Jade Lady Burning (31 page)

“Yeah,” I said, standing. “I’m curious, too.”

I slugged down the dregs of my beer. We grabbed our jackets off the backs of the bar stools and headed toward the big double doors. Outside, the smoke and noise and smell of booze faded behind us. The young doorman bowed. I figured him to be about thirteen years old, either a distant relative of the owner or some urchin they took in off the streets. He was wrapped in three layers of grease-stained sweaters. A gauze mask protected his mouth and nose from the cold.

I took a deep breath and felt the fresh bite of winter.

Itaewon was layered in crusts of snow. Neon lined the road running up the hill, flashing and sparkling through the latticework designs of frozen white lace. Shivering business girls, half naked, stood in alcoves, arms crossed, peering out over the rims of their dark-lined eyes, searching for the next customer.

A GI winter wonderland.

We twisted up our collars and shoved our hands into our pockets. Ernie blew a great billowing breath through tight lips.

“Cold out,” he said. “Colder than a GI’s heart.”

At the Kayagum Teahouse it was easy enough to spot her. She wore a white cotton blouse buttoned all the way to the neck, and her face was a smooth oval, like an oblong polished pearl. Her mouth was moist and red, and shining eyes gazed steadily at the world in dark seriousness. Her name was Miss Ku.

She handed us a note, intricately wrapped into the shape of a flower, and asked us to deliver it to Cecil Whitcomb, a soldier of the British contingent of the United Nations Honor Guard.

As a civilian, she wasn’t allowed on the compound to deliver it herself.

I was hesitant at first but Miss Ku pleaded with her eyes. They’d been lovers. They’d broken up. She wanted to see him one more time.

Each word was pronounced carefully. Precisely. As if the English had been memorized after long hours of study in a library. She told me that she was a graduate of Ewha, the most prestigious women’s university in the country.

She apologized for becoming involved with Cecil. It was a mistake. She’d met him at a British-Korean Friendship Day at the British Embassy. He was in civilian clothes and she didn’t know he was in the army. She bowed her head.

Soldiers are low on the Confucian hierarchy. Almost as low as prostitutes and actors.

Ernie and I waited. Something was screwy. I didn’t know what, but something.

I noticed her hands. Long and slender with short cropped nails and small calloused knots on the fingertips. She slid an envelope across the table. It was stuffed with a short stack of five-thousand-won notes. About a hundred bucks’ worth. This changed everything. Greed usually does.

Ernie snatched up the money and shoved it deep into the pocket of his nylon jacket.

I looked around. No Americans in the Kayagum Teahouse. Only young Koreans of college age, boys and girls, hunched over steaming cups of ginseng tea. No one to spy on us. And besides, we weren’t taking a bribe. Just working a side job. Nobody could say we were doing anything wrong.

We’d do it. Why not? Easy money.

I picked up the paper flower and slid it into my breast pocket.

When Miss Ku smiled, the radiance of her gemlike face filled the room.

That alone would’ve been payment enough.

The next morning we gave the note to Lance Corporal Cecil Whitcomb.

Looking at Whitcomb, I wondered why a woman as gorgeous as Miss Ku would bother with a guy so unimpressive. His body was bony and pale. Dark brown hair fell over eyes that made him seem as if he hadn’t quite woken up.

Ernie and I towered over him. Ernie is over six feet tall and I’m almost six foot four, and I was about two shades darker than the nearly translucent Cecil Whitcomb. On duty, CID agents have to wear coats and ties, which is what we had on. Cecil was on a work detail. He wore baggy fatigue pants and a grease-smeared woolen shirt.

He was nervous about two cops cornering him outside the unit arms room, but he unfolded the paper flower and read the message, showing no expression on his long, shadow-eyed face. Somehow he had managed to bedazzle Miss Ku, and now he’d turned his back on her. It didn’t make sense. But it wasn’t any of our business. Our job was just to give him the note.

I glanced down at the printing. It was in English—in a careful hand—and said something about a meeting downtown and something about “I haven’t told anyone yet.”

When he finished reading, we waited for him to talk. He didn’t. We decided to hell with him and walked away.

Ernie shook his head. “A couple of goofballs.”

That summed it up. At least it seemed to at the time.

After work, the sun lowered red and angry beyond the hills overlooking the Yellow Sea. I noticed how cold it was. The temperature must’ve dropped ten degrees in the last couple of hours. A flake hit my head. White fluff whistled through the air. Snow would complicate things, but it wouldn’t stop us from running the ville. Nothing would.

A half hour before the midnight curfew, we stood at the central intersection in Itaewon, gazing at the sparkling neon through a steady sprinkle of snowflakes. Kimchi cabs slid on the road and people had to grab handholds to climb up even the most gentle incline.

“Another world of shit,” Ernie said.

“Looks like it,” I said.

Ernie and I were discussing which bar to hit next, when an icelaced gust of Manchurian winter roared up the main drag. An Eskimo trudged through the swirling wind. When he came near, I saw that he wasn’t an Eskimo at all. Another long nose. And then my eyes focused. It was Riley, the Admin Sergeant from the CID Detachment.

He pulled a thick wool scarf off his neck, scanned the street, and spotted us.

“What does
he
want?” Ernie said.

The first glimmer of worry shot through my brain. “We’re on call tonight, aren’t we?”

“Sure,” Ernie said. “But I left
ajjima’s
phone number.” He was talking about the landlady of the Nurse, his steady Korean girlfriend. “She would’ve come and found us if we had a call.”

I wasn’t so sure. Not in this blizzard.

Riley stormed up the road, stopped when he reached us, and motioned toward Ernie’s right hand. Ernie handed him the liter of
soju
, a fierce Korean rice liquor. Riley rubbed the lip of the bottle with the flat of his palm, tilted his head, and glugged down a healthy shot. His Adam’s apple undulated down his skinny neck as the searing liquid fell to his stomach. When he finished, he blew some breath out between his thin lips, thought for a moment, and slugged down another swallow. With red-rimmed eyes, he looked back and forth between us.

“Where have you guys
been
?”

“Right here,” I said.

“But you’re on call tonight.”

“Ernie left
ajjima’s
phone number.”

“But she wasn’t there when the First Sergeant called and her daughter answered and she can’t speak English.”

Ernie spoke up. “So the First Sergeant ought to learn Korean,”

Riley looked at Ernie as if he just realized that he should be committed to the looney bin.

“You know the First Sergeant hates Koreans.”

“That isn’t our problem,” Ernie said. “We left a good number.”

Riley let his head loll on his long neck, as if his skull was suddenly too heavy for his shoulder muscles.

“Okay, okay. So you guys have an excuse. What else is new? But when the First Sergeant can’t get through, he calls me in the barracks and orders me out of the rack and sends me down here to find you. At the Nurse’s hooch the daughter draws me a map and says ‘
soju
’ and pretends like she’s jolting down shots and I wander around the ville until I find you.” Riley spread his hands. “So it’s over now. So forget it. But we got bigger problems. Problems downtown.”

Suddenly I was worried. Not about the First Sergeant or about not being available when we were supposed to be on call—I’d been through that sort of trouble before—but about what had happened downtown.

“What problems?” I asked.

“Dead GI,” Riley said.

Ernie and I waited.

“Well, not a GI exactly.”

One of the business girls standing in the shadows plucked up her courage and sashayed toward us. Riley saw her coming and waved her off. She pouted, a gentle snort erupted from her nose, then she turned and marched back to her comrades waiting in the darkness.

“They found him downtown, near Namdaemun,” Riley said. “Gutted with some sort of big blade. Body in a snowdrift. Blood everywhere.”

He was warming to the subject, but I didn’t need the details. I’d examine those when I arrived at the site. I interrupted him.

“What do you mean, not a GI exactly?”

“I mean he’s not a GI. Not technically.”

Ernie leaned forward. “Then what the fuck is he?”

“He’s British. Member of the United Nations Honor Guard. A Lance Corporal. Name’s Whitcomb.” Mustard gas slammed into my nostrils. An old man pushed a cart past us loaded with the still-burning cinders of perforated charcoal briquettes. Things that had burned brightly, heating the flues beneath the floors of Korean homes, but that now were dead. And useless.

It took about five seconds for our brains to start working again. We left Riley standing in the snow and stumbled and slid down the hill, running toward the line of kimchi cabs waiting patiently in the somber night.

2

A
fter stomping through the snow to the 21 T-Car motor pool, Ernie flashed his badge and managed to get the keys to the jeep from the half-asleep dispatcher. Twenty-one T-Car is a military acronym that actually means 21st Transportation Company (Car), which maybe makes a little more sense.

Despite the frigid air, the motor started right away. Ernie grinned.

“Amazing what a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black will do for an engine.”

The bottle went every month to the head dispatcher who made sure the jeep was properly maintained and always available when Ernie needed it.

We drove through the gate and out into the city.

All vehicles were off the street now because it was past curfew, the midnight-to-four lockup the government slapped on a battered populace over twenty years ago at the end of the Korean War. The theory is that it helps the authorities spot North Korean spies who might be prowling through the cover of night. The truth is that it reminds everybody who’s boss. The government and the army. Not necessarily in that order.

We rolled through the shadows.

Seoul was dark and eerily quiet and looked like a town that had been frozen to death.

The jeep had four-wheel drive and snow tires, but still Ernie slid on the packed ice every now and then. He turned out of the skids expertly and I felt perfectly safe with him at the wheel. Safer than I would’ve felt if I were driving. He’s from Detroit. He’s used to this kind of thing. But I hadn’t learned how to drive until after I joined the army and, in East L.A., where I come from, it doesn’t snow very often. Only during Ice Ages.

I thought of the long summer days when I was a kid, running with packs of half-wild Mexican children through alleys littered with gutted mattresses and stray dogs and broken wine bottles. There were no swimming pools in the barrio. We poured buckets of chlorine-laced water over our heads in a futile effort to keep cool. And during the hottest days of the season, when I was fortunate enough to land a job, I breathed in the tang of warm oranges and overripe limes fermenting in a metal pail as I knocked on door after door in Anglo neighborhoods, hustling for a sale.

Every kilometer or so we were stopped by a ROK Army roadblock. The soldiers looked grim and tired. Their breath billowed from fur-lined hoods and they kept their M16 rifles pointed at the sky, which was okay with me. After we showed our identification and the twenty-four-hour emergency dispatch, they waved us through without comment.

Neither Ernie nor I talked. We were both thinking the same thing. We were in deep kimchi, the fiery-hot fermented cabbage and turnips that Koreans love. Kimchi up to our nostrils.

We’d taken money to deliver a note to Cecil Whitcomb, and now he was dead. Military justice doesn’t know much about mercy. If anybody found out, we’d be kicked out of the army with a bad discharge or end up doing time in the Federal Penitentiary in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, or both.

This wasn’t going to be a routine case.

I was also beginning to feel a little guilty about maybe getting Whitcomb killed. Maybe a lot guilty. But I decided to put that away for now. I needed to think. And concentrate on the job I had to do when we arrived at the murder site.

Despite all the boozing we’d done in Itaewon, Ernie and I were both sober. But it wasn’t from the cold air. It was from the tarantula legs of fear slowly creeping up our spines.

The upturned shingle roof of the Great South Gate was supported by stones weighing more than half a ton each. The gate had been built during the Yi Dynasty about four centuries ago, and was once part of a wall that surrounded the city. Now, in the deepness of the Seoul night, it sat somber and unmoving, as if it were watching us.

We circled the great edifice twice, creating lonely tracks in the snow, until I spotted a glimmer of light in one of the roadways running up a hill.