The Nine-Tailed Fox

by Martin Limon

  So much for that. But I’d fight. Even if all I had was dirt, I’d toss it into the bodyguard’s mangled face and run as far as I could before he gutted me with his blade. As these grim images ran through my head, the growling of a combustion engine in the distance began to compete with the roaring of the waves behind us.

  The gumiho looked back, smiled and said, “They’re here.” A van had pulled up to the edge of her estate. After traversing a bumpy dirt access road, it rolled to a halt, the back door slid open, and a crew tumbled out, bearing oddly shaped cases.

  “Who?” I asked.

  Turning back to me, she replied, “The musicians,” as though her answer were obvious.

  She began to walk off, ordering her bodyguard to bring me along.

  His knife now sheathed, he bowed, and followed behind me closely as we headed back to her palatial home.

  “What the hell happened to Sueño?” Riley asked.

  Miss Kim stopped typing, her forehead creasing in worry.

  Ernie pulled himself a cup of coffee from the silver urn and plopped down in the straight-backed chair in front of Riley’s desk. “He’s probably with a girl,” Ernie said.

  “I don’t give a damn if he has a date with Raquel Welch,” Riley replied. “He’s required to report here at zero eight hundred hours, standing tall and ready for duty!”

  “Bite me,” Ernie said, grabbing Riley’s copy of the Pacific Stars & Stripes and peeling it open to the Major League Baseball stats.

  Miss Kim never involved herself in the incessant arguments between Staff Sergeant Riley and Agent Ernie Bascom. But this time, she did. “He’s not with woman,” she said.

  Both men looked at her, astonished. “How do you know that?”

  “Because he still think of his girlfriend, Doctor Leah.”

  Ernie and Riley were now balking. In their minds, if a GI could get laid, he wouldn’t care if he’d just had a royal wedding presided over by the Pope.

  Riley said, “So you think he should be here?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  Something fell out of Riley’s newspaper. Ernie picked it up. “What’s this?”

  “I found that this morning. Somebody must’ve stuffed it in my low quarters.”

  “Your houseboy?”

  “No, he’s the one who found it, when he was shining them. Somebody else must’ve left it there.”

  It was a lined slip of paper, corners tightly tucked into the center, as was habitually done in Korea with private notes.

  “Have you read it?”

  “I meant to,” Riley replied. “My head hurt a little too much at the time.”

  “So you were gonna wait until you had your coffee and your Alka-Seltzer?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  Ernie unfolded the note.

  “Hey,” Riley said. “That’s my personal correspondence.”

  “Not anymore,” Ernie replied. “It’s from Sueño.” He scanned it quickly. When he was finished, Ernie used the newspaper to backhand Riley across the chops. “You dumb shit.”

  Riley batted the paper away and said, “Just tell me what it says.”

  “It says here that Sueño decided to go to the Harbor Lights, after all. Apparently, the ploy with that phony SOFA complaint worked like a charm.” Ernie continued to read. “There’s a serial number here for a classified document.”

  Ernie read it off and Riley copied it down. Without being asked, Riley called Smitty over at personnel. Five minutes later, Smitty called back. Riley thanked him and hung up.

  “What’d he say?” Ernie asked.

  “The classified document was originally issued to a Professor Fulton from Yonsei University. According to Smitty, he’s on the SOFA Committee.”

  “He must be the guy leaking information,” Ernie said.

  “Why’d Sueño write all this down in a note?” Riley asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “He’s worried,” Miss Kim said. They both looked at her again. She swallowed and said, “He’s worried that maybe something bad happen at the Harbor Light Club. So he write down where he go.”

  “Sueño? Worried?” Riley asked.

  “That’s all he ever does,” Ernie said. “He’s a worrywart. I’m always telling him it’s a waste of time.”

  “Why?”

  “It just is,” Ernie explained.

  Miss Kim became exasperated. Glaring at both of them, she stood up and stomped her foot. “You go find,” she said.

  Not only had neither Riley nor Ernie ever heard Miss Kim give her opinion on an investigation, they’d never once heard her raise her voice. She grabbed a tissue out of the box in front of her, held it to her nose, and stepped around her desk. They both listened as she clattered in her high-heeled shoes down to the ladies’ room.

  “Maybe she’s right,” Riley said.

  “There’s always a first time,” Ernie replied.

  “Not the first time,” Riley told him. “She was right about dumping you.”

  “She didn’t dump me,” Ernie said.

  “Then what do you call it?”

  “She figured me out.”

  “That’ll do it,” Riley told him. “Every damn time.”

  -18-

  The small orchestra set up in the central garden near a miniature waterfall flowing into a blue-water goldfish pond. A few of the musicians were young, others wizened. The men wore loose white cotton pantaloons and silk vests, and the women multicolored flowing skirts and long-armed blouses. The gumiho was clearly meant to be the focal point of the group. She played fluidly on her long-stringed zither as the others joined in with a wooden clapper, a gourd-shaped fiddle, a bamboo flute, and a double-headed drum. Though my head was still pounding from the hangover, I eventually began to find the music enjoyable. I pretended to sip the short glass of soju the maid had served, knowing my life could depend on remaining sober.

  Taking a break, the gumiho joined me at the small table, her expression surprisingly pleasant despite our earlier misunderstanding. The musicians played around with a new tune, laughing and bantering amongst themselves. They ignored me completely, as if I didn’t exist. The gumiho, however, stared expectantly at me.

  I offered her a full glass of soju. She raised her eyebrows in astonishment, but to my surprise, she accepted. I wished I could jolt back my shot, but remembered the pale corpse of Werkowski, floating in the Yellow Sea.

  Sipping her drink, she began to tell me her story.

  A GI had gotten her pregnant.

  The relationship had begun quite innocently. In preparation for university, she’d signed up for conversational English classes. Virtually all higher-level academic textbooks are in English, so after a certain point in most disciplines, knowing the language is crucial. The 8th Army Civil Affairs Office recruits GIs to teach colloquial English throughout the country. These classes are in high demand, though the number of GIs willing to take the time off from drinking and whoring is fairly low.

  “His name was Barry,” she told me. “Barry Krassler. After class, we went to coffee shops and talked.”

  “And you ended up in a yoguan with him.”

  She flinched. “Barry left me, went back to States, didn’t write a single letter. My maid and I hid the pregnancy from my father. He was so busy, he didn’t even notice. Until the night the doctor came to our house and the baby was born. My father was furious, screaming at me about causing him shame by bringing the child of an American into our family. He beat the doctor, threatening him with death if he ever said anything. He almost killed the maid; she barely escaped. Then he came after me. I only remember the first few blows before I went unconscious and he took the baby.”

  She paused now. The musicians were packing up. I put a hand atop hers. “What was the baby’s name?”

  “He never had a
proper name like my father would have given him if he’d accepted him into the family. So I gave him the name I wanted him to have.”

  “What was it?”

  “Bok-su.”

  “Moon Bok-su?”

  “Yes.”

  Before the musicians left, they all bowed to the gumiho. She dismissed them and turned to me. “Let’s go outside.”

  I acquiesced.

  We crossed the same expanse of grass we’d crossed earlier in the day, but this time, the bodyguard remained under the awning of the main building, glowering after us. Apparently, now that I’d been taught that escape wasn’t in the cards, I could be trusted to a small degree.

  I asked her about the stone building. “What is that?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “A tomb,” I replied.

  She nodded, and we continued to walk toward the cliff. At the edge, we stared out at the red sun setting into the Yellow Sea and the thick wall of fog rolling in slowly toward us.

  The gumiho started to murmur something. I couldn’t hear the first part, and leaned in to try to make out the words. Her voice, filtered by the swirling wind, lilted: “I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea . . .”

  I recognized the words, but from where? The breeze picked up, and I stumbled over a rock, once again unable to understand what she was saying. I stepped forward more carefully after that, watching for crags, and as I moved closer to her, the wind blew in my direction.

  Her voice had lowered to a whisper as she finished. “In the sepulchre there by the sea—in her tomb by the sounding sea.”

  We stood just a few steps from the stone edifice, and she had gone quiet. In the distance, the wind howled. Even an uneducated simpleton like me recognized what she’d recited. A poem.

  Edgar Allan Poe’s “Anabelle Lee.”

  We stared out at the sweeping blue waves.

  “My father,” she said, “took the baby and walked down that pathway.” She pointed. “He walked down the edge of the cliff to the Yellow Sea.” She was crying now. “He walked into the waves and lowered my son into the water.”

  The tears stopped. She looked at me. “I died, too, that night.”

  “And later, when your father died, you decided to carry out your revenge.”

  “Not revenge. Justice. GIs who murder their own children will be forced to honor my child, to lie next to him like the man who loved Anabelle Lee.”

  “In a tomb by the side of the sea.”

  “Yes, by the side of the Yellow Sea.”

  Until that moment, I had been internally poring through the list of Korean vocabulary words I’d spent so many months memorizing. Finally, I dredged up bok-su and realized what it meant: revenge.

  That night, the maid served a lavish dinner of bean curd in hot pepper stew, diced turnip kimchi, chopped squid tentacles, and mint leaves in soy sauce. As we ate, the gumiho opened up about her past. She’d been born into wealth. Her great-grandfather had been a Chinese merchant who’d accompanied an expeditionary force sent to Korea in 1883. Their mission was to enforce the Ching Dynasty’s claim of extraterritoriality rights in Korea. Because China, Japan, and even Russia were vying for influence in Korea at the time, this didn’t last long. When the Chinese were expelled, many of the soldiers and almost all of the merchants remained in Korea, and a Chinatown of sorts was set up in the heart of the port city of Inchon. At its peak in the early twentieth century, the Chinese population reached 65,000. But that number had greatly dwindled over the years, and only a fraction now remained. During the Korean War, Moon Guang-song’s father made a fortune selling legally imported and black market foodstuffs to the hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming down from the Communist north. When the ceasefire was signed, her father, along with a small group of well-connected Chinese allies, formed the Sea Dragon Triad.

  After divulging this half of her family history, she paused, waiting for me to ask about the Sea Dragons. But instead, I decided to focus on her personal life. “And your mother?”

  Surprised, she mumbled, “How odd. You’re the first one to ask about her.”

  I simply nodded, and she took a deep breath and continued.

  “My mother was Korean,” she told me. “She was marvelous at the komungo. Listening to her play are my happiest memories. She died when I was still young, but not before giving her instrument to me. She’s the reason I’ve refurbished this estate and hired musicians—I’ve built a repository of classical Korean culture in her honor.”

  Suddenly, her face darkened.

  Alarmed, I asked, “Is something wrong?”

  She looked at me sharply and said, “I believe my father murdered her.”

  “Why?”

  “Korean leaders have abused the Chinese,” she told me. “Levying taxes exclusively on Chinese merchants, denying them the right to buy or sell rice in bulk out of fear they’d corner the market. Sending spies to make sure they don’t betray their Koreans counterparts. Some of my father’s men have even disappeared without a trace.”

  “And he blamed your mother for this?” I guessed.

  “Yes,” she replied bitterly. “As if she had any control over the police or government officials.”

  “And after your mother passed away,” I asked, “it was just you and your father?”

  She nodded. “I looked after him for almost two decades, watching without a word as he brought one concubine after another into our home.”

  “And when your father died, you inherited leadership of the Sea Dragon Triad.”

  “Not without opposition,” she said.

  “But you won.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And we’re expanding. But our men are not as disciplined or loyal as they should be; I have higher hopes for the new recruits.”

  “What about your bodyguard?” I asked. “Did you inherit him from your father, too?”

  “No. A refugee family left him with us when I was an infant. My father had him trained extensively in martial arts, and assigned him to watch over me from about ten years old.”

  “I see.” I paused, then decided to risk it. “What’s his name?”

  “Gui-mul,” she told me.

  “Gui-mul?”

  “Yes.”

  I knew what it meant: monster.

  A skulk of foxes nipped at my face. I awoke with a start, sweating onto my warm sleeping mat. For five minutes I lay perfectly still, listening. The only sound was the feint drip of a faucet in the kitchen. The main advantage I had over the previous three hostages was that I knew what to expect, and it wasn’t good. I rose and slipped into my pantaloons and vest, then slid back the oil-papered door and padded as quietly as I could down the hallway. Slouched outside of one of the doors was gumiho’s guard, Gui-mul, snoring softly. His knife lay across his lap, and a set of keys hung on a large ring at his belt.

  -19-

  Later that morning, I was re-awakened by a severe wind rattling the windows and the walls. The maid knocked on my door and brought in a low table with my breakfast. Rice gruel and muu malengi, dried turnip. After she’d left the room, I sat cross-legged at the table and shoveled the hot gruel into my mouth. I chewed on the dried turnip a bit, grinding my teeth into its tough hide, but was rewarded only with bitter juice. In the end, I couldn’t stomach more than a small sliver.

  Outside, a car engine started. I stood and rushed over to the high window. The gumiho’s sedan was driving off; I thought I spotted her in the back seat. I sat down and finished my meal. After the maid took the table away, I got dressed and paced around the building, ending up out back, closest to the ocean. I spotted just two or three guards uphill and noted their positions. A thick mass of clouds was rolling in. I went back into the house and waited for lunch, slowly formulating a plan.

  Later that afternoon, I snuck back outside, keeping caref
ully out of the line of sight of the guards. Despite the wind gaining in strength and starting to blow cold rain into my face, I started up the path toward the stone sepulcher near the cliff’s edge. As droplets became fistfuls of water, I saw the first of the guards in an Army-issue poncho run for cover, his M-1 bouncing behind his shoulder. As the others followed, I recalled Moon Guang-song’s lament about the fading competence of the members of the Sea Dragon Triad.

  I stumbled in the relative darkness up the incline, careful to stick to the shadows of the birch trees.. When I reached the fork in the pathway, the thunderstorm was full-blown; I hurried toward the sepulcher. I stood for a moment in front of the tall stone doorway, recognizing the Sea Dragon insignia engraved into it—a furious, terrifying image of a scaled reptile, rampant in the waves, devouring ships and men alike. The carving was so lifelike that it seemed to move as the rain pelted against it. I grabbed the iron ring on the left edge of the door and pulled. Complaining loudly, the door screeched back to expose a large, dark entrance.

  The smell hit me all at once. Elements of it were familiar—feces, urine, and the body odor of someone who hadn’t bathed in weeks. But decaying flesh? That, I couldn’t detect. I held out hope that I hadn’t risked my life for nothing. Still, I inched forward, hesitant to head straight into the pitch black.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to what little light was coming in from outside. The floor of the sepulcher was dirt, the walls made of stone. On the far side of the sepulcher sat a small box atop a rectangular stone platform. On a second platform closer to me lay a long, dark mass. I had to move closer to make out thin protrusions, which I soon realized were arms and legs.

  “So you’ve found it.”

  I swiveled.

  The gumiho stood soaked at the door to the sepulcher, a tranquil smile on her face and Gui-mul behind her. He carried a glass lantern that softly illuminated the room.

  The shape groaned. In the light, I saw that it was a man, shackled by the wrists and ankles to the platform. I stepped forward and peered at him, lightly tapping his sunken cheek. Blue eyes popped open. He opened his mouth and croaked, emitting a strong stench. I turned away, but I knew who he was. Specialist Shirkey from Hialeah Compound in Pusan—the last GI taken.