Martin Limon - Jade Lady burning

Ernie leaned forward. “You know, Chaplain Sturdivant, with all due respect to your rank, you’re just about the tightest little asshole I’ve ever met.”

The chaplain turned red and stood up. So did Ernie. I grabbed my partner and walked him towards the door. ‘Thanks for your help, sir. We got all the information we need.”

Later that afternoon I slid in the side door of the chapel and found Hurchek alone in his office. He showed me the packet on Watkins and Miss Pak and I leafed through it quickly. There was a tag on it, a routing slip, with some scribbled initials. I asked him about it and he checked his log.

The packet had been signed out a week and a half ago and then returned a couple of days later. The signature was illegible but it had happened after the weekly command briefing. The recipient was someone on the Eighth Army staff.

As he was talking and checking the ledger, I wrote down the names of the people whose packets had been signed out during the last few months, the dates they were signed out, and the initials of the person who signed them out. It took me a while and it was mainly a dodge to make casual conversation while I pumped Hurchek for information. Mostly I got an earful about Chaplain Sturdivant.

He wasn’t married, didn’t go out much, and the only hobby he had, as far as Hurchek knew, was schmoozing with the general staff and raking marriage applicants over the coals.

On the way out, I heard a woman crying. The door to the chaplain’s office was open. Sturdivant, behind his desk, glared at a nervous young GI in soiled fatigues and a young Korean woman. The young woman was bowed as far forward as possible in her chair, her face in her hands, trying to hide her shame.

After work, I changed clothes and went straight to Ginger. She hadn’t seen Kimiko and didn’t have any new information about Pak Ok-suk. What she did have was the phone number of Miss Lim from Honolulu. Ginger called for me.

Maybe it was the chase that morning or the thumbing through all the names of the young Korean women getting ready to marry GIs, but for some reason I was particularly excited. Miss Lim and I met and only had a couple of drinks and went right to the yoguan. This time she washed me and I washed her and everything seemed permissible on the second date.

Outside, the hooting and honking subsided and the city shut down for midnight curfew. She told me about her husband, finally, and her life in the States, and about the person she had been before she got involved with Americans.

“1 was a good student, one of the best, and when I decided to marry an American all my girlfriends shook their heads. ‘You are too good to marry an American,’ they said. ‘We thought you would marry a high-class man. A Korean man.’”

She sat up in bed and lit a cigarette. I made her sit by the open window.

“My mother was ashamed at first but then she thought about our future. Two women, alone in Korea, my father dead for three years. Our money was almost gone. I couldn’t go to the university and, if I didn’t go to the university, I would not be able to find a good Korean husband. So I married an American. So we could get to the States.”

I covered myself with the shaggy comforter.

“What’s his name?”

“My husband?”

“Yeah.”

“Parkington. Enoch Parkington. He sells houses in Cincinnati. After I got my green card, I worked for a little while, saved up some money, and flew to Hawaii.”

“Has he divorced you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“If he does, you’ll lose your visa and have to move back to Korea.”

She shrugged her slender shoulders and exhaled a huge puff of smoke. Moonlight glistened across her black hair.

“No sweat. If he divorces me. I will pay some guy in Hawaii to marry me, so I can keep my green card.”

She stubbed out the cigarette and walked into the small tile-covered bathroom. When she returned, we resumed.

Riley is one of those drunks who is superefficient during the day. His fatigues are neatly pressed, his hair spiffily greased back into an old fifties-style pompadour, and he never stops moving, pivoting his head around, the pencil behind his ear constantly threatening to fly off. Maybe he thinks he’s fooling people. Or maybe the concentration he puts into churning out all those neatly paper-clipped stacks of official correspondence helps him keep his mind off the rancid juices that are rotting his gut.

Back in the barracks he keeps a couple of bottles of Old Overwart in his locker, the cheapest stuff they sell in the Class VI store. He hits the vending machine in the hall for cans of Coke and usually by seven or eight in the evening he’s completely blotto. He has a girlfriend who shows up in the barracks from time to time, and he’s been known to stay up until as late as four o’clock in the morning, chasing her around the showers, trying to lather her down. I don’t know if he ever catches her.

Occasionally Ernie and I take him out, usually on the weekends, and try to get him to eat something, listen to music, have a couple of drinks without getting destroyed.

When we suggest dinner he acts as if we’re abusing him. I think he eats about one greasy cheeseburger a week. And even then he opens up the burger and grimaces as if he were fighting back vomit, and finally wolfs it down as if hoping that, if he’s fast enough, somehow his stomach won’t notice it. Skinny isn’t the word for him. He makes broom handles look robust.

Riley’s from Philly. And he’s always going on and on about the tough old Irish neighborhood he grew up in. He uses all the racist jargon: wops, spooks, spics, and a few others I’ve never heard of. He respects the Italians, though, because they’re rich. But for all his bluster, face to face, he’s about the sweetest guy you’d ever want to meet. When people come to him with a problem, he adopts them as if they were stray puppies, regardless of their race, creed, or national origins.

When I point out the inconsistency in his position he looks at me as if I’m mad. “Of course I don’t like spooks,” he’d say. Then I’d say, “Well, what about that time you helped Ricky Hairston get that compassionate reassignment when his mother got sick?” Riley would shrug. ‘That’s different. Ricky’s a fine human being. You just don’t understand, George.” And then he’d launch into a long, detailed story about how he and his buddies back in Philly used to kick slope ass. Just your typical American abroad.

Riley’s position in the CID Detachment was one of great responsibility. He was the personnel sergeant. As such, he was responsible for not only all the personnel actions for the people assigned to the detachment but he also had the additional duty of running the Admin Section. Which meant he had to log in and distribute all incoming messages and he was responsible for maintaining all classified documents. It was a hell of a job. But with Riley’s manic dose of daytime energy, he somehow handled it. His only help was Miss Kim.

Miss Kim was one of the finer acquisitions the CID had ever made. She was so fine that guys from other offices throughout the thirty- or forty-acre headquarters complex would make a special trip just to say good morning to her. Ernie always found time to sit on her desk and look at her for a while, and usually he offered her a stick of gum, which she gratefully accepted. For some reason she put up with him. She wasn’t so tolerant of Burrows and Slabem although she was always polite and efficient in her official dealings with them.

Maybe she resented Burrows’s birdlike gawking or Slabem’s sly little porcine eyes. I couldn’t tell. I have a policy with gorgeous women. I leave them alone. When business calls for me to deal with them, I don’t flirt, I just get the job done. That’s not to say I’m grim. When the time is appropriate, I smile and say good morning or good evening or whatever. But I don’t harass them. I don’t believe in it. I know I wouldn’t like fending off a bunch of clumsy oafs all day, not on the pay Miss Kim receives. Besides, if a woman likes you, she’ll let you know. No sense pressuring her.