He shot a withering look of contempt at the enraged businessman and backed out of the room. Ernie proceeded down the long corridor, sliding open every oil-papered door, revealing groups of businessmen and other wealthy gentlemen drinking and enjoying themselves. Some of the kisaeng were dressed smartly in Western clothes, others wore the full traditional silk chima-chogori. But what we didn’t find, and what everyone denied knowledge of, was a Miguk yoja. An American woman.
The weightlifters had stayed close to us but so far they hadn’t made a move. I’m sure they were held back out of their respect-and fear-of my badge. But by now the entire Koryo Forest Inn was in an uproar and kisaeng and customers stood in the halls shouting. Ernie ignored them. He paraded up and down the corridor as if he owned the Koryo Forest Inn, the city of Byokjie, and the entire province in which it sat.
Finally, when he started to check the rooms out back, the weightlifters became fed up. One of them started to speak to Ernie in Korean, as if he wanted to reason with him, convince him to stop this disconcerting search through their little establishment. When the weightlifter reached out to touch Ernie’s arm, Ernie swiveled and shot a straight punch at the man’s nose. Within seconds, Ernie was flat on his back. Instead of jumping in to wrestle with the guy, I backed off a few steps, pulled my. 45, and aimed it at the two burly martial arts experts. They froze.
Down the corridor, the hubbub of outrage ceased, changing to a stunned silence. Ernie rose to his feet, dusted off his pants, and shot a long hard stare at the man who’d dropped him on his butt. For a moment, I was afraid he was going to repeat his stupidity. Instead, he regained his self-control. Before he lost it again, I motioned to him and he and I walked toward the front entrance. In Korean, I told everyone to stay put. Quickly, Ernie inspected the upstairs area and the empty side rooms that we hadn’t looked into yet and finally the gazebo out back that was used during the spring.
“Nothing,” he said when he returned.
“I guess that does it then.”
Speaking in Korean, I thanked everyone for their cooperation. Ernie and I backed out of the Koryo Forest Inn. The chauffeurs stopped smoking when we passed by. Together, we hustled down the gravel road.
“They’ll call the KNPs,” Ernie said.
“Yeah. Thanks to you.”
“Well, what did you want me to do? They weren’t answering your questions.”
“I hadn’t started asking questions.”
“Same difference.”
We returned to the jeep, Ernie started it up and we drove toward Reunification Road.
The time was ten minutes until midnight. Ten minutes until the midnight to four curfew. Ernie and I sat in the jeep in a cleared area next to Reunification Road that was normally used as a bus turnaround. For the last twenty minutes we’d been observing a steady stream of expensive sedans-Hyundais, Volvos, BMWs-streaming south, back toward Seoul.
Nobody was driving north.
“There must be a million of them,” Ernie said.
“Yeah. Which means a big demand for kisaeng.”
“Some of those gals back at the Koryo Forest Inn were good-looking hammers.”
“You noticed.”
“I did.”
The traffic in front of us started to thin. The vehicles that continued south were routinely breaking the speed limit, in a hurry to make it back to Seoul and get off the street before curfew.
“Here we are,” Ernie said. “Cold as shit, we haven’t uncovered anything new, and curfew’s about to descend on the entire world.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that I don’t want to sit here in this freaking jeep all night long.”
I thought about that for a minute. “Good point.”
“Glad you concur.” He waited for the silence to lengthen and then he raised his voice and said, “So what in the hell are we going to do about it?”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was thinking about the case.”
“The case? But we didn’t learn anything new tonight.”
“Sure we did.”
“Like what?”
“Like Jill Matthewson has never worked at the Koryo Forest Inn.”
“Great. That narrows down our search.”
“And during the hubbub you created, one of the kisaeng was holding on to another kisaeng’s arm, whispering to her.”
“Sweet. Whispering what?”
“Whispering ‘Chil Un Lim.’”
“What does that mean?”
“Forest of Seven Clouds, I think. But I’d have to see the Chinese characters to be sure.”
“You and your Chinese characters. So what do you make of it?
“The girl knew we were looking for an American woman, she whispered the name of a kisaeng house to her girlfriend. What do you think that means?”
“It means that she heard that a Miguk woman was working at that kisaeng house.”
“Exactly.”
“She might be right; she might be wrong.”
“That’s true.”
“So where is this place?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“That helps.”
“At least you’re becoming more optimistic.”
“Yeah. Now if I don’t freeze my spleen tonight, my attitude will perk up even more.”
“Wouldn’t want to dampen your attitude.”
We drove off toward the nearest village, searching for a place to flop. We found it. In a yoinsuk, a Korean flophouse with an outdoor toilet and communal sleeping rooms. A half-dozen Korean trucks drivers were snoring so loudly that I thought the tile roof would fall off. That part didn’t bother Ernie. He can sleep through anything. What did bother him was their kimchee breath.
“If I had a knife,” he told me, “I could cut the stink up into bricks and package it.”
As soon as he said that, one of the truck drivers farted. Ernie groaned and rolled over on his sleeping mat.
An hour before dawn, the proprietress provided-for a small fee-towels and pans of hot water and black-market shaving equipment. After we washed up, she provided us with a complimentary bowl of rice gruel and muu maleingi, slices of dried turnip. Thus refreshed, Ernie and I started our search for the Forest of Seven Clouds.
Or at least I thought we were going to start our search for the Forest of Seven Clouds.
11
Ernie balked. He’d been more than willing to come up here during our time off and take the risk of playing cat-and-mouse with the Division MPs, but he wasn’t willing to directly defy 8th Army.
“In two hours,” he said, “we’re going to be AWOL.”
We sat in the jeep, parked next to the wood-slat wall of the yoinsuk. In front of us, at the end of a gravel access road, the paved Tongil-lo highway, Reunification Road, sat on its earthen foundation elevated above the rice paddies that spread through the valley. A blanket of fog lay on the land. Our breath formed clouds on the windshield of the jeep.
“You’re wrong, Ernie,” I replied. “Failure to repair. That’s the most they can slap us with.”Missing mandatory formations is punishable, but it’s not AWOL.
Ernie looked at me as if I were out of my gourd. “Failure to repair, AWOL, either way we’re in line for an Article Fifteen. It’s now zero-six-hundred on Monday morning, Sueno, in case you forgot. We have two hours to show up for work-clean shaven, shoes shined, smiles on our chops-at the Criminal Investigation Detachment on Yongsan Compound. That’s by direct order of the Eighth United States Army provost marshal. If we leave now, and the Seoul traffic’s not too bad, we just might make it.”
“Your shoes aren’t shined.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I’m not changing the subject. We go back now, they’ll never let us return to Division. The honchos will stick together and not one of them will be willing to take responsibility for making a decision that directly contradicts the 2nd Division request to have us recalled.”
Ernie kept his arms crossed. “Not my lookout,” he said. “When we get back we tell them what we know. If the provost marshal sees it our way, he’ll send us back up here to finish the job.”