Martin Limon: Slicky Boys

Soldiers are low on the Confucian hierarchy. Almost as low as prostitutes and actors.

Ernie and I waited. Something was screwy. I didn’t know what, but something.

I noticed her hands. Long and slender with short cropped nails and small calloused knots on the fingertips. She slid an envelope across the table. It was stuffed with a short stack of five-thousand-won notes. About a hundred bucks’ worth. This changed everything. Greed usually does.

Ernie snatched up the money and shoved it deep into the pocket of his nylon jacket.

I looked around. No Americans in the Kayagum Teahouse. Only young Koreans of college age, boys and girls, hunched over steaming cups of ginseng tea. No one to spy on us. And besides, we weren’t taking a bribe. Just working a side job. Nobody could say we were doing anything wrong.

We’d do it. Why not? Easy money.

I picked up the paper flower and slid it into my breast pocket.

When Miss Ku smiled, the radiance of her gemlike face filled the room.

That alone would’ve been payment enough.

The next morning we gave the note to Lance Corporal Cecil Whitcomb.

Looking at Whitcomb, I wondered why a woman as gorgeous as Miss Ku would bother with a guy so unimpressive. His body was bony and pale. Dark brown hair fell over eyes that made him seem as if he hadn’t quite woken up.

Ernie and I towered over him. Ernie is over six feet tall and I’m almost six foot four, and I was about two shades darker than the nearly translucent Cecil Whitcomb. On duty, CID agents have to wear coats and ties, which is what we had on. Cecil was on a work detail. He wore baggy fatigue pants and a grease-smeared woolen shirt.

He was nervous about two cops cornering him outside the unit arms room, but he unfolded the paper flower and read the message, showing no expression on his long, shadow-eyed face. Somehow he had managed to bedazzle Miss Ku, and now he’d turned his back on her. It didn’t make sense. But it wasn’t any of our business. Our job was just to give him the note.

I glanced down at the printing. It was in English-in a careful hand-and said something about a meeting down-town and something about “I haven’t told anyone yet.”

When he finished reading, we waited for him to talk. He didn’t. We decided to hell with him and walked away.

Ernie shook his head. “A couple of goofballs.”

That summed it up. At least it seemed to at the time.

After work, the sun lowered red and angry beyond the hills overlooking the Yellow Sea. I noticed how cold it was. The temperature must’ve dropped ten degrees in the last couple of hours. A flake hit my head. White fluff whistled through the air. Snow would complicate things, but it wouldn’t stop us from running the ville.

Nothing would.

A half hour before the-midnight curfew, we stood at the central intersection in Itaewon, gazing at the sparkling neon through a steady sprinkle of snowflakes. Kimchi cabs slid on the road and people had to grab handholds to climb up even the most gentle incline.

“Another world of shit,” Ernie said.

“Looks like it,” I said.

Ernie and I were discussing which bar to hit next, when an ice-laced gust of Manchurian winter roared up the main drag. An Eskimo trudged through the swirling wind. When he came near, I saw that he wasn’t an Eskimo at all. Another long nose. And then my eyes focused. It was Riley, the Admin Sergeant from the CID Detachment.

He pulled a thick wool scarf off his neck, scanned the street, and spotted us.

“What does he want?” Ernie said.

The first glimmer of worry shot through my brain. “We’re on call tonight, aren’t we?”

“Sure,” Ernie said. “But I left ajjima’s phone number.” He was talking about the landlady of the Nurse, his steady Korean girlfriend. “She would’ve come and found us if we had a call.”

I wasn’t so sure. Not in this blizzard.

Riley stormed up the road, stopped when he reached us, and motioned toward Ernie’s right hand. Ernie handed him the liter of soju, a fierce Korean rice liquor. Riley rubbed the lip of the bottle with the flat of his palm, tilted his head, and glugged down a healthy shot. His Adam’s apple undulated down his skinny neck as the searing liquid fell to his stomach. When he finished, he blew some breath out between his thin lips, thought for a moment, and slugged down another swallow. With red-rimmed eyes, he looked back and forth between us.

“Where have you guys been?”

“Right here,” I said.

“But you’re on call tonight.”

“Ernie left ajjima’s phone number.”

“But she wasn’t there when the First Sergeant called and her daughter answered and she can’t speak English.”

Ernie spoke up. “So the First Sergeant ought to learn Korean,”

Riley looked at Ernie as if he just realized that he should be committed to the looney bin.

“You know the First Sergeant hates Koreans.”

“That isn’t our problem,” Ernie said. “We left a good number.”

Riley let his head loll on his long neck, as if his skull was suddenly too heavy for his shoulder muscles.

“Okay, okay. So you guys have an excuse. What else is new? But when the First Sergeant can’t get through, he calls me in the barracks and orders me out of the rack and sends me down here to find you. At the Nurse’s hooch the daughter draws me a map and says ‘soju’ and pretends like she’s jolting down shots and I wander around the ville until I find you.” Riley spread his hands. “So it’s over now. So forget it. But we got bigger problems. Problems downtown.”

Suddenly I was worried. Not about the First Sergeant or about not being available when we were supposed to be on call-I’d been through that sort of trouble before-but about what had happened downtown.

“What problems?” I asked.

“Dead GI,” Riley said.

Ernie and I waited.

“Well, not a GI exactly.”

One of the business girls standing in the shadows plucked up her courage and sashayed toward us. Riley saw her coming and waved her off. She pouted, a gentle snort erupted from her nose, then she turned and marched back to her comrades waiting in the darkness.

“They found him downtown, near Namdaemun,” Riley said. “Gutted with some sort of big blade. Body in a snowdrift. Blood everywhere.”

He was warming to the subject, but I didn’t need the details. I’d examine those when I arrived at the site. I interrupted him.

“What do you mean, not a GI exactly?”

“I mean he’s not a GI. Not technically.”

Ernie leaned forward. “Then what the fuck is he?”

“He’s British. Member of the United Nations Honor Guard. A Lance Corporal. Name’s Whitcomb,”

Mustard gas slammed into my nostrils.

An old man pushed a cart past us loaded with the still-burning cinders of perforated charcoal briquettes. Things that had burned brightly, heating the flues beneath the floors of Korean homes, but that now were dead. And useless.

It took about five seconds for our brains to start working again. We left Riley standing in the snow and stumbled and slid down the hill, running toward the line of kimchi cabs waiting patiently in the somber night.

After stomping through the snow to the 21 T-Car motor pool, Ernie flashed his badge and managed to get the keys to the jeep from the half-asleep dispatcher. Twenty-one T-Car is a military acronym that actually means 21st Transportation Company (Car), which maybe makes a little more sense.

Despite the frigid air, the motor started right away. Ernie grinned.

“Amazing what a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black will do for an engine.”

The bottle went every month to the head dispatcher who made sure the jeep was properly maintained and always available when Ernie needed it.