Ping-Pong Heart

– 11-

We gassed up the jeep at the 8th Army POL point (petroleum, oil, and lubricants) and crossed the Chamsu Bridge, leaving the Han River and the City of Seoul behind. We cruised south on the Seoul-to-Pusan Expressway, admiring the new road that had been completed little more than a year ago.

“Korea’s going to hell,” Ernie said.

He was alluding to the road. It looked almost like a Stateside freeway: two lanes in either direction with a ten-yard-wide divider in the middle. Much of it had been carved into the countryside, and the ridges on either side were lined with newly planted birch trees.

“Can’t even see the rice paddies,” I said.

Ernie nodded.

We preferred the old roads. Two-lane affairs that wound through pear orchards and passed craggy peaks and narrowed when entering farming villages, with ramshackle wooden buildings and homes covered with straw thatch and old men sitting on stone porches puffing serenely on long-stemmed pipes. Of course, this new expressway from Seoul to Pusan did cut the driving time by more than half.

“Look!” I pointed at a billboard with a giant picture of a pretty young girl about to chomp into a Choco Pie. Such advertisements were never allowed before.

“I told you,” Ernie said. “The road to perdition.”

About sixty kilometers south of Seoul we turned off the expressway, heading for the city of Pyongtaek. Before we reached it we turned west toward our destination. After passing a busy bus station and bouncing over a double row of railroad tracks, we entered the small village of Anjong-ri. As far as I knew, it hadn’t even existed before the Korean War. If it had, it was probably just a country intersection that wasn’t on maps. But after the war, it was settled that the US military would be using the flat plains in the surrounding area to construct a large helicopter base, and the town had sprung up like wet rice shoots reaching toward sunlight. First had been the bars, then the chophouses, and finally the shops: tailor shops, brassware souvenir emporiums, photography studios, sporting goods stores. And from there, the place had continued to grow. Rat-infested yoguans-Korean inns-and endless catacomb-like alleys where the business girls plied their trade.

One thing Anjong-ri did have was a brand-new white cement-block building housing the local office of the Korean National Police. We cruised past it, the flag of the Republic of Korea-its red and blue yin-yang symbol on a pure white background-fluttering in the cold morning breeze. I thought of the card Mr. Kill had given me for Lieutenant Kwon. I hoped I wouldn’t need it.

As we neared the front gate, pedestrian traffic increased: young women scantily clad, wearing just shorts and T-shirts with a sweater thrown on to protect them from the cold, plastic pans canted against their hips, on their way to the bathhouse; old men pushing carts laden with produce or hay or old pieces of junk metal that were somehow valuable to them; the occasional GI in civvies, rubbing his eyes and making his way back toward base.

At the big front gate of Camp Humphries, we were waved to a halt by an MP. Without a word, Ernie handed him our dispatch.

“CID,” the MP said.

“No,” Ernie snapped, “just Eighth Army Provost Marshal’s office. Nothing to be gabbing about.”

The MP handed the clipboard back to Ernie, who in turn handed it to me.

“ID,” the MP said.

We both showed him our military identification. Grim-faced, he waved us through.

Ernie gunned the engine. “In five minutes, every MP on base will know that two CID agents from Seoul have come to poke into their business.”

“Forget ’em, Ernie,” I told him. “We’ll be operating off base. They won’t bother us.”

“They better not.”

Ernie turned left into a row of angled parking spots. He switched off the ignition, lifted the chain welded to the floorboard, and wound it through the steering wheel. When it was knotted securely, he clicked home the padlock. We hopped out of the jeep and strode toward the pedestrian exit. The same MP glanced at our identification again and stared at us suspiciously, but waved us through.

The dirty neon of Anjong-ri flickered in the overcast afternoon, the village greeting us without emotion, like a sullen victim of domestic abuse.

It wasn’t difficult to find the Yobo Club. We wound around the narrow alleys past the Kisaeng Bar, China Doll Nightclub and Mini Skirt Scotch Corner until we found it. As we pushed through the single wooden door, a bell rang above us. A girl who had been dozing behind the bar sat upright.

The joints in Anjong-ri were much smaller than the spacious nightclubs of Itaewon, which made sense because they were catering to fewer GIs. Only a few hundred soldiers were stationed full-time at Camp Humphries. And Anjong-ri didn’t draw anyone other than GIs. No English language teachers, no tourists, no foreign businessmen, no Peace Corps workers on a Friday night out. What it had was GIs. GIs and business girls. And that was it.

“I love this place,” Ernie said.

Other than the girl behind the bar, the Yobo Club was empty. “You love the Yobo Club,” I asked, “or the whole village?”

“The whole village,” Ernie said, spreading his arms. “It’s so beaten up, so run-down, so depraved.”

“Like you,” I said.

“Like my ping-pong heart.”

We took a seat at a table against the wall. The girl came out from behind the bar. No sense beating around the bush. I asked her if she knew Miss Jo Kyong-ja. She shook her head no. I explained that Miss Jo had left Anjong-ri a few months ago, and the girl said that she’d only been working here a few weeks. She seemed pleased to be speaking Korean to an American, a new experience for her. She told me how difficult it was to understand the English the GIs spoke, so different from what she’d studied in middle school, but apparently the more experienced employees of the Yobo Club had told her she’d pick it up soon enough. She hoped that was true.

Ernie waited patiently while we talked and finally said, “Can a guy get a beer around here?”

The girl didn’t understand, so I translated.

She brought two brown bottles sporting the Oriental Brewery label. When I ordered a glass to go with mine she seemed surprised, but brought it back quickly. It was smudged and dusty, but I’d used worse.

Ernie paid her out of the envelope Mr. Kill had given us.

I asked to talk to the mama-san. The girl seemed surprised and explained that she wouldn’t be in until five, when the cannon on compound went off.

“Tell her we need to talk to her now.” I showed her my badge. She couldn’t read it or understand it, but just knowing we were some sort of government officials was enough to frighten her. Without hesitation she took off through a door in back. Ernie and I sat alone, quaffing our cold beer.

“You gotta stop being so friendly to these girls, Sueno.”

“Why?”

“They lose respect for you.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You make it too easy for them. Speak their language and all that. You gotta make them work for it.”

“Being mutually unintelligible helps interpersonal relationships?”

“Lets them know who’s boss.”

I was formulating a response when someone burst through the back door. A small woman with a round face and a grey bouffant hairdo, wearing black slacks and a red Chinese blouse. Without slowing down, she barreled around the far edge of the bar.

“Who wanna talk mama-san?” she asked, peering around the small barroom like a bull who’d just entered the ring. Surprised, Ernie turned and studied her. Slowly, he raised his right hand and pointed at me.

She pounded across the wood-planked floor. “What you want?” Her voice was like the scrape of a razor along leather.

“Have a seat,” I said, motioning to an open chair.

“You talk first,” she said. “Then I sit. Maybe.”

Before I could say anything, the cannon went off. In a few minutes, off-duty GIs would be filtering out of the front gate of Camp Humphries and into the village of Anjong-ri.

“You talk,” she said. “Pretty soon I busy.”

I asked her again to sit, this time in Korean. She thought it over, stepped forward, and keeping her butt toward the front edge of the chair, sat down. “You speaky Korean pretty good,” she said. “Who teach you?”

“I study it,” I said. “On compound.”

“They teach Korean on compound?”

“In Seoul, yes.”

She shook her head. “Number hucking ten.” No good. There’s no “f” sound in the Korean alphabet so often it’s replaced with “h.” And in GI slang, number one-or hana-is best and, reasonably enough, number ten is worst.

“Why number ten?” I asked.

“GI speak Korean, all girl lose respect for GI.”

Ernie grinned and sipped on his beer.

I took the bait. “Why lose respect?”

Her eyes widened. “Talk like baby. All girl laugh at them.”

Ernie glugged even more of his beer down, trying to keep from bursting into laughter.

“Okay,” I said. “No more Korean. Only English.”

“That smart,” she said, reasonably.

Then I asked her about Jo Kyong-ja.

Her eyes squinted but she answered. “She long time go.”

“Go where?”

“Seoul. She owe me money. Why you look for her?”

I showed her my badge.

“You MP?”

“No, CID.”

I explained the difference. We handle mostly capital crimes as opposed to misdemeanors and lesser felonies and we’re trained in the latest techniques of forensic science. When I was done, she waved her hand. “MP same same.”

Ernie was thoroughly enjoying himself.

“You want ’nother beer?” she asked, turning to him. When he didn’t answer right away, she shouted to the girl behind the bar to bring two more beers. For a moment I thought she was going to pay for them, but when she demanded money, I realized she wasn’t impressed with our law enforcement status. Ernie pulled out the wad of Korean bills again and the mama-san eyed them knowingly.

“You not GI,” she said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Too much Korean money.”

I was about to steer her back toward the subject of Jo Kyong-ja when a half-dozen GIs pushed through the door. They wore dirty fatigues and the shoulder patch of the local aviation unit, and every one of them, it seemed, had fingers darkened with grease. They marched resolutely toward the bar and the girl pulled out cold OB and set them up all around. One of them kept turning his head toward me and Ernie and the mama-san sitting at the table.

She ignored them, keeping all her attention on Ernie’s envelope of won.

I asked her when she’d last seen Jo Kyong-ja, and she said months ago and that the girl owed her money for the last month’s rent; all the girls who worked in the Yobo Club also lived out back.

“Why didn’t she pay?” I asked.

“She wanna go to Seoul. So she pack her bag, leave at night time, everybody sleep.”

“Did she go with a boyfriend?”

“No. By herself. Probably she take taxi to Pyongtaek. From there take train.”

“Did you try to find her?”

“No.” The old woman pulled out a pack of Kent cigarettes and lit one up. “Too hard find. Anyway, I make money. She gone.”

Ernie leaned toward her. “If she came back to Anjong-ri, would you know it?”

“Course I know. Anybody know Yobo Club mama-san. Anybody tell me.”

The GI at the bar kept swiveling his head, eyeing us suspiciously, clearly jealous that we were involved in such an intimate conversation with the mama-san of the Yobo Club. He chugged down a huge swig of beer, set the bottle down, and rose to his feet.

“Here he comes,” I told Ernie.

We were used to this. In these little GI villages, everyone knows everyone else, and they’re suspicious-and resentful-of strangers. The guy walked up behind the mama-san. I saw that his rank was staff sergeant, and his nametag said Torrelli. He leaned down and put his arm around her shoulder.

“Are these guys bothering you, Mama?”

“No. Okay,” she said, waving her cigarette.

“If they bother you,” he continued, “you let me know, okay, Mama?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I let you know.”

Then he stood to his full height. “Nobody,” he said, pointing a grease-stained forefinger at us, “and I mean nobody, messes with our Mama-san. You got that?”

Ernie rolled his eyes. I was hoping he’d ignore the guy, but instead he said, “What’re you? Her daddy?”

Torrelli stared at him for a while, letting his eyes go lifeless. “Where I come from,” he said, “we eat guys like you for lunch.”

“Well then,” Ernie said, “you can bite me right now.”

Torrelli stepped toward Ernie and Ernie-never one to de-escalate a confrontation-lifted the cocktail table and threw it at him.