The Door to Bitterness

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 and 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.

“You are to remove nothing,” he told us.

He was a portly man with a receding hairline, a gray mustache, and a white lab coat that failed to hide his paunch. Physically, not very impressive. What was impressive, at least to soldiers, were the silver eagles pinned to his collar.

“Yes, sir,” I answered. “Only notes. That’s all we’ll be taking.”

“See that you do. Before you leave, check out with Sergeant Whitworth, and I want to be briefed on whatever you find.”

“Of course, sir,” I said.

Fat chance. Eighth Army criminal investigation files are confidential, revealed only on a need-to-know basis. This pompous colonel wouldn’t have a need to know unless we said he had a need to know. But no sense yanking his chain, so I just waited until he left.

“Asshole,” Ernie mumbled.

“Someday you’re going to say that too loud.”

He shrugged.

We continued to look through files. VD records. Huge canvas-covered logs with every infected GIs name, rank, serial number, and unit. What type of VD, where he was infected, how long ago the contact was, and who had infected him. Many of the entries were blank, because if a GI was promiscuous, and many of the repeat offenders were, he couldn’t quite be sure where or when or by whom he’d been infected. Ernie covered the most recent cases. After all, we couldn’t be a hundred percent sure that the son of Miss Yun had killed him. Possibly Spec 5 Fairbanks had been involved in some sort of nefarious activity that had resulted in his death. We had to check that. Still, I doubted Ernie would find anything.

So did he. After half an hour, Ernie grew antsy and decided to walk out in the front office and chat with Sergeant Whitworth. She was a leggy blond, and Ernie hadn’t been quite as lucky as I had been last night. He’d left the Seven Club alone.

Leftover fumes of bourbon and beer churned in my stomach and rose like hot air into my throat and nose. I had already taken four aspirin along with bicarbonate of soda, and I doubted that a cup of black coffee from the silver urn in the front office would help. My side was okay. It was healing nicely. No infection. That Greek sailor kept a clean knife. In a day or two, I’d pull the stitches out.

Outside the open door of the records office, white-smocked medics, nurses, and doctors paraded back and forth on their soft-soled shoes, hurrying to do the beneficial work of healers. They murmured and laughed and chortled, untroubled by visions of two children starving on the streets of Seoul while they watched their mother cough bloody guts onto a crystalline pile of ice.

I shoved such thoughts out of my mind and concentrated on my work.

I started with the records that ended two years ago. Why there? No particular reason, other than I had to start somewhere. And the Uichon mama-san had told me that she believed Miss Yun had died three or four years ago. But her memory could be wrong. Starting at two years ago, and working back from there, seemed safe.

I moved my finger name by name down the row of infected GIs, searching the columns to see where they’d been infected and by whom. Occasionally I slapped my cheek to keep alert, to avoid being mesmerized by the endless row of handwritten entries.

Most were in the hand of the late Specialist 5 Arthur Q. Fairbanks. He’d extended his one year tour time after time until, on the day he was shot, he had been in country almost five years.

This entire effort might be a waste of time. Possibly, if Miss Yun was involved with any of these GIs, they might not remember her name, or who it was that had infected them, or where they had met her. This would be particularly true once she was no longer working as an unpaid “entertainer” in a specific nightclub. A few of the entries said “streetwalker.” I paused at each and studied it, but the information told me nothing.

A few of the entries had a red asterisk by the name of the “contact,” the accused prostitute. I wasn’t sure what the asterisk meant, but I’d figure that out later if I needed to.

After two hours, I passed the four-year mark. That is, the entries were now older than four years before today’s date. As a reward to myself, I stood up and stretched and walked out to the front office.

Ernie sat on the edge of Sergeant Whitworth’s desk, playing with the sharpened pencils she had placed upright in a coffee mug. He said something and leaned toward her, making her laugh. They ignored me as I walked past. Out in the busy hallway, I followed the signs to the men’s latrine.

When I returned, Ernie and Sergeant Whitworth had disappeared.

I sat back down at my little desk, took a deep breath, and studied the thick clothbound ledgers again. I had only been working about ten minutes when I spotted it. The GIs name was Bombeck, Rufus R. His unit was the 501st Signal Battalion, and the point of contact was “streetwalker.” But penciled beneath the entry was the name Yoon. And next to that was another red asterisk.

Quickly I jotted down the information and folded the top corner of the ledger page. I continued to work, but after two hours, and going back in the records another year, I found no similar entry.

I walked back into the front office. Still no Sergeant Whitworth. And no Ernie. I poured myself some coffee and waited. When they finally returned, Whitworth’s immaculately white uniform was askew, her cheeks flushed red. Ernie grinned at me.

“Find anything?” he asked.

Whitworth scurried behind her desk and sat, immediately picking up the phone and making what must’ve been an extremely urgent phone call. While she chatted, I filled Ernie in.

“What the hell does the red asterisk mean?” he said.

I nodded toward Whitworth. When she’d finished her phone call, I asked her.

“Tuberculosis,” she answered.

I sat quietly while she explained that when a prostitute was known to have an active case of tuberculosis, and Fairbanks found out about it, he routinely notified the Korean health authorities. Then a pickup was arranged.

“What do you mean ‘a pickup?’”

“Four or five Korean health officials meet us here at the 121, and we convoy out to Itaewon, usually with the infected GI. He shows us where the woman lives, or at least where he had contact with her, and we take it from there. Usually, we find her, and the Koreans take her into custody.”

“So,” I said, “if a streetwalker with tuberculosis was picked up in Itaewon, Fairbanks would’ve been there to see her arrest. To see her being taken away.”

“Oh, yeah. He had some stories. People crying, children screaming. You know, the whole works.”

“By the way,” I asked, “do you miss him?”

Her nose wrinkled. “Honestly,” she said, “he was sort of a jerk.”

Ernie and me and Suk-ja sat at a low-backed booth in the first-floor coffee shop of the Hamilton Hotel in the heart of Itaewon. Ernie sipped ginseng tea. Suk-ja and I drank coffee. She ladled plenty of sugar and cream into hers. Mine was black. She grimaced every time I took a sip.

“Nomu jjia,” she said. Too sour.

I explained to them what I thought, so far, about the case.

“First, Boltworks, the smiling woman, and her brother are running around Itaewon bopping drunken GIs on the head and taking their money.” I sipped on my coffee, picturing the three of them in action. Then I set the coffee cup down. “But this can’t last long, because Captain Kim and his men have dealt with crooks like that countless times, and I think the smiling woman was smart enough to realize they had to try something new. So they decide to go for a big score. A casino. But how? How do you gain entry and the confidence of a casino manager-get close enough to the cashier cage so you can force your way to the money?”

“That’s where you came in,” Ernie said.

“Right. They drug me, bop me over the head in an alley, and take my identification, badge, and sidearm.”

Suk-ja looked as if the thought of me being hurt was causing her pain.

“So they rob The Olympos Hotel and Casino in Inchon,” I said. “But while the robbery is going down, the owner makes a break for the fire escape. Without thinking, Kong, the brother, pops off a round. A young female blackjack dealer steps in the way and takes a bullet that should’ve landed in the casino owner’s back.”

“Okay,” Ernie said. “I buy that. But why do you say ‘without thinking?’ This son of a bitch, Kong, is a cold-blooded killer.”

“All right. Scratch the ‘without thinking’ part. But as far as we know, at that moment he had never killed anyone before.”

“So he’s in deep kimchee,” Ernie said. “He takes the money and he and his sister run and hide.”

“Right. But how long is that going to last? The KNPs are all over the case. And when Han Ok-hi dies, he knows they’ll never stop coming after him. Maybe they don’t have any leads, maybe they won’t be able to track him down, because he left very little evidence at the crime scene.”

“Other than a bullet from your gun.”

“Yeah. Other than a round from my gun. But he knows that once he and his sister start spending the money, they’ll be caught.”

“Marked bills?”

“No. Not marked, but people remember half-Miguks, especially when they spend money and have no visible means. Eventually, they’d come to the attention of the Korean police.”

“He should’ve thought about that before.”

“And he knew Bolt would be caught. A GI on the run in the Korea-how long is that going to last?”

“Not long,” Ernie said.

“Since they stiffed him of the money, they knew Bolt would spill his guts.”

“They were right about that,” Ernie said. “So why didn’t he kill Bolt when he had the chance?”

“Maybe he was planning to. Maybe that’s what the rendezvous in Seoul was all about, or maybe he planned to slip back into Inchon and murder Bolt at Yellow House Number 17.”

“But we screwed it up by chasing Bolt away.”

“Exactly.”

Suk-ja stopped sipping coffee. Her smooth brow wrinkled in concentration as she stretched her knowledge of English in an attempt to follow our conversation.

“What about woman?” she said.

“The smiling woman?” I replied. “What about her?”

“She no have plan? She no say nothing?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Maybe she smarter than man.”

“How do you mean?”

“Maybe her brother fight you, fight Korean police.

When you catch him, she run away. Take all money, go.”

“Maybe,” I said.

But I didn’t think so. The smiling woman had grown up with her brother under conditions that most of us couldn’t begin to imagine. That would’ve made their bond impossible to break. But she had been fooling around with Bolt when her brother wasn’t watching. What was that all about? And then I remembered her face. The eternal smile, the eternal willingness to please. Maybe she hadn’t made a decision to fool around with Bolt, maybe he had simply made a demand.

“Sueno,” Ernie said. “You still with us?”

I nodded and sipped on coffee. “Yeah.”

I continued to explain that once the woman and her brother knew they were so hot they were bound to be caught, they had decided that-before being caught-they would take revenge on the people who had wronged their mother.

“Everybody murdered so far-at least after Han Ok-hi’s death-has been somebody who was an important player in Itaewon during the years their mother operated there as a prostitute. Jo Kyong-ah was the biggest black-market mama-san in Itaewon until she retired less than a year ago. Spec Five Fairbanks was the VD tracker for the 8th Army. He wielded the power of life and death over some of these poor hookers. If he turned them in to the Korean health authorities, they couldn’t work any longer.”

Ernie sipped his tea. Suk-ja stirred her coffee.

“Makes sense,” Ernie said. “But the big question is, who’s next?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But Haggler Lee seems awfully nervous.”

“Maybe for good reason. Maybe he hasn’t told us everything.”

“Maybe. You finished with your tea yet?”

“Almost. Why?”

“Let’s go check out a few bokdok-bangs.” Real estate offices. “See if we can scare up somebody who remembers Miss Yun and her two kids. They lived here in Itaewon for years.”

“Probably hopping from hooch to hooch,” Ernie said.

“That’s a needle in the haystack, Sueno.”

“We’ve got to try something.”

“Good. You do that. Me, I’m taking the jeep in for maintenance.”

“You can do that anytime.”

“What else do you want me to do? Stand around while you speak Korean to a bunch of realtors? Xin loy. You do what you got to do, I’ll do what I got to do.”

Suk-ja stared into her coffee, embarrassed by the disagreement.

Ernie was burning out on this case, that much was clear. We’d made progress. Plenty of it. We knew who had perpetrated the murders, and we even had a pretty good theory as to why. The problem was that we didn’t know where the woman or her brother were hiding and, even more importantly, we had no idea who in the hell they might choose as their next victim. The thought that they’d stop killing now, when they’d gone this far, seemed unlikely. Ernie was frustrated, so was I, and going back to talk to realtors sounded too much like starting from scratch. He couldn’t deal with it. I was having trouble myself, but I was determined to drive on. If he didn’t want to help, that was his problem.

“Okay,” I replied. “Take care of the maintenance. But be back here in two hours.”

Ernie stood up, buttoned his coat, and stalked out of the Hamilton Hotel Coffee Shop.

With the tips of her soft fingers, Suk-ja caressed my knuckles. I pulled my hand away, told her I’d see her tonight, and found my way out of the warm coffee shop. Alone, I walked the cold streets of the Korean red light district.

A sharp wind picked up beneath an overcast sky.

The torn shreds of a dried noodle wrapper tumbled past my feet. A few of the front doors of the nightclubs were open, and an occasional drunken GI stumbled in. All in all though, Itaewon was mostly deserted.

A little brown-faced girl with a Prince Valiant haircut appeared at my elbow.

“You buy gum?”

She held out a cardboard box crammed with an assortment of American and Korean brands.

“No gum,” I said, sticking my hands in my jacket pockets. If I remembered correctly, there were real estate offices up the hill, beyond the nightclub district. In Korea, the bok-dok-bangs are not just for buying homes. In fact, they’re more often used as brokers for people trying to rent. Even one-room hovels were rented through a bokdok-bang. Ernie was right though, they changed personnel a lot. What was the likelihood that I’d run into an agent who had been working the Itaewon area four years ago and remembered one business girl out of how many?

But when I thought of Han Ok-hi and Jo Kyong-ah and Arthur Q. Fairbanks, and the weapon that had killed them, I knew I had to keep trying.

The girl selling the gum pressed my elbow.

I turned and said, “I told you, no gum!”

“Solip,” she said.

“What?”

“Solip.”

Then I understood what she was saying. The Korean word I had learned not too long ago. Solip. Pine needles.

“What are you talking about?” I asked the girl.

She pointed with a grimy finger.

“She want talk to you.”

“Who wants to talk to me?”

“I show you.”

Without warning, she scampered off. Into the mouth of a dark alley leading uphill into the jumbled hooches. When I didn’t immediately follow, she paused and waited.

Pines needles. Who would know about the pine needles that had been left on the stove to burn in the home of Jo Kyong-ah? Only the people who had murdered her. Should I stop and call Ernie?

Not only would it be tough to get in touch with him, but the little girl could run away at the slightest provocation. Was I armed? I hadn’t been since the smiling woman led me into that dark alley. And now I was being led into a dark alley again, perhaps by the same person.

What choice did I have?

I shoved my fists deeper into my pockets and trudged on, following the girl into the dark heart of Itaewon.

The alleys of Itaewon cannot be plotted on a grid. They wind around and back, uphill and down, like the tentacles of a squid. I realized the girl had disappeared. I stood alone, behind a row of ramshackle wooden hooches, alongside a stone-lined drainage ditch fenced off by rusty, netted wire topped by coiled concertina. The ditch was six feet wide and just as deep. Filth flowed sluggishly through its channel. There were no lights, and although the sun had not gone down, the thick shroud of overhead clouds kept the world under a blanket of gloom.

I stood with my back against a dirty brick wall, facing the ditch. Nothing moved on either side. Most of Itaewon teems with life, but back here the world was holding its breath.

On my own, I never would’ve found this spot. Why come back here? Most GIs never wander far from the bar district. And when they did, they were escorted by a business girl directly to her hooch.

A glimmer of light appeared in the corner of my eye. Like a cartoon character, I swiveled my head in an exaggerated double-take.

She stood alone, on the opposite side of the drainage ditch, the ten-foot-high chain-link fence between us. She wore a plain beige overcoat that looked fashionable, with the collar turned up and the belt cinched at the waist. Her light brown hair fell to her shoulders, cascading in gentle waves. She stood so still that I blinked, wondering if she was imaginary. Her smooth unblemished skin set off the startling blue sparkle in her otherwise Asian eyes, and then I saw the smile. Broad. Too broad. As if the muscles of her face were incapable of assuming any other configuration.

Could I grab her?

No way. By the time I climbed the fence and hopped the ditch, she’d be long gone. Instead, I slowly moved a few feet, until I stood exactly opposite her. She didn’t move, and she didn’t stop smiling.

I stared into her eyes, she stared into mine.

“Why have you and your brother murdered those people?” I asked.

“Fanny likes you,” she said.

I was startled. She meant the crippled woman at the Half Half Club in Songsan-dong.

“I like Fanny too,” I said.

“You gave her money.”

I shrugged. “She needed it.”

The smiling woman stared at me in silence.

Finally, she said, “I have job for you. You don’t want to do anything for me. I know that. No GI wants do anything for me. But this time you must do.”

“Do what?”

She seemed pleased that I’d responded.

“You don’t know. But when time to do job, you will do.”

“How do you know that?”

She studied me. Weighing possibilities.

“You will do,” she said, and took a step backward.

“Wait,” I said. “Don’t kill any more people. We can work something out for you. I know about your mom. About how she was cheated by Jo Kyong-ah. About how the VD guy dragged her away from you and your brother. I will testify on your behalf. The judge will be lenient. You can’t go on killing.”

She stopped, still smiling, but her leer now conveyed rage. Her neck was glowing crimson and she was about to blow her top.

“My mom?” she said. “My mom? You know nothing about her!”

With that she took two quick steps into the dark and was gone.

I leapt at the wire, clinging to the rusted coils, staring across the drainage ditch into the alley beyond. But she was in the wind.

The Yoju City Hall of Records was an old wooden building, probably built during the period of Japanese colonization, that had somehow survived the Korean War. Mementoes and plaques lined the walls, commemorating kings of the Yi Dynasty and victories over invaders stretching back to battles that were fought against Hideyoshi’s invading army during the Sixteenth Century. I was staring at a hand-crafted bronze helmet when Ernie elbowed me in the ribs.

“This guy going to take all day?” he asked.

“It takes a while,” I said. “All this stuff is filed on paper, the old-fashioned way. The archives down in the basement must be enormous.”

“You’d love to look at them, wouldn’t you?”

“Damn right.”

Ernie rolled his eyes. “Figures.”

Since seeing the smiling woman in that back alley yesterday afternoon, I’d been in what psychologists might call a dream state. I’d managed to make my way out of the catacombs and re-enter the land of the living, but as I did so, I started to doubt if I’d really seen her, or if I’d just imagined the whole thing. Of course, I knew it was real. It’s just that what she and her brother were doing seemed so unreal. Unreal, until you saw the blood.

Naturally, when in a dream state, I did what I always do-I wandered into a bar. By the time Ernie found me, I was pretty well gone. He slapped my face a little and made me drink some barley tea and drove me back to the compound in his jeep. Somehow, that night, I managed eight hours of sleep for the first time in a long time. The next morning, after a cup of hot Joe at the snack bar, it came to me what we had to do.

“We gotta find out more about her family,” I said to Ernie.

“Her family? Why?”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, Agent Bascom, that’s what this entire mess is about. Family. And yesterday, that’s what seemed to enrage her. When I mentioned her mother.”

In one of the files at the 121 Evacuation Hospital, Specialist Fairbanks had kept a copy of the Ministry of Health records ordering the pick up of Miss Yun Yong-min, the mother of the smiling woman. According to the background information provided, Yoju was the kohyang, the ancestral home, of Miss Yun.

“If we’re going to head off the next killing,” I said, “we’re going to have to find out more about the smiling woman’s family.”

What I didn’t tell Ernie about the encounter yesterday was what the woman had said about having a job for me to do. I’m not sure why I didn’t.

When the bespectacled Korean man who was the Yoju Clerk of Records emerged from the creaking staircase, he plopped an enormous leather-bound ledger on the counter. Photocopying was conducted in another office and would take a half hour, he said, but I told him I didn’t need it. I just wanted to study the documents and take some notes.

Why had I started thinking in terms of family? A few things. The piece of cardboard that Specialist Fairbanks had been forced to bow to. A photograph maybe. Of an ancestor? And then someone joined the killer while Fairbanks was being forced to perform the seibei ceremony. The smiling woman, I presumed. She’d been present when her brother murdered Fairbanks. Had she been present when Jo Kyong-ah was similarly killed? I was starting to think that she had. These two were turning murder into a family affair.