Buddha's Money (21 page)

Admin Sergeant Riley buried his nose deeper into his paperwork, worried that Ernie might go too far. Riley was a bureaucrat and a lifer. He wasn't going to take a no-power lowlife staff sergeant's side against the First Sergeant, the top noncom in the CID Detachment.

Miss Kim paid attention only to the jade skull. She was used to GIs arguing over things that couldn't be changed. Since English wasn't her first language, it was easy enough to tune us out.

Not easy for me. I figured I'd better back Ernie off or the First Sergeant was going to grind his teeth so hard his molars would pop out. Top hated admitting that he couldn't get a job done without me and Ernie to help.

"Who'd you send out there?" I asked.

"Burrows and Slabem," he replied.

Ernie groaned. "Not those two dorks!"

The First Sergeant's face reddened. "They're good investigators."

"They're two white nerds," Ernie said. "The soul brothers out there in Samgakji aren't going to have shit to do with them. And the Korean business girls, less."

"And you two can do better?"

"You
know
we can do better. We speak the language of the night. That's why you been waiting for us to get back. So somebody can go out to Samgakji and collar this mugger once and for all."

Ernie was right. All the other CID agents in the Detachment prided themselves on staying away from the drunks in the bars and the dopers dealing drugs and the Korean prostitutes who swarmed through the GI villages. Ernie and I thrived in that environment. And we were known out there. And trusted. When you needed something done in the red-light districts of Korea, Ernie and I were the investigators to see. The other CID agents couldn't sniff out a correct quote on the price of kimchi.

The First Sergeant was silent for a long time. His fists clenching and unclenching, his jaw working away as if he were gnawing on a bone. Finally, he nodded.

"All right. You two are such hotshots. Get your butts out to Samgakji, like right now. And find this asshole for me. The honchos up at the head shed are about to shit a brick because we haven't been able to pick up the GI who jacked up that Buddhist nun. So you guys are back. So you're the experts on the Korean villages and the biggest ville rats in Eighth Army law enforcement. So you set down those mugs of coffee and you put on your jackets and you hop in your jeep and you get your asses down to Samgakji. Right now! You understand me?"

The First Sergeant stabbed his forefinger into Ernie's face and then into mine. "Do either of you have any questions?"

"Yeah," Ernie said.

The First Sergeant swiveled on him. Glaring.

Ernie's face was as relaxed as that of a Buddhist saint. "What's for chow?"

After Riley pulled the First Sergeant off of Ernie, he escorted him down the hallway, whispering soothing words into the old sergeant's ear. When he returned to us, Riley shook his head.

"Ernie," he said. "You have to stop messing with the First Sergeant like that. He's going to burst one of his blood valves some day."

Ernie swallowed the last of the coffee in his cup. "Not to worry. Army medical coverage is a hundred percent."

Trying not to laugh, I managed to pry the jade skull from Miss Kim's soft hands. Riley filled out a receipt for it, handed me the pink copy, and slid the original into his files.

He had written:
Skull, jade, ancient, one each.

I wrapped the skull in some brown pulp hand towels. Riley opened the big wall safe behind his desk and slid the precious antique onto the widest metal shelf.

He slammed the door, cranked shut the handle, and twisted the dial.

BEFORE GOING TO SAMGAKJI, WE CHECKED WITH A COUPLE OF our contacts on the compound. The first one was scared shitless when we mentioned the mugging of the Buddhist nun, and he wouldn't tell us anything. The second snitch, a small-time dope dealer known as Brother Andrew, was foolish enough to provide us a little leverage.

Ernie didn't smoke much marijuana, but when he had the urge he always bought the reefer from Brother Andrew. When Ernie asked him about copping some shit, Andy didn't hesitate. As soon as the transaction was complete, I entered the barracks and read Brother Andrew his rights. As I did, he wheeled on Ernie.

"You wouldn't
do
this to me."

"Watch me, Bro," Ernie answered.

Andrew had a shaved head shaped like a peanut and a neatly trimmed goatee. The goatee was allowed by the doctor because Andy suffered from folliculitis and couldn't shave. It drove the lifers mad, but they couldn't do anything about it.

Ernie folded his arms. "Tell me about the guy who jacked up the Buddhist nun."

Andy wouldn't tell us anything at first. Apparently, the guy who had attacked the nun had a lot of people terrorized. We had to actually handcuff him, shove him in the back of the jeep, and drive him down to the MP station. When Andy was finally convinced that we were going to book him, he started to talk.

"His name's Bro Hatch," Andy told us.

"We already know that," Ernie told him. Bored.

"He hangs out with a fine-looking sister. Everybody says she's half white and half Korean. Name's Sister Julie."

"Where's she work?"

"In Samgakji. The Black Cat Club."

"Is Hatcher there now?"

"I don't know. But once you take a look at Sister Julie you'll realize that no man in his right mind would stray far. She's one fine hammer."

Ernie leaned back and unlocked Andy's cuffs. "All right, Andy. You can go."

"Hey, you're not going to tell Bro Hatch that I told you how to find him, are you?"

"Depends on how I feel," Ernie answered.

"Feel good," Andrew said. "I got a life to lead here."

BACK IN THE BARRACKS, WE CHANGED INTO CLEAN BLUE JEANS and nylon jackets with embroidered dragons on the back. Fresh running-the-ville outfits.

I called Itaewon and spoke to Herman. Still no word from the kidnappers. I told him we'd be out and I'd call back in an hour.

This afternoon we would go out to Samgakji and find Bro Hatch, the big GI who'd mugged the Buddhist nun. It shouldn't be hard. Not if Andrew was telling the truth. And not if Bro Hatch wasn't quite as tough as people seemed to think he was.

I grabbed the roll of dimes in my left pocket, enjoying its heft as I slammed my fist into my open palm. After thinking about it, I dropped another roll into my right pocket.

Samgakji is definitely a two-roll kind of place.

23

SAMGAKJI IN THE AFTERNOON IS LIKE A GHOST TOWN, SALOONS and muddy streets. Upturned red tile roofs. A skinny old man pushing a cart down the center of the road, lifting a dirty canvas sheet, hoisting a shimmering blue block of ice into one of the gin joints.

The front door of the Black Cat Club was locked, so we walked around to the back. A beaded curtain led into a narrow hallway bordered by the latrines. Inside the main room, metal chairs were turned upside down on round cocktail tables. A boy swabbed the cement floor, the odor of disinfectant bubbling in the air. An old woman sat beneath a bent lamp, studying the wrinkled pages of a ledger as if they were bamboo tablets carried across the Himalayas by a Buddhist scholar.

When we walked into the bar, the woman glanced up.

"Ajjima, tangsin yogi ei junim ieyo?"
Aunt, are you the owner here?

She nodded her wrinkled face. Ernie wandered through the Forest of upturned chairs in the ballroom, hands in his jacket pockets, checking for an enemy ambush.

The boy stared at us for a while, but when he saw that we weren't going to cause any trouble he went back to his mopping.

I propped my elbows on the bar and spoke to the old woman. "My partner and me," I said, "are looking for a business girl called Sister Julie."

The old woman didn't flinch, as if she'd been expecting my question. She answered immediately.

"I remember her. But she gone now. Quit work. Two days no come back."

"Where'd she go?"

She waved her hand. "Business girl come. Business girl go. Nobody know where."

I turned to Ernie and translated. "She says Sister Julie left two days ago."

Ernie strode toward the bar. "I believe her. Absolutely. Just for the hell of it, though, how about we check upstairs?"

"Capital idea."

We started toward the narrow wooden staircase when we heard the click of footsteps descending. First appeared a shapely high-heeled foot. Long legs sheathed in black leotards followed. Then round hips, a narrow waist, and a frilly white blouse filled out with extra helpings of female pulchritude.

Her face was a slightly flared oval, her skin smooth as a dark olive, lips full, hair glossy black, curled tightly, exploding straight out from the skull.

She moved like a cobra ready to strike.

Ernie sucked in his breath.

She reached the bottom of the stairs, turned, and sashayed across the ballroom floor toward us, staring right into my eyes.

Brother Andrew was right, she appeared to be half white. The eyes were blue. As blue as light gleaming from a block of glacial ice.

We couldn't move. Even Ernie kept his mouth shut. She stopped a few feet from me. Her scent enveloped us in a cloying hug.

"You look for Sister Julie?" she asked.

I nodded.

She ran red-tipped fingers from her waist down toward her thighs, stuck out her hip, and sneered.

"You lucky today, T-shirt," she said. "Sister Julie be here."

Her accent was perfect. The ultimate soul sister.

"Where's Hatcher?" I asked.

Her lined eyes widened into mock innocence. "I don't know. I no see. Two, maybe three days."

She breathed in and breathed out, letting us enjoy the full magnificence of her warm brown flesh.

Ernie looked but shook it off. He slipped behind Sister Julie and stepped quietly up the stairs.

Sister Julie spun her head. "Where he go?"

"He has to use the
byonso."

"Byonso
downstairs."

I shrugged. "He'll find it eventually. Why'd you hook up with Bro Hatch?"

"He
hook up with
me.
All man want to hook up with Sister Julie."

I didn't argue with that. "Why'd you choose him?"

"He big. Strong. Before, I have 'nother boyfriend. Bro Oscar. He be fine dude, but not strong like Bro Hatch."

"What happened?"

Sister Julie allowed herself a smile. "Bro Hatch knuckle sandwich with Bro Oscar."

"Who won?"

"Be cool, T-shirt. You know who won."

Sister Julie looked and talked and moved like an American black woman. Close enough, anyway, for being seven thousand miles away from the nearest American ghetto. Smears of dark makeup clung to the folds of her neck just above the collarbone.

Under the dim barroom light, once she was fully made up, cooing into the ear of some lonely black GI, who would know the difference? Who would care?

If this woman wanted to be black, the soul brothers would allow her to be black.

Not an attitude shared by their white compatriots.

I had trouble keeping my eyes off her low-cut blouse. With an effort, I gazed into her eyes, shocked again by the startling clarity of their blue light.

"You're half American, aren't you?"

She shrugged her elegant shoulders. "So what?"

"But not half black. Half white."

"The white rapist been doing evil to black women for long time."

The line was memorized. Like propaganda.

"I'm not a T-shirt," I said. "I'm Mexican. And nobody in my family ever raped anybody."

"So?"

"So nothing. Why don't you like white GIs?"

"Before I work T-shirt club. White GI all the time bother me. All the time want to touch
jiji."
One hand slithered up toward a breast. "All the time no want to pay. Complain about Korea all the time. Act like little boy. I no like."

"And it's better here in Samgakji?"

"Black GI like Sister Julie. Sister Julie like them."

"And your white father, he left you?"

Sister Julie's eyes flared with anger. "Of course he leave me! And my mother. And my brother. You think I work here if my daddy take care of me?"

One of the rules of interrogation is to keep the conversation moving in one direction, preferably an emotional one, then switch directions when your subject least expects it. Sister Julie was about to slash my face with her crimson nails. Time to change direction and spring the question.

"Why did you tell Hatcher to beat up that nun?"

For the first time creases appeared on her brow. "What you talk about, T-shirt?"

"I'm talking about how you took Bro Hatch out to Itaewon and told him about all the money the Buddhist nun would collect from the business girls. The nun's purse would be full, you told him. And she's just a small woman. No Korean thief would ever touch a nun. Easy money, you told him."

Her eyes crinkled in anger. "You got a big mouth, T-shirt. Too damn big."

Something crashed upstairs. A door slamming shut. Or slamming open. I heard a grunt. Pounding footsteps and then Ernie hollering. Cursing.

Sister Julie's hand was back on her hip and she was smiling again.

"Sounds like some white boy be getting his ass kicked."

I grabbed her shoulders. "Hatcher's upstairs," I said. "You lied!"

"What lie?" She smiled even more broadly. "Maybe he come back. Looking for Sister Julie."

I shoved her away and ran up the stairs.

Metal clanged on metal, something else crashed, and I heard the wrenching, ripping sound of wood splintering like toothpicks.

Ernie lay flat on his butt, a flimsy wooden door beneath him. The latticework paneling fronting someone's bedroom had been smashed open. Tattered strips of oiled paper fluttered like the tentacles of a squashed squid.

Ernie shook his head, still dazed, a disoriented look in his eyes. I stretched out my hand to help him to his feet.

"Let me refresh your memory," I told him. "You were looking for Hatcher. All hell broke loose and somebody shoved you through that wall."

Suddenly, Ernie came back to his senses. His head whipped back and forth. "Come on!"

He sprinted down the hallway and shot down a stairway that emerged onto the alley running behind the Black Cat Club.

Walls made of stone and wood and ancient lumber lined the gloom. Water trickled down the center of a cobbled lane, reeking of human waste. But no sign of Hatcher.

Ernie glanced around, turned completely, and then looked up. I followed his eyes.

Like a huge bird, something floated from the rooftop of the Black Cat Club over to the red brick of the next building. With a great thump, the raven landed.

"He went upstairs," Ernie said.

We ran into the back door of the brick building next to the Black Cat Club.

It was a series of hooches. A nightclub downstairs. Broad cement hallways and rooms full of business girls upstairs. One woman wore shorts and a light green T-shirt and was bent over filling a pail of water from a rusty spigot. Ernie almost plowed into her.

"How do we get to the roof?" he shouted.

The girl turned, her face pocked, her eyes wide.
"Mullah
gu?"
What did you say?

"Shit!" Ernie tore off down the corridor. At the end he found a stairway and charged up, taking three steps at a time. I followed.

The stairway narrowed and ended at a wooden door. Ernie kicked it open.

Out on the roof, the skyline of Samgakji was visible. Tile-roofed hooches clustered around the main drag of bars and chophouses and
yoguans.
In the distance were the neat manicured lawns of ROK Army Headquarters and beyond that, the Eighth United States Army. Behind us, vibrating with the low rumble of the endlessly charging herd of
kimchi
cabs and three-wheeled trucks, loomed the elevated traffic circle for which Samgakji was famous.

We were three stories up. Since this was a skyscraper— by Samgakji standards—our view of the village was unobstructed. I circled the ramparts, scanning the streets below. No Hatcher.

The sky was overcast, no rain, but dark clouds on the horizon, cavorting with the jagged peaks north of Seoul.

Ernie shouted, pointing, leaning over the edge. "Got him! The son of a bitch took the damn fire escape!"

Before I could try to reason with him, Ernie was rappelling down the creaking metal ladder like a monkey on his way to a coconut feed.

Whenever we're after a suspect, and we have the full weight and authority of military law enforcement behind us, Ernie is joyous. Knowing that at the least sign of resistance he'll be able to vent all the violence that is constantly bubbling inside of him. And that no matter how badly he mauls the hapless victim, the honchos at Eighth Army will back him up. The honchos aren't particularly in love with all that Stateside civil liberties stuff, anyway.

Hatcher, though, was a hard case. If Ernie ran head first into him alone, he might be ground into dust before I had a chance to help. And, if we lost Hatcher, the nun would burn herself to death.

I reached the edge of the roof and peered down. Hatcher had dropped the last few feet to the alleyway, hit, rolled, bounced to his feet, and was sprinting toward the neon-decorated heart of the ville.

Ernie was already halfway down the fire escape. Rusty bolts creaked under the strain. Figuring they wouldn't hold my weight, too, I ran back to the stairwell.

Bounding down the steps, I made pretty good time and when I burst through the nightclub downstairs, hit the front door, and emerged on the street, I could still see Hatcher rounding a corner about two blocks down the road. Ernie was a few yards behind him.

In front of the Black Cat Club, Sister Julie, the owner, and the boy with the mop stood watching.

I ran down the street, twisted down a couple of alleys. Up ahead, metal clanged, canvas tore, water splashed, and voices were raised in a cacophony of cursing.

What I saw first was a
pochang-macha,
a cart that sells soup and dried cuttlefish and
soju,
tipped over on its side. A rubber wheel spun madly. Feet stuck up in the air. Two men rolled in the mud, punching one another.

Ernie and Hatcher. Kicking and gouging. And Ernie was getting the worst of it.

The owner of the cart, a woman with a bright pink knit cap pulled down over her ears, stood with her hands splayed at the side of her head. Screaming.

Without thinking, I was on Bro Hatch. Punching, mauling, slamming my kneecap into ribs as sturdy as tree branches. I rolled on the ground seeing only grunting flesh and sweaty male bodies.

Ernie's sneakers scraped against gravel. I realized that he had pulled away. Now it was only me and Bro Hatch grappling with one another, rolling on the ground.

As we twirled, I saw a large heavy black pan lift in the air. I never saw it fall. Bro Hatch tugged and whipped me over, and I felt the iron slam into my back. I went limp.

Bro Hatch managed to pull a fist out of somewhere and ram it into my jaw. I almost laughed. Not much power for such a big guy but, of course, he wasn't able to launch his best punch while wrestling on the muddy streets of Samgakji.

The black pan orbited above us and slammed to earth once again. This time it found its mark. I heard a bong and felt it reverberating through the thick skull pressed against my shoulder. The pan raised again and crashed once again into bone.

This time, Hatcher's bloodshot eyes rolled back. He lay still.

As Ernie fumbled with the handcuffs attached to the back of his belt, I unwrapped bearlike arms from around me and raised myself unsteadily to my feet. I inventoried the damage. A few more cuts. A few more bruises. Nothing serious.