The Door to Bitterness gsaeb-4

by Martin Limon

  “Why?” I whispered. “Why mine?”

  Riley didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice came out softer, less gruff. “The way your luck’s been running, Sueno.”

  I hung up the phone.

  Ernie started to say something, but one look at my face, and he bit off whatever comment he’d been about to make.

  “Another one,” I said. “Itaewon, this time.”

  He didn’t ask me to elaborate. Silently, we walked outside to the jeep. Ernie fired up the engine.

  We sped back to Seoul, breaking the speed limit all the way.

  During the interrogation at the Pupyong Police Station, Private First Class Rodney K. Boltworks had told us what he liked about the brother of Yun Ai-ja, the smiling woman.

  “He kicked my ass,” Bolt said. “I thought I was good, but he knows all kinds of karate moves and shit. You know, like Bruce Lee, except this guy doesn’t whistle or flex his muscles, he just comes at you. He doesn’t stop. His face is covered with little scars, and you should see his body. Knife wounds, the works. And man, don’t look at his sister. He goes off.”

  “How does that work?” Ernie asked. “His sister’s a prostitute.”

  “When he’s not around. When he’s around, she bows and serves tea and does all that kind of shit.”

  “What kind of shit?” I asked.

  “You know. Lights incense. Bows to those statues they got.”

  “She’s religious?”

  Bolt shrugged muscular shoulders. “I never saw her go to church.”

  To him, religion was church. Anything else, he wasn’t sure of.

  “What made you decide to go AWOL?” Ernie asked. “And rob a casino?”

  “Kong, that’s what he calls himself.”

  “’Kong?’” I asked. “That’s it?”

  “Yeah. His sister said Kong is part of his full name. She told me the whole thing, but I forget.”

  Given names are almost sacred in Korean society. Not shared lightly. The fact that the smiling woman’s brother only allowed PFC Boltworks to use part of his name said something about how much he trusted him.

  “I was tired of Charley Battery,” Bolt continued. “Tired of taking crap from lifers, and tired of getting up early in the morning. Kong told me that with an American to help him, we could make a lot of money.”

  “Help him do what?”

  “You know, fool people. Make GIs relax when they saw me, and then Kong would bop ‘em over the head.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “A few times. But sometimes the GI fought back, and there were always too many people around.”

  “So you decided to switch to robbing casinos.”

  “Yeah. More money.”

  “Did you know that Kong and his sister are half-American?”

  “I figured.”

  “You ever talk about it?”

  “Never. Kong hates Americans.”

  “Did he hate you?”

  Boltworks grinned. “Yeah. He and I were always about to fight, you know. But after a while, I learned a lot of his tricks, so he started to lay off me.”

  “Why would you hook up with somebody who hates you?” Ernie asked.

  “We were making money. Besides, his sister didn’t hate me.”

  “You were still boffing her?”

  “When Kong wasn’t around.”

  “Wasn’t that sort of dangerous?”

  “Yeah.” Boltworks smiled. “Real dangerous.”

  There were certain lines of questioning that I didn’t want to follow. Instead, I stuck to the more pragmatic questions. Bolt told us that after the casino robbery, he had split from Kong and, as planned, Kong kept the money and met up with his sister. Kong took off his sunglasses, changed clothes and put on a hat, and that made him look more Korean. She tied a shawl over her blonde hair. Together, carrying the money, they walked to the Inchon Train Station, merged with other commuters, and caught a ride to Seoul. Bolt holed up at the Yellow House at Brothel Number 17, and the idea was that after a few days, they would rendezvous in Itaewon and divide the money.

  “You didn’t keep any money?” Ernie asked.

  “I was supposed to meet with them.”

  “Did you?”

  “You guys screwed me up. Ai-ja was going to contact me at the Yellow House, but you guys chased me away.”

  “Didn’t you have an alternative plan?”

  Boltworks looked confused, and then remorseful, and then he shook his head.

  “Did it ever occur to you,” Ernie said, “that they never intended to give you any money?”

  “No way.” He sat up and pulled his hands against the cuffs behind him. “Ai-ja liked me. She told me she did.”

  “So what were you going to do?” Ernie said. “Wait in ASCOM City forever?”

  “No. When the heat died down, I was going to go to Itaewon. To the coffee shop at the Hamilton Hotel. They like it there.”

  The Hamilton Hotel sat right on the MSR, across the street from the main nightclub district of Itaewon. The hotel featured a hundred or more rooms, and they were usually full of Japanese tourists and American GIs. The coffee shop was comfortable and well-appointed and probably the most popular meeting place in Itaewon.

  “They go there often, do they?” Ernie asked.

  “All the time.”

  “So all you’d have to do is sit there a few days, sipping on overpriced coffee, and eventually they’d show up.”

  “Two hundred and fifty won per cup,” Bolt said.

  “That’s not so much.”

  “No,” Ernie said. “I suppose not. Not when you’re a big-time gangster.”

  Bolt grinned. And he kept grinning until we started to leave. Which is when he started to squeal.

  At the main drag of Itaewon, the jeep’s engine churned up the incline. We passed the U.N. Club and the Seven Club and the King Club, and then hung a left about a block past the clump of nightclubs. A bunch of U.S. military vehicles- sedans, vans, MP jeeps-blocked all vehicular traffic. Ernie parked the jeep, chained and padlocked the steering wheel, and we climbed out.

  We entered an alley leading into the bowels of Itaewon. Ahead, a gateway was open in a stone and brick wall.

  As we approached, the hum of murmuring American voices grew louder. I ducked through the gate, and all talking stopped.

  Eyes were on me. Gawking. Technicians and MPs and astonished Korean National Policemen turned their heads and stared. As if they couldn’t believe I’d have the temerity to show up at this crime scene.

  Ernie tried to stuff a fried dumpling into my mouth. I slapped it away.

  “Come on,” he said. “Yakimandu. I paid two thousand won for this stuff.”

  He motioned at the plate on the bar between us. A dozen meat-filled dumplings, fried in peanut oil, fanned out in a circle with a bowl of soy sauce in the middle. We were sitting at the bar of the Seven Club on the main drag of Itaewon. Night had fallen, and I’d already polished off four beers and two shots of bourbon.

  Ernie lifted another dumpling, dipped it in the soy sauce, and offered it to me. “You haven’t eaten all day, for chrissake. You need something.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “It ain’t your fault,” he said. “How many times do I have to tell you? They could’ve stolen anybody’s gun and done what they did. You can’t blame yourself.”

  Ernie was right, of course, but the crowd of MPs and other 8th Army officials who’d been milling around in the courtyard where the VD Honcho had been killed left no doubt as to who they thought was responsible: Me.

  It was a brothel. Not surprising. Spec 5 Five Arthur Q. Fairbanks, the VD overseer, had been out in Itaewon early in the morning, trying to track down a woman who had reportedly infected five American GIs with gonorrhea. All he wanted to do was take her into the local health clinic. The U.S. government would pay for the antibiotics and the medical bills, a worthy investment if it helped keep our servicemen in fighting trim.

&nb
sp; Why early in the morning? Because at night, these girls were almost impossible to find, and Spec 5 Fairbanks, by all accounts, was dedicated to his job. The Korean women present told the KNPs that Specialist Fairbanks had been talking to the infected business girl, explaining to her that the U.S. government would pay for everything, when a man in a ski mask entered the hooch. He stood just under six feet and wore a raincoat, nondescript slacks, and rubber-soled shoes. Some girls said the skin of his hands was white, some said brown, but they all agreed that there were tufts of black hair on his wrists. The man motioned with his pistol for Fairbanks to step into the courtyard, while all the business girls, most still in their pajamas or nightgowns, crouched on the edges of the horseshoe-shaped raised floor, with the open doors of their hooches behind them.

  Fairbanks was terrified, the girls said. He began to cry and plead for his life. The man motioned with his weapon for Fairbanks to kneel. He did. The girls were ordered into their hooches. Some peeked through rips in the oil-paper doors.

  The masked man reached into his raincoat and pulled out a stiff sheet of paper. Maybe cardboard. He set it on the ground and leaned it against the iron pump. Then he stepped back and ordered Fairbanks to bow to the paper. They weren’t sure what language he spoke, they couldn’t hear, but Fairbanks understood and did what he was told. He prostrated himself in front of the paper three times. While this was going on, someone joined them. Whoever it was slipped in through the front gate and stood next to the masked man in the raincoat. No one could see because of the angle from the hooches to the front gate, but they heard footsteps and a whispered, urgent conversation. They were too far away to make out what was said.

  When the seibei ceremony was over, the masked man ordered Fairbanks to remain kneeling. Then he walked around behind Fair-banks and aimed the. 45 at the back of Fairbanks’ head and pulled the trigger.

  16

  Some of the young girls who witnessed this were so traumatized they’d been hospitalized.

  After the killing, the assassin calmly replaced the pistol in the pocket of his raincoat, retrieved the piece of cardboard, and walked back out through the front gate with the other person.

  Ernie and I spent the entire morning with the KNP crime-scene technicians, gathering evidence and then we spent the afternoon and into the evening listening to Captain Kim at the Itaewon Police Station interrogate witnesses.

  Why did everyone believe that the. 45 used in the crime was my weapon? Because it was the same type used in the shooting of Han Ok-hi in Inchon and Jo Kyong-ah in Songtan. The masked gunman matched the general description of the second bank robber who’d shot Han Ok-hi.

  Why Fairbanks? Why kill Fairbanks?

  That was what I kept asking myself.

  And if it was the same gunman-this man called Kong, the brother of the smiling woman-why didn’t he leave something behind to identify himself as he had at the killing of Jo Kyong-ah?

  I puzzled over this all through the tedious gathering and recording of evidence, the tear-filled interviews at the Itaewon Police Station. Late in the afternoon, the answer occurred to me.

  At both the shooting of Han Ok-hi at the Olympos Casino in Inchon and at the assassination of Spec 5 Fairbanks in Itaewon, there’d been witnesses. No witnesses had been available when Jo Kyong-ah was murdered. So my weapons card had been left behind in the byonso, to make sure we knew who was doing this.

  Why did they want us to know? What was his motive for all this carnage? And still the question remained: Why Fairbanks?

  There had to be a connection between the Olympos Casino, the black marketeer Jo Kyong-ah, and Spec 5 Arthur Q. Fairbanks. I just wasn’t smart enough to see what it was.

  I shouted at the bartender. “OB tubyong. Bali!” Two bottles of Oriental Beer. Quick!

  Ernie stared at me. I felt uncomfortable under his gaze but I knew why he was staring. It wasn’t like me to be impolite. Even to a young man behind a bar.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

  He nodded and sipped on his beer. When the bartender arrived with our drinks, I tipped him heavily, which was unlike me too. Ernie was about to comment when we both smelled a warm, perfumed body. We turned.

  Her face was too heavily made up, and she was wearing a sequined bikini with tassels hanging from a g-string. At first I didn’t recognize her. Then I did.

  “Suk-ja,” I said.

  She smiled broadly. “You no forget.”

  “How could I forget?” Then I turned to Ernie. “She helped us at the Yellow House in Inchon. She works at Number 59.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  It wasn’t surprising that we hadn’t remembered her right away. At the Yellow House, Suk-ja had first worn see-through pink lingerie. Later, she’d changed into blue jeans and a pullover sweater and sneakers. Her face had been washed and she’d worn black, horn-rimmed glasses, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She’d looked more like a college co-ed than what she truly was. Now she’d transformed herself again. The glasses were gone, her face was heavily made-up. A curly hairdo fell to her shoulders. Most impressively, she was wearing the barely legal outfit of an Itaewon stripper. The make-up I could live without, but in that skimpy outfit, her figure looked fabulous.

  “First I do show,” she said. “Then you buy me beer.

  Okay?”

  She pointed at me and I nodded vigorously. “Okay.”

  She smiled and scurried back to the stage.

  Watching her, I felt guilty again. One mad rush of sexual desire and, just like that, I’d forgotten about the murdered body of Specialist Five Arthur Q. Fairbanks. For a few seconds anyway. When Suk-ja disappeared behind the stage, guilt rushed back to replace the excitement.

  The rock band started up with an out-of-sync rendition of “Satin Doll.” Mercifully, Duke Ellington wasn’t around to hear it. Suk-ja appeared on stage to a round of guffaws and proceeded to strut her way through her act. GIs were hooting, as were the Korean business girls, and then Suk-ja was almost naked and dodging grasping hands. Finally, the song ended, and she was off the stage. Twenty minutes later, the Suk-ja I had known at the Yellow House, in blue jeans, ponytail, and horn-rimmed glasses, sat next to me on a barstool.

  17

  We had a few more drinks.

  Drunkenly, Ernie kept telling me not to blame myself. But the more he said that, the worse I felt.

  Suk-ja ordered another plate of yakimandu. Using her polished fingernails, she raised a dumpling, dipped it in soy sauce, and popped it in my mouth. This time I ate.

  I sat up in bed.

  I was on a soft mat, and I could feel the heated floor beneath. A window was slightly open. An almost full moon shone. A soft hand touched my shoulder.

  “What’s the matter, Geogi?”

  It was Suk-ja. We’d left the Seven Club together right before the midnight curfew and rented this room in the Seven Star Yoguan, a Korean inn.

  “Miss Yun,” I said.

  “Nugu?” Who?

  “Miss Yun. The woman who is the mother of the man who executed Specialist Fairbanks. And the man who murdered Jo Kyong-ah, and the same man who shot Han Ok-hi.

  They kicked her out of her home.”

  Suk-ja sat up. Her soft body was naked.

  “What?” she asked. “Who did?”

  “A mama-san up in Uichon told me. Miss Yun had two children, both half-Miguk. One a boy, one a girl. She caught tuberculosis, so they made her leave her home.”

  “She was a business girl?”

  “Yes.”

  I told her the story.

  The order for Miss Yun to be separated from her children and placed in a sanitarium had been executed maybe five years ago. The children were to be placed in an orphanage, possibly put up for adoption. Miss Yun fled the sanitarium. Somehow, she’d found her children and gone into hiding. A business woman without a home nightclub, where she could be registered with the authorities and receive regular health checkups, was reduced to avoiding the KNPs an
d walking the streets. With two children in tow, both just reaching adolescence themselves, she wasn’t making enough money. Predictably, she tried to borrow. But after a few loans without repayment, she was turned down everywhere.

  Her tuberculosis became worse, yet she couldn’t go to a hospital. If she did, the authorities would be called, and she would be once again held as a risk to public health. Tuberculosis, small pox, venereal disease-these scourges had taken a terrible toll on Korean society during and after the Korean War. The government had no choice but to take draconian measures in an effort to curb their spread.

  Miss Yun had remained on the street with her children until one cold winter night, she lay down on the frozen concrete and went to sleep. She never woke up.

  Before dawn, her children tried to rouse her, to no avail. Her body was taken away, for reasons of public health, and burned. When the authorities tried to shuffle the kids off to orphanages, they escaped. When the smiling woman, the daughter of the late Miss Yun, showed up in Uichon asking for a job, she would not talk about the period after her mother’s death. She did, however, always keep a white box wrapped in black ribbon. The Uichon mama-san couldn’t be sure but she suspected that the box contained the ashes of the girl’s dead mother.

  I explained all this to Suk-ja. She listened patiently. I also told her about the smiling woman’s sojourn at the Half Half Club north of Seoul near Uijongbu. How she’d been stalked there, and how she’d run away and hidden farther north with the Uichon mama-san. I wasn’t sure who was after her or how this tied in with everything else. When I finished, Suk-ja rolled off the sleeping mat and, crouching on her haunches, poured barley tea from a brass pot into an earthenware cup. She offered the cup to me. I drank.

  Then she lit incense in a bronze burner. Three sticks. Tiny flames burning brightly. Suk-ja pressed her palms in front of her nose and bowed three times to each red pinpoint of light. Miss Yun, her daughter and son. When she was finished, Suk-ja, one by one, snuffed them out.

  The Chief Medical Officer of the 121 Evacuation Hospital was not happy to see two CID agents rummaging through the records of his Communicable Disease Unit.