The Door to Bitterness

by Martin Limon

  He dragged me back over to the brick chimney. On the other side was an open wooden hatchway. I looked down. Another metal ladder led down into the hallway of the third floor.

  “He probably already reconnoitered,” Ernie said. “Knew that we’d expect him to hop from roof to roof, but instead he doubled back. Come on.”

  He lowered himself through the hatchway and then let go and dropped down to the creaking floor below. I followed, and we ran down the hallway until we found the stairwell. We flew down to the first floor.

  The women in front of the window were up now, terror showing in their eyes, all of them pointing through the light-smeared glass. A dark figure flashed down the street, heading toward the gang of Greek sailors blocking the walkway.

  In seconds, Ernie was out on the street, running after him, me right behind.

  Twenty yards ahead, I saw the dark figure smash into the unsuspecting Greeks. Men cursed and spun out of the way. A beer bottle crashed to the ground. Someone shouted and threw his hands up. I couldn’t understand a word, but the guttural sounds of cursing were unmistakable. And then our quarry was through the Greeks and past them and already disappearing into the mist.

  Ernie didn’t slow down.

  One of the Greeks shouted. They all spun, staring at Ernie, who was plowing toward them. The men stepped together and formed a phalanx, as if responding to an ancient instinct left over from Alexander’s army. Before Ernie could dodge them, they walked forward and reached out for him. Momentum rammed his body into the men, who grunted and gave and then held. They began to push back.

  I could’ve run around them. Even through the dark and the fog I could still see the figure about thirty yards ahead, gaining speed, turning around a mist-shrouded corner. But the Greek sailors were pummeling Ernie. A knife glimmered in the yellow light of the street lamp.

  I veered and rammed into them.

  Men screamed and cursed, and I punched and kicked, happy, at last, to be set free. For the past few days, I had been holding everything inside: pining over a lost weapon and a stolen badge; putting up with the sneers of cops who play it safe, who stay on the compound near headquarters, afraid to put themselves at risk in the dark shrouded alleys of Asia. But now I was able to fight, to feel the satisfying crunch of fist on skull. Moving as fast as I could. Acting on instinct alone. Punching, kicking, screaming.

  And then there was more shouting and Ernie was pulling me away, even while I still jabbed and cursed, and then my eardrum shuddered with the blast of his .45.

  As if encountering a thunderbolt, the Greeks retreated.

  Ernie pointed the .45 at them and cursed and kept jerking on the back of my coat and we backed off, until finally we were enveloped by the glow of the street lamp in front of House Number 17. Suk-ja was there, reaching for us, pleading with us to follow. The next thing I knew, we were running once again through the endless dark. I was enjoying the trip, feeling light-headed, flushed with the giddy rush of having released so much tension, until suddenly the world became smaller. Pinpoints of light spangled a blanket of fog. The lights faded. The fog closed in on me. A lonely foghorn moaned far out at sea.

  And then I was leaning on Ernie and my feet grew numb. Suk-ja was helping. I’m not sure exactly when, but I must’ve collapsed.

  Damp cobbles pressed against my cheek. People jerked on my arms, but I couldn’t get up.

  I’d been stabbed.

  The cut wasn’t deep, and the blade hadn’t hit any vital organs but it hurt like hell nevertheless. The doctor told me it was a slice more than a stab wound. She actually used those words.

  “Slice your rib,” she said, pointing at her own rib cage. “Not stab into you lung.”

  Her name was Dr. Lim. A bespectacled woman, middle-aged, about the size of your typical twelve-year-old American boy. But the girls at House Number 59, including Suk-ja, bowed whenever she looked at one and backed up in the hallway to make way for her as she passed. They treated her like a visiting potentate. Why? The doc was a savior to the girls in the Yellow House area. Suk-ja told me that she was in charge of the city VD clinic, a clinic that years ago set up business only a few blocks away.

  Dr. Lim swabbed my wound with rubbing alcohol, then gave me a tetanus booster and a shot of antibiotic. When I asked her what kind of antibiotic it was, she grew impatient and said, “You be quiet.”

  I did. In the Third World doctors are gods. Not to be questioned.

  Then she sewed me up. Three stitches. Without anesthetic.

  All the while, I lay on the warm vinyl floor of Suk-ja’s room in House Number 59, on a rolled out cotton sleeping mat. Suk-ja, the mama-san, Ernie, and about a half-dozen of the House Number 59 girls looked on, the girls still wearing their flimsy lingerie.

  Life is a communal activity in Korea. Everyone believes they have a right to know what’s going on.

  Ernie paid Dr. Lim out of his own pocket. After she left, Suk-ja fetched a bottle of Kumbokju brand soju, and she and Ernie and I sat in her room toasting one another, tossing back thimble-sized shots of the fierce rice liquor, talking about the fight, laughing, speculating on who the guy was who got away.

  I passed out first.

  “You smell like a sewer,” Ernie said.

  “You’re not much better.”

  The time was oh-dark-thirty. The sun still hadn’t come up, and Ernie and I were winding our way through the walkways of the Yellow House, heading back to House Number 17. Both of us were feeling pretty gamey, what with all the activity of the last twenty-four hours. Now, early in the Inchon morning, unable to perform our morning GI rituals— a shower, shave, and change into clean clothes—we were each becoming more uncomfortable by the minute.

  Before we left House Number 59, Suk-ja had done her best to wash me up, bringing a pan of heated water for what Koreans call seisu, scrubbing of the hands and face. But it wasn’t the same as being in the barracks and standing under a luxuriantly hot shower for twenty minutes.

  The Koreans consider Americans to be unclean. Most Koreans don’t have much more than one faucet or well outside to provide water for their home, therefore they don’t shower every day. But when they do shower, it’s with a vengeance. At a public bathhouse, they might spend two or three hours, rubbing and grinding and pelting their raw skins until every pore in their bodies is free of grease and grime.

  We stood in the dark street in front of House Number 17.

  The Greeks were gone. The narrow alley, where one of them had sliced me, was empty and silent. Ernie stepped up to House Number 17 and pounded on the locked door until the mama-san opened up. I explained that we wanted to talk to the girl who’d spent time yesterday with the criminal who’d escaped last night. She agreed but asked for ten more dollars. I turned her down flat. When she complained, I told her that if she preferred, I would call Lieutenant Won of the Korean National Police and she and the girl could both talk to him downtown. That was enough to make the frowning mama-san open the door and let us in. She told us to wait and went upstairs to fetch the girl.

  Five minutes later, the frightened young woman knelt on the warm vinyl floor in the front room, dressed in lumpy blue jeans and three layers of upper garments, topped off with a thick wool sweater that she clutched across her chest.

  When we’d seen her last night, she’d been naked and screaming, while bullets whizzed past her head.

  Her name was Mi-ja, she told me. Beautiful Child. I held out the sketch of the Caucasian man who’d robbed the Olympos Casino.

  When she reached for it, her hand shook, as it had last night when she’d attempted to cover her nakedness. Before she grabbed hold of the flimsy construction paper, she closed her eyes and pushed it away.

  “Come on, Mi-ja,” Ernie said. “You have to look at it sometime.”

  Apparently, Mi-ja didn’t understand. So far, she hadn’t done anything other than kneel before us and bow her head. I spoke soothingly in Korean, asking her to just take a look at the sketch. She kept her face down, and th
en I realized that she was crying.

  I explained that more people would be hurt if she didn’t help us capture this guy.

  Without looking up, Mi-ja raised the left sleeve of her sweater. There, in a straight row, red and angry, were half a dozen holes in her flesh. All about the size of the tip of a burning cigarette. She continued to hold out her arm. Nobody spoke. Nobody breathed.

  Slowly, I reached out my hand, feeling the ache of the slice in my side, and, as gently as I could, I touched the fingertips of her hand with mine. We lingered like that for a few seconds, flesh on flesh, and then Mi-ja pulled her arm back and rolled down her sleeve.

  I held out the sketch again. This time she took it, sat it in her lap. While she studied it, fat tears splashed against the deft pencil lines. Finally, she handed the sketch back to me. Then she nodded.

  It was him.

  When she finally started to talk, she told me everything.

  Hundreds of commuters, maybe thousands, stood in orderly lines along the cement passenger platform next to the tracks of the Inchon Main Train Station. They were silent, barely shuffling their feet. Occasionally someone coughed.

  The cut in my side didn’t hurt much. Actually, my head hurt more, and my stomach still roiled from last night’s soju.

  Another blast of cold, salted mist rolled in from the Yellow Sea. Then a buzzer sounded, and the tracks rumbled, and a few seconds later a train rolled up, brightly lit inside. It stopped, two dozen doors slid open, and the people standing on the platform rushed in, spreading themselves quickly over the seats and benches.

  “Seems like the whole damn city works in Seoul,” Ernie said.

  I braced myself against a metal railing, supporting about half my weight with my arm, trying to keep the pressure off the slice below my armpit.

  6

  “Any Miguks?” I asked.

  “Not that I could see.”

  Ernie had just returned from a stroll down the loading ramp, reconnoitering the crowd. But in the dim morning light and with so many people, it was difficult. The Korean National Police were out in force. Lieutenant Won figured that the Caucasian fugitive who’d gotten away from us last night might use the morning rush hour of workers commuting to Seoul to escape from Inchon. The roadblocks had been called off. The KNPs had decided it was too disruptive to keep them on this morning. Our only chance was to get very lucky here at the train station. So far, luck didn’t seem to be going our way.

  In an hour, the rush hour had subsided. I bought a copy of the Korea Herald, an English language daily. Miss Han Ok-hi, the young casino worker who’d been shot, was still in critical condition, according to the report.

  Before we reached the train station, Ernie and I flashed the sketches of the two thieves and the smiling woman to all the vendors who sold newspapers and dried cuttlefish and warm barley tea outside on the street in front of the station. None recognized anyone in the sketches, and all claimed to have been asked the same questions by the Korean National Police yesterday. But our persistence paid off.

  One old woman pushing a wooden cart supporting a cast iron stove shouted her lungs out trying to interest passersby in warm chestnuts. When I showed her the sketches of the two men, she claimed to have been shown copies yesterday by a Korean policeman. She hadn’t recognized the two men then; she still didn’t recognize them today. But the new sketch, the sketch of the smiling woman, intrigued her.

  “Boasso,” she said, gravely nodding her head. I’ve seen her. “Before noon yesterday,” she continued, “rushing toward a train. I noticed her because she was tall and had a wool scarf tied over her head which I thought was unusual for such a young woman. And she clutched a canvas bag.”

  “That’s the only reason you noticed her?” I asked.

  The woman blushed slightly.

  “Also,” she said, “she’s different.”

  “How so?”

  “Like you guys,” the old woman said. “Maybe she’s American.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “No. Someone was with her. A man, I think, but I didn’t pay attention.”

  They’d hurried right past her and hadn’t stopped to buy chestnuts. Still, the half-American blonde Korean woman had been unusual enough for the old chestnut vendor to notice.

  “Had you ever seen her before?” I asked the old woman.

  “Never,” she said. “And not since. But if I spot her again, I’ll grab her and hold her for the police.”

  Her eyes gleamed as she told me that. Something about her enthusiasm made me feel uneasy. I shivered in the cold morning air.

  I boarded the next train for Seoul.

  Ernie would drive the jeep to Seoul yok, the Seoul Train Station and pick me up there.

  Why was I taking the train back to Seoul? I wanted to experience what the smiling woman had experienced. I wanted to put myself in the place of two people—one of them clutching a bag full of stolen cash, the other knowing he’d just shot an innocent woman—and see what they’d seen on the train ride back to Seoul.

  People glanced at me as I boarded, but most were polite and turned away. I strode up and down a few of the cars, just to get a feel for the train. Wooden benches lined either side of the compartments, and in the center two rows of leather straps hung from metal railings. The train wasn’t too crowded now since it was past 8 a.m., so I found a spot on a bench and plopped down to watch the scenery roll by.

  Ernie and I had pretty much nailed the sequence of events. At least to my satisfaction.

  The smiling woman, along with two male accomplices, had decided to rob the Olympos Hotel and Casino. To make it easier to bluff their way into the casino’s cashier cage, they needed law enforcement badges and a weapon of some sort. They cased Itaewon. For how long, I don’t know, but eventually the smiling woman found her chance and managed to sit alone with an armed man: me. That’s when she slipped something into my beer. In the alley, her accomplices knocked me over the head, stole my badge and my .45, and three days later, robbed the Olympos Casino.

  After the robbery, the two men split up. One of them fleeing for the anonymity of the Yellow House, the other keeping the money and joining the smiling woman for the train ride back to Seoul. Why the train? It would be leaving right away, it wouldn’t be subject to KNP roadblocks, and the police would be looking for two men traveling together—not a man and a woman.

  Had the thief planned on shooting Han Ok-hi? I doubted it. More likely his target had been the owner of the Olympos Casino, probably because he expected there to be more money hidden in a safe in his office. But the owner had fled through the escape hatch in the back wall, the thief had fired in an attempt to stop him, and poor innocent Han Ok-hi had stepped in front of a bullet that hadn’t been intended for her.

  That’s the way I saw the case so far.

  The next question was, where would the dark thief and the smiling woman go?

  Somewhere in Seoul, no doubt. Somewhere they felt safe. Home, probably. But where was that? In a city of eight million people, it wouldn’t be easy to pinpoint them. But there were ways. There had to be.

  Once we left the outskirts of Inchon, the train picked up speed. Small stations flashed by: Jeimul-po, Dong-am, Pupyong, Buchon. But we didn’t stop at any of them. This was the express. Seoul Station was our destination. Nothing less. A half hour later, we slowed as we rolled through the densely populated district of Yongdung-po, and then we wound our way onto a bridge that crossed the blue expanse of the Han River. There, on the far river bank, rose the mighty city of Seoul. Green-topped Namsan Mountain loomed to the right, the skyscrapers of the downtown district were straight ahead and to the left. Behind them, craggy granite peaks had long protected the ancient capital from marauding nomads from the north. The train slowed as it reached the far bank and the tracks rose slightly and we rumbled through the southern district of Yongsan. Finally, two miles later, we came to a halt behind the stately old Seoul Station. It was a round-domed building, made of brick, and looked like
something out of Doctor Zhivago. It had been built in the 1890s by Russian architects, supposedly a gift to the Korean people from the Czar.

  I jumped off the train onto the cement platform and strolled along with the flow of the crowd, surveying directional signs, keeping my eyes open for anything that might give me a hint of where the smiling woman had gone.

  At a long row of turnstiles, I stood in line and handed my ticket to a uniformed Korean conductor. The white-gloved man squinted at me curiously but made no comment. Inside the main hall of the station, people hustled back and forth: women balancing bundles on their heads, men pushing carts laden with wood-framed boxes, school children in black military uniforms with square backpacks slung over their shoulders.

  Outside, rows of vendors. Six times as many as at the Inchon Station. Systematically, I worked through every stall, showing the sketches of the two men and the smiling woman. Just as systematically, I was told no one had ever seen them before. I showed the sketches to the two policemen working traffic in front of the bus and taxi stands. Again, the response was negative.

  The entire left wing of Seoul Station was occupied by 8th Army’s RTO, the Rail Transportation Office. Inside was a counter for traveling GIs to buy train tickets, a small PX, a snack stand, even a barber shop. A little piece of America. Ernie’s highly polished jeep, with its distinctive leather tuck-and-roll interior, sat parked out front. He was waiting for me inside, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to enter 8th Army’s RTO. It would be too much like leaving Korea. I wanted to stay with the people—Koreans—as the smiling woman and the dark thief had done. So, instead of searching for Ernie, I walked down a cement stairway and joined the crowd in a pedestrian tunnel crossing beneath the busy thoroughfare that ran in front of Seoul Station. There were more vendors on the far end of the underpass and more negative responses. I continued walking into the heart of Seoul. In the distance, I saw the green tile-roofed edifice of Namdae-mun, the Great South Gate, a meticulously preserved remnant of the stone wall that had once surrounded the entire ancient capital. Skyscrapers loomed over dark alleys lined with canvas lean-tos. People swarmed everywhere. Signs hung from brick walls covered with the neatly stenciled hangul lettering or the elegantly slashed characters of Chinese script. Squid tentacles boiled in oil, dumplings steamed in straw baskets. Only a few of the Koreans strolling past me gawked at the tall Miguk wandering lost through their bustling city.