The Nine-Tailed Fox

by Martin Limon

  “Did you pay someone for this?” I asked, holding up the paper.

  “Pay? With what?” Katie Allsworthy swept her arm across the small office. “You think we have enough money to pay for anything?”

  “If you don’t represent this woman, then you’re not authorized to have this,” I said. “So you must’ve stolen it.”

  Eyes narrowed and fists clenched, she took a step toward me. “You have the gall to accuse us of that? After what you did to an innocent young woman?” Her voice went low. “We don’t have to steal things. We have people who help us—people who believe in what we’re doing. ”

  Wang Ok-ja reached out and touched her forearm. This seemed to calm Katie down. She stared up at me, brushed her hair back, and held out her palm. “Give it back.”

  I hesitated, glanced at the serial number one more time, and then handed the document back to her. Katie stepped back.

  Both women stared at me as if I were something that had just oozed up out of the muck of the city sewer. Feeling like about two cents, I turned on my heels and walked out of the Women’s Power Coalition.

  -16-

  I couldn’t find Ernie. Riley had gotten off work at seventeen hundred hours, and instead of staying late in the office as he often did, he’d returned to the barracks. Once there, he’d purchased a can of cola out of the lobby vending machine and repaired to his room, whereupon he proceeded to start on the bottle of Old Overwart he kept hidden in his wall locker.

  By the time I went to talk to him, the rye whiskey had already made him stupid. He threw a few punches in the air and told me that he was going to kick some ass, and I shoved him down on his bunk and told him to sleep it off. Mumbling incoherently, he closed his eyes.

  What I wanted to do was tell Ernie, or at least Riley, that we now had a way to find out who’d passed the information on my bogus charge to the Women’s Power Coalition. That meant there was at least one crack in the bubble of confidentiality of the committee. Whether this leak was the same one the gumiho was getting her information from, I had no idea, but at least we could interview the guilty party and find out. But that would have to wait until tomorrow, until we could locate the breach and confront the perpetrator with what we knew.

  I went to the latrine to shower and shave, then returned to my room. Donning a fresh shirt and the same slacks I’d worn last night, I checked myself in the mirror. I felt like shit after my second fight with Katie Allsworthy, but I wasn’t looking too bad. As I slipped on my highly polished low quarters and combed my hair, I wondered if my shy solo act at the Harbor Lights Club would ever attract female interest. Probably not.

  I felt like I was spinning my wheels, but I couldn’t think of any other way to move this investigation forward—until we tracked down the leak tomorrow—so I slipped on my jacket and made sure I had my wallet, my money, my keys, and my CID badge. Then I looked at the shoulder holster with my .45 automatic. I was supposed to either carry it with me or return it to the MP station and turn it back in to whoever was on arms room duty. Both seemed like way too much trouble, so I did something I shouldn’t have. I stashed the pistol in the back of my wall locker.

  When it comes to weaponry, the Army is fanatical about safety and accountability. We’re not allowed to leave loaded weapons around willy-nilly. The weapon, and associated ammunition, had to be properly checked out and then properly secured or on one’s person at all times. I felt guilty about taking this shortcut, but if I was going to pump people for information at the Harbor Lights Club, a pistol strapped to my chest was probably not the most appropriate conversation piece.

  I snapped my wall locker shut and stepped out into the hallway. Then I remembered that I’d told Ernie I wouldn’t be going to the Harbor Lights Club, but that was before I’d found out about the SOFA Committee leaking like a sieve. Now, what had appeared to be a stalled investigation was moving forward again. I was excited; I wanted to keep the momentum going, and getting out to the Harbor Lights Club before anyone else found out about the leak provided at least the outside chance that more information would fall into my lap.

  Still, it’s not good practice to leave your investigative partner unable to find you. So I wrote a note to Ernie that mentioned not only Harbor Lights, but also the leaked confidential document and its serial number, along with the fact that the document was copy number six of seven. After perusing the classified documents issue log, we’d know who the recipient had been. Returning to Riley’s room, I stuck the note into his scuffed low quarters, figuring the houseboy would find it early tomorrow morning and give it to him once he was sober enough to read it.

  Outside the barracks, the air was fresh and bracing.

  Twenty minutes later, unencumbered by lethal weaponry, I was climbing the broad cement steps of the Harbor Lights Club.

  I drank too much. It hurt me to shell out so much money for Heineken, a European beer I didn’t even like, at 1,500 won a pop. So I switched to bourbon. Price-wise, that certainly didn’t help. They charged 2,000 won per shot. But the pour was generous, and wasn’t watered down. Don Yancey lived up to his reputation for running a class joint. After a couple of shots, I wandered toward the back of the nightclub where the expansion would be taking place. I pushed past dusty plastic sheeting and entered a room floored in powdered concrete. Oddly shaped chunks of lumber lay about, and cans of paint and cleaning solvent were piled in a corner. I’d been in there for less than a minute when staccato steps approached me from behind. I turned around.

  A young Korean woman in an expensive-looking red dress and a long pearl necklace stood a few feet from me, arms folded across her chest. She was tall and slender; she could have been a fashion model. In keeping with her sharp beauty, her eyeliner swept upward past the corners of her eyes, like a jet taking off into the sky. Her cheekbones were carved like shelves on the side of Mount Rushmore.

  “What in the hell are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, gesturing to the room. “I wanted to see the progress on your new casino. Don told me about it.”

  She was unimpressed by my name-dropping. Her frown remained fixed. I studied the dark hair falling to one side of her face, her manicured nails, and the flashy rings constraining the flesh near her knuckles. It occurred to me that she was younger than I’d originally thought, which the makeup and jewelry were intended to hide.

  “You’re the CID agent,” she said.

  No point in denying it. I grinned and opened my palms wide. “You caught me. How’d you know?”

  “Don told me.” When I stared at her quizzically, she said, “I’m his wife.”

  She didn’t seem thrilled by the fact. An awkward silence followed. I was willing to bet she was anticipating my unspoken question: Isn’t he a little old for you?

  With a sour expression, she turned and strode toward the far wall. Abruptly, she stopped and pointed. “See this shit?” she said. Lumber had been hammered into the outline of a half-finished bar. “Piss-poor workmanship,” she said. “Before I went to the States, Koreans knew how to do a good job. Now?” She scoffed. “All they want is to get paid. Smile and bow and take your money. Korea’s gone to hell.”

  We both stood there, contemplating the Hermit Kingdom’s long slide into perdition. The silence grew.

  “How long were you in the States?” I said in a weak attempt to make conversation.

  “I immigrated with my parents when I was in the tenth grade.” She laughed. “Didn’t speak a word of English.” She turned to face me. “You can imagine how awkward I felt in an American high school. The only chink,” she said bitterly. “But I survived, and as soon as my diploma was under my arm, I headed straight to New York. Drove my parents crazy, of course; they wanted me to be a freaking accountant. After landing a few modeling jobs, I grew restless and came back to Korea on my own. Then I met Don.” She opened her arms to her kingdom. “And now I’m going to run this.�
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  “The casino?” I asked.

  She nodded, re-folding her arms across her chest.

  “So you have experience,” I said.

  “Six months,” she said.

  Don had told me twenty years. Just a slight variance. “In Vegas?” I asked, still playing dumb.

  “No,” she replied vaguely. “Here. As a marketing director.”

  “For the Olympos, right?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “How’d you know?”

  I shrugged. “Don mentioned it.”

  “Him and his big mouth.”

  “Was it supposed to be a secret?”

  “No. It’s just that he can’t keep anything anyone tells him to himself.”

  I gestured back at the very busy floor of the Harbor Lights Club. “Seems to work for him,” I said.

  “Sure,” she replied. “Don Yancey, everybody’s friend.”

  I wanted to ask her more about her relationship with her husband, but it seemed impertinent. And I didn’t want her assuming I was interested in her. Most men would be—she was one of those gorgeous young gals who walked into a room and took everyone’s breath away. Exactly the type of woman Don Yancey would go after. But not me. As Ernie always said, I was too introverted to want a woman who sucked up all the air. And I was still hung up on what Wang Ok-ja must think of me—not to mention my confusion over Leah Prevault and the sudden distance between us.

  She seemed to sense my withdrawal and changed the subject. “Are you a gambler?” she asked.

  “Only when I have the edge.”

  “The edge?” she asked.

  “A mathematical advantage.”

  “Hard to find in a casino.”

  “Very.”

  Someone shoved through plastic sheeting. “Pooki,” said Don Yancey. “There you are.” Pooki’s eyes didn’t exactly light up. “I see you two have met.”

  “I wanted to take a look at the construction,” I said.

  “You find your fugitives yet?” Don asked.

  “Not yet. I better get back and keep watch.”

  “If you need anything,” he said, smiling, “give me a holler.”

  “Will do.” I turned to Don’s wife and said, “Nice to meet you.”

  Her arms were still crossed. “My name’s Agnes, by the way, not Pooki.”

  Don Yancey slid his arm behind her waist. “Pooki’s what I like to call her.”

  I nodded to Don and hurried back to the noise and tobacco smoke of the main ballroom.

  As I sat at my table, nursing another shot of bourbon, I went back over my conversation with Agnes and Don. As usual, I’d been awkward, which was why I usually avoided social situations. I preferred confronting people in the capacity of criminal investigator; I knew what I was in for when I approached someone and introduced myself as a CID agent. But in non-Army social settings, I had no idea what I was after. I was certainly no Don Yancey.

  Yancey must’ve first spotted Agnes while out gambling at the Olympos. His presence at a high-end joint like that meant there was a good possibility he had a connection to the Sea Dragon Triad. I wondered if today’s raids by Mr. Kill and the KNP would put the kibosh on WVOW sponsorship of Don’s and Agnes’s new casino. Maybe dry up funding, force the triad to abandon the project. I wasn’t sure of how much the Sea Dragon’s money and influence had been diminished, but we’d see soon enough.

  I thought of Agnes. How deeply was she involved with the Sea Dragons, if at all? Had she encountered them in New York, or had she approached them and applied for a job at the Olympos? Certainly they’d seen her potential. A stunning Korean woman who spoke fluent English—an ideal hire for an international, high-rolling operation like the triad’s. Of course, that didn’t mean she’d joined their ranks as a criminal.

  The waitress brought me a double shot of bourbon. Noting my surprise, she said, “From Don.”

  I thanked her, and she left. After I tossed back half of it, my worries began to fade. In fact, I was getting closer to my goal of not having to think altogether. I wanted to stop picturing the corpse of Sergeant Werkowski, staring up at me from between tangled strands of concertina wire, and the sad, small body of Soon-hui laying on a cold metal slab before she’d ever had the chance to become something other than a disdained business girl. I wanted to stop worrying about what might be happening to the two missing GIs and the abuse they had inflicted upon their Korean yobos. I wanted to stop asking myself why Leah Prevault had stopped writing, and I wanted to stop seeing the hatred in the eyes of Katie Allsworthy and Wang Ok-ja.

  After I finished the double bourbon, the same waitress brought me another. Setting it down, she asked, “You want Heineken?” When I didn’t answer, she said, “Don say okay.”

  Apparently, Don Yancey wanted me on his side. I told the waitress I’d take the Heineken. As I sipped on it, I remembered the folktale I’d read in the book Miss Kim had given me. The one in which the nine-tailed fox, in the form of a beautiful woman, rolled up her right sleeve, slathered her forearm in sesame oil, and stuck her hand down the throat of her comatose lover. Reaching, reaching, reaching, until her fingers found what she wanted. She plucked out his liver, letting the rest of him fall to the ground, and as the folklorist put it, “devoured it with relish.”

  After finishing the Heineken and my third double bourbon of the night, I worked up the courage to ask a woman to dance.

  More drinks came from the same waitress, who almost seemed to be following me around. I vaguely remember dancing. Wildly. Doing something called the frug. A girl dragged me out on the dance floor, and when she was done with me, another woman took over. There was a long row of laughing faces. I must have put on quite a show.

  As I staggered down the steps of the Harbor Lights Club and out onto the sidewalk, I was still too drunk to regret anything. I was just pleasantly aware of my newfound popularity and assumed vaguely that, by tomorrow morning, I would probably find the memory less pleasant. For some reason, this made me laugh.

  A Korean couple eyed me nervously as they walked past, and the young man steered the woman he was with toward the far side of the pathway. “Yoboseiyo!” I practically shouted the greeting at them.

  A big bus rolled past. The small crowd waiting for the next one stared at me, unmoving and wide-eyed.

  “To hell with you,” I said. Or at least, I think I did. Then I staggered down one of the back alleys, climbed a long flight of stone steps, and reached the front of a Korean movie theater with a huge, mural-like painted sign above it advertising the most recent epic. The huge faces of Korean actors and actresses stared down at me. One belonged to a man in the traditional robes of an ancient warrior. The other was of a young woman who was wearing a silk chima-jeogori and a jade tiara atop her head. As I passed, I pressed my fingers to my lips and threw her a kiss.

  Suddenly, I was walking downhill toward the central Itaewon bar district. Neon signs flashed on brightly and then off again, as if rolling over in their beds and settling down for the night. Women cooed at me from doorways. I didn’t want to hear their offers. I didn’t want to see the sadness in their eyes or feel their desperation. I veered into another dark alley, this one running behind the bar district whose illumination still shone above the two- and three-story buildings.

  I reached another abandoned road, one that ran atop the main drag of Itaewon, and turned right, heading for where it intersected with the hill that overlooked the busiest part of the neighborhood. Up there, I knew there would be kimchi cabs waiting, ready to zoom down as soon as they spotted a likely customer emerging from one of the bars. They took turns. And if there was a long wait, they’d climb out of their cabs, light up a Turtleboat cigarette, and exchange gossip and insults with their fellow cab drivers. Bleary-eyed, I could see the intersection. There were maybe a half dozen cabs waiting there. But they were disappearing fast. The midnight curf
ew was approaching, and people were fleeing Itaewon like first-class travelers abandoning the Titanic.

  I leaned forward and tried to hurry, not wanting to be stranded out here. But I wasn’t making much progress. My eyes were focused on a lit-up menu written in hangul, shining from the front window of a chophouse to my left: bibimpap, mulmandu, dubu jigei. It moved closer to me, then away, then closer again. I forced my brain to deduce why: I was staggering. Moving faster sideways than forward.

  This made me chuckle. And as I laughed, a dark sedan slowly rolled up and stopped about ten yards in front of me, blocking the way. I paused, still swaying involuntarily back and forth, studying it warily. The front door popped open, and the driver, whose brimmed cap obscured his face, emerged. He wore a black vest over a white shirt, rushing around to the rear of the car and pulling open the door. He stood at attention as if waiting for the Queen of England. The thought made me laugh again, though I had no idea whether that was out loud or just in my head.

  When he reached out a white-gloved hand, slender fingers grabbed it, and a woman climbed out. She took a regal step forward, sporting a black skirt and red waistcoat over a frilly white blouse. Her face was pretty and perfectly heart-shaped, though not particularly young. Cascades of black hair were piled intricately atop her head. What impressed me most was her bearing. She smiled at me as if we’d known each other for years. With an open palm, she gestured for me to climb into the back seat.

  I thought about it, noting that she certainly didn’t have nine tails. I attempted to study the face of the driver, but it was dark and his head was tilted downward, as if to intentionally hide his expression. I couldn’t make out his features, but he was a husky fellow. Small and self-contained, like the sawed-off trunk of a mighty oak. His mistress continued to smile, as if reading my thoughts, but instead of rushing me, she waited patiently as I made my decision.