The Ville Rat

– 5-

The Munsan police station was an impressive building for such a small town. Like other Korean National Police stations, it was constructed of sturdy cement block and the flag of the Republic of Korea-a red and blue yin-yang symbol centered on a background of pure white-fluttered from a pole on the roof. What differentiated it was the square footage out back. It was two or three times larger than most police stations, probably because of its proximity to the Freedom Bridge and, a few miles beyond that, the truce village of Panmunjom, where representatives from the two opposing governments in the Korean War and their respective allies met regularly for talks. Along the DMZ in recent years, North Korean commandos had machine-gunned American GIs standing in chow lines and even blown up a barracks on an American compound. The South Koreans suffered even greater casualties, with over a hundred dead in one particularly bad year. In this area, crisis could erupt at any moment, making a large police presence necessary.

Ernie and I pushed through the metal-reinforced front door. A young cop in a khaki uniform rose to his feet and shouted a formal greeting. Behind a low railing, Ernie and I stood for a moment. The room smelled of fermented cabbage and cheap Korean tobacco. A sad-looking elderly couple sat on a bench, looking as if they’d been waiting there since they were young. A slightly older police officer, a lieutenant, emerged from a back office and, as if he was expecting us, motioned for us to follow. As we marched down a cement hallway, he said in halting English, “Inspector Gil soon be here.” He ushered us into a small conference room with eight straight-backed chairs arrayed around a rectangular wooden table.

“Please, sit,” he said.

After he left the room, I sat. Ernie paced.

Two minutes later, a young woman in KNP uniform entered holding a stainless-steel tray. On it was a metal pot of hot water and four porcelain mugs. She set the tray in front of us, and without ever looking directly at us, bowed and backed out of the room.

“She likes you,” Ernie said. “I can tell.”

The tray held a few Lipton tea bags and a small jar of Folgers freeze-dried coffee. The water was steaming. I poured myself a cup and used a tin spoon to stir in the coffee. Ernie followed suit, stirring some sugar into his.

We sipped and waited, but not for long. Before I finished my coffee, Inspector Gil Kwon-up, Mr. Kill, barged into the room.

“I found him,” he said.

“Found who?”

“Come, I’ll show you.”

We set our mugs down and followed Mr. Kill out of the room. Outside, he motioned to his right. “It’s not far. We can walk.”

We passed wood-planked storefronts with hangul writing that said things like grain storage and agricultural implements and seasonal loans. On the other side of town, I knew, were about a million eateries and makkoli houses, purveyors of rice wine, catering to the needs of the thousands of ROK soldiers stationed in the military compounds dotting the hills along the Imjin River. There were even a few kisaeng houses for the officers. But we were in the more utilitarian part of town.

A half-mile on, Mr. Kill turned left into a narrow pedestrian pathway. It was muddy and just wide enough for us to walk single file, occasionally dodging old women with huge bundles of laundry balanced atop their heads. Inspector Gil pulled a sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket. He showed it to me: 113 bonji, 47 ho. An address. The walls on either side of the walkway were made of brick and cement block and occasionally wood. Every few feet, rotted panels in recessed gates were slashed with numbers in various styles of handwriting and various shades of paint. The Korean address system makes sense. Bonji is the neighborhood and ho is the number, but sometimes the sequence is off due to the constant tearing down and building up of new residences. We found number 46 and number 48, but no 47 ho. Mr. Kill asked a middle-aged woman stepping carefully through the mud if she could direct him to number 47. She pointed toward a narrow alley. It was there, in the darkness, about twelve feet in.

Mr. Kill stepped up to the gate and pounded on grease-stained planks. Nothing happened. He pounded again. Finally, from within, a woman’s voice said, “Nugu-seiyo?” Who is it?

“Kyongchal,” Mr. Kill answered. Police.

Urgent whispering. Cautious footsteps. Finally, the gate creaked open. Mr. Kill ducked inside. Ernie and I followed.

The courtyard was much like the pathway outside, composed of moist dirt. But there was an iron pump in the center surrounded by a circle of rocks. Beyond that was a low porch fronting a row of oil-papered sliding doors. In front of an open door sat a man in a khaki uniform, just reaching down to slip on a highly polished pair of black combat boots. As we walked across the courtyard, he looked up at us. I recognized him. Kim. The Korean contract gate guard who we’d seen in front of Camp Pelham working with the MP known as Specialist Four Austin.

Mr. Kill greeted him politely, bowing slightly. Then he pulled out his badge and told him in Korean that we had a few questions. The man nodded. I noticed he had bags under his eyes and he looked tired; the kind of fatigue that comes not from losing a night’s sleep, but from four or five decades spent clinging to the lowest rungs on the economic ladder in a country ravaged by a brutal, endemic poverty. The woman who I assumed to be his wife scurried about her business, splashing water into a pail and sloshing it on the cement floor of the walk-in byonso.

Mr. Kill spoke in rapid Korean, getting to the point without any nonsense or preamble. I followed most of it. The gate guard nodded occasionally, shook his head at other times, and finally spoke in a slow, gravelly voice. Ernie waited near the gate, hands in his pockets.

When we were done, Mr. Kill thanked the man, turned, and started to step toward the gate.

As he did so, the gate guard spoke again. “Chotto matte.”

Mr. Kill stopped and turned. It was Japanese, but even I knew what it meant. Wait a moment. Until 1945, while Korea had been colonized, Japanese had been the official language of the country. Older people had learned it in school when they were young. These days-and even then-it was the hated language of occupation. In my months and years here in Korea, I couldn’t remember ever having heard it spoken. Even Mr. Kill seemed surprised.

Gate guard Kim continued to speak in Japanese to Mr. Kill. He knew from our first encounter that I could speak Korean and didn’t want me to understand. Mr. Kill frowned as he listened. Finally, the gate guard stopped talking, and without acknowledging him further, Mr. Kill turned and ducked through the small opening in the gate.

Ernie glanced at me, raising one eyebrow. He knew something strange had happened. We followed Kill outside to the muddy lane.

When we reached the main road, Mr. Kill slowed enough for me to catch up.

“Did you understand,” he asked me, “the Korean part?”

“Most of it.”

It had been a routine set of denials. The gate guard said he didn’t know who the woman in the red dress was, he didn’t know where she’d come from or how she’d gotten there, and when she asked the American MP for help he’d told her to get lost. He claimed the woman spoke to the MP in broken English but she hadn’t spoken to him at all.

“But then,” I said, “gate guard Kim spoke Japanese to you.”

“Yes.” Mr. Kill’s mouth was lined with anger.

“What did he say?” I ventured.

“He said that the woman claimed that someone was after her.”

“An American?”

“She didn’t say. She was hysterical. Not giving much coherent information, just glancing back over her shoulder and begging the American MP for help.”

“That was it?”

“Then he went on, using Japanese, a language I don’t like listening to very much. He said that it didn’t matter what these whores did for their foreigners. If they ended up dead, it was better for us, because then Korea would be purified.”

“He said that?”

“Yes. And he said he applauded the man who killed her. He only regretted that her body had been left in the Sonyu River.”

“Why?”

“According to him, she defiled the water.”

Ernie and I slurped our noodles, using both a flat spoon and chopsticks. Mr. Kill had already finished his bowl and leaned back contentedly, staring at the sea of short black haircuts surrounding us.

We were in a busy chophouse with picnic-like tables and movable two- or three-man benches. The place was packed with Korean soldiers in dark-green fatigues, all of them with their hats pulled off because they were indoors and most of them shouting and gesticulating at one another, laughing and enjoying their food and the raucous company. The place was as noisy as a Cape Canaveral launch pad.

There were no menus, only large hand-printed signs papered to the wall: bibimbap, mae-un tang, naengmyeon, and dubu jjigae baekban, amongst other delights. Sturdy waitresses wearing long cotton aprons and with their hair tied severely in white bandannas plowed through the crowd with huge, round trays laden with steaming metal bowls and plastic plates of cabbage and turnip kimchi. No elegant china in this place. When the boys blocked their way or got too grabby, fat female elbows jabbed callused knuckles and muscled ribs.

Mr. Kill pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket, smoothed it on the rough wooden surface, and started to talk. He almost had to shout to be heard, which is why I think he chose this place, so no one could eavesdrop. I finished my noodles and shoved the bowl aside. Ernie did the same.

Bearing a huge brass pot, one of the waitresses leaned over our table and sloshed warm barley tea into thick porcelain cups. Mr. Kill barely jerked the paper away in time. Like the goddess of all floods, the waitress ignored his discomfort and, as fast as she’d come, she was gone.

“This is what was in her sleeve,” Kill told us.

“The woman in the red dress?” Ernie asked.

“Yes,” Mr. Kill replied. “Precisely. In traditional Korean dresses, there are interior pockets hidden inside the long sleeves. Remember that snippet of paper we found?”

I nodded.

“It had calligraphy on it,” Mr. Kill continued. “I thought I recognized it at first, but I wanted to be sure, so we had it analyzed.”

He slid the paper toward me. It was three lines of neatly printed hangul.

“Of course what she had was just a portion of this poem. The first five words, to be exact, written in ink, we think with a horsehair brush. But I recognized it from the beginning. It’s the first five words of a work done in the ancient sijo style, probably the most famous poem in the Korean language.

“Hwang Ji-ni,” I said.

Mr. Kill sat back, eyes popping wide. “You know it?”

“I know of it. I read the poem in English translation once in one of my textbooks.”

“You would,” Ernie said, disgusted. “Read, read, read. That’s all you ever do.” He grabbed a mug of tea and slurped loudly. “Okay,” he went on, “so she liked poetry. So what?”

Mr. Kill ignored him. “The poem was hand copied, not with a pencil or a ballpoint pen but with a traditional writing implement. We found a single strand of hair clinging to the paper. It turned out to be horsehair.”

“Horsehair?” Ernie glanced at me, then at Mr. Kill.

“That’s the traditional way to make Chinese writing brushes,” I told him. “Nobody makes ’em that way anymore. The few companies that do make old-fashioned writing brushes use synthetic materials.”

“Maybe it’s too hard to catch the horse,” Ernie said.

“Except for one place that still makes them in the traditional manner,” Mr. Kill said. “Red China.”

“So she’s a Commie spy?” Ernie asked.

“No. I doubt that. All imports from Communist countries are banned here in the Republic of Korea. Still, there are a few things people covet. Chinese ink, the inkstone, the horsehair brush-these are examples. Those who follow the ancient art of calligraphy believe that the synthetic substitutes are unworthy of their erudition.”

“So some are smuggled in?” Ernie said.

“Precisely. Mostly from Hong Kong or Japan.”

“They allow the import of goods from Red China?”

“Yes. Unfortunately.”

“So this gal liked poetry,” Ernie said, “and she used a contraband brush to write it down. So what?”

“Not your typical GI business girl,” I said.

Ernie thought about that. “No. Most of them don’t get past the sixth grade. But maybe she didn’t write it. Maybe somebody else did.”

“Maybe.”

We sat in silence for a moment. Apparently, chow time was over, because the Korean soldiers rose from their benches in groups and started to depart. Many of them shot us curious glances as they passed, but they were polite. I didn’t hear one soldier use the phrase kocheingi. Big nose.

Then I thought of something. “What about the paper?” I asked.

Mr. Kill smiled broadly. “I thought you’d never ask. Yes, that’s an important clue. The paper the poetry was written on is imported also, handmade from the bark of the mulberry tree. Not manufactured here in Korea or anywhere else that I know of, other than Red China.”

“If they’re such dedicated Communists and modern and stuff,” Ernie asked, “why do they still make these things?”

“Foreign exchange,” Mr. Kill replied. “There’s a huge demand in Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and other countries with enclaves of Chinese culture.”

“So they’re anxious to make a buck.” Ernie nodded. “But as far as we know, that red dress and the paper in the sleeve didn’t even belong to the dead woman. Maybe she just grabbed them and ran, not knowing about the poetry or the mulberry leaves or any of that crap.”

“Maybe,” Kill said. “Probably even, since she had been in such a rush. But still, it tells us something. Whoever she’s associating with had gone to a lot of trouble and a lot of expense to buy contraband Chinese writing implements.”

“You can track those,” I said.

Mr. Kill nodded. “We’re working on it now.”

“Doesn’t sound like a GI,” Ernie said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Mr. Kill answered. “But then what was this young woman doing way up here near the DMZ, running through a GI village right outside of an American compound, speaking broken English, pleading with an American MP to save her life?”

The question hung in the air. None of us had any answers.

A different MP and a different Korean contract guard manned the front gate of Camp Pelham. I didn’t ask about gate guard Kim because I figured he’d been reassigned to either one of the back gates or, worse, perimeter patrol. The MP stared at our badges stoically and then called the Camp Pelham MP station. After a few mumbled words, he waved us through the gate. Apparently, the 8th Army provost marshal’s directive to cooperate was working, at least so far.

We’d been here before, to the battalion headquarters, but we bypassed that single-story complex and kept walking down the narrow blacktop road. Green Quonset huts lined either side of the road, interspersed with whitewashed signs sporting black stenciled lettering: battalion ammo point; alpha battery, 2/17th fa; bravo battery; and finally charley battery, 2nd of the 17th field artillery. Without knocking, we pushed through the double swinging doors of the orderly room.

A first sergeant was waiting for us. He didn’t stand up. “You’re here about Threets,” he said, pulling a half-smoked stogie out of his mouth.

“We’re here about the shooting,” I said.

“Yeah. Same same. You’ll want to talk to the CO and the executive officer. They’re both out. Don’t know when they’ll be back.” He had a smug smile on his face, as if we’d just been checkmated.

“What makes you think we want to talk to them?” Ernie asked.

The first sergeant’s eyes narrowed. He was a husky man, muscle bulging out of a neatly pressed but faded fatigue blouse. His name tag said Bolton. “Because they’re in charge,” he said in a low, menacing tone, daring us to contradict him.

“I know who we want to talk to,” Ernie replied, “and it ain’t no freaking officers.”

First Sergeant Bolton stood, placing the remnants of his cigar gently into a glass ashtray. “No one talks to the men until the CO says so.”

“Bull,” Ernie replied. He turned and together we walked out of the orderly room. Off to the left was a small billeting area, probably for the NCOs. In front of us, across the narrow street, were two large Quonset huts linked together by a cement-block building with steam rising from aluminum vents. Two enlisted barracks with a latrine wedged in the middle. The same setup we’d seen in camp after camp throughout the Korean peninsula.

We walked across the street. Neither First Sergeant Bolton nor anyone else bothered to follow us.

On the door of the barracks, a rectangular sign hung from a single remaining nail. I had to twist my head to read it: off limits except to authorized personnel. Ernie pushed through into the Quonset hut. The lights were dim in here. A couple of GIs sat near a window, cleaning their M16 rifles.

“Where is everybody?” Ernie asked.

One of them shrugged. The other GI spoke up. “At the motor pool, mostly,” he said.

In the back, past the exit to the latrine, stood a line of wall lockers, as if the Quonset had been partitioned. Low mumbles escaped from behind the line of grey lockers. Ernie walked past a row of bunks. At the end, on the far side of the lockers, a group of GIs in fatigue uniform lurked in the darkness. Some of them standing, two sitting. All of them were soul brothers, black soldiers. Ernie used a hand signal to let me know he’d take over from here.

“What’s happening?” he asked, ignoring the fact that no one answered. He walked past the row of wall lockers and took a seat on one of the square foot lockers at the end of a bunk, pulling something from his front pocket as he did so. Then he was mumbling, using the same tone the GIs had been using. They stared at him, hostile at first, and then I saw curiosity overtake their stares. Ernie kept talking, holding something between his fingers, fiddling with it. One of the GIs smiled. Another mumbled back.

When I left, Ernie was still mumbling. I thought I knew what he was doing, and if I was right, I didn’t want to know any more about it. I hurried out of the building. First Sergeant Bolton was waiting for me in the company street, arms crossed, felt cap pulled low across his forehead.

“I thought I told you not to talk to our troops.”

I was worried about what Ernie was doing in the barracks, so I decided to stall. Instead of telling him to drop dead, I pulled out my badge and patiently explained to him that, when on a case, the Criminal Investigation Division doesn’t require the permission of superior officers to speak to potential witnesses.

“None of these guys witnessed nothing,” he said.

“They were on the range, weren’t they?”

“Yeah, but it happened so fast. Threets swiveled, fired his rifle, and the chief of smoke went down. These guys didn’t see nothing.”

“But you saw something,” I said.

Bolton’s face flushed red. “I didn’t see nothing.”

With that, he stormed past me into the barracks. The two GIs I’d seen earlier were still cleaning their weapons. In back, behind the row of wall lockers, Ernie and the black GIs had disappeared. Apparently, in a puff of smoke.

The MP barracks sat off by itself, on the far side of a circle of reinforced gun emplacements. The bunks were lined up in a similar fashion, but the wall lockers were evenly spaced. No partitions here. A couple of MPs were asleep, with pillows pulled over their heads, probably night-shift workers. Others were flopping around in white boxer shorts and rubber sandals, heading back and forth to the latrine. They looked at me curiously.

“Groverly,” I said to one of them. He glanced upstairs, toward the front of the huge Quonset hut. I hurried up the wooden stairway, figuring I didn’t have much time. Groverly was awake, sitting on the edge of his bunk, dressed in a crisp pair of fatigues, lacing up a pair of spit-shined jump boots. I recognized him from his rank insignia, buck sergeant, and his embroidered name tag.

“Swing shift?” I asked.

Slowly, he looked up at me.

“You’re the CID guy?”

“That’s me.” I smiled.

“You’re not supposed to be talking to me.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“It’s a matter of orders.”

“The orders don’t override a murder investigation.” I stared at his eyes as I spoke. They were green, his face was long, soft, almost girlish, but there was a steel to his countenance, and I understood why this guy was an MP in a combat unit. He was tough. He’d be able to hold his own. I spoke quickly, knowing I might only have a few seconds to convince him to cooperate.

“She was murdered,” I said, “probably held down face-first in the freezing water and the mud. She didn’t have a chance. The worst part is she saw it coming. She knew somebody was after her and she knew they were about to catch her. After talking to you she ran to the ville, to the nightclubs, asking mama-sans for help. Nobody wanted anything to do with her. She was trouble, she was a crazy woman. Then a woman heard her in one of the alleys heading toward the Sonyu River. He must’ve caught up with her there. They argued, she struggled, then she was gone.” I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the black-and-white photograph Mr. Kill had provided. “This is how she ended up.”

I handed the photo to him. Gingerly, he took it in his hands and studied it.

After a pause, he said, “This is her?”

“She looks different,” I said, “from when you talked to her?”

Sergeant Groverly nodded. “Different,” he said.

“No one’s blaming you,” I said. “You had no jurisdiction over her. It was a Korean matter. In fact, gate guard Kim says you told her to go talk to the KNPs. You even pointed her in the right direction.”

Groverly nodded. “I did.”

Now he was staring at the floor. Then he looked back up at me and finally started talking. “There was nothing I could do,” he said. “I couldn’t leave my post and there was no point in even talking to the watch commander. We don’t deploy MP assets for Korean civilians. It just isn’t done. Never. It’s a matter of jurisdiction. If we did, the KNPs would have a fit.”

I nodded. He kept talking.

“She was so desperate. It was clear that someone was right on her tail.” He paused and stared at the glossy tip of his jump boot. “I figured it was her pimp or her boyfriend or something like that. He’d knock her around, maybe. I figured she’d be okay . . .”

His voice trailed off.

“Where had she come from?” I asked. “Which direction?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Suddenly she was just there.”

“What else did you notice?”

“She was on foot, and stepping carefully.” He gazed at me as if it were the strangest thing in the world. “She didn’t have any shoes.”

“What else did she say, Groverly?”

He shook his head, as if to clear it. “That’s it. She said it in English. ‘Help me.’ And then something in Korean to Kim. ‘Saram sorry oh,’ or something like that.”

“Saram sollyo,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

It means help. Literally, save a person.

I stood silent for a moment, waiting for him to add something more. He didn’t. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, slowly shaking his head. Finally, I thanked him and walked away. He still hadn’t finished lacing up his boot.

“The Black Star Club,” Ernie told me as we exited the main gate of Camp Pelham.

I waited until we were off compound to say it: “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“What do you mean?” he said, innocent and red-faced.

“Your eyeballs are as big as platters.”

“Oh, that. Yeah,” he said, “some good shit.”

“You brought reefer up here?”

“Yeah, shared it with the brothers.”

“First Sergeant Bolton was looking for you.”

“The brothers knew that. We went to a good place, out behind the motor pool.”

An exasperated sigh escaped my lungs. “You know the Division doesn’t play. They’ll lock us up and drop the key in the Imjin River if they catch us with that shit. Do you have any more?”

“No,” Ernie said, “all gone.”

“You’re sure?”

He glanced at me. “You don’t trust me?”

“Sure, I do,” I said.

But not when it came to drugs. I didn’t say that part. Ernie had spent two tours in Vietnam, volunteering to go back for the second. He always said it was a “sweet one” and there’d never be another war like it. On his first tour, young boys sold hash to the GIs, dirt cheap. On his second tour, all the hash was gone, replaced by pure China White. Also cheap. Ernie had picked up the habit there, but I had to admire him, he’d kicked the jones completely here in Korea. Of course, there was no heroin to be had in Korea, not by anyone. The South Korean government checked every bag of every traveler coming in or out of the country, and possession of heroin was punishable by life in prison. The sentence for trafficking was death. And they’d carried out that sentence more than once, standing the erstwhile drug kingpin up against the wall and executing him by firing squad. The 2nd Infantry Division and 8th Army in general were also tough on drug possession. But when it came to marijuana, the Americans might take a hard line but the Koreans were surprisingly more tolerant. After all, it was a natural plant, grown by local farmers, and although it was technically illegal, the KNPs wouldn’t prosecute a poor farmer for making a few extra bucks by selling weed to American GIs. Koreans weren’t interested in the stuff, with the exception of a few business girls who’d picked up the practice from their clients. Still, Ernie worried me, but as long as he promised he didn’t have any more, I had to trust him.

“You showed them the picture?”

Mr. Kill had provided us each with a three-by-five-inch glossy of the corpse in the Sonyu River.

“Showed ’em,” Ernie said. “They never saw her before.”

“How about Threets?”

“Him, they knew well and they gave me an earful.”

“They didn’t look like a very talkative bunch.”

“You just have to get them started,” he said. “Besides, I brought an icebreaker.”

“Where’s The Black Star?” I asked.

“Up that crack,” he said, pointing toward a narrow pedestrian lane just past Miss Cho’s Brassware Emporium. For the first time I noticed that there was a small neon sign with a finger pointing optimistically into the darkness.

“There’s a club up there?”

“Yeah, for them.”

“They don’t hang out with the white GIs?”

“Did you see any black GIs when we ran the ville?”

I hadn’t thought of it, but he was right. In the village of Sonyu-ri, all I’d seen were white GIs, a few Hispanics, and dozens of Korean business girls.

“So if the brothers told you all they know about Threets, why are we going to The Black Star?”

“The Ville Rat,” Ernie replied, grinning now.

“The who?”

“The Ville Rat. While we were talking about Threets, I asked them about the skinny white guy with the red Afro. The one who stopped us on our way out of Sonyu-ri last time and led us on that merry chase. When I described him, their eyes lit up. After some coaxing, they told me about him.”

“They knew him?”

“Of course they knew him. He thinks he’s a soul brother himself. Come on, I’ll show you.”

The proprietress of The Black Star Nightclub was a grumpy old woman with streaks of grey hair that fell past her ears. As she talked, she kept brushing unruly strands from her eyes, trying at the same time to keep a cheap Turtle Boat cigarette lit.

“I don’t know Ville Rat,” she told us.

“White guy,” Ernie told her, holding his hands to the side of his head. “Red hair. Sticks out like a soul brother.”

“I don’t know,” she said stubbornly.

I showed her my badge.

“Ajjima,” I said, using the honorific form of address for an older woman. “We don’t want to bother you, we just want to know about the Ville Rat. But if you don’t want to talk to us, you can talk to this gentleman.”

I pulled out Inspector Gil Kwon-up’s calling card and showed it to her. She took one look at the emblem of the Korean National Police and started shaking her head.

“I don’t wanna talk him.”

“Okay,” Ernie said. He walked around behind the bar. “Then you talk to me.” He rattled the chain that locked the metal cooler. “Open it.”

The old woman frowned, took a long drag on her cigarette, and snuffed it out on a metal ashtray. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Anyway he black market. Sell me this shit.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Ville Rat,” she said impatiently.

She pulled a ring of keys out from a pocket in her skirt and opened the cooler. Inside were the usual brown bottles of OB beer, but stacked neatly beside them was a row of ice-cold sixteen-ounce cans. She pulled one out and handed it to Ernie. “Soul brother like,” she said.

It was a Stateside product, malt liquor, a brand known as Colt 45. It had a higher alcoholic content than regular beer. I’d tasted it before and hadn’t liked it much since it also had a fermented tartness that, as far as I was concerned, ruined the flavor of the hops and barley.

Ernie held it up to the light to see if there were any customs labels on it. There weren’t. “Where does the Ville Rat get this stuff from?”

The old woman shrugged. “How I know?”

“What else does he bring?”

She glanced at the liquor bottles behind the bar. There were three or four brands of imported cognac. Ernie lifted them up to the light and all of them had ROK customs labels on them. But the bottles looked ancient, scratched and chipped, probably refilled a thousand times. “Cognac?” Ernie asked.

The old woman shrugged again. “Maybe brandy.”

She refilled the expensive bottles with cheaper booze. Standard practice. After a few snootfulls most GIs couldn’t tell the difference, if they ever could in the first place.

“Who else does he sell to?” Ernie asked.

“Me, I’m the only one.”

“The only one in country?”

“The only one in Sonyu-ri. Maybe he go ’nother village, sell to ’nother club have soul brother.”

She pronounced the word “village” like “ville-age-ee” and the word “soul” like the capital city of the country, “sew-ul.”

“How often do you see him?”

She shrugged again. “Maybe once a month.”

“At mid-month payday or end-of-month payday?”

“Maybe end-of-month.”

“Does he live here in Sonyu-ri?”

“No. Not live here.”

“Where does he live?”

“I don’t know. Maybe far away.”

“Like where?”

“How I know?”

“Does he have a girlfriend here?”

“Any Black Star girl like him.”

“They do? Why?”

“Because he smart. Not stupid, like GI. He make money.”

“GIs make money,” I said.

“Skoshi money,” she said. Little money. “All the time Cheap Charley.”

“The Ville Rat is not a Cheap Charley?”

“No. He spend money, buy girls tambei.” Cigarettes. “Satang sometimes.” Candy. “Any GI like Ville Rat too.”

“So he’s spreading it around,” I said. She didn’t understand what I meant by that, so I said, “Who does he stay with when he visits The Black Star Club?”

“I don’t know. Before curfew, he all the time go.” She waved her hand toward an unknown distance.

A skinny little boy ran into the club. Breathless, he spoke to the proprietress.

“Ajjima,” he said. “Migun wa-yo.” Aunt, American soldiers are coming.

“Otton migun?” What kind of American soldiers?

“Honbyong,” the boy said. MPs.

That’s all I needed to hear. We thanked the woman and departed, in a hurry.