The Door to Bitterness

by Martin Limon

  I believed them. They were too frightened and in too much awe of our supposed authority to lie. The oldest boy didn’t recognize the sketched faces either.

  Ernie sighed, frustrated at this waste of time and effort. He reached into his pocket and slapped a ten-dollar MPC note on the bar, not looking at any of the kids. He was ashamed of what he’d done, but he had to be certain that information would be surrendered quickly and accurately. With a killer on the loose, we had no time for niceties.

  He was about to leave when I stopped him.

  “Maybe these kids can help us another way,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “The woman involved in the altercation, she’s a black marketeer . . . just a minute.”

  In Korean, I asked the kids if they knew where the woman who had been in the fight lived. All stood dumb except for one chubby girl. Almost imperceptibly, she nodded her head.

  I asked again. “You know where she lives?”

  “We all do,” she answered.

  The oldest boy frowned. I crossed the carpeted floor and slipped my arm around his narrow shoulders.

  “Bali kaja,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Sullenly, he nodded. He slipped on a wool sweater to ward off the cold, and then Ernie and I and the boy left out the back door of the bar.

  The sky had taken on a slightly lighter hue. As we wound through fog-shrouded alleys, Ernie leaned into me. “Why do you want to talk to this black-market woman? What’s she got to do with all this?”

  “Boltworks is on tilt. He’s making purchases out of the PX. He knows eventually we’ll cancel his Ration Control Plate. The time to buy is now. And if he buys, he has to sell. And quickly. Probably at bargain rates. The black market mama-sans in ASCOM City will be on him like vultures. The woman who started the fight at the Asian Eyes Bar is a black mar-keteer and a feisty one. And she has enough pull in the village to be released by the KNPs with nothing more than a warning. She’ll probably know about a new GI in the village making beaucoup black-market buys. I’m willing to bet on it.”

  Ernie thought it over. “Maybe,” he said.

  The boy turned down a crack between two buildings. We angled in, emerging onto another alley. The boy stopped. He pointed at a wooden gate in a granite wall.

  “Yogi,” he said. Here.

  Nimbly, he hopped back, and then he disappeared. Ernie almost went after him, but I grabbed his elbow.

  “Don’t,” I said. “The kid’s not lying. He knows we can find him.”

  Ernie shrugged and stared at the gate. There was a black button with a wire running back into the hooch. Ernie reached to press it. Again, I stopped him.

  I said, “Let’s not knock.”

  Ernie’s eyes widened, then narrowed. He nodded.

  I checked for a brass nameplate embedded in the wall; there was none. Only two numbers on the door in black paint: “201 bonji, 36 ku.” The address, but no name.

  We searched around until we found a wooden trash crate. We set it on its end against the wall. Ernie was armed, his .45 snug in his shoulder holster, so he climbed up first and went over the top. He leapt, and I heard him grunt when he hit the ground. Then I was on the crate and atop the fence. I leapt down into a cleanly swept courtyard. The hooch was silent, its oil-paper sliding doors shut.

  At the lip of the raised wooden floor, Ernie and I slipped off our shoes and stepped up onto the immaculate surface. A gleaming hallway led through an opening between the first few hooches. It emptied onto a courtyard, a well-tended garden paved with flagstone. The surrounding hooches faced inwards. All were silent. Sliding doors closed.

  From behind, footsteps. I swiveled.

  She wore a flower-print robe. Her feet were bare, her black hair ratted up in a sweaty disarray.

  “What’s the matta you?” she snarled.

  Ernie and I stared. She must’ve been fifty, at least, with a wrinkled face and a round button nose that would’ve been cute when she was young. “Pak Mi-rae?” I asked.

  “How you know?”

  “You were in a fight at the Asian Eyes Bar the other night.”

  “Yeah. So what? GI owe me money. I knuckle sandwich with him.”

  A few of the doors around the courtyard slid open. Women lying on down-filled mats peeked out with sleep-filled faces. All were young, as Pak Mi-rae had once been.

  Ernie grinned, looking around. He placed his hands on his hips. We were in a brothel, and he felt right at home.

  I turned back to Pak Mi-rae. “Can we talk? You have coffee?”

  She snickered. “You come my hooch, climb fence, wake up me, wake up all girls. Now you want kopi?”

  “Yes,” Ernie said, grinning broadly. “That’s what we want. Part of what we want anyway.”

  He approached Miss Pak and pulled out his CID badge.

  She stared up at him. “CID. Don’t mean shit.”

  “Good. Then you won’t mind fixing us some coffee.”

  She snorted, stared at Ernie for a moment, then swiveled and walked back toward her hooch. We followed. Ernie smiled and waved at the sleepy young women gawking at us.

  A few, timidly, waved back.

  15

  Pak Mi-rae knew all about the retired black marketeer, Jo Kyong-ah, who’d been murdered in the city of Songtan.

  “She treat somebody bad,” Miss Pak said. “Me, I never treat nobody bad.”

  To her, punching out a GI who owed her money didn’t qualify.

  We sat in a large hooch near the front gate. Pak Mi-rae boiled water in a brass pot and poured us cups of freeze-dried coffee. We were cops. It was best to humor us. We sat on her warm ondol floor and used a foot-high table with folding legs. The table and the four armoires surrounding us were made of polished black lacquer inlaid with expensive mother-of-pearl designs. Miss Pak’s bed was Western-style, with a hand-embroidered silk comforter hiding the wrinkled sheets. The place reeked of perfume. No sign of any man living there.

  Ernie told her about the GI and his partner who’d robbed the Olympos Casino in Inchon and murdered a blackjack dealer. She knew about that too. Then he told her that we believed the GI’s partner had murdered Jo Kyong-ah.

  She thought about that for a while, stirring too much non-dairy creamer into her coffee.

  “The GI’s name is Boltworks,” Ernie said. “Rodney K. He made a few purchases on ASCOM compound two days ago. He’s dangerous, and we believe he’s armed, with the pistol stolen from the security guard at the Olympos Casino in Inchon.”

  Ernie wasn’t holding back on his English. Pak Mi-rae understood it as well as we. Her pronunciation and grammar, and liberal use of slang, was far from perfect, but we didn’t have to talk down to her. And I didn’t have to speak Korean. She’d probably been speaking English since she was a teenager, when she’d first arrived in some GI village to start work as a business girl.

  She stared at her coffee cup, then ladled more sugar into it.

  She knows something, I thought. Ernie sensed it too.

  “We only want him,” Ernie said. “We’re not here to bust anybody for black marketing or anything.”

  She continued to stir, and then I noticed her hand was shaking. Behind us, I heard whispering. Quickly, I stood. Ernie too, instinctively going for his .45. But the whispering wasn’t coming toward us, it was receding from the hooch, along with footsteps. I slid open the door of the hooch and, as Ernie was about to step past me with the weapon, Pak Mi-rae leapt at him. Screaming.

  “Ka! Bali ka!” Go! Go quickly!

  I tried to pull her off Ernie but she had dug her claws into his coat and held on like a snow leopard. We heard the front gate open, and then slam shut. With a fierce tug, I ripped Pak Mi-rae off of Ernie, and we rushed into the courtyard. We both remembered our shoes and skidded to a halt, but when we looked for them under the porch they were gone.

  “Shit!” Ernie shouted. He stared at Pak Mi-rae standing in the doorway to her hooch and, without thinking, pointed his .45 at her. She cower
ed.

  “Where are the shoes?” he shouted.

  She retreated from the doorway.

  “No time,” I said. “Come on!”

  In our stocking feet we ran across the courtyard, fumbled with the lock of the front gate, and burst into the alley, running full tilt, not sure which way to go.

  “Did you see him?” Ernie shouted.

  “No.”

  “Then where?”

  “We’ll never find him in this maze,” I said. We stopped, looking around at the gaping mouths of dark, empty lanes. The morning fog had started to lift, but the sky was still a dark gray. “The MSR,” I said. “That’s where he’ll go.”

  “How do we get there?”

  I didn’t know. Not exactly. I knew only the general direction. North, toward the long brick walls of the ASCOM compound.

  We ran through the maze, past shuttered bars and quiet nightclubs, always heading north toward larger and larger alleyways. Finally, a curving pathway led sharply up an incline, past Han’s Tailor Shop and Miss Goo’s Brassware Emporium. Ernie stepped on a rock and hopped up and down, cursing. I kept going. Then we were on a sidewalk, and the walls of the ASCOM compound were across the street, and the MSR spread east and west in front of us. Two kimchee cabs sat about ten yards over. Ernie and I each chose a cab and ripped open the doors.

  “Migun,” I shouted in Korean—GI.

  “Kumbang.” Just a moment ago.

  “Odi kasso?” Where did he go?

  Both drivers pointed straight ahead. East, toward the Pupyong Train Station.

  Ernie and I jumped into the lead taxi. “Bali ka!” I shouted. Go quickly.

  The driver glanced down at my stocking feet, but didn’t comment. He started the engine and slammed it in gear. We lurched forward, shouting to go faster. He did. In a few seconds we were past the village, speeding into the still quiet edge of Pupyong proper.

  And then, up ahead, we saw a kimchee cab. Ernie spotted it first.

  “There!” He pointed, and the driver saw it and stepped on the gas. As we closed in, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a rumpled five-dollar MPC note. Too much. Way too much. And cops in Korea—at least Korean ones— have the right to commandeer any vehicle they want any time, as long as it’s used for police business. I shoved the fiver back in my pocket. The driver would have to derive his satisfaction from doing his civic duty.

  Ernie was shouting and pounding the back seat. “Faster! Faster!”

  The driver understood, but the cab in front of us had realized it was being followed. It lurched right, toward the front of the Pupyong Train Station. Before it had rolled to a complete stop, the back door popped open and someone was out and running. Blond hair, short crew cut, stocky build. Civilian clothes that were a blur. Dark pants. Darker jacket.

  “Boltworks!” Ernie shouted.

  Our driver screeched up behind the other kimchee cab, and for a terrifying second, I thought he was going to smash into the rear bumper, but somehow he stopped in time, and Ernie and I were out of the cab, dashing flatfooted across cement, startling men in suits carrying briefcases. Ernie bounded up, trying to see over the growing crowd of morning commuters. I spotted it first. Not the blond head of Boltworks, but the dark-haired heads of Koreans being jostled out of the way.

  “Over there,” I shouted. “Heading for the trains.”

  The sign overhead had a fist with a finger pointing east.

  Beneath that, in hangul and English, the sign said: Seoul. If he hopped on a train, I knew we’d never find him in that teeming city of eight million.

  We had just rounded the corner, running flat out, heading for the tracks lined with passenger cars, when a shot rang out.

  Ernie and I flung ourselves to the ground. Ernie’s .45 was out now, pointing ahead. All around us people screamed. Some threw themselves to the ground. Others ran back toward the front of the station.

  Ernie was waving and shouting, “Get down! Get down!”

  The train to our right, crammed with passengers, started to roll forward. Two cars ahead, we saw him. Private First Class Rodney K. Boltworks, pistol out, right arm wrapped around the neck of a struggling woman.

  All I could think was how nicely she was dressed. Polished black shoes, naked legs, expensive knit wool skirt and matching jacket, and a beige overcoat that fell to her ankles. Her leather briefcase lay partially open on the cement platform, and her polished nails were clutching Boltworks’ forearm, as if she were trying to loosen his grip so she could breathe. Thick-rimmed glasses were tilted at an angle across her flat nose. Her silky black hair swung as she struggled.

  The train was barely creeping forward, but gathering speed.

  Boltworks glanced between us and the metal steps in front of the next car that was rolling slowly toward him.

  “When the steps get close,” Ernie said, “he’s going to let her go. When he does, you charge.”

  There was no time to think this over, no time for me to agree or disagree. What Ernie had said would be our plan. I raised myself to a crouch and edged forward. Boltworks was maybe twenty yards ahead of me now. How long would it take for me to cover that distance? Pro football players cover it in three seconds. I thought I could make it in four.

  Still lying flat on the cement, Ernie raised his .45.

  Boltworks glanced again at the steps leading up to the train, and I broke and ran. He turned back to look at me. As he did so, Ernie fired. The bullet ricocheted off the edge of the train. The Korean woman bucked and struggled, and Boltworks tried to point his gun at me and then at Ernie but he knew his shot would be wild, and the steps of the moving train were only a few feet away from him now.

  He let go of the woman and raced toward the platform.

  I ran as fast as I could, low to the ground, legs churning, hoping I wouldn’t step on a rock. Another shot rang out from Ernie’s .45, and Boltworks stopped, just for a second, only six feet from the onrushing metal steps.

  Praying Ernie wouldn’t fire again, I plowed into Private Rodney K. Boltworks. We slammed into the metal steps, falling forward onto them. The train rolled on, shoving us to the side. I twisted, holding onto Boltwork’s neck. He twisted with me and the metal railing struck my back. I grunted and we were twirling through the air and falling backwards. The front wall of the passenger cab slapped into me once again. Boltworks and I twirled with the force of the blow, spinning like a top and rebounding once, twice against the side of the moving train. Startled Korean faces inside flashed by. Men, women, a few children. Mouths open. Eyes wide. And then the windows were gone and something metal slammed into us once again—into Boltworks this time—and we spun madly across the cement platform and crashed onto the ground in a heap.

  Boltworks flailed, trying to rise and push me away but I held tightly. And then Ernie leaned over us, telling me to let go, grabbing Boltworks by the wrists and, finally, sweet sound of relief, metal handcuffs clinked. Boltworks let out a sigh of exasperation, and all the strength seemed to rush out of his thick body. I relaxed my arms.

  I looked up at Ernie. He grinned. I passed out.

  “I don’t know where she is,” Boltworks said.

  We were in the Pupyong Police Station. One of their officers had patched up the slice in my side and once again stopped the bleeding. He also slapped a few poultices here and there over the bruised portions of my body and, most importantly, fed me a handful of unnamed painkillers, which helped some. Also, the KNPs had been kind enough to send a patrolman over to the home of Pak Mi-rae to reclaim our footwear.

  Ernie and I wanted to escort Boltworks back to the ASCOM Provost Marshal’s Office, but the local KNPs would have none of it. Bolt, as we were calling him now, had terrorized a Korean woman and half the morning commuters on their way to Seoul, amongst them many important and influential people. The KNPs weren’t about to give him up. Not yet anyway. Not without orders from headquarters.

  Bolt looked a lot less intimidating now. Of course, the KNPs had confiscated his stolen p
istol, and they’d taken his jacket and his shirt and trousers. Bolt sat on a chair, wearing only boxer shorts and a sleeveless white T-shirt, his arms handcuffed behind him. His face was dirty and sweating, and I’m sure he fully expected to be beat up—maybe even tortured—by the Korean National Police. I doubted that, but I wasn’t about to disabuse him of the notion. As I patiently explained to the morose Mr. Boltworks, his only chance of being returned to U.S. custody was by cooperating fully with me and Ernie.

  “It’s up to you, Bolt,” Ernie said. “Me, I wouldn’t want to spend no time in a Korean jail. Un-huh. Not after killing an innocent young Korean girl. No way.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” Bolt said for what must’ve been the umpteenth time.

  “So your partner did. Same difference. You think those Korean convicts are going to give a rat’s ass?”

  Bolt didn’t answer. He let his sweaty head hang. A hot bulb filled the cement-box interrogation room with light. Ernie and I stood, as did the five Korean cops.

  The woman Bolt had taken hostage had been rushed to Pupyong Municipal Hospital. She appeared uninjured, but was suffering from shock.

  “You know who your hostage was, Bolt?” Ernie asked.

  Sullenly, he shook his head.

  “The wife of the third son of the brother of the Mayor of Pupyong. You know how to pick ’em. Smooth move. Smoother than Exlax.”

  Private Boltworks’ head hung even lower.

  “Me and my partner have to go now,” Ernie said. “We have things to do. Don’t have time to sit here all morning chatting with you, no matter how much we’d like to.”

  Boltworks raised his head. “Don’t leave.”

  “How can we stay? You haven’t told us a goddamn thing. We want to get back to the compound, have breakfast. A cup of coffee. Because of you, we missed our bacon and eggs.”

  “Don’t leave me.”

  “Sorry, Bolt,” Ernie said, shaking his head. “You don’t talk, we go.”

  “Okay,” Boltworks said. “What do you want to know?”

  Ernie smirked. I pulled out my notebook. In less than a half hour, we had the whole story.