Shadowing hardened criminals is never easy.
Ernie slid expertly through the busy afternoon Seoul traffic and stayed within a few yards of the cab. In Itaewon the cabby turned left, ran the big Ford up a steep hill through a walled residential area, and took a quick right. Ernie waited at the base of the hill until he was out of sight and then, the sturdy old engine whining all the way, charged up after him. At the corner he turned off the Jeep and wedged us up against a stone wall.
I got out and peered around the corner. The cab driver was helping her unload the groceries. I went back to the Jeep and waited.
Most Korean wives of GIs will finish their black market activities in the afternoon before their husbands get home from work. They don’t want to jeopardize his military career by getting caught selling a few jars of mayonnaise and maraschino cherries for twice what they paid for them in the commissary. Sometimes the husbands are a little squeamish about the whole thing, but most of them like the extra income just as much as their wives do. An extra four or five hundred dollars a month. Easy. And if they get serious, go for the big ticket items-TVs, microwaves, stereo equipment-they can make as much as fifty thousand dollars during a one-year tour.
Ernie and I usually get stuck with the black market detail. Our job is to bust housewives, embarrass their husbands, and cut back on the flow of duty-free goods from the US bases to the Korean economy.
So far we’d managed to keep the deluge down to about a couple million dollars a week. Exactly what it has always been.
The cab driver finished unloading the groceries, accepted his tip with both hands, bowed, and in a few seconds the walled street was empty and quiet.
Ernie and I walked by her front gate. Stopped. Listened. Nothing I could make out.
Down about fifteen yards on the other side of the road was a small neighborhood store, fronted by an ice cream freezer and a couple of rickety metal tables under an awning emblazoned with the Oriental Beer logo. We rummaged around, Ernie bought some gum, and the old woman smiled as she came up with two paper cups to go with the liter of beer we bought. We sat outside, under the awning, and waited.
Spring was becoming summer in Korea and the afternoon was clear and bright but not hot. It reminded me of the endless days of sunshine I’d survived in foster homes throughout East LA. The sun had been as glaring and unrelenting as the gaze of the adults I’d been forced to live with. I’d cursed my mother for dying and my father for disappearing into the bottomless pit south of the border.
It hadn’t all been grim. One of my foster parents, Mrs. Aaronson, made sure I brought my schoolbooks home and then took the time to correct my homework. She showed me that arithmetic and spelling and science are all puzzles. Games. The greatest games. And as I lost myself in these games for hours, I looked forward, for the first time in my life, to being praised by the teacher and respected by the other children for something besides my fists.
The first payoff was when I joined the army and my high test scores earned me a brief stint in the military police. Later, I found myself graduating from the Criminal Investigation School-and on my way to Korea.
Ernie and I had gravitated toward each other somehow. The two duds of the CID Detachment. The first sergeant kept us together mainly to keep an eye on us. We both had this bad habit of following an investigation even after the right slots had been filled in the provost marshal’s statistical charts. They wanted a body count of GIs caught selling coffee in the village-not a report on how it was a customs violation for a general’s wife to ship Korean antiques back to the States at government expense and then sell them at a three hundred percent profit.
There was no briefing chart for that.
By all rights Ernie should have been in Georgetown trying to pass the bar exam or working his way up through the ranks of young stockbrokers on Wall Street. His dad, a big honcho somewhere in the government, expected it of him. But for Ernie, Vietnam had interrupted everybody’s plans.
Most people would blame his choices on the pure China White he was able to buy there from snot-nosed boys through the wire. But I knew him better than that. It was the loathing of routine, of predictability, that had caused him to reject a life of seeking riches in the States and caused him to reenlist in the army. And besides, he’d put down the heroin now-you couldn’t buy it in Korea anyway-and replaced it with the duty-free, shipped-at-taxpayer-expense, happy-hour-priced booze that gushed from the army warehouses like crude from a grounded tanker.
A Korean man wearing sandals, a T-shirt, and loose-fitting gray work pants rode past us on a sturdy bicycle.
Ernie elbowed me. “Must be the pickup, pal.”
The produce displays kept the man from seeing us, and Ernie and I got up, taking our beer with us, and faded deeper into the darkness of the grocery store.
The man parked his bicycle in front of the doll’s front gate and rang the bell. In less than a minute the door opened and the man went through, carrying some flattened cardboard boxes and some string.
We sat back down and finished our beer. Ready for action.
A rag dealer pushing a wooden cart on oversized bicycle tires rolled past us. He clanged his big rusty metal shears and wailed something incomprehensible to his prospective customers. A woman down the street, across from the doll’s house, came out from behind her big metal gate and bartered with the rag dealer for a while, finally selling him a brown paper bag filled with flattened aluminum cans.
The Koreans have been recycling for centuries.
The rag dealer tried to interest her in some bits of clothing but she shook her head and demanded money instead. A few coins changed hands, the woman went back behind her protective walls, and the rag dealer clanged down the road, turned left, and was out of sight.
In the distance his clanging and wailing stopped for a while and I figured he must have found another customer.
The man on the bicycle reappeared carrying two large cardboard boxes wrapped in string. He struggled beneath their weight but managed to hoist them up onto the heavy-duty stand on the back of his bicycle. He secured the boxes with rope, hopped on the bike, and rode off. The gate behind him had long since been closed.
“Let’s go, pal.” Ernie and I trotted down the hill after him, and then jumped in our Jeep and followed at a safe distance as he crossed the Main Supply Route and went about a half mile farther into the heart of Itaewon.
A steep alley turned up a hill, and the man jumped off his bicycle and pushed it slowly up the incline. Ernie pulled over, and I got out of the Jeep. I followed the man to the top of the hill and down a couple of alleys, and watched as he parked in front of a small house surrounded by a decrepit wooden fence. He unloaded his boxes and entered. Then he took his bicycle in and closed the gate.
On the way back to the Jeep I stopped at a public phone and called the Korean National Police liaison officer.
By the time I returned to where Ernie was waiting, a small blue and white Korean police car was just pulling up. Two uniformed KNPs got out, and the four of us walked up into the catacombs of the Korean working class neighborhood.
They kicked the door in. In about ten seconds the man was face down on the floor of his home, his wrists handcuffed securely behind him. Some of the fruit was smashed and the US-made canned goods rolled slowly across the room. They took him to the Itaewon police station.
Ernie and I popped back to the doll’s house and knocked on the door. There was no answer. We waited for a while and then a GI sauntered toward us carrying a briefcase. He was tall and thin, with a pencil-line mustache and the strut of a Southern aristocrat.
The insignia on his neatly pressed khaki uniform identified him as Chief Warrant Officer Three Janson. Medical Corps.