The Door to Bitterness

by Martin Limon

  Where the Uichon mama-san had been cute in her youth, in a hard sort of way, this woman was truly beautiful. Her face was smooth and unblemished, oval-shaped, and her black hair hung like silk to her shoulders, framing doe-like eyes that stared at the camera lens with a mournful challenge.

  “That time,” the mama-san told me, “she already pregnant.”

  “With her daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t she give the baby up for adoption?”

  “No can do.”

  “Why not?”

  “Some woman,” the Uichon mama-san said, “no can do.”

  I thought of the smiling woman’s mad expression. “It would’ve been better for her daughter, don’t you think, if Miss Yun would’ve turned Ai-ja over for adoption? She could’ve grown up in the States or in Europe. She wouldn’t have ended up here, working for GIs.”

  Still squatting, the Uichon mama-san puffed on her cigarette for a long time. Finally, she said, “Better, yes.” Then she pounded her fist on her chest. “But inside, never better.”

  “What happened to your friend, Ai-ja’s mother?” I asked.

  Without looking at me, the Uichon mama-san slid a skinny finger across her throat.

  “Killed?”

  “Die.”

  “What happened?”

  She told me, and I took notes, but not many. I kept thinking about Ernie stalling Lieutenant Cheon, and about Private Rodney K. Boltworks out there somewhere still on the loose. The story was upsetting, but it was all a long time ago. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with our current investigation, so finally I interrupted.

  “The daughter of Miss Yun, this young woman named Yun Ai-ja, where is she now?”

  The Uichon mama-san shrugged. “She go. GI beat her up, then her brother come.”

  I stopped her right there. “Her brother?”

  “Yes. Dong seing.” Younger brother.

  “What does he look like?”

  She described him. I took notes, trying not to let my excitement show. I pulled out the sketch of the man in sunglasses that Ernie and I had been calling “the dark GI.”

  “Is that him?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  So that was it. All three of the people involved in the robbery of the Olympos Casino and the murder of the blackjack dealer Han Ok-hi were identified. At last. Now we just had to catch them.

  “What happened after her brother arrived?” I asked.

  “He taaksan kullasso.” She raised two forefingers on either side of her head, indicating that he was angry.

  “Why?”

  “Ai-ja, she all hurt. Here, here, here.”

  She pointed at her face and shoulders and back.

  “Bruised,” I said.

  “Yes. GI punch many times.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Ai-ja no do nothing. Never make GI angry. She out in grass with crazy GI. He move far away from us. Nighttime, so my other girls plenty busy. First, I don’t hear nothing, then I hear fighting.”

  “She fought back?”

  “You better believe-uh.”

  “But she didn’t scream?”

  “Ai-ja never scream. Never ask for help. I run over there, try to stop him. He no stop. Finally, GI tired of punching Ai-ja. He stand up, very happy on face. He give extra money, maybe ten MPC.” Ten dollars in Military Payment Certificates. “Then he go back to Charley Battery. Say he no want any other man touch Ai-ja that night. But he don’t have to say because she manhi apo.” Hurt very much.

  “Did you take her to the hospital?”

  The mama-san shrugged. I took that as a no.

  “And then her brother showed up?” I asked.

  “Yes. Maybe two days later. He tough man. Very tough.

  Half-GI baby gotta be tough. He so angry, he come back next time Charley Battery come to Nightmare Range.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Maybe one month.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He tell Ai-ja wait for mean GI. She do. Together with mean GI, she go in bushes. Maybe mean GI he want to beat up Ai-ja again. But when he start, her brother jump on him.” Her eyes gleamed at the memory. “Like tiger from mountain.”

  “They fought?”

  “They fight. GI bigger, stronger, but Ai-ja brother, he tough. Very tough. He taaksan beat the shit outta GI. GI bloody, all beat up, but then something funny happen.”

  “What?”

  “He laugh.”

  “The GI laughed?”

  “Yes. He happy. He get beat up, he like. So Ai-ja brother, he do again.”

  “He kept beating on him?”

  She nodded her head. “Until GI go back to Charley Battery. He have guard duty that night.”

  So much for military security.

  “Later that night,” she said, “Charley Battery have alert. Move to other side of Nightmare Range. We follow. Again they fight, all three. Ai-ja and her brother knuckle sandwich with GI.”

  “Ai-ja was fighting him too?”

  The mama-san nodded.

  “Next day, morning time, Ai-ja go.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Itaewon,” she said. “That’s where she grow up. That’s where her brother grow up. They want to live there.”

  “They grew up in Itaewon?”

  “Yes.” She proceeded to tell me more stories about that, but I was impatient and interrupted.

  “That morning, when Ai-ja left with her brother, the mean GI went with them?”

  “Yes. He say he no wanna go back Charley Battery. Too much bullshit.”

  “So he followed Ai-ja and her brother?”

  11

  “Yes. Like, how you say, kangaji?”

  “Puppy dog,” I said.

  “Yes. GI follow like puppy dog.”

  * * *

  Ernie jammed the jeep into fourth gear and gunned the engine down the four-lane highway known as Tongil-lo, Reunification Road. We were heading south, back toward Seoul.

  “So what’d she tell you?” he asked.

  “I know who the dark GI is now. He’s the smiling woman’s brother.”

  Ernie shot me a glance. “How’d you get that?”

  “She recognized him from the sketch. Boltworks beat up the blonde, and little brother came to the rescue. The mama-san was friends with their mother. She’s got a million stories.”

  “Any other leads?”

  “Maybe a couple,” I said. “She was pretty vague.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  He meant everybody a cop interviews. Nobody ever remembers much, and if you press them for facts, one of two things happens: They become defensive and clam up or, hoping to seem intelligent, they make up what they think you want to hear. Either way, a cop has to push past the first line of bull and search for the truth. That’s what I’d tried with the old mama-san, but I’m not sure if I did it to her or she did it to me.

  But I’d heard whisperings. Things not meant for my ears, said by the girls who worked for the Uichon mama-san as they struggled to get up and wash their faces and clean up the hooch while the mama-san and I talked.

  Songsan-dong had been mentioned a couple of times. Star Mountain District. And Ban Ban Suljip. The Half Half Club. I rummaged through the canvas emergency bag beneath the front seat of the jeep and found what I was looking for. A U.S. Geological Survey map of the northern half of Kyongi Province. After five minutes of study, I found it. Songsan-dong was a suburb of Uijongbu, a city twenty miles north of Seoul, located in the middle of an ancient invasion route that military planners call the Eastern Corridor. And south of Songsan sat Camp Stanley. For security purposes, it was not on the map. DivArty, the GIs called it. Division Artillery. The headquarters of the field artillery brigade of the 2nd United States Infantry Division.

  Songsan was out of our way, but when I told Ernie about the whisperings I’d heard and why I thought it might be worth checking out, he changed lanes and at the n
ext intersection turned left toward the Eastern Corridor. I hadn’t questioned the girls further, not in front of the mama-san. I knew they’d wanted to keep something secret, but I didn’t know why.

  We passed fallow rice paddies, white cranes winging toward a gray sky. In the distance the Bukhan Mountains loomed. We sped at fifty miles per hour toward a place known on military maps as the District of Star Mountain.

  Camp Stanley sits on a ridge overlooking a broad valley full of rice paddies and straw-thatched farmhouses and narrow chimneys with smoke rising slowly toward the abode of ancestors. It was noon when Ernie and I arrived at the Camp Stanley main gate, and the day was still overcast, the air brisk. After being checked out thoroughly by the MPs, we cruised past truck parks reeking of diesel fumes. Huge tin-domed maintenance sheds lined the road to Camp Stanley’s back gate. It was open only to pedestrians—a gate designed to let GIs on pass out into the village of Songsan-dong. We parked the jeep and strode toward the MP shed. When we flashed our military identification, the MPs guarding the gate stared at our civilian coats and ties suspiciously but waved us on. We had only taken a few steps before they cranked the canvas-covered field phone, reporting our movements to the MP Desk Sergeant.

  Ernie didn’t bother looking back. “Hayseeds,” he said.

  The truth was that an isolated base like Camp Stanley received virtually no visitors. Two CID agents from Seoul operating in the DivArty area would probably be enough to make the local Provost Marshal go into cardiac arrest. Like all military bureaucrats, his main job is to make sure the local commander looks good—under all circumstances and at all times. Having two outside investigators prowling around his back yard would almost certainly raise his blood pressure.

  Not that Ernie or I gave a damn.

  Hot grease popped out of deep fat fryers. American rock music vibrated out of warped speakers. GIs in uniform, wearing the Indianhead patch of the 2nd Infantry Division, paraded from one shop to another, some of them hunched over fried-chicken baskets at open-fronted eateries. Middle-aged Korean men and women slaved behind hot stoves. Young girls with long black ponytails carried trays back and forth, serving the hungry Americans.

  Hundreds of GIs were lined up in front of the main mess hall back on Camp Stanley, waiting with their army-issued meal cards for free chow. But dozens came out here to eat, even though it would cost them. Mainly because out here in Songsan, it’s just more fun.

  Ernie and I strolled past the eateries until we came upon the inevitable tailor shops and brassware emporiums and sporting goods stores, and then we found what we were looking for. The bars. All shuttered now and locked up in the middle of the day. We checked out the signs: Gun Bunny Inn, The Royal Club, The Dragon Lady Bar.

  I stopped a freckle-faced GI heading back toward the gate and asked him about the Half Half Club.

  His round nose crinkled in confusion. “You want to go there?”

  “Why not?” Ernie asked.

  “You’re white,” he said.

  “So?”

  “The Half Half Club is for soul brothers.”

  He told us to continue down the lane another fifteen yards and there’d be an alley branching off to the right. We were to follow it for a quarter mile and watch for the signs.

  “You can’t miss it,” he said.

  Then he turned and continued his march toward the back gate of Camp Stanley.

  Ernie and I followed his directions. We found the signs and were soon walking single file through a brick-walled walkway so narrow I had to angle in to squeeze through. The alley let out into an open flagstoned courtyard, then up a short flight of steps. At the top a sign above a door read: Half Half Club.

  The door was locked but instead of pounding and demanding entrance, Ernie and I slipped around the side of the building to the alley behind the Half Half Club. The back door stood open. Laughter drifted out. High and shrill. Women’s laughter.

  Ernie and I stepped into the dark passageway. We strode forward, our GI-issue oxfords clattering on dirty cement.

  A row of bulbs behind the bar cast a yellow glow onto a room equipped with a jukebox, a dance floor, and fifteen cocktail tables.

  Some of the Half Half Club women wore shorts and T-shirts, apparently on their way to the bathhouse. Others sat on metal-legged stools around a table laden with steamed rice, cabbage kimchee, and miyok kuk—seaweed soup. They all looked up when Ernie and I entered; some with chopsticks halfway to their mouths, others in the midst of packing soap and shampoo and washcloths into small metal pans.

  Once again, as had happened at the Olympos Casino, the reaction was fear. Abject fear. As if the two tall strangers who’d walked into their midst were the most dangerous people in the world.

  “Anyong hashi-motor pool,” Ernie said as he strode forward, grinning like a hero returning home from a war. The girls gazed at him, mesmerized, wondering who in the hell he was.

  The women of the Half Half Club were unlike any group of Korean women I’d ever seen. Why? Because they were not fully Korean; they were half-American, every one of them. All had dark hair and dark eyes, but some looked like their daddy could’ve been a coal miner from rural Kentucky, with a pointed nose and sunken cheeks and a sullen look that seemed to expect trouble. Others had faces that were full and noses more bulbous, and at least two of the girls had the tightly curled hair and dark complexion that indicated that they were partially of African descent. But none of the women were blonde. Light-colored hair had been subsumed by their Asian ancestry. And none of the girls dyed their hair blonde, trying to pretend they were more American than they were. Something told me that these women were proud to be Korean and maybe wished they could claim to be one hundred percent Korean. Then they wouldn’t be working in this back alley in a low-rent bar called the Half Half Club, hidden away, as if there was something undesirable about them.

  “Meikju kajjiwa!” Ernie shouted. Bring me a beer!

  A space was opened for him, and he sat down with the girls at the table. One hustled over to the bar and returned with an ice-cold OB. Ernie pulled cash out of his pocket and ordered another beer for me, and then asked the girls what they were drinking. Cola and Orange Fanta were the main orders, and soon everyone had something to drink and Ernie sent one of the girls over to play a few tunes on the jukebox. Soul music: Jackie Wilson wailing an unrequited plea. Within five minutes, Ernie had the girls of the Half Half Club laughing and relaxed as if we were all old friends.

  I appreciated his work. Relaxing them so I could start asking questions, but I knew I had to hurry. There were no GIs in the club right now, but once they started showing up later this afternoon, the girls would be distracted, and my chance at finding out what the Half Half Club had to do with the smiling woman would be diminished.

  The first girl I talked to was tall and dark-complected and told me before I asked that her daddy had been a Creole from Louisiana.

  “I never see,” she said, “but my ohma, she show me picture many times.”

  I pulled out the sketch of the smiling woman.

  The reaction of the girls was as if I had reached into a velvet bag and pulled out the Hope Diamond. They gathered around, oohing and aahing, jostling for a look.

  “You know her?” I asked.

  “We know,” one of the girls said. “Yun Ai-ja. Best looking half-half jo-san in Korea.”

  Jo-san. GI slang, from Japanese, for a business girl.

  “Do you know where she is now?”

  They all shook their heads.

  “But she used to work here,” I said.

  They nodded. She’d left, according to them, about three months ago. Approximately the same time she arrived up north at the doorstep of the Uichon mama-san.

  “Why’d she leave?”

  Eyes dropped, avoiding my stare. I waited, and when I received no response, I folded up the sketch and unrolled the sketches of PFC Rodney K. Boltworks and the other man, who was Yun Ai-ja’s younger brother.

  “Do you know eith
er one of these two men?” I asked.

  Everyone shook their heads no.

  “Answer the man’s questions,” Ernie said gruffly. “Why did Yun Ai-ja leave the Half Half Club?”

  The women who were standing backed up a half step. The women sitting bowed their heads.

  There is much talk about Asian women being submissive. Maybe whoever said that wasn’t talking about Koreans. I’ve seen Korean women stand in the middle of the street and exchange punches, toe to toe, with a grown man. And I’d never met a Korean woman who wasn’t feisty when the need presented itself. But these women of the Half Half Club seemed particularly fearful, as if life had beaten them down and their only defense was abject submission to anyone who held the slightest hint of power.

  Ernie repeated his question. Finally, the Creole girl sang out.

  “Ask Fanny,” she said. “She tell you.”

  “Fanny?”

  “Yes.”

  Ernie stood up but I waved for him to stay put. He nodded, knowing that I meant for him to protect our rear. Two of the Half Half girls took me by the hand and led me to a dark corner beyond the bar. A flicker of candlelight revealed a steep stairway. They pointed up. I left them and climbed the creaking stairs.

  As I climbed, an aroma sharpened, biting deeply into my sinuses. At first I thought it was incense. Then I realized the smell was too fierce and disagreeable to be incense. I took a deep breath and held it. Hanyak. Chinese medicine. Herbs and exotic ingredients boiled to within an inch of their fundamental essence.

  Whoever this Fanny was, she figured to be sick.

  The stairs of the Half Half Club squeaked. The sharp, almost toxic odor of hanyak grew unbearable. Holding my breath, I gazed down a varnished wooden-slat hallway. There, in a small room at the end, a brown earthen jar sat atop a flickering purple flame. I stepped closer. The spout of the earthen jar was covered with a thick wad of cheesecloth. Pungent steam moistened the cloth and bubbled upward, carrying the medicinal scent of ancient herbal remedies into the air.

  “Nugu ya?” someone shouted. Who is it?

  A woman’s voice, in the room next to the small kitchen.

  “Na ya,” I assured her. It’s me.