The Wandering Ghost

2

Footsteps echoed off distant walls.

The 2nd Infantry Division Central Issue Facility was an open warehouse as big as an aircraft hangar. Far overhead, above gnarled wooden rafters, rays of sunlight fought their way through soot-smeared skylights. The entire facility reeked of damp canvas and decayed mothballs. A cement-floored walkway was lined by square plywood bins, each bin filled to overflowing with steel pots, web gear, helmet liners, wool field trousers, fur-lined parkas, ear-flapped winter headgear, rubber boots, inflatable cold-weather footgear, ammo pouches, and everything the well-dressed combat soldier needs to operate in the country once known as Frozen Chosun.

Ernie and I had decided to interview Jill Matthewson’s roommate, a supply clerk who worked here at the CIF. From what people told us about her, she’d be worth talking to. The opposite, they said, of Jill Matthewson.

The facility was quiet. No troops were lined up to receive their initial issue of combat gear. Off to our left, stuffed into wooden shelving twenty or thirty feet high, was more army-issue equipment. This time, an enormous pile of metal canteen cups. In a back office, we heard voices. Ernie and I strode toward a buzzing fluorescent bulb.

Sitting at a desk, shoulder-length blonde hair hanging limply, sat a woman in wrinkled fatigues. Although she was young, her face seemed to sag. Her eyes were blank and her mouth open. I almost expected to see spittle roll across her pink lips.

“Korvachek?” Ernie asked.

Slowly, she looked up. The embroidered name tag on her fatigue shirt confirmed that Ernie was right. The insignia pinned to her collar was PFC.

A. Korvachek. Private First Class. Corporal Jill Matthewson’s roommate.

Korvachek gazed at Ernie, but the expression on her face didn’t change.

Ernie reached down, cupping her narrow chin in the palm of his hand, and tilted her head back. Blue eyes continued to stare up at him. Lifeless.

Ernie let her chin go and stepped away. He turned to three men standing at the far end of a counter. They’d stopped working now and were looking at us. The ranking man wore the insignia of a buck sergeant.

“You let her come to work like this?” Ernie asked.

The buck sergeant shrugged. “It’s her life.”

I read his name tag: HOLLINGS.

“She should be in a program,” Ernie said.

“Been in one. Fell off the wagon a week ago.”

Ernie looked back at Specialist Korvachek. The MP report said her first name was Anne. Ernie walked over to the water cooler in the corner of the office, grabbed a paper cup from the dispenser, and filled it with water. Then he walked across the office to Korvachek’s desk and tossed the cold water directly into her face.

She sat up sputtering.

I expected her to start cursing but she was too surprised. Ernie stepped around the desk, grabbed her by the arm and hoisted her to her feet, walking her toward the open door.

I followed, closing the door as we left the office, warning off the three men inside with my eyes. Soon, the three of us were in the center of the warehouse. Piles of folded canvas and green wool blankets towered above us like pungent cliffs of cloth.

“Matthewson,” Ernie said, grabbing Korvachek by her narrow shoulders. “Talk.”

The young woman’s head swiveled and her eyes rolled. “You’re cops.”

“Good guess, Miss Marple. What happened to Jill Matthewson?”

“I don’t know. She’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“There.” She pointed vaguely toward the main gate and beyond to the city of Tongduchon.

“She went to the ville?” Ernie said.

“Yeah.”

“How do you know that?”

“She always went to the ville. She worked there and when she was off duty she went there, too.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Korvachek seemed surprised by the question. She waved her hand again. “To get away from this shit.”

“To get away from the army?

“Yeah. And all the jerks who are trying to pinch your butt and call you names.”

“Some of the other MPs were giving her a hard time?”

“Of course. I told that other guy that. The one with the big nose. What’s his name?”

“Bufford?” Ernie asked.

“Yeah, that’s right. Mr. Bufford.”

“So this GI who was giving Jill a hard time, what was his name?”

“Not a GI,” Korvacheck said. “Any GI. They’re always making comments about your body, or what they want to do with you, or rubbing their crotch and leering. You know, things like that. That’s why Jill wanted to get away.”

None of this had been in Bufford’s report. Not surprising. Not only would he not want to embarrass the Division but in the United States Army such behavior is so routine that it’s not worth mentioning.

A door opened and slammed, the same door Ernie and I had used to enter the Central Issue Facility. I motioned to Ernie and we ushered Anne Korvachek deeper into the bowels of the CIF warehouse. Once in a position where we hoped nobody could hear us, we stopped. Above us now, instead of mothballed army blankets, a jagged mountain of entrenching tools-short-handled shovels- loomed. Ernie resumed his questioning.

“When Jill went to the ville,” he asked, “where did she go?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Korvachek answered. “We weren’t that close. She didn’t tell me.”

She pouted as she crossed her arms. Ernie let go of her and stepped back, giving her a chance to breathe. After a moment of silence, I said, “It’s important, Anne. I know you didn’t want to tell those other investigators. But we’re not from Division, we’re from Eighth Army.”

She snorted. “Same difference.”

“No. There is a difference. We don’t want to embarrass Jill or harm her in any way. Her privacy is her privacy and if she doesn’t want to be in the army anymore…” I waved my hand in a broad circle. “If she doesn’t want to put up with all this, that’s her decision. We’ll honor it. We’ll tell her what to do and who to talk to and how to go about requesting a discharge. It may not be easy and she might be punished for going AWOL, but we’ll tell her straight. And the only reason we’re up here and the only reason we’re looking for her is because she hasn’t contacted her mother. Her mother wrote to her congressman about Jill’s disappearance and started this investigation rolling. At least Eighth Army’s part in it.”

“Her mother?” Korvacheck asked.

“Yes. Jill hasn’t contacted her. No letter, no phone call, no nothing.”

Anne’s brow furrowed and she started to chew on the nail of her thumb.

“You promised you wouldn’t tell,” I said. “Didn’t you?”

When she didn’t answer, I took her silence for consent. “But it’s beyond that now,” I continued. “Jill Matthewson could be in danger. She could be hurt. She could be praying that someone finds her.”

Anne Korvachek let out a deep sigh. “I didn’t want to tell that other guy. What’s his name?”

“Bufford,” Ernie said again.

Korvachek nodded. “Yeah, Bufford. He acted like Jill had done something wrong.”

She had, actually. In the military, not reporting for duty is a crime but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said, “We don’t think she’s a criminal. We think she needs help.”

She studied Ernie and me again and made her decision. “I don’t know much. While she was on patrol, out in the ville with the other MPs, she came to know some of the girls who work there. Korean girls. You know, strippers and stuff like that. She said they weren’t so bad and some of them were friendly and started talking to her. One of them helped her find a hooch. A cheap place, somewhere in the ville, away from the bar district. I don’t know exactly where ’cos she never invited me to go with her. But it’s quiet, she told me, and there was a nice old mama-san who taught her how to do things. You know, how to get water out of the well, where to hang her laundry, how to change the charcoal, things like that. It was the only place where Jill could get away from all the GIs leering at her and making comments and trying to talk her into taking off her pants.”

“This friend of hers,” I asked, “this stripper who helped her find the hooch, do you know her name?”

“No.”

“Which club does she work at?”

“I don’t know. More than one, I think. And I don’t know what she looks like. Jill and I weren’t close.”

Neither Ernie nor I asked why. Instead, we stared at her. When she could no longer bear the silence, Anne Korvacheck said, “Me and Jill, we’re into different things, you know?”

We knew. According to everyone we’d talked to, Corporal Jill Matthewson didn’t smoke or drink or do drugs and, until she disappeared, the Division chaplain claimed that she’d attended church services every Sunday. Something told me that Anne Korvachek hadn’t attended church services in quite a while. I wanted to hug her and tell her to forget all this military stuff and go home to her family. Instead, I remembered she was a soldier. And I remembered that she might have information important to our investigation.

“Druwood,” I said.

“The dead guy?”

“Yes. Do you know what happened to him?”

“Jumped off the tower at the obstacle course. That’s what everyone says.”

“Do you believe it?”

“In this hellhole? Why wouldn’t I?”

“So you think he killed himself.”

Anne Korvachek shrugged. “How would I know?”

“Did you know him?” Ernie asked.

“No. But Jill did. He was an MP.”

“Did she know him well?”

“Too well. He was always hanging around the barracks, asking about her.”

Ernie and I froze. This could be the connection we were looking for, the type of connection that broke a case. I didn’t want to ask a question that would lead Anne Korvacheck down a preconceived path, so I used an old technique. I simply repeated the last thing she had said.

“Asking about her?”

“Yeah. You know. Trying to get a date. Hoping she’d start liking him. Jill didn’t dislike him but she didn’t like him either. She avoided him.”

Ernie glanced around, listening. I heard it, too. Squeaks. Shoe leather? No, more like mice. Pest control should’ve been a high priority in a huge warehouse like this. Apparently not so. I turned my attention back to Anne Korvachek.

“Was he stalking her?”

“No. Nothing like that. He was just a big dumb puppy dog. Sick with love.”

“Love for Jill Matthewson?”

“Not ‘love’ love. A crush, like.”

I was about to ask Anne Korvachek another question when something hard thumped against wood. Anne and I glanced toward the sound but Ernie looked up. And then he leaped at us. Screaming.

For a moment I thought my partner, Ernie Bascom, had gone mad. He shoved me with his right hand and shoved Anne Korvachek with his left and knocked us both against the open wood frame foundation of the holding bin. I clunked my skull against a two-by-four but Ernie kept pushing until I dropped to a sitting position and kicked myself backwards beneath the safety of the wood-slat platform. Anne Korvachek did the same.

The Central Issue Facility rained shovels.

About two tons of them. They clattered to the cement floor with an enormous din, sometimes slamming down hard on their flat metal edges, sometimes gouging sharp corners into the cement, leaving half-inch-thick, arrow-shaped dents. Ernie kept shoving Anne and me until our arms and legs and other vulnerable body parts were protected beneath the wooden platform from the landslide of entrenching tools.

Finally, the shovels stopped falling.

Ernie and I clawed our way out of the avalanche. He ran behind the platform that had only recently held the entrenching tools. I followed. When we found no one there, we ran toward the door that had opened and slammed.

No one there either. Not inside. Not outside.

Wheel marks in gravel. Nothing we could trace. Apparently a getaway vehicle had been waiting. Whoever had slipped into the warehouse and toppled the enormous pile of entrenching tools had planned his escape well.

Ernie and I dusted ourselves off.

Sergeant Hollings and his crew were still cowering, afraid to come out of the back office. When we frightened them into talking, they claimed they hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave the warehouse, and they had no idea who’d tried to shove two tons of entrenching tools atop Ernie, me, and Anne Korvachek.

I believed them. But only because they appeared to be genuinely scared. But why were they so scared? What was happening on Camp Casey that was creating a climate of fear? When I asked that question I received only shrugs and grunts and finally I gave up. I figured there was no way-short of torture-I was going to extract any information from them.

In a corner of the warehouse, Anne Korvachek sat alone on a stool. Crying. I tried to comfort her but it didn’t work. Instead, when she wouldn’t stop sobbing, I told her to get herself back into the rehab program. She said she didn’t want to and anyway it was none of my business.

I thanked her for her cooperation and we left.

Coincidences, of course, are something cops are taught never to believe in. The fact that another young MP, Private Druwood, had been involved in a serious incident-an incident that led to his death-only a few days after Corporal Jill Matthewson’s disappearance was a coincidence in and of itself. But when you added the fact that Private Druwood-at least according to Anne Korvachek-had harbored an unrequited crush on the selfsame Corporal Jill Matthewson and he’d actually been following her around, then the coincidence was too great for Ernie and me to ignore.

Late in the morning, Ernie and I stopped at Camp Casey’s 13th Field Dispensary. As usual, four or five Quonset huts of various sizes were hooked together by short walkways. I wanted to take a look at Private Druwood’s body. Maybe it would tell me something that would give me a clue as to Jill Matthewson’s disappearance. More likely, it wouldn’t. But if the corpse was still here on Camp Casey, I wanted to see what I could. In any investigation, more information is always better than less.

We entered through the back, via a loading dock where Division ambulances pulled up and delivered soldiers who’d been injured in field training. Field training is the lifeblood of any infantry division. A way for young soldiers to stay in combat trim. As such, it was constantly being conducted somewhere in the Division area.

We pushed through double swinging doors. A young man, stripped to the waist, sat on a metal table staring at his bleeding arm. A jagged shard of purple bone stuck through the flesh. A tall man with swept-back brown hair ministered to him, blood spattering his white coat. He jabbed the young soldier’s biceps with a syringe and told him to lie back and try to relax, the MEDEVAC to transport him to Seoul would arrive in a few minutes. The young man seemed unsure but then, apparently, the drugs kicked in. His eyeballs rolled back in his head and he leaned to his side and the tall man in the white coat eased him down onto the metal table. When the young soldier was arranged neatly, the tall man turned to face us.

“What are you doing here?”

His name tag said WEHRY. His rank was specialist six. Not a doctor, a medic.

“Druwood,” I said, flashing my identification. “The body still here?”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. We’re going to send it down to Seoul on the same chopper transporting this young man.”

“We want to look at it,” Ernie said.

Wehry straightened his spine, thrusting back his shoulders. “Absolutely not. The body is encased and prepared for transport and no one is going to look at it until it reaches the medical examiner in Seoul.”

Ernie and I glanced at one another. We had developed a routine for this type of contingency. In a bureaucracy as cumbersome as the United States Army, we’re forced to perform it often.

Ernie approached Wehry, his face twisted into a sneer, his body relaxed, hands on hips, doing everything he could to convey to Spec 6 Wehry that Ernie was totally disgusted with his response.

“Do you realize what you’re doing, Wehry?” Ernie asked. “Obstructing justice? Do you have any idea who sent us here?”

“I don’t care,” Wehry replied. “We have procedures. No one can traipse in here and start examining bodies.”

Ernie stepped to his left, opening his jacket, letting Wehry see the hilt of his. 45 in its shoulder holster, making him worry that Ernie was about to pull it. I moved to the right. The injured soldier moaned as I did so, and then Ernie raised his voice and started gesticulating wildly. Wehry crossed his arms and was having none of it, shaking his head resolutely. I stepped to the far side of the room and pushed through a single swinging door.

It wasn’t hard to spot the corpse. A body bag, full of something long and lumpy, lay on a metal cart. I stepped quickly toward the bag and examined the red tag on the bottom. DRUWOOD, MARVIN Z., PRIVATE (E-2). I reached to the top of the bag, grabbed the zipper, and pulled.

I don’t think anyone ever gets completely used to the odor of death. I know I haven’t. It slapped me like a clammy hand enveloping my face, suffused with the raw, gamy scent of meat.

Holding my breath, I examined the body as best I could. Feet, legs, genitals, hips, abdomen, chest: all body parts were intact but none of them looked normal. Everything, especially the arms, was scraped red and raw. The elbows and fingers had virtually no flesh left on them whatsoever. The nails, without exception, were torn, bent back. Had the body been dragged behind a jeep? That was the first thing that leaped into my mind. But then some part, like maybe the lower legs and feet, would’ve been spared the shredding. But nothing on Druwood’s body had been spared. It was as if he had been dragged, face down, along cement. The neck was bruised and slightly askew; it had probably snapped. The face looked surprised, mouth open. I closed the eyes. But the biggest attention-getter on the body of the late Private Marvin Z. Druwood was the front top quadrant of his skull. Smashed in. Red and pulpy with shards of bone sticking out. That impact is what had killed him, and probably snapped his neck at the same time. I leaned down to look more closely at the gaping wound and saw gravel. Flecks of it. I carefully removed one of the larger pieces and held it up to the overhead light. I rubbed it between my fingers. It was jagged. Applying only a very light pressure, the tiny chunk crumbled into powder.

Cement.

He’d fallen from a great height and cracked his skull on something made of cement. Pretty much what the provost marshal and Warrant Officer Bufford contended. Still, there were things here that didn’t add up. Had the body been scraped in the fall? Or after it?

The door squeaked behind me. I turned. Red-faced, Spec 6 Wehry stood in the open doorway.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I didn’t bother to answer. Instead, I zipped up the bag, rubbed my hands on the side of my coat, and walked past him. In the back room of the dispensary, I passed Ernie and the injured soldier still laying on his gurney. I kept going, onto the loading dock. Then I hopped down onto the gravel-topped parking lot. At the far edge, I stood for a while, staring across a vast expanse of lawn at the helicopter landing zone on the far side of the Camp Casey parade ground. Hands on my hips, I took deep breaths. The cold Korean winter filled my lungs.

I felt it now. The old remorse. The old anticipation of something horrible that was about to happen that I couldn’t do anything about.

My mother was still young. Still healthy, still beautiful, and yet she was dying. I was her only child. The women stood around her, their heads covered with black shawls, candles flickering in brass holders. They mumbled prayers in Spanish, kissed the tips of their fingers, and then caressed the silver crucifixes hanging at their necks.

I wanted it to stop. I wanted things to return to normal. I wanted my mother to laugh and shout and pinch me and chase me around the backyard of the little hovel in East L.A. in which we lived. But she was so pale and her breathing was labored and she didn’t move. And then later-I’m not sure how much later-the priest told me that she was gone. My father had already fled, run off to Mexico like the coward that he was. I moved in with foster parents, first one set and then another, the entire program compliments of the Board of Supervisors of the County of Los Angeles. Living like a fugitive, I started to become alert to people’s moods, the flickering of their eyes, the inflections in their voices, the double meanings in the words they spoke. I dealt with the jealousy of the other kids in the families, the hatred of the fathers when they watched me shovel beans into my mouth, the impatience of the mothers when I dirtied one pair of blue jeans too many.

But through it all, I remembered what my mother had told me before she died: Be strong. Don’t lie to people. Don’t be like your father.

I promised her I wouldn’t.

At the pedestrian exit from Camp Casey, Ernie and I flashed our identification at a frowning MP. Then we walked past a line of waiting kimchee cabs, across the MSR, and entered the bar district of the fabled city known as Tongduchon.

HUANYONG! a sign said, in the indigenous Korean hangul script. Welcome!

It was followed by three Chinese characters: tong for east, du for bean, and chon for river. Tongduchon. East Bean River. Welcome to Tongduchon. Or TDC as the GIs loved to call it.

For a young American GI, the bar district in Tongduchon is the French Riviera, Las Vegas, and Disneyland all rolled into one. It’s brightly lit and there’s bar after bar and nightclub after nightclub and hundreds of young women parading around in various stages of undress. A bottle of Oriental Brewery Beer costs 200 won, about forty cents, and a shot of black-market bourbon costs 250 won. An “overnight,” an evening with a beauteous lady, costs anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars, depending on a few variables: her pulchritude, your willingness to spend, and how close it is to the end-of-month military payday.

Night had fallen. Therefore, Ernie and I had changed out of our coats and ties and were now wearing our “running-the-ville” outfits: nylon jackets with fire-breathing dragons embroidered on the back, blue jeans, sneakers, and broad, mindless grins on our smoothly shaven faces. We may have looked like a couple of idiots wasting our money in a GI village that’s designed to do nothing else but separate a GI from his pay, but actually we were conserving the twelve bucks a day in travel per diem 8th Army authorized. We were tailing an armed military police patrol.

The patrol was composed of three men: a U.S. Army military policeman; a honbyong, an ROK Army military policeman; and a KNP, an officer of the Korean National Police. The reason for its odd composition was that the mayor of Tongduchon and the commander of the 2nd Infantry Division wanted to ensure that all jurisdictions were covered. Whether any given miscreant was an American GI, a Korean soldier, or a Korean civilian, one of the triumvirate of law enforcement officers would have the authority to arrest him. Or her.

The patrol wound through a vast labyrinth of narrow alleys filled with flashing neon and jostling crowds and rock music blaring from vibrating speakers. They entered bar after bar, checking out the American GIs and shoving through small seas of scantily clad Korean business girls. Usually, they were greeted and bowed to by an elderly female hostess. More often than not, she wore a brightly colored chima-chogori, the traditional Korean skirt and blouse. These women were the mama-sans, the older sisters to the business girls, the moms to the American GIs, the managers of all operations in the nightclubs for the absentee bar owners. These women wore their black hair formally, knotted high atop their heads and held together with jade pins, and often they wore earplugs, so they wouldn’t go deaf listening to the obnoxious American rock music pulsating out of enormous stereo speakers.

The ville patrol paraded into each nightclub like a pack of young kings. They searched not only the environs of the nightclub but also the areas behind the bar and the back storerooms and particularly the bathrooms, both women’s and men’s. If everything seemed to be in order-there were no fights, no drugs being dealt, nobody passed out-they departed and marched to the next bar. Ville patrol was the job Jill Matthewson had done. For years- probably since the Korean War ended in 1953-the ville patrol had consisted of three policemen. Adding Jill was an innovation. She became the fourth member of the team. Since American women had first been assigned up here to Division, a few of them complained about Korean cops barging into ladies’ rooms and checking the stalls, with them in it! So the Division provost marshal assigned Jill Matthewson to the ville patrol with the understanding that it was her duty to check the female latrines.

Now that she was gone, and with no female replacement in sight, the ville patrol was back to the same old intrusive routine.

So far, Ernie and I had been discreet. The ville patrol hadn’t noticed that we were following. Unprofessional of them but who can blame them? They were bored. They did this every night, and it figured that in the history of the 2nd Infantry Division the ville patrol had probably never been followed before. Not once. We wanted to see how they operated before questioning them. When it became clear that nothing untoward was going on and they were conducting themselves in a professional manner, Ernie and I stopped them outside the Montana Club.

The American MP’s name was Staff Sergeant Weatherwax, Rufus Q., a thin black man with an aquiline nose and eyelids that seemed to be having trouble staying open, like a jazz musician maintaining his cool. We flashed him our CID badges and asked about Jill Matthewson. He knew her but had worked with her only a few nights due to the fact that the ville patrol was a rotating duty.

“But Matthewson didn’t rotate,” I said. “She was on full time.”

“Right. Because she was the only female MP.”

“We heard she was friendly with some of the Korean women,” Ernie said. “Can you give us a hint on that?”

“Can’t be sure.”

“There must be something.”

Then Weatherwax started conversing with the Korean cop and the ROK Army MP. I helped the conversation along by speaking Korean.

They remembered. Down the road, through a narrow passageway known as “the crack,” an area of Tongduchon frequented mostly by black American soldiers, in a joint called the Black Cat Club, Jill had smiled and hugged the female bartender. And once or twice they’d seen her there, in civilian clothes, when she was off duty.

I asked Weatherwax another one: “Did Corporal Matthewson have a boyfriend?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Why not?” Ernie asked.

Weatherwax thought about it for a while. “I’m not sure exactly but it seemed she didn’t like GIs much.”

“But a lot of them were hitting on her.”

“All of them were hitting on her.”

“Including you?”

He grinned. “Hey, I gave it a try once.” As he studied our faces, his grin turned to a frown. “When she didn’t go for it, I left it alone.”

“That makes you a minority of one.”

Weatherwax didn’t respond.

Ernie inhaled sharply and took a step toward Weatherwax. “I remember you now,” Ernie said. “As soon as you smiled. You were in the hallway this morning. At the Provost Marshal’s Office.”

Weatherwax stared at Ernie blankly.

Ernie waved his forefinger at the hooked tip of Weatherwax’s nose.

“Having a good time with your pals, eh Sarge? Hooting and howling about Eighth Army REMFs.”

Weatherwax groaned and rotated his head as if his neck hurt. “If you can’t handle the heat up here in Division,” he said, “then run on back to the rear echelon.”

I stepped between the two men. “Come on, Ernie. We have work to do.”

Ernie allowed me to shove him backwards a few steps but he kept staring at Weatherwax. “We’ll talk, Sarge. Again.”

Staff Sergeant Weatherwax placed his palm atop the hilt of his holstered. 45. “Anytime,” he said. Then he turned and the other two cops fell in behind him and the ville patrol continued their rounds.

“Ain’t no bag, man,” the bartender explained.

She was Korean but wore dark makeup and her jet black hair was frizzed into a towering Afro. Her face was round and her lips full and the smooth features of her soft flesh were nicely accentuated by the hoop earrings she wore. Her body was something to write home about. Plenty of curves and, as she moved about, her red silk blouse caressed each and every contour.

“Ain’t no bag,” had been her response when Ernie asked her if there were ever any problems when white GIs entered the Black Cat Club. She went on to explain that not many “T-shirts” entered here but when they did it was “ain’t no bag,” as long as they treated the brothers with respect.

Maybe she was right but I had my doubts. We were only a week away from end-of-month payday, but the Black Cat Club was still about half full. Mostly with Korean business girls, many of them doing their best to look like “sisters.” A soft red glow illuminated the smoke-filled room. The rest of the customers were black GIs, some of them wearing brightly colored outfits they’d designed themselves in the local Korean tailor shops. Almost to a man, they glanced at us warily. I was happy that we were here early, before the place became crowded and before any of the brothers were fully toked up.

The bartender’s name was Brandy.

Probably not a name that her Confucian ancestors would’ve approved of but a name that worked well in the Black Cat Club. Marvin Gaye wailed as Ernie leaned across the bar and shouted his questions into Brandy’s ear.

She knew Jill Matthewson and she liked her. They’d become friendly one night after there’d been a fight in the Black Cat Club. One of the business girls had been injured in the melee and when the ville patrol arrived, Jill provided first aid for the teenage prostitute. Brandy assisted by bringing towels and water and Corporal Jill Matthewson made sure that the young Korean woman was treated for free at the 2nd Division emergency room rather than being left to her own devices as some of the male MPs wanted to do.

“Jill good people,” Brandy said.

Ever since then, Brandy couldn’t do enough for her.

I asked Brandy if she knew what had happened to Jill Matthewson.

“I don’t know. I go to KNPs, tell them everything I know, but they say they no can find.”

“You went to the Korean National Police?” Ernie asked.

“Yes.”

“They didn’t come to you?”

She shook her head negatively and her hoop earrings jingled.

“And no GIs came and asked you about Jill Matthewson?”

She shook her head again.

Apparently, the 2nd Division investigation hadn’t been as thorough as we’d been led to believe.

Then we asked more about Jill, trying to encourage Brandy to open up. Between bouts of pouring drinks, she did. She said that after the night of the fight, Jill stopped in a few times, off duty, just to talk. She ordered orange Fanta, a soft drink, and when GIs approached and tried to talk to her, she told them she was here to talk to Brandy. When Jill told Brandy that the female barracks on Camp Casey were too noisy and filled with drunken GIs chasing women at all hours of the night, Brandy suggested Jill rent her own hooch.

“She afraid at first,” Brandy told us. “You know, not used to Korea. But I fix up.”

Brandy referred Jill Matthewson to a bokdok-bang, a local real estate office, and within a week, Jill had picked out a hooch on the other side of town. In my open notebook, using hangul script, I jotted down the address as Brandy recited it to me.

After that, Jill hadn’t stopped in the Black Cat Club often, only once or twice a month to bring gifts from the PX. American-made hand lotion for Brandy and chocolate for the business girls.

We asked about a boyfriend. Again, Brandy said that, as far as she knew, Jill didn’t have one. We asked her why not.

“She waiting,” Brandy said. “She no like stinko GI.”

“Stinko” as in drunk.

Once again, I asked the big question. “Where is Jill Matthewson now, Brandy?”

She shook her head sadly. She didn’t know. But she promised if she heard anything, she’d come and find us. She also promised that she’d use her contacts, and ask around town. But she wasn’t optimistic. If Jill Matthewson was still in Tongduchon, Brandy said, she’d know it.

Maybe we’d had a few too many drinks. Maybe I just couldn’t get over the coincidence of Private Marvin Z. Druwood, a military policeman, dying an accidental death-supposedly-only a few days after a fellow MP, Corporal Jill Matthewson, disappeared. Nothing in the Division serious incident report indicated that there’d been any connection between the two of them. Yet Ernie and I had discovered their connection on the first day.

From the ville, Ernie and I walked back to Camp Casey. A huge arch straddled the main gate. Lit up by a row of bare bulbs, it said: 2ND INFANTRY DIVISION, SECOND TO NONE! Above

the guard shack, a smaller sign, written in both English and hangul, said: INFOR-MATION ON NORTH KOREAN INTRUDERS WELCOMED AT THIS GATE.

A stern-faced MP examined our identification carefully. Too carefully. The MPs all knew who we were and what we were here for. Finally, he snorted, tossed the identification back, and waved us through. After a half mile of walking, Ernie and I had just about reached the room we’d been issued at transient billeting. That’s when I suggested we continue on to the obstacle course.

“Are you nuts?” Ernie asked. “The obstacle course in the middle of the night?”

“We’ll drive,” I said.

Ernie’s jeep was parked near the transient billets. He protested for a while, but I told him we might need it for the investigation. He didn’t see how but finally he relented. We jumped in the jeep.

Many of the main buildings of Camp Casey-like the Provost Marshal’s Office and the PX and the Indianhead Snack Bar-were clustered near the front gate. But “the flagpole,” the line of wooden buildings that composes the Division headquarters complex, was three-quarters of a mile in. We drove beyond the main parade ground that stretched dark and empty in the moonlight and beyond the three flagpoles that during the day held the flags of the United Nations, the United States, and the Republic of Korea. Another mile on, we reached the turnoff for the firing ranges and the physical training grounds. Camp Casey is huge. And this in a country that, although lush with fertile river valleys, is also hilly and mountainous. As a result, farmland is precious. Every parcel is measured by the pyong, a unit of measure not much larger than two meters square.

A wooden sign announced the obstacle course: 2ND INFANTRY DIVISION CONFIDENCE COURSE. The military loves euphemisms. Ernie parked the jeep in a gravel parking area. Then he crossed his arms.

“I’ll wait here.”

“Okay.”

He was morose and drunk and pissed off at having to sit out here in the cold night air; there was no point in arguing with him. I pulled out my pocket flashlight and started traipsing through sand. A log stretched across the “confidence course” starting line. Beyond that a well-trodden pathway led through quivering elms. I glanced back at Ernie. He still sat there alone, comfy in the jeep. I shivered in the cold. The snow from this morning clung in small scattered clumps on bushes and grass. The lights of Camp Casey proper flickered far off in the distance. On the hills surrounding us, moonlight illuminated ten-foot-high wooden posts linked by thick strands of barbed wire. The perimeter was patrolled by Korean security guards armed with Korean War vintage M-1 rifles. At the moment I couldn’t see any of them. Would they notice my little flashlight? Probably. Would I be reported? Who knew? I started walking the course.

First there were wooden balance beams to run on and sandbag-lined moats to leap across and wooden walls to climb over. I walked around them. I passed long tubes to crawl through and metal poles to swing from and rubber tires to bounce against. Again I circled the obstacles. I was heading for the tower. The spot where, according to Division PMO, Private Marvin Z. Druwood had voluntarily leapt to his death.

Finally, I reached the tower and looked up. It was about as high as a three-story building. Made of wood. Four long beams on the corners, square wooden platforms placed about ten feet apart until the top one. Like an air-filled layer cake. No ladders. No handholds. Just smooth, slippery wood.

To me, the tower had always been the most frightening part of any obstacle course. Standing here in the moonlight, staring up at the sleek structure, I discovered nothing to disabuse me of that opinion. And just last night, Private Druwood had climbed this tower, stood on the top-who knows for how long-and then leaped off, head first, to his death.

I stuck my flashlight in my pocket, marched to the base of the tower, and started to climb. Resolutely, I stared at the silver moon. Praying to it. Making it my own personal goddess. Trying not to look down. Maybe it was my imagination but the higher I climbed, the more fiercely the wind howled.