The Door to Bitterness

19

I quickly located today’s date. It was almost one p.m. and penciled in for 12:30 was the character for “Yun” and the name of a restaurant: Silla Cho Siktang. Silla Cho, the Silla Dynasty. It ruled southern Korea thirteen hundred years ago, during and after the Three Kingdoms Period. Siktang means eatery. Next to that was an entry I couldn’t understand, written in Japanese hiragana syllables interspersed with Chinese characters. The Chinese characters said “turtle mountain,” although how you pronounced that in Japanese I had no idea.

I pointed at the entry and asked the flustered manager, “What’s this mean?”

“Not your business,” he said and tried once again to grab the appointment book.

The pit bosses were grumbling amongst themselves and glaring at us. One of them picked up a phone. I grabbed Bok by the lapels.

“Where’s the Silla Cho Siktang?” I asked.

His eyes widened. “You must not bother Mr. Yun. His meeting very important.”

“With some Japanese millionaire?” I said.

“How you know?”

I pointed at the Japanese writing. Turtle Mountain I figured was somebody’s name.

“Where is Silla Cho Siktang?” I asked again.

Bok crossed his arms and snorted but Ernie had been rummaging in the side pocket of his jacket. Ernie plucked out a pamphlet printed in blazing color and handed it to me. It was a directory to the meeting halls and restaurants and other services located in and around the hotel and casino. The Silla Cho Siktang was located adjacent to the Olympos, on the other side of the parking lot, on a cliff overlooking the Yellow Sea.

I tossed the pamphlet back to Mr. Bok and thanked him for his cooperation. As we hurried to the front door, Bok was already on the phone.

There was only one bodyguard, standing off to the side beneath the brightly painted archway that was the entry to the Silla Cho Siktang. He was still talking on the phone, to Mr. Bok, I imagined, and he kept saying, “Nugu?” Who?

The guy wasn’t too bright. Ernie poked the business end of his pistol into the ear of the young bodyguard. “Relax, Tiger,” Ernie said. “We just want to talk.” He grabbed the phone from the man’s grasp and hung it up.

I frisked him, found his gun, and relieved him of it. I told him to keep his hands raised, and nothing would happen to either him or his employer. Together, the three of us walked into the banquet hall of the Silla Cho Siktang.

The entire expanse of the main floor was covered with immaculately clean tatami mats. A dozen low tables were arranged in the middle of the hall in a horseshoe shape. Some thirty men sat on silk cushions on the outsides of the tables. They picked with silver chopsticks at tender morsels on porcelain plates. In the center of the mats, a young woman, wearing the traditional embroidered silk dress of Korea, plucked on a kayagum, a straight-backed zither, and warbled songs of love in an ancient dialect.

The men were Japanese. How did I know? Their bodies were more slight than that of the average Korean, the bone structure of their faces less like granite. But mostly, I knew from the buzz of conversation, which I could not understand, and from their clothes. They were dressed casually in woolen socks, pressed slacks and cotton shirts, some with expensive-looking cashmere sweaters pulled over for warmth. Everything about them, from their neatly coifed haircuts to their glittering wristwatches and bracelets, reeked of wealth.

One man wore a suit jacket with a white shirt and tie, and he sat at the center of the head table: Yun Guang-min. I recognized him not only from the family registers we’d just seen, but also from our first visit to the Olympos Casino shortly after Han Ok-hi had been shot, when he’d walked out briefly onto the casino floor surrounded by his bodyguards and glared at me.

Beside him, dressed more casually than any of his countrymen, but with a casualness that bespoke wealth, sat a white-haired man who seemed as at home in this elaborate banquet as if he were having a bowl of noodles in his wife’s kitchen. The way the other men smiled and bowed toward him convinced me that he was “Turtle Mountain,” the boss of these Japanese businessmen, probably here on a sex-and-gambling tour of their former colony-now known as the Republic of Korea.

Young women, also dressed in elaborate chima-chogori, scurried back and forth to the kitchen, replacing dishware laden with mint leaves marinated in soya, boiled quail eggs, and pulverized seaweed flattened into paper-thin sheets, salted and toasted in sesame oil.

Other young women-with even more elaborate make-up, hairdos, and dresses of silk-sat amongst the men, pouring heated rice liquor into tiny cups from celadon jugs.

“Sort of like the Eighth Army chow hall,” Ernie told me.

“Right.” I slipped my shoes off and stepped up onto the raised wooden floor covered with tatami. “Watch him,” I said, indicating the red-faced bodyguard, “and watch my back.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Parley,” I said.

I ambled over. The serving girls stopped what they were doing and gawked. The men gradually ceased their chatter. The player of the kayagum stopped plucking on her zither and slid unobtrusively back, until she was out of the way.

Yun Guang-min and his white-haired Japanese guest were deep in conversation. I stood at the center of the U-shaped array of tables, and waited.

Finally, they stopped talking and turned to look at me.

The white-haired businessman seemed amazed to see a foreigner so close. He frowned, but regained his composure and stared impassively. Clearly, it was up to his host, Yun Guang-min, to handle the situation.

Yun was a small man, neatly contained in an expensive wool suit, immaculately tailored. Gold-rimmed spectacles sat across the bridge of his flat nose and what with his high cheekbones and stern facial features, his expression was about as readable as a carving on the side of a mountain. At the moment, I was angry enough not to be too concerned about what he was thinking. I pulled the photograph Jimmy had given me out of my coat pocket and tossed it on the table in front of Yun.

“Your little sister,” I said. “And her daughter and her son when they were kids.”

He stared at the photo, but didn’t reach for it.

“When they needed your help, why did you refuse?”

Short, manicured fingers crawled toward the photo, but stopped an inch away. Yun studied the photo for a moment longer, his expression as blank as it had been when I walked in, but the blood rushed up his neck and into his face, and even years of training in Confucian self-control couldn’t stop it. Finally, Yun tipped his head back and stared into my eyes.

In English, he said, “What do you want?” His voice was like a lizard zapping a fly.

A chill radiated up my spine. Owning a casino on the edge of the Yellow Sea doesn’t require just money, but nerve, ruthlessness, connections-with politicians, gangsters, those who tap into power. If he really wanted to, Yun Guang-min could snap Ernie and me. Still, I knew Ernie and I were probably safe. Too much heat would come if they started killing Americans. We weren’t worth the expense, losses due to interruptions in business. Money talks. Big fat piles of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Yun Guang-min wouldn’t touch us. We were safe, unless I pushed him too hard.

At the moment, with people dead from my. 45, I didn’t mind pushing him.

“What I want,” I said, “is information on the whereabouts of the boy-now a man-in that photograph.”

I pointed to the photo, the boy clinging to his mother’s skirts.

“Your nephew,” I said.

Yun Guang-min didn’t look down.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because he’s the one,” I said, “who robbed your casino and shot Han Ok-hi.”

Yun shook his head slowly. “He’s not my nephew.”

“He is,” I said.

Yun shook his head. “No! He’s nothing to me.”

“Maybe that’s what you want these customers of yours to believe,” I said. “But you know the truth and so do I.”

“You know nothing of the truth!” Yun’s fists were clenched in rage. He paid no attention to the Japanese men who gawked nervously, not understanding the Korean. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said, “to have a sister who turns to foreigners. Who has the village whisper behind our backs, as if we’re unclean. My children were ashamed to go to school, ashamed to stand in front of their own teachers!”

Yun stood, quivering, glaring at me as if he wished me dead. Yun Guang-min, the most powerful man in Inchon, for that moment could do nothing.

“Only one of your bodyguards is here,” I said. “Where are the rest? Out looking for your nephew?”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

“Where’s your nephew, Yun?”

“I don’t know where he is.” His face again flushed, his cheeks as red as the snarling dragons carved into the ceiling.

Were they in this together? Could Yun Guang-min have commissioned his nephew to commit the robbery of his own casino so they could split the profits? Maybe he had partners he was trying to steal money from. Was it possible? I didn’t think so. The amount stolen, one or two days’ take, was a drop in the ocean compared to the amount they took from the high-rollers from Japan and Hong Kong. Those guys bet fortunes, sometimes wiping out the entire accumulated wealth of themselves and their families and their corporations. The Olympos was pulling down more money per gambler than any Las Vegas casino could ever hope for. That’s why GIs weren’t welcome. We upset the high-rollers, and the money soldiers could lose was a pittance compared to what most of the Asians dropped before they even started tapping their lines of credit.

No, it wasn’t an inside job. Everything I’d learned so far pointed to the smiling woman and her brother setting out on a quest for revenge against the world. Starting at the logical place. With the uncle who had left their mother to die on the streets.

I was about to ask another question when Ernie lost his temper.

He fired a round into the ceiling.

All of us jumped and plaster, and bits of paint rained down onto Yun’s table.

Now he’d done it. Up until this point, all our rude behavior could be explained by saying that we were gathering information for a murder investigation. Ernie’s unauthorized use of a firearm changed that. He’d taken us over the line.

Yun’s exalted Japanese guest, Turtle Mountain, jumped back in alarm. The bodyguard started to make a move, but Ernie pointed the. 45 at him and shoved the young man back down and forced him face down onto the tatami on the floor.

The Japanese looked bewildered and pale. Concerned. Were they being robbed? A few rose to their feet. Ernie boomed another round into the ceiling.

“Don’t move!” he shouted.

Everyone understood that.

His face twisted in anger, Erin pointed his. 45 at Yun Guang-min. “You let your sister cough her guts up on the