Jade Lady Burning

by Martin Limon

  I had to get closer. The cement and the brick walls blocked the sound of her steps. The ground was unpredictable. Not the flat, hard pavement on the roadway but bricks and stones placed haphazardly in the frozen earth like cobblestones.

  I held my breath and stood perfectly still. She was just a few yards away from me. I knelt down carefully and lowered myself so my chest was just above the ground and, like a huge, cloth-covered salamander, I slowly inched forward until I could see. It was a double wooden door. Kimiko was rapping on it and calling out softly, “Ajima. Ajima.”

  Finally a piece of wood slid aside and the back door opened. An old woman held it for her, she entered, and then the door was shut again. I heard the wooden crossbar slide into place. I stood up and waited a moment, then went to the gate and tried to find any openings in the wooden slats that I could see through. There were none. It was well built and heavy and sat flush up against the brick wall. The wall was about eight feet high and shards of jagged glass, imbedded in the mortar, stuck up along the top. Coiled and rusted barbed wire wound through the glass, completing the compound’s defenses.

  I carefully placed my hands atop the wall, between pieces of glass, and pulled myself up until I could just see into the courtyard. It was set up like a typical Korean house. Four hooches were arranged in a U shape against the back wall facing out toward the front gate. In the center of the courtyard was an old hand pump with a lot of plastic pans and two rickety-looking wooden benches nearby. A small circular planter held the stems of what was left of a few sturdy bushes. Earthen kimchi pots lined the walls on either side of the house, most of them covered with a small inverted cone of snow. Directly below me and to the left was a small solitary building. The odor left no doubt as to its function.

  The old woman puttered around on the wooden porch running the length of the four hooches. Finishing her chore, she padded along in her stocking feet and entered the small hooch off to the right.

  There were lights on in the two central hooches and I could see a shadowy figure moving back and forth behind the paper windows of the wooden panel doors. From the height and general size there was no doubt in my mind. It was Kimiko and she seemed to be very busy.

  I looked beneath the porch to see how many pairs of shoes were down there, and what type. There were outlines of shoes in the darkness. I couldn’t make them out.

  I stayed there hanging from the wall as long as I could, but my muscles were beginning to give out. I was just starting to lower myself when I saw a shadow walk toward the open door. It was Kimiko. She stood there for a minute directly in front of the opening and I could see her face clearly. She was looking up at the sky, at the stars, or maybe something even farther away. She turned suddenly, as if she had been startled out of her reverie by a sound and, without looking back, she slammed the door shut.

  My arms were cramping up and I wasn’t even sure I could unfold them. I just let go of my grip on the cold brick and dropped back down to the slippery pavement. I lost my footing, gyrated for a moment, arms flailing, and then fell flat on my ass.

  I hit flush and wasn’t hurt but I just sat there for a moment, taking inventory of my chilled limbs and slowly unfolding the knotted muscles of my forearms and biceps. When the cold moisture began to seep through the seat of my pants I jumped back up and swatted the snow off my rear end.

  I walked back to the recessed doorway across the street and stood in the shadows to think for a while.

  Kimiko had been wearing black silk stockings with a black garter belt and a black brassiere. When she looked up at the sky, I had been staring at her jet black pubic hair. Further back in the room was sprawled Mr. Lindbaugh in equally scanty attire.

  Two hours later she came out and hailed a taxi on the main road. We followed it back to Itaewon and the Lucky Seven Club.

  Inside, Kimiko wore a bright blue low-cut dress and sat by herself at a table near the stage. She ordered a big liter bottle of OB and a bottle of Suntory whiskey with a small bucket of ice. A young boy arrived carrying a square metal box. The boy squatted next to Kimiko’s table and slid back the walls of the box, revealing two steaming plates of food. One was mul mandu, boiled meat dumplings, and the other was chapchae, rice noodles mixed with beef and vegetables. The boy placed the plates on Kimiko’s table, along with a few small side dishes and a short bottle of soy sauce. He closed the box up, bowed, and trotted through the half-full tables and out of the club.

  Kimiko split apart her wooden chopsticks, rubbed them together to get off all the splinters, and dug in. She didn’t notice Ernie and me standing in the back of the room.

  “She’s rich,” Ernie said. “A catered feast.”

  “Didn’t take long.”

  “And she couldn’t have made it entirely on her charm. What’s she celebrating?”

  We backed out of the club and I almost jumped when I saw him but managed to keep my eyes straight ahead. At the bottom of the hill, we turned towards the King Club.

  “Did you see him?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy in the alley.”

  “No.”

  “One of the pair who jumped Kimiko. Smoking a tambei, in the alley next to the Lucky Seven.”

  “What a coincidence,” Ernie said.

  “Yeah.”

  The King Club was packed: wall to wall with GIs, business girls, and a few American civilians. Ernie and I shooed a couple of business girls away and took a small table back in the darkest corner. A couple of waitresses came by to serve us but I waved them off until Miss Oh came close and then I grabbed her wrist and pulled her over and ordered two OBs.

  She was still pissed but, after all, we were two customers in desperate need of beer and, as a cocktail waitress, it was her sworn duty to provide.

  When she brought the beers back I made her wait for the money.

  “The only reason I walked out of here with Kimiko last night,” I said, “is because of my job.”

  She glowered at me.

  “We all have to do things we don’t want to do sometimes. And I’m sorry if I made you feel bad. Let me buy you a drink, any kind you want.”

  The sullen expression of her beautiful face didn’t change but her eyebrows lifted just slightly. She flounced away.

  “You’re in for it now,” Ernie said.

  A couple of minutes later she brought back something big and red and full of tropical growth.

  “Two thousand, two hundred won,” she said. Over four bucks.

  GIs at other tables and business girls gazed at us. Smirking. Imagine me, Itaewon’s number-one Cheap Charlie, buying something ridiculous like this. But it was the price I had to pay to restore Miss Oh’s face. I forked over the money.

  She bounded away happily. In a few moments she came back, put her metal cocktail tray down on our table, lifted the big tumbler, and sipped her drink. I was certain there wasn’t an ounce of hooch in it. She put the drink back down, smiled at us, and then went back to her appointed rounds.

  “Looks like you’re back on the sleeping mat, pal.”

  “At what a price.”

  Ernie shrugged. “A few bucks.”

  “It’s not the money. It’s the self-respect. Nobody but a dildo spends money on those sweetheart drinks.”

  “Maybe you can join Dildos Anonymous.”

  “You’re a world of help, you are.”

  Later, when Miss Oh had returned, I asked her about the man I had seen with Lindbaugh.

  “The man at the Sloe-eyed Lady Club,” I said. “He has an office upstairs or maybe he lives upstairs. I think he’s the honcho.”

  She ran her fingers over my cheeks. “A lot of hair? Black?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kwok,” she whispered, her voice soft, as if she were in church.

  Before Miss Oh told me about Kwok, she made me promise not to repeat the story to anyone. “If anyone talks about his daddy,” she said, “he gets taaksan angry.”

  She held her forefingers to her head, as if she
had grown horns.

  Although Kwok didn’t like the subject discussed in his presence, apparently the demimonde of Itaewon was well aware of his mixed ancestry. His mother was a farm woman, seeking refuge with the rest of the country during the Korean War, when she and her family had run into a small, bedraggled contingent of Turkish soldiers. They were part of the United Nations forces sent over to protect the South Koreans from the attacking Northern Communists and their Chinese comrades. Kwok’s mother was raped. The result was the man who was now trying to take control of all the rackets in Itaewon.

  After the war, when things had settled back to some sort of normalcy, the young woman with the half-Turkish baby didn’t have a chance of finding a husband. War had left young men in short supply and the Koreans can be sticklers on little items like racial purity. But the family of the young mother loved her, and they pooled all their money for a dowry. A charcoal carrier, whose tuberculosis and gimpy leg had kept him out of the war, was finally persuaded to accept the dowry—and the young woman and her half-Turkish baby who came with it.

  His name was Kwok and he turned out to be a drunk. A vicious one. He squandered the dowry on rice liquor, gambling, and fancy women, and began to vent his rage on the young boy who had taken his name. He beat the boy for imagined offenses and made him do most of the work at the yontan yard and carry the charcoal briquettes to customers throughout the rural village. The boy carried them on a wooden A-frame strapped to his little back. His mother tried to protect him as much as she could but it was of little use.

  Young Kwok grew up tough and immensely strong. He worked and cursed and drank like a man before he was ten years old. His mother contracted tuberculosis from his stepfather and by the time her son was thirteen, she had succumbed.

  By now the young man was approaching his full growth and the gimpy elder Kwok had begun to fear him. Fear made him drink more and made him more vicious until, it was said, the young Kwok simply strangled him.

  The official police report said that the elder Kwok had drowned in his own vomit. The police figured the young man had suffered enough, but he had brought shame on the village so they forced him to leave. Young Kwok hopped on a train and went off to Seoul, to receive his higher education on the streets. He was sixteen.

  His strong-arm exploits, unorthodox in Korea, were terrifying and soon brought him to the attention of racketeers. They considered having him killed. He was affecting their operations. Instead, they decided to discipline him, and keep him on a leash, like an attack dog awaiting his master’s bidding. He acquiesced but ended up turning on a few of his immediate masters, gradually working his way up to the top of the syndicate until he was in a position to make a grab for control of Itaewon.

  I said, “Do you think he will eat all of Itaewon?”

  Purple light caressed Miss Oh’s body. “Yes,” she said. “He will win.” She stared off into the din of the bar. “You should see his eyes.”

  10

  I had told Ernie to meet me at the coffee shop of the Hamilton Hotel at six in the morning. He hadn’t been happy about it since it was Saturday and we were supposed to be off, but he had promised. Now he was late.

  It was already 6:20 and I was sipping my second cup of instant coffee. I’d already paid the teenage girl in the waitress uniform over four hundred won. Miss Pak Ok-suk was beginning to get expensive and I wondered if she was worth it. I could have been asleep back at the hooch with Miss Oh. Certainly Lindbaugh had crashed, probably with one of those girls at the gisaeng party.

  Last night I had answered Ernie’s grumbling with a conjecture. For all we knew, the guy waiting in the alley for Kimiko had been planning on killing her, and early this morning, when we went to check her out, we might stumble on a corpse.

  But I didn’t think so. I figured if these hoodlums had wanted to waste Kimiko, they could have done it long before this, and if they had planned to kill her last night I doubted that they would have waited around in alleys to do it.

  They were following her. For the same reason they had roughed her up before and searched her hooch. The problem was that I didn’t know what that reason was.

  But the harassment had stopped, it seemed, and somehow Kimiko had come into money. We’d seen evidence of that. She was enjoying herself, putting on the dog at the Lucky Seven, a place that had barred her in the past and had just had one of its employees killed—Miss Pak Ok-suk. Kimiko had to hustle every night just to keep afloat. Suddenly she was flush and coasting.

  Perhaps the old crone who ran the club didn’t feel like tussling with Kimiko any longer and let her come and go as she pleased.

  Had Kimiko been paid for murdering Pak Ok-suk or for setting her up to be murdered? But why would anyone want to kill a simple business girl?

  The first night after the murder, when Kimiko disappeared, where had she gone?

  Her friend is murdered. She disappears. When she returns, thugs search her room and keep her under surveillance. Then she comes into money.

  She’s got something they want. The only way to find out what is to do the same thing the thugs are doing. Follow her.

  Tires screeched in the parking lot outside the coffee shop and somebody leaned heavy on their horn. Ernie.

  I got up, pocketed all my change, and pushed through the turnstile doors.

  “You’re late.”

  “The Nurse wanted me to practice my injection technique.”

  We sped up the hill towards Itaewon and Ernie pulled to the side of the road before we got to the turnoff to Kimiko’s hooch. I walked up the road while he waited, the engine idling for a quick takeoff. I stayed across the street from the entrance to the alleyway, hoping I wouldn’t be noticed. I walked up, past the alley, waited a couple of minutes, and then made another pass going downhill. I returned to the jeep.

  “He’s still waiting, in a doorway across from her hooch.”

  “She’s probably still asleep.”

  “Probably.”

  “What now?”

  “We wait. Hide the jeep.”

  Ernie groaned, jammed the gearshift into reverse, and whined down the road and then back into an alley out of sight.

  In a few minutes he came around the corner walking towards me.

  “I need some coffee.”

  “Me too.”

  Everything in Itaewon was closed. This part of Seoul was reserved for the night.

  The shutters on a market up the road rattled and then one of the panels fell back in. A middle-aged Korean man, in sleeveless T-shirt and pajama bottoms, methodically unlocked and pulled back the protective partitions. We waited until the front of the store was completely open and then sauntered towards the little one-story building. I bought a small bottle of orange juice and Ernie bought some gum. I talked to the old man about coffee. He said they didn’t have any. I told him about how bad we needed it and finally he relented and yelled something to his wife, who was just getting up from her bed on the floor in the room directly behind the store. Two children, about ten and twelve years old, were still asleep under the blankets.

  We waited outside, keeping an eye on the alley, while his wife boiled water. I shook my bottle of orange juice and drank it down in one gulp. I returned the empty to the man, who was sweeping behind the counter. His wife, with a robe on now, came out with a tray and poured two glasses full of boiling water and then mixed in generous portions of instant coffee, Maxwell House spelled out in Korean characters. I offered her money. She waved it away and went back to her room.

  Outside we sat on stools at a metal table with a big OB beer umbrella over it. The coffee was good. I had been so busy last night that I hadn’t been able to get too drunk.

  I felt better than I had in a while. And grateful to the store owner and his wife who had made the coffee for us.

  In so many ways we were so different from the Koreans, and sometimes the GIs resented them a lot. But in a thousand small ways the Koreans were extremely generous and friendly. I imagined it was that way with
all the people who had misunderstood each other over the centuries. Hatred in war and then friendship, and even love, when you had time to get to know them.

  Last night’s booze and this morning’s caffeine were getting to me.

  A gnarled stick poked over the wall of the hooch on the corner across the street. I elbowed Ernie. We took our coffee with us and walked back into the store.

  A hand reached up on the wall and then another and then a head followed, hooded by gray material. The top of the ten-foot-high wall was studded with various colored shards of broken bottles but the person behind the wall placed a straw mat atop the glass and gingerly pulled herself over. It was a woman. A Buddhist nun. The hood turned into a gray cape and beneath it was a long dress of the same material. She wore soft-soled black shoes and black stockings that disappeared beneath the dress.

  She clung to the top of the fence like a cat. Carefully, she lifted the straw mat and threw it back into the courtyard she had just left. Then she dropped herself to the street, hit, and rolled smoothly onto her buttocks and back. A jumpmaster at the Fort Benning Airborne School couldn’t have done better. She popped up, dusted herself off, and tiptoed to the mouth of the alley. She peered around the corner. The hoodlums were half-asleep, their faces turned away from her. She glanced around in our direction.

  That’s when I saw her face.

  She darted across the alleyway like a large gray mouse. Then she trotted down the hill and slowed to a brisk walk, looking back occasionally, and straightening her shoulders when she realized that no one would be following. She brandished her polished walking stick in front of her and looked for all the world like a proud representative of a religion that had preached peace and mercy for the last twenty-four hundred years.

  We put our half-empty glasses down on the counter and waved our thanks to the owner. And then we were running. Ernie had the jeep started and moving before I could climb all the way in.

  After Kimiko.

  Kimiko knew the hoodlums were waiting for her outside and they had underestimated her. She had put on the Buddhist nun outfit, climbed over the wall that surrounded the cluster of hooches among which she lived, crossed the neighbor’s courtyard, and then climbed the wall that led to the main street running through Itaewon.