Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 37, No. 13, Mid-December 1992

ASCOM City by Martin Limón

The breath of hungover GI’s steamed the windows of the rickety army bus as it swerved around potholes on the road to ASCOM City. Things couldn’t have been better. Except that we weren’t going there to run the village, we were going there to look at a corpse.

My name is George Sueňo, Criminal Investigation Division, 8th Army Detachment, Seoul, Korea. When my partner Ernie Bascom and I got the assignment from the first sergeant, we thought it was harassment.

“GI’s turn up dead in business girls’ hooches all the time,” Ernie said. “Carbon monoxide poisoning. Routine.”

“Maybe so,” the first sergeant said. “But this time the girl wasn’t lying next to him. She cleaned out her room, and she’s gone.”

Ernie shrugged. “She probably got scared. The Korean National Police will find her.”

“Or you will.” The first sergeant looked at his watch. “A bus leaves for the Army Support Command every other hour. I expect you two guys to be on the next one.”

Ernie started to say something, but I slapped him on the elbow. He looked at me, I jerked my head towards the door, and we got up and walked out. We didn’t speak until we were halfway down the hallway.

“The team from the inspector general is going to be here tomorrow,” Ernie said. “That’s probably why he wants us out of the way.”

“Maybe. Or maybe his cop’s sense of propriety is offended when a GI wakes up in the morning dead.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Ernie slammed through the big double doors of the red brick C.I.D. building. “At least it’ll give us a chance to run the ville in ASCOM City.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

We flashed our identification to the desk sergeant at the ASCOM MP station.

“Lieutenant Crane has been waiting for you,” he said. “Straight down the hallway. Third room on the left.”

Lieutenant Crane was a gangly man in his early twenties with fatigue pants covering the length of his stilt-like legs. When we walked in, he looked up from a scattering of paperwork and ran a hand through his hair.

“I don’t know why they sent you down here. The KNP’s are still looking for the girl, but other than that it’s nothing more than a carbon monoxide poisoning.”

Ernie let me do the talking. He usually did when we talked to officers.

“Let’s go see the hooch anyway, lieutenant. You never know.”

His face went through suspicious contortions, but then he came to the conclusion that since we were from 8th Army headquarters, and since we were on an official investigation, it would be best to cooperate. In our business those thought processes are familiar.

He strapped on his .45, perched his shiny MP helmet liner atop his head, and ambled out into the hallway. As we went through a doorway, the top of his narrow shoulders hunched forward and stayed that way. “I’ll be in the ville,” he told the desk sergeant, “on the VonEric case. Send a patrol for me if you need me.”

The desk sergeant nodded.

At the gate, armed MP’s carded Ernie and me but just saluted the lieutenant and let him by.

The ville started right across the street: Lee’s Tailor Shop, the Brass Emporium, Chosun Souvenirs. Farther down the road came a few nightclubs: the Hideaway, the Lotus Blossom, the UN Club. And then the alleys. Narrow. Mud-filled. With more nightclubs, more neon, and more rock and roll blaring out of darkened doorways. Little eateries were interspersed throughout the maze, advertising fried chicken and yakimandu. Old women carried bundles of laundry atop their heads. Young girls scurried back and forth from bathhouses, flat sandals slapping against the balls of their feet.

Ernie took a deep breath.

“Nice place they got here,” he said.

We wound down another couple of alleys — Lieutenant Crane at the point — until he turned down an opening that was nothing more than a gap between cement block walls. As we passed through, I turned slightly sideways to keep the arms of my leather coat from getting scuffed. A quick jog to the left and then he pounded on a high wooden gate.

“Ajjima,” Crane said. “Hon-byong!”

I was impressed. He announced himself in a polite way as being a representative of the military police. And his pronunciation was good.

An old woman opened the gate and let us in.

The hooch was, typical. A small dirt-floored courtyard surrounded by a tile-roofed building divided into four or five rooms. Without bothering to speak to the woman, Lieutenant Crane stepped up on the wooden porch in front of the nearest hooch and slid back the wood frame door.

“It was here,” he said. “We found Specialist VonEric dead about 0700 this morning. This old lady called the Korean National Police, and they relayed the message to us.”

I talked to the old woman. She was surprised at first that I spoke Korean, but she went on to explain that she had heard nothing with the possible exception of the front gate slamming some time before dawn. Of course she might’ve been dreaming it, she said. I liked the old woman. She had a fat oval face that broke into concentric circles when she smiled, which she often did. The smile disappeared when I asked her about the body.

It was late, the sun was already up, and she knew the GI who was staying in the first hooch should have been on his way to work, but she had heard no noise. She called to the woman who lived there, her name was Yu Kyong-hui, and when there was no answer, she rapped on the rice-papered door and slid it open.

She couldn’t smell the carbon monoxide, of course, because it’s an odorless gas, but she saw the gray pallor on the GI’s face and smelled the evidence of the loosening of his bowels. She opened all the windows and called the police, but it was too late.

Ernie wandered around the courtyard, restless. A few young Korean women were playing flower cards in their room and had slid back the door when we came in. Ernie winked at them. They giggled.

The old woman said she recognized the GI. He had lived with Miss Yu in the past but hadn’t been around for over a month. Who had Miss Yu been seeing during that time? No one. She kept talking about an old boyfriend who would be coming back to Korea. The old woman didn’t know who he was. She had never seen him, that had happened before Miss Yu ever moved here. The old woman also had no idea where Miss Yu had gone, and there had been no indication that she was planning to leave but, yes, most of her clothing had been taken with her. It didn’t look like she was planning on coming back. She’d left a deposit on the room, the old woman said, but it didn’t cover the back rent she owed.

Ernie and I slipped off our shoes before we stepped into the hooch. A large western-style bed filled most of the room. There was a beat-up old hi-fi set, a few scattered jars of makeup, some loose scraps of clothing, and a jumble of naked coat hangers in the small plastic wardrobe.

“The KNP’s have already searched the room,” Lieutenant Crane said. “They’re very thorough.”

“I know that,” I said.

Just for drill I lifted the mattress, and Ernie poked around behind the wardrobe.

After a little searching Ernie said, “This must have been where the gas came out.”

There was a Crack in the cement floor. Most Korean homes are heated by charcoal gas that is pushed through ducts beneath the floor. When the floor is covered with vinyl and a soft mat is laid down, it makes a comfortable place to sleep during the cold Korean winters.

Ernie lifted his fingers. They were dusted with powdered cement from the edges of the crack. “The hole opens directly into the gas duct,” he said.

We stood up and straightened our clothes. On the way out I noticed something white and pointed peeking out of a crack in the wallpaper. It was flat against the wall, and I had a little trouble getting my fingernails under it to pull it out.

It was a wallet-sized photograph of a GI. His smiling face beamed out at the world over his neatly pressed dress green uniform. Blue infantry piping draped his arm.

The morgue was in the basement of a thick-walled cement building that was so heavily fortified it must have been an ammunition storage building at one time. I shivered when the white-smocked attendant slid the body out of the refrigerated cabinet.

“The remains of Specialist Four Rodney VonEric,” Crane said. “Former stalwart employee of the ASCOM Repo Depot.”

I compared the pasty gray face of the corpse to the bright suntanned face in the photograph. Not even close.

Lieutenant Crane decided he had pretty well wrapped up the case for us, so he left us and went back to his office. A small army compound is always a little nervous when somebody from 8th Army comes poking around, but Crane figured that the case was so clearly an accident he’d be able to tell the ASCOM provost marshal that there was nothing to worry about from us.

Probably he was right.

After he left, we wandered around the compound. Neatly clipped patches of lawn had been bleached yellow by the cold breath of autumn. A few crinkled leaves hadn’t given up for some reason and still clung stupidly to skeleton branches.

“Should we catch the last bus to Seoul?” Ernie said.

“I keep wondering why that girl disappeared.”

“The KNP’s will find her. That’s not for us.”

“Yeah.”

We wandered past the facade of the post theater. A fantasy was playing, with the half-naked daughter of some movie star in the lead. Nothing I wanted to see.

“Anyway, let’s check out the Repo Depot,” I said. “Give us some more notes for our report. Then we can spend the night here in ASCOM City. Go back to work late tomorrow.”

Ernie shrugged. “The ville looks pretty good, but I don’t know.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It looks even better at night.”

What was commonly called the Repo Depot was more properly known as the Army Support Command Replacement Detachment. After a GI lands at Kimpo Army Airfield, he is hustled through a maze of inoculations and customs procedures and then bused to the Repo Depot here at ASCOM. A day or two later, the unit he will be assigned to is decided upon.

This is a crucial moment in a GI’s life. He could get assigned to the sunny beaches of Pusan in the south of the country, or he could be banished to freezing night patrols along the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.

When he strode into the Replacement Detachment area, Ernie snorted.

“They kept me here for four days. Couldn’t decide what to do with me.”

“It’s those lousy efficiency ratings you got,” I said.

“Yeah. Sure. That’s why they sent me to 8th Army headquarters.”

“To keep an eye on you.”

He shrugged. “Fuck up and move up.”

A wall-sized map of Korea greeted us as we walked through the entranceway. The U.S. Army compounds scattered throughout the peninsula were marked in red, and a chubby hand pointed to Pupyong over the stenciled message, “You are here.” The map had been there during my first tour in Korea, and it had probably been there for years before that. A geographical anchor for disoriented troops.

There was a little traffic in and out of the Replacement Detachment. Unusual for a sleepy compound on a Sunday afternoon, but not so unusual if they just got a flight in full of replacements. We sought out the Charge of Quarters. The thin old crewcut man took us directly to Buck Sergeant Freddy R. Waitz.

He had just sent some men away from his desk and was rummaging through a short stack of paperwork, checking off blocks with a pencil. He looked up when we approached.

“Spec Four VonEric used to work for you?”

Waitz was not a tall man, about five seven or five eight, with a husky build and a flat, hooked-nose face that would have looked Indian if he hadn’t been fair-skinned, blond, and blue-eyed. He spoke with an Alabama drawl. On a small compound like this, he didn’t have to ask if we were C.I.D. He knew.

“That’s right.”

“Where’s his desk?”

“There.” He pointed past some filing cabinets and a stencil machine on the other side of the room. “I was gonna have it cleaned out today, but we got a flight in.”

The desk was standard army issue. Gray. Metal. Boxlike. There was an in and out box on top of it and a few manuals but no pictures of relatives. I riffled through the paperwork and then checked the drawers. Ernie wandered over to the water cooler and got interested in the pure spring refreshment from Mount Sorak.

It was the bottom right drawer where I found them. Stacks of neatly folded newspapers. The last few weeks’ worth of the sports page of the Pacific Stars & Stripes. On each page penciled figures surrounded the pro football betting line.

Waitz looked down at me as I rummaged through them.

“He bet football?” I said.

Waitz shrugged. “I don’t know.”

I stood up and looked down at him.

“Come on, Waitz. Betting football is a petty offense. Not nearly as serious as getting yourself dead out in the ville. Now, who did he bet with?”

Waitz turned his face. The profile would have looked at home on the flip side of a buffalo nickel.

“He bet with Phil Austin. I don’t know much about it, but it was just innocent stuff. You know, to have a little money down on the games so he could look forward to the Tuesday issue of Stripes, so he could see who won.”

“Who was his favorite team?”

“Huh?”

“Didn’t he have a favorite team?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Where was he from?”

“Somewhere up north. Indianapolis, I think.”

“They don’t even have a pro team there.”

“Oh. Well, we don’t have one in Birmingham, either.”

Waitz reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He lit it with a match from a brightly colored box.

“Do you know the girl Von-Eric was with last night?”

“No. I’ve seen her around, but I never paid much attention. He’s been moping around because they broke up a few weeks ago.”

“Broke up? Did you see them together last night?”

“Not out in the ville. At the EM Club. I stopped in there to get something to eat, and I saw him all smiles, leaving with her.”

“What time was that?”

“About ten.”

“You eat late.”

“Flight in last night.”

Waitz fiddled with the matchbox in his hand, and I saw the logo of the Olympos Hotel and Casino in Inchon.

“Do you go to the ville often?”

“I stay away from that dump. I got a section to run here. I don’t want my men to see me out there.”

“What do you do for recreation?”

“Work.”

His blue eyes squinted at the smoke curling up from his nostrils.

“Where can I find this Phil Austin?”

“I don’t know where he is today. He works at the printing plant, though.”

I searched through the remaining drawers of the desk and found nothing except army issue office supplies and a few notes concerning the assignments of GI’s to various bases throughout the country.

A group of sergeants came in for processing, and Waitz got busy handing out forms and explaining how to fill them out. When he wasn’t looking, I slipped a couple of things into my pocket and then we left, without saying goodbye.

“Zilch,” Ernie said. “It’s time to hat up.”

“Why are you in such a hurry to get back? Is the nurse waiting for you?”

“Yeah. You know how she is. Freaks when I stay out overnight on a case.”

“With good reason.”

Ernie snorted.

“But you’ve never run the ville of ASCOM City,” I said. “You don’t want to miss your chance. And tomorrow we can sleep in late before we catch the bus back to Seoul. We’ll check with this guy Austin at the printing plant, just to wrap things up, and tell the first sergeant we were working on the case.”

“How many clubs you figure they got out here?”

“More than we can hit in one night.”

A thin beam of greed emanated from Ernie’s pale green eyes.

We stopped at the ASCOM NCO Club, had the pork cutlet special with a big bottle of chilled red wine, and then I.D.’d our way through the heavily fortified gate. After trotting through the traffic of the Main Supply Route, we strolled into the neon night of ASCOM City.

The Pupyong Police Box, Western Area, was a small cement block building painted yellow with a winged flower over the entranceway. We showed our identification to the sergeant on duty and told him we were here to investigate the death of Rodney VonEric from carbon monoxide asphyxiation.

He immediately knew which case we were talking about — GI’s don’t die every day in ASCOM City — but his English was very poor and he was relieved to find out that I could speak Korean.

“Have you found the girl yet?”

“No.” He thumbed through a notebook in front of him. “The police in her hometown have been contacted. They talked to her mother, but she claims that they have not seen her for many months now.”

“What is her hometown?”

“Pankyo. A little country village outside of Taejon.”

“Was she registered here with you, as an entertainer, I mean?”

“Yes.”

He took us over to a large booklet with the names of nightclubs stenciled neatly on top and dozens of small photographs pasted beneath. Blank female stares winked at us as he thumbed through the book.

“Here she is,” he said. “She worked at the Blue Dragon Club, and her name is Yu Kyong-hui.”

I thanked him, and we walked out of the police box. He didn’t have an extra copy of the photograph, but even considering the poor quality of the black and white snapshot, I wasn’t likely to forget that face.

No matter how many years I spent in the Orient I would never get used to the number of gorgeous, women who were forced to work in dumps like ASCOM City.

We rolled through the alleys. Rock and roll blared from darkened nightclubs, brightly manicured fingers clutched at us as we passed. Finally we found the Blue Dragon. From the outside it appeared to be one of the larger clubs, and it sat in one of the most crowded and brightly lit alleys. I figured we were approximately in the center of the red-light district known as ASCOM City.

We pushed through the beaded curtain, and thirty sets of blinking eyelashes followed us as we stepped carefully through the multicolored darkness to the bar. The place was mostly empty, just a few GI’s at tables in desultory conversation with a couple of the girls. An old woman approached and brought us a couple of cold beers, and then a pair of mini-skirted girls materialized out of the darkness. They got a little standoffish when I mentioned Miss Yu Kyong-hui, but they swore they hadn’t seen her for two nights. “Two nights?”

“Yes,” one of the girls said. “She wasn’t here last night. And the night before that she went out early with a GI, but she never came back.”

“Did Miss Yu have a boyfriend?”

“Yes. But she finished with him about a month ago.”

“Why?”

The girl shrugged her slim bare shoulders. Ebony hair cascaded around them and glistened in the gyrating light.

“Maybe not enough money. I don’t know.”

“This GI who took her out night before last, do you know him?”

“No.”

“What did he look like?”

She conferred with the other girl, they chatted, and soon some of the other girls had gathered around and were offering their opinions. Finally the girl I had been talking to turned back to me and said in English, “We don’t know what he looked like. Just GI, that’s all.”

The old woman brought another couple of wets, and Ernie gave one of the girls some money and sent her out to buy some dried squid and peanuts. I found out that the girl I had been talking to was named Miss Kwon, she was from Taegu, and she had high hopes of becoming a secretary some day. For the rest of the night we drank and feasted, and when curfew came, I put away all thought of going back to Seoul.

After pounding on a small wooden door for about five minutes I got Ernie up. It took him about thirty seconds to get his clothes on, and we promised the girls we’d be back and bundled out the door into the cold Korean morning.

Ernie looked up at the sky. “Oh, good,” he said. “It’s cloudy.”

A sharp wind whipped particles of grit into my face.

“What time is it?”

Ernie checked his watch. “Ten thirty.”

I groaned.

We showered at the post gymnasium and then got shaves at the PX barber shop. By then it was almost noon, so we went over to the NCO Club and had lunch. By the time we got to the 8th Army Printing Plant it was already past one o’clock.

“Maybe we ought to call the first sergeant,” Ernie said.

“With no news? Let’s wait a little longer.”

The 8th Army Printing Plant was a huge, thick-walled building, so brightly whitewashed that it almost hurt my eyes. The only thing I could figure was that the Japanese Imperial Army that had built this compound must have kept a lot of valuables on hand. The whole place was like a fortress.

We walked into the admin office and flashed our identification, and it wasn’t long before we had the plant manager, an American civilian, buzzing around us.

“Corporal Austin is one of our most reliable employees,” he said. “I can’t imagine what could be wrong.”

“Maybe nothing,” I said. “We just want to talk to him.”

Austin was at his printing press, ink smeared on his fingers and a folded newspaper covering his head.

He was almost as tall as me, but lanky, and muscles stood out on his arms, pulsating in almost as steady a rhythm as the machinery behind him. He stared at us with intelligent brown eyes.

“It’s about your bookmaking operation,” I said.

He said nothing.

“How much was Rodney Von-Eric into you for?”

He didn’t move. The only change in his face was a little moisture that appeared in his eyes. Finally he made his decision. “Over fifteen hundred dollars,” he said.

Ernie whistled.

“But I didn’t kill him.”

“Where were you Saturday night?”

“Out.”

“Where?”

“I go hiking sometimes. Through the Korean countryside.” He waved an inkstained hand. “It’s very peaceful out there, once you get away from the city.”

“Where did you stay?”

“In a grove of trees.”

I stared at him.

“I take my rucksack and a few C rations. When it’s cold enough, I take my sleeping bag.”

“Was anybody with you?”

“No.”

“Did anybody see you leave?”

“I doubt it. Most of the guys in the barracks were already out in the ville. You know how they are.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

Apparently the civilian manager had taken it upon himself to call the MP station because just then he walked in with Lieutenant. Crane at his side. Crane started snapping questions, and Austin told him the same story. Crane turned to me.

“Why didn’t you notify me?” he said. “This case belongs under our jurisdiction.”

Ernie piped up.

“You weren’t doing nothing.”

Crane glared at him for a second and then turned back to Austin. He took a green walkie-talkie off his belt and fiddled with it until it beeped. Thirty seconds later, two MP’s came into the printing plant at a brisk walk.

Crane looked at. Austin. “You’re under arrest. Clean off your hands and step over here against the wall.”

He did as he was told, and soon the MP’s had him trussed up and Crane got into feverish conversation with the plant manager.

We left. I was happy to be outside in the fresh air and away from the noise of the churning machinery.

Back at the Blue Dragon Club we sat at a table nursing a couple of wets, waiting for Miss Kwon and her girlfriends to come back from the bathhouse. When they came in, they were wearing only T-shirts and short pants and had towels wrapped around their hair, and their clean, fresh faces bubbled with laughter. When they saw us, they surrounded our table.

Miss Kwon said, “You come back.”

“Sure,” Ernie said. “We’re not number ten GI’s. We came back to say goodbye.”

They went upstairs to change, we ordered another round of beers, and Miss Kwon was the first one back.

I was fiddling in my wallet, looking for the first sergeant’s number, thinking of calling him so we wouldn’t get in too much trouble. The photograph of the GI I had found in Yu Kyong-hui’s hooch fell out. Miss Kwon snatched it up.

“Where you get this?”

“From Miss Yu’s hooch.”

“She taaksan crazy about this GI. He’s infantry, but he was stationed here before. He almost married Miss Yu, but he ran out of time to get an extension and had to go back to the States.”

“Well, she kept his picture for a long time.”

“Not so long. Maybe two years. She still gets letters from him, and she told everybody in the club that he got orders and he will be coming back soon.”

“If she is waiting for him to come back to Korea, why would she leave here so suddenly?”

Miss Kwon shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Then it clicked. The whole thing. I slammed my palm down on the table. Ernie jumped back.

“What the...”

“We’ve been idiots, Ernie. If VonEric needed money to pay off gambling debts, where would he get it?”

“Well...”

“Sure. I’m going to call the first sergeant right now and let him know that we’re going to be here a little while longer. We’ve got some paperwork to do.”

Ernie frowned at that. But while I was on the phone behind the bar trying to get through to Seoul, he made sure to finish all the beer.

Word of our snooping would spread quickly, so I waited until Waitz was off duty to start going through the records of the Army Support Command Replacement Detachment. I compared some of the entries to the notes I had pilfered from VonEric’s desk. As we went over the assignments for the last few months, Ernie started to see the pattern.

“Waitz has been diverting guys to posts in Korea where their specialty is not required.”

“Right.” I stood up and reached for my coat. “Let’s get off base and find a taxi.”

“Where are we going?”

“To Inchon.”

“What the hell do you want to go there for?”

“They’ve got a nice place there I want to visit. The Olympos Hotel...”

“You don’t need a room. Miss Kwon will put you up.”

“I don’t want a room. It’s the other half of the title I’m interested in.”

“What’s that?”

“The Olympos Hotel and Casino.”

The cab driver swerved rapidly through the countryside, and I kept telling him to slow down so we wouldn’t slide off the slick roads. When we came over the crest of the hills surrounding Inchon, the huge harbor spread out below us like rippling green glass. Rusty merchant ships nodded lazily on the gentle waves like drunken sailors sleeping against lampposts. At the edge of the water, on a slight hill above the rest of the city, stood the Olympos Hotel. Half of its square eyes twinkled in the sunset.

Chandeliers, plush red carpet, beautiful women flashing brightly colored cards across green felt tables.

“Let’s get out of this dump,” Ernie said.

“I just want to see if he’s here.”

“Who?”

“Waitz.”

There was not much of a crowd, since it was Monday night. A few Japanese tourists, a couple of high-rollers from Hong Kong at the baccarat table, and a smattering of be-whiskered merchant marines. Although there wasn’t much foliage for camouflage, I didn’t have to take any extra precautions to conceal myself from Waitz. He was humped over one of the blackjack tables, jabbing his finger into the green felt when he wanted a hit, waving his hand from side to side when he wanted to stay. His small pile of chips dwindled and then disappeared before our eyes. Without looking up from his cards, he reached back into his wallet and pulled out another short stack of twenty dollar bills. The dealer arrayed them like a fan on the table, counted them quickly, and then made a pencil calculation converting them to won, the Korean currency. She pushed two small stacks of chips out to him, and Waitz dropped almost half of them into the betting circle.

We waited outside the hotel. I figured it wouldn’t be long.

He walked through the lobby rubbing his face, and the red-coated attendant opened the door for him. I couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders were still hunched and he stumbled a little as he walked. We put down the beers we had been drinking in the small garden overlooking the bay and followed.

His cab pulled up in front of Whiskey Mary’s, one of the oldest establishments in Inchon’s nightclub district. I told our driver to cruise by, and we watched Waitz walk in.

By the time Ernie and I peeped through the beaded doorway, Waitz was already too busy arguing with a Korean woman to notice us.

“Who is she?” Ernie said. “Miss Yu Kyong-hui.”

“How do you know?”

“Waitz and VonEric were both gambling. One out here at the casino, the other on football, placing bets with Austin. When Waitz got in too deep, he started taking bribes to give GI’s choice assignments.”

“If VonEric was in on it,” Ernie said, “how did he get in so deep to Austin?”

“From checking the records, it looks like he wasn’t taking any bribes. Maybe he figured he’d rather be in trouble with an illegal bookmaker than get caught by the army for abusing his official position and face a court-martial. But he worked in the same room with Waitz, so eventually he must have found out what Waitz was doing, or maybe Waitz told him, figuring to enlist him as a collaborator. Who knows? But when VonEric wouldn’t go along with the program, it made Waitz nervous. Maybe real nervous. And maybe VonEric even threatened to turn him in. The records were there, the ones we saw this afternoon. Enough to convict him, or at least build a hell of a case against him. If anybody knew about it.”

“So Waitz decided to kill VonEric.”

“Right.” I jerked my thumb towards the club. “And he knew that Miss Yu Kyong-hui had jilted him, so he talked to her. It turned out they had something in common. Miss Yu’s old boyfriend was infantry. He had probably just gotten lucky on his last tour to Korea and got assigned down here, maybe to the Special Forces detachment they got. But he probably wouldn’t be so lucky again. It would be the DMZ for him. Miss Yu might not even be able to see him for weeks on end.”

“And Division isn’t real big on helping GI’s get their marriage paperwork through.”

“Right. So Waitz made a proposition to Miss Yu. Just take VonEric home with her, loosen a crack in her floor that was already there, and her boyfriend would get a choice assignment away from the DMZ and away from ASCOM City.”

A shriek rippled through the beaded entranceway to the club. Ernie was first in. I pushed my way through a gaggle of sweet-smelling business girls and found Ernie wrestling a bloodied knife away from Miss Yu. Waitz was on the floor. The wound in his neck was deep, and pumping blood out fast. I squeezed an artery and slowed it down, but no matter what parts of his loose flesh I grabbed, the red stuff kept coming out.

Miss Yu screeched and clawed at Ernie’s face, like some great warrior bird come suddenly to life.

“He’s got to fix the assignment!” she said. “I don’t care about MP’s. I don’t care about C.I.D. I did what he wanted me to do, I made the hole bigger and let the gas in, now he must help me!”

Abruptly she stopped clawing at Ernie and squatted down into a little ball on the floor. Sobbing.

I held on to Waitz’s neck until the Korean police burst through the door. But by then his big bleached Indian face was slack and devoid of life.