“So what else is open to her?” I asked.
“You know the answer to that.”
I did. Prostitution. But from everything I’d learned about Jill Matthewson, I didn’t believe she’d stoop to that.
“Besides that,” I asked Ernie, “what else could she do?”
“She could strip. Like Pak Tong-i said, she has big geegees.”
“And she has a girlfriend who already knows the business,” I added. “So we have to put that down as one of the possibilities. Still, I don’t think she’d become a stripper.”
“Why not?” Ernie asked. “It pays well.”
“For an American woman it would pay great,” I agreed. “But it would also attract attention. A lot of attention. There’d be advertising. Posters announcing when she was going to perform, that sort of thing.”
Ernie nodded his head. “I see what you mean. So something more low-profile.” Then he thought of it. “Hostess.”
“Exactly.”
Ernie meant a bar hostess in a fancy drinking establishments. A tradition in Korea. No self-respecting Korean businessman wants to sit alone, or even with his pals, and drink the night away without a “beautiful flower” to laugh at his jokes and pour his drinks and light his cigarettes. The fanciest of these drinking establishments were called kisaeng houses. Kisaeng in ancient Korea were highly trained female performers who were responsible for entertaining royalty. Somewhat like Japanese geisha. Since the Yi Dynasty, however, their job has degenerated to merely acting as the beautiful and charming hostesses to rich businessmen in private clubs. The pay can be fabulous. In the higher-class clubs some of the sought-after kisaeng are remunerated out of corporate expense accounts and pull down hundreds of dollars per night. But that’s for the most high-class girls. In most of the dives in and around Seoul, bar hostesses are lucky to pull down the equivalent of ten or twenty dollars a night. As an American, however, and a blonde verging on beautiful, Jill Matthewson could demand top dollar right from the start.
“But there’s jillions of kisaeng houses,” Ernie protested.
“Right. But maybe we can narrow down our search geographically.”
“How?”
The bartender checked our half-empty mugs. Much to my surprise, Ernie declined a refill.
“Jill had taken the time to put two thousand dollars together before she left Tongduchon. So she probably took the time to plan her escape. That meant that she had both a low-profile job and a low-profile place to live waiting for her,” I said.
“She’d already been hired?”
“Yes. I think so. That’s one of the reasons she has been able to hide so successfully. An American woman traveling from bar to bar searching for a job would’ve been spotted.”
“So Pak Tong-i set her up with a job.”
“I think so. Both her and his girlfriend, Kim Yong-ai.”
“But the job could be anywhere. And there are a lot of bars in Seoul.”
We both knew that if Jill Matthewson had gone to Seoul and taken work at some obscure nightspot, living in a hooch on the premises, it could take months to find her.
“Maybe not Seoul,” I said. “First, when I searched Pak’s files they were all for work in and around the 2nd Division area, both Eastern and Western Corridors. Nothing in Seoul.”
“Seoul’s not his territory.”
“Right. And with a good-looking girlfriend like Kim Yong-ai, it also makes sense that he’d want to keep her nearby. He wouldn’t want to send her down to Seoul, into the hands of those sharks. Not voluntarily.”
“So not in Seoul. But he wouldn’t want to land them a job in Tongduchon either.”
“No way. Too risky.”
“So he’d find them work in the Western Corridor.”
“Exactly.”
That’s why I’d drawn my map. I pulled it out now.
The newly built highway, Tongil-lo, Reunification Road, runs down the center of the Western Corridor, a fertile valley filled with rice paddies that has been an ancient invasion route for the Chinese, the Mongols, and the Manchurians. It runs from Seoul Station up through Bongil-chon to the city of Munsan. From there, it continues north until it hits Freedom Bridge crossing the Imjin River. Beyond that, civilians are not allowed, not without special permission. But the road continues north into the Demilitarized Zone, until it finally hits the Military Demarcation Line that separates South Korea from communist North Korea in the truce village of Panmunjom. All the way from Seoul to Jayu Tari, Freedom Bridge, there are kisaeng houses and other bars that cater strictly to rich Korean businessmen. It isn’t unusual to see a small convoy of black sedans cruising north out of Seoul to reach a kisaeng house in the countryside. Out of town they can forget the hustle and bustle of the big city and enjoy a relaxing business meeting, the overworked businessman catered to by a bevy of beautiful women. These places are busy during the lunch hour and busy again at night. And more than one wealthy businessman has promoted his favorite hostess to be his well-compensated mistress.
Jill Matthewson would fit into this world like a goddess dropped from the sky.
“So we search every kisaeng house and high-class Korean bar,” Ernie said. “From Munsan down to the outskirts of Seoul.”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“What do you mean?
“I think we can narrow the search further.”
“How?”
“If you were on the lam from the honchos of the 2nd Infantry Division, what would you be worried about?”
“Them finding me.”
“And if you were as smart as Jill Matthewson…”
“What do you mean ‘if’?”
“I mean since you are as smart as Jill Matthewson, you’d want a backup plan in case they found you.”
“Right.”
“You’d want to still have a chance of getting away if they stumbled onto your location.”
“Right.”
“So you’d have to plan a second escape.”
Ernie studied the map I’d drawn. Then he saw it. “You’d want to be close to Seoul. If you had to run, you’d have a better chance of disappearing if you could get lost in the crowd in a city of eight million people.”
“Right. You wouldn’t want to be stuck up north in Munsan, near the DMZ. There’d be nowhere to go.”
That was an exaggeration. There’d be some places to go but the options for escape into the teeming metropolis of Seoul would be better if you could locate yourself at the southern edge of the Western Corridor.
Ernie glanced again at the map, at the southernmost city within the 2nd Division area of operations.
“Byokjie,” he said.
Because of its nearness to Seoul, it had a plethora of kisaeng houses. In the two years since Tongil-lo had been completed, making the drive from Seoul to the countryside more convenient, they’d sprung up like sunflowers after a summer rain.
“Byokjie,” Ernie said, almost reverentially. Then he brightened. “We ain’t there yet?”
Byokjie was nothing more than a good-sized intersection. Reunification Road, all four lanes of it, ran north and south along the edge of miles of fallow rice paddies. Bright headlights zoomed by in the darkness. Another road, this one two lanes, stretched from Uijongbu in the east and ran west until it smacked right up against Tongil-lo, forming a T-shaped intersection. The little village of Byokjie, sitting along the stem of the T, was lit up by floodlights. The small collection of buildings was what you’d expect: a sokyu sign for the gas station, a tire warehouse, a mechanic’s workshop, and then a few noodle stands. All of the establishments were still open, hoping for late-night business. A well-lit sign next to a large bus stop listed the connecting runs between here and numerous farming villages, all of them home to some people, adults or students, who commuted into Seoul every day.
The cab driver who’d driven us from Bopwon-ni asked us where to stop.
“Kisaeng,” Ernie said.
The driver laughed and waved his hand. “I kuncho manundei,” he said. In this area there are a lot of them.