Minutes later, we screeched up in front of the Inchon Police Station, just as a GI in civvies trudged up the stone steps, a pistol hanging at his side. Ernie didn’t even slow down. He slammed the jeep into low gear and the vehicle thumped up the steps. Waitz turned in horror but before he could bring his weapon into play, the front bumper of Ernie’s jeep sent him flying.
A dozen Korean cops streamed out of the building, some of them with their weapons drawn. Ernie and I stood with our hands straight up in the air and I started shouting that we were American MPs and here to arrest the man who lay injured on the steps. When everyone calmed down, I turned Waitz over and clamped the cuffs on him. His left leg had suffered a compound fracture so Ernie pulled off his belt and used it as a tourniquet. Waitz screamed when Ernie pulled it tight.
“You ran me over,” Waitz said. “On purpose.”
“I should’ve stepped on the gas,” Ernie replied.
“Why’d you kill VonEric?” I asked.
Waitz stared at me, his eyes wide with glazed panic. “I didn’t kill nobody.”
Ernie slapped him, and then slapped him again. Finally, I had to make him stop. We tossed Waitz in the back of the jeep and drove him, howling all the way, back to ASCOM City. It wasn’t easy but I managed to keep the MPs there from killing him before we even had a chance to book him for murder.
The MP Johnson survived. While she rotted in jail, Miss Yu’s case made its slow and painful way through the intricacies of the Korean judicial system. At Waitz’s preliminary court-martial hearing, there was so much evidence piled up against him that he and his military attorney copped a plea. The result: twenty years’ hard labor at Fort Leavonworth, Kansas. He’d probably be out in five.
NIGHT OF THE MOON GODDESS
Outside the main gate of Osan Air Force Base the narrow lanes of Songtan-up wind off in three directions. Each alleyway is crammed with brightly painted signs touting the best in leather goods or the tastiest in beer or guarantees as to which bar offers the greatest prospects for romance. At night the place is lit up as brightly as the spangled posterior of an overage stripper. In the morning it looks quiet and sad, especially when a low-lying mist crawls through the damp cobbled streets.
“How we ever going to find this joint?” Ernie asked.
I pulled the note I had made out of my pocket. “Kim’s Tailor Shop and Brassware. It should be easy. I even have the address.”
Ernie snorted. “Addresses don’t mean nothing in this mess.”
It turned out that he was right. It wasn’t so easy. Each little number hand-brushed in white paint over a doorway was covered with tote bags and running shoes and jogging outfits hanging from every available rafter. While we were searching, an old woman approached us and offered herself as a guide to that particular nirvana that all young GIs seek. I shooed her away and held Ernie back, reminding him that we had a job to do. He stared straight ahead and chomped more viciously on his clicking wad of gum.
Ernie and I had jumped at this case because it gave us a chance to get out of Seoul. Osan is the largest US air base in the country, situated about thirty miles south of the capital city of Seoul and about fifty miles from the Demilitarized Zone that slashes like a knife through the heart of the Korean Peninsula.
We were on what’s called a “SOFA case,” a claim made against the US government by Korean civilians under a treaty known as the Status of Forces Agreement. A young woman, Miss Won Hei-suk, had committed suicide. The family contended that she had been driven to it by an American serviceman who had taken advantage of her youth and gullibility and promised her-among other things-marriage. The monetary figure they came up with included not only her projected productivity and value to the family in the future but also the price of their emotional suffering. How they figured that one I didn’t know.
The US Army pays out millions of dollars in claims each year. In Germany it might be the price of an apple tree mowed down by a tank on maneuvers, in the Philippines income lost from rice churned up by the navy construction battalions. In Korea, it’s the loss of a daughter.
Of course, the army didn’t want to pay, so it was our job to find out if the story of this sordid little love affair was valid or bogus. A copy of Miss Won’s family register had been submitted to 8th Army along with the claim, and it proved that she was clearly underage. One way out for the military was to find the GI, court-martial him for statutory rape, and force him to pay the claim. But finding him could be a problem. Not only were there a couple of thousand airmen stationed on Osan itself but the place was also a popular vacation spot for Marines from Okinawa and Japan. They caught military flights over here-at government expense-and they stayed in billeting facilities on post for four or five dollars a day. While here, they shopped for the cheap brassware and leather goods and textile products that the village offered in abundance and shipped tons of junk back to the States. They also enjoyed the more ephemeral charms of Songtan-up, when the sun went down and the neon began to sparkle.
We found Kim’s Tailor Shop and Brassware in a side alley. The sign was painted in English with the small Korean translation below. The back walls were hung with drapes of gray and blue material. The front of the shop was lined with brass vases, urns, and sculptures, the most prominent of which was a fist displaying a stiff upward-thrust index finger.
When we walked in, a man rose from a small leather sofa.
“Welcome,” he said. “If you want suits, Kim’s Tailor number one in Songtan Village.”
He was a sturdy looking Korean man, a few years older than us, maybe thirty, with short cropped black hair brushed neatly back along the geometric lines of his big square head. His leathery brown face was trying to smile, but it couldn’t get past the lines of concern folded just beneath his eyes. When I pulled out my badge, he sighed and deflated, as if he had been expecting customers rather than cops.
“Are you Mr. Kim?”
“Yes. I’m Mr. Kim. I already tell everything to Korean police.”
He plopped back down on the sofa and folded his short, bulging forearms across his knees. I sat down in a wooden chair across from him. Ernie wandered around the shop, running his fingers lightly over the contours of a brass female nude.
“The Korean police didn’t find out much,” I said. “Not even the name of the GI.”
“Sure. I show them.”
He reached across the coffee table, grabbed a large dog-eared book covered with red cardboard, and thumbed through the onionskin sheets. After flicking the pages back and forth a few times he jabbed a stubby finger at one of the receipts and turned it toward me.
“Here. These are the names.”
“There were more than one?”
“Sure. GI never come from Okinawa alone. They all come in here buy some brassware. Two of them bought suits.”
I stared at him for a moment.
“Only one of them went out with Miss Won,” he said. “This guy here. The Cheap Charlie.”
“He’s the one who didn’t buy a suit?”
“Yes.”
The names were scribbled in hangul, the Korean script, and I sounded them out haltingly.
“Tom-son. Jo-dan. Pok-no.”
“That’s him. Pok-no. He’s the one who went out with Miss Won.”
The first two names were easy enough-Thompson and Jordan-although there must be a few hundred Marines on Okinawa with those last names. The last name, Pok-no, I couldn’t figure. Mr. Kim had no idea how to spell it in English.
Could it be phony? It didn’t seem likely that he would have passed off a false name with his buddies hanging around. Unless they were all in on some sort of plan. I figured it was more a translation problem than anything else. Some of the sounds of English don’t work all that well in Korean.