Slicky Boys (33 page)

“Or a trial?”

“Or a trial.”

He let his breath out slowly and turned away again, as if searching for strength in the distant sea.

“The girl’s name was Myong-a. Her family name isn’t important. She spoke English well, and she and Shipton liked each other immediately. It seemed as if she did something for him. Shipton had been a lonely man. He left his family years ago and had never returned home. He spoke of his mother only when asked and of his father not at all. But Myong-a was a bright girl. She knew how to make him smile and make him laugh, and it seemed that he was forgetting the horrors of the war he had left behind.”

A fisherman and his son rowed slowly on a splintered prow down the river, heading for the verdant waters of the estuary. As they slipped out of the fog Commander Goh watched them, and when they were once again covered in mist he resumed his speech.

“What Shipton didn’t know, and what most Americans don’t know, is that we Koreans are a very practical people. Marriage, to us, is primarily an economic union, a union designed to continue the growth and prosperity of the family. Love, if it comes at all, comes later and grows slowly. Marriage proposals don’t usually start with love for us. But they did for Shipton.

“Myong-a, however, was a spirited young woman, and as such she had been in love with a Korean man, one of her former classmates at middle school. A man who wasn’t suited for her. A common laborer. Even though she was planning on marrying Shipton and leaving the country, she—foolishly and to the shame of her father—continued to see this man, “Shipton, although somewhat befuddled by your American notions of love, was also observant and shrewd. It didn’t take him long to realize that not all of Myong-a’s devotion was directed toward him.”

Commander Goh opened his palms toward the heavens. “Shipton followed her, waited to see what she was planning to do, and broke in on them while she was in a room in a cheap
yoguan
with her young man.”

He shook his head, his eyes crinkling, as if he were fighting back tears.

“He killed them both! Why? So foolish. So rash. And then he was gone. We never saw him again. The National Police found the bodies, but when they discovered the identity of the girl we were notified and we immediately assumed jurisdiction of the investigation.”

Korea had been under virtual martial law since the Korean War. A few strings, pulled in the right places, and the navy could have what it wanted. Even a murder investigation.

“Why didn’t you notify us?” I asked.

“Ah, don’t you see? This became a personal matter. Between the officers here at Navy Headquarters and Shipton. We wanted to catch him before he somehow slipped out of our country. We wanted our own revenge.”

“But you failed?”

“Yes. Lieutenant Commander Shipton is a very resourceful man.”

“And as a consequence, three more people are dead.”

Commander Goh’s eyes burned into mine. “Would you have been able to stop him, Agent Sueño?”

I thought of our own contacts on the Korean economy. Slim to none. If the ROK Navy investigators hadn’t been able to find Shipton, we were unlikely to.

“No,” I said. “We probably wouldn’t have.”

The commander nodded. “So don’t put the blood of these new victims on our hands.”

Bureaucratic shuffling. Even when the entrails of sweet young ladies are being sliced out of their soft bodies. I thought of the Nurse and I got mad. Mad at their arrogance, their willingness to keep things covered up, their overbearing desire to have their integrity protected, no matter what the cost. Even at the cost of blood.

“If the blood is not on your hands, whose hands is it on?” I asked bluntly.

“Shipton’s.”

He was right, but he was also wrong. With more manpower, maybe we would’ve stumbled onto Shipton by now. Maybe Ernie and I would’ve been less gullible. Maybe we would’ve been more likely to protect Miss Ku and the Nurse. But I was too angry to argue. It was useless now. I only wanted one thing. To bring Shipton down.

“I want everything your investigators have uncovered.”

“They will brief you.”

“Now,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Now.”

We marched silently back into the headquarters building.

They showed me photographs of the two bodies. The young woman laying naked in an alley, her neck snapped. The young man with sliced arms, razorlike cuts to the legs and torso, a deep killing gash in the center of his chest below the sternum.

A couple of Korean sailors in dungarees were standing next to the jeep, goofing off from a work detail. Ernie was leaning out of the jeep, showing them the pictures in the magazines, pointing and making comments that had them laughing uproariously.

It was good to see his spirits lifting.

When he saw me coming, he folded up the magazine and handed it to one of the sailors. The sailor tried to refuse but Ernie insisted and also presented both of them with a couple of sticks of gum. They chomped happily with their big square bronze jaws.

“Took you long enough,” Ernie said.

“You should’ve gone in there with me. Some of the secretaries are finer than moon goddesses.”

“Yeah?”

Commander Goh strode quickly across the lawn. Both sailors snapped to attention, saluted, bowed, and got back to work. Commander Goh ignored them and stopped at our jeep.

“You also are an investigator?” he asked, staring at Ernie. His English was accented but understandable.

“Yes,” Ernie said.

Commander Goh shook his forefinger at me and resumed speaking in Korean.

“He, too, must abide by our bargain. Silence on the murder of the daughter of one of our brother officers.”

“Kokchong halgossi oopsoyo,”
I said. You have nothing to worry about.

He nodded, took another hard look at Ernie, turned, and strode away.

“Who was that asshole?” Ernie asked.

“His name’s Commander Goh. He wanted to make sure you and me are operating on the same sheet of music.”

“Why?”

“Let’s get out of here. Then I’ll tell you.”

The two sailors in faded dungarees waved as we drove off.

I filled Ernie in on what I’d learned. About how the ROK investigators had followed Shipton around the country, how he’d eluded them by only minutes in a couple of spots, but eventually he’d disappeared entirely from their radar screens. They figured he was receiving help. Possibly from one of the organized crime syndicates in the country.

Ernie frowned. “The slicky boys?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. They’re not the only hoodlums in the country.”

If Shipton was receiving help, he would’ve been a natural for mobsters to use to obtain phony identification and buy black market items out of the commissaries and the PX’s. And that’s what we could’ve been checking out all this time, but the ROK Navy hadn’t notified us. I complained about that, but it didn’t seem to bother any of the stoic Korean investigators. The fact that a
kisaeng
and a business girl had been slaughtered cut no ice with them. And they were only vaguely disturbed by the murder of a British soldier.

As usual, Ernie summed up the situation.

“So we still don’t know where in the hell he is?”

“You got that right.”

“So what’s our next move?”

I pulled out the slip of paper the Chinese girl had given me this morning.

“Eighth Army Data Processing,” I told Ernie. “We live in an age of computer punch cards.”

Ernie shifted into low gear, gunned the engine, shifted back into high, and swerved around a farmer riding a rickety wooden buggy pulled by a flea-bitten pony.

“Fuck a bunch of computers,” he said.

31

T
HE
NCO
IN CHARGE OF THE
D
ATA
P
ROCESSING
Unit was a nervous type with thick glasses and a habit of biting on his lower lip and brushing back his brown-and-gray mustache.

“This’ll be hard,” he said. “Four numbers. All bogus. And they could’ve been used anywhere in country.”

“Start your search in Seoul first,” I said, “and spread out from there.”

“Not normal procedure,” he insisted. “And we have other batches to run. I’m already working everybody overtime.”

“I’ll call the Provost Marshal, if you want, and have him call your boss.”

“No.” He waggled his nervous fingers. “That won’t be necessary. Three murders, you say? Yes. That’ll get priority.”

“We thought so, too.”

He scurried off toward the clattering machines busily processing punch data cards. Ernie and I walked back into the waiting room and poured ourselves overly cooked coffee into white foam cups.

As we waited, I watched the stream of young GI’s, all with sheaves of paperwork in their hands, parading in to get a new ration control plate issued or an old one renewed. The time and money and effort the 8th Army put into ensuring that nobody sold a jar of instant coffee down in the village was enormous. Still, millions of dollars of black market goods found their way onto the Korean markets. The whole reason behind the system—supposedly—was to protect fledgling Korean companies from the unfair competition of duty-free goods from the U.S. Army compounds. The only problem was that there weren’t any Korean companies that grew bananas or bottled maraschino cherries or distilled Scotch whiskey, as far as I knew. So the demand was tremendous. And although the honchos of 8th Army went at their task with all the vigor of Hercules cleaning out his stables, they weren’t able to do much more than cause a ripple in the flow of contraband.

I think, if the truth were known, they were more concerned with making sure a bunch of foreigners didn’t get their grubby hands on the products that, by divine right, belonged to Americans. Brainwashed by Madison Avenue, the army hoards consumables like gold.

A courier came in carrying three oblong boxloads of data punch cards, stacked one atop another. He hoisted them onto the counter. Another bored clerk signed a receipt for them, then lifted them onto a long table with other stacks of boxed cards. I stood and wandered over to the end of the counter.

Each box was marked in black grease pencil: Wonju, Osan, Pyongtaek, Waegwan, Taegu, Pusan. The cities near all the major U.S. bases. Every few minutes, from the other end of the table, a listless clerk picked up a box and fed the cards into one of the whirring machines.

I sat back down and waited.

“This coffee’s for shit,” Ernie said.

“They use it on the printers when they run out of ink.”

“I believe it.”

He shuffled through a news magazine looking for pictures of naked women but didn’t find any.

“Don’t they have a
National Geographic
around here?” he said.

I helped him look. No dice.

It took about a half hour but finally the harried sergeant came back out, holding a sheet of paper with the four numbers Herbalist So had given us on it.

“Checked everywhere,” he said. “No luck. None of these numbers turned up. Not even in the history files. Which doesn’t surprise me because all of them are of a sequence that we haven’t even issued yet.”

“Then they made a good guess when they chose those numbers.”

“All four?” He frowned. “More likely they knew something.”

“How could anyone determine what number sequences you use?”

“Beats me. It’s strictly classified.” He handed the paper back to me. “Sorry we couldn’t help.”

I pointed to the boxes on the table behind the counter. “What about those?”

“Those? Cards from PX’s and commissaries around the country. They’re just in.”

“How about running them for us? Checking for these numbers?”

“But they just came in.”

“It’s a bother, that’s for sure. But, you know, murder and all that . . .”

He sighed, looking extremely tired and harassed. “Okay. But it’ll take a while.”

“We’ll wait.”

He went back into the noisy bowels of the data processing unit and I sat back down next to Ernie.

“Dick,” Ernie said.

It was almost midafternoon by the time the sergeant reemerged, and both Ernie and I were grumpy because with all the activity today we hadn’t been able to squeeze in lunch. The sergeant handed me a three-page computer printout. Rows of numbers were printed on it. The numbers were so light, I had to squint to read them.

“Don’t you guys ever change your ribbon?”

“Every week.”

“What’s all this supposed to mean?”

“Your number.”

“Where?”

“One of them anyway.” He pointed an ink-smudged finger at the second page. “Card was used once in the PX on Hialeah Compound. And again, less than an hour later, at the commissary on the same base.”

“How long ago?”

“This morning.”

“Where’s Hialeah Compound?”

“Pusan.”

“How’d these cards arrive here so fast?”

“Flown up by helicopter.”

“They bring them in every day?”

“Every day. Unless the weather grounds the aircraft.”

So Shipton had murdered the Nurse and then hopped on a train or a bus and headed down to Pusan, the southernmost city on the Korean Peninsula, a trip of about five hours. He’d appeared bright and early this morning at the PX and commissary, making purchases, knowing that we wouldn’t be looking for him that far away.