Jade Lady Burning (2 page)

The taxi sped on. The city was everywhere. Building after building, sign after sign, an endless jumble of streets, alleys, and overhangs. People were crammed into buses full to bursting, jostling each other on the packed sidewalks, and riding bicycles piled six feet high with goods of all descriptions.

I looked at the girls: their dresses, their coats, their hairdos. My eyes jumped rapidly from one to another, each with straight black hair to her waist.

A GI bus drew alongside, bearing the spare, stenciled markings of the U.S. Army. It didn’t stop for civilians. The Korean populace stood at their own bus stops, patiently waiting while the drab green bus sped by them, stopping only for GIs, or Korean women frantically waving their Military Dependent identity cards.

The Korean buses were packed. Heads and arms pushed up against the steam-smeared windows in a flesh-colored jigsaw puzzle. I spotted a pretty girl. She stared blankly ahead.

Large and green, Namsan loomed over everything, standing just south of the city’s center. The “South Mountain” was about halfway between the King’s Palace and the Han River. Radiating from it in all directions were millions of buildings and houses and the skyscrapers of the downtown business district.

“It wasn’t anything like this my first tour,” I said. “There weren’t hardly any buildings over two stories tall. And there weren’t hardly any girls asking more than ten dollars for an overnight.”

“The two must be related,” Ernie said.

Another two blocks and we came to an abrupt halt. Ernie fumbled with some coins and gave the driver the exact change indicated by the meter.

“Shit, pal,” I said. “You’re not going to embarrass me and not tip this guy?”

“Hell no, I’m not going to tip him.” He picked up his bag. “These guys don’t know what a tip is. Korean custom.”

Across the street we entered Yongsan Compound, headquarters of the Eighth United States Army. A block past the gate, we passed through the Moyer Recreation Center and went straight to the snack stand. I ordered a hot dog and a medium Coke and Ernie had the same.

The buns were steamed, the dogs hot, and we piled them high with mustard, sweet pickle relish, and onions. They didn’t last long. Then we looked at each other, hesitated … and got up to order two more. It had been a long ride from Pusan.

“How was the teenybopper?” I said.

Ernie shrugged. “She did what I told her to do.”

My voice husked down a few decibels. “What did you tell her to do?”

“Routine.” Ernie leaned back in the vinyl-covered seat and pushed his pelvis forward a little. “Had her work on my joint for a while. She wasn’t very good but she tried real hard. I like watching them while they try to figure out what to do with it.” He crossed his arms and stared straight ahead. His blue pupils threatened to melt the thickest part of his round wire-rimmed glasses. “That’s what brought me back,” he said.

“Brought you back? I thought that was the first time you’d ever seen her.”

“I mean back in the Army. Back here.” He twisted his head towards the window. “The American girls, they want you to talk. They want you to understand them. Even with all this stuff back in the States about free love, I never yet ran into one that didn’t claim she was old-fashioned.”

“Weren’t getting enough nooky, huh?”

“I could have,” he said. “I just didn’t want to talk to them.” He looked back out the window. “It’s better here, where you just pay them.” He leaned back, pushed his hands into his jacket pockets, and tilted his head against the hard metal siding of the snack stand. “The price in the States is too high.”

He closed his eyes. I thought of the college courses I had taken courtesy of Uncle Sam. The ones I had signed up for were mostly on the Orient: Asian history, Asian languages, the anthropology of the Far East. The friends I had made were mainly veterans, and there weren’t many of them. I had drunk a lot and tried to talk to some of the girls just out of high school but it hadn’t worked. It never had. But now it wasn’t working for a different reason.

“Come on,” I said, checking my watch. “It’s game time.”

* * *

Bile percolated up my throat and pumped gas into the hollow of my chest. I popped the last of my antacids and swore.

“They found her at zero four hundred this morning,” the first sergeant said. “The body was badly burned but the neighbors are certain that it’s the young girl by the name of Pak Ok-suk who lived in that hooch.”

The first sergeant sipped his milky brown coffee, grimaced, and placed the porcelain mug in the center of his immaculate desk. Down the long hallway an ancient radiator whistled and clanged while the snow outside swirled in a howling wind from Manchuria.

Ernie Bascom fidgeted in his chair and tucked his tie into his trim belt line.

“So far, the Korean National Police don’t have much information on Miss Pak other than that she was a registered prostitute and her hometown was Yoju. The neighbors claim that she had an American boyfriend, actually a number of American boyfriends, but that for the last two or three months it had been the same guy. The KNPs didn’t get much of a description of him: under six feet, light brown hair, average weight, early twenties. Could be a million GIs. He’d been living with her, bringing her stuff out of the PX to black-market. Routine. They never seemed to have any fights, except around payday, when she pushed him a little, and no one noticed whether or not he came to her hooch last night. Normally he arrived around six p.m., after work. There were no other bodies found in the hooch, just hers, and by the time the neighbors were awakened by the flames, it was too late to save her. No one else was hurt since they were able to get out in time.”

The first sergeant rattled the paperwork in front of him and took another sip of his coffee. Ernie sat perfectly still, leaning back in his chair, his right ankle crossed over his left knee, a Caucasian Buddha in baggy coat and tie.

“All of this would be just routine—a fire starts in a business girl’s hooch out in Itaewon, she’s burned to death in her sleep, and life goes on—if it wasn’t for the findings of the Itaewon fire marshal. The girl had been bound hand and foot, trussed up, actually, and some sort of bonfire had been built under her body. So it was clearly arson and apparently murder. She might have been dead before the fire started. The neighbors heard no struggle or fighting that evening and were unaware of anything unusual until they smelled the fumes coming from her hooch. Strange enough by itself, but things sort of get worse when we get to the final entry in the fire marshal’s report. Upon examining what was left of the girl, they discovered that a large wooden stake had been shoved inside her body. This, taken with the unusual, trussed-up position they found her in and the bonfire that had been prepared, led them to believe that it had been some sort of ritualistic killing. It almost seems as if the girl had been skewered and prepared for roasting.”

Ernie reached in his coat pocket and fumbled for a stick of gum. The bile in my stomach hit my head and threatened to burst it. Last night’s booze or this morning’s killing, I wasn’t sure which.

The first sergeant cleared his throat and continued. “The young lady’s close association with American servicemen, of course, casts immediate suspicion on Eighth Army personnel. The story didn’t break in time for the Seoul morning papers but we expect the afternoon editions to be screaming about it. We’ll have to wait and see if the Koreans broadcast the details of such a grisly murder on TV. What makes this case even worse than if a GI had just murdered a Korean woman is the way the assailant did it. The corpse was treated as if it were a beast. And I know you two guys have read your Eighth Army training manuals and know that Koreans are particularly sensitive about any implications that they should be treated in any way less than human. Being called an animal, something nonhuman, is the supreme insult to a Korean. We can expect the TV and radio people to whip up a frenzy of anti-Americanism over this one.

“The provost marshal, Colonel Stoneheart, has already gotten the word from the commanding general. Pull out all the stops. Take all needed investigators off all other details, get to the bottom of this murder, and bring the culprit to justice. ASAP.”

The first sergeant set the paperwork down, positioned it perfectly, and looked at us.

“I know I’ve been on you guys lately, what with keeping you on the black-market detail and keeping the pressure on to get as many arrests as possible, but that’s what the colonel wanted. And you’ve got to remember some of the shit you’ve gotten into before, like overstepping your jurisdiction. You, Sueño.” The first sergeant pointed his finger at me.

“We got that all cleared up, Top.”

He shook his head at the memory. “But, anyway, it’s over. The Army likes things to proceed in orderly fashion. You need to remember that. You, too, Bascom.”

The first sergeant put his big hands flat on the desk. “Still, after all is said and done, I’ve got to admit that you two are the best ville rats I’ve got. Nobody can go out there, work with the Koreans, and come back with the goods like you guys.”

A compliment, the first one in months. And it obviously hurt him to say it, judging from his rictus grin. He was setting us up for a big one.

“That’s why I’ve called you into this one. I need you to get out there and find out all you can about this Miss Pak Ok-suk. Who she knew, what she was up to, and how she ended up the way she did. I’m taking you off the black-market detail effective immediately. You can consider yourselves on this case twenty-four hours a day. Just report back to the office every morning prior to zero eight hundred hours. You got that?”

“What about our expense account?” Ernie said.

“Sixty dollars a month.”

“Make it a hundred.”

The first sergeant gazed at Ernie for a moment and then at me.

“Okay. But I want results. And I want ‘em fast. And if I find that you’re out there screwing off on me, you’ll be cleaning grease traps from here to Pusan.”

We lifted ourselves out of our chairs and strode out into the hallway.

Ernie stopped in the Admin Section to shoot the breeze with Miss Kim, the fine-looking secretary. I found Riley, the CID Detachment’s personnel sergeant, hair greased back, working away frantically on a pile of paperwork.

“So what’s the deal, Riley?”

He looked up at me through thick square glasses. “It’s hitting the fan, George. Find out who dorked that girl and you’ll be a hero.”

“And if I don’t?”

Riley jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Back to the DMZ.”

“I’ve walked the line before.”

“Yeah,” he said, disinterested.

Ernie and I walked out into the cold wind of Seoul. Snow crunched beneath our feet, left over from the off-and-on fall we had had the night before. We jumped into the old motor-pool jeep and Ernie brought it coughing to life.

“Where to, pal?” he said.

“Where else?” I said. “Itaewon. The home of my fevered dreams.”

They say that Seoul is not as cold as other parts of Korea. Particularly not as cold as up north in the hills near the Demilitarized Zone or down south in the flat, unprotected plains of Taegu. But it’s cold enough. The Chosen peninsula has all four seasons; the summer almost tropical, the spring and autumn achingly beautiful. This was a big change for me. I was used to the flat, unrelenting sunshine of East Los Angeles, with the only variable being the thickness of the smog layer.

The streets I grew up on were mean but they never became part of me. Primarily because I kept moving. From one foster home to another. My mother died when I was two. Some people say she was killed. And then my father disappeared into Mexico, the ancient land whence he had come.

I don’t know the truth of how my mother died or why my father disappeared. As a child I had no choice but to accept it, and just before I was scheduled to graduate from high school, I joined the Army. I’ve thought a few times since then of going back, talking to some of my cousins and my uncles and aunts scattered around the city. After all, I’m a trained investigator now, but I’ve been busy and I’ve been overseas and maybe you could say that I’m afraid to find out the truth.

The foster homes I lived in were grim, a child always knows when he’s not wanted, but there was one bright spot. Mrs. Aaronson, one of my foster mothers and the one I lived with the longest, took a special interest in my schoolwork when she realized that the math and reading weren’t sinking in. She showed me what they really are—puzzles. She made sure I brought my books home and made sure I did some homework, whether it was assigned or not, every night. And after a while she didn’t have to check very close because the thrill of surprising the teachers and my fellow students with a perfect test score became my incentive to work on my own.

It didn’t last long, though. After I left Mrs. Aaronson, I climbed into the rebellious shell of all adolescents, and soon I was looking for a way out of high school other than the car washes or factories that swallowed whole legions of Mexican-American kids.

I dropped out and joined the Army. My high test scores landed me a clerical job and for a couple of years I kicked around in the States, my newly found buddies spinning off occasionally to Vietnam, spit out like tickets from a rotating drum in a lottery drawing. With a little more than a year left on my enlistment, I got orders to Korea. At first I couldn’t believe my luck. No getting shot at. And then they bused me and about a hundred other guys over to an Air Force base, strapped us into a chartered jet, and we were on our way. Hours later I saw Mount Fuji through the clouded porthole. We refueled and another couple of hours later we landed at Kimpo Air Field.

Like rats we wound through a maze of partitions, getting shots, having papers stamped, exchanging our greenback dollars for Military Payment Certificates, and then they put us on a bus for the Army Support Command Replacement Depot. I saw my first stern-faced Korean soldiers manning sandbagged machine gun emplacements.

I loved Korea. It was a whole new world of different tastes and smells, and a different, more intense way of looking at life. People here didn’t take eating and breathing for granted. They were fought for.