Ping-Pong Heart

– 22-

Songsan means Star Mountain. Looming above Camp Stanley, it’s a pointed peak that would provide a layer of protection from incoming artillery in case of war. The peak slants down to a narrow plateau, upon which two artillery battalions and the 2nd Infantry Division Artillery headquarters are stationed, and from there the mountain continues to slope downhill. The narrow pathway leading out of Camp Stanley’s back gate was steep and lined with neon-signed bars and nightclubs jammed together like dominoes. Heaven, in other words, to an American GI. We parked the jeep at the base of the hill, about a hundred yards from the compound itself, and walked up slippery steps, passing soul music and rock and roll blaring out of open doorways. About thirty yards from the base’s back gate stood the Star Mountain Club.

I entered first. Ernie followed shortly after.

The joint was for older soldiers, with slightly more sedate music, soft lighting and upholstery a few millimeters thick on all of the seats. The women working the bar were older, too-some in their thirties, a few probably in their forties. A couple of NCOs sat at the bar, and one guy lounged in a booth with his yobo-or at least, his yobo for the evening. The far end of the bar was wide open, so Ernie and I sat down. We ordered ourselves OB.

Time was of the essence, so I got straight to the point. “Where’s Miss Lee?” I asked the waitress who brought us the drinks.

“Who?”

“Miss Lee Suk-myong. She works here, doesn’t she?”

The woman looked startled. “Miss Lee? She long time go.”

“She doesn’t work here anymore?”

“No. Long time tonasso-yo.” She left a long time go.

“Long time,” I repeated, “like one month ago, two months ago?”

The woman thought about it. “Not last payday, maybe payday before that one.”

Two months ago, maybe less.

“Where’d she go?” I asked.

Her forehead crinkled. “I don’t know,” she said. Then she looked at me more closely. “Why you wanna know?”

“When I was in the States,” I told her, “my chingu told me he steadied her before. He told me she is a good woman.”

Chingu means friend. It’s not uncommon for a GI to have a steady yobo, to return to the States after his tour is up, and then recommend her to a friend who’s on his way to Korea. If she’s proven to be reliable and not a thief, some guys will look her up and, if she’s available, move right in.

“You too young for her,” the woman told me.

I shrugged. “Young woman, old woman, what’s it matter?”

This seemed to please her. She grinned and said, “You wait.”

At the end of the bar, she conferred with two of the other hostesses who were chatting and smoking. Life can be boring, even in a sex bar, and after listening to the barmaid, the three women engaged in animated conversation.

Finally, the barmaid returned. “Maybe not sure, but somebody say she move to TDC.” Tongduchon, the city outside of the 2nd Infantry Division headquarters at Camp Casey.

“There’s a lot of clubs up there,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Taaksan.” Many. “Maybe she get job at Cherry Girl Club.”

“Is she a cherry girl?” Ernie asked.

The woman laughed with just a hint of bitterness and waved her cigarette. “Long time ago she cherry girl. Same time Yi Sing-man president.” The Syngman Rhee regime had been deposed by a military coup in 1962, more than eleven years ago.

We thanked her and rose to leave. Ernie left a generous tip: five hundred won. Almost a buck.

“Now who’s spoiling them?” I asked.

Ernie patted the envelope with the expense money Inspector Kill had given us. “My days of being a Cheap Charley are over.”

“For the time being,” I said.

The city of Tongduchon was about a twenty-minute ride up the road. That is, it would have been twenty minutes if it weren’t for the 2nd Infantry Division military checkpoint. That took over fifteen minutes to clear; there was a long line of vehicles waiting to get through. When we reached the front of the line, we showed our emergency dispatch, but just our regular military ID instead of our CID badges.

The MP eyed us suspiciously, keeping his M-16 rifle pointed skyward. Then he gazed at the bumper of the jeep, which was stenciled in white with the 21 T Car unit designation. He brought the dispatch back.

“You can’t drive a military vehicle while wearing civilian clothes,” he said.

“Why not?” Ernie asked.

He seemed flummoxed by the question. Finally, he said, “This is Division. I don’t know what you all do down in Eighth Army.”

“There’s nothing that says we can’t drive a jeep in civilian clothes,” Ernie said, “as long as we can identify ourselves and the vehicle is properly dispatched.”

We’d been through this before.

The MP motioned to the ROK Army MP not to move the barricade. He returned to his field radio and made a call. The radio buzzed and clicked and the MP kept his voice low so we couldn’t make out what he was saying. Finally, he switched off the radio, returned to us and said, “Destination?”

Before Ernie could argue with him, I said, “Camp Casey.”

He nodded and said, “They’ll be expecting you at the front gate. Check in there. The Duty Officer wants to talk to you.”

“Why?” Ernie asked.

“To make sure your heads are screwed on right.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

The MP ignored him, turned away, and motioned for the ROK MP to pull back the crossed metal stanchions.

“It means they want to show us who’s boss,” I told Ernie.

He gunned the engine and we sped off.

“Butthole,” Ernie said.

We didn’t check in at the Camp Casey front gate.

We were still a hundred yards from it when we parked in a side alley. Just off the main road ahead, neon was punctured by silhouetted GIs parading from nightclub to nightclub in packs of three or four, as if buttressing one another in their quest for debauchery.

“What’s the name of the club again?” Ernie asked.

“According to the gal at Star Mountain, it’s called the Cherry Girl Club.”

“How could I forget?” asked Ernie rhetorically. “Do you know where it is?”

“No idea.”

“So we search.”

And search we did, navigating past the drunken GIs who barreled down crowded lanes like pinballs in a brightly lit machine. Korean business girls in shorts and miniskirts pressed against beaded curtains, beckoning to passersby to enter their dens of sweet iniquity. Old women fished onion rings and sliced yams out of bubbling vats, slapping the oily concoctions onto folded wads of newspaper and collecting a few coins from half-drunk GIs. MP patrols shoved their way through the milling crowd, checking one bar after another for miscreants, overwhelmed by the boisterous humanity that threatened to envelop them.

I asked a couple of the business girls where the Cherry Girl Club was. They shook their heads, confused.

“It must be new,” Ernie said.

I nodded. And if it was new, it wouldn’t be here in the heart of the GI village. It would probably be somewhere on the outskirts. “Maybe across East Bean River,” I said. There were a few bars over there, mostly frequented by the older non-commissioned officers. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

“She’s no spring chicken,” I told Ernie, “if the other gals who work at the Star Mountain Club are any indication.”

“So she’ll be across the bridge, where the lifers hang out.”

“Lifer” is the derogatory term young GIs use for the older NCOs who’ve made the army their career.

“Worth a shot,” I said.

We left the neon behind and made our way through muddy lanes to the footbridge across the East Bean River. Lights spread up and down the water, flickering from the backs of hovels and dilapidated two-story buildings that housed the working-class families who made their livings off the meager economy that Camp Casey provided. During the day, acres of laundry fluttered on lines like the flags of a Mongol army. But now, at night, back windows were lit up in a checkerboard pattern and the steady buzz of radios and television sets was interspersed with the occasional shouts of children, the clang of pots and pans and the wailing cries of infants.

On the far side, we turned north toward the branch of the Military Supply Route that ran west from Camp Casey. Eventually the road would cross the small mountain range dividing the Eastern and Western Corridors.

Finally we hit neon. Not as much as on the main drag of TDC, but enough to make us feel at home.

“There it is,” Ernie said, pointing to a sign about fifty yards ahead: the cherry girl club.

We walked quickly, our hands buried deep in our coat pockets. The night was becoming colder.

We decided not to take the direct approach. Better to play it low-key and check out the lay of the land. A few NCOs in civvies sat at the bar. We steered away from them, settled into a booth, and ordered a pitcher of OB. Ernie splurged for a plate of daegu-po, strips of dried cuttlefish with a dip of red pepper paste.

“You’re hungry,” I said after the waitress brought our beer and snacks.

“So are you,” he said.

Our server was a husky woman who wore short yellow pants and a pullover sleeveless blouse. She could get away with such skimpy attire because the Cherry Girl Club had an Army-issue diesel space heater on either side of the twenty-yard long barroom. Her nameplate read miss noh.

“We’re hungry,” Ernie told Miss Noh as he paid her for the beer and daegu-po. “Where’s a good place to eat?”

“Sell hamburger here,” she said.

“What kind of meat?”

She crinkled her round nose. “Maybe not good like compound.”

“You’ve been on the compound?” Ernie asked.

“Sure. My yobo take me.”

“You have a steady yobo?”

“Of course. Supposed to.”

“Is that a rule here?”

She grew exasperated. “What you mean?”

“I mean a friend of mine back Stateside, he used to steady a woman here. A woman who works at the Cherry Club.”

Miss Noh sat down, mildly interested. “What her name?”

Ernie told her. “Miss Lee,” he said.

Miss Noh held up three fingers. “We have three Miss Lee work here.”

“Three? Damn. Where are they?”

“Most tick they come. Early now. Most GI, they get off work, eat in mess hall, take shower, change clothes. Maybe they get here seven o’clock. Maybe eight.”

“And that’s when the other waitresses come in?” I asked.

She pondered what I’d said, processing the English. “Yeah. Most girl come in eight o’clock.” She turned back to Ernie. “What’s your chingu name?”

Ernie didn’t want to say Arenas. It might ring alarm bells. “Schultz,” he replied.

“Schultz?” Miss Noh pronounced carefully. Ernie nodded.

“When they come, I ask,” she said.

Most of the hostesses and waitresses and business girls knew each other by either their family name or a nickname they used at the club. Seldom would their first name be offered, because that was considered to be private, almost sacred, and not something to be spread around. So it wasn’t unusual that Miss Noh knew three Miss Lees but didn’t bother asking for a first name, since she wouldn’t recognize it anyway.

We ordered the hamburgers Miss Noh had mentioned. They were as bad as implied. But the fries were okay, as was the sliced cucumber.

As we sat in the booth, I studied the Arenas file. The case against him had been based primarily on the testimony of his yobo, Miss Lee Suk-myong, and that of a black marketeer named “Nam,” who’d allegedly introduced Arenas to an unnamed North Korean agent. Nam, when used as a family name, is usually represented by the Chinese character for “south”-pretty ironic, for someone doing business with a North Korean agent. Quite a few things were strange about the Arenas case. First and foremost was that the 501st had busted Arenas early on, when normal procedure would’ve been to observe and follow him, waiting patiently for the opportunity to take down his handler and this mysterious North Korean agent. As it turned out, the agent never appeared, and they couldn’t even find Nam and take him into custody. Only Miss Lee and Staff Sergeant Arenas had been arrested. The paperwork indicated that Miss Lee had made a deal with the Korean prosecutor and gotten off with time served in exchange for her testimony against her former yobo.

“Bullshit case,” Ernie said. “If we brought something like that to the Provost Marshal, he’d kick us out of his office.”

“Especially since they didn’t arrest the most important person in this whole drama. The still-anonymous North Korean spy.”

Ernie poured himself more beer.

I wasn’t worried about him getting wasted-I didn’t figure we’d be doing any more driving tonight. When the time came, we’d just find a cheap room in a yoguan, a Korean inn, or even more economically, a couple of sleeping mats in a community room of a traditional establishment known as a yoin-suk. I’d spotted a few on the way over.

“What did Arenas give up?” Ernie asked.

“You mean, what classified information was compromised?”

“What’d I just say?”

Ernie was getting irritable. I flipped through the pages in the file. “Staff Sergeant Arenas worked at the Camp Red Cloud Communications Center. As such, he had access to classified information all the way up to Secret. He occasionally hand-carried Top Secret documents to and from the I Corps Headquarters, since he was cleared for that.”

“But he wasn’t supposed to read them,” Ernie said.

“No. Just determine where the document should be routed, then deliver it.”

“But he could’ve read them because he had his hands on them.”

“Sure. If he was careful, he could’ve even made a copy. Not authorized, but there’s one of those big Xerox machines in the Commo Center.” I pointed at the paragraph I was scanning. “Says so right here.”

“Okay, so he had access to Top Secret information. How do they know he stole any of it?”

“Testimony of his girl.”

“The woman we’re waiting for.”

“Right.”

“That’s it? They didn’t have anything else?”

“She says this guy Nam showed up, all good looks and nice clothes and personality, and started taking Arenas out to those kisaeng houses down south on the outskirts of Seoul.” Kisaeng are female entertainers, typically skilled in the art of catering to wealthy clientele. “According to her, Arenas went along with it and even spent nights away from home.”

“She was jealous that he was out with Nam all the time.”

“Maybe. Or jealous of the money Arenas was spending on some kisaeng instead of her.”

“But what about the actual leak of classified info? What does the file say about that?”

I thumbed through it, twisting the pages as I read in order to catch more of the words in the dim light. I went through the file once, then back through it again.

“It doesn’t say anything about that. It only has testimony from one of the GIs who worked for Arenas, who talked about how he would sometimes sneak off to the copy room by himself, then bring back pages and not show them to anyone.”

“Sounds pretty flimsy to me.” Ernie glugged back more beer. “Did Arenas build up a lot of cash in his bank account, or buy money orders and mail them home?”

“If he did, it doesn’t appear here.”

“So the main thing is that at least one of his subordinates didn’t like him, which isn’t unusual, and his girlfriend was jealous that he had a rich buddy who took him to party with a bunch of kisaeng.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

Ernie shook his head. “No wonder they keep these proceedings in camera. Who’d want that out in the world? Did Arenas hire a Stateside lawyer?”

I flipped back to the appendix. “No. He was represented by military counsel.”

“Mistake,” Ernie said.

“The biggest thing that the prosecution harped on was that there were Top Secret documents not properly logged in and out. This happened right in the middle of Sergeant Arenas’s shift-he was the NCO in charge.”

“Did other GIs have access to the login and logout register?”

I studied the statements. “Yes.”

“But Arenas was the man in charge.”

“For that shift, yes. He was the ranking man in the Commo Center during the hours the documents in question were supposed to have been logged in and logged out.”

Ernie polished off his beer and ordered another. “So somebody was taking shortcuts and not following procedure. Christ, we could put away half the US Army if that’s the standard. Does the file say why the counter-intel pukes didn’t go after this guy Nam?”

“Not a word,” I said.

“Figures. They didn’t want to embarrass themselves. Maybe because he doesn’t exist.”

After about twenty minutes, a half-dozen hostesses entered the Cherry Girl Club. Three were named Miss Lee. Miss Noh wasted no time. She cornered them all as they were taking off their coats, speaking rapidly, and once she had their attention, she pointed toward us. After a quick trip to the ladies’ room, two of the women came over and sat down next to us. We didn’t want to waste time buying them drinks if we didn’t have to, so I immediately asked if either of them was Lee Suk-myong. My abruptness was rude, but I could tell by their baffled reaction that neither was the woman we were looking for.

I watched the far side of the bar, and from the ladies’ room emerged the third Miss Lee. Her head was down and her coat was back on. She shuffled quickly back toward the door she’d first entered through.

“Come on,” I said to Ernie, and started to get up.

The Miss Lee next to me pouted and grabbed my wrist. I ripped my hand away and almost dumped her out of the booth, though at the last minute she managed to keep on her feet. Then I hurried across the barroom and hit the far door, and outside I saw our prospective Miss Lee Suk-myong hail a cab. She climbed in, and before I could position myself in front of the cab to block it, it sped off, drenching my blue jeans with water. I ran after it, glimpsing part of the license plate.

“Damn!” Ernie said, sprinting up to my side.

But I was already waving my arms frantically, and another taxi emerged out of the night. We hopped in and I yelled the Korean equivalent of “Follow that cab!”

He did. And then I told him to step on it, which in Korean is bali, bali. Quickly, quickly.