Martin Limón - Nightmare Range

Freddy stared at me, his thin brown mustache quivering with rage.

“You’re an idiot, George.”

Ernie passed us on his way to the cashier’s cage, his Falstaff still in hand. “That’s what everybody tells him. Doesn’t do any good, though. He’s still the same.”

The middle-aged bespectacled woman in the cashier’s cage stood up as we entered. I went right to work. The total amount of operating funds for the club was posted on the side of the safe and signed by the Yongsan Compound Director of Personnel and Community Affairs. The total was eight thousand five hundred dollars in US money and fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of Korean won . Any monies above that would be cash receipts and would have to be accounted for with a form called the Daily Cashier’s Record.

The big safe was open, and the money was neatly arranged. With Freddy and the cashier watching us, we counted it quickly. It was all there with the addition of the two hundred seventy-three dollars and eighty-five cents taken in by the bar and the six hundred forty-seven dollars taken in by the kitchen during the just completed lunch hour.

There was only one problem. Instead of fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of won , the Korean operating bank had nineteen hundred seventy-five dollars’ worth of won and the US dollar operating bank was depleted by exactly four hundred seventy-five. It all balanced out, but they had too much Korean money and not enough US money. And the difference was exactly the amount found in the big glass brandy snifter.

“You took up a collection, didn’t you, Freddy?”

“Not me.” Freddy put his hand to his chest and took a step out of the cashier’s cage. “I don’t know nothing about it.”

“Or maybe you didn’t want to know nothing about it.”

“What the employees do with their own money is up to them. I had nothing to do with it.”

Ernie snorted.

Freddy turned and fled back to his office.

Talk about standing up for your staff.

The situation didn’t look too serious. Apparently what had happened was that Miss Pei noticed that the football pool money was missing from the brandy snifter, informed the new assistant manager, and he told the 8th Army chief of staff, who is also head of the Club Council. The chief of staff got on the horn and told the CID to get down here right away. Hot stuff. Money missing from the Army-Navy football pool-some of it his.

Meanwhile, Freddy and the club employees got wind of the situation and for some reason decided to take up a collection in won , the Korean currency; change it into US dollars at the cashier’s cage; and replace the money in the brandy snifter. Why they did this I didn’t know. One reason could have been to keep the heat off the club. Those bar inventories looked too precise to account for normal human activity. Bartenders sometimes spill liquor or open the wrong can of beer, or a customer sends a drink back because it isn’t what he ordered. Inventories shouldn’t come out even down to the last ounce of liquor and the last can of beer. Not real inventories. But when you’re pulling a scam, you might decide to make everything balance perfectly so you don’t attract attention. So you won’t have a couple of nosy CID agents wandering around your club.

Or maybe the employees collected the money for some other reason. I didn’t know. But most important, I couldn’t figure who had stolen the money in the first place.

I looked at the cashier. “Who took the money out of the brandy snifter?”

She stared at the floor. Slowly she began to shake her head. I tried again.

“Where did all this extra won come from? Did you take up a collection?”

Still she said nothing, as if she were tremendously ashamed, and just kept shaking her head.

I stood up. I knew I wasn’t going to get anything here. Ernie stood up and threw his empty beer can into the wastebasket. We walked out into the hallway.

Ernie said, “They’re trying to cover something up.”

I said, “You got that right.”

Two cute young Korean girls, bundled in sweaters and scarves, bounced down the hallway toward the main exit. Lunch hour waitresses, heading home. I stopped them and spoke in Korean.

“Young lady. Who is the head of the union here?”

They both stopped abruptly, breathless and wide-eyed.

“Mr. Kwon. The bar manger.”

I thanked them; they giggled and continued on their way.

Ernie looked after them. “Nice legs.”

“That’s all you could see of them.”

“That was enough.”

We wandered down the red carpeted hallway, took a couple of lefts, and found the bar manager’s office. Mr. Kwon stood up when we walked in. He was a tall man, close to six feet, maybe in his mid-fifties, and he had the scholarly air of someone who works with books and ledgers-not like most of the bartenders I was used to back in the States. He wore slacks and a white shirt with a black tie. His hair was oiled and combed straight back. I tried to imagine him in the white pantaloons and tunic of the ancient Korean with the hair long and knotted on the top. He looked like a Confucian scholar caught in modern times.

His eyes widened slightly. “Yes?”

“It’s about the money you collected,” I said, “to replace what was missing from behind the bar. Why?”

Mr. Kwon sighed and indicated the chairs across the small cubicle. “Have a seat.”

We sat.

“This morning,” he said, “when Miss Pei came to me and told me the money was missing, we decided to take up a collection and replace it.”

“We?”

“The Korean employees here. It is not good to leave something shameful like the disappearance of money unattended to. This is our home. We take care of it.”

“But Miss Pei had already told one of the Americans, the assistant manager.”

“A mistake. We should not have bothered you about this matter.”

“Who took the money?”

Mr. Kwon looked down for a second then up at me. “The money is back now. There is no reason to worry about who took it.”

“Maybe not. But I need to know. Otherwise, I won’t know whether to worry or not.”

“And besides,” Mr. Kwon said, “now that the chief of staff is interested in this matter, you are nervous and if you don’t find out the truth it could be bad for you.”

Bingo. I was hardly admitting it to myself. If this had been the Enlisted Club and the money had been returned and none of the 8th Army honchos had known about it, I wouldn’t have bothered to look any further. As it was, the first sergeant would be breathing fire if we didn’t wrap this thing up.

Ernie jumped in. “Don’t you worry about the chief of staff. You just tell us who stole that damn money.”

Mr. Kwon looked at him steadily. “One of our waitresses stole it. Miss Lim.”

Ernie said, “Why haven’t you turned her in?”

“We will take care of it. Our own way.”

There was something about this situation that was bothering me. If the Korean staff had a bad apple among them who was embarrassing everybody by stealing the Army-Navy football pool money, I could understand their trying to get rid of her quietly in order to save face. But what I couldn’t understand was why they would donate their hard-earned money to cover for her. Their chances of recouping their donations were nil. So why not just admit the thievery, run her out of town, and forget it? Were they that embarrassed that they’d shell out cash to avoid the wrath of the 8th Army chief of staff? I knew I wouldn’t. Of course, years of doing without in East LA had taught me to be somewhat parsimonious. And the Koreans had risen from the ashes of a devastating war less that two decades ago. They were even thriftier than I was. It didn’t make sense.