Jade Lady Burning (5 page)

I expected reticence, a closing of ranks against a foreigner. What I got was a girl who wouldn’t shut up, a girl who seemed proud that Itaewon had finally hit the Korean equivalent of the tabloids.

Everyone had heard about the murder and the manner in which it was done and “Mangnei” was as fascinated by the grotesquerie as anyone. Other girls walked over and started to add their embellishments and before long I had more information than I really wanted.

Pak Ok-suk had drifted into Itaewon from the countryside, cast off by a family that could no longer afford to keep her. Not that they couldn’t afford to feed her. They could manage that. What they couldn’t manage were her eccentricities—her demands for new clothes, her willfulness in going out at night with her friends, and her refusal to take her father’s word as law. The cramped quarters of the Korean rural home got tighter each day until the walls were about to explode and the family lashed out at her for being the source of their shame, for being a grown daughter yet unmarried.

The young men her age were in the Army, manning a fighting force almost as big as America’s in a country one-sixth the size. The country was crammed with armaments and soldiers that pushed up against the Demilitarized Zone, threatening to burst across.

Her choices included the textile mills and the factories, filled with white-bandannaed female automatons churning out hightech equipment for the world’s consumers. Or collecting tokens, sweeping out buses, jamming the passengers in the door, straddling the exit to keep anyone from falling out, shielding them with her body.

Instead she chose Itaewon.

At first she was just a barmaid’s helper, doing lowly work: the sweeping and the cleaning and the washing of the bar rags. She hid from the GIs but watched them with her big round eyes and, as time went by, she became more bold. She poured Cokes for them or popped open beers, saving the more complicated highballs for her wiser sisters. And she even went so far as to collect money from them and hand it over to the old crone who guarded the cashier’s box, receiving change from gnarled hands.

And she loved the music and the dancing and the clothes and the hairdos and she longed to have nice things of her own.

She slept in the bar, on chairs pulled together after the Lucky Seven Club closed for the evening, before the midnight curfew. And at first she couldn’t sleep because she was too wound up by all the things she had seen. And she listened to the young men who were the ushers by night and the janitors by day, as they crept from their rickety multilegged beds and crawled in with some of the older girls who rated soft vinyl-covered booths for their boudoirs. And she listened to their giggles and then their grunts, but none of the young men crawled in with her. There wasn’t room.

And she dreamed of home and how warm it had once been and how it would never exist for her again. When she met Kimiko, everything changed.

Kimiko hadn’t frequented the Lucky Seven Club much in the last few years. They hadn’t let her in since the spitting and scratching contest she’d had with a girl she found with one of her GI boyfriends. When she got through with the girl, she punched out the GI and two of the young ushers. Soon whistles were blowing and the Korean National Police joined the fray. Snarling and clawing and kicking, she had fought them off until one of the cops whipped out his baton and ended the altercation with one clean swipe to her head.

But time has a way of draining rancor, and Kimiko was eventually allowed back into the club again. All the young help had changed, maybe two or three times, and no one was too anxious to tell her to leave anyway. The old crone, hunched over the cash box, remembered her and kept an eye on her but didn’t say anything when she started a restrained and civil conversation with the young little Pak Ok-suk.

Kimiko was known to all the GIs of Itaewon and some of them called her Short Time, a reference to the way she financed her life.

She freelanced, strictly, rolling from bar to bar searching for GI prey, getting them to buy her drinks. Not those overpriced sweetheart drinks, with hardly any liquor in them, but beer and straight shots of bourbon. And she held her liquor well. But sometimes her heavy makeup would get smudged or her skintight dress would seem a little twisted, off center, and she would look like some demented doll that had been dressed by a clumsy child. Hemline riding high over spindly legs, neckline bursting with bosom.

Kimiko had been around long enough to know GIs. She knew about the problems they had getting an overnight pass, she knew that they’d get shafted if they were caught on the street after the midnight curfew, and she knew that some of them would do anything to get promoted and others didn’t care. Some of them just wanted to do their time and get out and some of them had much more money at home than the U.S. Army could ever pay them. And she kept looking for that one starry-eyed young GI from a rich family who would flip for her. She was like an old sourdough in the desert, pulling her old burro along, searching for that last shining vein of boyish El Dorado.

When she came back into the Lucky Seven Club after such a long absence, she was prim and proper. She behaved herself. And she didn’t get drunk. She sat at the bar, sipped on a Chilsung Cider, and left early. She didn’t hang around for those last few GIs who were too drunk to walk—her normal clientele—but instead held a polite conversation with the one person behind the bar who seemed to have some sort of respect for her age and her experience: Pak Ok-suk.

None of the girls remembered exactly when they had started talking together. It was something that just happened. Kimiko would pontificate, waving an American-made cigarette in the air and punctuating her discourse with sips of beer, while Pak Ok-suk leaned across the bar, a devotee at the feet of a guru.

Some of the girls tried to warn her: Stay away from Kimiko. But they couldn’t give concrete reasons. Kimiko had never messed with the other girls in the village unless she caught them with one of her boyfriends, one of her sources of livelihood. Mainly she was just aggressive about making her living.

The girls were unanimous in not blaming her for that. After all, who else would take care of her? But they knew that Kimiko was bad news for Miss Pak, yet Miss Pak didn’t listen, and now all their dire warnings had come to pass.

“Did Kimiko kill Miss Pak?”

Mangnei pulled her head back, her eyes and mouth rounding. “Of course not.”

“Then who did?”

She didn’t know. But Kimiko had probably gotten Miss Pak involved with a man she couldn’t handle. Who?

She didn’t know that either. She only knew that Miss Pak had quit her job behind the bar and started wearing nice clothes and getting her hair done and learning how to dance, until she was the sexiest girl in Itaewon. Often she had left the club in the company of Kimiko. On important missions. And each day she seemed to have more money and more clothes and soon had her own hooch. After a while she stopped talking to any of the girls who worked in the Lucky Seven Club.

“What about her boyfriend, Johnny?”

“He was crazy about her and used to follow her all the time.”

“Has he been in lately?”

“Every night. He sits over there, same table.” She pointed. “Waiting for Miss Pak. But she didn’t have time for him. She talk to him for few minutes and then goes with Kimiko.”

“Was he here last night?”

“Yes. Early. But then left.”

“What time?”

“Maybe ten o’clock.”

“Where does he work?”

The girls buzzed amongst themselves on that one. They mentioned some other names—Freddy and Sammy—friends of his, and one of the girls seemed certain that they worked at the motor pool.

I turned to her. “How do you know?”

She blushed. The other girls laughed. She’d spent the night there.

We didn’t bother to ask the girls where we could find Kimiko. She could be anywhere and then turn up where you least expected her. We’d find her ourselves. Or she’d find us.

As we walked out of the Lucky Seven Club, the amplified instruments on the bandstand clanged to life and the ballroom began to whirl with multicolored light. People jumped up from their tables and chairs and soon the dance floor was packed with gangly GIs and sweet young girls just in from the lush green valleys of Korea, all dancing to Motown.

GIs bounced up the main road of Itaewon, hands in their pockets, breath and laughter billowing from their mouths, ignoring the slippery ice as they headed for the neon.

The village was a huge web of brightness, shrouded in snow. Nightclubs lined the main road, and alleys branched off, up steep stone steps, to smaller, cozier clubs. Old women lurked in the darkness ready to lead any willing GI to a brothel if he didn’t have the time or the temperament for the dancing and the booze and the laughter.

Ernie took a deep breath of the biting air and let it out slowly.

“It’s good to be back.”

“After forty-eight hours away?”

“Entirely too long.”

We popped into the King Club, elbowed our way through the crowd, and asked a few questions. No one had seen Kimiko. We got some strange looks. Normally people tried to avoid her.

At each club the answer was the same. No one had seen her.

“Sort of like the dog that didn’t bark,” Ernie said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, normally when you come to Itaewon there’s three things you can count on—cold beer, women, and Kimiko bugging the shit out of you. So if we come out here one night, get all the cold beer we want, have to push our way through bunches of sweet young girls, but still we can’t find Kimiko no matter how hard we look, there’s got to be something wrong.”

“What’s that got to do with a dog that didn’t bark?”

“Like in Sherlock Holmes. If a burglar breaks into a place and the dog didn’t bark, that’s got to mean that maybe a burglar didn’t break into the place.”

“Not in East L.A. The mutts just snarl and attack.”

We decided to hit up Ginger at the American Club. It would be good to get in out of the cold. Relax, have a beer, and maybe learn something.

When she saw us, she pounded down the planks behind the bar, squealing all the way.

“Georgie! Ernie! Long time no see! Short time how you been?”

Ginger made a point of making all her customers feel welcome.

She was a big girl. Round. Maybe not chubby but definitely husky. She was Korean through and through but her bobbed hair was light brown and her face was dotted with freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. All the old NCOs and retirees who hung out at her place kidded her about it: “A little
Miguk
in the woodpile, eh, Ginger?” Meaning, she was half Caucasian—a mixed blood.

She called herself Ginger because it was a spice used in a lot of Korean cooking. When she found out that Americans used it too
and
it was a woman’s name, she couldn’t resist.

She took pains to be the sauciest gal at any gathering and she was the smartest woman in Itaewon, as far as I was concerned. The only one to own a club outright, and not part of a family-run operation.

We ordered a couple of beers. The place was full, with quite a few nice-looking women, but most of them escorted. No heavyhanded hustle in Ginger’s place. A row of beer bellies, belonging to middle-aged American men, lined the bar. Luckily, the countrywestern band was on break.

Ginger poured our beers, made change, and then propped her elbows on the bar.

“I got a problem, Ginger,” I said. “We can’t find Kimiko.”

Her eyes widened and then set back into their normal position.

“Information?”

We laughed. “How’d you know?”

“You guys can’t be looking for a woman that old for sex. Not unless you’re getting kinky on me. And you’re not looking for her for black market. Nobody does black market with Kimiko, except for a newbie. So you must be looking for her for some sort of information. Hot information. Like maybe something to do with that poor little girl who was murdered last night.”

“Don’t stop now, Ginger,” Ernie said. “We’ll just drink beer and listen.”

“In Itaewon during the day, when the GIs are at work, the main thing everybody does is wait for beer deliveries and gossip. Today there was only one subject, Kimiko and Pak Ok-suk. Kimiko had been running that girl around, making money off of her, and she must have got her involved with some mean guys.”

“Anybody know who they are?”

“Not that I’ve heard. Kimiko always took little Miss Pak out of the village, away from Itaewon. Nobody knows who they were seeing. Everybody expects Kimiko to disappear for a while. Eventually she’ll come back and try to find a new girl.”

“Has she done this before?”

“Yeah. The last one wasn’t killed, at least not that I know of. She just disappeared.”

“Do you know who she was?”

“No. But I can find out for you. Check back tomorrow.”

Nothing like a little murder to convince people to support law enforcement.

We ordered a couple more beers just before the band started and if we hadn’t I probably would have left before the first song was over. They were young, Korean, and enthusiastic but that didn’t make up for their lack of skill. Of course, I’m not too crazy about country music even when it’s played well. The old guys at the bar didn’t seem to mind. Already anesthetized. And at least it wasn’t rock and roll.

Ginger had jumped into an intimate conversation with a woman down the bar. She was elegantly dressed, tall, with a big shining rock on her finger. Ernie pointed his nose at a few of the girls on the dance floor and finally one of them walked over to him and stood leaning against his bar stool, his legs spreadeagled around her.

Ginger brought me another beer and leaned over to talk in my ear so I could hear her above the dulcet sounds of “The Orange Blossom Special.”

“This is from her. She wants to talk to you.”

I glanced down the bar for a second. The woman was older than I usually liked, closing in on thirty. Her eyes were cast demurely down.

“No sweat,” Ginger said. “She’s my friend, here from the States. On vacation.”

I walked down the bar and she smiled when I took the seat next to her. Ernie got lost and, by the time the band was ready to start another break, so did we, scooting out the front without even saying goodbye to Ginger.