Martin Limon - Jade Lady burning

“Like our congressman.”

“Or a reporter,” Ernie said, looking encouraged.

“Right.” Riley sipped his coffee. “So they’re going to keep you here, keep an eye on you, and give you an attitude check. Your prospects around here, though, are not too bright after being foolish enough to lower the hammer on the chief of staff of the Eighth United States Army. But the one ray of hope is that they’ve definitely taken you off the shit list.”

“What? You’re kidding.”

“No. Seriously. They’ve taken you off it. And put you on a whole new list that they’ve created just for this situation. They’re calling it the disembowel-as-soon-as-possible list. You’re both tied for first place.”

“Anybody else on it?”

“No. Just you two.”

“You’ve been a great help to us, Riley.”

“Glad to be of service.”

The monks kept their vigil for two days and finally they took Kimiko’s body away, back to the mountains.

The landlady seemed relieved and had a couple of young men helping her clear the remains of Miss Pak’s apartment while she got Kimiko’s little closetlike room in shape for a new tenant. When she saw me she stopped what she was doing, tensed, and just waited. I nodded, turned around, and went away.

She didn’t nod back.

Palinki wasn’t the type to hound me about the. 45, so I held on to if for a while, keeping it in my wall locker, checking the cold steel and counting the cartridges every day, just to make sure they were still there.

I wasn’t sure why but it was important to me.

Ernie and I went on a huge drunk, reeling from bar to bar, starting early in the morning, sometimes taking a nap in the afternoon, and then getting drunk again at night. When we went back to work Monday, we were just going through the motions on the black-market detail and found plenty of time to slip away to little isolated draft-beer halls out in Itaewon and have a few cold ones for lunch. We went on like this for quite a while. I can’t say how long now. The time faded into a dismal blur.

Ernie never once mentioned the Nurse.

Finally one morning I woke up and was sick about how I’d been acting. I made a special effort to get over to the gym and see Mr. Chong for the noon tae kwon do workout.

“Where have you been, Georgie?”

“Busy.”

“You should not get so busy. It is dangerous.”

I sobered up, worked out steadily, and my midsection started to firm up again. It was as if my body had taken hold of my fate and slowly its resolve started to become apparent to me.

Mr. Kwok, meanwhile, had made more and more inroads into the economic life of the village. A couple of his competitors had closed down and a couple more had sold out to him. He closed their clubs down for a while, remodeled them, and reopened the doors with big, flashy grand openings. I started hanging out in the ville, supposedly for the black-market detail, but mostly watching his comings and goings. I kept particular track of his thugs, sipped on Coke, and somehow stayed sober.

The winter should have been over but a last flurry of cold, ice-laden air whistled through Seoul. The snow wasn’t heavy but just enough to make the roads slick and life a little uncomfortable. I loved the long overcast days and the freezing crispness that seemed to tighten and enflame my body.

I started carrying the. 45.

My Spartan regimen had kept me a long time without a woman, and one late afternoon, while slogging through my black-market rounds, I turned-without thinking about it much-down the alley that led to the hooch where the girl lived, along with her sisters, in the brothel behind the Sloe-eyed Lady Club.

She was wary. I had cut out on her before, without giving her any money, and made her lose face. This time I gave her the money up front and went into her hooch to relax while she got a pan of hot water ready.

She was very young, very small, and I was very excited. When I finished, I got dressed and went back to the latrine. Most of her sisters were out, or sitting quietly in their rooms, gossiping, playing cards. I found a toehold in the fence and climbed over.

Kwok was usually in his office this time of day. He got up late so the afternoons were like mornings for him. Time for the mundane things in life. Paperwork. Bills. The Hamboyance came after the sun went down.

His thugs were rarely around during the daytime. They slept even later than he did. Sometimes he had late-night things for them to do.

I climbed the rickety metal staircase on the outside of the building, unable to keep completely quiet but trying to keep my advance as rhythmic and as calm as I could.

One of the things that had bothered me from the first was the pair of straight metal tongs in the middle of Miss Pak’s room. Someone had found the half-submerged heater outside and then used the tongs to pull out one of the flaming briquettes and bring it inside and put it on the vinyl floor. Maybe Miss Pak had done it herself, if she was very drunk or very loaded on drugs. But that seemed unlikely because if she was that far gone she would have just passed out and not paid any attention to the underground heating system. If, however, she had actually tried to change the charcoal briquettes in the heater, it would have been second nature to her to replace one of the flaming briquettes with a new one and leave its red-hot embers in a metal pan outside near the stove. She was a farm girl, she knew how to do these things, and for her to have started the fire herself seemed unlikely.

Major General Bohler, however, had little knowledge of the workings of Korean households. This was his first tour in Korea-they didn’t need underground heating systems in Vietnam-and since he’d been here, his servants had done everything for him, including tying his jogging shoes.

If he had choked Miss Pak until she was either dead or she had passed out, it didn’t seem possible to me that he would have put on his clothes, gone outside in the freezing cold, searched around until he found the heater, opened it, used the tongs to pull out one of the charcoal briquettes, and then brought it back into the house to start a fire and destroy the evidence. He would have exposed himself to too many prying eyes.

It was more likely that he would have panicked and put his clothes on and run to the one person in Itaewon who could help him: Kwok.

I could imagine the frantic Bohler, telling Kwok that he thought he’d just killed a girl. The solicitous Kwok telling him to go home, that he would take care of everything, and then going to the hooch and

… But that’s where it broke down. Why not just remove the body? Business girls disappeared from Itaewon all the time.

So the blackened tongs festered in my mind.

But then we saw the photos. I felt sorry for Miss Pak, who was being so ravaged, but still it was exciting and I searched every part of her body. The clarity of the photos was bad, and Bohler was all over her, but I did manage to make out, in a couple of the shots, the medallion that she was wearing around her neck. The one that said ok. Jade.

It seemed sort of strange to me that a young girl like her, having money for the first time in her life, would buy herself such an oldfashioned piece of jewelry. Jade, from antiquity, and Chinese characters yet.

Not exactly trendy.

And if she did like that sort of thing, why wasn’t she wearing it when she had her photograph taken for the marriage paperwork? Maybe she hadn’t bought it yet, sure, but there was another possibility. Maybe a man had bought it for her. As a gift. And it wouldn’t have seemed appropriate to her to wear it in the photograph intended to accompany her request for betrothal to Johnny Watkins.

And I doubted that it was a GI who had bought it for her. When GIs buy gifts for Korean business girls they usually come straight out of the PX. After all, what value does a thing have if you haven’t seen it advertised on television?