The Door to Bitterness

by Martin Limon

  But when I thought of Han Ok-hi and Jo Kyong-ah and Arthur Q. Fairbanks, and the weapon that had killed them, I knew I had to keep trying.

  The girl selling the gum pressed my elbow.

  I turned and said, “I told you, no gum!”

  “Solip,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Solip.”

  Then I understood what she was saying. The Korean word I had learned not too long ago. Solip. Pine needles.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked the girl.

  She pointed with a grimy finger.

  “She want talk to you.”

  “Who wants to talk to me?”

  “I show you.”

  Without warning, she scampered off. Into the mouth of a dark alley leading uphill into the jumbled hooches. When I didn’t immediately follow, she paused and waited.

  Pines needles. Who would know about the pine needles that had been left on the stove to burn in the home of Jo Kyong-ah? Only the people who had murdered her. Should I stop and call Ernie?

  Not only would it be tough to get in touch with him, but the little girl could run away at the slightest provocation. Was I armed? I hadn’t been since the smiling woman led me into that dark alley. And now I was being led into a dark alley again, perhaps by the same person.

  What choice did I have?

  I shoved my fists deeper into my pockets and trudged on, following the girl into the dark heart of Itaewon.

  The alleys of Itaewon cannot be plotted on a grid. They wind around and back, uphill and down, like the tentacles of a squid. I realized the girl had disappeared. I stood alone, behind a row of ramshackle wooden hooches, alongside a stone-lined drainage ditch fenced off by rusty, netted wire topped by coiled concertina. The ditch was six feet wide and just as deep. Filth flowed sluggishly through its channel. There were no lights, and although the sun had not gone down, the thick shroud of overhead clouds kept the world under a blanket of gloom.

  I stood with my back against a dirty brick wall, facing the ditch. Nothing moved on either side. Most of Itaewon teems with life, but back here the world was holding its breath.

  On my own, I never would’ve found this spot. Why come back here? Most GIs never wander far from the bar district. And when they did, they were escorted by a business girl directly to her hooch.

  A glimmer of light appeared in the corner of my eye. Like a cartoon character, I swiveled my head in an exaggerated double-take.

  She stood alone, on the opposite side of the drainage ditch, the ten-foot-high chain-link fence between us. She wore a plain beige overcoat that looked fashionable, with the collar turned up and the belt cinched at the waist. Her light brown hair fell to her shoulders, cascading in gentle waves. She stood so still that I blinked, wondering if she was imaginary. Her smooth unblemished skin set off the startling blue sparkle in her otherwise Asian eyes, and then I saw the smile. Broad. Too broad. As if the muscles of her face were incapable of assuming any other configuration.

  Could I grab her?

  No way. By the time I climbed the fence and hopped the ditch, she’d be long gone. Instead, I slowly moved a few feet, until I stood exactly opposite her. She didn’t move, and she didn’t stop smiling.

  I stared into her eyes, she stared into mine.

  “Why have you and your brother murdered those people?” I asked.

  “Fanny likes you,” she said.

  I was startled. She meant the crippled woman at the Half Half Club in Songsan-dong.

  “I like Fanny too,” I said.

  “You gave her money.”

  I shrugged. “She needed it.”

  The smiling woman stared at me in silence.

  Finally, she said, “I have job for you. You don’t want to do anything for me. I know that. No GI wants do anything for me. But this time you must do.”

  “Do what?”

  She seemed pleased that I’d responded.

  “You don’t know. But when time to do job, you will do.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She studied me. Weighing possibilities.

  “You will do,” she said, and took a step backward.

  “Wait,” I said. “Don’t kill any more people. We can work something out for you. I know about your mom. About how she was cheated by Jo Kyong-ah. About how the VD guy dragged her away from you and your brother. I will testify on your behalf. The judge will be lenient. You can’t go on killing.”

  She stopped, still smiling, but her leer now conveyed rage. Her neck was glowing crimson and she was about to blow her top.

  “My mom?” she said. “My mom? You know nothing about her!”

  With that she took two quick steps into the dark and was gone.

  I leapt at the wire, clinging to the rusted coils, staring across the drainage ditch into the alley beyond. But she was in the wind.

  The Yoju City Hall of Records was an old wooden building, probably built during the period of Japanese colonization, that had somehow survived the Korean War. Mementoes and plaques lined the walls, commemorating kings of the Yi Dynasty and victories over invaders stretching back to battles that were fought against Hideyoshi’s invading army during the Sixteenth Century. I was staring at a hand-crafted bronze helmet when Ernie elbowed me in the ribs.

  “This guy going to take all day?” he asked.

  “It takes a while,” I said. “All this stuff is filed on paper, the old-fashioned way. The archives down in the basement must be enormous.”

  “You’d love to look at them, wouldn’t you?”

  “Damn right.”

  Ernie rolled his eyes. “Figures.”

  Since seeing the smiling woman in that back alley yesterday afternoon, I’d been in what psychologists might call a dream state. I’d managed to make my way out of the catacombs and re-enter the land of the living, but as I did so, I started to doubt if I’d really seen her, or if I’d just imagined the whole thing. Of course, I knew it was real. It’s just that what she and her brother were doing seemed so unreal. Unreal, until you saw the blood.

  Naturally, when in a dream state, I did what I always do—I wandered into a bar. By the time Ernie found me, I was pretty well gone. He slapped my face a little and made me drink some barley tea and drove me back to the compound in his jeep. Somehow, that night, I managed eight hours of sleep for the first time in a long time. The next morning, after a cup of hot Joe at the snack bar, it came to me what we had to do.

  “We gotta find out more about her family,” I said to Ernie.

  “Her family? Why?”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, Agent Bascom, that’s what this entire mess is about. Family. And yesterday, that’s what seemed to enrage her. When I mentioned her mother.”

  In one of the files at the 121 Evacuation Hospital, Specialist Fairbanks had kept a copy of the Ministry of Health records ordering the pick up of Miss Yun Yong-min, the mother of the smiling woman. According to the background information provided, Yoju was the kohyang, the ancestral home, of Miss Yun.

  “If we’re going to head off the next killing,” I said, “we’re going to have to find out more about the smiling woman’s family.”

  What I didn’t tell Ernie about the encounter yesterday was what the woman had said about having a job for me to do. I’m not sure why I didn’t.

  When the bespectacled Korean man who was the Yoju Clerk of Records emerged from the creaking staircase, he plopped an enormous leather-bound ledger on the counter. Photocopying was conducted in another office and would take a half hour, he said, but I told him I didn’t need it. I just wanted to study the documents and take some notes.

  Why had I started thinking in terms of family? A few things. The piece of cardboard that Specialist Fairbanks had been forced to bow to. A photograph maybe. Of an ancestor? And then someone joined the killer while Fairbanks was being forced to perform the seibei ceremony. The smiling woman, I presumed. She’d been present when her brother murdered Fairbanks. Had she been present when Jo Kyong
-ah was similarly killed? I was starting to think that she had. These two

  18

  were turning murder into a family affair.

  The Uichon mama-san had told me that when Miss Yun’s older brother refused to register her first child—her smiling daughter—on the family register, Miss Yun registered by herself as the head of her own family. No father, no grandparents, nothing. This is unusual in Korea, because the mantle of “head of the family” passes from father to oldest son to younger sons, to first daughter, to younger daughters, and finally to mother—in that order.

  When one family member is seen to be shaming the rest of the family, they are sometimes banished from their hallowed place on the register. They’re forced to return to their kohyang, the ancestral home, and request a new family register under their name alone. Apparently, that’s what Miss Yun had done.

  The family register the records clerk placed in front of me was the register where Miss Yun, the mother, was recorded. At the top were the stern-faced black and white photos of her father—the smiling woman’s grandfather. Below, Miss Yun’s mother—the smiling woman’s grandmother. Both of them were marked deceased. Listed next were three sons. The first two were also deceased. I checked the dates. They had both died during the Korean War, a number of years before their parents. The only surviving son was Yun Guang-min. The photo showed him as a child of twelve years, stern-faced and sullen.

  Yun Guang-min was older than his sister, Miss Yun, and had to be in late middle-age by now. His face was square, with high cheekbones, and bore little resemblance to the smooth contoured lines of his younger sister’s face.

  Miss Yun was the only daughter listed. She was a late child. Of all the faces on the family register, hers was the only beautiful one in the bunch.

  “Seen enough?” Ernie asked.

  “One more thing.” I spoke to the clerk, explaining in Korean what I wanted. He nodded, took the ledger back, and returned it to the archives down in the basement.

  “What is it now?” Ernie said.

  “You’ll see.”

  When the clerk returned, he brought a newer book, already open to a page that had the photo of a now-adult Yun Guang-min. Below him was his wife, a cute heart-faced young woman, and below that, four children. After his older brothers and parents passed away, Yun Guang-min opened his own family register with himself as head of the family. By tradition, his unmarried sister should’ve been listed on his register but, of course, she wasn’t. Even Ernie understood why.

  “His sister’s children were half-Miguk,” he said. “He didn’t want anything to do with her.”

  “Right. He turned his back on all of them. And did nothing to help when she was working the streets and slowly dying of tuberculosis.”

  Yun Guang-min’s treatment of his younger sister was harsh, no question about it, but not all that unusual. Sure, most people continue to support their daughter or sister, even if they’re pregnant with a GI’s baby. But other Koreans, the more traditional ones, didn’t always act with such equanimity. There’d been cases, recorded by the Koreans themselves, in which a woman with a GI baby had been hanged by her father or brothers. The police, when they investigated, often wrote the whole thing off as suicide.

  “I suppose,” Ernie said, “this uncle will be the next victim on the smiling woman’s hit list.”

  “Maybe.”

  “We’d better warn him.”

  “No need,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s already been warned.”

  “Already warned? How?”

  “Look at the face again.”

  I pointed to the photograph of Yun Guang-min. The same high cheekbones and square face, but in this second family register, instead of being a boy of about twelve, he was a man in his early thirties.

  “Imagine the face as a middle-aged man,” I said. “Imagine gray hair, more wrinkles, a grim expression.”

  Ernie worked on it for a while, and then his eyes widened. “Holy shit,” he said.

  I thanked the records clerk, slid the ledger across the counter, and Ernie and I trotted outside to the lot in front of the Yoju Hall of Records. Ernie fired up the jeep.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I know the way.”

  We wound through back country roads, heading west. The afternoon was once again gray and overcast. At an intersection, one sign pointed north toward Seoul, another pointed west toward Inchon.

  Ernie turned toward Inchon and shifted into high gear.

  Blackjack dealers looked up from their tables as Ernie and I waded across the carpeted floor of the Olympos Casino. I wanted to talk to the smiling woman’s uncle, question him about the whereabouts of his nephew and niece, and maybe— just maybe—head off the next killing. The door of the cashier’s cage was locked, but I pounded on it and told the cashiers inside that I wanted to talk to Yun Guang-min, the owner of the casino.

  Their eyes widened, and they conferred with one another, and while they mumbled, the manager, Mr. Bok, appeared out of nowhere. He smiled and bowed and told me that unfortunately Mr. Yun Guang-min was not available. I asked him why. He said that he was currently engaged in a banquet entertaining honored guests.

  “Where?” I asked.

  Bok just kept repeating that Yun Guang-min was unavailable.

  Ernie was fed up. He reached for Bok, grabbed his shoulders, and while the casino manager’s mouth opened in shock, Ernie reached inside the man’s expensive suit jacket and pulled out a leather-bound notebook. He handed it to me.

  Bok struggled to grab it back, but Ernie held him off.

  I riffled through the pages. It was an appointment book.

  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 ha
ppen 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.