G. I. Bones

4

I sat in front of Doc Yong’s desk, a warm earthenware cup of barley tea in my hands. She stared at me with a black-eyed intensity that I found so enticing.

“What have you found?” she asked.

She wore a white lab coat and a stethoscope hung from her neck. Outside in the waiting room a few pregnant women and a half-dozen business girls waited patiently for her attention. Each month, the business girls of Itaewon invaded Doc Yong’s clinic to be inspected for venereal disease and, if they passed, their “VD card” was stamped with red ink and they were good for another month. The clinic was mostly funded by American dollars, which was why Doc Yong cooperated so closely with 8th Army health officials.

“Why is it so important to you, Doc,” I asked, “this business about Mori Di? Sure, Auntie Mee helps you with the girls. Helps them keep a positive outlook on life. I understand that. But you know and I know that Auntie Mee hasn’t been visited by the ghost of Mori Di nor by the ghost of anybody. She wants me to find his bones because she’s nuts. But you’re not. So why are you backing her up?”

Doctor Yong In-ja studied me as if I were a patient with curious symptoms. I loved the square shape of her face, the high cheekbones, the unblemished skin. But mostly I loved the full richness of her lips. Unrouged. No slime slathered on her face. Just flesh. Just woman.

She must’ve read my thoughts for her eyes shifted. She took her elbows off her desk and sat back in her wooden chair.

“I understand your concern,” she said. She thought for a moment, composing herself, and then started once again. “The women I work with, especially the business girls, are mostly uneducated and mostly from rural areas. If Auntie Mee says she’s being bothered by the ghost of a dead American, the word spreads quickly and, in no time, they believe it. And they all believe that this ghost will cause trouble in Itaewon. Bad luck. That adds to their depression. Depression leads to despair. Despair leads to illness or, worse, suicide. As a physician, I must try to prevent that.”

Suicide was a fairly common event amongst the business girls of Itaewon. The Korean government didn’t allow Doc Yong, or anybody, to keep statistics-not officially. But those of us who worked out here knew that at least three or four girls per year died by their own hands.

“But even if I locate the bones of Mori Di,” I said, “and have them shipped back to the States, the business girls and Auntie Mee will just find something more to be depressed about.”

“Yes. Of course. It’s always something.” She leaned toward me. “Someone’s been complaining about Miss Kwon,” Doc Yong continued. “An American G.I.”

“A G.I. complaining about Miss Kwon?”

“Yes.”

I was flabbergasted. Even before Doc Yong introduced me to Miss Kwon, I’d taken note of her while Ernie and I worked our regular rounds. She was a hostess at the King Club: a small, cute, country girl with chubby cheeks who kept to herself. Why would any G.I. complain about her?

“What sort of complaint?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. But the owner is concerned and there’s even talk that Miss Kwon might lose her job. Not that losing that kind of work would be bad for her but I know the pressure these girls are under. She needs the money. Otherwise, where will she go? What will she do?” Doc Yong shook her head. “You can’t believe what these girls go through. Many of them are the sole support of their families, putting their younger brothers and sisters through school.”

Yes, I could imagine what they went through but I didn’t interrupt.

Doc Yong stared into my eyes. “Will you look into it?”

How could I say no? I nodded. She smiled, reached out, and squeezed my hand.

On the way out of the clinic, the women in the waiting room stared at me. But all I could feel was the warmth where Doc Yong’s hand had touched mine.

Although I’d questioned Doc Yong’s motives for searching for the remains of Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti, I was beginning to develop motives of my own. Moretti had been murdered. Cort, the on-the-scene investigator, had strong suspicions as to who had murdered him but the body had gone missing and, after that, Cort had been hampered by both the Korean and the 8th Army powers that be. At the time, right after the war, Korea was still in turmoil. There was even talk that the Communists might make a comeback. In fact, the starving Korean populace would’ve followed just about anyone who promised to put food in their bellies and into those of their children. So the South Korean government and 8th Army wanted to squash, as quickly as possible, any sort of incident that portended discord between the U.S. and Korea, including the incident known as the Itaewon Massacre.

But those days were long gone and Ernie and I were new to the case-fresh eyes looking at the evidence. I was beginning to wonder if, in addition to finding his bones, we couldn’t breathe life back into the search for the killer of Mori Di.

After all, Moretti had been a man of principle. A man who’d traveled thousands of miles from his hometown in New Jersey to a country on the far side of the world. He’d put everything on the line, including his life, to help people he didn’t know. And, as Ernie said so succinctly, Tech Sergeant Moretti had been a fellow G.I.

That, in itself, was enough to keep us investigating.

Starting on the morning after the assault on Moretti, Cort had interviewed everybody he could find-both G.I. s and Koreans- who’d been present the night of the Itaewon Massacre. The evening had started routinely enough. The Buddhist nuns fed about a hundred people-men, women, children, and old folks-from the soup kitchen set up behind Moretti’s headquarters building. Moretti had overseen the food preparation, taken inventory personally, and prepared the next day’s ration order for the driver whose turn it was to make the pickup. Then he’d listened while the nuns told him about the various things that were needed for the orphans, including more diapers, soap, and textbooks for the older children who would be starting school as soon as the first one in the area reopened in February.

Where Moretti planned to find this stuff, Cort didn’t know but he’d found entries concerning these items in Moretti’s loose-leaf notebook.

What changed Moretti’s routine that night was a group of business girls banging on the front door of his headquarters. According to their breathless report, another business girl, a friend of theirs, had been beaten up. She was laying in an alley just off the main drag, bleeding profusely.

As of yet, there wasn’t an emergency medical service set up in the city of Seoul. And even the phone lines, what there were of them, were constantly overloaded and not much use when you had to get through to an ambulance. So, Moretti grabbed his army-issue first-aid kit and followed the business girls outside into the cold night.

He’d done this before, Cort found out. And when first aid had not been enough, he’d arranged for one of his trucks to transport a sick or injured person to the one functioning Korean hospital about four miles away in downtown Seoul.

On the way to the scene, Moretti was informed by the babbling women that a policeman had beaten the girl for nonpayment of the commission she owed to the Seven Dragons on a particularly large windfall-twenty dollars, they said-which the girl had earned in a secret assignation with some big-shot American. Moretti asked the girls who the American was but they claimed they didn’t know. At the scene, Moretti used his army-issue flashlight and determined that the girl had been beaten badly but the external bleeding was not arterial. He cleaned and stanched the various flows as best he could but whether or not she had internal bleeding, only time would tell. The girl was conscious now and Moretti asked her who’d done this to her. She wouldn’t talk. And then Moretti realized that the girls who’d brought him here had disappeared. The injured girl’s eyes widened as she stared at the village’s one streetlamp casting its amber glow on the main drag. Moretti turned. Approaching him were seven men, all of them wielding clubs.

Words were exchanged. The men told Moretti that the girl was their property and ordered him to stand away from her. Moretti refused. Within seconds, they were at it. Moretti threw his metal first-aid kit at them, kicking, punching, and clawing for his life. Other residents of Itaewon alerted the three G.I. truck drivers and they ran to the scene to join the melee, trying to pull Moretti to safety.

MPs were alerted. After a few minutes they arrived, sirens blaring, along with the Korean National Police. According to the first MP on the scene, seven men, just dark shadows, fled the moment their jeep rounded the corner. The MPs gave chase but lost them in the maze of dark passageways behind the main drag of Itaewon.

The three truck drivers had been hacked and stabbed and pummeled and sawed and beaten until there would’ve been nothing left to save if the MPs hadn’t arrived when they did. They were lucky to be alive. The injured truck drivers were driven back to Yongsan Compound and checked into the emergency room of the 121 Evacuation Hospital.

But Moretti was missing. The seven thugs had taken him with them.

That night, the MPs started kicking doors in.

The KNPs protested. Eighth Army law enforcement had only limited jurisdiction in Itaewon; they could arrest G.I. s only. But by now dozens of MPs had seen how badly the three G.I. truck drivers had been beaten and they were enraged. And they knew who they were looking for: the Itaewon Chil Yong.

The MPs forced their way into all the usual haunts that the Seven Dragons frequented: nightclubs, bars, brothels, the black-market warehouses. But Snake, Horsehead, and Dragon’s Claw Number One, along with their four brethren, were nowhere to be found.

Neither was Moretti.

Judging by the shape they’d found the three truck drivers in, the MPs thought that Moretti was probably dead. The Seven Dragons must have taken his body because they wanted to eliminate all evidence of the crime. Without a body to prove that a murder had been committed, and without weapons to prove how the murder had been perpetrated, the likelihood of the Seven Dragons being indicted- much less convicted-was virtually nil.

The reaction at 8th Army headquarters was outrage. Not at the men who’d perpetrated this crime but at the MPs who’d gone on their midnight rampage in search of Mori Di. The Korean newspapers were flooded with reports of Korean citizens being ripped cruelly from their homes in the middle of the night, of innocent black-market entrepreneurs being interrogated and slapped around by long-nosed foreigners, and of the Korean National Police being shamed in their own precincts by burly American MPs who showed no regard for the sanctity of Korean law.

All of the responding MPs were brought up on charges.

The civil affairs operation that Moretti had run in Itaewon was curtailed. His headquarters building was decommissioned by 8th Army and turned over to the ROK Ministry of the Interior. Construction operations, financed by American money, were no longer run by 8th Army Engineering but shifted to Korean subcontractors approved by the ROK government. This was supposed to help strengthen the Korean economy. But the real reason was to insure that there was not another Itaewon Massacre.

After a hearing conducted by the judge advocate general, the MPs who responded to Moretti’s distress call that night were formally reprimanded though not brought up on court-martial charges, and all of them were shipped back to the States.

When the dust settled, the hunt for Moretti had been forgotten. As was the hunt for the seven men who had assaulted him. Forgotten by everybody, that is, except for an MP investigator named Cort.

The progress report I turned into Staff Sergeant Riley at the 8th Army CID office indicated that our search of Itaewon the previous night for Corporal Paco Bernal had turned up negative results.

“You mean he’s not there?” Riley asked us.

I shrugged. Ernie was busy fixing himself a cup of coffee poured from the big silver urn behind Miss Kim’s desk.

“I can’t tell the first sergeant this shit,” Riley said, “that you didn’t find nothing.”

“Why not? That’s what happened.”

“So you don’t have any leads on the whereabouts of this guy?”

I shrugged again. “We’re working on it,” I said.

“The provost marshal wants positive, measurable progress,” Riley said. “Estimates of when a goal will be attained. Not just ‘we didn’t find nothing.’”

“If they want positive,” I said, “they’ll just have to wait.”

“No, they won’t,” Riley said, grabbing a pencil. He spoke as he wrote. “Ongoing searches of the areas the suspect was known to frequent are expected to turn up results prior to the next reporting period.”

“Bullshit.”

Riley looked up from his work. “What do you think we do here?”

Ernie finished his coffee.

The two of us left the CID office and drove over to the barracks at the 21 T Car motor pool. According to the head houseboy, Paco Bernal had not returned to his room. A couple of the G.I. s who knew him couldn’t provide any new information and, moreover, they didn’t seem concerned about Paco’s fate.

As we walked back to the jeep, Ernie said, “They really watch out for one another in this unit, don’t they?”

As we left 21 T Car and drove out Gate 9, heading toward Itaewon, I surprised Ernie by telling him to turn left on the road leading toward Namsan Tunnel.

He swiveled his head and asked, “We going downtown?”

I nodded.

“What the hell for?”

“You’ll see.”

I’m not sure why I hadn’t told Riley that we had thought we had actually seen Paco Bernal-although only fleetingly. Something told me it wasn’t going to be easy to catch Paco until he wanted to be caught.

At the tollbooth I tossed a hundred won into the tin basket. Ernie gunned the jeep’s engine and slid through the milling field of kimchee cabs. Namsan means literally “South Mountain” and it hovers on the southern edge of Seoul like a sentinel monitoring the life of the entire city. The tunnel that was recently carved through it is the technological pride of the country. It’s open mouth loomed before us.

We cruised into its cold depths.

Ernie and I must have been the only Miguks to enter the big cement block building of Seoul City Hall in quite a while judging by the stares we received. None of the signs were in English and some of the Korean was beyond my capacity so I ended up stopping men in suits carrying briefcases and asking them tomfool questions. Since I didn’t know the technical jargon, I described what I needed in broad terms. Cute young secretaries stared at Ernie and me as if we were animals escaped from the zoo. Ernie grows antsy in these situations and I was worried he’d do something ill-considered. After we were directed to the third wrong office in a row, a kindly elderly woman finally directed us to what I later found out was the Office of Building Plans for the Southern Districts of Seoul.

The original plans to the seven buildings Moretti had built were still on file. Not blueprints. Nobody had time for something so time consuming after the war. Buildings had to be built and they had to be built now. Most of the plans were nothing more, really, than glorified sketches done on pulp paper with pencil and ruler, notations in Korean and English made in the margins. Then, after a number of erasures, the broad outlines of the structure had been recopied, right over the pencil lines, in blue ink.

I paid for photocopies to be made of each set of plans. I counted out the won and the grim-faced clerk handed me the plans in a brown envelope along with a receipt. Ernie and I walked back out into the broad hallway.

“What are you going to do with these things?” Ernie asked.

“Some comparison shopping.”

“You really are nuts, Sueno.”

Across the street from city hall, we found a teahouse with waitresses wearing blue uniforms and white gloves. Ernie convinced one of the girls to slip off her gloves and started fondling her fingers, all the while-supposedly-teaching her how to count in English. While the waitresses giggled, I sipped on ginseng tea and studied the plans, comparing them to what I’d seen in Itaewon last night.

There had been a lot of changes made since the buildings were originally erected. Rooms added, walls torn down, electrical wiring installed. And, of course, the Yobo Club had been completely demolished and replaced by a brand new structure, not a nightclub but a shopping emporium: trinkets, T-shirts, sporting equipment.

After the Itaewon Massacre, the ROK Army and the Korean National Police had clamped down on the entire area. For the better part of a month, Itaewon had been put off-limits to all civilians. The only people allowed to enter were those who could prove, by the address on their national identity card, that they were residents. All vehicles leaving the village were searched, either by the ROK Army at roadblocks or by the KNPs. Cort searched Itaewon himself, assisted by two armed MPs. They concentrated on the bars and brothels controlled by the Seven Dragons and any places likely to hide a corpse, including icehouses and electrical refrigeration units. They came up with nothing.

The Han River was about two miles away but the KNP roadblocks had been slapped on so fast after the fight that it was unlikely the killers could have made it out of there in time to dump the body. And even if they had, the corpse probably would’ve been spotted when it rose to the surface a few miles downstream near the Han River Estuary.

Of course, the Seven Dragons could’ve buried Moretti’s body in an empty field. But the southern edge of Seoul-and, indeed, the entire city-was so crammed with refugees after the war that there weren’t any empty fields to be found. Squatters were everywhere. Someone would’ve spotted men burying a corpse. The squatters would have been afraid to report it to the KNPs. Still, rumors would’ve spread. Someone would’ve heard something. And no such rumor had ever come to light.

Maybe the Seven Dragons had chopped up Moretti’s body and disposed of it. This was a possibility so grim I didn’t like to think about it. As vicious as the Seven Dragons were, they had never been known to resort to anything quite so macabre, according to Cort. The Seven Dragons would have been subject to the same superstitions as other Koreans and chopping up someone’s body is the perfect way to insure that their spirit will come back to haunt you.

In fact, when no sign of Moretti’s corpse surfaced, Investigator Cort started to suspect-or maybe hope-that Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti was still alive.