The Door to Bitterness

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.