The Wandering Ghost

5

After leaving the Chon residence, Ernie and I wandered aimlessly through the narrow pedestrian lanes of the western edge of Tongduchon. Men on bicycles piled high with layered shelves of dubu-Korean tofu-jangled their bells and shouted for people to make way. Old women pushed carts laden with glimmering green cabbages through crowds of pedestrians; young women carried infants strapped to their backs; toddlers wearing heavy sweaters but no pants gazed up at us and peed innocently by the edge of the road.

After a few minutes, Ernie and I reached a twenty-foot-wide cement bridge that stretched across the East Bean River. A narrow trickle of water ran below down the center of a broad, muddy riverbed. The backs of homes and apartment buildings lined either bank of the Tongdu River: kimchee jars on balconies; laundry hanging from wire lines fluttering in the morning breeze; an occasional housewife leaning out a window to toss the contents of a porcelain pee pot onto the muddy banks below. A few dozen yards beyond the bridge, back in the city proper, a large wooden archway announced the entrance to TONGDUCHON SICHANG. The East Bean River City Market.

Ernie and I entered. A canvas roof held in place by twenty-foot-high bamboo poles sheltered acres of produce stands. Behind the piled vegetables, women in white bandannas waved their arms and shouted at customers. Housewives with plastic baskets hooked over their elbows browsed along the lanes, seemingly ignoring the chanting vendors. Warm air reeking of green onions and garlic and Napa cabbage freshly plucked from verdant earth suffused the entire market.

Ernie breathed deeply and a broad grin spread across his face. We both felt it. The tactile caress of human life, unsullied by advertising and corporate greed. This is what our lives had once been on this planet. What they should be now. Everywhere.

We wound our way past the produce until we reached walls of shimmering glass tanks holding wriggling mackerel, eels, and octopi. Beyond the tanks a cloud of dust advertised the poultry, flapping smelly wings and cackling, within handmade wooden crates. Finally, like an oasis of calm, the dry goods. Hand-embroidered silk comforters, leather gloves, umbrellas, plump cotton-covered cushions, and then the porcelain: china dolls; effigies of Kumbokju, the chubby god of abundance; pee pots; tea cups with no handles; and tiny drinking glasses made for jolting back shots of soju, the fierce Korean rice liquor.

At last, our search was rewarded. We found what we were looking for. Noodle stands. Billowing steam announced their environs and Ernie and I found a tall, round, rickety table made of splintered wood and shouted our order to an elderly proprietress: “Ramyon, tugei”. Spicy noodles, two.

The other customers were all Koreans and they studiously ignored the two Miguks in their midst. They inhaled noodles or chatted with their neighbors in rapid sentences or gazed intently at books, studying for the exam that always seemed to be looming on the Confucian horizon.

A pig-tailed teenage girl with a solid physique and a blank expression brought us chopsticks and spoons and two cups of barley tea. She must’ve been about the same age that Chon Un-suk would’ve been except her parents weren’t rich. Not fortunate enough to attend middle school, she was forced to work. Ernie started to say something to her-probably something flirtatious-but then thought better of it. What was the point? He wasn’t going to be able to change her fate. Ever. As the quiet girl plodded away I thought she probably had a rough life ahead of her. But at least, unlike Chon Un-suk, she had life. Breath. Feeling.

When the noodles came, Ernie lifted a clump with his chopsticks and slurped them into his mouth. Still chewing, he started to talk.

“So far,” he said, “we don’t know shit.”

“That’s not true,” I replied. “We’re making progress.”

Ernie snorted. “Yeah. Like a snail. What we gotta do is beat the crap out of somebody.”

“Anybody in particular?”

Ernie shrugged. “Kuen-chana.” It doesn’t matter.

“Why should we beat somebody up?” I asked. “To gather information? Or just for the hell of it?”

“For both. I wouldn’t want to beat somebody up just for the hell of it.”

Instead of continuing down this road, I recapped what we knew so far, starting with motive.

According to PFC Anne Korvachek, Jill Matthewson’s roommate, Jill had been fed up with the stereo sexual harassment that women at the 2nd Division live with day in and day out, hour by hour. It came from men of low rank and men of high rank. All-pervasive. Complaining about it was about as useful as complaining about the weather. Still, when you don’t like the weather in the place you live, you move.

That’s what Jill Matthewson had done.

But there were other motives. Her friend, the Korean stripper Kim Yong-ai, owed a ton of money. To pay it off she and/or Jill had raised the Korean won equivalent of two thousand dollars. Exactly how they’d done that, we didn’t know. What could either one of them do to earn that kind of money? Crime, of course, came to mind. Had Jill ripped somebody off-or assisted in the ripping-off- and then fled Tongduchon?

Maybe.

The next possible motive was her disgust with the court-martial of the two GIs who’d run down Chon Un-suk. The fact that they’d been tried by American military judges-and not a Korean judge- had enraged the Korean public. But what had enraged Jill most was that, as the first MP on the scene, she’d never been called as a witness and that the two perps had been let off so easily.

Ernie and I resolved to check into the trial more thoroughly.

The final motive was that, according to Madame Chon, Jill had actively participated in the demonstrations held outside the main gate of Camp Casey. That, in itself, was a violation of 8th Army regulations and-I wasn’t sure-might even be a court-martial offense. Had Corporal Jill Matthewson’s politics become so radicalized that she’d decided she’d had enough of the U.S. Army?

By the time I laid all this out for Ernie, he’d finished his noodles, drank down the remaining broth directly from the bowl, and ordered another cup of barley tea from the poker-faced teenage waitress.

“So we have a lot of possible motives for going AWOL,” Ernie said. “All of them might be true; none of them might be true. We don’t know. But what we do know is that if Jill Matthewson is still alive, somebody had to facilitate her escape.”

I whistled softly.

“What?” Ernie asked.

“ ‘Facilitate?’ ”

Ernie grabbed his crotch. “Here. Facilitate this.”

“Okay. I’m just impressed by your vocabulary. Go ahead.”

“Where was I?” Ernie gulped down the last of his barley tea and slammed the bottom of the cup on the rickety wooden table. “Oh yeah. So if somebody facilitated Corporal Matthewson’s unofficial resignation from the Second Infantry Division, they would have had to help her find a place to stay, a source of income, and maybe even a way to avoid the scrutiny of the Korean National Police.”

“That’s a lot to provide,” I said. “A tall, good-looking, Caucasian woman in Korea would be sort of conspicuous.”

“ ‘Conspicuous?’”

“Okay, Ernie. Can it. So what you’re saying is instead of fretting about motives, what we should be working on is who helped her leave, who’s providing her income, who is offering her a safe place to hide.”

“By Jove, I think he’s got it.”

I finished the last of my noodles and the waitress came by and poured us both more barley tea from a large brass urn.

“If I were an American female MP,” I said, “and I wanted to leave the Division, and I knew I needed Korean help, who would I talk to?”

“The people you’d been talking to,” Ernie replied. “Your friends.”

“In this case, the stripper Kim Yong-ai. But she didn’t have much in the way of money.”

“No,” Ernie said, “but she knew how to make it.”

I looked up at Ernie. “You think Jill could be working the Korean nightclub scene?”

“Or something like it,” Ernie said. “An American chick as good-looking as her could make a fortune from Korean businessmen. We need to talk to that Kimchee Entertainment guy again.”

“Pak Tong-i,” I said.

“Right. Maybe he was lying to us. Maybe he knew where they were going. But even if he didn’t lie, he has contacts in the entertainment world. He can provide leads.”

Pulling out wrinkled Korean won notes, I paid the old woman behind the stand for our noodles. Thinking I wasn’t looking, Ernie pulled a couple of dollars worth of MPC, military payment certificates, out of his pocket and palmed them to the young, poker-faced girl who’d waited on us.

I’m not sure but I think she cracked a smile.

The front door to Kimchee Entertainment was padlocked from the outside. Ernie pounded on the door anyway just to make sure, but there was no answer.

“Show-business people don’t keep regular hours,” I said. “We’ll try back later.”

We returned to the spot where we’d left the jeep. Ernie unlocked the chain wrapped around the steering wheel, fired up the engine, and drove us back to Camp Casey. After a thorough identification check at the main gate-and the usual inspection of the back of the vehicle for contraband-we were allowed to pass. Immediately after we rolled away, the MP headed back to the guard shack and switched on his two-way radio.

“They’re keeping tabs on us,” Ernie said.

“Night and day,” I replied.

We cruised through Camp Casey. GIs everywhere. Some marching in military formation, some walking together in small groups. Tanks and self-propelled guns and two-and-a-half-ton trucks and resupply vehicles of all descriptions rumbled past us, everyone moving on compound at a safe, sane fifteen miles per hour. MP jeeps lurked behind hedges, making sure everyone kept within the posted speed limit.

“No little girls are going to be run over here,” Ernie said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Except there are no little girls here.”

The 2nd Infantry Division JAG Office was located deep inside the environs of Camp Casey, facing the enormous quadrangle of the Division parade ground. On the opposite side of the field, the three flags of the United States, the Republic of Korea, and the United Nations loomed above the Division Headquarters building. A lifer NCO had once advised me, “Keep a low profile and stay away from the flagpole.” Ernie and I weren’t following either dictum. Not because we wanted to, but because we had no choice.

Second ID JAG was the usual cluster of single-story Quonset huts painted puke green. Instead of a huge statue of an MP outside, they sported a simple whitewashed wooden sign with

black stenciling: OFFICE OF THE 2ND INFANTRY DIVISION JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL.

Ernie and I walked inside. Our shoes sunk into plush carpet. Behind a low mahogany counter, an attractive Korean secretary smiled up at us.

“Can I help you?” she asked, in expertly pronounced English.

We showed our badges and I explained that I wanted to talk to the legal officer who had worked on the recent case involving the death of Chon Un-suk. The young woman’s smile flickered. It wasn’t much, just a cloud fleeing across the sky on a sunny day, but it told me much. Koreans knew about the case. All Koreans.

Motioning with her open palm, she said, “Please have a seat.” Then she hustled off into the quiet back corridors of the connected Quonset huts.

Ernie and I sat on cushiony leather. A painting hung from the wall. Traditional Yi Dynasty silk screen: Siberian tiger rampant. But more than rampant. Somehow the artist managed to make the tiger’s eyes look not only human, but crazed.

“Nice digs,” Ernie said.

“You should’ve gone to college,” I told him, “then law school. You wouldn’t have to be traipsing around the ville all day.”

Ernie smiled. “I’d have a good-looking secretary like that one.”

“Yeah.”

“And an air-conditioned office, heated in the winter, cooled in the summer.”

“Of course.”

Ernie thought about it. Finally, he seemed to come to a decision. “Nah. Wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“I’d get my secretary pregnant and punch the presiding judge on the Chon Un-suk court-martial right in the nose.”

“You probably would.” I shook my head. “All that schooling gone to waste.”

“Exactly.”

A few minutes later the secretary returned and beckoned for us to follow. She ushered us down the long corridor, past well-appointed offices with military officers behind teak desks and their Korean civilian assistants in dark suits and ties. We turned right and then left and at the end of the hallway, we were ushered into the office of Lieutenant Colonel Wilbur M. Proffert. The secretary hurried out of the office as Ernie and I saluted the man.

His face was narrow and his glasses were polished so brightly that they shone like cheap jewelry. After chewing us out for a while about arriving without an appointment, Colonel Proffert checked our identification thoroughly and jotted down each of our names and badge numbers. He cleaned his glasses and told us to be seated. Then he shoved across his desk a copy of the trial transcript of the court-martial involving the death of Chon Un-suk. He told us that beyond what was included there, the 2nd Infantry JAG Office had no further comment.

Ernie thumbed through the transcript, snorted, and handed it to me. “Were they speeding, sir?” he asked.

“What?”

“The two GIs driving the deuce-and-a-half. Were they exceeding the speed limit just prior to plowing into Chon Un-suk?”

Colonel Proffert rose from behind his desk and placed his hands on narrow hips. He was a jogger, that was for sure. Officers have to stay thin in today’s army if they expect to be competitive for promotion. Especially staff officers.

He wagged his forefinger at Ernie’s nose.

“Whether those two young men were speeding or not,” Colonel Proffert said, “has no bearing on this case.”

It was my turn to be surprised. “No bearing?”

“None,” Colonel Proffert repeated. “Driving conditions in Korea are atrocious. The roads are narrow, jammed with pedestrians, choked with bicycles and pushcarts and Korean drivers who don’t know even the rudiments of safe motoring. On top of that the weather is treacherous, there’s little de-icing equipment or anything as fancy as snow plows and despite all this we expect young soldiers to go out in the middle of night, in the middle of howling storms, and perform their duty and drive where and when their military missions require them to. Under these stresses, can we punish them for driving ten or fifteen miles over the speed limit?”

He waited for our answer. I gave him one.

“When there’s thirty school girls standing on the side of the road, yes.”

He shook his head vehemently.

“You’re missing the big picture.” Dramatically, he pointed toward the north. “We have seven hundred thousand bloodthirsty communist soldiers less than twenty miles north of here. Every one of them just waiting for a chance to push south past the Second United States Infantry Division and invade Korea. What do you think would happen to those middle-school girls then? Rape. Pillage. Murder. That’s the big picture we’re looking at, and we can’t have GIs driving out into ungodly dangerous road conditions while at the same time having to look back over their shoulders, wondering if Division JAG is going to nail them for violating some petty traffic regulations. We can’t do it. Our job, first and foremost, is to protect freedom here in Korea.” He wagged his forefinger once again, more forcefully this time. “And don’t you ever forget it.”

I tossed the trial transcript onto his desk.

“Thanks for your time, sir.”

I grabbed Ernie by the elbow but he wouldn’t budge. He kept staring at Colonel Proffert.

“So the facts of the case don’t matter?” Ernie asked.

I tugged on his arm. Ernie shrugged me off.

“I didn’t say that,” Proffert answered mildly.

“The hell you didn’t. That’s exactly what you said.”

Colonel Proffert’s face started to turn red. “Don’t you come in here and lecture me, young man. Eighth Army CID or not.”

“No point in lecturing you,” Ernie replied. “Because you know what you did.”

Colonel Proffert’s voice lowered. “And what exactly,” he said, “was that?”

“You let two GIs get away with murder.”

Colonel Proffert sputtered but before he could reply, Ernie plowed on.

“And what’s more important, you sent a message to every GI in Division that no matter how recklessly they drive, no matter who they kill or maim, the Division will protect them from having to take responsibility for their actions.”

“Out!” Colonel Proffert roared. “Get out of my office!”

I practically lifted Ernie off of his feet and dragged him out of the office and down the hallway. JAG officers in their neatly pressed fatigues were standing in front of their cubicles now, watching Ernie and me struggle down the corridor, listening to Colonel Proffert cursing behind us.

As she held the front door open for us, the cute Korean secretary stared at the floor. Very modest. Very Confucian. I dragged a struggling Ernie Bascom out of the JAG Office and onto the gravel-covered parking lot. We stood by the jeep until Ernie’s breathing became regular once more.

This time I took the wheel. As we drove away, Ernie sat in the back seat of the jeep, arms crossed, fuming.

Late that afternoon, when Ernie pounded on the door to Kimchee Entertainment, we knew it was futile because the hasp was still padlocked from the outside. He did it out of frustration and to attract attention. A ploy that worked. Within seconds another resident of the two-story brick building emerged from her lair and began sweeping the blacktop in front of the building with a short-handled broom.

I greeted her in Korean and asked her if she knew where Mr. Pak Tong-i, the owner of Kimchee Entertainment, had gone.

“Moolah,” she told me. I don’t know. “Haru cheingil anwasso.” He hasn’t been in all day.

I asked her if he did this often and she told me that he’s in show business and therefore very unreliable and she never knows when he’s going to show up and start making noise. I asked her what kind of noise and she told me that he often plays the radio too loud or has some musician banging away on drums or other foreign instruments. When she couldn’t give us his home phone number or his address, we thanked her and went on our way.

About a half block down the road, Ernie asked me, “Did you see him?”

“See who?”

“The chubby guy. Korean. Bald head. He bought a newspaper at the stand next door and stood around pretending to read all through your conversation.”

“He wasn’t Pak Tong-i, was he?”

“No. Too husky for that little twerp. Just a big guy in pajamas.”

Koreans, especially middle-aged men, think nothing of parading around their neighborhoods in pajama bottoms and slippers.

“What makes you think he was paying attention to us?”

“Maybe he wasn’t. I just wondered if you noticed.”

“I didn’t. Where did he go?”

“Back to the alleyway on the far side of Kimchee Entertainment.”

“Probably just a local resident.”

“Probably.”

The purple Korean night started its slow descent upon the city of Tongduchon. Bulbs burst into brightness; neon flickered to life. Clumps of uniformed students pushed past us, toting backpacks bursting with books. Farmers rolled empty carts back toward the countryside. Without really planning to, Ernie and I wandered closer to the bar district.

“We’ve talked to just about everyone who knew Jill Matthewson,” Ernie said. “So now it’s time to stop talking and do something.”

I thought about that for a minute. A girl in a dirt-floored mokkolli house, an establishment that sells warm rice beer to cab drivers and construction workers, gazed out at us in mute awe. Despite all the American movies and television programs they see, most Koreans still think of Americans as being odd. Almost nonhuman. In all her life, she’d probably never spoken to a foreigner. For a moment, I was tempted to go in and talk to her. Let her know that although we looked strange, Ernie and I were still human. Sort of.

And then I thought of Corporal Jill Matthewson on her first night of ville patrol. How strange the ville must’ve seemed. How awful. Wailing rock music, drunken GIs, desperate business girls, persistent old farm women selling packages of warm chestnuts to overly made-up cocktail waitresses. She wasn’t in Terre Haute anymore. But she must’ve seen humanity too. People who were fundamentally the same as her. That’s why she’d become friends-or at least we thought she’d become friends-with the stripper, Kim Yong-ai. That’s why, together, they’d disappeared.

But had she become friends with anyone else?

That’s when it hit me. Brandy. The bartender in the Black Cat Club. Of course. There must be more she knew, more facts that we could pull out of that sharp brain beneath that bouffant Afro hairdo.

I told Ernie. He liked it. Any nightclub in a storm. Besides we had an entire evening to kill until the midnight to four a.m. curfew, which was when I wanted to try something else I’d been planning.

Had I proposed the plan to Ernie yet? No need. It was crazy and bold and reckless, and that’s why I had no doubt he’d love it.

Brandy wasn’t in. We checked with the old mama-san behind the bar and she said Brandy wasn’t feeling well. I asked for her address but the woman claimed she didn’t know it. How then, did she know that Brandy was sick? A boy arrived with a note, she claimed. I pressed but the old woman wasn’t budging. Can’t say that I blamed her. In a joint like the Black Cat Club a woman’s privacy is important. A drunken GI would be likely to barge in on her at any hour of the night or day if they gave out her address to anyone who asked.

I considered flashing my badge and threatening the old woman with calling in the Korean National Police if she didn’t cooperate. But that wouldn’t ingratiate me to Brandy and it was her goodwill and cooperation that I needed. Besides, a few of the soul brothers were beginning to mumble amongst themselves, upset that a couple of “T-shirts” were monopolizing the women at the bar.

Ernie grinned at them and flashed the thumbs-up sign. He could either defuse a situation with his charm or punch somebody and end up causing a riot, depending upon his mood. Rather than wait for that decision, I thanked the old woman and asked her to please tell Brandy that we’d been in.

She agreed and Ernie and I strolled out of the Black Cat Club.

Outside, I told Ernie what I wanted to do tonight. Ernie not only agreed but he laughed and rubbed his hands in glee. We decided to bypass the neon lights of TDC and return to Camp Casey. There were three reasons. One, we wanted to have some Miguk chow: meat and potatoes. Two, we needed to stay relatively sober. And three, we wanted to change out of these suits and ties and into clothing more appropriate for the task I had in mind.

Ernie kept running ideas and scenarios by me, thrilled to have something to do other than just walk around interviewing people. His enjoyment was further enhanced by the fact that what we planned to do tonight after the midnight curfew was, and still is, completely illegal.

On Camp Casey, we stopped at the Gateway Club, less than a hundred yards in from the main gate, eighty yards past the Provost Marshal’s Office and the twenty-foot-tall statue of the MP. The Gateway was theoretically an all-ranks club but mostly young enlisted men used it. The officers had restaurant/bar establishments of their own, as did the Senior NCOs. Ernie and I sat at the bar, sipping on beers, studying the Gateway Club menu in the dim glow of an overhead blue light. Behind us, a Korean go-go girl gyrated wildly on a raised stage. GIs cheered. Rock music blared from a jukebox. Both Ernie and I felt completely at home.

The plastic-coated menu bore the Indianhead 2nd Division patch on the front. The numbered list inside featured the usual adventurous fare one found in military dining facilities: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, sirloin steak, fried chicken, and a couple of exotic foreign dishes like onion rings and coleslaw.

The dining room was operating, the cocktail lounge was operating, but the main ballroom of the Gateway Club was still closed. Later this evening a rock band would start and the ballroom would be packed with young GIs-and the twenty to thirty business girls whom the club manager was authorized to escort on post. Right now, the big room was dark and empty except for one man sitting alone at a table on the far edge, hunched over a plate of food. I recognized him. Sergeant First Class Otis, who’d greeted us upon our arrival in 2nd Division and the NCO who’d been leading the physical training formation this morning, the formation that had been so anxious to express their feelings-in a knuckle sandwich kind of way-toward Ernie and me.

I told Ernie I’d be back, rose from my barstool, and sauntered toward Sergeant First Class Otis.

“I don’t want no trouble,” was the first thing he said to me when he looked up. He was eating fried chicken with rice and gravy. A glass of iced tea stood next to his plate.

“No trouble.” I pulled a chair out from the table and sat down across from him. “Thanks for saving our butts during the run this morning.”

He shook his head and shoveled a spoonful of rice into his mouth. “I ain’t your friend,” he said.

I let that sit for a while. Then I said, “So why’d you stop your MPs from beating the crap out of us?”

“Nothing to do with you,” he said. “When I’m in charge of a formation, it don’t turn into a mob.”

I appreciated that. Whatever those MPs did, right or wrong, would reflect on his ability to lead. His ability to control men in formation. NCOs, most of them, take their leadership role seriously. Obviously, Sergeant Otis did.

“Weatherwax had it coming,” I said. Ernie had punched him for following us through the ville.

Otis shrugged. “You say.”

A middle-aged Korean waitress approached and poured more iced tea into Otis’s glass from a plastic pitcher. He knew her, they seemed relaxed with one another, and Otis probably tipped well to convince her to serve him dinner some twenty yards from the boisterous young GIs in the well-lit dining room. I figured Otis was working the desk tonight. That’s why he was wearing a freshly pressed set of fatigues and why he was having chow at the Gateway Club, the eating establishment nearest to the Provost Marshal’s Office. The waitress gazed at me quizzically, feeling the tension between me and Otis. When she asked if I wanted anything I told her no. She left. I waited for her footsteps to fade.

“You know more than you’re telling me,” I said.

Otis didn’t even look up from his plate. “Of course I know more than I’m telling you. What the hell you think?”

“Why aren’t you telling me?”

“First, you didn’t ask. Second, you a rear echelon motherfucker just up here to make Division look bad.”

I paused again, letting the silence grow. It wasn’t silence exactly. We could still hear the rock music from the cocktail lounge and the clang and buzz of people talking and eating and laughing in the dining room. But for Camp Casey, a place where men and heavy equipment were always on the go, it came as close to silence as we were going to get.

“Druwood,” I said. “You know what they’re saying about him isn’t right.”

Otis picked up a drumstick and chomped into it, chewing resolutely.

“Private Druwood didn’t die out at the obstacle course,” I continued. “Crumbled cement was still lodged in his skull. I saw it. No way he could’ve jumped from that tower. No cement around there. Somebody dumped him at the obstacle course. Said he jumped from the tower. Said it was an accident.”

Otis stopped chewing.

“He was an MP,” I continued. “White. Young. Not black and old and wise like you. But he was your responsibility, Sergeant Otis. Your soldier. You were supposed to look out for him.”

Otis swallowed the last of the chicken, as if it were something dryer than sand. He stared at his plate, at the half-eaten remains of the bird and the gravy smeared through glutinous Korean rice. Slowly, he looked up at me.

“He wasn’t in my platoon.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.

Otis stared so steadily that for a minute I thought he was going to come across the table at me. I wouldn’t use my pistol, I knew that, but I might pick up a chair to hold him off. Although I was taller, and probably heavier, he was a strong man, the thick muscles of his shoulders bulging through the material of his green fatigues. I held his gaze. If we had to fight, I’d fight.

Instead, his lips started to move.

“Bufford,” he said. It was almost a rasp, as if his vocal chords had suddenly been stricken by laryngitis.

“What?”

“Bufford,” he repeated. “Maybe he drove Druwood on compound, maybe he didn’t. But he was behind it. Arranged it so it would look like a training accident.”

“Druwood was killed off base?” I asked.

“Maybe not killed. Maybe he killed himself.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“No. But the excuse to bring him on base was that the Division suicide rate is too high. Had to make it look like an accident.”

“Bufford didn’t want Division to look bad.”

“Not him,” Otis said. “Somebody higher.”

“How high?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I listen,” he said. “And I think.”

“So they don’t confide in you?”

“I don’t know which ‘they’ you’re talking about but no, they don’t.”

“Where was Druwood killed?”

“You don’t know that he was killed.”

“Okay. Where was his body found?”

“In the ville, that’s what I heard. Where the black-market honchos operate. An off-limits area.”

“Which one?” In Seoul there are numerous areas designated as off-limits to United States Forces personnel. Sometimes they’re placed off-limits for health reasons because of poor sanitation or disease. Sometimes because there’d been altercations between GIs and the local populace and 8th Army didn’t want a repeat. I assumed the same was true in Tongduchon, that there were many off limits areas. I was wrong.

“There’s only one off limits area,” Sergeant Otis said. “The Turkey Farm.”

I’d heard of it. Almost as if it were a footnote in history. The Turkey Farm was an old brothel district that during and after the Korean War had been infamous. Infamous for the number of desperate business girls the area housed, for the amount of venereal disease that was spread, and for something neither the U.S. military nor the Korean government liked to talk about: child prostitution.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“There’s a map at the PMO. In the MP briefing room. Every nightclub and bar and chophouse is listed.”

“How do you know that it was Bufford who had Private Druwood’s body driven back on post?”

“I don’t. Not for sure. But he does everything else.”

“Everything else? Like what?”

A group of MPs stormed into the Gateway Club. A couple of them glanced our way.

“You ruined my dinner,” Otis told me. “It’s time for you to leave.”

I knew he meant it. Still, I had one more question for him. “Matthewson. Where is she?”

“Don’t know.”

“Why’d she leave?”

“You would too if you had to put up with the shit she put up with.”

“Like what?”

“What do you think?”

I waited, my arms crossed, knowing that he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with an 8th Army CID agent sitting across from him at his table. He sipped on his iced tea and then set the glass down, hard.

“She was white pussy,” he told me. “Everybody was after her, from the top honchos to the bottom maggot E-1 privates. And then she gets involved in that traffic case, the one where the middle school girl was run over.”

“Chon Un-suk.”

“Yeah. That one. Matthewson couldn’t handle the pressure. She left.”

“What pressure?”

Otis shrugged. “The usual pressure.”

“The pressure not to make Division look bad.”

He shrugged again.

“You know this for a fact?” I asked.

“I don’t know nothing for a fact. You want testimony under oath, you ain’t getting it from me.”

“Why not?”

Sergeant First Class Otis lay down his fork and stared at me as if I were the biggest idiot in the world.

“For one thing,” he said, “because I finish my twenty in less than two years. And for another, I’ve slept out in the snow and the rain on field maneuvers and put up with white officers and drunken GIs and their slut girlfriends for so many years that I’m not going to jeopardize my retirement check just so Eighth Army can feel good about itself for five minutes. An Eighth Army that been ignoring Division for all the three tours I spent up here. An Eighth Army that let the Division commander run his area of operations as if he were the king of the world and all the rest of us be slaves, and nobody get out of line because if they do they be subject to humiliation and the loss of everything they been working for.”

Otis’s right hand clutched his butter knife; his knuckles were pale brown, heading to white. Also, his language was losing its precise military cadence, returning to the rhythms of the streets.

“Now get the hell outta here,” he told me. “Build your own case and leave me the hell alone.”

I figured that was enough. For the moment. If Ernie and I ever broke this case wide open-if it turned out as bad as I was afraid it might-we’d corner Otis, read him his rights, and force him to make a formal statement under oath. But I wasn’t ready for that yet.

I rose to my feet, snapped Sergeant First Class Otis a two-fingered salute, and left.

The more Ernie and I talked about it, the angrier we became.

Sure, we knew Division PMO was dragging their feet. We’d been expecting that since we came up here. But Mr. Fred Bufford- with the probable collusion of his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Alcott-had withheld information that bordered on being a criminal obstruction of justice. To wit, the involvement of Corporal Jill Matthewson in the case of the accidental death of Chon Un-suk and the true nature of the facts concerning the death of Private Marvin Druwood.

When we walked through PMO’s reception area, the swing-shift desk sergeant looked surprised. We veered to the right, before he could say anything, and entered the MP briefing room. Behind us a phone jingled and a dial turned. The MP briefing room was a small auditorium with a narrow stage in front. Overhead lights shone down on rows of metal chairs, providing dim light. The map Sergeant Otis had told me about hung from the back wall, next to posters warning of the danger of venereal disease. An overhead bulb shone directly on the map. Bright colors formed an intricate mosaic that seemed to pulsate.

It was an ingenious design. Right away, just by the style, I guessed that a Korean graphic artist had created it. It looked Asian. That is, not precisely realistic, not precisely to scale. Not scientific. Everything about it was slightly off kilter. But in many ways it conveyed the confusion and teeming life of Tongduchon better than any machine-manufactured topographical map could.

The background was a polished cherrywood panel of about four feet by four feet, hanging from thick brass hooks. Etched onto the right side of the panel was the main gate of Camp Casey fronted by the north-south running Main Supply Route. On the left was the East Bean River with various of the vehicle and pedestrian bridges depicted, some of which Ernie and I had already walked over. Beyond that, farmland. In the center, between the main gate of Camp Casey and the sinuous flow of the East Bean River, stood the bar district of Tongduchon.

The streets were drawn with black lines while the buildings of Tongduchon were moveable, held by thumbtacks, and depicted by various colored symbols. Gold stars for nightclubs, red hearts for brothels, circular targets for suspected black-market operations. The stores, factories, living establishments, and markets were just various covered rectangles with Chinese symbols painted onto them. The MPs couldn’t understand those symbols of course, but they did understand where the bars and the brothels and the black-market operations were. That’s where the GIs hung out and that’s all the MPs really needed to know. Ernie stepped back to better study the huge mosaic.

“It’s breathing,” he said.

“I’ll say.”

The teeming jumble of life in Tongduchon was somehow conveyed in the glowing map. We pointed out details to one another: the Tongduchon City Market; the street where Pak Tong-i’s office could be found; the location of the Chon family residence; the bar district; the Black Cat Club; the Silver Dragon Nightclub; the yoguan where we’d spent the night with Ok-hi and Jeannie. And finally, surrounded by red dashes, the off-limits area known as the Turkey Farm.

“It’s right in the middle of the ville,” Ernie said.

He was right. Although we hadn’t seen it in all our sojourns through TDC, the Turkey Farm sat behind the main row of bars, the row that held the Oasis Club and the Montana Club and the Silver Dragon Club-but while we walked those streets we hadn’t even realized it was there. Why? Because you couldn’t see it from the main drag and who would walk down those dark alleys to look? To the east of the Turkey Farm sat the Black Cat Club. Then I spotted something that surprised me. According to the map, right in the center of the off-limits area, the artist had deftly inserted a black inverted swastika. I pointed it out to Ernie.

“What the hell’s that?” Ernie asked. “A Nazi meeting hall?”

“No. That’s not a swastika but something more ancient. The symbol for a Buddhist temple.”

“A Buddhist temple in the center of the Turkey Farm?”

“Yeah. Go figure.”

Ernie searched the legend below the map. “That symbol’s not here.”

“That’s why the artist must be Korean. There are a few other symbols on this map that American MPs probably wouldn’t recognize. Look here.”

I pointed at the symbol for myo, a Confucian shrine. I’d remembered it from my Korean language class because it looked like two capital Ls turned upside down with their bases pointed outwards. Then, about two-thirds of the way up the spines of the Ls, a horizontal line slashed across them. The symbol looked to me like one of those tall horsehair hats Chinese priests wear when conducting Confucian ceremonies. And that’s why I could remember it.

Ernie stared at me quizzically. “A Confucian shrine,” he said, “in the center of the Turkey Farm? Not too far from a Buddhist temple?”

“Apparently,” I told him, “there’s more to this Turkey Farm place than GIs have been saying.”

The double door of the briefing room swung open with a crash.

“Freeze!” someone shouted.

Tall, gawky Warrant Officer One Fred Bufford stood in the doorway, his knees flexed, both arms held straight out in front of his body. Clasped firmly in his white-knuckled fists, he held an army-issue. 45 automatic pistol. The dark pit of the barrel was pointing right at us.

Ernie started to laugh.