The Door to Bitterness

by Martin Limon

  I slipped back a flimsy wooden door.

  She lay on a down-filled mat, rolled out on a floor covered with vinyl. Her back was propped against the wall. A small window was partially open, letting in fresh air and the midafternoon sun.

  The young Asian woman stared at me with large hazel-green eyes.

  She was thin, with long legs. But her cheeks were full, as if she might’ve been a rotund woman at one time. Her hands pushed down on the floor, straining. She was trying to rise, preparing for flight. But her legs couldn’t join in the movement. They were atrophied, useless. And then I realized what she was and why she was sitting here alone. She was a cripple.

  “Fanny?” I asked.

  She nodded warily.

  Her hair and skin were lighter than any of the women downstairs, though not as light as the smiling woman’s. Her complexion was smooth and unblemished, but she was not a particularly attractive woman. She wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Stateside supermarket or laboring in a barley field on the Russian steppes. Her age I estimated at about twenty.

  I squatted slowly, and crossed my arms over my knees.

  “My name is Sueño,” I told her. “I’m looking for your friend, Yun Ai-ja.”

  Fanny stared at me without emotion. I wondered if she’d understood me. I decided to speak again, this time using Korean, when I realized her eyes had filled with tears.

  It took a while to calm Fanny down. She didn’t get many visitors—that’s what had upset her, or so she said, and when I’d asked about Yun Ai-ja. I’d brought back a lot of memories. The sound of laughter, from Ernie and the Half Half girls, drifted up the stairway. Before pestering her with more questions, I offered to take her downstairs. She hesitated, but after a little coaxing, relented. I called for the Creole girl and she and her friend came upstairs. While I waited in the hall, they helped Fanny dress. When she was ready, I carried her down. According to the Creole girl, Fanny hadn’t been downstairs since the “accident” three months ago.

  I sat her in a chair at a table in the ballroom. Ernie ordered Chinese food for everyone, and when the delivery boy arrived, Ernie and I moved three cocktail tables together. The boy laid out yakimandu, fried meat-filled dumplings; chapchae, noodles made of sweet potato flour; and pibin pap, rice and vegetables mixed with hot pepper paste. Then we sat down and me and Fanny and Ernie and all the girls at the Half Half Club enjoyed a small banquet.

  A couple of hours later, the GIs started to arrive. They dropped coins into the jukebox and ordered drinks. Ernie and I moved to a table out of the way. But I kept Fanny in a chair next to me, and she told me of the night she’d been hurt and of the man who attacked her and knocked her down the stairs. And how in the melee the woman the man was after, Yun Ai-ja, managed to escape.

  “She left everything,” Fanny told me. “Her clothes, her money, everything. Except her mom.”

  “Her mom?”

  “Yes. Her mom. You know, box hold her mom.”

  Not a casket, surely. And then I understood. “Her ashes?”

  “Yes. Mom’s ashes.”

  “She took a box filled with her mom’s ashes and never came back?”

  “Never.”

  “Who was the man who attacked her?”

  “I don’t know. She no tell. She very ashamed.”

  “Ashamed? Why should she be ashamed?”

  Fanny shook her head. She didn’t know.

  “But this man,” I asked, “this man who attacked her, it was someone who knew her?”

  Fanny nodded emphatically. “Yes. Someone who knew her.”

  I showed Fanny the sketches of PFC Rodney K. Boltworks and the smiling woman’s younger brother. “Was the man who attacked her one of these men?”

  Fanny couldn’t be sure since the attacker wore a ski mask and gloves. But her impression was that he was Korean. She also told me that he was not tall, but average height, and he’d attacked just after the midnight curfew, after all GIs had left the Half Half Club. He didn’t have a weapon, but was brutal. He shoved Fanny toward the top of the stairwell, and she lost her balance and reeled backward.

  “How can you be so sure,” I asked, “that this man was after Yun Ai-ja?”

  “I don’t know. She know. She so frightened she crawl out window, almost naked, how you say . . . nei yi?”

  “Underwear.”

  “Yes. In underwear. When man see Yun Ai-ja not here, he leave.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  “Take go hospital. Stay two days. When no can pay more, Half Half women, they bring me back here.”

  There is no disability or workman’s compensation in Korea. No welfare or food chits or universal health insurance. Fanny told me that her mother was dead, her father a GI whom she’d never known. Since she didn’t have a family, this half-American woman was on her own.

  At midnight, I carried Fanny back upstairs to her room and lay her down on the cotton-covered sleeping mat. I was about to leave when she grabbed my hand and asked me to stay.

  The next day, I rose early. Before she woke, I left all my travel pay—about seventy dollars worth of MPC—stacked in a pile on the dresser next to her bed.

  Ernie and I didn’t pull into the parking lot of the CID headquarters in Seoul until noon. Two-story red brick buildings, built by the Japanese Imperial Army before World War II, rose above us. Ernie and I ran up cement stairs. When we entered the CID Admin Office, we discovered that the First Sergeant and the Provost Marshal were out to lunch. Lucky for us. Who needed them anyway? All they’d do is pester us for a preliminary report that, if our assumptions didn’t pan out, they’d hammer us with later. Better to keep pushing on the investigation and report to them when we were sure of what we had.

  Miss Kim sat behind her typewriter, a new pink carnation sticking out of a narrow vase on her desk. When she saw Ernie, she lit up, but then remembered how he’d been ignoring her lately and pretended to pout. Ernie strode across the room, plopped down in the chair in front of her desk, grabbed a copy of today’s Stars & Stripes, and pretended to read. Furiously, Miss Kim rolled paper into her typewriter and banged away on the keys, turning sideways from Ernie, pretending to be absorbed in her work.

  Both a couple of frauds. But I had to hand it to Ernie, he was playing her like a violin. Or at least he thought he was.

  I sat down next to the Admin NCO, Staff Sergeant Riley.

  Miss Kim skipped lunch to watch her figure. Riley skipped lunch because the wasted lining of his stomach no longer tolerated food. He’d been boozing heavily since he was a teenager, and now, in his mid-thirties, he looked like a skinny old man two steps away from the intensive-care ward. Sometimes I worried about him, keeping a bottle of Old Overwart in his locker back at the barracks, hitting it hard every night. But he was an adult and the decision was

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  his. And the honchos at 8th Army CID didn’t care, because during the day, Riley worked like a Siberian tiger. Gathering information, nurturing contacts throughout 8th Army headquarters, handling all our pay and personnel needs with only the help of the diligent Miss Kim.

  Riley stared at me balefully, withered lips pursed around a crooked front tooth.

  “Where you been?”

  “Up north,” I said.

  “The Provost Marshal’s about to shit a brick.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Koreans are shitting a brick over the death of Han Ok-hi.”

  He handed me this morning’s edition of the Hankuk Ilbo, the Korea Daily. Some of the big block Chinese characters in the headline, I recognized. The name, Han Ok-hi; the name of the city, Inchon; and finally sa, the character for death.

  “The head shed wants answers,” he said. “What can I tell them?”

  “We’re working on it,” I said.

  “That’s not good enough, Sueño. Don’t mess with their minds. The Provost Marshal is already pissed off enough about you and Ernie being granted special access to General Armbrewster.” Riley shook his head.
“Going over their heads.”

  “We didn’t go over their heads,” Ernie said. “Armbrewster called us.”

  Riley shrugged. “Same difference. When this shit is over, you’re going to be just a couple of no-rank CID maggots again. Nobody to protect you. Better tell the Provost Marshal something. Make him at least feel like he’s in charge.”

  “Screw him,” Ernie said. “And the First Sergeant.”

  I finished my coffee in silence. Riley had given up on Ernie, but he was still waiting for me to say something. I told Riley that Ernie and I were going to find some chow, and then we were going out to follow some leads.

  “Give me more than that, Sueño,” Riley replied. “I have to feed them some sort of line. Even if it’s bullshit.”

  I paused at the door. “Tell them we’re going out to Itaewon,” I said, “to search for a woman who might be able to crack this case wide open.”

  Riley almost smiled. “You’re that close?”

  “We’re close,” I replied. “The only problem is, for the last four or five years, the woman’s been dead.”

  Maybe it was his stomach. Maybe it was my answer. For whatever reason, Staff Sergeant Riley’s mug turned sour again.

  Ernie and I were wearing our “running the ville” outfits: blue jeans, T-shirts, sneakers, and jackets with an embroidered dragon on the back. My dragon embraced a map of Korea and said: “Frozen Chosun, Land of the Morning Calm.” Ernie’s dragon coiled itself around a beautiful Asian woman and said: “Served my Time in Hell, Korea, 1971-1973.”

  Without coats and ties, Ernie and I felt free again. That, along with being fed and rested and, most importantly, back on our home turf: Itaewon, the greatest GI village that ever was.

  It was late afternoon, the sun setting red and angry behind the western hills. We were checking yak bangs. The literal translation would be “medicine shops.” The more accurate translation would be “pharmacies.” Pharmacies in Korea, however, are different from pharmacies in the States. For one thing, customers don’t need prescriptions. In fact, you don’t necessarily need a doctor’s advice at all. Many people, especially those who can’t afford to see a Western-style doctor, simply stand in the yak bang and describe their symptoms. The man behind the counter probably isn’t medically trained, and might not have even finished middle school.

  That’s what was happening now. A portly middle-aged Korean woman was grabbing her back in the lumbar region, ranting about the pain she suffered daily. She crouched, stood up, bent over, moved her arms as if swimming, all in an effort to make the Korean man behind the counter fully understand the pain she was experiencing.

  The Korean behind the counter rubbed his chin and sucked in air and tilted his head, agonizing over his decision. He said something in Korean that I couldn’t understand, and his wife, who had been standing patiently beside him, brought forth from the stacks in the rear of the shop a large brown bottle filled with pills. The three of them chatted loudly for a couple of minutes, and finally a dozen pills were poured onto a sheet of paper and the wife deftly folded the paper into the shape of a fat envelope. The middle-aged woman handed a short stack of wrinkled won notes across the counter. Then the pharmacist and his wife bowed to their customer, and the woman turned and slid open the door of the shop and walked out, the overhead bell tinkling after her.

  The pharmacist and his wife turned their attention to me.

  In the back, behind the rows of pills was a room with a warm floor and a television set, where two young children were watching cartoons.

  I told them what I wanted. Their eyes widened. I explained again, using different Korean words this time, trying to insure that I was being understood. When I finished, the pharmacist breathed in deeply and shook his head.

  Then he said something to his wife and she brought out a different brown bottle and poured out a few capsules for me to inspect. Ernie joined me now, sticking his nose in so close I was worried his hot breath might melt the gelatin.

  The capsules were bright red, packed full of powder.

  “Made in the U.S.A.,” Ernie said. “Good stuff.”

  What we were looking at was what GIs called “reds.” Barbiturates. Downers. A drug designed to relax you and put you to sleep. Taken responsibly, they’re a perfectly legitimate medication. Taken irresponsibly, they can be lethal.

  I asked the pharmacist again: how many reds would it take to knock out a GI as big as me who’d already been drinking? Knock him out so he could walk around for a short while, but in a few minutes be out cold.

  The pharmacist told me it wasn’t a good idea to drink and, at the same time, consume this drug. But if you did, probably two or three would be enough to incapacitate a man my size—if, that is, he’d already downed a lot of alcohol.

  Then we showed him the sketches.

  Ernie and I had played this routine in over a dozen pharmacies. This one was about three blocks from the nightclub and brothel area of Itaewon, but still close enough to attract an occasional GI customer. Theoretically, all Korean pharmacies are off limits to 8th Army GIs. Nobody pays much attention to the rule, however. Particularly since there are so many goodies in these yak bangs that GIs crave—and also because the rule was unenforceable. There aren’t enough MPs to monitor every pharmacy in the Republic of Korea.

  The man and his wife studied the sketches with interest. When the wife saw the smiling woman, her mouth opened in surprise.

  “Boassoyo,” she said. I’ve seen her. She glanced at her husband. “Dok kattun kot sasso.” She bought the same things, she said, pointing at the red capsules.

  Then her husband remembered. “Yes,” he told me. “She asked me the same question. How many would it take to knock out a big man who’d been drinking? I told her. Two. Maybe three.”

  “The same woman?” I asked again.

  “Yes. I’m sure. She bought the same medicine as this.”

  “How long ago was she in here?”

  He frowned and looked at his wife.

  “Maybe one week,” she said in Korean.

  That sounded about right. This pharmacy must’ve provided the medicine she’d used on me.

  “When you told her two or three capsules,” I said, “how many did she buy?”

  The pharmacist smiled. “That, I remember. She bought six. Twice as many as I recommended.” Then his face turned grave. “I told her to be very careful.”

  I translated for Ernie.

  The pharmacist interrupted. “She asked me to do an odd thing. She asked me to open all the capsules and pour the powder inside one wrapper.”

  “I did that,” his wife said proudly. “My husband is very smart, but he’s also very clumsy.”

  The pharmacist smiled as if he hadn’t heard her.

  I translated this exchange also.

  Ernie slapped me on the back. “The Dragon Lady was careful, all right,” he said. “She wanted to make sure you wouldn’t wake up while she was robbing you. Good thing you’re so big. Six reds on top of all that booze might’ve killed a lesser man.”

  It might’ve killed me too. But it didn’t.

  I asked the couple if they’d ever seen the woman again. They shook their heads emphatically. Never before and never since.

  We thanked our friendly local pharmacists and left.

  We stood on the streets of Itaewon. Gusts of cold wind threw whirlwinds of brown and yellow and red leaves into the heart of the nightclub district. I strained to see the stars, but could only make out a few. Mainly because of the glare from the main drag of Itaewon, which was likewise spangled with flashing neon: red dragons and golden butterflies, and even one sign with a blue and pink rotating yin and yang symbol.

  Why had we returned to Itaewon when the two women had been killed in Inchon and Songtan? Because all the evidence so far pointed back to these hallowed grounds.

  I’d been robbed here, my badge and my .45 stolen.

  The casino robbery was only a thirty-minute train ride away on the most heavily tr
aveled commuter run in Korea.

  According to the KNP report from Songtan, the second victim, Miss Jo Kyong-ah, had been arrested numerous times over the last twenty years for black marketing. Where? Itaewon. A few months ago, she’d retired and moved to Songtan.

  My final reason: Yun Ai-ja and her younger brother grew up here, in Itaewon. And their mother, while raising them, had worked for years as an Itaewon business girl.

  Packs of GIs roamed the streets, their clean-shaven jaws chomping on chewing gum, their shiny eyes studying everything around them. Business girls stood in covered doorways, or in the beaded entranceways to the bars and nightclubs. They laughed and joked and called out to the GIs as they passed.

  “Haggler Lee,” Ernie said. “That’s who we ought to talk to first.”

  Ernie was right. Haggler Lee was the biggest black market honcho in Itaewon. He’d been here for at least a decade. Since the murdered woman in Songtan, Jo Kyong-ah, had once worked the black market in Itaewon, Haggler Lee must know something about her.

  “A surprise visit,” I said. “Catch him off guard.”

  Ernie nodded, and we tromped up a dark alley, away from the nightclub district. We turned down one lane and up another. These roadways were only wide enough for one car at a time, but I knew from experience that a PX taxi could navigate up here easily. If somebody dropped off a load of duty-free military commissary and PX goods, cops like me and Ernie couldn’t sneak up on them in our jeep. Which is why we did a lot of work in Itaewon on foot.

  We turned down another cobbled street, and there before us stood the dark warehouse of Haggler Lee. Kukchei

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  Suchulip Gongsu. International Import Export.

  We walked around the side of the old brick building and squeezed through a passageway just wide enough to walk through single-file. At the end of the building, a candle flickered inside a dirty window.

  Someone coughed. Ernie motioned for quiet. He edged closer to the back door of the warehouse.