Jade Lady Burning (30 page)

If he had choked Miss Pak until she was either dead or she had passed out, it didn’t seem possible to me that he would have put on his clothes, gone outside in the freezing cold, searched around until he found the heater, opened it, used the tongs to pull out one of the charcoal briquettes, and then brought it back into the house to start a fire and destroy the evidence. He would have exposed himself to too many prying eyes.

It was more likely that he would have panicked and put his clothes on and run to the one person in Itaewon who could help him: Kwok.

I could imagine the frantic Bohler, telling Kwok that he thought he’d just killed a girl. The solicitous Kwok telling him to go home, that he would take care of everything, and then going to the hooch and … But that’s where it broke down. Why not just remove the body? Business girls disappeared from Itaewon all the time.

So the blackened tongs festered in my mind.

But then we saw the photos. I felt sorry for Miss Pak, who was being so ravaged, but still it was exciting and I searched every part of her body. The clarity of the photos was bad, and Bohler was all over her, but I did manage to make out, in a couple of the shots, the medallion that she was wearing around her neck. The one that said
ok.
Jade.

It seemed sort of strange to me that a young girl like her, having money for the first time in her life, would buy herself such an old-fashioned piece of jewelry. Jade, from antiquity, and Chinese characters yet.

Not exactly trendy.

And if she did like that sort of thing, why wasn’t she wearing it when she had her photograph taken for the marriage paperwork? Maybe she hadn’t bought it yet, sure, but there was another possibility. Maybe a man had bought it for her. As a gift. And it wouldn’t have seemed appropriate to her to wear it in the photograph intended to accompany her request for betrothal to Johnny Watkins.

And I doubted that it was a GI who had bought it for her. When GIs buy gifts for Korean business girls they usually come straight out of the PX. After all, what value does a thing have if you haven’t seen it advertised on television?

But a Korean man could have bought it for her. He would have had to be rather infatuated with her, though. Kwok didn’t seem to be the type, but who knows?

If he were, that would explain his desire to destroy Miss Pak Ok-suk along with the evidence of Bohler’s debauchery. A man can fight jealousy, put himself above it, but not forever.

Another factor was the silence of the neighbors. If the person lurking around Miss Pak’s hooch just prior to the fire had been a GI, even Major General Bohler, the Koreans would have had no hesitation in reporting everything to the police.

Had it been a known thug, they might have hesitated, but the police would have gotten the truth out of them and taken care of the thug.

If it had been Kwok, however, the neighbors would have been frightened to death to talk about anything, and the police wouldn’t have pursued the case either. They probably received more money from Kwok’s operations than they did from their regular paychecks. In some ways he was their employer. And even if they had decided to throw him in the can, they would have to put up with a lot of heat from up top.

All that trouble for a GI whore? Not likely.

But all this was really just a mind game I was playing with myself. Even if Kwok hadn’t killed Miss Pak, I knew he had killed Kimiko, or had one of his boys do it. And he’d crippled Miss Lim.

That was enough for me.

I opened the door to Kwok’s office and walked in.

His head was in a big safe. He sat up abruptly and swiveled around in his chair when he heard me enter.

The office was spare. A small wooden desk, a couch, a coffee table, a green-shaded lamp on his desk fighting the gloom of the overcast afternoon.

“What do you want?” he said in Korean.

I closed the door behind me, reached in my coat, and pulled out the .45.

His body sagged, just slightly, as breath escaped from his body. Slowly, he gestured toward the safe. “I have money,” he said in English.

The bullet slammed into his body and he spun back off his chair. I stepped forward but he was down, a puddle of blood growing on the floor. The gun had been sighted on his chest when it went off. The .45 had a heavy slug. He would die soon. If not, maybe he deserved to live.

I looked at the money. Some of it was greenbacks and some of it bank notes, but most of it was Korean money. Stacks of it, in various denominations. I took a bundle of worn-looking ten-thousandwon notes, folded it, and stuffed it into my pocket. Expenses.

The puddle of blood was getting bigger now, almost reaching my shoes. I stepped towards the door but halfway there I stopped. Something was holding me. I went back to the desk and quickly looked through the drawers. In the top middle drawer I found it. The jade medallion.
Ok.
I left it there, closed the door to the office behind me, and walked hurriedly, but not frantically, down the steps.

I climbed the fence back into the brothel. As the cold night approached, all of the girls were indoors, fixing their hair and putting on makeup. No one noticed me as I slipped through the hooches and left quietly through the front gate.

One loud noise. Maybe a backfire. That’s all anyone would think. The next day I cleaned the .45 carefully, threw the two remaining cartridges into a septic tank, and returned the weapon to Palinki.

“Everything go okay, brother?”

“Yeah. I got in a little target practice.”

“If you need to use it again, you let me know, you hear?”

“Yeah, Palinki. Thanks.”

There was no mention of Kwok’s death in the Korean newspapers. He wasn’t the type anybody makes a fuss over after they’re dead.

Out on black-market detail I watched the comings and goings of his underlings. They seemed agitated and never stopped ranting at each other. We heard from the KNP blotter report that a couple of them were killed. Knifework. And three or four of Kwok’s nightclubs closed. Pretty soon somebody must have taken his place because things got quiet again. The closed nightclubs were reopened, one of them under a new name and another as a Japanese nightclub, catering to tourists from Tokyo.

Itaewon is going to hell.

Ernie and I didn’t get to work together anymore. The first sergeant kept us separated and kept finding more and more menial tasks for me to perform.

Finally Riley broke the news to me.

“You’re being transferred, George. Up north.”

“At least they waited a decent interval.”

“They’re claiming that it doesn’t have anything to do with your arrest of General Bohler, just manning requirements.”

“Bull.”

“Yeah.”

The DMZ is beautiful. I mean that. I’m at a little firebase overlooking a valley with hills marching off as far as you can see in either direction until you run into the snow-capped mountains. There are no trees, just shrubs, because no one wants their field of fire obstructed.

The hills are capped by sandbagged positions and in the valleys below, rows of barbed wire parallel chain-link fences, and between their fences and ours about a jillion land mines lurk underground, like lethal subterranean mushrooms.

The North Korean across the valley, looking at me through field glasses, sports a brown uniform and a floppy cap with a red star on it and there is no doubt that he is my enemy.

He sits on one side of the line and I sit on the other.

Neat.

I often think about Kimiko and Miss Lim and Miss Pak Ok-suk. And when I get a night off I take the Army bus across the half-frozen Imjin River, but I never go to Seoul. I stay in a village of thatched-roof hovels and drink rice wine and cuddle with country girls who haven’t yet learned how to speak English.

It’s only when the rice wine flows, and won’t stop, that I think of Kwok and Miss Pak, and the Jade Lady dances, burning in my soul.

Turn the page for a sneak preview of

SLICKY
BOYS

MARTIN LIMÓN

1

“Y
ou buy me drink?”

Eun-hi coiled her body around my arm and leaned over the bar, her shimmering black hair cascading to the dented vinyl counter. I inhaled lilacs.

“Tone oopso,”
I said. No money. “Payday’s not until Friday.”

She pouted. Red lips pursed like crushed cushions.

“You number ten GI.”

Ernie leaned back on his bar stool. “You got that right, Eun-hi. George is definitely number
ten
Cheap Charley GI.” He tilted his head back and swigged from a frosty brown bottle of Oriental Beer.

We were in the U.N. Club, in Itaewon, the greatest GI village in the world. Shattering vibrations careened off the walls, erupting from an out-of-tune rock-and-roll band clanging away in the corner. On the dance floor Korean business girls, clad in just enough clothing to make themselves legal, and American GIs in blue jeans and sports shirts gyrated youthful bodies in mindless abandon.

It felt good to be here. Our natural environment. My belly was full of beer and my petty worries had been flushed away by the gentle hops coursing through my veins. Still, I was surprised Eun-hi had talked to me and I wondered why. Usually she remained aloof from all GIs except those who were willing to spend big bucks, which—on a corporal’s pay—didn’t include me.

Eun-hi stood up and pushed a small fist against her hip. She was a big girl, full-breasted, tall for a Korean woman. Long leather boots reached almost to her knees and white hot pants bunched into the inviting mystery between her smooth brown thighs. Dark nipples strained to peek out at the world from behind a knotted halter top bundling her feminine goodness. Eun-hi was a business girl. One of the finest in Itaewon. Finer than frog hair, to be exact. A GI’s dream, a sailor’s fevered vision, a faithful wife’s nightmare.

My name is George Sueño. My partner Ernie Bascom and I are agents for the Criminal Investigation Division of the 8th United States Army in Seoul. We work hard—sometimes—but what we’re really good at is running the ville. Parading. Crashing through every bar in the red-light district, tracking down excitement and drunkenness and girls. In fact, we’re experts at it.

Gradually, over the last few months, more girls like Eun-hi had drifted into the GI villages. More girls who’d grown up in the twenty-some years since the end of the Korean War, when there was food to be had and inoculations from childhood diseases and shelter from the howling winter wind. Eun-hi was healthy. Not deformed by bowlegs or a pocked face or the hacking, coughing lungs of poverty.

She must’ve felt the heat of my admiration. At least I hoped she did. She took a step forward.

“Geogie,” she said. “Somebody want to talk to you.”

Ernie shifted in his stool, straightening his back. I stared at her. Waiting.

“A girl,” she said.

My eyes widened.

She waved her small, soft palm from side to side.

“Not a business girl.
Suknyo
.” A virtuous woman.

Ernie leaned forward. Interested now.

“Why in the hell would a good girl want to talk to George?”

I elbowed him. He shut up. We both looked at Eun-hi. She shrugged her elegant shoulders.

“I don’t know. She say she want to talk to GI named Geogie. In Itaewon everybody know Geogie. So I tell you.”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“At the Kayagum Teahouse. She wait for you there.”

“Is she a friend of yours?”

“No. I never see before. She come in here this afternoon when all GIs on compound. Ask me to help her find Geogie.”

“How’d she know I’d be here?”

Eun-hi laughed. A high, lilting warble, like the song of a dove.

“She know. Everybody know. You always here.”

It wasn’t true. Not always. Sometimes Ernie and I hit other clubs. But it was true that we were in Itaewon almost every night.

Ernie set his beer down. “What does she want?”

“I don’t know. She no say. You want to know, go to Kayagum Teahouse. Find out.”

She placed one shiny boot in front of the other and thrust out her hip.

“You no buy Eun-hi drink, then Eun-hi go.”

With that, she performed a graceful pirouette, held the pose for a moment, and sashayed her gorgeous posterior across the room toward a group of hell-raising helicopter pilots.

Ernie looked at me, lifting his eyebrows.

“A
suknyo
,” he said. “Looking for you?”

“Yeah. What’s so surprising about that?”

“Oh, nothing. Except you’re a low-rent, depraved GI and no decent Korean woman would get within ten feet of you.”

It bothered me. Where did he get the idea that I was depraved? Sure, I preferred girls who were young. Eighteen or nineteen. But I was only a few years older than that myself. What was wrong with that?

“Not so depraved,” I said.

Ernie stood up. “Shall we go?”

“Aren’t we going to think about this first?”

“What’s to think about?” he said. “A virtuous woman wants to talk to you. You think of yourself as a knight in shining armor. Maybe a horny one but still a knight. Besides, I’m curious.”

He was right. It was enough to get anybody curious. Itaewon was, by edict of the government, for “tourists” only. Translated— American GIs. And any woman caught in the area of the GI clubs, without a VD card proving that she was a registered prostitute, was subject to arrest. Whoever this suknyo was, she had risked losing a hell of a lot of face by coming down here.