The Iron Sickle

— 9-

As I approached the BOQ, Captain Prevault was outside waiting. She walked toward me wearing a warm coat and a large bag over her shoulder. At Gate Number Five we waved down a kimchi cab heading east.

“Where to?” I asked.

She pulled out a slip of paper with an address written on it. I read it to the driver.

“Aju molli,” he said. A long way.

I groaned inwardly, happy I’d gotten a petty cash advance from Riley.

We headed east for almost five miles along the blue ribbon of the Han River, spanning the southern edge of the city of Seoul, until finally we crossed the Chonho Bridge and headed southeast. We passed a few cement block housing areas and some tin-roofed factories, then acres of open junk yards, and finally we were back in the countryside; fallow rice paddies interspersed with small clumps of farm houses with wisps of smoke rising from narrow chimneys.

“Where the hell is this place?” I asked Captain Prevault.

“Not far.” She pointed to a wooden sign on the side of the road and said, “Chogi.” There.

The driver nodded and took the turn.

“You speak Korean,” I said.

“About ten words,” she replied.

“Do you know how to tell the cab driver to stop?”

“Seiwo juseiyo.”

The driver slammed on his brakes and veered toward the side of the road.

“No,” I told the driver in Korean. “Keep going straight. She was just practicing.”

He nodded, then shook his head. Crazy foreigners.

Captain Prevault held her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide with glee. “It worked,” she said.

The road wound up into low hills covered with stands of pine. A breeze bent some of the branches. It would be cold tonight. Maybe this was the end of the fall, I thought, and the beginning of the Korean winter; a freezing winter that howls out of the icy steppes of Manchuria. Finally another sign led us to a gravel parking area in front of a substantial two-story brick building.

“The Japanese built this as a prison,” Captain Prevault said.

“What is it now?”

“A home for the criminally insane.”

“Still a prison,” I said.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

We climbed out of the cab. I handed the driver a five thousand won note, about ten bucks, and asked him to wait. He said he would.

Inside, we were met by a middle-aged Korean man in a white medical uniform who bowed to Captain Prevault, then to me, and escorted us down a long hallway. The odor of kimchi wafted through the air behind him. At the end of the hallway, we descended stone steps into darkness. I touched the walls. They were cold, smeared with moss.

The female prisoner sat up, her back perfectly straight, and her eyes wide in the darkness.

“We can’t turn on the light,” Captain Prevault whispered to me. “She finds it upsetting.”

The ambient glow from a yellow bulb at the far end of the stone tunnel was the only illumination. We had descended a full three stories beneath the ground. The woman sat behind a heavy wooden door, but we were able to observe her through a wire-reinforced window made of half-inch-thick glass. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I could see she was holding a tattered rag doll.

“Why do they have her here?” I asked.

“Murder. She hacked three people to death with a hoe.”

“Another farm implement.”

“Precisely. But her crime was committed almost twenty years ago, shortly after the end of the Korean War.”

“She’s so young.”

“Yes. She wasn’t much more than a child when she committed the crime.”

I knew the Korean judicial system made no differentiation between juvenile and adult crime, in part because they saw so little juvenile crime. “So what does she have to do with my case?”

“Maybe nothing. It’s her reaction that caused us to think you needed to see her.”

“Reaction?”

“To your drawing. Doctor Hwang at the sanatorium took the liberty of distributing the drawing among his colleagues, to see if it meant anything to any of them. He came out here himself and showed the drawing to each of the inmates, under controlled conditions, of course.”

“He must’ve had his suspicions.”

“Yes, you might say he did.”

“What were these ‘controlled conditions’?”

“Physical protection.”

“From the patients?”

Captain Prevault nodded. “Many of them are dangerous.”

“How about this one?”

“Since she’s been incarcerated, she’s attacked two staff members. One lost an eye, the other the use of his right leg.”

“These were men she attacked?”

“Yes.”

“But she’s so tiny. What did she do?

“She might be tiny but she has teeth. The jaws of even a small woman can exert up to five hundred pounds of pressure.”

“She bit the guy’s eye out?”

“And half of the other guy’s leg.”

“Damn.” I looked back at the silent woman with more respect. “What made her go nuts?”

“I’ve made a copy of her file,” Captain Prevault replied. “When we’re through here, I’ll give it to you.”

“When we’re through?”

“Yes. Rather than describe her reaction to your drawing, we thought it best if we showed you.”

The male nurse joined us, but now he was wearing a square mask with an iron mesh, something like a baseball catcher’s mask. He also wore the padded chest and groin protection that karate experts wear in Taekwondo tournaments. On his lower legs he wore shin guards, the kind used in soccer. Two other white-clad attendants joined us. One of them opened the door, and the heavily armored man slipped on thick leather gloves and entered the room. He sat down on a stool opposite the tiny woman. So far, she hadn’t reacted at all. The man pulled a sheet of paper out of his sleeve. He placed it on the floor in front of her, propped up slightly with his foot. Then he pulled out a penlight and shone the bright beam on the drawing.

It was my drawing of the Itaewon alley totem all right: the wooden stand, the wire grill-like square, and a rat hanging by its ankles.

The light caused the woman to stir. She glanced at the space alien sitting across from her but seemed completely unperturbed. Then she looked down at the drawing. If I live to be a hundred I’ll never forget the look of horror that took possession of her face, as if she’d just seen the sum of all the fears any of us has ever imagined. A scream erupted from her open mouth and became progressively shriller, until it seemed like the intensity of the sound would pierce the stone walls that surrounded her. She leapt on top of her bench, crouching like a monkey evading a lion, her eyeballs riveted to the drawing, waving her free hand, as if clawing for it to go away, her tattered rag doll still clutched against her bosom.

The male nurse switched off the light. He picked up the drawing and backed smartly out of the room. The door was opened just wide enough for him to exit, then slammed shut. With a sigh of relief, the male nurse slipped off the wire mask. His brown face was pale, and sweat poured down his forehead.

Inside the tiny cell, the woman was still screaming.

I dropped Captain Prevault off at Gate Five with my apologies for not stopping somewhere for dinner. I explained I had another appointment. She pretended it didn’t matter, but the way her shoulders tightened made me believe it did matter. I asked if she had time for lunch tomorrow so that after I’d had a chance to read the complete file, we could discuss it in more detail. This brightened her up somewhat, and we made a date to meet at noon in the main cafeteria of the 121 Evac Hospital.

After I dropped her off, I told the cab driver to take me to Sogye-dong. He asked for more money because the meter read almost twenty thousand won already, and I handed him another ten thousand won note. How I wished the tires of Ernie’s jeep hadn’t been slashed. I could’ve saved a bundle.

At the Mobom Teahouse in Sogye-dong, the meter indicated I owed the driver another four thousand three hundred and thirty won. I handed him a five thousand won note and surprised him by telling him to keep the change. In Korea, cab drivers don’t expect tips but I didn’t have the time to wait for the change. I was already forty-five minutes late for the 7 P.M. appointment. I walked into the teahouse.

As usual, every pair of eyes looked up at me. Maybe a dozen tables were occupied, twenty customers max. But they were all Koreans as this was an area of town that wasn’t near a military compound and therefore wasn’t frequented by American GIs. At six-foot-four, I was an oddity in the States, never mind here. They gawked at me, expecting me to do something. None of the staff approached me, so I just stood there, futilely trying to spot Mr. Pak from the Sam-Il Claims Office. Finally, I walked up to the glass counter, behind which sat plastic replicas of delicacies such as chopped squid tentacles and rolls of glutinous rice wrapped in seaweed. The man in a white cook’s hat behind the counter had his back to me, and he was concentrating on preparing something, studiously ignoring me. I knew the treatment. I was an American and he wanted me to go away; he might be afraid that talking to me would expose his ignorance of English and possibly provoke a confrontation with an unpredictable foreigner.

I said, “Yoboseiyo.” Hello. When I got no response I wrapped my knuckles on the glass counter and shouted, “Yoboseiyo!” They want obnoxious American, I’d give them obnoxious American.

The man set down the chopper and turned. I spoke in rapid Korean. “I was supposed to meet a man named Pak here at seven o’clock. Was he here? Was he waiting for me?”

The man stared at me dumbly as if I were some sort of display in a wax museum, then turned back to what he was doing. I was about to wrap my knuckles on the glass again when a young woman in a black skirt and white blouse hurried out of the back room. Apparently, she’d been alerted that there was a foreigner out front who refused to go away, and she’d been assigned the job of dealing with me. It was a status thing. The cook couldn’t be bothered. This waitress could.

She nodded slightly to me, not a full bow, and I proceeded to tell her what I had just told the cook. She seemed relieved that I spoke Korean.

“Mr. Pak?” she asked.

“Yes. He owns the Sam-Il Claims Office,” I said, pointing across the street at an angle. “It’s not far. He must’ve come in here before.”

“Yes. I’m sure he has. But no one here was waiting for a foreigner.” She paused, her smooth face glowing red. “We don’t see foreigners in here. We don’t know what to do with people like you.”

She was becoming increasingly flustered and increasingly incoherent. I too was a little tired of being treated like a stray circus animal. Many GIs would’ve become angry and caused a ruckus. I knew because I’d seen them in action, and I read the 8th Army blotter reports often enough. Me, I liked to think I took the more cosmopolitan view. Korea is a homogenous society and has been for thousands of years. Foreigners thrust into their midst throw them off balance-at least some of them.

I fought down my frustration, thanked the waitress and walked out of the Mobom Teahouse. Mobom means exemplary. I didn’t think it really applied.

I stood on the sidewalk. The wind I had noticed earlier picked up, blowing dust down the streetlit road and whirring plastic noodle wrappers about like mad ghosts. In the distance the moon lowered red toward the Yellow Sea. I inhaled deeply of the smog and grime and the chill night air. I loved it here, in the middle of this magnificent city, even when I felt embarrassed and out of place.

A cab pulled up and slowed. The driver leaned toward me. “Where you go?” he said in English. I waved him off. I wanted to stand there awhile, alone, away from the compound, away from Americans, away from the case I’d been pursuing for the last few days. I wanted to think.

I pulled the file Captain Prevault had given me out of my pocket. It was in English and only two pages long. A synopsis, I figured, of the longer Korean file. I’d already skimmed through it. Now I stood beneath a streetlamp and read the single-spaced typing more slowly.

The woman in the home for the criminally insane never had a name. For convenience’s sake, the staff at the home had called her Miss Sim Kok-sa, for the Buddhist monastery near where she’d been found. It was a ginseng hunter who found her, in a rundown hut on a remote plateau that had been farmed by an old woman and man. They were the ones found hacked to death with a hoe. The girl was estimated to be about ten years old at the time, and she was just sitting there near the rotting bodies, surviving off of raw grain. The testimony of the ginseng hunter, later confirmed by two local KNPs, led the doctors to believe the young girl had been enslaved by the elderly couple. If she’d been sexually abused, the report didn’t mention it. Not unusual in official Korean documentation, since sexuality was not a topic that was discussed in polite company, however widely it was practiced.

The girl was taken into custody, committed, and had been locked up in that small cell ever since. Where she’d come from, no one knew for sure. There had been so much tragedy and so much displacement during the Korean War that no one had taken the time to find out.

The question for me was, why did she react so violently to the drawing of the totem? Had she seen something similar? Is that what had driven her mad in the first place?

The area where she’d been found was near the Simkok-sa Buddhist monastery on the slopes of Dae-am Mountain in the Taebaek Range. I didn’t have a map but the report triangulated the position by saying it was located forty-five kilometers northeast of the city of Chunchon and thirty kilometers northwest of the port city of Sokcho. Both of those places I’d heard of, and both of them were out in the boonies.

What did it have to do with the man with the iron sickle? I didn’t know. I stuffed the report back into my pocket. Time to head back to the compound. I started looking for a taxi, but before I found one a small man in a tattered suit hustled up to me.

“Geogie! Geogie!” he said, waving at me frantically. He stepped into the light, out of breath. “I’m Ming,” he said proudly, as if that were supposed to mean something to me.

“Yes?” I said.

“The man you were supposed to meet in the Mobom Teahouse.” He frowned. “Over an hour ago.”

“I thought I was going to meet Mr. Pak.”

“No, no. He sent me. I’m so glad I caught you.” He held out his hand and we shook. “Shall we go in?” he said, motioning toward the teahouse.

“It’s late,” I said.

He nodded. “Then we won’t waste time.” He raised his arm high over his head and out of nowhere a cab appeared. “Come,” he said. “I’ll take you to someone who maybe can help you find this man who is causing so much trouble.”

I hesitated, unsure if I should get in, but he looked harmless enough. “Ming isn’t a Korean name,” I said.

“No.” He smiled broadly. “I am Chinese. Born and bred in Korea though.” He motioned again for me to enter the cab. I did. The cab sped through downtown Seoul and kept traveling north.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Oh, you’re going to love this place. Full of lovely ladies.”

“Where?” I insisted.

“Mia-ri. You ever been there?”

“Briefly,” I said.

“Yes. American GIs don’t go often. Too expensive.”

“I’m not looking for a night on the town,” I said.

“No. Of course not. I just want you to meet someone.”

I asked him how he knew Mr. Pak at the Sam-Il Office, and he told me he was a field agent. He scoured the Korean countryside, from Pusan to Seoul and up north to the DMZ, looking for victims who might be eligible to file claims against 8th Army. He particularly made hay when he followed US armored battalions on field maneuvers. They had a tendency to cause much damage. So did the 101st Airborne or the US Marines when they were rotated in for war games. They caused almost as much damage as a division of tanks, some of it interpersonal rather than physical: pregnant girls, broken noses.

“Did you know Mr. Barretsford?” I asked.

He shook his head vehemently. “I’m only a small fish. He was a big banana.” Ming dragged the words out, pronouncing every syllable. “So sorry what happened to him.”

Ming’s English was the English you hear outside of base camps, laced with GI slang, the language of a hustler. I’d seen his type before, but never one who regularly wore a coat and tie. Probably to impress potential clients.

“Who is this person you’re taking me to?”

“A very intelligent lady, but somewhat of a pest. She’s been bothering Mr. Pak since he opened his office, but there was nothing he could do to help her.”

“And I need to talk to her why?”

“Because of her claims.”

“The ones Pak can’t help her with?”

“Yes, precisely.”

“You’re just trying to get me to take her off your hands.”

“No. It’s more than that. Listen to her. Hear what she has to say.” The cab stopped in front of a brightly lit road that sloped gently uphill. Chinese lanterns were strung across the entranceway, and neon flashed everywhere. I’d been here before on an investigation, but I’d seen the place in the daytime when it was drab and lifeless. I didn’t remember it like this.

The road was lined with single-story establishments all emblazoned with neon signs written in a combination of the indigenous hangul script and Chinese characters. Some of the characters I could read. Printed beneath these flashing red, blue, and gold signs in smaller script was an English translation like Blazing Star Nightclub or Flying Dragon Inn or, my favorite, The Long Life Scotch Corner. In front of these establishments, pouring out the doors, were beautiful young ladies, fully made up, waving and cooing and calling to any likely male. What made it all so stunning and so strange to the foreign eye was that the girls in each establishment all wore exactly the same type and color of evening gown. At one, the uniform was a floor-length, high collared dress with a slit up the side; at another, a mini skirt and a tight blouse displaying pushed-up decolletage. They were a team or, more accurately, a family.

Mia-ri is a playground for men, mostly Korean businessmen. Groups of men, usually executives from the same company or employees of the same government office, entered an establishment as a group and sat on the floor of the party room around a low table, each with a lovely hostess next to them. Food and drinks-and eventually entertainment-were brought to them. The hostesses encouraged the men to engage in drinking games and stuffed food in their mouths, all in an effort to run up the bill. Usually there was one woman in charge: an older woman, a “mama-san” in GI parlance. She and the leader of the group of men would negotiate in advance on a set price for a certain amount of food and drink-and time with the girls. During the frivolity, if that price was exceeded, which it often was, additional charges would be slapped on. This system usually worked, but not always. It was a common site to see a group of inebriated businessmen trying to leave a Mia-ri establishment late at night and the mama-san and the other girls hanging onto their coats arguing about additional charges.

I knew all this, and the only reason I knew was because Ernie and I had once followed an investigation here and witnessed how it all worked. As usual, Ernie’d flirted with the girls and over-promised, and after spending about half a month’s pay, we practically had to fight our way out of the Eternal Spring Whiskey Bar, an establishment that had been replaced now, I saw, by the Kiss Kiss Gentleman’s Club.

As field agent Ming and I walked up the center of the narrow road, some of the girls waved at us, but mostly half-heartedly. They could see by our shabby clothes and by our demeanor that we weren’t the advance guard of some group of up-and-coming executives. We looked odd, Ming and I, out of place, and the girls were puzzled.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“Right around the corner,” he said, pointing. “The Inn of the Crying Rose.”

“ ‘The Crying Rose’? That’s a sad name for one of these establishments.”

“Yes. She’s a strange woman.”

Once we turned there was less neon. The joints were smaller, with only a single sign above the door, and most of them had only one or two women standing outside. The Inn of the Crying Rose had none. Ming pushed the door open and motioned for me to enter.

A tiled bar and the mirror behind it were illuminated by a dim light and a few upholstered booths ran along the wall. This was for smaller groups of two, three, or four men, groups who couldn’t afford the larger establishments along the main drag. Behind a sliding, oil-papered door there was one party room, dark now, which was large enough to hold a group of a half dozen. A smattering of cocktail tables filled the rest of the space. The music was some Korean lament sung by Patti Kim.

One booth in the corner was filled by three drunken men and hostesses but nobody looked up at us, which was a good sign. Ming hustled me toward a booth on the opposite wall. A waitress holding a silver tray followed, and after we took our seats she bowed and said, “Muol duhshi-geissoyo?” What can I get for you?

I ordered beer. Ming ordered tea.

After she left, two hostesses appeared, smiling and decked out in red evening gowns. Ming bowed and told them very politely in Korean that we were there on business, and we only wanted to talk to the proprietress. The girls continued to smile and bowed and hustled into the back room. The waitress brought our drinks. We waited. After five minutes, I said, “Where is she?”

Ming glanced at the booth on the far wall and for the first time I noticed that besides the hostesses another person sat with them. She was an older woman with a fuller figure, not one of the slender wraiths who floated silently through the dark environs of the Inn of the Crying Rose. She was smoking-which the younger women wouldn’t do in front of customers-talking to the businessmen and waving her cigarette, jabbing the burning ember like a tiny spear.

“That’s her,” Ming said. “Madame Hoh.”

One of the hostesses leaned over Madame Hoh’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear. They both turned and looked at us. Madame Hoh asked the young woman a couple of more questions and when the girl shrugged she was dismissed. Madame Hoh reached for her shot glass and tossed the brown fluid back in one deft movement before stubbing out her cigarette, rising, bowing to the three gentlemen at the table and taking her leave. She turned and walked toward us.

Her face was confused, squinting in the dark, and then her eyes zeroed in on Ming.

She bowed to him, placing both hands demurely in front of her waist. “Ming Sonseing-nim.” Honorable Teacher Ming.

Ming bowed in return and motioned toward me, speaking in his broken English. “This is Agent Sueno, from Eighth Army. Maybe you talk to him, about your case.”

Ming smiled so broadly I could see his back molars.

Madame Hoh stared at him. She was no youngster, pushing forty, and they looked like hard years. Her cheeks were puffed, as were the wrinkles surrounding her eyes. There was suspicion in them, and a hardness. It was clear she wasn’t pleased with Ming.

She motioned for us to sit. We did. She adjusted her long silk gown and sat on the straight-backed chair opposite us.

“My case,” she said, using English, “is closed.” She stared directly at him. “You knew that, Mr. Ming.”

“Yes, but it has never been resolved. Agent Sueno here would like to re-open it.”

I held up my hand. “I didn’t say that.”

“Then what do you want?” Madame Hoh snapped.

I sat back. She was obviously irritated and immediately seemed to realize she’d over-reacted. Her shoulders relaxed and she tried again, this time speaking more softly.

“My case was closed long ago,” she said evenly. “I have no money to pursue it further.”

“I just have a few questions,” I said. “I won’t take much of your time.”

Just then one of the hostesses approached and whispered in Madame Hoh’s ear. I figured it was a pre-arranged move, designed to interrupt long-winded talk and induce customers to order more scotch, or the expensive appetizers these joints served. But instead of pressing us for our order, Madame Hoh rose and bowed again and said, “Excuse me for a moment.”

We both nodded and she scurried off.

I turned to Ming. “I thought you said she wanted to pursue her claim?”

He shrugged. “She did. Before.”

“How long ago was that?”

He thought for a moment. “Three, maybe four years.”

“So maybe now,” I said, “she doesn’t want to be bothered.”

Ming looked abashed. “Maybe not,” he said. “I am sorry,” he said, more than once.

“Tell me about her,” I said.

Her claim, Ming told me, had to do with American GIs. There’s a surprise, I thought. The woman, who he called Madame Hoh, had been a girl at the time, during the worst days of the Korean War. For some reason on which Ming wasn’t clear, a small contingent of American soldiers had been sent to the remote village where Madame Hoh lived with her family. There had been a misunderstanding between the villagers and the soldiers, according to Madame Hoh. The GIs had reacted viciously. People had been murdered. Madame Hoh had been left an orphan. Because she’d been young, and her memory of the events wasn’t clear-and because she was afraid of Korean officialdom-Madame Hoh had never given Mr. Pak at the Sam-Il Office all the details he needed to pursue a claim. A claim had been filed earlier, according to Madame Hoh, shortly after the war, but for some reason known only to the relevant authorities, it had been suppressed.

Ming leaned across the table. “Madame Hoh knew she didn’t have enough evidence to reopen the claim at this late date,” he said, “but she also believed a detailed claim had once been filed. If Mr. Pak could find that claim and reactivate it, then she’d have a chance at receiving compensation from the Eighth Army Claims Office.”

“How much?” I asked.

Ming widened his eyes and rolled his neck. “Who knows? Madame Hoh claimed that the actions of those GIs ruined her life and the lives of many people in the village. If true, it could’ve amounted to one of the largest claims ever paid out by Eighth Army.”

“What happened to the file?”

“That’s what caused Mr. Pak so much trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Yes. As soon as he made an inquiry at Eighth Army Claims Office, he received a visit from the Korean National Police. They wanted to know who had told him about this incident and who had told him about the file.”

“Did he tell them?”

“No. He refused to reveal the identity of his client.”

“The KNPs didn’t like that.”

“No. Mr. Pak was forced to drop the inquiry. Everything calmed down after that.”

“How did Madame Hoh react?”

“She’s a strong woman. She said nothing, only thanked him for trying. And one other thing,” Ming told me. “One of our contacts at Eighth Army told us of a secret file. A file that contained Madame Hoh’s claim, along with others.”

“Secret? You mean it’s not kept with the other files at Eighth Army Claims?”

Ming shook his head vehemently. “No.”

“Then where is it?”

“That’s what we don’t know.”

I sat back, taking this all in, studying Ming’s smiling face. “Why are you taking the risk,” I asked him, “of telling me about this and introducing me to Madame Hoh?”

He grinned, the sickly grin of someone who’s just swallowed a medicine that upset his stomach. “We hope that because you’re from Eighth Army, you can find the file and re-open it. Then the KNPs will have no choice but to go along. Where you Americans lead, they follow.”

“But if something goes wrong?”

“Then Mr. Pak will send me out in the field somewhere far away, and he will bow deeply to the KNPs and tell them how sorry he is.”

“And maybe a little money will be handed over to ease hurt feelings.”

“A good relationship with the KNPs,” Ming said, “is very important.”

We finished our drinks.

Ming glanced back at the hallway where Madame Hoh had disappeared, then turned back and rubbed his hands nervously. Suddenly, he leapt up from his chair, bowing again, and said, “She’s angry now but I’ll fix it up. You don’t worry. I’ll fix everything.”

With that, he scurried off to the back and disappeared into the same dark hallway.

I sat alone. None of the hostesses approached me, no one asked if I wanted anything to drink. In Mia-ri a man alone was an odd sight, especially an American man alone. Not only did the hostesses ignore me, they didn’t even look at me.

I wondered why this Madame Hoh would’ve pursued a claim aggressively in the past, been denied, and then apparently changed her mind to the point of seeming aggrieved that Ming would bring the issue back to life. The more I thought about it, the more I believed there had to be a good reason and the more uncomfortable I felt.

Did this have anything to do with the man with the iron sickle? Why did Ming, and his boss Mr. Pak, bring me out here? Just to reopen a case they thought they might make some money on? At the moment, I had no answers.

The back hallway remained dark.

The only sound out here in the main ballroom of the Inn of the Crying Rose was the tinkling of ice cubes dropping into crystal tumblers and the gurgling of scotch being poured. The only smell was the pungent tang of stale Korean tobacco. Still, no one looked at me. I might as well have been invisible. What would Ernie do in a situation like this? Probably throw something, smash a mirror. Instead, I rose and walked toward the back hallway. As I did so, the hostesses and even the customers, studiously averted their eyes.

I entered darkness.

A dark hallway stretched back toward one naked bulb. The reek of ammonia led to the co-ed byonso. I walked past it and found a hallway leading to the left. At the end was another doorway with no lettering on it. I tried the knob. It opened.

A single green lamp illuminated a small wooden desk in the corner. Taking up most of the room were two stiff-backed couches on either side of a short coffee table. In the center of the table sat a hexagonal box of wooden matches and two large glass ashtrays. I sniffed the air. No smell of fresh smoke.

A shadow loomed out of the darkness. I raised my fists and was about to punch the approaching figure and then I realized who it was. Ming.

“What are you doing?” I asked, lowering my fists.

“She’s gone,” he said. “When you came, I hid.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Something’s not right.”

“Is this her office?”

“Yes.”

“Why would she leave?” I asked.

Ming shrugged. He didn’t have a reply to that. We walked back toward the byonso but now a double door just beyond it was open. I stepped toward it and discovered it was the loading area that led to a storeroom. It was piled high with wooden crates filled with brown OB Beer bottles and the smaller crystalline containers of soju.

But there was no truck backed up to the door. One of the doors swung open on its hinges, creaking, as if someone had just departed. I stepped outside. A dark alley stretched before us, lined with walls of brick and cement block.

“She’s running,” I said. “Come on.”

“Better we wait here,” Ming replied. “I think maybe I shouldn’t have brought you.”

I had no time for him. I was already trotting down the alley.

There was only one reason Madame Hoh would’ve decided to drop her claim-if she had already begun to pursue the resolution of that claim in a different way; a way that she wanted to keep secret. A way that wouldn’t stand scrutiny from an agent of the 8th United States Army Criminal Investigation Command.

I had already reached the end of the alley when I saw them, emerging from a cross street. Four men, until a fifth stepped from a shadow behind me. Two of them held clubs. The others had unusually large fists. Brass knuckles, I thought. They were all slender young Korean men. In the dim yellow light from the bulb in back of the Inn of the Crying Rose, I could see their grim expressions, their square faces and high cheekbones.

I was toast, I thought. Unarmed. Alone. But I also knew the worst thing I could do was hesitate. I didn’t slow my stride. Instead, I marched straight at them, tossing back the edge of my coat as if reaching for a weapon. I shouted, “Freeze! Eighth Army CID!”

Somehow, I don’t think they were impressed.