Jade Lady burning

19

The monks kept their vigil for two days and finally they took Kimiko’s body away, back to the mountains.

The landlady seemed relieved and had a couple of young men helping her clear the remains of Miss Pak’s apartment while she got Kimiko’s little closetlike room in shape for a new tenant. When she saw me she stopped what she was doing, tensed, and just waited. I nodded, turned around, and went away.

She didn’t nod back.

Palinki wasn’t the type to hound me about the. 45, so I held on to if for a while, keeping it in my wall locker, checking the cold steel and counting the cartridges every day, just to make sure they were still there.

I wasn’t sure why but it was important to me.

Ernie and I went on a huge drunk, reeling from bar to bar, starting early in the morning, sometimes taking a nap in the afternoon, and then getting drunk again at night. When we went back to work Monday, we were just going through the motions on the black-market detail and found plenty of time to slip away to little isolated draft-beer halls out in Itaewon and have a few cold ones for lunch. We went on like this for quite a while. I can’t say how long now. The time faded into a dismal blur.

Ernie never once mentioned the Nurse.

Finally one morning I woke up and was sick about how I’d been acting. I made a special effort to get over to the gym and see Mr. Chong for the noon tae kwon do workout.

“Where have you been, Georgie?”

“Busy.”

“You should not get so busy. It is dangerous.”

I sobered up, worked out steadily, and my midsection started to firm up again. It was as if my body had taken hold of my fate and slowly its resolve started to become apparent to me.

Mr. Kwok, meanwhile, had made more and more inroads into the economic life of the village. A couple of his competitors had closed down and a couple more had sold out to him. He closed their clubs down for a while, remodeled them, and reopened the doors with big, flashy grand openings. I started hanging out in the ville, supposedly for the black-market detail, but mostly watching his comings and goings. I kept particular track of his thugs, sipped on Coke, and somehow stayed sober.

The winter should have been over but a last flurry of cold, ice-laden air whistled through Seoul. The snow wasn’t heavy but just enough to make the roads slick and life a little uncomfortable. I loved the long overcast days and the freezing crispness that seemed to tighten and enflame my body.

I started carrying the. 45.

My Spartan regimen had kept me a long time without a woman, and one late afternoon, while slogging through my black-market rounds, I turned-without thinking about it much-down the alley that led to the hooch where the girl lived, along with her sisters, in the brothel behind the Sloe-eyed Lady Club.

She was wary. I had cut out on her before, without giving her any money, and made her lose face. This time I gave her the money up front and went into her hooch to relax while she got a pan of hot water ready.

She was very young, very small, and I was very excited. When I finished, I got dressed and went back to the latrine. Most of her sisters were out, or sitting quietly in their rooms, gossiping, playing cards. I found a toehold in the fence and climbed over.

Kwok was usually in his office this time of day. He got up late so the afternoons were like mornings for him. Time for the mundane things in life. Paperwork. Bills. The Hamboyance came after the sun went down.

His thugs were rarely around during the daytime. They slept even later than he did. Sometimes he had late-night things for them to do.

I climbed the rickety metal staircase on the outside of the building, unable to keep completely quiet but trying to keep my advance as rhythmic and as calm as I could.

One of the things that had bothered me from the first was the pair of straight metal tongs in the middle of Miss Pak’s room. Someone had found the half-submerged heater outside and then used the tongs to pull out one of the flaming briquettes and bring it inside and put it on the vinyl floor. Maybe Miss Pak had done it herself, if she was very drunk or very loaded on drugs. But that seemed unlikely because if she was that far gone she would have just passed out and not paid any attention to the underground heating system. If, however, she had actually tried to change the charcoal briquettes in the heater, it would have been second nature to her to replace one of the flaming briquettes with a new one and leave its red-hot embers in a metal pan outside near the stove. She was a farm girl, she knew how to do these things, and for her to have started the fire herself seemed unlikely.

Major General Bohler, however, had little knowledge of the workings of Korean households. This was his first tour in Korea-they didn’t need underground heating systems in Vietnam-and since he’d been here, his servants had done everything for him, including tying his jogging shoes.

If he had choked Miss Pak until she was either dead or she had passed out, it didn’t seem possible to me that he would have put on his clothes, gone outside in the freezing cold, searched around until he found the heater, opened it, used the tongs to pull out one of the charcoal briquettes, and then brought it back into the house to start a fire and destroy the evidence. He would have exposed himself to too many prying eyes.

It was more likely that he would have panicked and put his clothes on and run to the one person in Itaewon who could help him: Kwok.

I could imagine the frantic Bohler, telling Kwok that he thought he’d just killed a girl. The solicitous Kwok telling him to go home, that he would take care of everything, and then going to the hooch and

… But that’s where it broke down. Why not just remove the body? Business girls disappeared from Itaewon all the time.

So the blackened tongs festered in my mind.

But then we saw the photos. I felt sorry for Miss Pak, who was being so ravaged, but still it was exciting and I searched every part of her body. The clarity of the photos was bad, and Bohler was all over her, but I did manage to make out, in a couple of the shots, the medallion that she was wearing around her neck. The one that said ok. Jade.

It seemed sort of strange to me that a young girl like her, having money for the first time in her life, would buy herself such an oldfashioned piece of jewelry. Jade, from antiquity, and Chinese characters yet.

Not exactly trendy.

And if she did like that sort of thing, why wasn’t she wearing it when she had her photograph taken for the marriage paperwork? Maybe she hadn’t bought it yet, sure, but there was another possibility. Maybe a man had bought it for her. As a gift. And it wouldn’t have seemed appropriate to her to wear it in the photograph intended to accompany her request for betrothal to Johnny Watkins.

And I doubted that it was a GI who had bought it for her. When GIs buy gifts for Korean business girls they usually come straight out of the PX. After all, what value does a thing have if you haven’t seen it advertised on television?

But a Korean man could have bought it for her. He would have had to be rather infatuated with her, though. Kwok didn’t seem to be the type, but who knows?

If he were, that would explain his desire to destroy Miss Pak Ok-suk along with the evidence of Bohler’s debauchery. A man can fight jealousy, put himself above it, but not forever.

Another factor was the silence of the neighbors. If the person lurking around Miss Pak’s hooch just prior to the fire had been a GI, even Major General Bohler, the Koreans would have had no hesitation in reporting everything to the police.

Had it been a known thug, they might have hesitated, but the police would have gotten the truth out of them and taken care of the thug.

If it had been Kwok, however, the neighbors would have been frightened to death to talk about anything, and the police wouldn’t have pursued the case either. They probably received more money from Kwok’s operations than they did from their regular paychecks. In some ways he was their employer. And even if they had decided to throw him in the can, they would have to put up with a lot of heat from up top.

All that trouble for a GI whore? Not likely.

But all this was really just a mind game I was playing with myself. Even if Kwok hadn’t killed Miss Pak, I knew he had killed Kimiko, or had one of his boys do it. And he’d crippled Miss Lim.

That was enough for me.

I opened the door to Kwok’s office and walked in.

His head was in a big safe. He sat up abruptly and swiveled around in his chair when he heard me enter.

The office was spare. A small wooden desk, a couch, a coffee table, a green-shaded lamp on his desk fighting the gloom of the overcast afternoon.

“What do you want?” he said in Korean.

I closed the door behind me, reached in my coat, and pulled out the. 45.

His body sagged, just slightly, as breath escaped from his body. Slowly, he gestured towards the safe. “I have money,” he said in English.

The bullet slammed into his body and he spun back off his chair. I stepped forward but he was down, a puddle of blood growing on the floor. The gun had been sighted on his chest when it went off. The. 45 had a heavy slug. He would die soon. If not, maybe he deserved to live.

I looked at the money. Some of it was greenbacks and some of it bank notes, but most of it was Korean money. Stacks of it, in various denominations. I took a bundle of worn-looking ten-thousand-won notes, folded it, and stuffed it into my pocket. Expenses.

The puddle of blood was getting bigger now, almost reaching my shoes. I stepped towards the door but halfway there I stopped. Something was holding me. I went back to the desk and quickly looked through the drawers. In the top middle drawer I found it. The jade medallion. Ok. I left it there, closed the door to the office behind me, and walked hurriedly, but not frantically, down the steps.

I climbed the fence back into the brothel. As the cold night approached, all of the girls were indoors, fixing their hair and putting on makeup. No one noticed me as I slipped through the hooches and left quietly through the front gate.

One loud noise. Maybe a backfire. That’s all anyone would think. The next day I cleaned the. 45 carefully, threw the two remaining cartridges into a septic tank, and returned the weapon to Palinki.

“Everything go okay, brother?”

“Yeah. I got in a little target practice.”

“If you need to use it again, you let me know, you hear?”

“Yeah, Palinki. Thanks.”

There was no mention of Kwok’s death in the Korean newspapers. He wasn’t the type anybody makes a fuss over after they’re dead.

Out on black-market detail I watched the comings and goings of his underlings. They seemed agitated and never stopped ranting at each other. We heard from the KNP blotter report that a couple of them were killed. Knifework. And three or four of Kwok’s nightclubs closed. Pretty soon somebody must have taken his place because things got quiet again. The closed nightclubs were reopened, one of them under a new name and another as a Japanese nightclub, catering to tourists from Tokyo.

Itaewon is going to hell.

Ernie and I didn’t get to work together anymore. The first sergeant kept us separated and kept finding more and more menial tasks for me to perform.

Finally Riley broke the news to me.

“You’re being transferred, George. Up north.”

“At least they waited a decent interval.”

‘They’re claiming that it doesn’t have anything to do with your arrest of General Bohler, just manning requirements.”

“Bull.”

“Yeah.”

The DMZ is beautiful. I mean that. I’m at a little firebase overlooking a valley with hills marching off as far as you can see in either direction until you run into the snow-capped mountains. There are no trees, just shrubs, because no one wants their field of fire obstructed.

The hills are capped by sandbagged positions and in the valleys below, rows of barbed wire parallel chain-link fences, and between their fences and ours about a jillion land mines lurk underground, like lethal subterranean mushrooms.

The North Korean across the valley, looking at me through field glasses, sports a brown uniform and a floppy cap with a red star on it and there is no doubt that he is my enemy.

He sits on one side of the line and I sit on the other.

Neat.

I often think about Kimiko and Miss Lim and Miss Pak Ok-suk. And when I get a night off I take the Army bus across the half-frozen lmjin River, but I never go to Seoul. I stay in a village of thatched-roof hovels and drink rice wine and cuddle with country girls who haven’t yet learned how to speak English.

It’s only when the rice wine flows, and won’t stop, that I think of Kwok and Miss Pak, and the Jade Lady dances, burning in my soul.