Martin Limón - Nightmare Range

An oil lamp guttered in the small office adjacent to Haggler Lee’s warehouse.

Although he might’ve been the richest man in Itaewon, Haggler Lee had a habit of keeping expenses to a minimum. Electricity was seldom used in his place of business. He wore traditional Korean clothing, a green silk vest and white cotton pantaloons, and didn’t believe in wasting money on haircuts. Instead he kept his black hair tied above his head and knotted with a short length of blue rope. We sat on the oil-papered floor in his office.

“Moretti,” Haggler Lee said. “Nineteen fifty-four. Only one person I know of was in business back in those days.”

“Who?” I asked.

Ernie sipped on the barley tea that Haggler Lee’s servant had served shortly after we arrived. The entire room smelled of incense. A stick glowed softly in a bronze burner.

Haggler Lee rubbed his smooth chin. “Why would two famous CID agents be interested in a case so old?”

“What do you care?” Ernie said. “Your operation is safe. We’re not after you.”

“Thanks to my ancestors watching in Heaven,” Lee replied. “Still, nineteen fifty-four. Unusual, is it not?”

“Unusual,” I said. “Who was in operation then?”

“The black market was small in nineteen fifty-four. Koreans were so poor they could afford few of your imported American goods.”

“Who is it, Lee?” Ernie asked.

“Whiskey Mary.”

“Whiskey Mary? What’s her Korean name?” I asked.

“I don’t know. She’s been called Whiskey Mary so long even we Koreans call her that.”

“Where can we find her?”

“Last I heard she worked at a yoguan in Munsan-ni. An unsavory place.”

Haggler Lee gave us the name of the inn, the Kaesong Yoguan. Ernie finished his tea and we left.

Munsan is a small city about thirty kilometers north of Seoul, near the DMZ. Ernie and I cruised through the narrow main road. This was Sunday morning so Korean soldiers were everywhere, elbowing their way past farmers pushing carts full of turnips and grandmothers balancing pans full of laundry atop their heads.

The Dragon Eye Yoguan sat in an alley just off the main drag. It was a ramshackle building, two stories high, made of old varnished slats of wood. When Ernie and I slipped off our shoes and stepped up into the musty foyer, a woman wearing a long wool skirt and wool sweater emerged from a sliding, oil-papered door.

“ Andei, ” she said. No good. “ Migun yogi ei, andei. ” American soldiers aren’t allowed here.

Ernie didn’t understand and I didn’t bother to translate. It was understandable that the woman wouldn’t want American GIs staying here. If her main clientele were Korean soldiers, that would be asking for trouble.

I ignored her remark, showed her my badge, and spoke to her in Korean. When I mentioned the name Whiskey Mary, her eyes widened.

“No trouble,” I said quickly. “We just want to ask her some questions.”

Shaking her head, the woman led us down a long narrow hallway. Sliding doors were spaced along the walls every few feet, some of them open, showing rumpled blankets and porcelain pots inside. The aroma of charcoal gas and urine filled the hallway. Occasionally Ernie and I had to duck to avoid bumping our heads on overhanging support beams.

Out back was a muddy courtyard with a few skinny chickens behind wire and two neatly spaced outdoor latrines made of cement blocks. The woman motioned with her open palm, turned, and left.

Ernie and I crossed the courtyard.

Whiskey Mary was bent over with her back to us, kneeling in one of the latrines, scrubbing with hot soapy water and a wire brush.

“Whiskey Mary,” I said.

She froze in mid-stroke.

When she turned around, I could see two teeth missing up front, the others blackened around the edges. Wiry gray hair, face full of wrinkles and a suspicious squint to her eyes.

“Why?” she asked.

“Moretti,” I said.

She squeezed the wire brush, leaned on it, and began to cry.

In wine is truth, the Romans used to say, and maybe that’s what happened to Ernie and me. When we returned to Itaewon that night we sat at the bar in the Seven Club and rehashed what we knew about the Moretti case.

Whiskey Mary had owned her own bar and run a successful black market operation out back. She wasn’t worried about arrest because the US Army authorities had no jurisdiction over her and the Korean National Police were being paid off. She even showed us photographs of herself in those days. Sitting with the girls who were hostesses in Whiskey Mary’s, all of them with new hairdos and makeup and wearing expensive silk chima-chogori . GIs brought in the PX-bought whiskey and cigarettes and instant coffee and Whiskey Mary turned it into cash and other favors from her hostesses. A sweet deal.

Until Moretti was killed.

He was one of her best customers. And went so far as to hustle other GIs, especially those new in-country, to use their ration cards to make a little money. And if they were worried about being caught by the MPs, Moretti would handle all transactions for them, taking half the profit for his efforts.

He was a good boy, Whiskey Mary told us. Most of the money he made, he mailed home by US Postal money order to his mother in Newark, New Jersey.

Then someone stabbed him to death.

Neither the KNPs nor the MPs had a clue as to who had murdered Moretti. But his body had been found in the middle of the street in Itaewon, apparently attacked just after curfew at four in the morning, stabbed in the solar plexus and left to bleed to death on a muddy road.

A senator from New Jersey raised hell and the Syngman Rhee government was under pressure to do something to insure the safety of American GIs. If the GIs left Korea, they’d take military and foreign aid money with them. The Rhee government couldn’t tolerate anything like that so the pressure to charge someone with Moretti’s murder was enormous.

Whiskey Mary was chosen.

“They wanted to take over my operation,” she said. Her English was heavily accented but still understandable after all these years. “Somebody up high.” She pointed toward Heaven. “In the government. The Americans were happy and the Korean big shots stole my business at the same time.”

The charge was murder. She was arrested, tried, and sentenced to five years.

“Why only five years?” Ernie asked.

Whiskey Mary answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Because I wasn’t guilty.”

“But Eighth Army kept the case open,” I said.

She waved her hand in the air. “They never happy with what Korean police do. American CID man, he know I no kill Moretti.”

“How would he know that?”

She smiled her toothless smile. “Because he sleep with me that night.”

When I asked her who did kill Moretti, she didn’t know.

“ Mori Di , he knew everybody,” she said. “He have many friends and many girlfriends. I don’t know why anybody want kill him.”

When we finished our questions, I handed Whiskey Mary a few dollars. She stuffed them in her brassiere.

Probably an old habit.

The Seven Club’s new all-Korean Country Western band clanged to life. Ernie and I sat through the yodeling and the twanging guitars patiently, both of us thinking about what we’d learned. When the Korean cowboys finished their first set, Ernie swiveled on his barstool and faced me.

“We both know who we have to talk to.”

“We do?”

“Sure. We’ve been looking at this case in the wrong way from the beginning. All that kut mumbo jumbo bent our heads the wrong way.”

I thought about that for a moment. Finally, I said, “I see what you mean.”