Ping-Pong Heart

– 6-

Captain Kim, Commander of the Itaewon Police Station, stood waiting for us. He was a lugubrious-faced man with sagging jowls and eyes that sloped downward at the edges, as if weighed down by years of misery. He opened his palm and waved us through the door of the Dragon King Nightclub.

It was a small joint off the main drag of Itaewon, along the main supply route. One of the boutique barrooms that had sprung up not only to cater to GIs, but also to the growing class of young Koreans from wealthy families who could afford to spend ten or twenty thousand won per night-twenty to forty US dollars-on beer or liquor and an evening of cabareting. These youthful elites found it particularly exciting because these nightclubs were near the notorious red-light district of Itaewon, restricted to foreign guests only. Nothing is more titillating than that which is forbidden.

The place was modern compared to the old joints in the heart of Itaewon. The floor was tiled, the bar lit with a wedge of neon, and the stools made of stainless steel. We followed Captain Kim to the hallway in the back that led past the bathrooms and through a swinging door and into a neatly kept storage room. The back door was open. Sunlight filtered through a heavy overcast. We stepped into the alley.

“Here,” Captain Kim said, pointing, “next to those.”

Four wooden crates, all full of empty crystalline soju bottles, were piled on top of one another. But beyond that were more crates, some of them smashed, bottles shattered, and the strong rice liquor long since seeped into the ground. I knelt and watched the dim sunlight play off the jagged edges of the glass, stained with tiny spots of reddish-brown. The spray droplets grew larger as they consolidated into a pool of something sticky and black, looking as if they had been tossed from a large pan.

I stood slowly. “The technicians?” I asked.

“They come soon,” Captain Kim said. “Truck come.”

“And the body?”

“Already take to Seoul. They gonna check. Everything.”

He meant the morgue in downtown Seoul. Ernie and I had been there many times before.

“Why didn’t you wait for the Eighth Army Coroner?” Ernie asked.

“First, we don’t know he GI. No wallet, no nothing.”

“We’re right next to Itaewon,” Ernie replied. “You must’ve known he was a GI.”

“Maybe,” Captain Kim said, shrugging. “But honcho say take Seoul.”

“Which honcho?” I asked.

“You know.”

I stared at him. “No, I don’t know.”

He shrugged, resigned to the fact that we’d find out soon enough. “Gil Kwon-up,” he said.

This was indeed a man we knew well. The brilliant chief homicide detective of the Korean National Police, whom American GIs called “Mr. Kill.”

“Why’s he interested in this?” Ernie asked.

Captain Kim shrugged again. “You ask him.”

“When we took the call, we were told that the victim was Major Schultz. If you had no wallet and weren’t even sure he was a GI, how’d you know his name?”

“Maybe they find wallet later. I don’t know. You ask chief inspector.”

The KNPs were just making excuses for having transported his body to the downtown morgue. Routinely, if the victim was an American, they were more than happy to turn it over to us; less trouble for them, less scrutiny from their superiors. In this case, there had to be a reason they’d wanted to examine the corpse on their own.

“How was he killed?” I asked.

“A lot of blood, you see. Body cut bad. Maybe twenty, thirty times.”

“What type of blade?”

“Maybe more than one type.”

“A knife?”

“You look at body. You see.”

“Did he fight?”

Captain Kim spread his arms and turned slightly. “Look.”

What surrounded us were neatly stacked wooden crates filled with glass bottles, beyond the stack that had been turned over and smashed. Not one of the others had been knocked over.

“Did somebody clean up?”

“No, still same.”

That meant that if a fight had taken place, it had been short and sweet, and Major Schultz had gone down quickly.

“What time was the body found?”

“This morning, old lady come. Her job, clean up.”

“She has a key?”

“Yes. Always come in back door. First she see body, then she see blood. She run away, go KNP station.”

“Did she see anybody else around here?”

“No, just body.”

“And last night, was there a fight?”

“Owner at station now. We go talk.”

We did. The owner claimed to know nothing about the big American who’d ended up dead behind the Dragon King Nightclub. As a matter of fact, no Americans at all had entered his club last night. Just before the midnight curfew, he had personally locked the place up tight and left through the back door. He hadn’t noticed anyone lurking in the alley at that time.

When we were through talking to him, I asked Captain Kim, “Has he already been interrogated by Gil Kwon-up?”

Captain Kim nodded. “Already.”

Ernie and I returned to the jeep. As we climbed in, Ernie started the engine and said, “Looks like we’re sucking hind tit.”

“Mr. Kill wants to get a handle on this crime,” I said. “An American officer stabbed to death on the edge of Itaewon. His bosses will want a report every five minutes.”

The Republic of Korea was receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military assistance from the United States government. There were more than 50,000 American military personnel stationed in country with the mission of helping to protect the ROK from another invasion by the Communist regime to the north. Incidents involving the murder of American soldiers generated bad publicity back in the States, put pressure on politicians, and directly threatened the flow of military and financial aid. The Korean government leaders refused to tolerate such a risk. As such, as soon as it was out that an American field grade officer had been murdered, they’d put their best man, Mr. Kill on it, and so far he’d taken full control of the case and full control of the evidence.

“Before we go to the morgue,” Ernie said, “maybe we should check on Miss Jo.”

“Maybe we should,” I said.

Ernie parked the jeep on the edge of the Itaewon Market and we hoofed it into the narrow pedestrian alleys. But the landlady told us that Miss Jo had already moved out. With her hospital bills, she hadn’t been able to make the rent.

“Where’s her stuff,” Ernie asked, “the bed and her clothes?”

I translated and the landlady led us to a wooden storeroom. She pulled a keychain out of the deep folds of her house dress and popped open the padlock. Inside, stacked upright were the bed, the now dismantled plastic wardrobe, and cardboard boxes full of clothes.

“Is she coming back for them?” I asked in Korean.

The landlady shrugged. “That’s what she said. If she doesn’t, I’ll sell everything.”

I asked the landlady for a forwarding address, but of course she didn’t have one. She did believe that Miss Jo would be staying nearby, here in Itaewon, so she could earn enough money to pay her back rent and reclaim her clothes.

“Clothes are very important to a young woman like her,” she said.

The City Morgue in downtown Seoul is a giant stone building one major street over from KNP headquarters. There was no place to park, so after I hopped out, Ernie cruised around the block. Wisps of cold rain splattered against my face as I made my way up the steps and through the big glass double doors. Inside, the clerk was less than helpful. Even my 8th Army CID badge didn’t impress her. She did, however, pick up the phone, press a button, and was soon chattering away with someone who I believed was at KNP headquarters. She hung up and said, “You wait.”

Ernie showed up.

“Where’d you park?”

“I paid a mama-san to move her cart.”

Pushcarts serving bean curd soup or roast corn-on-the-cob or pindaedok, mung bean pancakes, roam the crowded streets of Seoul, mainly at night but some to service the lunch crowd during the day. They guard their territory with their life, but room can be made for a jeep if the price is right.

I was about to question the clerk again when a man accompanied by a young woman wearing the neat blue uniform of the Korean National Police pushed through the front door. Chief Inspector Gil Kwon-up, aka Mr. Kill, with his female assistant, Officer Oh.

He was dapper as usual, with grey hair swept back from his forehead and a neatly pressed suit that, for all I knew, was imported straight from Europe. They walked briskly toward us, then swerved to the right. “Come,” he said.

We did. Officer Oh lagged behind, making sure we followed her boss. She looked crisp and efficient in her knee-length dark-blue skirt with a sky-blue blouse buttoned to the collar. A flat, upturned brim cap sat atop a cascade of curly black hair. When I caught her eye, I nodded to her and she nodded back, smiling politely. We’d worked with her and her boss before; sometimes cooperatively, sometimes not so much. The four of us trotted down two flights of broad cement steps. At the bottom, we entered a low-roofed hallway illuminated by yellowing fluorescents. The bulbs grew dimmer as we rounded a corner until we finally pushed through a pair of swinging doors and entered a refrigerated room bathed in reddish light. A technician with a white smock stood at attention.

Mr. Kill barked an order.

The tech retreated to an inner room and within seconds, he rolled out a long table and shoved it in front of us. Then he pushed over a lamp on wheels and switched it on. When the lumpy object in front of us was fully illuminated, Mr. Kill whipped off the sheet.

Major Frederick Manfield Schultz, lifeless eyes staring straight ahead, looking, now, a little worse for wear. His cheeks weren’t puffed out anymore; they were sunken, and they certainly weren’t red, but a sickly grey. A stench wafted off the corpse. I knew the body had been washed, but the odor of two hundred pounds of dead meat still reminds one of the undiscerning darkness that will one day embrace us all.

Mr. Kill pointed toward the wounds. “Two knives,” he said. “Maybe one a small axe?” He made a chopping motion.

“A hatchet,” I said.

“Yes. A hatchet.” He seemed satisfied with the word.

Inspector Gil Kwon-up was a highly educated man, both in formal Western education and in the classical curriculum of the Far East. After receiving a four-year degree in Korea, he’d gone on to graduate work at an Ivy League school in the States. He was also versed in the Four Books and the Five Classics of the Confucian cannon, and was such an expert on Chinese calligraphy that he often lectured on the subject at local universities. Still, he was a man of the streets. He’d been working at this job for over twenty years, since the end of the Korean War, and he’d put away more killers and psychopaths than Ernie and I were ever likely to see.

I studied the wounds. “Two different blades,” I said.

“Yes. Here are the measurements.”

Officer Oh handed me a sheet of paper written in both hangul and English. The measurements were in centimeters. I thanked her and pocketed it.

“What was the cause of death?” I asked.

Mr. Kill nodded toward the technician, stepped forward and, with Officer Oh’s assistance, rolled Major Frederick Manfield Schultz onto his side. As they did so, his right arm flopped forward lifelessly, as if waving for us to join him in the endless depths.

While Officer Oh held the corpse in place, the technician hurriedly repositioned the lamp, aiming it at the back of Major Schultz’s head.

“Christ,” Ernie said.

I let out a gasp too.

It was a neat chop, slicing the flesh and then the skull, like a tomahawk blow to a tree.

“Hatchet,” Mr. Kill said once again.

“Hatchet,” Officer Oh repeated.

Then he turned to us. “Tell me what you know,” he said.

The KNPs put out an all-points bulletin for Miss Jo Kyong-ja. After her recent trouble with Major Schultz, she was a prime suspect in this murder. It was physically unlikely that she could’ve pulled off the attack herself, unless she’d caught him completely unawares, but it was possible that she put somebody up to it. In fact, Mr. Kill thought it likely.

The tentacles of the Korean National Police spread down every back alley of Seoul and into every village and hamlet in the still-pristine countryside of South Korea. If she was out there, they’d find her eventually. But sometimes, when people are well hidden, that can take years. It was agreed that for the first foray into Itaewon, Ernie and I would take the lead.

“She’s a GI business girl,” Mr. Kill told us. “You’re GIs. You go.”

When the KNPs are on a search mission in Itaewon, word spreads fast and people hide like scattering rats. Ernie and I could, if we played it right, draw less attention.

We returned to Yongsan Compound. At the barracks, we changed into our running-the-ville outfits: sneakers, blue jeans, button-down collared sports shirts, and nylon jackets with fire-breathing dragons hand-embroidered on the back; sinuous creatures, with gaping mouths and wicked claws. The caption beneath mine said: Republic of Korea, 1972 through 1975. Ernie’s not only had a dragon on the back, but a voluptuous lady locked in a less-than-subtle embrace. He’d added an additional epitaph, I’ve served my time in hell. Overstated, but most GIs not only weren’t into subtlety, but didn’t know what the word meant. An assignment in Korea was officially termed a “hardship tour,” but it was hardly a sojourn in hell. Still, I didn’t quibble. Our object, after all, was to fit in.

I used the military phone in the barracks lobby to dial the CID office. Staff Sergeant Riley answered on the first ring.

“You’re gonna do what?” he said.

“We’re gonna run the ville.”

“You’ve got a damn murder to solve.”

“And this is how we’re going to do it.”

“The Provost Marshal wants you back here, in uniform, giving him a full report.”

“No time now.” I explained the urgency to find Miss Jo before she decided to run.

Riley still didn’t like it. “Do you have any idea about what kind of pressure the Chief of Staff is putting on Colonel Brace? They’re livid up at the head shed. A field grade officer hasn’t been murdered in this country since the Korean freaking War.”

“Been that long, huh?”

To me, the premature taking of life was a sin against humanity no matter the rank of the victim.

“Colonel Brace is the Provost Marshal,” Riley continued. “It’s his job to protect people.”

“It’s our job too.”

When he continued to cuss, I hung up on him. Ernie and I trotted out to the jeep.

“They took it well?” he asked.

“They’re delighted with our plan,” I told him.

He hopped behind the wheel of the jeep and started the engine. “I knew they would be.”