The Door to Bitterness (2 page)

A scene from last night flashed before my eyes. Me and Riley hanging onto the edge of the bar, two or three women wrapped around Ernie. One of their faces became clear. Unbidden, her name came to me: Julie. That was the Anglicized version. In Korean it was Pak Chu-li. A waitress, not a business girl, although there’s usually not much difference. And I knew she lived somewhere in one of the hooches on a narrow pedestrian pathway behind the King Club. Not off the alley I had been lying in, but farther back amidst the tightly packed jumble of brothels and hovels that house the denizens who work the night.

That’s where I had to go.

A cold breeze gathered. I tightened my jacket and began my march into the dark heart of Itaewon.

At the top of Hooker Hill, I entered a cobbled walkway lined by brick walls. Shadow enveloped me.

It took me twenty minutes, pounding on wooden gateways, waiting for someone to emerge from a room and cross the courtyard, and then asking if this was the home of Pak Chu-li, had they seen Ernie Bascom. More often than not I described him: Tall, just over six feet, short blond hair, round-lensed wire-rimmed glasses. Last night he had been wearing a coat and tie, as required on-duty for every agent of 8th Army’s CID.

It was the third wooden gateway I banged on that finally opened.

I crouched through and entered a long, rectangular courtyard with a few scrawny chickens behind a wire coop. A row of earthenware kimchee jars lined the far wall, and a rusty iron water pump dripped water into a plastic pail hanging beneath its spout. As I approached a row of hooches, the smell of charcoal gas emanating from beneath the ondol-heated floor became stronger. A paper-covered door slid open and a sleep-puffed face peered out.

Julie. I recognized her from the King Club. Her eye makeup was smeared and her long black hair was bundled behind her head, held in place by chopsticks puncturing a knot.

I stepped toward the raised wooden porch and said, “Ernie isso?” Is Ernie here?

Her eyes widened and she screamed.

In seconds, Ernie’s startled face popped out of the door above her, his chest bare. He looked me over and said, “What in the hell happened to you?”

Julie was up now, throwing on her clothes, and soon the electric bulb was switched on and she was dressed in blue jeans and a pullover sweater. She filled a pail of water from the pump in the courtyard and began dabbing at the thick blood that ran down the side of my neck.

“Apo?” she asked.

“No,” I lied, even though it did.

As Julie worked, clucking away in concern, I questioned her in Korean about the smiling woman.

“She new,” she said in English.

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t know. Mama-san know.”

All women in an Itaewon bar, whether waitresses or hostesses or out-and-out business girls, had to register with the owner and show their VD cards to verify they’d been checked by the Yongsan District Health Department and wouldn’t be spreading disease to the courageous American allies. If the bar owner failed to enforce this rule, she could be subject to heavy fines. Or even shut down.

“Where’s the mama-san live?”

“Why? This woman take your money?”

“Worse than that.”

Ernie was out of the hooch, dressed in slacks and white shirt, sitting on the lacquered wooden walkway, slipping on his shoes and tying the laces. He wore his .45 automatic pistol in his shoulder holster beneath his jacket and there was a bulge in the pocket where his badge should’ve been.

“So who do we have to kill?” he asked.

I opened my jacket, flashing the empty shoulder holster.

“Oh shit,” he said.

Julie gasped.

When he’d sufficiently recovered, Ernie asked, “Where’d you wake up?”

“In an alley.”

“You searched for the gun?”

“Thoroughly. Not there. Nor badge. Nor wallet.”

Ernie kept shaking his head, sadly, as if I were the sorriest piece of maggot-meat in the entire universe.

A .45 caliber automatic pistol is a weapon of massive firepower. My poor judgment, my lack of responsibility, had put that pistol into the wrong hands. Irresponsible hands. Criminal hands. And the misuse of that pistol could cause someone’s maiming or death. I was to blame. No one else. Despite what a panel of 8th Army officers might decide in a court-martial, I knew if someone got hurt by that gun, ultimately I’d be judged most harshly by the person who mattered most: me. Unless I recovered that .45, I’d be found guilty. And my punishment would not last for one year or ten years or even thirty years. It would last for the rest of my life.

Julie waved goodbye to the old woman who owned the hooch and the three of us stepped through the wooden gate, back out into the cold alleyway.

The proprietress of the King Club switched on a fluorescent light beneath the long wooden bar and flipped open a thick book with heavy cardboard pages.

“You look,” she said.

Each page held three entries, with a black-and-white photograph of a woman, a name, and other identifying information. Their duty position was listed—waitress, hostess, or entertainer—their name, their place of birth, their Korean National Identification Number, their VD card number and the date of their last checkup. All the faces looked lifeless, resigned. Showing none of the spunk I saw in them every night.

It must’ve been humiliating to travel downtown to a government office and admit you were selling yourself to foreigners, have some bureaucrat fill out paperwork on you and snap your mug shot and then send you down to the VD clinic as the next step in processing your body through the maze of Korean officialdom. All to insure the safety of a bunch of rowdy American GIs.

Julie sat on a stool on the customer side of the bar, sucking silently on a tambay, blowing blue smoke rings into the air. Ernie reached into the beer cooler, helped himself to a cold one, and raised his eyebrows in my direction. I shook my head.

Except for the four of us, the King Club was deserted. Cocktail tables sat in front of an empty stage, the straight-backed metal chairs turned upside-down atop them. Earlier, Julie had guided us through the maze of Itaewon’s walkways until we reached the home of Mrs. Bei, the owner of the King Club. After I explained the seriousness of the situation, Mrs. Bei consented to take us to her place of business and give us what little information she had on the woman who had been sitting with me last night.

“I felt sorry for her,” Mrs. Bei said. “Her skirt and blouse were shabby. She said she had come to Seoul to see her mother and only wanted to work here one night to make some money so she could buy her mother a present before she went home.”

It is a Korean custom never to visit anyone, especially one’s parents, with “empty hands.”

“And Chusok is coming up in a few days,” Mrs. Bei said. “She told me she had to save money to properly perform the seibei ceremony.”

Chusok, the Autumn Moon Festival, was an ancient holiday celebrating a bountiful harvest. It is the most popular holiday in Korea. Families travel many miles to be together and give thanks to their ancestors for providing the precious gift of life. The custom is to pile a table with fruit and other delicacies, wear your best hanbok—traditional Korean clothing—and perform the seibei ceremony, where you kneel and bow your head before your parents.

“Of course,” Mrs. Bei told me, “I had to make sure this woman had a VD card.”

She flipped the ledger open to the last page. There, written in ink, with no accompanying photograph, was the entry for the smiling woman. Her name, her Korean Identification Card Number, her VD Card number, her hometown and date of birth. I borrowed a piece of scrap paper and a pen and scribbled it down, copying the hangul script verbatim. The name she’d given was Yun Ai-ja. Love Child Yun.

“Did this Miss Yun tell you where she was staying?” I asked.

Mrs. Bei shook her head. “She was staying here. Hoping some GI—some GI with money—would become interested in her and take her somewhere.”

That GI, unfortunately, had been me.

Things did not go well back on the compound.

The CID First Sergeant was so angry that every red vein in his pale head popped. Colonel Brace, the newly appointed Provost Marshal, didn’t speak to me directly, of course, but word came down that he was livid over having to report to the 8th Army Commanding General that one of his CID agents had been rolled and his badge and .45 stolen. The CG, in turn, had gone ballistic.

Later, Ernie and I talked to every CID agent or MP who’d been in the King Club last night. None of them remembered me at all. Everyone had been drunk and, as expected, paying attention only to their own concerns.

That afternoon, I made my formal report to the Korean National Police concerning the theft of my sidearm and my badge. Captain Kim, the commander of the Itaewon police station surmised, without me telling him, that I must’ve been drugged. It made sense. Neither Ernie nor Riley nor any of the other guys in the King Club last night had been so inebriated that they’d been unable to walk under their own power. Only me. Captain Kim promised to check with their records division in downtown Seoul, searching for someone known as Miss Yun Ai-ja, and also for any drug-and-mug operations that had been spotted recently.

That night, Ernie and I searched the ville thoroughly, asking everyone if they’d ever heard of a woman who matched the description of Miss Yun Ai-ja. No one had.

The next morning, the KNP records came in and Captain Kim told me that the smiling woman, the woman who called herself Yun Ai-ja, had no police record. Her Korean National ID Card had been a phony. So had her VD card. The smiling woman, at least officially, didn’t exist.

Ernie and I kept up our search into the next day and the next. Still no dice. What I was worried about most was that I’d been stalked. I didn’t believe that the smiling woman and her confederates, whoever they were, had singled me out of the hundreds of drunken GIs by accident. I believed that they were aware I was a CID agent, carrying a badge and a gun. That’s what they were after. And that meant that they had plans for the badge and the gun. Almost certainly. Plans that included using them in the perpetration of another crime.

2

* * *

It was mid-morning of the third day, when Ernie and I returned to the CID office. Sergeant Riley popped up from his desk.

“Inchon,” he said, scribbling on a pad of paper. “The call just came in. You’re in a world of hurt now, Sueño.”

“What do you mean?”

“Here’s the name of the place. The Olympos Hotel and Casino. North of the Port of Inchon on the edge of the Yellow Sea. The KNPs tell me you can’t miss it.”

I glanced at the paper. “What’s some casino in Inchon have to do with me?”

“It’s been robbed.”

“So?” Ernie said. “That’s the KNP’s job. Not ours.”

“It’s your job now,” Riley said. “Somebody was shot. Point-blank.” He grinned a crooked-toothed grin. “With Sueño’s forty-five.”

Blood drained from my face.

Ernie leaned across Riley’s desk. “How in the hell could they know that? There hasn’t been enough time to run ballistics.”

“The thieves bluffed their way in using a badge,” Riley said. “A CID badge. With Sueño’s name on it.”

Ernie and I sprinted for the parking lot.

What I feared most had come true. My .45 had been used in the commission of a crime.

I saw the face of the smiling woman, the woman who called herself Yun Ai-ja. I saw her staring at me with her half-mad eyes. She was smiling. Smiling broadly.

And the more she stared at me, the broader her smile became.

T
he City of Inchon sits on the coast of the Yellow Sea thirty kilometers due east of Seoul. It’s South Korea’s second largest port—after Pusan on the southernmost edge of the peninsula—and, as such, it provides much of the export-import capacity for the bustling capital city of Seoul. Inchon is most famous for the Inchon invasion, General Douglas MacArthur’s master stroke during the first few months of the Korean War. An amphibious landing that sliced the North Korean Communist supply lines and forced their army to retreat all the way to the Yalu River on the northern border with China.

Ernie pulled off the two-lane highway, crossed a ridge, and the city spread out before us. A cramped downtown area with a few skyscrapers—none more than five or six stories high—surrounded by a vast sea of tile-roofed homes and shops. The jumble of wood and mortar spread in every direction and jutted into the Bay of Kyongki. On the southern edge of the city sat the port with a few foreign ships, and about a half mile farther out, the huge stone-and-brick breakwater that vainly tried to hold back frothing white seas. If you ventured out into that green expanse and continued east, you’d eventually hit Shanghai and the teeming continent known as China, the Middle Kingdom.

Ernie kept both hands on the jeep’s big steering wheel and, chomping on a wad of ginseng gum, wound his way through the busy streets of Inchon. Eventually, we reached the city’s central train station. From there it was just a few yards to the Olympos Hotel and Casino. The whitewashed cement edifice sat perched like a conquering hero atop a hill overlooking the Yellow Sea.

We parked the jeep in the small front lot, avoided a few swooping sea gulls, and walked through the glass doors of the lobby’s foyer. Yellow-jacketed bellmen bowed as we entered, spouting the requisite “Oso-oseiyo.” Please come in.

We ignored them and trotted up the red-carpeted stairway with the neon sign pointing upward that said “Casino.”

When Ernie and I walked through the front portals of the Olympos Casino, everything stopped.

It wasn’t a casino like you think of in the States, with clanging slot machines and flashing neon lights. This place was more like a mausoleum. Our feet sank into plush red carpet as we entered a huge round hall. Chandeliers hung glittering from the ceiling, and unobtrusive classical music was being piped in through speakers.

Korean men in suits, both young and middle-aged, and young women, all wearing the blue dress uniform of an employee of the Olympos Casino—every one of them stopped, immediately, what they were doing. If they were talking, they froze in mid-sentence. If they were about to sit down, they immobilized themselves in mid-squat. If they were drinking tea, they held their cups poised awkwardly at their lips.

Scattered amongst the casino employees were a few men dressed in the khaki uniform of the Korean National Police, their eyes also riveted on us. Right hands slipped toward the big pistols they wore at their hips.

The only sound was Ernie’s gum clicking.

Without turning my head, I told him, “Don’t make any quick moves.”

Ernie frowned. “What the hell’s wrong?”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. Two tall Americans like Ernie and me, wearing coats and ties and visiting places where foreigners seldom tread, attract a lot of attention. I won’t say we were used to it, but we were resigned to it. But this was more than the usual reaction to a couple of out-of-place Miguks. This was fear.

The ceiling was two stories high. Across more plush carpeting, in the center of the room, a circle of green felt-covered blackjack tables surrounded a desk and telephone. Most of the employees were huddled there, as if for protection. In the back was a cocktail lounge on raised split-level flooring, and in a corner by themselves were the baccarat tables. A few disgruntled Asians sat there. From the singsong lilt of their conversation, I figured them to be tourists from Hong Kong. The other customers, all Korean, occupied a cocktail table in front of the bar. They were being interviewed by a khaki-clad Korean National Policeman. He hunched over the table, diligently jotting notes.

In back, beyond the baccarat tables, light shone through iron grating. The cashier’s cage. Its thick, iron-barred entrance door hung open.

I held my hands out to my sides and walked slowly toward the circle of blackjack tables. “Na nun, Mi Pal Kun,” I said. I’m from 8th Army.

A chubby-faced young woman in the uniform of the Olympos Casino began to whimper. Then cry. Two other women threw their arms around her, glaring at Ernie and me.

“I didn’t do it,” Ernie said softly. “Honest.”

One of the uniformed cops stepped forward and frisked me. He seemed surprised at my empty shoulder holster. I’m not even sure why I was still wearing it. Force of habit, I suppose. Or wishful thinking.

Then he frisked Ernie and found his weapon, and Ernie held up his CID badge and offered it to the cop. The cop took it, turned, and carried it over to a wooden table that had been set up near the cashier’s cage. Another cop sat behind the table. Ernie and I followed.

All of the casino employees, particularly the young women in their blue dresses, backed off as we walked by, some of them hugging themselves, their eyes wide, as if wary of any sudden movement we might make.

The cop at the table was a thin man whose narrow frame seemed lost in his neatly pressed uniform. He wore rectangular glasses, and a growth of straight white hair shot up from his round skull. His face was weathered, grim, beyond any hope of surprise. His name tag said Won. His rank insignia indicated that he was a lieutenant.

The Korean National Police are a militaristic organization. Uniforms, rank, salutes, basic training—all the things you expect to see in an army. In fact, the Korean government considers the KNPs to be an integral part of national defense. Along with solving day-to-day crime, they are also tasked with being on the lookout for North Korean Communist infiltrators. Infiltrators who routinely slip into the country to commit sabotage, murder, espionage, and various forms of creative mayhem.

Captain Won ran his fingers through his hair.

“Anjo,” he said roughly, and pointed at two metal chairs in front of his table. He’d used the non-honorific imperative form of the verb “to sit” and, inside the cage, two of the female cashiers tensed slightly. They knew an insult when they heard it.

Ernie sat.

He hadn’t noticed the insult. His Korean is rudimentary, and besides, he’s not into honorific verbal conjugations. Ernie’s a more direct person. If you slap him, he’ll punch you right in the nose and proceed from there to kick your butt. More often than not, subtlety escapes him. I, however, considered making a fuss over the way Lieutenant Won had just spoken to us.

Eighth Army offers free Korean language lessons on base. Very few GIs take advantage of them; they’re busy chasing women and running the ville. But I go every Tuesday and Thursday night. And during my free time, I continue to study the language on my own, picking up, on the streets of Seoul, words and slang that don’t appear in my textbook. Fluency, I hope, will help me in my job. But sometimes it just seems to make it harder. Like in this case, when I realized we’d been insulted.

Given the tension in the room, I decided not to react. There was too much I wanted to find out about what had gone on little more than an hour ago in this casino that was making these employees act so strangely. Nevertheless, to warn Lieutenant Won not to push his luck, I kept my eyes on him as I sat down, moving deliberately.

Lieutenant Won chose to ignore my reaction and continued to speak gruffly. He demanded our identification. Ernie handed him his military ID card and his badge, and I handed him the temporary replacement paperwork for mine. He stared quizzically at mine, probably not even understanding the neatly typed sheets, but he made no comment. He wrote down our names and ID numbers in a notebook. Everyone watched. This was a show for them, to let the employees of the Olympos Casino know that the Korean National Police were not going to take any guff off Americans. Maybe in his own way Lieutenant Won was trying to help us. From the look of the male pit bosses, and even in the eyes of the blue-clad female dealers, violence against a foreigner wasn’t completely out of the question.

When he was finished, Lieutenant Won spoke in English.

“Not good.”

We waited.

He shook his head and spoke again, “Two bad men. Very bad. They come in casino, they show badge. Your badge.” He pointed at me. “You, Sueño. Casino manager he look at badge, say Geogie Sueño. He write down. Here.”

Lieutenant Won slid a notepad across the desk. The letterhead of the Olympos Hotel and Casino was emblazoned across the top, and on the clean white sheet were handwritten notes, all in scribbled Korean. One word was written in English. My name: Sueño.

“This guy showed my badge?”

Lieutenant Won nodded.

“To the casino manager?”

He nodded again.

I paused, thinking it over. Until now, I had assumed—I think correctly—that the smiling woman was working with confederates. That she led me into that alley where a man— or two men—were waiting, and they had been the ones who’d knocked me out and stolen my weapon and my badge. Were these the same two guys who’d robbed the Olympos Casino? Or had the smiling woman sold the badge and the .45 to a different set of thieves who’d used them here in Inchon? Somehow I doubted that the badge and the .45 had been sold. Why? Because illegal arms trafficking in Korea is a dangerous proposition. The Korean government believe such a trade is a threat to their national security and, as such, the punishment is death. More likely that the smiling woman and her confederates planned from the beginning to use the .45 and the badge on their own. They were after a big score—a much bigger score than they’d ever find in Itaewon. My badge and my .45 were just a means.

Could I prove any of this? No. Not yet. But it was the theory I was working with for now.

Then I remembered something.

“My photograph,” I said. “It’s on the badge. Was it switched?”

Lieutenant Won shook his head. “No. Casino manager checked. Not switched.”

“If my photograph was on the badge, then how was the casino manager fooled?”

“Man who rob casino,” Lieutenant Won said, “he look like you.”

Ernie clicked more loudly on his ginseng gum.

“He was an American?” I asked. Or maybe I should’ve said Chicano. But the distinction between Anglos and people of Latin American descent is not one that Koreans usually draw. To them we’re all wei guk in. Outside people.

“Maybe American,” Lieutenant Won answered. “Seems like. But he wore . . . what you call?”

Lieutenant Won ran pinched fingers across his eyes.

“Sunglasses,” I said.

“Yes. Sunglasses.” Lieutenant Won turned to Ernie. He flashed a grim smile. “And the man who come with him, he look like you.”

Ernie and I gazed around the large room. The casino employees still huddled in small groups, looking for all the world like frightened deer in the middle of a forest.

I turned back to Lieutenant Won. “The casino manager allowed these two men to enter the cashier’s cage?”

Captain Won nodded.

“Why?” Ernie asked. “The cashier’s cage would’ve been locked, and there must be an alarm system of some sort. Normally, the cashiers would keep the door locked, sound the alarm, and wait for the police.”

Captain Won held up his hands. “Wait. I bring manager. You talk to him.”

A thin, nervous Korean man with thick glasses and a toadying manner was introduced to us as Mr. Bok, the manager of the Olympos. He stood while we questioned him, speaking English and, when his nervousness overtook him, falling back to Korean. He was the type of man who had risen to his current position by ingratiating himself to customers. Never contradicting them, always submissive. A good policy when you’re in the process of cleansing people of all their money. Slowly, painfully, Mr. Bok stammered the story of what happened.