The Ville Rat

– 6-

Ernie and I scurried through a narrow pedestrian lane, hopping over mud puddles, dodging ancient cobwebs that swung from rafters like low-hanging vines.

“You think they’re after us?” Ernie asked.

“Probably,” I replied. “We’re up here on the Threets case, and according to the memo from Eighth Army, the Threets case only.”

“That’s what we’re doing,” Ernie said indignantly.

“Maybe,” I replied. “Either way, it’s best if we un-ass the area.”

The pedestrian lane let out onto a two-lane blacktop that I recognized. It ran north toward more small farming communities and, beyond that, the winding flow of the Imjin River. South only a couple hundred yards, it intersected with the road that ran in front of Camp Pelham and through the village of Sonyu-ri. We trotted across the street and when we hit the intersection we turned left. About fifty yards on stood the entrance to meikju changgo, the Non-Appropriated Fund transshipping point. We waved to the gate guards whom we’d already plied with packs of Kent cigarettes, and trotted to Ernie’s jeep. He started the engine and said, “Are we done up here?”

“For the time being,” I said.

He backed out, spinning gravel as he did so.

Ernie’s left foot worked the clutch as his right hand fondled the crystal skull that topped the four-on-the-floor gear shift. He loved this jeep and had put a lot of work into it. Well, not work, exactly. What he did was, at every end-of-month payday, he gave a gift of one quart of Johnny Walker Black to the head honcho dispatcher at the 21st Transportation Car Company, or “21 T Car,” the main motor pool for 8th Army headquarters. As a result of this highly prized gift, what Ernie received was his personal jeep that was always dispatched to him and him only, topped off with gasoline, with maintenance thrown in and new tires every six months. In addition, Ernie popped for the tuck-and-roll black leather upholstery that puffed up proudly in the backseat.

“Never know when some dolly might want to crawl back there with me,” Ernie’d told me.

We sped out of the front gate of meikju changgo and turned right, heading for Sonyu-ri. The MPs approaching The Black Star Club had been on foot, and when we’d passed the intersection minutes ago there’d been no activity. So when we saw two MP jeeps lurking behind a brick wall on the near side of the Camp Pelham main gate, Ernie and I were both taken by surprise. As we passed, the MPs started their engines, turned on their overhead emergency lights, and gave chase.

“Aren’t they ever going to stop messing with us?” Ernie asked.

“This is Division,” I replied.

As if that explained everything, Ernie stepped on the gas. It was mid-afternoon, so the denizens of the Sonyu-ri nightlife were up and about and the roads teemed with pedestrians. Ernie swerved past kimchi cabs parked on the side of the road, avoiding an old man pushing a cart filled with yontan charcoal and rushing past scantily clad business girls carrying pans filled with soap and shampoo on their way to the public bathhouse. We must’ve been doing forty by the time we passed the front gate of RC-4. A half-mile later, we sped past the spot, off to our left, where the corpse of the woman in red had been found. We raced past the Country Health Clinic, still leaving the MP jeeps in the dust, when five hundred yards ahead a quarter-ton truck nosed out onto the road.

“Damn.” Ernie swerved to his left, but the truck kept coming. To avoid it, he swerved back to his right, but the driver of the military vehicle seemed to have anticipated Ernie’s move and quickly backed up. Ernie slammed on the brakes. Behind us, the two MP jeeps kept coming. Ernie glanced back, shifted the jeep into reverse, but it was too late. The MP jeeps nudged up to our rear bumper and cut off all means of escape. Armed MPs hopped out of the rear of the quarter-ton truck.

A half-dozen MPs surrounded us. Slowly, Ernie and I clambered out of the jeep.

“You’re interfering with a freaking investigation!” Ernie shouted.

Ignoring him, the MPs closed in. One of them I recognized: Specialist Austin, the gate guard who hadn’t given us the time of day. The ranking man appeared to be a buck sergeant. Four of them pulled their batons and the other two stepped toward us.

“Assume the position,” the buck sergeant said.

Ernie replied with his usual brilliant retort: “Get bent.”

The four MPs hopped forward. I grabbed one of them, shoved him away, and Ernie popped another in the jaw. After that, confusion reigned, and after much jostling, Ernie and I ended up in the backseat of an MP jeep, hands cuffed behind our backs. An MP driver started the engine and, after another MP hopped in the passenger seat, he sped back toward Camp Pelham, Ernie and I bouncing in the backseat. But much to my surprise, when we reached Camp Pelham, the driver kept going past the main gate, continuing east, toward the hills that rose inland from the Western Corridor.

“You guys are fucked,” Ernie shouted at the driver. “We had authorization to be up here!”

He kept at it, screaming at the top of his lungs, calling the two MPs three kinds of asshole when finally the one riding shotgun cracked. “You had authorization,” he shouted back, “until you interviewed Groverly!”

Ernie looked surprised and turned to me. I grimaced and then shrugged. Either Groverly had admitted that he’d talked to me or someone in the MP barracks had spotted us talking. Either way, Division was apparently using that as an excuse to take us into custody and ship us back south. At least, that’s what I thought was happening, especially when we turned right at one of the country roads and wound our way through hills and cabbage fields that led to the city of Popwon-ni. I figured we’d keep moving south from there, running parallel to the MSR on a road that would eventually reach the mountains just north of Seoul. But I was wrong. Four or five miles on, we turned into the back gate of Camp Howze.

“Why are we going here?” I asked.

The 2nd Infantry Division MP headquarters was at Camp Casey in the Eastern Corridor. The Western Corridor and the Eastern Corridor were both traditional invasion routes that stretched from China, through Manchuria, through North Korea, and finally ended at the capital city of Seoul. In ancient times they’d been used by Chinese legions, Manchurian raiders, and Mongol hordes. During the early 20th Century, the Japanese Imperial Army had used them to go north toward Siberia. Most recently, they were guarded by the GIs of the US 2nd Infantry Division. We were still deep in Division territory, more than ten miles north of the outskirts of Seoul.

Neither MP answered. But I believed there was a certain smug satisfaction in their silence, a satisfaction that grew as we wound through the rows of olive-drab Quonset huts perched on the hilly ridges that comprised Camp Howze. It seemed like an awkward place for a military compound, surrounded by hills, until you realized that those same hills would probably provide excellent protection from North Korean artillery.

We stopped at the back door of one of the larger Quonset huts. The quarter-ton truck pulled up behind us, and MPs hopped out and took up positions with nightsticks drawn. Like a couple of Brahma bulls, Ernie and I were pulled out of the jeep and herded through a door that said: no admittance. authorized personnel only.

Amongst the US Army’s favorite directives.

I expected an ass chewing. None came. Ernie and I sat in an interrogation room that was locked from the outside. Our handcuffs had been removed, but we hadn’t been provided chow, and from the growing darkness outside the painted window I could tell that night had fallen.

Impatient, Ernie rose and pounded on the door. No one answered. He kept pounding. Finally, he shouted, “Goddamn it! I have to take a leak.”

Five minutes later, the door creaked open. Before Ernie could pounce, a metal bucket was shoved in and the door slammed shut. Ernie carried the bucket to the far corner of the room and took his leak. Later, I took mine.

We were dozing on a wooden bench and I wasn’t sure how many hours we’d been cooling our heels when there was a quick knock on the door and it swung open. My eyes opened at the same time. A man walked into the room; he wore baggy fatigues. He stopped in front of us and jammed both fists into his narrow hips.

“What the hell is wrong with you two?” It was Staff Sergeant Riley.

“Up yours,” Ernie replied, lazily rubbing his eyes.

“I had to drive all the way up to Camp Howze to bail your sorry asses out!”

“Bail?” I said.

“They made me sign a chit. Taking responsibility for you two lowlifes and guaranteeing you’d un-ass the Division area.”

“What about the Threets investigation?”

“Finished,” Riley said. “Done. Kaput.”

“It ain’t finished,” Ernie said, growling.

“It’s finished up here,” Riley said. “Come on.”

We followed him out into the hallway.

The MPs wouldn’t give us Ernie’s jeep back, not until we were out of the Division area. Instead, two of their MPs drove it, their headlights tailing me and Ernie and Riley in Riley’s green army sedan. Just past the last Division checkpoint, we pulled over onto the side of the dark road. The two MPs hopped out of Ernie’s jeep and walked over to the floodlight illuminating the checkpoint. Soon they were bullshitting with the checkpoint guards, exchanging cigarettes, apparently waiting for transportation back.

Riley drove south in his sedan. Ernie and I jumped in his jeep and followed. Speeding off, Ernie leaned out of his side of the door, held his arm high, and flipped the Division MPs the bird.

“It’s past midnight,” I told him. “They can’t see what you’re doing.”

Ernie shrugged. “It’s the thought that counts.”

The compound known as ASCOM, the Army Support Command, sits about fifteen kilometers west of Seoul, just outside the city of Bupyong, not too far from the shores of the Yellow Sea. Ernie and I left early and drove on a two-lane elevated highway that wound through fallow rice paddies and past clusters of straw-thatched farmhouses. Metal chimneys spewed ribbons of charcoal smoke into the blue sky. At the ASCOM main gate, an MP checked our dispatch and rusty wheels squeaked as a Korean gate guard rolled the barbed-wire fence open. We drove through onto a small compound composed mostly of tin Quonset huts, which looked like all the other US military compounds in the country except that it was interspersed with massive concrete buildings that had been constructed before World War II by the Japanese Imperial Army, supposedly for ammunition storage.

One of those huge storage bunkers was surrounded by another chain-link fence with a small administration building out front. The sign at the entranceway said: welcome to the 8th united states army stockade. authorized personnel only.

At the front desk, we showed our badges to a bored clerk. A couple of phone calls were made and then, after about ten minutes, an MP with a steel helmet and a plastic faceguard motioned to us with his truncheon. We followed. A long hallway led into the heart of the concrete bunker and, once inside, the world changed. Sounds were amplified. Metal clanging on metal and the sharp shouts of commands echoed down whitewashed corridors. We followed the MP through one of those corridors, turned right, and finally reached a door marked prisoner conference room. He pulled out a ring of keys, unlocked the door and waved us in.

“I’ll be right outside the door,” he said. “Have a seat. The prisoner will be brought in shortly.”

Ernie and I pulled straight-backed chairs out from beneath a counter and sat down. The partition reached from floor to ceiling and the windows were made of thick plastic with a metal mesh to speak through.

“Where are the telephones?” Ernie asked.

“What?”

“In the movies,” he said, “the prisoner sits on one side and his visitor sits on the other, talking through telephones.”

I studied the little metal duct.

“I guess Eighth Army couldn’t afford them,” I said.

Ernie peered through the thin wire. “You can spread germs through this thing.”

Five minutes later, a burly MP, similarly masked with a metal helmet and a plastic visor, escorted in the prisoner. He wore army fatigues, but without rank insignia or a belt to hold up his baggy pants. Instead, he clutched them with his right hand, which was handcuffed to his left. His name tag said Threets. Peering at us, he remained standing until the guard pointed at the chair with his nightstick. Immediately, Threets sat down. The guard backed out of the room and shut the door behind him.

Ernie glanced at me. I think I knew what he wanted to say. Threets looked like a child. The flesh of his face was soft and without whiskers, and even though he was rail-thin, baby fat rounded his cheeks. He wore Army-issue horn-rimmed glasses and his hair was tufted out a little too long for Army regulation.

“Hey, buddy,” Ernie said. “How’s it going?”

Threets didn’t answer. Mostly, he stared at his hands in his lap, but occasionally his eyes popped up to study us. Ernie introduced us and then said, “Monk up at Charley Battery says hello.”

Threets’s eyes lit up. “Monk?”

“Yeah. We smoked some reefer together. He says he wants to testify on your behalf, but so far they won’t let him.”

Threets glanced back down. “I don’t do no reefer.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ernie said. “They told me.” He paused, glancing at me to see if I wanted to say anything, but this was his show. Ernie cleared his throat and stared again. “So Monk said it was an accident. You didn’t mean to shoot nobody.”

Threets kept his eyes down. In reply, he raised and then lowered his narrow shoulders. This wasn’t good. The unwillingness to answer, in the military mind, meant agreement.

Ernie didn’t push it. “They say Smoke was riding you.”

“Smoke” meant Sergeant First Class Vincent P. Orgwell, formally the chief of Firing Battery.

When Threets didn’t answer, Ernie said, “You’re a gunner. Young for a gunner. But Monk and the other guys tell me that you can work the numbers in your head. Lay the gun faster than any other gunner in the battery. The chief of smoke knew that. He knew you were good.”

Ernie paused. Still Threets said nothing.

“Maybe that’s why he rode you,” Ernie said. “Because you’re young and you’re smart.” Ernie let the silence hang. Finally, he said. “And because you’re black.”

Threets’s mouth tightened. Still, he didn’t speak. When he finally did say something, it was almost a whisper. Both of us leaned forward to hear what he said. He repeated it, louder this time.

“He didn’t ride me because I’m black,” he said.

Ernie waited again, longer than he had before. For some reason it hung in the air, the feeling that what Threets was about to say was something that neither Ernie nor I really wanted to hear. It was intuition, I suppose, although I don’t really believe in those things. Somehow, mysteriously, both Ernie and I sensed that what was coming wouldn’t be good.

“It wasn’t because I was black,” he said. “It was because he wanted to train me.”

“To be a better gunner?” Ernie ventured.

For the first time Threets showed some emotion. Violently, he shook his head and in an exasperated voice he said, “No. Nobody understands.”

“Understands what?” Ernie asked.

“Nobody understands what Smoke really is.” For the first time Threets looked up at us, in turn, staring us both in the eye. “He told me to report to him, after work, but to tell no one. ‘For extra training,’ he said. I met him in the training room. It was empty, just him and me, and then he . . .”

Suddenly, Threets lost his nerve and stared at the ground.

“Then he what?” Ernie asked.

This seemed to enrage Threets. “What are you, stupid? Don’t you get it?” He stood up. The helmeted MP burst into the room. As he grabbed Threets by the arm, Threets twisted away and screamed at us. “Don’t you get it? Smoke is a fag. He’s a goddamn fag!”

The MP pulled Threets away.

This was not good news.

Homosexuality was a crime in the US Military, and 8th Army brass didn’t like dealing with it. It was too touchy. Nobody wanted to be assigned to a “homo investigation”; nobody wanted to type up the formal accusation, and field-grade officers didn’t like to be appointed to the boards of inquiry or, worse yet, the courts-martial that had to prosecute such a case. Still, it was our sworn duty and it had to be done. And it would explain why Threets turned his weapon on the Chief of Smoke. He was being coerced by a senior noncommissioned officer, a man older and more experienced than him, into doing things that he didn’t want to do.

As far as 8th Army was concerned, the Threets case was a simple prosecution for armed assault. It was about to get uglier.

On the trip back from ASCOM we didn’t talk much. When we returned to the Yongsan Compound, Ernie entered through the back gate to South Post. After winding through some tree-lined lanes, he parked the jeep in the lot across the street from the “One-Two-One Evac,” the 121st Evacuation Hospital.

At the front desk, a female medic told us where we could find SFC Vince Orgwell. We clattered down long tile-floored hallways. As we did so, Ernie’s head kept swiveling, checking out the nurses and the medical aides clad in their tight white jumpsuits. Finally, we reached a ward with a half-dozen beds on either side. SFC Vincent P. Orgwell was the third on the right.

“Smoke,” Ernie said. Orgwell opened his eyes. Seeing us, he pushed himself farther up on the raised bed, pulling the white sheet higher as he did so.

“Who are you?” he asked.

We flashed our badges. This time I did the talking. I asked him to describe what had happened on the firing range. He did. Everything he said matched what was in the initial MP report. He’d been the safety officer on the left side of the range. Initially, he’d pointed the green disc of his signal paddle at the fire control tower, indicating that the six firing points on his side of the range were all clear. But then he’d seen that PFC Threets was not pointing his weapon up and down range, so he’d immediately signaled with the red side of the paddle.

“I remember the voice coming over the loudspeaker,” Orgwell told us. “‘Cease Fire! The range is not clear. Repeat, the firing range is not clear!’” He mimicked it with the authoritative voice of a fire control officer.

“What was Threets doing?” I asked.

“He was climbing out of the foxhole,” Orgwell said. “I went over to see what the hell was wrong with him and, without warning, he turned and fired.”

I glanced down at his leg.

Orgwell leaned forward and touched the cast. “Won’t lose my knee,” he said. “The docs here have done a hell of a job, although they say I won’t be doing any squat thrusts any time soon.”

He was referring to one of the exercises in the army’s “daily dozen” calisthenics drill.

“Are you putting in for disability retirement?”

“Don’t want it,” he said. “All I want is to return to Charley Battery.”

“Hope you make it,” I said.

“Thanks.”

I paused. “Do you have any idea why Threets did this to you?”

Orgwell shook his head. “Fed up with the army, I suppose.”

He thought about it a moment and then he continued.

“He was like most of these kids, didn’t take it seriously. Also, you know how some of these blacks keep bad-mouthing the ‘man.’ Claiming every time their pass is pulled it’s racist.” He studied me as he said it, wondering if I was a full-blooded member of the club. Apparently, he decided I was. “Just an excuse to not pull their weight,” Orgwell said. When neither Ernie nor I reacted, he added, “in my opinion.”

“Threets says there’s another reason he shot you,” I said.

“Yeah?” Orgwell was suspicious now. “What was that?”

“You know,” Ernie said.

Orgwell swiveled his head. “I know?”

“Yeah,” Ernie said. “You know damn well.”

Orgwell pulled the sheet up closer to his neck. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Threets says you made a pass at him,” Ernie said.

“A pass?”

“You tried to enter into a homosexual relationship with him,” I explained.

Orgwell’s face flushed red. He began to sputter. “You must be out of your mind!” When we didn’t respond, his face grew more contorted, and then he’d thrown the sheet back and he was sitting up, the brace surrounding his wound strapped tightly against his leg. “You lie!” he shouted and then lunged at Ernie.

Ernie stepped back and Orgwell tried to grab him, but his leg gave out and he tumbled to the tile floor in a heap, screaming in pain as he did so. An orderly entered the ward and started to pull him upright. Orgwell continued to sputter until a nurse hurried in and helped the orderly get him back into bed. Once he was settled, she turned to us and pointed with her forefinger for us to leave. As we walked out of the ward, Orgwell was still swearing.

“He said, she said,” Riley told us. Then he corrected himself. “Or in this case, he said and the other he said. Either way, you can’t prove nothing.”

“Not up to us to prove it one way or the other,” Ernie said. “It’ll be up to the court-martial to decide.”

“Threets better not demand a court-martial,” Riley said. “He’d better settle and take the time they give him. If he forces Eighth Army to go to trial and if he throws this homo stuff at him, they’ll put him away until he’s as old as . . .”

Riley paused, groping for the right comparison.

“As old as one of your girlfriends,” Ernie interjected.

“Right,” Riley said, and then he caught himself. “What do you mean by that crack?”

Ernie shrugged and continued reading the sports page of Stars and Stripes.

I was seated at a field desk near the coffee urn typing up our report. Ernie liked for me to do them, since he had no patience for paperwork. I liked paperwork. Sitting at the typewriter relaxed me and spelling everything out gave me a chance to put it all in perspective. Make sense of what was essentially unending chaos, like the case of the frozen lady in the red dress. By typing out our report, it was made clear to me where we had to go next. We had to go after the one lead we had. We had to find the Ville Rat.

I considered this to be a revelation. The masterstroke of a great detective. Or at least I did until Ernie stepped in front of the coffee urn, poured steaming java into a thick mug, and said, “Strange wants to talk to us.”

“Finally?”

“Yeah.”

“He found something out?”

“Apparently. He says it’s all hush-hush.”

“Where do we meet him?”

“Where else? The Snatch Burr.”

Which is what Strange called the 8th Army snack bar.

“At lunch?”

“Yeah.” Which is when we usually met him, in the middle of a crowd, where we’d be less conspicuous and less likely to be overheard.

“In the meantime,” I said, “we have to find the Ville Rat.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He knows something. More than he’s telling.”

Ernie nodded. “So where do we start?”

I thought about it. Then I said, “We start with the Colt 45.”

The Central Locker Fund was very possibly the neatest military warehouse I’d ever seen. The vast cement floor was swept immaculately clean, and the wooden shelves lining the walls and running in three long rows down the middle aisles were made of pine-smelling wood and shining nails. A purring forklift carried pallets laden with neatly stacked cardboard cases of Carling Black Label toward the small mountains of beer in the back. Toward the front, Korean workmen rolled flat metal carts laden with cases of imported scotch and vodka to the rows of shelves closer to the main office.

“Clear the booze out of here,” Ernie said, “and you’d have space for a C-130.” A military air transport.

Light shone behind a glass enclosure. We entered a short hallway and followed it to a double-doored entranceway. Inside was another vast warehouse, about half as big as the other, this one filled with rows of desks interrupted by grey hedge rows of Army-issue filing cabinets, all of it populated by industrious-looking Korean workers hunched over stacks of onionskin invoices or hauling manila folders from one wire in-basket to another or talking animatedly on heavy, black military phones.

“It ain’t easy keeping Eighth Army half loaded,” Ernie said.

He was right about the consumption. Not only did the Central Locker Fund have over 50,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen to provide beer and liquor for, but they also had about 20,000 dependents and Department of the Army Civilians (DACs) to worry about. And that might’ve been just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Ernie and I both knew that a lot of the beer and booze that the Central Locker Fund provided, if not most of it, ended up on the Korean black market. Imported liquor was extremely popular in Korea, but the Korean government, in order to protect its own fledgling industries, imposed high customs duties on all imported goods, especially luxury items. The US military shipped everything over for free, with no customs duties. As a result, a GI-or more likely his Korean wife-could sell a bottle of imported scotch on the Korean black market for three or four times what they paid for it.

A Korean woman wearing a white blouse and black skirt stood in front of us, both hands placed primly in front of her, fingers pointing downward. She bowed and asked if she could help. I flashed my badge and told her who we wanted to speak to. She bowed again and led us toward a glass-enclosed office against the far wall.

Inside, at a desk larger than those in the main work area, a figure sat in what appeared to be solemn meditation. A dapper man, he wore a suit and had brushed-back brown hair greying at the temples. Rick Mills was somewhat of a legend in 8th Army. It was said that he’d been a mess sergeant in the Korean War who’d been put in charge of setting up the Class VI stores-the branch of the post exchange that sold liquor and beer-from one end of the Korean peninsula to the other. He’d done such a good job and his work was appreciated by so many high-ranking officers that when he retired from the military he’d been given the same job, running the Central Locker Fund, as a Department of the Army Civilian. He’d held the job ever since, for more than twenty years. In military life this was common. You build relationships while on active duty and then parlay them into a lifetime job. Rick Mills had become an institution at 8th Army. Some said he was into illicit activities and more than once a zealous provost marshal had tried to bust him, but Rick Mills had always come through any investigation unscathed. Most recently, in the audit performed by our colleagues, Burrows and Slabem, Rick Mills and the 8th Army Central Locker Fund had been shown to be efficiently run and in full compliance with all pertinent regulations.

Maybe.

He stood as we approached. I flashed my badge and explained why we were here. Rick Mills studied us briefly, shook our hands, and then asked us to have a seat. Unbidden, the same Korean lady who’d ushered us in appeared expectantly at the door.

“Coffee,” Rick Mills asked, “or something else to drink?”

“A case of scotch would be nice,” Ernie said.

I overrode him. “No, nothing, thank you.”

Rick Mills turned to the lady. “Thank you, Miss Jo, nothing today.” She bowed and backed out of the room. He turned to us.

“It’s about malt liquor,” I explained.

His eyes widened.

“How much of it do you import?” I asked.

Rick Mills seemed surprised by the question. “Malt liquor? Why, none.”

“None?” Ernie asked.

Rick Mills turned to him. “Yes. We don’t get much call for it.”

“But the black troops,” Ernie replied. “Colt 45. And what’s that other one?” He snapped his fingers.

“Jazz City Ale?” Rick Mills said.

“Yes. The green death.”

“That’s what they call it.”

“So why don’t you ship it over if the black troops like it?”

Rick Mills looked down at the desk blotter in front of him, as if searching for an answer. I noticed that behind him, neatly arranged on a polished mahogany shelf, were a series of framed photographs. One showed a much younger Rick Mills in uniform, standing with a group of fellow GIs in front of a jeep. All were smiling and laughing. The rest of the photos were more formal, with Rick Mills standing with one general or another, receiving a plaque or some kind of award. There were close to a dozen of them. Providing booze to the troops can be a rewarding career.

“It’s been decided,” Mills said, “that the alcohol content in malt liquor is too high. For the health and welfare of the troops, we don’t order it.”

“The alcohol content in liquor is even higher,” Ernie said. Mills didn’t answer. Ernie went on. “It’s because the black troops like it,” he said. “They like the fact that it gives them a quick kick and they don’t have the bloated feeling they get from beer. It’s a ghetto thing. You don’t want them drinking the same shit they drank back on the block.”

Mills looked up at Ernie. “It’s not me.”

“The command,” Ernie said.

Mills shrugged.

“And for the same reason,” Ernie said, “you don’t order cheap wine, like T-Bird or Bali Hai. Only the expensive stuff, for the officers.”

“Trade-offs are made,” Mills said. “We can’t order everything.”

Finally, Ernie shut his mouth. I was glad he did. No sense blaming Mills for the priorities that 8th Army demanded. In the military, it was the highest-ranking officers who made the decisions that affected the rest of us in every aspect of our lives. Invariably, they made them according to their own likes and dislikes. The likes and dislikes of the black troops, as far as I could tell, were not even considered.

Ernie leaned back in his chair. It was my turn.

“If a person wanted to get ahold of malt liquor,” I asked, “how would he do it?”

Mills slid his fingertips across the smooth white paper of the blotter.

“What type of malt liquor?”

“Does it matter?”

“No. Not really. If you ordered it directly, you’d not only pay a small fortune in transport costs, but also be hit hard by Korean customs duties.” He was silent for a moment and then he said, “The merchant marine, in the Port of Inchon or the Port of Pusan. It wouldn’t be easy, but occasionally a Korean guard at the port can be bribed to look the other way. You could bring in a shipment that way.”

“It would still be expensive. The payoffs would be almost as big as the customs duties.”

Mills shrugged again. “I imagine.”

“Any other way?” Ernie asked.

Mills seemed to have gotten fed up. He stared at Ernie steadily. “Are you implying something?”

“If anyone knows how to import alcoholic beverages into Korea, it would be you.”

“Our record is clean,” Mills told him. “Nothing through here without it being logged in and logged out.”

Miss Jo entered Mills’s office. Her face was slightly flushed but still she placed her hands in front of her again and bowed. She apologized profusely and said, “There’s been an accident.”

Mills rose to his feet and bolted out the door. We followed. On the way to the warehouse I noticed the signs that said: anchon cheil. Safety first.

The reek of booze hit us like a fist. One of the forklifts at the huge main entrance to the warehouse had apparently collided with a green army pickup. The front end of the truck had been dented and the forklift was wedged against the fender at an almost forty-five-degree angle. Cases of liquor had crashed to the floor, flooding the smooth cement slab with a small tsunami of spirits.

“Gin,” Ernie said. “Beefeater.”

Leave it to Agent Ernie Bascom to notice the important details.

A Korean man stood next to the forklift clutching a blue cloth. I checked his wound. Bleeding, but not arterial. Two other workmen approached and led him to another vehicle. Rick Mills conferred with them and they sped off, escorting the wounded forklift driver to the local dispensary.

A tall GI in starched fatigues paced next to the pickup truck, back and forth, sliding his green cap across a bald skull. He was about six-foot-one, thin, with the belt of his uniform cinched tightly around a narrow waist. His eyes were large and blue and moist and his name tag simply said Demoray. His rank insignia indicated that he was a master sergeant, one step below the highest enlisted rank.

“I told Han not to take those corners so tight.” He was speaking mostly to himself but occasionally he glanced over at Rick Mills, who was glaring at him. “He comes barreling out of the warehouse just as I’m turning in and I didn’t see him, and I sure as hell didn’t have time to stop.”

Then he looked at Ernie and then at me. He pointed a long, bony finger.

“It’s your fault. If you hadn’t been here, I never would’ve needed to come over. Didn’t we just finish one freaking CID inspection?”

“That’s enough, Demoray,” Mills said. “Get this mess cleaned up. And then get over to the dispensary and check on Mr. Han. I want a full report by noon.”

Demoray stared at him for a moment, moist blue eyes blaring indignation. He rubbed his head again, tilting back his cap. Then he turned, throwing his arms up in the air in exasperation, shaking his head, and stalked away.

Mills turned to us. “He’s a good man, usually. Just very emotional.”

“And he drives too fast,” I said.

Mills nodded sadly.

Ernie poked through the broken bottles. “Why was he so worried about us?”

“He’s very protective of the operation here.”

“That’s a good thing.”

Mills sighed. “It can be.”