by Ed Gorman
See I got the idea for the con watching this Hitchcock flick Vertigo on TV one night in a motel room in El Monte, laying low from a grift gone south. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart has it bad for Kim Novak, who reminds him of this other woman he couldn’t save because of his fear of heights. Only of course it turns out Jimmy’s being played. Kim is both women, the dead bit faked to draw him into a psychological trap of sexual obsession. And thus I created the Kim Novak Effect.
I figured the big dog here must have invested money in Dudley’s clinics. I knew from my due diligence the dentist was a lapsed Mormon. “How’d you get to me if my girl lit out?”
Bishop George was smoking a cigarette in one of those old-fashioned cigarette holders. On him, it wasn’t gay, just eerie. “Searching for the woman’s trail, I worked backwards.” He blew a stream of smoke into the still air. “The bartender at the Blue Velvet told me, for a hundred dollars, you’d gotten her hired there. Said he owed you a favor over some sort of misunderstanding. One I’m sure you engineered so as to have him in your pocket when you needed him.” He tapped ash. “That put me on to you and,” he spread his arms wide, “here you are.”
“So what do you want?”
“I’m your new partner, partner. And you will pay back the money, with interest.”
Shit. “That right?”
The bishop stood, poking my leg with the end of his cane. “Yes, that is so. You will continue to do what you do, the research and selection of the woman.” He showed his blunt teeth. “I have no insight into the type of devious female you seem to be able to ferret out for this work. But I do have ideas on certain businessmen and politicians that we will go after.”
“Wonderful.”
“Get him cleaned up,” Bishop George said to his muscle. Hat Boy made to snatch me off the floor but stumbled and then went to one knee, heaving.
“The hell,” he said, and keeled over like a felled rhino.
Bishop George stared at this and Leaning Man said, “Let’s go,” to me. There was a gun in his hand.
“What’s going on here?” the bishop sputtered, gaping at his goon. He squinted, pushing his homely face toward the hood. He started to laugh. “Very good. Very clever,” he said.
We left the bishop in the unfinished room, methodically tapping his cane. Out in the dusk Leaning Man helped me into the late-model Mustang they brought me in, and we rode away from those unfinished two stories in a development where the bishop was one of several investors. At a motel on 93, near the Arizona border, Helen was waiting for us as we entered a room. She was still hosting her Jerri Rocklyn look. “Guess we’ve worn out our welcome in Vegas,” she cracked, noting my condition.
Leaning Man had already removed the bulky coat and now his shirt, revealing the wrap and sports bra Shauna Cheung wore to hide her breasts. She scrubbed off her fake beard and the glue she’d used on her eyelids to make them temporarily rounder and less of her natural epicanthal fold.
I sat on the edge of the bed. “How’d you two work this?”
“The bishop was asking around about you once he got your name from Burt,” Helen said. Burt was the bartender at the Blue Velvet. “This I learned from a girlfriend who works the VIP lounge at Caesars.”
I looked at Cheung, who had stripped down to her underwear. I supposed that whatever she gave Hat Boy in the bottled water to knock him out, she’d done to the hood she’d impersonated. She’d worn some padding to give her quite obvious female physique more of a manly shape. Pointing at her I said, “You two already knew each other.”
“Yep,” Cheung answered. “We figured you and the doc needed watching.”
That was horseshit. Neither of them gave a damn about me or that cokehead. They’d been setting me or Steiner up for something, only the bishop’s intervention presented another opportunity. Plus, they let me take a beating to make me grateful when they got me out of it. They wanted me for something.
“We better get down the road.” Helen was up and moving.
I could have split — or tried to, since I was sure Shauna didn’t just wave around that pistol for show. I should have gone on and left these two scheming honeys to work their juju on some other sucker. But I was the dude who came up with this and damned if I was going to turn over my most lucrative swindle to them for nothing.
Turns out Helen had been scamming the Leaning Man, the real one, for a while. He was too young to know about Jerri Rocklyn, but was mesmerized by that rack she sported. That’s why she’d tried to beg off getting re-cut. She’d recently learned from him that the bishop had a network of non-Mormon business and elected-official types he hobnobbed with, and not just in Nevada.
Relocated to swell Laguna Beach, California, Steiner modeled me to look just enough like the long-disappeared surfer son of a widow whose Frank Gehry-designed glass-and-stone pad overlooks the Pacific. I clip her toenails, make sure she takes the right meds at the right time, and give her back rubs with lotion that, well, let’s just say often leads to other duties, if you follow my meaning. Ugh.
I couldn’t run now anyway. My real name and face was on some kind of Homeland Security watch list thanks to the bishop. According to this bent-lawyer acquaintance of mine, this also put getting to my funds in the off-shore accounts iffy — at least for now, until I figured that out.
Hey, I know, the situation’s somewhat reversed, but I’m also lining up some of the widow’s male friends for the women to do their thing. So as I sat here on the deck of the old girl’s house, as she napped from our rub-down session, I sipped a merlot and watched the sky turn orange. On the sound system Celine was singing about the Last Plane Out. And I dreamed of being on one some day, no longer trapped by the Kim Novak Effect.
GARY PHILLIPS spends an inordinate amount of time concocting plots for the tales of chicanery and malfeasance he details in various mediums. When he’s not doing that, he’s often smoking a cigar contemplating life and his lousy poker hands. His latest efforts include editor of the upcoming Orange County Noir anthology from Akashic, and Cowboys, a crime story graphic novel from DC/Vertigo. Please visit his website for more of his stuff at: www.gdphillips.com.
The Opposite of O
BY MARTIN LIMÓN
Never the twain shall meet,” a wise man once said.
He was referring to the Occident and the Orient, but as a criminal investigator for the 8th United States Army in Seoul, Republic of Korea, I can assure you that the two worlds often meet. Usually in harmony. Occasionally in conflict. And in the case of Private First Class Everett P. Rothenberg and Miss O Sung-hee, the two worlds collided at the intersection of warm flesh and the cold, sharpened tip of an Army-issue bayonet.
My name is George Sueño. Me and my partner, Ernie Bascom, were dispatched from 8th Army Headquarters as soon as we received word about a stabbing near Camp Colbern, a communications compound located in the countryside some eighteen miles east of the teeming metropolis of Seoul.
Paldang-ni was the name of the village. It clings to the side of the gently sloping foothills of the Kumdang Mountains just below the brick and barbed-wire enclosure that surrounds Camp Colbern. The roads were narrow and farmers pushed wooden carts piled high with winter turnips, and old women in short blouses and long skirts balanced huge bundles of laundry atop their heads. Ernie drove slowly through the busy lanes so as to avoid splashing mud on the industrious pedestrians that milled about us. Not because Ernie Bascom was a polite kind of guy but because he wasn’t quite sure where in this convoluted maze of alleys we would find the road that led to the Paldang Station of the Korean National Police.
Above a whitewashed building, the flag of Daehan Minguk, the Republic of Korea, fluttered in the cold morning breeze. The yin and the yang symbols clung to one another, like red and blue teardrops embracing on a field of pure white. Ernie parked the jeep out front and together we strode into the station. Five minutes later we were interrogating a prisoner: a thin and very nervous young man by the name of Private First Class Everett P. Rothenber
g.
Geographically, Korea doesn’t sit on the exact opposite side of the Earth from the United States, but it’s pretty close. Things are different here. People look at their lives and their relationships and their place in the cosmos through a different lens than people in the States do. For example, G.I.’s new in country see Koreans waving good-bye to one another but are puzzled when no one departs. Actually, waving the hand with the palm facing downward means “come here.” So what looks like “good-bye” to an American actually means “hello.”
Similarly, a Korean never says “no” to another person’s face. Such a bald statement of negativity damages kibun, the aura of congeniality that envelopes human relationships. Instead, a polite Korean will answer “yes,” meaning “yes, I’ll think about it.” So “yes,” G.I.’s soon come to find out, usually means “no.”
Children also have a different attitude toward their parents. You’ll never hear a Korean child saying, “I didn’t ask to be born.” No matter how disaffected a Korean child is with his or her parents, they always give their parents credit for at least providing them with the opportunity to be born. An opportunity they see as being quite preferable to not being born.
We all know that in Asia elders are honored rather than ignored and that the past is revered as opposed to the future. But another difference that G.I.’s run into is two women calling one another “sisters.” At first we believe that two women who work together and call one another “sister” are actually sisters. Sometimes we’re puzzled that the two women don’t look alike — one is tall and the other is short or one has a narrow face and the other has a round face — but having heard vaguely about the workings of genetics, we write that off as the occasional anomaly that happens within families. It is only later, after a G.I. becomes seasoned in the ways of Frozen Chosun, that he realizes that when two young women call one another “sister” they are actually referring to the fact that they are close — and often inseparable — friends. Conversely, when a G.I. stumbles across two young women who actually are biological sisters, they will most often refuse to admit to any relationship. Why? Because the family is considered sacred in Korean society, and a dumb foreigner, especially a know-nothing American G.I., has no business prying into the complex interrelationships of a Korean clan.
As if all this isn’t confusing enough, there is also the language barrier. And then, of course, the biggest barrier of all: American arrogance. Our refusal to believe that foreigners have anything whatsoever to teach us.
“They were sisters,” Private Rothenberg told us.
“Who?” Ernie asked.
“Miss O. And the woman she shared a hooch with, Miss Kang.”
“Sisters?”
“Yeah.”
Ernie crossed his arms and stared skeptically at Rothenberg. Rothenberg, for his part, allowed long forearms to hang listlessly over bony legs. The three-legged stool he sat upon was too low for him and his spine curved forward and his head bobbed. He looked like a man who’d abandoned any hope of receiving a fair shake.
“Didn’t it ever trouble you,” Ernie asked, “that the two women had different last names?”
Rothenberg shrugged bony shoulders. “I figured they had different fathers or something.”
I asked the main question. “Why’d you kill her, Rothenberg?”
He tilted his head toward me and his moist blue eyes became larger and rounder.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“What’s to believe? You haven’t told us anything one way or the other.”
“I told them.” He pointed to the three khaki-clad Korean National Policemen standing outside the cement-walled interrogation room. Their arms were crossed, fists clenched, narrow eyes alight with malice. Rays from a single electric bulb illuminated the interrogation room, revealing cobwebs and dried rat feces in unswept corners.
“What’d you tell the KNPs?” I asked.
“I told them I couldn’t have killed Miss O.”
“Why not?”
Rothenberg once again allowed his head to hang loosely on his long neck. “Because I love her,” he said.
Love. The classic four-letter word. Ernie smirked. Virtually every young G.I. who arrives in Korea and finds his first yobo down in the ville falls in love. The U.S. Army is so used to this phenomenon that they require eight months’ worth of paperwork for an American G.I. to marry a Korean woman. What with a twelve-month tour of duty, a G.I. has to fall in love early and hard to be allowed permission to marry. Why all the hassles? Simple. To protect innocent young American G.I.’s from the sinister wiles of Asian dragon ladies. At least, that’s the official rationale. The real reason is flat-out racism.
“Where were you last night, Rothenberg?”
“You mean after curfew?”
“Yes. But let’s start from the beginning. What time did you leave work?”
I dragged another wooden stool from against the wall of the interrogation room and sat down opposite Private First Class Everett P. Rothenberg. I pulled out my pocket notebook and my ballpoint pen and prepared to write. Rothenberg started talking.
Ernie leaned against the cement wall, arms crossed, and continued to smirk. The KNPs continued to glare. A spider found its web and slowly crawled toward a quivering moth.
Our first stop was the Dragon Lady Teahouse.
Miss O had worked here. And according to Rothenberg, she was the toast of the town. The tallest and most shapely and best looking business girl in the village of Paldang-ni. The front door was covered with a brightly painted façade; a replica of a gateway to an ancient imperial palace. The heavy wooden door was locked. Ernie and I strolled around back. Here the setting was more real. Piled cases of empty soju bottles, plastic-wrapped garbage rotting in rusty metal cans, a long-tailed rat scurrying down a vented drainage ditch.
The back door was open. Ernie and I walked in. The odor of ammonia and soapy water assaulted our nostrils. After a short hallway, light from a red bulb guided us into the main serving room. Wooden tables with straight-backed chairs covered most of the floor. Cushioned booths lined the walls, and behind a serving counter a youngish-looking Korean woman sat beneath a green-shaded lamp, laboring over heavy accounting ledgers. When she saw us, she pulled off her horn-rimmed glasses and stared, mouth agape.
I flashed my ID. Ernie found a switch and overhead fluorescent bulbs buzzed to life. The woman stared at my Criminal Investigation badge and finally said, “Weikurei nonun?”
No bow. No polite verb endings. Just asking me what I wanted. A Korean cop would’ve popped her in the jaw. Being a tolerant Westerner, I shrugged off the insult.
“What we’re doing here,” I said, “is we want to talk to Miss Kang Mi-ryul.”
She touched the tip of her forefinger to her nose. Another hand gesture not used in the West. She was saying, that’s me. I explained why we were here but she’d already guessed. She said, “Miss O” and pulled out a handkerchief. After a few tears, she calmed down and started to talk. In Korean. Telling me all about her glorious and gorgeous friend, the late O Sung-hee. About Miss O’s amorous conquests, about the job offers from other teahouse and bar owners in town, about the men — both Korean and American-who constantly pursued her.
Miss Kang closed the accounting books and, after shrugging on a thick cotton coat, walked with us a few blocks through the village. It was almost noon now and a few chop houses were open. The aroma of fermented cabbage and garlic drifted through the air. Miss Kang led us to her hooch, the same hooch she and Miss O had shared. She allowed us to peruse Miss O’s meager personal effects. Cosmetics, hair products, a short row of dresses in a plastic armoire, tattered magazines with the faces of international film stars grinning out at us. Then Kang told us that Miss O’s hometown was Kwangju, far to the south, and that she’d come north to escape the poverty and straightlaced traditionalism of the family she’d been born into. When I asked her who had killed Miss O, she blanched and pretended to faint. But it was a pretty good
act because she plopped loudly to the ground and a neighbor called the Korean National Police, a contingent of which had been following us anyway.
In less than a minute they arrived and glared at us as if Miss Kang’s passing out had been our fault. One of the younger cops stood a little too close to Ernie and Ernie shoved him. That caused a wrestling match and a lot of cursing until the senior KNP and I broke it up.
So much for good relationships between international law enforcement agencies.
As we left, Miss Kang was still crying and two of the KNPs, God bless them, were still following us.
Camp Colbern wasn’t much better.
Rothenberg worked in the 304th Signal Battalion Communications Center. Electronic messages came in over secure lines and were printed, copied, and distributed to the appropriate bureaucratic cubbyholes. Apparently, Camp Colbern had two functions. First, as a base camp for an army aviation unit, boasting a landing pad with a dozen helicopters and associated support personnel, and second, as a relay station for the grid of U.S. Army signal sites that runs up and down the spine of South Korea. When I asked the signal officers a few technical questions, they clammed up. I didn’t have a “need to know,” they told me.
“How do they know what we ‘need to know’?” Ernie asked me. “This is a criminal investigation. We don’t know what we need to know until after we already know it.”
I shrugged.
Private Rothenberg had been a steady and reliable worker, I was told. A good soldier. He had no close buddies because his off-duty time was spent out in the village of Paldang-ni, apparently mooning over Miss O Sung-hee.
Ernie pulled a photograph from his pocket, one he’d palmed while we rummaged through O’s personal effects at Miss Kang’s hooch. It was of Miss O and Miss Kang standing arm in arm, smiling at the camera, in front of a boat rental quay on the bank of a river. The sign in Korean said NAMHAN-KANG, the Namhan River not far from here. Miss O was a knockout, with a big beautiful smile and even white teeth and a figure that would make any sailor — or any G.I. — jump ship. Miss Kang, by comparison, was a plain-looking slip of a girl. Shorter, thinner, less attractive. And her smile didn’t dazzle as Miss O’s did; it looked unsure of itself, slightly afraid, wary of the world.