Martin Limon: The Ville Rat

“No,” Ernie said, “all gone.”

“You’re sure?”

He glanced at me. “You don’t trust me?”

“Sure, I do,” I said.

But not when it came to drugs. I didn’t say that part. Ernie had spent two tours in Vietnam, volunteering to go back for the second. He always said it was a “sweet one” and there’d never be another war like it. On his first tour, young boys sold hash to the GIs, dirt cheap. On his second tour, all the hash was gone, replaced by pure China White. Also cheap. Ernie had picked up the habit there, but I had to admire him, he’d kicked the jones completely here in Korea. Of course, there was no heroin to be had in Korea, not by anyone. The South Korean government checked every bag of every traveler coming in or out of the country, and possession of heroin was punishable by life in prison. The sentence for trafficking was death. And they’d carried out that sentence more than once, standing the erstwhile drug kingpin up against the wall and executing him by firing squad. The 2nd Infantry Division and 8th Army in general were also tough on drug possession. But when it came to marijuana, the Americans might take a hard line but the Koreans were surprisingly more tolerant. After all, it was a natural plant, grown by local farmers, and although it was technically illegal, the KNPs wouldn’t prosecute a poor farmer for making a few extra bucks by selling weed to American GIs. Koreans weren’t interested in the stuff, with the exception of a few business girls who’d picked up the practice from their clients. Still, Ernie worried me, but as long as he promised he didn’t have any more, I had to trust him.

“You showed them the picture?”

Mr. Kill had provided us each with a three-by-five-inch glossy of the corpse in the Sonyu River.

“Showed ’em,” Ernie said. “They never saw her before.”

“How about Threets?”

“Him, they knew well and they gave me an earful.”

“They didn’t look like a very talkative bunch.”

“You just have to get them started,” he said. “Besides, I brought an icebreaker.”

“Where’s The Black Star?” I asked.

“Up that crack,” he said, pointing toward a narrow pedestrian lane just past Miss Cho’s Brassware Emporium. For the first time I noticed that there was a small neon sign with a finger pointing optimistically into the darkness.

“There’s a club up there?”

“Yeah, for them.”

“They don’t hang out with the white GIs?”

“Did you see any black GIs when we ran the ville?”

I hadn’t thought of it, but he was right. In the village of Sonyu-ri, all I’d seen were white GIs, a few Hispanics, and dozens of Korean business girls.

“So if the brothers told you all they know about Threets, why are we going to The Black Star?”

“The Ville Rat,” Ernie replied, grinning now.

“The who?”

“The Ville Rat. While we were talking about Threets, I asked them about the skinny white guy with the red Afro. The one who stopped us on our way out of Sonyu-ri last time and led us on that merry chase. When I described him, their eyes lit up. After some coaxing, they told me about him.”

“They knew him?”

“Of course they knew him. He thinks he’s a soul brother himself. Come on, I’ll show you.”

The proprietress of The Black Star Nightclub was a grumpy old woman with streaks of grey hair that fell past her ears. As she talked, she kept brushing unruly strands from her eyes, trying at the same time to keep a cheap Turtle Boat cigarette lit.

“I don’t know Ville Rat,” she told us.

“White guy,” Ernie told her, holding his hands to the side of his head. “Red hair. Sticks out like a soul brother.”

“I don’t know,” she said stubbornly.

I showed her my badge.

“Ajjima,” I said, using the honorific form of address for an older woman. “We don’t want to bother you, we just want to know about the Ville Rat. But if you don’t want to talk to us, you can talk to this gentleman.”

I pulled out Inspector Gil Kwon-up’s calling card and showed it to her. She took one look at the emblem of the Korean National Police and started shaking her head.

“I don’t wanna talk him.”

“Okay,” Ernie said. He walked around behind the bar. “Then you talk to me.” He rattled the chain that locked the metal cooler. “Open it.”

The old woman frowned, took a long drag on her cigarette, and snuffed it out on a metal ashtray. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Anyway he black market. Sell me this shit.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Ville Rat,” she said impatiently.

She pulled a ring of keys out from a pocket in her skirt and opened the cooler. Inside were the usual brown bottles of OB beer, but stacked neatly beside them was a row of ice-cold sixteen-ounce cans. She pulled one out and handed it to Ernie. “Soul brother like,” she said.

It was a Stateside product, malt liquor, a brand known as Colt 45. It had a higher alcoholic content than regular beer. I’d tasted it before and hadn’t liked it much since it also had a fermented tartness that, as far as I was concerned, ruined the flavor of the hops and barley.

Ernie held it up to the light to see if there were any customs labels on it. There weren’t. “Where does the Ville Rat get this stuff from?”

The old woman shrugged. “How I know?”

“What else does he bring?”

She glanced at the liquor bottles behind the bar. There were three or four brands of imported cognac. Ernie lifted them up to the light and all of them had ROK customs labels on them. But the bottles looked ancient, scratched and chipped, probably refilled a thousand times. “Cognac?” Ernie asked.

The old woman shrugged again. “Maybe brandy.”

She refilled the expensive bottles with cheaper booze. Standard practice. After a few snootfulls most GIs couldn’t tell the difference, if they ever could in the first place.

“Who else does he sell to?” Ernie asked.

“Me, I’m the only one.”

“The only one in country?”

“The only one in Sonyu-ri. Maybe he go ’nother village, sell to ’nother club have soul brother.”

She pronounced the word “village” like “ville-age-ee” and the word “soul” like the capital city of the country, “sew- ul .”

“How often do you see him?”

She shrugged again. “Maybe once a month.”

“At mid-month payday or end-of-month payday?”

“Maybe end-of-month.”

“Does he live here in Sonyu-ri?”

“No. Not live here.”

“Where does he live?”

“I don’t know. Maybe far away.”

“Like where?”

“How I know?”

“Does he have a girlfriend here?”

“Any Black Star girl like him.”

“They do? Why?”

“Because he smart. Not stupid, like GI. He make money.”

“GIs make money,” I said.

“ Skoshi money,” she said. Little money. “All the time Cheap Charley.”

“The Ville Rat is not a Cheap Charley?”

“No. He spend money, buy girls tambei .” Cigarettes. “ Satang sometimes.” Candy. “Any GI like Ville Rat too.”

“So he’s spreading it around,” I said. She didn’t understand what I meant by that, so I said, “Who does he stay with when he visits The Black Star Club?”

“I don’t know. Before curfew, he all the time go.” She waved her hand toward an unknown distance.

A skinny little boy ran into the club. Breathless, he spoke to the proprietress.

“Ajjima,” he said. “Migun wa-yo.” Aunt, American soldiers are coming.

“Otton migun?” What kind of American soldiers?

“Honbyong,” the boy said. MPs.

That’s all I needed to hear. We thanked the woman and departed, in a hurry.