The Door to Bitterness

by Martin Limon

  Candlelight cast odd figures on the cement flooring. We heard urgent mumbling inside. Korean, but from this distance I could understand none of it.

  Ernie knelt low. He peeked around the open door, then quickly pulled back. Motioning me forward, we entered the warehouse. After a few steps, we found cover behind a plastic-sheeted pallet of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Swirling dust clouds fogged my vision and made me want to cough. I fought the urge. Crouching, Ernie whispered in my ear.

  “Move closer,” he said. “So you can hear what they’re talking about.”

  I nodded and, as quietly as I could, I duck-walked my way to the far wall of the warehouse. I found a gap in the piled merchandise and worked my way toward the voices.

  When I was close enough, I peered around a pile of cardboard boxes full of Del Monte canned peaches. There, on a raised ondol floor, sat Haggler Lee—on his knees, as was his custom—wearing the traditional turquoise blue silk vest and white pantaloons of an ancient Korean patriarch. Lee, I guessed, was only in his early forties, but he acted as if he were a grandfather of venerable age. Maybe he thought it gave his black-market operation more class. Maybe he was just an old-fashioned guy. Who knows? What I did know was that the mumbling we’d heard wasn’t conversation. It was chanting, coming from Haggler Lee. In front of him on a low table was a framed photograph, edged with black ribbon. On either side of the photograph, candles flickered. Lee mumbled some more, and then bowed, placing two palms flat in front of him and pressing his forehead to the floor.

  I inched forward, hoping to catch a glimpse of the photograph. Squinting, I recognized the face. It was the same plain female I had seen in the crime folder in the Songtan Police Station: Jo Kyong-ah, the retired black marketeer who’d been murdered in her home by person or persons unknown.

  All my concentration focused on Haggler Lee and the photograph and the ancient ritual that he performed.

  Four dark shapes emerged from the rows of piled merchandise. Men. All holding something in their hands. Cudgels? Knives? From this distance, I couldn’t be sure.

  Shoe leather shuffled off to my right, probably Ernie.

  The dark figures floated past and headed unerringly toward Ernie’s last hiding place.

  The blast of a .45 reverberated throughout the warehouse.

  Haggler Lee sat on a silk cushion, shaking his head in dismay. “Why you shoot?” he asked Ernie. “Scare everybody?”

  “Your men were coming after me,” Ernie said, his neck a little too stiff.

  “They only checky checky. See who’s in warehouse.”

  The single shot fired from Ernie’s .45 had, in fact, frightened the crap out of everybody, especially me. Ernie had held Haggler Lee’s thugs at gunpoint until I determined that they were armed with nothing more than clubs and knives. When they put those away, we agreed to a truce and Ernie slipped his .45 back into his shoulder holster.

  We sat on the raised wooden floor in the middle of Haggler Lee’s inventory. Haggler Lee clapped his hands. A young Korean woman clad in traditional dress shuffled out of the darkness, slipped off her sandals and stepped up onto the platform. She set between us a small tray holding a round brass pot of hot water, a box of Lipton Tea bags, and a jar of Taster’s Choice freeze-dried coffee. I took coffee, black. Ernie, too. He stirred sugar into his. The woman had a smooth, pleasant round face and was as cute as a porcelain doll and Ernie couldn’t take his eyes off her. Both she and Haggler Lee ignored this rudeness. She bowed and backed away.

  “Nice setup you got here, Lee,” Ernie said.

  Haggler Lee nodded and sipped from an earthenware cup. He was a frail man with long, tapered fingernails. In his traditional silk vest and pantaloons, he looked more like an ancient Confucian scholar than the head of a black-market operation. I waited until he set the cup down to ask my question.

  “What are you so nervous about, Lee?”

  He smiled at that.

  “Besides your friend’s pistol,” he said, “only one thing.

  Someone murdered a very close friend of mine.”

  “Jo Kyong-ah,” I said.

  “Exactly. Before, long time ago, she black-market honcho. When I come Itaewon, she helped me set up business.”

  Lee wasn’t afraid to talk about illegal matters with a couple of GI cops. Although he was black-marketeering, almost exclusively, goods purchased from 8th Army PXs and commissaries, we had no jurisdiction over him. Of course, he had underlings handle all the day-to-day transactions but even if Ernie and I had caught Haggler Lee red-handed buying PX goods from a GI, we would have been unable to arrest him. We could arrest the GI, for violation of 8th Army prohibitions against selling duty-free goods to an unauthorized individual. And we’d busted many GIs for just such an offense and, in some cases, testified at their courts-martial. But Haggler Lee we couldn’t touch.

  The Korean National Police could arrest him but wouldn’t. To keep the 8th Army honchos happy, they sometimes ran in some of the low-level Korean black marketeers, held them for an hour or two, and filed their equivalent of misdemeanor charges against them. Usually, the black marke-teers paid a fine and were back in business the next day.

  If the purpose of black-market restrictions was to protect the Korean economy, why didn’t the KNPs take it more seriously? My theory was that a Korean just can’t fault another Korean for trying to make a buck in a nonviolent way. Besides, everybody in the country—everybody who could afford it—bought American-made cigarettes and whiskey and imported foodstuffs; that included the rich, movie stars, and even politicians, those self-same politicians who signed treaties to limit the importation of such items.

  The honchos at 8th Army, however, took black-marketing seriously. Why? They didn’t want low-ranking enlisted GIs making money that way. Some GIs I’d arrested had made upwards of $40,000 per year black-marketeering. When a GI makes that kind of money, the brass loses control. It’s hard to keep a young man enthusiastic about fighting war games in the snow and mud when he’s making more than twice as much as the Captain barking orders at him. That’s what 8th Army was fighting against, primarily. The loss of control over their own troops.

  And if anything could tempt a GI to lose his dedication to duty, it was the easy money to be made on the black market in Itaewon.

  Ernie and I never black-marketeered. It wasn’t a moral thing. It was just that we both hated shopping. For Ernie, it was insulting to be in the PX and have a sweet-voiced announcer over an intercom refer to him as a “shopper.” It enraged him. Even buying a bar of soap was a trial. I wasn’t much better. Commercialism never appealed to me. And besides, we both had plenty of money. I cleared over $400 per month, more money than I’d ever seen when I was being shuffled between foster homes as a kid. Ernie had one more stripe than me and consequently he cleared $50 more per month. What we made, we spent on booze and women. Occasionally, when we got lucky, we received those things free. So who needed money?

  I finished my coffee and asked Lee, “Why are you worried? Someone murdered Jo Kyong-ah thirty miles from here, in Songtan. What does that have to do with you?”

  “Revenge,” he said.

  I waited for him to explain.

  “In the black-market business some customers, when they run out of money, come to us for loans. Sometimes we give them loans. Have to. Otherwise people very angry. But I hate to give loans. Always causes trouble.”

  “People don’t want to pay you back,” Ernie said.

  Haggler Lee nodded.

  Ernie continued. “Because they think you’re making so much profit off what they sell you out of the PX, that it’s unfair for you to ask them to pay back the loan. So when you either collect or deny them another loan, they hate you.

  Over the years, you pick up a lot of enemies.”

  Lee nodded again.

  “So,” I said, “you think a disgruntled customer murdered Jo Kyong-ah, and you’re worried that the same customer might come after you.”

  Haggler Lee said, “Sometim
es people crazy about money.”

  I glanced at the piled goods in this dark warehouse and tried to calculate the cash they must represent. Tens of thousands of U.S. dollars, I imagined, and Haggler Lee was accusing other people of being “crazy about money.”

  “Who would’ve hated Jo Kyong-ah,” I asked, “enough to kill her?”

  “Lot of people.”

  “You, for instance?” Ernie said.

  Lee shook his head vehemently. “No. She never cheat me.

  She can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Lee straightened his back and thrust out his narrow chest. “I’m business man.”

  That explained that.

  “So who else?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who would know?”

  Lee thought about that, then shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  I pulled out the three sketches and laid them on the floor in front of Lee. “Do you recognize any of these people?”

  I watched his eyes as he scanned them. He skipped past Private Boltworks and the dark man, but his eyes lingered on the sketch of Yun Ai-ja, the smiling woman. Still staring at her, he shook his head.

  “Her,” I said, pointing at the smiling woman’s sketch.

  “You know her.”

  “No,” he said, but his voice sounded weak. Indecisive.

  A thought hit me. Improbable, but worth a try.

  “Think about this,” I said. “What if her hair in this sketch was the same length but straighter, less wavy, and it was jet black.”

  He stared at the sketch again.

  “Imagine her skinny,” I said. “So skinny her cheeks were sunken in.”

  I sucked my cheeks in to demonstrate, but Haggler Lee wasn’t watching. He stared intently at the sketch. As quietly as I could, I moved one of the candleholders closer. Suddenly, Haggler Lee gulped an involuntary intake of breath.

  “Miss Yun,” he said.

  Haggler Lee took the unusual step of leaving his warehouse, along with his bodyguards, and escorted Ernie and me down to the nightclub district of Itaewon. While we stood on a dark corner, his bodyguards reconnoitered the area until they found the man they were looking for: Jimmy. A slender, middle-aged Korean who rode his motor scooter to Itaewon every night. With a big flash camera hung over his neck, he wandered from club to club offering his services to the GIs and business girls who snuggled together in dark booths, snapping a photo and popping the hot flash bulb into his white-gloved hand.

  It was a living—the type of hustle that everyone had to make to get by in post-war Korea.

  Jimmy stood before me and Ernie and Haggler Lee, eyes wide, crooked smile showing amusement at the attention. He nodded to Lee, but not deeply, Jimmy being older.

  Lee spoke to Jimmy so rapidly I could barely keep up— something to do with showing photographs to me and Ernie. Jimmy nodded, jumped on his motor bike, rolled up to one of the kimchee cabs that lined the streets of Itaewon, and gave the driver directions. Ernie and I hopped in the back of the cab. We followed Jimmy’s scooter through the winding roads of Seoul.

  Finally, in the riverside district known as Dongbinggo, Jimmy stopped on the flag-stoned sidewalk of a busy thoroughfare. He motioned for the cab to pull over, and we climbed out. Pushing his motor bike, Jimmy trudged up a pedestrian pathway that ascended a steep hill. The path was lined with wood and brick walls, behind which squatted teeming small hovels. When we were almost to the top, the road leveled off, and Jimmy turned and stopped at a rickety wooden gate. He banged on it with his fist.

  “Na ya!” he shouted. It’s me.

  When the gate opened, two bright eyes shone out at us. A woman turned and shuffled off quickly, back to the hooch behind the wall. I helped Jimmy lift his scooter through the gate. We were in a small courtyard with the usual byonso on one side, earthen kimchee jars on the other. The kimchee jars flanked a cement-block building almost as large as the hooch. It seemed out of place in this Asian slum. Modern. Its red door and blue-tiled roof gleamed in the moonlight, and promised entry into another world.

  Ernie inhaled the aroma of boiling red peppers wafting from the house the woman had disappeared into.

  “Nice place you got here, Jimmy,” he said, and I knew he meant it.

  Below, headlights streamed down Han Kang Ro, the Han River Road. On the other side of downtown, a three-quarters-full harvest moon illuminated craggy peaks. I could just make out the symmetrical stone battlements that had once protected this ancient city from invasion.

  Jimmy pulled out a ring of keys and opened the red door. He flicked on a switch and the interior was bathed in red light. With his free arm, he motioned for us to enter.

  When I was a kid in L.A., our grammar school once took a busload of us Chicano kids from the slums of Maravilla up to the scenic grandeur of Griffith Park Observatory. I was impressed with the granite monolith and the panoramic view of the Los Angeles Basin from its stone walkways. I was even more impressed by the show inside. We sat in comfortable chairs and the lights were turned lower and lower until, from horizon to horizon, the entire star-studded universe erupted from the darkness.

  What I saw in Jimmy’s photo lab that night was not nearly as magnificent. But in some ways it was more beautiful. For what Jimmy had done during his years since the Korean War—years spent wandering from bar to bar with a camera—was to chronicle a way of life. GIs pulled from their homes and thrust into the harsh and lonely environment of the United States Army, facing a four thousand year old Asian culture that was on the ropes, a country halved and reeling from thirty-five years of Japanese occupation and three years of vicious civil war, followed by a wary peace. Overly made-up Korean girls filled shot after shot. Girls who only weeks or days before had been squatting in muddy rice paddies, trying to harvest enough grain and pick enough cabbage to survive through the long months of the Korean winter. If the survival of their families meant they had to sell their bodies to American GIs, they would.

  Jimmy stored the photos in long narrow boxes, each marked with a letter written in hangul. Without asking questions, he located three boxes buried under a table, lifted them up, blew dust off, and plopped them on the tabletop. He deftly thumbed through the photos, each sheathed in a brown pulp envelope. When he found what he was looking for, he slapped it up on a plastic-backed wall board and switched on the fluorescent light. He slapped another photo up, and then another, and Ernie and I stared at the universe before us.

  The uniforms are what I noticed first. Archaic. Stiff old-fashioned khaki. The GIs wore black ties and their trousers were bloused into brown combat boots. Styles have changed. The haircuts are shorter now. The Rock Revolution, begun a decade earlier, prompted the army to tighten its haircut restrictions, so anything longer than a crew cut is frowned upon. The GIs in these photos from the fifties sported hair that looked shaggy in comparison.

  Still, they were young and fresh-faced. There were many different GIs in the pictures, but the woman was the same. The same Korean face. She looked very much like the smiling woman, except her hair was black instead of blond, and her cheekbones were higher. She was skinnier than the smiling woman. On the edge of each envelope was written a single Chinese character: Yun.

  And still there were more. The parade of GIs sitting next to Miss Yun changed as rapidly as an old film in a nickelodeon. Each one younger and more wholesome than the one before. And all the while, the woman known as Miss Yun kept her smile cranked up to full velocity.

  Some of the photos that Jimmy slapped up for us weren’t taken in nightclubs. Some showed Miss Yun outside the clubs, or on the shores of a lake, or standing with a Korean friend outside a bathhouse. I recognized one of her companions, the woman who was now the old hag known as the Uichon mama-san. And then a child: a toddler with straight blonde hair and a Korean face. As the child grew older and taller, a second child appeared. This one a boy. Dark. His hair curly, face scowling. Jimmy slapped another photo up and stopped.

 
“This her long time yobo,” he said. Her long time American boyfriend.

  He was beefy, with large hands and a scorched-earth crew cut framing his bulging cheeks. He was homely, even in uniform, battle ribbons across his chest. Suspicious eyes glared out from behind thick Army-issue glasses. Miss Yun, although she was aging, was still much too beautiful for him.

  Another photo. The booth was full. The beefy soldier took up most of the space. Sitting on either side of the couple were the children. The girl’s hair was a little darker—light brown— and looked more Asian. His hair was wavy, no longer in curls. They boy had a strong square jaw. He sat with a non-committal expression, the big GI’s paw resting on his shoulder. The GI’s other arm was looped all the way around behind Miss Yun. His hand rested on the girl’s head. His fingers were long, languid, fleshy. Possessive.

  Miss Yun looked resigned.

  The rank insignia on his khaki sleeve was SFC, Sergeant First Class. The name: Garner.

  After that, the photos stopped. Except for one more that Jimmy found on the other side of his lab. It was from a much later date, because now both kids were teenagers, the boy maybe thirteen, the girl a couple of years older. Miss Yun stood between them, being held up. She seemed ancient now, skinnier than she had ever been, her face wrinkled, her eyes drooping as if exhausted from the effort of living. All stood in front of an ancient wooden gate. Above, three Chinese characters were slashed in red. Dirty snow lay in clumps at their feet.

  “Where was this taken?” I asked Jimmy.

  “At Buddhist temple in country. Called Hei-un Sa. The Temple of Cloud and Sea. Sometimes I go there pray. That time I see Miss Yun and her children.”

  “Why’d you take her picture?” I asked.

  “Miss Yun made me much money for many years. Always ask GI take picture. Some say no. Most say yes. When she young, many GI like her very much. So when she ask me to take picture of her and her children, how can I say no? I take photo, give each one copy. Keep this one myself. Here.” He handed me a copy of the photo. “I have negative.”