The Door to Bitterness (22 page)

“Marked bills?”

“No. Not marked, but people remember half-Miguks, especially when they spend money and have no visible means. Eventually, they’d come to the attention of the Korean police.”

“He should’ve thought about that before.”

“And he knew Bolt would be caught. A GI on the run in the Korea—how long is that going to last?”

“Not long,” Ernie said.

“Since they stiffed him of the money, they knew Bolt would spill his guts.”

“They were right about that,” Ernie said. “So why didn’t he kill Bolt when he had the chance?”

“Maybe he was planning to. Maybe that’s what the rendezvous in Seoul was all about, or maybe he planned to slip back into Inchon and murder Bolt at Yellow House Number 17.”

“But we screwed it up by chasing Bolt away.”

“Exactly.”

Suk-ja stopped sipping coffee. Her smooth brow wrinkled in concentration as she stretched her knowledge of English in an attempt to follow our conversation.

“What about woman?” she said.

“The smiling woman?” I replied. “What about her?”

“She no have plan? She no say nothing?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Maybe she smarter than man.”

“How do you mean?”

“Maybe her brother fight you, fight Korean police.

When you catch him, she run away. Take all money, go.”

“Maybe,” I said.

But I didn’t think so. The smiling woman had grown up with her brother under conditions that most of us couldn’t begin to imagine. That would’ve made their bond impossible to break. But she had been fooling around with Bolt when her brother wasn’t watching. What was that all about? And then I remembered her face. The eternal smile, the eternal willingness to please. Maybe she hadn’t made a decision to fool around with Bolt, maybe he had simply made a demand.

“Sueño,” Ernie said. “You still with us?”

I nodded and sipped on coffee. “Yeah.”

I continued to explain that once the woman and her brother knew they were so hot they were bound to be caught, they had decided that—before being caught—they would take revenge on the people who had wronged their mother.

“Everybody murdered so far—at least after Han Ok-hi’s death—has been somebody who was an important player in Itaewon during the years their mother operated there as a prostitute. Jo Kyong-ah was the biggest black-market mama-san in Itaewon until she retired less than a year ago. Spec Five Fairbanks was the VD tracker for the 8th Army. He wielded the power of life and death over some of these poor hookers. If he turned them in to the Korean health authorities, they couldn’t work any longer.”

Ernie sipped his tea. Suk-ja stirred her coffee.

“Makes sense,” Ernie said. “But the big question is, who’s next?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But Haggler Lee seems awfully nervous.”

“Maybe for good reason. Maybe he hasn’t told us everything.”

“Maybe. You finished with your tea yet?”

“Almost. Why?”

“Let’s go check out a few bokdok-bangs.” Real estate offices. “See if we can scare up somebody who remembers Miss Yun and her two kids. They lived here in Itaewon for years.”

“Probably hopping from hooch to hooch,” Ernie said.

“That’s a needle in the haystack, Sueño.”

“We’ve got to try something.”

“Good. You do that. Me, I’m taking the jeep in for maintenance.”

“You can do that anytime.”

“What else do you want me to do? Stand around while you speak Korean to a bunch of realtors? Xin loy. You do what you got to do, I’ll do what I got to do.”

Suk-ja stared into her coffee, embarrassed by the disagreement.

Ernie was burning out on this case, that much was clear. We’d made progress. Plenty of it. We knew who had perpetrated the murders, and we even had a pretty good theory as to why. The problem was that we didn’t know where the woman or her brother were hiding and, even more importantly, we had no idea who in the hell they might choose as their next victim. The thought that they’d stop killing now, when they’d gone this far, seemed unlikely. Ernie was frustrated, so was I, and going back to talk to realtors sounded too much like starting from scratch. He couldn’t deal with it. I was having trouble myself, but I was determined to drive on. If he didn’t want to help, that was his problem.

“Okay,” I replied. “Take care of the maintenance. But be back here in two hours.”

Ernie stood up, buttoned his coat, and stalked out of the Hamilton Hotel Coffee Shop.

With the tips of her soft fingers, Suk-ja caressed my knuckles. I pulled my hand away, told her I’d see her tonight, and found my way out of the warm coffee shop. Alone, I walked the cold streets of the Korean red light district.

A sharp wind picked up beneath an overcast sky.

The torn shreds of a dried noodle wrapper tumbled past my feet. A few of the front doors of the nightclubs were open, and an occasional drunken GI stumbled in. All in all though, Itaewon was mostly deserted.

A little brown-faced girl with a Prince Valiant haircut appeared at my elbow.

“You buy gum?”

She held out a cardboard box crammed with an assortment of American and Korean brands.

“No gum,” I said, sticking my hands in my jacket pockets. If I remembered correctly, there were real estate offices up the hill, beyond the nightclub district. In Korea, the bok-dok-bangs are not just for buying homes. In fact, they’re more often used as brokers for people trying to rent. Even one-room hovels were rented through a bokdok-bang. Ernie was right though, they changed personnel a lot. What was the likelihood that I’d run into an agent who had been working the Itaewon area four years ago and remembered one business girl out of how many?

But when I thought of Han Ok-hi and Jo Kyong-ah and Arthur Q. Fairbanks, and the weapon that had killed them, I knew I had to keep trying.

The girl selling the gum pressed my elbow.

I turned and said, “I told you, no gum!”

“Solip,” she said.

“What?”

“Solip.”

Then I understood what she was saying. The Korean word I had learned not too long ago. Solip. Pine needles.

“What are you talking about?” I asked the girl.

She pointed with a grimy finger.

“She want talk to you.”

“Who wants to talk to me?”

“I show you.”

Without warning, she scampered off. Into the mouth of a dark alley leading uphill into the jumbled hooches. When I didn’t immediately follow, she paused and waited.

Pines needles. Who would know about the pine needles that had been left on the stove to burn in the home of Jo Kyong-ah? Only the people who had murdered her. Should I stop and call Ernie?

Not only would it be tough to get in touch with him, but the little girl could run away at the slightest provocation. Was I armed? I hadn’t been since the smiling woman led me into that dark alley. And now I was being led into a dark alley again, perhaps by the same person.

What choice did I have?

I shoved my fists deeper into my pockets and trudged on, following the girl into the dark heart of Itaewon.

T
he alleys of Itaewon cannot be plotted on a grid. They wind around and back, uphill and down, like the tentacles of a squid. I realized the girl had disappeared. I stood alone, behind a row of ramshackle wooden hooches, alongside a stone-lined drainage ditch fenced off by rusty, netted wire topped by coiled concertina. The ditch was six feet wide and just as deep. Filth flowed sluggishly through its channel. There were no lights, and although the sun had not gone down, the thick shroud of overhead clouds kept the world under a blanket of gloom.

I stood with my back against a dirty brick wall, facing the ditch. Nothing moved on either side. Most of Itaewon teems with life, but back here the world was holding its breath.

On my own, I never would’ve found this spot. Why come back here? Most GIs never wander far from the bar district. And when they did, they were escorted by a business girl directly to her hooch.

A glimmer of light appeared in the corner of my eye. Like a cartoon character, I swiveled my head in an exaggerated double-take.

She stood alone, on the opposite side of the drainage ditch, the ten-foot-high chain-link fence between us. She wore a plain beige overcoat that looked fashionable, with the collar turned up and the belt cinched at the waist. Her light brown hair fell to her shoulders, cascading in gentle waves. She stood so still that I blinked, wondering if she was imaginary. Her smooth unblemished skin set off the startling blue sparkle in her otherwise Asian eyes, and then I saw the smile. Broad. Too broad. As if the muscles of her face were incapable of assuming any other configuration.

Could I grab her?

No way. By the time I climbed the fence and hopped the ditch, she’d be long gone. Instead, I slowly moved a few feet, until I stood exactly opposite her. She didn’t move, and she didn’t stop smiling.

I stared into her eyes, she stared into mine.

“Why have you and your brother murdered those people?” I asked.

“Fanny likes you,” she said.

I was startled. She meant the crippled woman at the Half Half Club in Songsan-dong.

“I like Fanny too,” I said.

“You gave her money.”

I shrugged. “She needed it.”

The smiling woman stared at me in silence.

Finally, she said, “I have job for you. You don’t want to do anything for me. I know that. No GI wants do anything for me. But this time you must do.”

“Do what?”

She seemed pleased that I’d responded.

“You don’t know. But when time to do job, you will do.”

“How do you know that?”

She studied me. Weighing possibilities.

“You will do,” she said, and took a step backward.

“Wait,” I said. “Don’t kill any more people. We can work something out for you. I know about your mom. About how she was cheated by Jo Kyong-ah. About how the VD guy dragged her away from you and your brother. I will testify on your behalf. The judge will be lenient. You can’t go on killing.”

She stopped, still smiling, but her leer now conveyed rage. Her neck was glowing crimson and she was about to blow her top.

“My mom?” she said. “My mom? You know nothing about her!”

With that she took two quick steps into the dark and was gone.

I leapt at the wire, clinging to the rusted coils, staring across the drainage ditch into the alley beyond. But she was in the wind.

T
he Yoju City Hall of Records was an old wooden building, probably built during the period of Japanese colonization, that had somehow survived the Korean War. Mementoes and plaques lined the walls, commemorating kings of the Yi Dynasty and victories over invaders stretching back to battles that were fought against Hideyoshi’s invading army during the Sixteenth Century. I was staring at a hand-crafted bronze helmet when Ernie elbowed me in the ribs.

“This guy going to take all day?” he asked.

“It takes a while,” I said. “All this stuff is filed on paper, the old-fashioned way. The archives down in the basement must be enormous.”

“You’d love to look at them, wouldn’t you?”

“Damn right.”

Ernie rolled his eyes. “Figures.”

Since seeing the smiling woman in that back alley yesterday afternoon, I’d been in what psychologists might call a dream state. I’d managed to make my way out of the catacombs and re-enter the land of the living, but as I did so, I started to doubt if I’d really seen her, or if I’d just imagined the whole thing. Of course, I knew it was real. It’s just that what she and her brother were doing seemed so unreal. Unreal, until you saw the blood.

Naturally, when in a dream state, I did what I always do—I wandered into a bar. By the time Ernie found me, I was pretty well gone. He slapped my face a little and made me drink some barley tea and drove me back to the compound in his jeep. Somehow, that night, I managed eight hours of sleep for the first time in a long time. The next morning, after a cup of hot Joe at the snack bar, it came to me what we had to do.

“We gotta find out more about her family,” I said to Ernie.

“Her family? Why?”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, Agent Bascom, that’s what this entire mess is about. Family. And yesterday, that’s what seemed to enrage her. When I mentioned her mother.”

In one of the files at the 121 Evacuation Hospital, Specialist Fairbanks had kept a copy of the Ministry of Health records ordering the pick up of Miss Yun Yong-min, the mother of the smiling woman. According to the background information provided, Yoju was the kohyang, the ancestral home, of Miss Yun.

“If we’re going to head off the next killing,” I said, “we’re going to have to find out more about the smiling woman’s family.”

What I didn’t tell Ernie about the encounter yesterday was what the woman had said about having a job for me to do. I’m not sure why I didn’t.

When the bespectacled Korean man who was the Yoju Clerk of Records emerged from the creaking staircase, he plopped an enormous leather-bound ledger on the counter. Photocopying was conducted in another office and would take a half hour, he said, but I told him I didn’t need it. I just wanted to study the documents and take some notes.

Why had I started thinking in terms of family? A few things. The piece of cardboard that Specialist Fairbanks had been forced to bow to. A photograph maybe. Of an ancestor? And then someone joined the killer while Fairbanks was being forced to perform the seibei ceremony. The smiling woman, I presumed. She’d been present when her brother murdered Fairbanks. Had she been present when Jo Kyong-ah was similarly killed? I was starting to think that she had. These two

18

were turning murder into a family affair.

The Uichon mama-san had told me that when Miss Yun’s older brother refused to register her first child—her smiling daughter—on the family register, Miss Yun registered by herself as the head of her own family. No father, no grandparents, nothing. This is unusual in Korea, because the mantle of “head of the family” passes from father to oldest son to younger sons, to first daughter, to younger daughters, and finally to mother—in that order.

When one family member is seen to be shaming the rest of the family, they are sometimes banished from their hallowed place on the register. They’re forced to return to their kohyang, the ancestral home, and request a new family register under their name alone. Apparently, that’s what Miss Yun had done.

The family register the records clerk placed in front of me was the register where Miss Yun, the mother, was recorded. At the top were the stern-faced black and white photos of her father—the smiling woman’s grandfather. Below, Miss Yun’s mother—the smiling woman’s grandmother. Both of them were marked deceased. Listed next were three sons. The first two were also deceased. I checked the dates. They had both died during the Korean War, a number of years before their parents. The only surviving son was Yun Guang-min. The photo showed him as a child of twelve years, stern-faced and sullen.

Yun Guang-min was older than his sister, Miss Yun, and had to be in late middle-age by now. His face was square, with high cheekbones, and bore little resemblance to the smooth contoured lines of his younger sister’s face.

Miss Yun was the only daughter listed. She was a late child. Of all the faces on the family register, hers was the only beautiful one in the bunch.

“Seen enough?” Ernie asked.

“One more thing.” I spoke to the clerk, explaining in Korean what I wanted. He nodded, took the ledger back, and returned it to the archives down in the basement.

“What is it now?” Ernie said.

“You’ll see.”

When the clerk returned, he brought a newer book, already open to a page that had the photo of a now-adult Yun Guang-min. Below him was his wife, a cute heart-faced young woman, and below that, four children. After his older brothers and parents passed away, Yun Guang-min opened his own family register with himself as head of the family. By tradition, his unmarried sister should’ve been listed on his register but, of course, she wasn’t. Even Ernie understood why.

“His sister’s children were half-Miguk,” he said. “He didn’t want anything to do with her.”

“Right. He turned his back on all of them. And did nothing to help when she was working the streets and slowly dying of tuberculosis.”

Yun Guang-min’s treatment of his younger sister was harsh, no question about it, but not all that unusual. Sure, most people continue to support their daughter or sister, even if they’re pregnant with a GI’s baby. But other Koreans, the more traditional ones, didn’t always act with such equanimity. There’d been cases, recorded by the Koreans themselves, in which a woman with a GI baby had been hanged by her father or brothers. The police, when they investigated, often wrote the whole thing off as suicide.

“I suppose,” Ernie said, “this uncle will be the next victim on the smiling woman’s hit list.”

“Maybe.”

“We’d better warn him.”

“No need,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s already been warned.”

“Already warned? How?”

“Look at the face again.”

I pointed to the photograph of Yun Guang-min. The same high cheekbones and square face, but in this second family register, instead of being a boy of about twelve, he was a man in his early thirties.

“Imagine the face as a middle-aged man,” I said. “Imagine gray hair, more wrinkles, a grim expression.”

Ernie worked on it for a while, and then his eyes widened. “Holy shit,” he said.

I thanked the records clerk, slid the ledger across the counter, and Ernie and I trotted outside to the lot in front of the Yoju Hall of Records. Ernie fired up the jeep.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I know the way.”

We wound through back country roads, heading west. The afternoon was once again gray and overcast. At an intersection, one sign pointed north toward Seoul, another pointed west toward Inchon.

Ernie turned toward Inchon and shifted into high gear.

Blackjack dealers looked up from their tables as Ernie and I waded across the carpeted floor of the Olympos Casino. I wanted to talk to the smiling woman’s uncle, question him about the whereabouts of his nephew and niece, and maybe— just maybe—head off the next killing. The door of the cashier’s cage was locked, but I pounded on it and told the cashiers inside that I wanted to talk to Yun Guang-min, the owner of the casino.

Their eyes widened, and they conferred with one another, and while they mumbled, the manager, Mr. Bok, appeared out of nowhere. He smiled and bowed and told me that unfortunately Mr. Yun Guang-min was not available. I asked him why. He said that he was currently engaged in a banquet entertaining honored guests.

“Where?” I asked.

Bok just kept repeating that Yun Guang-min was unavailable.

Ernie was fed up. He reached for Bok, grabbed his shoulders, and while the casino manager’s mouth opened in shock, Ernie reached inside the man’s expensive suit jacket and pulled out a leather-bound notebook. He handed it to me.

Bok struggled to grab it back, but Ernie held him off.

I riffled through the pages. It was an appointment book.