by Martin Limon
Dark ice patches covered many surfaces so we had to watch our step over the haphazardly cobbled pathways. A light snow continued to fall. I pulled my jacket tighter around my chest and wished I’d brought the long heavy overcoat the army issues. The lanes became gradually narrower and there was less sound in the hooches behind the high brick walls. I started to realize where we were going. Approaching from this direction I hadn’t been sure at first but now I was. Within ten minutes, we stood in front of the rotted wooden gate that led into the home of Auntie Mee, the fortune teller.
Everything was quiet except for the tiny bells tinkling and the red spirit flags flapping in the late-night breeze. Doc Yong didn’t bother to knock. She pushed open the wooden doorway in the gate and the rusted hinges groaned, like a ghost being called from the dead.
I hesitated for a second, knowing from Doc Yong’s grim expression and from the silence that surrounded us like a shroud, that something was desperately wrong. I crouched, stepped through the little gate, and entered the darkness of the quiet courtyard.
My mother died before I even started school. My father, the coward that he was, shrugged off his responsibility toward me and took off back to Mexico. That left me, U.S. citizen George Sueño, alone in the world. Growing up as a foster child in East L.A. was difficult but what kept me going through all of it was what my mother had told me before she died. “Be good, Jorge mío,” she said. “Never betray those you love.”
The problem was that, so far, I’d never found anyone to love. I wasn’t even sure, exactly, what the word meant. Were they talking about the feelings I had toward my mom? Or where they talking about new feelings I would develop some day as I matured, feelings that I would have toward a young woman closer to my own age?
I knew about lust. That feeling was quite familiar to me. In fact, lust was an enemy that never let me rest. Visions of sex exploded in my brain night and day and from what I could tell of other young G.I.s, I wasn’t alone. But love, I suspected, was something else entirely.
I watched Doc Yong walking in front of me, arms crossed on her chest, her head down, straight black hair sticking out beneath the edge of her red cap. What was most astonishing about her was her relentless desire to help the business girls of Itaewon. To offer them a hand. To pull them out of the mire in which they were so securely stuck. Doc Yong was almost thirty so she was older than me. I didn’t believe the age difference mattered and so far she had treated me strictly as a colleague. Sort of her own personal U.S. Army liaison officer. A job she needed done because the Korean business girls who swamped her clinic had so many interactions, most of them unpleasant, with 8th Army G.I.s and there always seemed to be something that needed to be worked out with military officialdom. I was happy to perform the role and the closer I was to her the better I felt.
Tonight, I sensed, was a turning point for us. She was taking me somewhere, preparing to show me something that would take us beyond our workday acquaintance stage. Something told me that what I was about to see would be horrible beyond belief. And I believed that this horrible event, whatever it was, would either bring Doc Yong and me closer together or it would split us apart forever. I didn’t know which.
So I was braced not just for blood but for heartache. Either or both, would not be new to me. I could handle anything, or at least that’s what I thought at the time.
Auntie Mee’s hooch was silent and completely dark. I took a few tentative steps across the varnished wooden floor. Silvery moonlight filtered through a back window. A shadow moved through the moonbeams. Doc Yong. She had crouched in front of a wooden cabinet and was fumbling around, looking for something. Finally, she found it. Cardboard scratched on cardboard and then a match scraped and hissed. A tiny fire erupted and I turned my head away from the sudden glow. Deft hands lit two candles. Doc Yong handed one to me.
“Come,” she said.
We walked toward the moonglow. Wind rustled silk curtains. In the distance a dog howled. There weren’t many howling dogs in Korea. People lived too close together and they worked too hard to allow their sleep to be disrupted by some canine barking at the moon. So a noisy pooch was seldom tolerated. But for some reason, tonight, a dog howled. Maybe it wasn’t a dog. Maybe it was something else. I pushed such superstitious thoughts out of my mind. Instead, I searched the shadows.
They looked back at me.
13
Auntie Mee’s hooch hadn’t been trashed. In all my years in law enforcement I’d never seen anyone break into a house and be so respectful of the furniture and the artifacts and the personal possessions within. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Nothing, that is, except for Auntie Mee.
She was still wearing her silk robes. She had been kneeling in front of the small table upon which lay her ancient codex. It was open to an astrological entry. I held my candle closer to examine the script. Chinese. Although I recognized a few characters—like those for sun and moon and the autumn season—I couldn’t read enough to make any sense of it. Doc Yong knelt next to me.
“The rites of burial,” she said. “How to honor a dead person, how to prepare their grave, how to place them in it, what rituals to perform to assuage their spirit and make sure that they continue to receive honor from their living descendents and therefore will be allowed to take their rightful place in heaven.”
“All that here,” I said, pointing at the long rows of script.
“Yes.” Doc Yong flipped the thick page. “And on further. We Koreans have no end of instructions when it comes to honoring the dead.”
“And she was studying this,” I said, “just before her murderer showed up?”
“Maybe after,” Doc Yong replied.
“After?”
I thought about it. It made sense. Auntie Mee seemed so composed in death. Her corpse lay back on the wood-slat floor, her knees curled in front of her, as if she’d been kneeling in front of this cheiksang, book table, just prior to death. And she’d purposely opened her codex to the rites for the dead, leaving instructions to whoever found her as to the proper method of her burial. So she’d known someone was going to kill her. Possibly they’d talked. Possibly, Auntie Mee had slipped on the same long silk robe in which she gave psychic readings so she’d be presentable in death. But who would do that? Who would face their murderer calmly and quietly and accept their fate? Why hadn’t she tried to run? Why hadn’t she screamed? Why hadn’t she put up a fight?
It only made sense if Auntie Mee knew that there was no place for her to run to. If she knew that whoever was here to kill her—or whoever had ordered her to be killed—was too powerful to resist. Auntie Mee’s only source of income was fortune-telling and psychic readings. If she couldn’t do that, then she couldn’t live. And if the person who wanted her killed was powerful enough to hunt her down, to find her wherever she happened to set up shop, then she might’ve decided that there was no use trying to run. That there was no use trying to fight. Better to accept her fate gracefully. To go out in style, wearing her best silk robes and leaving instructions for her burial so the rites performed after her death would bring honor to her memory and give her prestige on her journey to join her ancestors.
“She didn’t fight,” I told Doc Yong.
“No.”
The cause of death was strangulation. Her neck was bruised and her jaw was cracked open; her tongue lolled out purple and bloated. She’d bitten her own tongue and lips while trying to gasp for breath and she must’ve lost her resolve to die peacefully because she had scratched at her neck with her own fingernails. Long red welts ran down the smooth flesh. A silk rope lay next to her corpse, a few strands of Auntie Mee’s long black hair entertwined with it. The rope was composed of at least a half-dozen plies of silk strips braided together and then tied into thick knots at the ends. There was little bleeding. Only what Auntie Mee’s frantic scratching had caused on her own neck. Her body looked frail and helpless now in death. But calm. Acceptant.
“Who told you she was dead?” I asked.
“One of the business girls. She came here to ask Auntie Mee to read her fortune. The front gate was open. When there was no answer she came inside, found Auntie Mee like this.”
“And she came straight to you?”
“Yes.”
“Who was it?”
“Miss Kwon.”
Again, Miss Kwon. She seemed to be everywhere at all times.
“She recovered quickly from her accident,” I said.
“Very quickly.”
“And she’s determined.”
Doc Yong nodded. What, I thought, was Miss Kwon so determined about? Even if she couldn’t afford to stay in the hospital, certainly Doc Yong would’ve loaned her enough money to enable her to eat and to rest a few days. Instead, Miss Kwon had gone right back to work. In fact, she’d become a busybody. What was the purpose of all this determination? Or was I becoming paranoid? I said, “And after telling you about the body, Miss Kwon went to the Seven Club to meet Hilliard?”
Doc Yong shrugged. “She has to live.”
“But just a few days ago, she tried to kill herself.”
“That was then. Now she wants to live.”
Yes. She did. Even to the point of putting up with Sergeant First Class Quinton Hilliard. But life, even a life of shame, is preferable to death. That’s what I thought at the moment, with the reek of lifeless flesh filling my nostrils.
A fly buzzed our heads and landed on the edge of Auntie Mee’s smooth jawline. I waved it away.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“I want to pray first.”
And then, reading from the codex, Doc Yong instructed me in how to assist her in lining up candles and igniting incense in a bronze burner and reciting chants in a language so ancient I couldn’t understand it. We spent the better part of an hour doing this, she instructing me carefully in the arcane rites of the dead. Meanwhile, outside, the silent storm brewed. And when we were finally done, Doc Yong gently closed Auntie Mee’s eyes.
“Goodbye, my friend,” she said.
We stayed still, kneeling, for a long time.
When we emerged from that place of horror, the outside world had been transformed into a universe of darkness and swirling snow. The electricity had gone out and the glow of the moon and the stars were just a memory. I knew we’d never find our way back to Doc Yong’s clinic, not while we groped blindly through this endless maze of narrow pathways. And the thought of reaching her apartment or the front gate of 8th Army compound was completely out of the question. They were much too far away. Meanwhile, the city of Seoul, blasted by the Manchurian weather, had shut down. Anyone with any sense had long ago taken shelter. There were no taxis roaming the streets, no buses; even the white mice curfew police had given up trying to find North Korean infiltrators and had taken shelter somewhere, probably in an igloo.
With a gloved finger, Doc Yong pointed ahead.
A plastic sign. Unlit. I could barely make it out in the darkness but the sign said yoguan. Literally, mattress hall. A traditional Korean inn. After staggering a few more steps, I pounded on the double wooden doors. They were locked tight and there seemed to be no life within. Still, I kept pounding. We either found shelter here or we lay down in one of the snowdrifts behind us and when the storm finally subsided the local residents would find us, frozen stiff. After every major snowstorm in Seoul, dozens of people are found dead on the streets the following day. The city fathers don’t like to advertise this fact but it’s true. In Korea, poverty is rampant but being homeless is rare. Most everyone has somewhere to go. But for those few who don’t, life is short.
Doc Yong started pulling on my elbow, ready to give up and move on but I resisted. Instead, I continued hammering my fist on the unmoving wooden door. After ten more minutes even I was about to call it quits but just before I did, metal creaked loudly behind the door. It wedged open, crusted snow falling everywhere, and then finally, with a sigh of warm air, the door opened.
A woman wrapped in a cloth overcoat motioned for us to enter.
“Bali,” she said. “Chuyo.” Hurry. It’s cold.
Doc Yong and I rushed in, stamping our feet on a flagstone walkway. The woman slammed the door shut behind us and without saying a word, scurried back toward the warmth of the two story building. Before entering, Doc Yong and I brushed as much snow as possible off our outer coats and then, in the foyer, we slipped off our shoes and stepped up on the raised lacquered floor.
“Aigu,” the woman said, “wei pakei naggaso?” Why did you go outside?
“We made a mistake,” Doc Yong replied in Korean. Then she asked if we could rent a room. The woman nodded and led us down a hallway. There was no light in the building but the owner provided us with a candle. It was an ondol room, meaning it was heated by charcoal gas running through ducts below the floorboards. This meant that even though the electricity was out, the room was warm and cozy. The owner arranged the yo, the sleeping mats, and opened a cabinet that held silk-covered comforters. She showed us where the outside byonso was located and later she came into the room carrying a tray with two cups and a thermos of warm barley tea.
I paid her and after she left, Doc Yong and I took off most of our clothes, grabbed the comforters, and lay down on the warm sleeping mattress on the floor. Within seconds we were clutching one another, strictly for warmth. We were both exhausted and after a few minutes our mutual body heat and the warm floor below finally allowed us to thaw out. And then I was kissing her and she was kissing me back.
Maybe it was the death we’d seen in Auntie Mee’s hooch. The horrible death and the horrible pain. It made life, every second of it, seem more important. And then I was slipping the last of Doc Yong’s clothes off and she was slipping off the last of mine. We found a joy in one another, a joy that people rarely find, both of us becoming rabid with our desire to touch one another and suddenly, and completely, embrace life.
When we woke up on the mattresses in the yoguan, we didn’t talk to one another.
Gray sunlight filtered through the oil-papered windows and I tried to speak but Doc Yong shrugged me off, not making eye contact, acting as if I’d committed a great sin. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said nothing. Maybe she needed time; time to deal with what we’d done last night. I didn’t need any time myself. I felt great. But I had no idea what feelings she was dealing with so I left her alone. She didn’t even use the byonso but started to leave before I was half dressed.
“Wait,” I said. “I’ll go with you.”
“No.” It was a shout. Too loud. And then she realized that she was showing panic and she took a deep breath. “Better,” she said, holding out her hand in a halting gesture, “if I go first. Anyway, I must go to the clinic and you must go to your compound.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. She was ashamed of me. Ashamed to be seen on the street with a big-nosed foreigner. But I didn’t blame her. All the Koreans would look at her with amused smiles on their faces and later they would talk about her. Relentlessly. “Yang kalbo,” they’d whisper. Foreign whore.
I longed to step toward her and take her hand and tell her I understood. That she didn’t have to be seen on the street with me if she found it embarrassing. But she looked so skittish, like a yearling ready to bolt, that I didn’t dare. Instead, I stayed where I was and just nodded. Dumbly.
She said, “OK,” and walked out and closed the door behind her.
I listened to her footsteps retreat down the hallway.
The provost marshal was about to pop a blood vessel.
“You did what?”
Ernie stood in front of Colonel Brace at the position of attention, his jaw thrust out, his lips set into a grim sneer. “I punched his lights out.” Then he said, “sir.”
“Oh, I see. You punched his lights out. Any particular reason why you punched his lights out?”
“He had it coming. He was manhandling a business girl on the dance floor of the Seven Club.”
The provost m
arshal crinkled his nose in confusion and glanced at the first sergeant and then at me. You could almost hear his thoughts: Manhandling a business girl? That’s a crime? He glanced at the paperwork on his desk. “Hilliard said it was a racist attack.”
“Not so, sir. I would’ve been happy to punch his lights out regardless of his color.”
The provost marshal rolled his eyes and lifted both hands to the side of his head and rubbed his temples. He was through talking to Ernie. Instead, he talked to the first sergeant.
“We’ll have to answer this, Top. See if you can write up a statement that makes sense and before you send it out, run it by the JAG Office to see what they think.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Meanwhile, Bascom, you and your partner here are liable to come up on EEO charges.”
The colonel was about to go on but Ernie interrupted him.
“Sueño had nothing to do with it, sir. In fact, he tried to stop me.”
“Well he wasn’t very effective, was he?”
“I was too quick for him, sir,” Ernie continued. “I’ll accept the punishment but Sueño’s innocent.”
“Not according to the KNPs.”
The Korean National Police had not yet cleared Ernie and me of suspicion concerning the death of Two Bellies.
“That’s bull, sir. You know it. That’s their way of deflecting blame from any Korean who might have power. A safety valve. So in case they find that whoever murdered Two Bellies has money and influence, they can pretend that they suspect us.”
Colonel Brace didn’t respond to that. But he didn’t contradict Ernie either.
“All right,” he said, looking back and forth between us. “You two are about to lose your ratings as criminal investigation agents and, if you keep pissing off the power structure here at Eighth Army, you’re about to get court-martialed or even booted out of the army.” Colonel Brace held up his hand, not allowing us to respond.