Martin Limon: Ping-Pong Heart

“Did he hit you?” I asked.

“No. But he break this.”

She stepped back into the hooch, rummaged in a plastic wardrobe, and returned with a radio. It was smashed beyond repair.

“So you kept his money,” I said, “and he broke your radio.”

Miss Jo nodded grimly.

I asked her to write out a statement.

“In English?” she asked, surprised.

“No, in Korean.”

“You can read?”

I nodded. “I can read. Write carefully, though.”

She hesitated.

“If you don’t,” I told her, “we’ll take you to the Itaewon Police Station. You can write it there.”

Most Koreans steered resolutely away from any contact with the Korean National Police. They were an efficient organization, paramilitary, with the mission of not only stopping crime but also protecting the country from North Korean Communist infiltrators. Things were tough in Korea economically, so it wasn’t unusual for a KNP officer to take money on the side. But if you didn’t have money to give, heaven help you.

Miss Jo found a piece of paper and a pen and sat down on the floor to write. When she was done, she handed it to me and I made sure it was signed and dated. I asked her a few more questions, challenging her story, but she stuck with the jaded, simple narrative she’d originally given. I wrote the follow-up questions down, and one by one she wrote her answers. When we were done, I had her sign and date the statement a final time.

As we were about to leave, she said, “What about Johnny?”

“What about him?” I asked.

“He gone. How I pay rent?”

Ernie and I glanced at one another and shrugged. As we walked across the courtyard, she called after us.

“You have money,” she said. “You have food. Some people no have. You take Johnny away, how I pay rent?”

I turned. Her face looked small, sad, almost regretful. I guess I could’ve walked back and handed her some money, but that isn’t what a cop is supposed to do. Besides, Ernie was watching, and in the Army, an act of kindness is seen as something to be mocked, not applauded. Instead of doing what I wanted to do, I turned and the two of us crouched through the small door in the gate.

On our way back to the jeep, we didn’t talk.

The next morning in the Office of the 8th United States Army Provost Marshal, Colonel Brace asked me, “Who translated this?”

“I did, sir.”

“Did Miss Kim check it?”

“Yes. She made a couple of changes.” She hadn’t, but I wanted to make sure she received credit.

Colonel Brace nodded and placed the statement on his desk. “That’ll be all.”

In the Admin Office, Ernie sat in front of Staff Sergeant Riley’s desk reading this morning’s Pacific Stars and Stripes .

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“He’s not happy.”

“How could he be? A field grade officer lying to him, sending his agents on a wild goose chase. You’d think he’d show the Provost Marshal of the Eighth United States Army a little more respect.”

“How come you never show him any respect?” I asked.

“I work for him,” Ernie replied. “That’s different.”

Staff Sergeant Riley stuck a pencil behind his ear and leaned forward. “Maybe you two ought to get off your butts, move out smartly, and make your way over to the commissary and start doing your job.”

The words came out as a growl. Even though he had the physique of Tweety Bird in khaki, Sergeant Riley always tried to sound like he was the toughest guy south of the Demilitarized Zone. Still, he was a hard worker. A two-foot-high pile of reports teetered on one side of his desk, completed memos stacked on the other.

“We worked late last night,” Ernie told him, “until almost curfew. Don’t we get any consideration for that?”

“A soldier’s on duty twenty-four hours a day,” Riley replied.

“Unless you’re not,” Ernie said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that some guys have cushy office jobs and don’t have to go running around Itaewon at night until all hours.”

Riley puffed out his chest, but his uniform still hung off him like a starched shirt on a hanger. “I work overtime here.”

“You work overtime all right. You and your bottle of Old Overwart.”

“That’s Overholt!” Riley said. “Premium rye.”

“The cheapest rotgut in the Class VI store.”

“At least I don’t drink soju.”

Miss Kim snatched another tissue from the box in front of her, stood, and sashayed out the door. As she left, we all watched her shapely posterior. When she was out of sight, I said, “There you go. You two have upset her again.”

Riley grumbled. Ernie snapped the newspaper and pretended to be reading. The intercom buzzed. Riley pressed a button and said, “Sir.”

“Contact Major Schultz. I want him here in my office immediately if not sooner.”

“Yes, sir.” Riley buzzed off.

As he was dialing, Ernie and I glanced at one another. He slipped the newspaper into his jacket pocket and we walked out of the building to the jeep.

Attempting to obstruct the illicit flow of duty-free goods from the PX and commissary was a fetish within the command structure of the 8th United States Army. Groceries, clothing, stereo equipment and American consumer goods of all kinds were shipped to Korea at US taxpayer expense for exclusive use by servicemen and their dependents. However, there was an acute demand for these items in the Korean economy. Twenty years ago, at the end of the Korean War, the country’s industrial capacity had been totally destroyed. Even now it was still recovering, and exotic items like freeze-dried coffee, granulated sugar, imported bananas and jars of maraschino cherries still commanded a high price on the black market. GIs could buy a cartload of groceries at the commissary and sell them to Korean black market honchos for twice what they paid for them. Certain items, like Johnny Walker Black Scotch and Kent cigarettes, had an even bigger markup. Under the Status of Forces Agreement, 8th Army is tasked with stopping this illegal flow of goods. The rationale was that if fledgling Korean industries had to compete with a flood of cheap US consumables, they’d never get off the ground.

The real reason 8th Army was so obsessed with the black market was pure and simple: racism. Most of the purchasers of these goods were the Korean wives of American GIs-derisively called yobo s. They flooded both the PX and the commissary, especially after payday, and made it hard for “real Americans” to shop. Also, most of these Korean women were married to enlisted men, not higher-ranking officers. So race and class came into the disdain with which the command treated them.

Our main job, more important than investigating murder, mayhem, robbery, and rape, was to arrest as many yobo s as possible for trafficking on the black market.

“Tools of the power structure,” Ernie said.

“That’s us,” I replied.

We were sitting in his jeep, parked in the last row of the lot in front of the Yongsan Commissary, watching yobo s exit with cartload after cartload of duty-free US goods.

“Who should we bust?” he asked me.

“Take your pick.”

“Riley said we had to make at least four arrests today.”

“Four? He can forget it. Give ’em two and they get spoiled.”

“So what excuse do we use for just making one?”

“I’ll think of something.”

“That’s what I like about you, Sueno. You’re creative.”

A Korean woman exited the Commissary. She wore a long green dress that clung to the higher-altitude points of her figure. Loose flesh jiggled beneath. Behind her, a Korean man wearing the smock and pinned-on identification badge of a bagger pushed a cart fully laden with groceries. He loaded them into the trunk of a Ford Granada PX taxi and accepted a two-dollar tip from the fancy lady.