Hwang Sok-Yong - The Shadow of Arms

“I’ll be waiting for you in the car.”

Yong Kyu spat out those words above the blended noise of moaning, sniffling, and panting, then walked out into the corridor.

The old man at the ticket booth looked up at him with a vacant stare. Outside, the heat was still burning, reflected from the cement sidewalks. Hot air enveloped his eyes. Suddenly, Yong Kyu felt heavy at heart. Sure, treat him to a fine meal, maybe at the French restaurant down by the White Elephant. What the hell, it would all work out somehow. Garçon, a bottle of champagne, if you please.

Wait, a diplomatic mission this is not. Business ought to be a bit more barbaric. Right, a secret room would be perfect. There must be strong whiskey and the exquisite skills of naked women. Let’s call Toi. He should know all about it. The familiar sound of a grenade exploding could be heard only a block away. Instinctively, Yong Kyu pressed himself against the wall. A moment later, a roll of machine gun fire was audible. ARVN guards patrolling the street could be heard barking signals to each other. Across the street, people were cowering on the ground or else had dashed into nearby buildings. A terrorist attack by urban guerrillas, apparently. A little while later, armored personnel carriers and Jeeps were speeding by and the streets once more became animated with life. Slowly Yong Kyu crawled into the Jeep and fell asleep with the front door open.

The telephone was ringing loudly.

Yong Kyu managed to open his eyes, but getting out of bed would take too much effort. He fumbled around the table beside the bed for his watch, then picked it up to check the time. Two in the afternoon. The ache at the back of his skull was terrible and his mouth felt like it was full of sand. He staggered to his feet. By the time he picked up the receiver, the caller had hung up. For a long while he sat there on the edge of the bed, his mind completely blank. The buzzing white noise from the air conditioner made his head even fuzzier. He took a carton of milk from the refrigerator and downed a couple of gulps. The cold milk flowing down his throat put his senses on edge.

He had returned around six in the morning. He remembered Toi dropping him off. They had been drinking all night at some bar with a strip show. Toi had probably driven on with Leon slouched unconscious beside him, passing through the checkpoints on the outskirts of the city where ambush alerts remained in force, then slipped out of Da Nang.

Yong Kyu had seen floorshows a few times before, but this one was something else entirely. There were mulatto dancers and Vietnamese girls who could pass for white — half-French, must have been. He checked his jacket. A single ten-dollar note was left. He had had a hundred and fifty on him and Pointer had given him another three hundred, so he must have spent about four hundred fifty dollars. Peanuts, he thought to himself. He was confident that that and much and more would be easily recovered with a single deal.

After peering over the cliff of sudden death dozens of times and at long last emerging from the jungle swamps, a fighter about to embark for Korea would be unlikely to have saved from his combat pay more than three hundred dollars, a paltry sum of money stuck in a savings account somewhere back home. Korean crawlers often said their lives were worth forty dollars — their monthly salary. Sure, they got the economic, military and financial support America gave to its allies, and the privileges normally reserved to businessmen in Seoul. And army privates would sail back home along with their plywood crates holding a couple of Japanese appliances or electronics items they had conjured up on the sly.

Once he had showered, Yong Kyu rummaged through the refrigerator and ate what he found. He set his dirty laundry basket out in the hall and came back in and looked in the closet where he found a set of clean clothes neatly folded with a bill on top. The phone rang again. Yong Kyu slowly lifted up the receiver.

“Ahn Yong Kyu, is that you?” It was the voice of the staff sergeant.

“It’s me. What’s up?”

“Military life is tough, eh? Any idea what time it is? Hurry up and get your ass over here. We’ve got a problem.”

“Why are you getting all worked up on a Sunday? Call the PX boys.”

“No, the captain’s away at headquarters. He’ll be back tomorrow evening. I’m over at the CID office. We’ve got a problem.”

“What kind of problem? You’ve made a mess again.”

“Hell, I’m crying tears of blood. Come on, you bastard, some of our boys had their goods confiscated for no reason, and I can’t speak the damn language.”

“All right, I’m on my way.”

When Yong Kyu arrived at the office, the staff sergeant was sitting there simmering in his own sweat. Miss Hoa was not in. On the captain’s desk was nothing but an ashtray heaped with butts from the cigarettes he had been chain-smoking.

“I don’t get it. Today when the chief went off to headquarters he told me to man the office, you know. So I came in here, leaving the grunt sprawled in dreamland after a night on the town. And then, just a little while ago, some American boys come in here babbling away about God knows what. I guess they came to get me, but then they left and brought back two of our guys, kids who’d been on combat duty and are fixing to head home soon. One of the two had a television and the other a tape recorder they’d bought, but the PX guard caught them, I think. Black something or other, the boys said they were told. So I asked that guy Lukas who speaks Korean, and he said the goods were all going to be confiscated. Look, honestly, you know what kind of money that is, right?”

“Yeah, I know. I’ll handle it. Who’s in charge of the American boys?”

“The marine sergeant. You know, the fat one with the bulging eyes.”

Leaving the main building, Yong Kyu passed the radio room and walked over to the investigation office in a barracks next to a flower garden. As he entered, an American sergeant with a short crew cut dressed in a crisp uniform was leafing through some documents at his desk. Yong Kyu saluted, and the sergeant gestured with his chin towards a chair.

“Have a seat.”

“I heard there was some problem with two of our men, so I came to see you.”

“Ah, that case, you mean? We’ve put them in a cell since there was nobody to take custody. I’ve just received the report, would you care to look it over?”

Yong Kyu picked up the report. The ink was not even dry. One man was a marine corporal, the other a private. Both were assigned to a bottom-level combat infantry squad, and after a tough month in the field they were on special leave for a little R & R. They had access to a PX at brigade headquarters, but they were not allowed to use the American PXs and downtown Da Nang was off-limits. They had gone to the marine PX near the rec center and made black market purchases.

The report was simple enough: Two Korean marines in possession of a TV and a stereo tape recorder were stopped by a PX security guard. They were unable to produce ration cards, so the goods were confiscated and the two soldiers detained. The price of the TV was eighty dollars and the tape deck was one hundred twenty. Those were duty-free prices, naturally. The TV was a National and the tape recorder an Akai.

“According to this report, there was no evidence that they bought the stuff on the black market,” Yong Kyu said.

“They had no ration cards. Unless they stole them, there was no other way for such items to come into their possession under the circumstances.”

“As I understand it, in a black market deal, both the seller and the buyer are guilty of an infraction. In fact, the seller is the worse offender. No black market is possible without a seller, is it?”