“Waitz has been diverting guys to posts in Korea where their specialty is not required.”
“Right.” I stood up and reached for my coat. “Let’s get off base and find a taxi.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Inchon.”
“What the hell do you want to go there for?”
“They have a nice place there I want to visit. The Olympos Hotel …”
“You don’t need a room. Miss Kwon will put you up.”
“I don’t want a room. It’s the other half of the title I’m interested in.”
“What’s that?”
“The Olympos Hotel and Casino.”
The cab driver swerved rapidly through the countryside, and I kept telling him to slow down so we wouldn’t slide off the slick roads. When we came over the crest of the hills surrounding Inchon, the huge harbor spread out below us like rippling green glass. Rusty merchant ships nodded lazily on the gentle waves like drunken sailors sleeping against lampposts. At the edge of the water, on a slight hill above the rest of the city, stood the Olympos Hotel. Half of its square eyes twinkled in the sunset.
Chandeliers, plush red carpet, beautiful women flashing brightly colored cards across green felt tables.
“Let’s get out of this dump,” Ernie said.
“I just want to see if he’s here.”
“Who?”
“Waitz.”
There was not much of a crowd, since it was Monday night. A few Japanese tourists, a couple of high-rollers from Hong Kong at the baccarat table, and a smattering of bewhiskered merchant marines. Although there wasn’t much foliage for camouflage, I didn’t have to take any extra precautions to conceal myself from Waitz. He was humped over one of the blackjack tables, jabbing his finger into the green felt when he wanted a hit, waving his hand from side to side when he wanted to stay. His small pile of chips dwindled and then disappeared before our eyes. Without looking up from his cards, he reached back into his wallet and pulled out another short stack of twenty dollar bills. The dealer arrayed them like a fan on the table, counted them quickly, and then made a pencil calculation converting them to won. She pushed two small stacks of chips out to him, and Waitz dropped almost half of them into the betting circle.
We waited outside the hotel. I figured it wouldn’t take long.
He walked through the lobby rubbing his face, and the red-coated attendant opened the door for him. I couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders were still hunched and he stumbled as he walked. We put down the beers we had been drinking in the small garden overlooking the bay and followed.
His cab pulled up in front of Whiskey Mary’s, one of the oldest establishments in Inchon’s nightclub district. I told our driver to cruise by, and we watched Waitz walk in.
By the time Ernie and I peeped through the beaded doorway, Waitz was already too busy arguing with a Korean woman to notice us.
“Who is she?” Ernie asked.
“Miss Yu Kyong-hui.”
“How did you know?”
“Waitz and VonEric were both gambling. One out here at the casino, the other on football, placing bets with Austin. When Waitz got in too deep, he started taking bribes to give GIs choice assignments.”
“If VonEric was in on it,” Ernie said, “how did he get in so deep to Austin?”
“From checking the records, it looks like he wasn’t taking bribes. Maybe he figured he’d rather be in trouble with an illegal bookmaker than get caught by the army for abusing his official position and thereby face a court-martial. But he worked in the same room with Waitz, so eventually he must have realized what Waitz was doing, or maybe Waitz told him, figured to enlist him as a collaborator. Who knows? Then when VonEric wouldn’t go along with the program, it made Waitz nervous. Maybe real nervous. And maybe VonEric even threatened to turn him in. The records were there, the ones we saw this afternoon. Enough to convict him, or at least build a hell of a case against him. If anybody knew about it.”
“So Waitz decided to kill VonEric.”
“Right.” I jerked my thumb toward the entranceway to Whiskey Mary’s. “And he knew that Miss Yu Kyong-hui had jilted him, so he talked to her. It turned out they had something in common. Miss Yu’s old boyfriend was infantry. He had probably just gotten lucky on his last tour to Korea and been assigned down here, maybe to the Special Forces detachment on the ASCOM compound. But he wouldn’t be so lucky again. It would be the DMZ for him. Miss Yu might not be able to see him for weeks on end.”
“And Division isn’t real big on helping GIs get their marriage paperwork through.”
“Right. So Waitz made a proposition to Miss Yu. Just take VonEric home with her, loosen a crack in her floor that was already there, and her boyfriend would receive a choice assignment away from the DMZ.”
A shriek rippled through the beaded entranceway to the club. Ernie was first in. I pushed my way through a gaggle of sweet-smelling business girls and found Ernie wrestling a bloodied knife away from Miss Yu.
Waitz was already pushing through the back door. I ran toward him but had to dodge sloshing beer and broken bottles from the cocktail tables he’d turned over behind him. When I made it outside, I spotted him down the street hopping into a taxi. There were no others around, so I couldn’t follow him. I returned to the club.
Miss Yu was screeching and clawing at Ernie’s face, like some great warrior bird.
“He’s got to fix the assignment!” she said. “I don’t care about MPs. I don’t care about CID. I did what he want me to do, now he must help me!”
“What is it you did for him?” I asked.
Miss Yu glanced around at the business girls and the handful of merchant sailors. They all stared at her. Suddenly, she realized that she’d said too much.
“Nothing,” she replied. “I did nothing.”
It took us half an hour to get her booked into the Inchon Korean National Police Station. I briefly explained what the charge was but told them that Ernie and I had to leave in order to arrest the American who’d been her accessory.
When we reached the main gate of the Army Support Command, red lights flashed. We piled out of our jeep and showed our badges to the first MP we saw.
“What happened?”
“He opened up with a weapon.”
“Who?”
“Waitz, that’s what everybody’s saying. The guy at the Repo Depot.”
“A rifle?” Ernie asked. “A forty-five? What?”
“A forty-five. Johnson tried to card him, check his ID and pass, but instead Waitz shot him.”
“Is he dead?”
“They say it’s just a wound to his leg, no arterial bleeding. The MedEvac chopper is on the way.”
“Where’d Waitz go?”
The MP pointed toward the flashing neon of ASCOM City.
Ernie and I trotted through the narrow alleys.
“Where would he go?” Ernie asked. “He can’t get away.”
“I think he knows that.”
“Then what the hell is he doing?”
“He’s toast and he knows it. Unless he destroys the evidence and finds a way to silence Miss Yu.”
“How’s he going to do that?”
As if in answer to Ernie’s question, a tongue of flame shot over the tiled rooftops. When we reached Miss Yu’s hooch, it was already engulfed in flame.
“He can’t get away with this” Ernie said.
“He’s panicked,” I replied. “Not thinking clearly.”
“Which makes him dangerous.”
“Very.”
“Where to now?” Ernie asked.
“Back to the next thing he needs to eliminate.”
“Miss Yu?”
“Right.”
During the five-mile drive to Inchon, Ernie broke every speed limit in the books. At Whiskey Mary’s the girls were hysterical. I convinced one of them to calm down and she told us that Waitz had returned, this time with a gun, and he’d threatened to kill them all if they didn’t tell him where he could find Miss Yu. They told him she’d been arrested.