Martin Limon - Jade Lady burning

The way she reacted to Ernie added a somewhat demented corollary to my theory. He didn’t speak to her much at all, he didn’t touch her, and he didn’t pressure her in any way. He just stared at her, with pure unadulterated appreciation. Miss Kim seemed to come alive under his attention, like one of those plants that blooms when you think good thoughts at it. Ernie’s version of charm.

Riley treated her as a colleague. A full partner in the mission they had to accomplish. During working hours he didn’t seem to notice her attractiveness, only her mind. When we mentioned to him that he was lucky to be working with such a fox all day, he nodded agreement. But it was an intellectual acknowledgement, not visceral. A woman just didn’t have all that much appeal to him if he couldn’t lather her down and chase her around the latrine.

‘Top’s been looking for you guys,” Riley said, as we sauntered in.

“Isn’t he always?”

“It’s about this KPA bullshit again.”

Ernie wandered over to Miss Kim’s desk. She stopped typing and looked up, smiling. He sat down on the edge of the desk and looked at her. Then he offered her a breath mint. She accepted it, smiled, and turned back to her typing. Ernie just stayed there, staring at her. Sometimes I wondered if they weren’t autistic.

Riley shuffled through some papers and handed me one.

“It’s one of those guys from KPA. He put in this written complaint and now he wants to talk to the first sergeant. Top wants you and Ernie to sit in.”

“He’s here now?”

“Yeah. His appointment’s in ten minutes.”

I sat down to read the complaint. The Korean Procurement Agency is the civilian arm of the Eighth Army that uses American taxpayer money to buy local goods and services. Stuff that we were not going to go to the trouble of shipping over. Anything from a head of lettuce to a new command bunker extending three stories down into the ground. It was a huge operation with millions of dollars’ worth of contracts flowing through it every year. Most of the monitoring was done by accountants sent out by the Army Auditing Agency, but corruption and influence peddling was not always reflected in the credit and debit ledgers.

The guy who was making the complaint was an American, of course, hired from the States, and judging from his manic drive to get everything straightened out, he probably was on his first tour in the Far East.

I figured Top mainly wanted Ernie and me in the office as witnesses, so the guy wouldn’t make any accusations against him later. Most of this sort of work was done by Burrows and Slabem, but they were out at the Yongsan District Police Headquarters, monitoring the ROK activities on the Pak Ok-suk murder case. They were the experts at handling this KPA kind of situation. Not me and Ernie.

I read over the complaint. Routine. Korean businessmen were turning in bids on U.S. government contracts. Okay so far. But the Americans required three bids from three different companies on each contract. The businessman making the bid, of course, already had a connection with one of the Korean career bureaucrats within KPA so he knew exactly how much money was budgeted for a particular project. What he did was get three different stationery letterheads and put in three bids, ostensibly from different companies, and each signed by a different executive, with all three bids hovering right at or just below the budgeted appropriation.

The bidding was open to competitors, but through the network of Korean power brokers they would be warned off if they seriously tried to butt in. It was a syndicate, in effect, milking the American government. Nothing new. They’d been doing it for years.

And the work they did was not shoddy. It was efficiently produced and, for the most part, brought in on time. That’s why the U.S. Army lived with the system. It got results. Of course, they still went through the charade of all the regulatory purchasing requirements. The Koreans didn’t mind this. They liked paperwork: It produced jobs. And they understood the need to save face. Over the years there’d been a number of attempts to reform the system but in the end the Koreans had always patted the petulant American reformer on the head as he headed back to the States.

The American who was complaining this time only knew that someone was turning in three bids under three different cover companies and that the guy was buddies with one of the Koreans in the agency who let out the contracts. He saw only what looked like corruption to him. He didn’t see the cultural machinery that had evolved over four thousand years that kept disputes to a minimum and allowed for the smooth running of a society.

I had no plans to explain all this stuff to the bean counter or to the first sergeant. I would just keep my mouth shut and go through the motions, which was all, I figured, Eighth Army really wanted me to do. Mainly, I wanted to get back to the murder of Miss Pak Ok-suk and I didn’t need to waste a lot of time on some silly diversion.

The first sergeant plodded down the hallway in his big wingtips and peeked in the door of the Admin Section.

“Bascom. Sueсo. Come on down to my office.”

Miss Kim stopped her typing and gave Ernie a goodbye look. He got up, adjusted the buttons on his jacket, and marched down the hallway after the first sergeant. I followed.

In his office, the first sergeant introduced us to Mr. Tom Kurtz. We all sat down: the first sergeant behind his desk, me and Ernie sort of off to the side, looking at Mr. Kurtz, seated in front.

“What can we do for you, Mr. Kurtz?” the first sergeant said.

“I thought Inspectors Burrows and Slabem would be here.”

‘They’re on a high-priority case and I’m afraid I couldn’t pull them off it.”

“Ah, well. They were so helpful and so concerned about getting to the bottom of the corruption at KPA.”

Kurtz was young, like maybe just out of college, with curly brown hair and a tailored blue suit covering his frail body. He kept pushing his glasses back up his pug nose.

He bent forward, as if to confide in us. “You know I can’t stand working with people who aren’t totally honest. I don’t know how Eighth Army could have allowed the situation to deteriorate so much. I’ve recommended that a few of the people who work for me be fired, but all that happens is they get transferred, sometimes into better jobs, and the people who take their places are no better than the ones that left.”

Kurtz sat up in his chair. “But I’m not here to complain. Not this time. I’m here to thank you for all your help. Since I put in my complaints and your investigation started, things have really changed for the better at the Korean Procurement Agency.”

I had been starting to doze off but this woke me up. A little anyway.

“For the first time we’re getting real competition during the bidding for contracts. Just last week an entirely new company won a major contract to build a recreation center at Camp Carroll down in Waegwan. And it wasn’t just one of those shifting-letterhead deals either. I met the man who got the contract. He was delighted to be doing work, for the first time, for the U.S. government. What convinced me that the whole thing wasn’t some sort of sham was how upset my Korean employees were at the whole thing. And that’s not the only contract that has gone to new vendors. The winds of change are sweeping through KPA and I have you gentlemen to thank for it.”

“Just doing our job,” the first sergeant said. “You played a big role in this, too, Mr. Kurtz.”

The first sergeant didn’t want all the blame.

“No, no, no.” Mr. Kurtz waved off the compliment. “It’s you fellows. And especially Inspector Burrows and Inspector Slabem. Please give them my thanks.”