongst Americans, usually on compound, and that’s it.

I didn’t have much time to figure out why 2nd ID had conducted such a miserable investigation. Something more pressing was occupying my mind: finding Jill Matthewson. And learning what, if anything, the death of Private Marvin Z. Druwood had to do with Jill’s disappearance. What I could be sure of was that someone working for the Division PMO, or the Division provost marshal himself, had lied. I’d seen the evidence with my own eyes. Druwood’s corpse revealed that he’d cracked his skull on cement, but there was no cement near the obstacle course tower.

And now I had another burden. Not only was it my duty to find Jill Matthewson—and report back to her mother in Terre Haute, Indiana—but I also had to worry about the spirit of Chon Un-suk wandering through eternity as a hungry ghost.

I didn’t believe in hungry ghosts; Ernie didn’t believe in hungry ghosts. But Chon Un-suk’s mother
did
believe in hungry ghosts. And I’d promised to find Jill Matthewson so she could convince a hungry ghost to stop its wandering.

An odd promise, I’ll admit. But like any promise I’d ever made, I was determined to keep it.

5

A
fter leaving the Chon residence, Ernie and I wandered aimlessly through the narrow pedestrian lanes of the western edge of Tongduchon. Men on bicycles piled high with layered shelves of
dubu
—Korean tofu—jangled their bells and shouted for people to make way. Old women pushed carts laden with glimmering green cabbages through crowds of pedestrians; young women carried infants strapped to their backs; toddlers wearing heavy sweaters but no pants gazed up at us and peed innocently by the edge of the road.

After a few minutes, Ernie and I reached a twenty-foot-wide cement bridge that stretched across the East Bean River. A narrow trickle of water ran below down the center of a broad, muddy riverbed. The backs of homes and apartment buildings lined either bank of the Tongdu River: kimchee jars on balconies; laundry hanging from wire lines fluttering in the morning breeze; an occasional housewife leaning out a window to toss the contents of a porcelain pee pot onto the muddy banks below. A few dozen yards beyond the bridge, back in the city proper, a large wooden archway announced the entrance to
TONGDUCHON SICHANG
. The East Bean River City Market.

Ernie and I entered. A canvas roof held in place by twenty-foot-high bamboo poles sheltered acres of produce stands. Behind the piled vegetables, women in white bandannas waved their arms and shouted at customers. Housewives with plastic baskets hooked over their elbows browsed along the lanes, seemingly ignoring the chanting vendors. Warm air reeking of green onions and garlic and Napa cabbage freshly plucked from verdant earth suffused the entire market.

Ernie breathed deeply and a broad grin spread across his face. We both felt it. The tactile caress of human life, unsullied by advertising and corporate greed. This is what our lives had once been on this planet. What they should be now. Everywhere.

We wound our way past the produce until we reached walls of shimmering glass tanks holding wriggling mackerel, eels, and octopi. Beyond the tanks a cloud of dust advertised the poultry, flapping smelly wings and cackling, within handmade wooden crates. Finally, like an oasis of calm, the dry goods. Hand-embroidered silk comforters, leather gloves, umbrellas, plump cotton-covered cushions, and then the porcelain: china dolls; effigies of Kumbokju, the chubby god of abundance; pee pots; tea cups with no handles; and tiny drinking glasses made for jolting back shots of
soju
, the fierce Korean rice liquor.

At last, our search was rewarded. We found what we were looking for. Noodle stands. Billowing steam announced their environs and Ernie and I found a tall, round, rickety table made of splintered wood and shouted our order to an elderly proprietress: “
Ramyon,
tugei
”. Spicy noodles, two.

The other customers were all Koreans and they studiously ignored the two
Miguks
in their midst. They inhaled noodles or chatted with their neighbors in rapid sentences or gazed intently at books, studying for the exam that always seemed to be looming on the Confucian horizon.

A pig-tailed teenage girl with a solid physique and a blank expression brought us chopsticks and spoons and two cups of barley tea. She must’ve been about the same age that Chon Un-suk would’ve been except her parents weren’t rich. Not fortunate enough to attend middle school, she was forced to work. Ernie started to say something to her—probably something flirtatious—but then thought better of it. What was the point? He wasn’t going to be able to change her fate. Ever. As the quiet girl plodded away I thought she probably had a rough life ahead of her. But at least, unlike Chon Un-suk, she had life. Breath. Feeling.

When the noodles came, Ernie lifted a clump with his chopsticks and slurped them into his mouth. Still chewing, he started to talk.

“So far,” he said, “we don’t know shit.”

“That’s not true,” I replied. “We’re making progress.”

Ernie snorted. “Yeah. Like a snail. What we gotta do is beat the crap out of somebody.”

“Anybody in particular?”

Ernie shrugged. “
Kuen-chana
.” It doesn’t matter.

“Why should we beat somebody up?” I asked. “To gather information? Or just for the hell of it?”

“For both. I wouldn’t want to beat somebody up
just
for the hell of it.”

Instead of continuing down this road, I recapped what we knew so far, starting with motive.

According to PFC Anne Korvachek, Jill Matthewson’s roommate, Jill had been fed up with the stereo sexual harassment that women at the 2nd Division live with day in and day out, hour by hour. It came from men of low rank and men of high rank. All-pervasive. Complaining about it was about as useful as complaining about the weather. Still, when you don’t like the weather in the place you live, you move.

That’s what Jill Matthewson had done.

But there were other motives. Her friend, the Korean stripper Kim Yong-ai, owed a ton of money. To pay it off she and/or Jill had raised the Korean
won
equivalent of two thousand dollars. Exactly how they’d done that, we didn’t know. What could either one of them do to earn that kind of money? Crime, of course, came to mind. Had Jill ripped somebody off—or assisted in the ripping-off— and then fled Tongduchon?

Maybe.

The next possible motive was her disgust with the court-martial of the two GIs who’d run down Chon Un-suk. The fact that they’d been tried by American military judges—and not a Korean judge— had enraged the Korean public. But what had enraged Jill most was that, as the first MP on the scene, she’d never been called as a witness and that the two perps had been let off so easily.

Ernie and I resolved to check into the trial more thoroughly.

The final motive was that, according to Madame Chon, Jill had actively participated in the demonstrations held outside the main gate of Camp Casey. That, in itself, was a violation of 8th Army regulations and—I wasn’t sure—might even be a court-martial offense. Had Corporal Jill Matthewson’s politics become so radicalized that she’d decided she’d had enough of the U.S. Army?

By the time I laid all this out for Ernie, he’d finished his noodles, drank down the remaining broth directly from the bowl, and ordered another cup of barley tea from the poker-faced teenage waitress.

“So we have a lot of possible motives for going AWOL,” Ernie said. “All of them might be true; none of them might be true. We don’t know. But what we do know is that if Jill Matthewson is still alive, somebody had to facilitate her escape.”

I whistled softly.

“What?” Ernie asked.

“ ‘Facilitate?’ ”

Ernie grabbed his crotch. “Here. Facilitate
this
.”

“Okay. I’m just impressed by your vocabulary. Go ahead.”

“Where was I?” Ernie gulped down the last of his barley tea and slammed the bottom of the cup on the rickety wooden table. “Oh yeah. So if somebody
facilitated
Corporal Matthewson’s unofficial resignation from the Second Infantry Division, they would have had to help her find a place to stay, a source of income, and maybe even a way to avoid the scrutiny of the Korean National Police.”

“That’s a lot to provide,” I said. “A tall, good-looking, Caucasian woman in Korea would be sort of conspicuous.”

“ ‘Conspicuous?’”

“Okay, Ernie. Can it. So what you’re saying is instead of fretting about motives, what we should be working on is who helped her leave, who’s providing her income, who is offering her a safe place to hide.”

“By Jove, I think he’s got it.”

I finished the last of my noodles and the waitress came by and poured us both more barley tea from a large brass urn.

“If I were an American female MP,” I said, “and I wanted to leave the Division, and I knew I needed Korean help, who would I talk to?”

“The people you’d
been
talking to,” Ernie replied. “Your friends.”

“In this case, the stripper Kim Yong-ai. But she didn’t have much in the way of money.”

“No,” Ernie said, “but she knew how to make it.”

I looked up at Ernie. “You think Jill could be working the Korean nightclub scene?”

“Or something like it,” Ernie said. “An American chick as good-looking as her could make a fortune from Korean businessmen. We need to talk to that Kimchee Entertainment guy again.”

“Pak Tong-i,” I said.

“Right. Maybe he was lying to us. Maybe he knew where they were going. But even if he didn’t lie, he has contacts in the entertainment world. He can provide leads.”

Pulling out wrinkled Korean
won
notes, I paid the old woman behind the stand for our noodles. Thinking I wasn’t looking, Ernie pulled a couple of dollars worth of MPC, military payment certificates, out of his pocket and palmed them to the young, poker-faced girl who’d waited on us.

I’m not sure but I think she cracked a smile.

The front door to Kimchee Entertainment was padlocked from the outside. Ernie pounded on the door anyway just to make sure, but there was no answer.

“Show-business people don’t keep regular hours,” I said. “We’ll try back later.”

We returned to the spot where we’d left the jeep. Ernie unlocked the chain wrapped around the steering wheel, fired up the engine, and drove us back to Camp Casey. After a thorough identification check at the main gate—and the usual inspection of the back of the vehicle for contraband—we were allowed to pass. Immediately after we rolled away, the MP headed back to the guard shack and switched on his two-way radio.

“They’re keeping tabs on us,” Ernie said.

“Night and day,” I replied.

We cruised through Camp Casey. GIs everywhere. Some marching in military formation, some walking together in small groups. Tanks and self-propelled guns and two-and-a-half-ton trucks and resupply vehicles of all descriptions rumbled past us, everyone moving on compound at a safe, sane fifteen miles per hour. MP jeeps lurked behind hedges, making sure everyone kept within the posted speed limit.

“No little girls are going to be run over here,” Ernie said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Except there are no little girls here.”

The 2nd Infantry Division JAG Office was located deep inside the environs of Camp Casey, facing the enormous quadrangle of the Division parade ground. On the opposite side of the field, the three flags of the United States, the Republic of Korea, and the United Nations loomed above the Division Headquarters building. A lifer NCO had once advised me, “Keep a low profile and stay away from the flagpole.” Ernie and I weren’t following either dictum. Not because we wanted to, but because we had no choice.

Second ID JAG was the usual cluster of single-story Quonset huts painted puke green. Instead of a huge statue of an MP outside, they sported a simple whitewashed wooden sign with black stenciling: OFFICE OF THE 2ND INFANTRY DIVISION JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL.

Ernie and I walked inside. Our shoes sunk into plush carpet. Behind a low mahogany counter, an attractive Korean secretary smiled up at us.

“Can I help you?” she asked, in expertly pronounced English.

We showed our badges and I explained that I wanted to talk to the legal officer who had worked on the recent case involving the death of Chon Un-suk. The young woman’s smile flickered. It wasn’t much, just a cloud fleeing across the sky on a sunny day, but it told me much. Koreans knew about the case. All Koreans.

Motioning with her open palm, she said, “Please have a seat.” Then she hustled off into the quiet back corridors of the connected Quonset huts.

Ernie and I sat on cushiony leather. A painting hung from the wall. Traditional Yi Dynasty silk screen: Siberian tiger rampant. But more than rampant. Somehow the artist managed to make the tiger’s eyes look not only human, but crazed.

“Nice digs,” Ernie said.

“You should’ve gone to college,” I told him, “then law school. You wouldn’t have to be traipsing around the ville all day.”

Ernie smiled. “I’d have a good-looking secretary like that one.”

“Yeah.”

“And an air-conditioned office, heated in the winter, cooled in the summer.”

“Of course.”

Ernie thought about it. Finally, he seemed to come to a decision. “Nah. Wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“I’d get my secretary pregnant and punch the presiding judge on the Chon Un-suk court-martial right in the nose.”

“You probably would.” I shook my head. “All that schooling gone to waste.”

“Exactly.”

A few minutes later the secretary returned and beckoned for us to follow. She ushered us down the long corridor, past well-appointed offices with military officers behind teak desks and their Korean civilian assistants in dark suits and ties. We turned right and then left and at the end of the hallway, we were ushered into the office of Lieutenant Colonel Wilbur M. Proffert. The secretary hurried out of the office as Ernie and I saluted the man.

His face was narrow and his glasses were polished so brightly that they shone like cheap jewelry. After chewing us out for a while about arriving without an appointment, Colonel Proffert checked our identification thoroughly and jotted down each of our names and badge numbers. He cleaned his glasses and told us to be seated. Then he shoved across his desk a copy of the trial transcript of the court-martial involving the death of Chon Un-suk. He told us that beyond what was included there, the 2nd Infantry JAG Office had no further comment.