Ping-Pong Heart

– 10-

All the tables in the 8th United States Army Snack Bar were either occupied or covered with dirty plates left by recently departed diners. The lunch hour was almost over. Busy GIs grabbed their caps, civilian workers slipped on their coats, and the few American women who worked on post-mostly the wives of officers and senior NCOs-grabbed their purses. Ernie and I stood just inside the main door and scanned the cafeteria. Ernie elbowed me in the ribs.

“There he is.”

We walked toward a table against a side wall of the huge Quonset hut, pulled over two chairs, and sat down opposite a man wearing the long-sleeved khaki uniform of a Sergeant First Class.

“Strange,” Ernie said, plopping his elbows on the table. “How’s it hanging?”

“The name is Harvey.”

He wore dark glasses. His sparse hair was well-oiled and slicked back, and an empty cigarette holder dangled from thin lips.

“Long time no see,” I said, adding “Harvey” only after a pause.

Even though his glasses were entirely opaque, Strange’s facial expression broadcast grievance at a world that didn’t understand him.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Ernie replied, “just the usual.”

“Information?”

In response, Ernie stared at him, a half-smile on his face.

Strange glanced around the rapidly emptying snack bar, making sure that no one was listening. Then he leaned forward and asked Ernie, “Had any strange lately?”

“Does a general fart through silk? Of course I have.”

Strange waited, twisting his head slightly so his right ear was placed at a more advantageous angle.

“But you’re not going to hear about it,” Ernie continued, “not until you spill a little information of your own.”

“What information?”

Ernie looked at me. Strange turned in my direction, cigarette holder waggling.

“Major Schultz,” I said.

Strange stared at me like an overweight, wanton grasshopper. “What about him?”

“What’s his story? How’d he get himself dead?”

“You’re the cops. You’re supposed to know that.”

“We want to know more about his personal life.”

Strange nodded, getting it now. “You want to know if he had any strange lately?”

“Exactly. And if there were any problems he had. Any enemies. Anybody who would want him dead.”

“Wait a minute.” Strange sat back. “This could be dangerous.”

“Maybe.”

“It’ll cost you.”

“Cost me what?”

“He always tells me stories.” Strange jammed his thumb in Ernie’s direction. “You want this information, now it’s your turn.”

“Maybe I haven’t had any strange lately.”

Strange crossed his arms. “Maybe you’d better find some.”

Ernie was grinning ear to ear. “Right, Harvey. That’s telling him. It’s his turn.”

Strange nodded.

I was stuck, but we needed the information. “Okay,” I said, “you win. I’ll get some strange. ASAP. But we’ll be out of town and we need everything you can dig up on Major Schultz. I’ll call you.”

“No!” Strange said. “No phones.”

“Why not?”

“They’re tapped. Every line in the Yongsan Telephone Exchange is recorded and listened to daily.”

Panic rose in me for a moment as I thought of my calls with Leah Prevault. But we’d spoken in code and never said anything incriminating. “By who?”

“I ain’t saying.”

“Okay, Strange,” I said. He frowned. “I mean Harvey. We’ll be back in a couple of days. I’ll call you and we’ll set up a meeting.”

“Say it’s about the football bet I won.”

“Gambling’s against Army regulation. If somebody’s listening . . .”

“They don’t care about football betting,” he explained. “That’s all-American.”

“And so are you, right?”

“To the core.”

And the damn thing was, he was right.

We stopped briefly at the CID Admin office to let Sergeant Riley know where we were going.

“Anjong-ri?” he asked. “Why the hell you going down there?”

“None of your beeswax,” I said.

“You and that Mr. Kill,” he replied. “You think you’re hot shit now, but you’ll be back on regular duty soon.”

I asked him to check with his sources at personnel to find out what he could about Major Schultz.

“Why? He was offed by that business girl. What do you need to go poking into his background for?”

“Just find out, will you?”

“You’ll owe me.”

I glanced at Miss Kim’s desk. It was bare except for her teacup, which was empty.

“Where’d she go?” I asked Riley.

“Hell if I know. She’s been leaving the office a lot lately, and her work’s been backing up. She’d better get on the stick.”

Her in-box was empty as far as I could tell, but that was Riley for you. Always put the worst face on any given situation. On the way out, when Riley wasn’t looking, Ernie grabbed Riley’s copy of today’s Stars and Stripes and stuck it in his back pocket.

Ernie and I returned to the barracks and changed back into our running-the-ville outfits. Mr. Yim, the houseboy, had already washed and pressed my blue jeans and my button-down shirt. My previously dirty nylon jacket he handed me on a hanger. We were still more than a week out from mid-month payday, but since Ernie had given me part of the KNP expense money, I decided to pay Mr. Yim now. I handed him three ten-thousand-won notes, almost sixty bucks.

“Too much,” he said.

“Forty for the month,” I said, “and I won’t have time to buy soap or shoe polish.”

“No sweat,” he said. He’d ask another GI to purchase extra from the PX.

He was a middle-aged man, probably in his fifties. Before dawn, when he made his way to work, he-like the other houseboys-wore a suit and tie. Face was everything to him, and he didn’t want other Koreans to know that his job on the compound involved menial labor. Once Mr. Yim reached the barracks, he locked his suit in a wall locker and changed into the baggy shorts, T-shirt and flip-flops that he wore now. Some of the GIs lorded their status over the houseboys, barking orders at them. This wasn’t smart. They found minor ways to take their revenge; refusing to take combat boots off compound for repair or not bothering to carry their uniforms to the base laundry to have new patches sewn on. I was always respectful of Mr. Yim. Not only was he older than me-and Confucian propriety dictated that I be respectful to my elders-but I knew he’d lived through a lot. More than twenty years ago, as a young man, he’d been conscripted into the North Korean army. During one particularly horrific battle, he’d managed to slip away from his unit and escape to the south. Unfortunately, once he arrived in Seoul, a big army deuce-and-a-half rattled by, full of armed soldiers, and he was once again conscripted, this time into the South Korean Army. He’d survived the war, but just barely. After I’d gained his trust, he showed me the shrapnel wounds he’d suffered on his back and his upper thigh.

“American doctor save my life,” he told me. “I always like America.”

I supposed that was as good a reason as any.

He’d landed a job on compound washing GI laundry, shining GI boots and making GI bunks, and had been here ever since. Somewhere along the line, he’d married and he now had two kids, both recent high school graduates. He was proud that he’d gotten them such a high-level education. Still, they were both looking for work, and so he continued to put up with abuse from obnoxious American soldiers.

Once I made the mistake of asking him about his family in North Korea. When the war ended and the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone was set up, it became almost impossible to escape from the Communist-controlled north. Hundreds of thousands of families were divided. Mr. Yim stopped shining shoes and looked at the ground. It was almost two minutes until I realized that a puddle of tears had formed on the cold cement.

I never asked him again.