The Door to Bitterness

by Martin Limon

  There were no grounds to press charges. And Captain Kim wasn’t about to make accusations against a man as powerful as the owner without evidence any less convincing than two American bodies.

  “Too bad we weren’t shot dead,” Ernie said.

  I went on to the next subject. I explained to Captain Kim that Yun Guang-min and our killer-on-a-rampage were related, and that I expected Uncle Yun to be the next hit on the killer’s list.

  When I was finished, I braced for follow-up questions, maybe some attempt to shoot holes in my conjectures. After all, Korean cops, like cops anywhere in the world, are reluctant to accuse the rich of wrongdoing of any kind. Instead of responding, positively or negatively, Captain Kim said only, “I show you.”

  Ernie and I glanced at one another. When our clothes came back, we dressed and followed Captain Kim out of the station. He headed away from the nightclub district and trudged up clean walkways that led toward the fancy apartment buildings in an area of Seoul known as Hannam-dong.

  We climbed higher and higher. Soggy leather squished beneath my feet.

  Ernie leaned over and asked, “Where the hell’s he taking us?”

  “I don’t know.” I wasn’t liking this one bit. A cold chill began to grow in the pit of my stomach.

  Captain Kim hadn’t been impressed with my brilliant detective work, and he sure hadn’t been impressed with my theories about the Family Yun.

  Dumplings.

  Not the fried yakimandu I’d eaten with Ernie in the Seven Club, but a soft kind, kneaded from rice flour and steamed in a large pot. A kind that Captain Kim told me Koreans call songpyun.

  “For Chusok,” Captain Kim explained—the autumn moon festival.

  “When is it?” I said.

  “Tomorrow.” He looked at me with disdain, as if I should’ve known.

  He was right: I should’ve known. Chusok is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the eighth month by the lunar calendar. Therefore, it falls on a different day every year on the Western calendar. Still, I should’ve realized. But with all the goings on, I’d lost track. And besides, who could think with what was laid out in front of me?

  She was so young. So beautiful in her hand-embroidered silk dress. Blue cranes rising from green reeds adorned a background of pure white. A purity that had been splashed with blood.

  Dumplings, the songpyun, had been stuffed in her mouth. And then, or maybe before that, her throat had been cut.

  She lay on the tiled floor, in the kitchen of an opulent Western-style apartment in a modern building in Hannam-dong. It was a ritzy neighborhood on the side of Namsan Mountain, overlooking the squalor of Itaewon. From the open door of the balcony, a panoramic view of the main drag of the nightclub district spread before us. In the dusk, I could make out the unlit neon signs above the 007 Club and the King Club and the Grand Old Opry Club. Jumbled brick and wood and cement buildings stretched downhill toward the banks of the River Han.

  “How’d he get in?” I said.

  “Delivery,” Captain Kim pointed toward the kitchen area, “of the songpyun. In old days everyone make at home, to honor ancestors. Now people buy from store.”

  On Chusok, the steamed songpyun dumplings were offered before shrines to a family’s ancestors. Kim pointed to the sliding glass door that led onto the balcony. Ernie and I examined it.

  “The lock was broken outwards,” Ernie said. “As if it had been shoved from inside.”

  We peered over the edge of the concrete rail. Vines wound through a wooden trellis, many branches broken and hanging. Then we stepped back inside and turned our attention to the corpse.

  She’d been a beautiful round-faced Korean woman, maybe in her late teens or early twenties. She’d been killed so young. And I knew her. At first I couldn’t place her, but when Captain Kim said the name Haggler Lee, I suddenly remembered who she was. His serving girl. Usually, she worked at the warehouse, serving Haggler Lee and his guests coffee or tea. I remembered the American-made instant coffee I had been so graciously offered there a few nights ago. This penthouse, according to Captain Kim, belonged to Haggler Lee. The serving girl had been left here to keep an eye on things while he spent the last day or two holed up in his warehouse.

  We heard voices at the open door of the apartment, and Captain Kim and Ernie and I walked into the living room. It was modern, probably designed by some avant-garde interior decorator, so modern that there was no place to sit down. A group of Korean cops entered with a man held between them: Haggler Lee.

  His face was wrinkled with worry.

  “I didn’t think he would do this,” Lee said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The son of Miss Yun. He killed Jo Kyong-ah. Now he wants to kill me too. Why? Because I black market for his mother.”

  “Did you cheat his mother?” I asked.

  “Never!” Lee shrugged off the cops surrounding him.

  “I’m a business man. I no cheat nobody.”

  His usually precise English grammar was deteriorating rapidly.

  “She borrow money from me. I give. Then she come back, again and again. Always promise that some GI boyfriend was going to buy something out of PX for her and she would pay me back. She had GI boyfriend all right, plenty, but they never buy her nothing out of PX. She never pay me back.”

  “So you stopped loaning her money?”

  “Of course,” Lee said.

  “Then why,” I asked, pointing toward the kitchen, “would the son of Miss Yun murder your housemaid?”

  Lee stared at a trickle of blood that had overflowed the tile and was now soaking into his wall-to-wall carpet.

  “He couldn’t reach me,” Haggler Lee said. “I was at my warehouse, with my guards. So he come here.”

  Suddenly, Haggler Lee grabbed his face and fell to his knees. Then he was sobbing like a little boy.

  Captain Kim’s usually impassive face twisted in disgust, as if he’d like nothing better than to put his boot up Haggler Lee’s rear. But he resisted the urge. Instead, Captain Kim turned his back on Haggler Lee and barked an order to his officers. Unceremoniously, they dragged Haggler Lee out of his apartment.

  I stepped back into the kitchen and studied the moonfaced young woman who lay on the blood-smeared floor. The fat dumplings between her lips looked obscene. The gash in her neck even more so. Beneath her silk sleeve I spotted something, and I knelt down and pulled the sleeve up above her elbow. Cigarette burns. New. She’d been tortured before she was killed.

  I stood up.

  I was embarrassed, but relieved about one thing. There were no bullet holes in her body or anywhere in the apartment. This unfortunate young woman had been brutally murdered, but not with my gun.

  Ernie and I spent the next couple of hours at the crime scene, and later that evening returned to the deserted CID detachment to catch up on our written reports. Ernie left after an hour. I’d told him I’d finish up. He had a date, I think, with Sergeant Whitworth, the medic at the 121, but he was being cagey and didn’t tell me for sure. About midnight, I returned to the barracks and collapsed exhausted into my bunk.

  It was Chusok. The 8th United States Army Yongsan Compound was pretty much closed down. All the Korean employees at the snack bar had the day off, so the American manager was working the cash register, selling nothing but coffee and donuts and pre-made sandwiches wrapped in plastic. Ernie joined me there, bleary-eyed. He wolfed down a couple of egg and bacon sandwiches, cold, and we walked out the main gate of the compound, down the MSR three-quarters of a mile to the Hamilton Hotel.

  Already Suk-ja was waiting for us in the coffee shop.

  “They no come,” she said.

  She, of course, had memorized the faces in the sketches of the smiling woman and her brother and had promised, as her contribution to the investigation, to spend as much time as she could in the Hamilton Hotel Coffee Shop, seeing if they showed up. Private Boltworks had said they loved this place, and I could see why. There were GIs here and foreign tourists, K
orean business girls and bright-eyed college students, hanging out for the excitement of being near the notorious international red-light district of Itaewon.

  Suk-ja was happy in her work, but I was worried as to what she was up to. Why had she left the Yellow House? Did she owe the mama-san money? Why had she decided to glom onto me? I was enjoying the attention, of that there was no doubt. If it hadn’t been for this murder investigation, I would’ve enjoyed Suk-ja’s company even more. But I wasn’t fool enough to believe that she didn’t want anything out of this. Yesterday morning, when I offered her money, she’d taken it, but with the proviso that it was merely reimbursement to cover expenses while she was on duty at the coffee shop. She wasn’t taking any money from me in return for sex. Soon, she told me, she would receive her first paycheck as a stripper, and it would be her turn to treat me.

  I wasn’t holding my breath.

  Suk-ja snuggled closer to me. Ernie sat across from us.

  “Today,” she said, “you go with me, Geogi. My older brother, he live in Mia-dong. We start Chusok at noon time. He want me come. I tell him about you and he say he want you come too.”

  I studied her face, wondering why in the hell she wanted me to meet her family. Ernie smirked at my discomfort.

  “We’ll be working on the case,” I said.

  “Doing what?” she asked. “We only know Miss Yun’s son sometime come here. If he no come, how you find? Anyway, KNPs look for him. They find.”

  She was right. The KNPs would find him eventually. But how many people would be dead before they did? At least, in the most recent murder, he hadn’t used my piece. As relieved as I was about that, it still troubled me. Why hadn’t he used the automatic?

  “Go!” Ernie told me. “You need a break. Go somewhere and clear your mind.”

  Maybe he was right. Everything I’d seen and heard the last few days had jumbled into a knotted ball of grief. How to unravel it? How to stop the killing? No matter how hard I pressed, the answer was not forthcoming.

  Suk-ja clutched my arm tightly.

  “How about you?” I asked Ernie. “What do you plan to do?”

  He shrugged. “Wendy has duty today. I’ll probably run the ville.”

  “’Wendy?’”

  Ever so slightly, Ernie’s pale cheeks colored. “Sergeant Whitworth. The WAC at the 121.”

  “They don’t call them WACs anymore,” I told Ernie. The Women’s Auxiliary Corps had been disbanded a few years ago, and female soldiers were integrated into regular Army units.

  “Whatever you call them,” Ernie said. “And anyway, I received a note from an old friend.”

  He pulled a piece of lined notepaper out of his pocket. It was folded elaborately into the shape of a swan.

  Suk-ja grabbed it and, without asking permission, unfolded it. Quickly, she read the note.

  “Who’s this?” she said.

  “An old girlfriend.”

  Written in broken English, the note said that she missed him and she wanted to be with him, and she had no place to go on Chusok. She asked him to meet her at the Seven Dragon mokkolli house. It was signed Miss Na.

  I knew the Seven Dragon mokkolli house. It was a little dive in a back alley. It served warm rice beer. The type of place cab drivers and fledgling Korean gangsters hung out.

  Exactly the type of place Ernie loved.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  “What are you, my mother?” Ernie sipped on his ginseng tea. “One of the Seven Club waitresses slipped the note in my pocket while we were in there drinking the other night. I met Miss Na when I first arrived in country. Sexy lady. I was with her for a while, but she went to the States on a yobo visa.”

  Invited to immigrate to the United States for the purpose of matrimony.

  “If she’s back in country, why didn’t she talk to you herself?”

  “The waitress said she’d been in there three or four times looking for me, but we’ve been busy on this case. So she asked the waitress to hand me this note if she saw me.”

  “Why Chusok?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Maybe she figured I’d have that day off.”

  Suk-ja tugged on my arm. “We go to my brother’s house, okay Geogi?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  Her face beamed with joy.

  Burnt pine needles.

  I had smelled them before and now I was smelling them again. Suk-ja and I had taken a cab to the northern district of Seoul known as Mia-dong. The cabby let us off on the main road, and we hiked through winding pathways up the side of a hill. I lugged a basket of Asian pears that Suk-ja made me buy, because it would be impolite to enter her brother’s house with “empty hands.”

  It was a rickety hovel made of splintery wood, like all the others in the neighborhood. Her brother was a construction worker, she said, trying to become a carpenter, working secretly for a union that the government had declared illegal, like all the other unions in Korea. His wife was a stout woman with a ruddy smiling face, and they had three kids; one infant, two toddlers. When I shook hands with Suk-ja’s brother, his brown eyes were moist, earnest. This meeting meant a lot to him. And somehow, in that brief moment, I read the anguish he felt at not being able to properly take care of his younger sister. Of being poor and seeing her go with foreigners in order to survive.

  Suk-ja and I slipped off our shoes and stepped up onto the raised wooden floor. The main room of the small home had been cleared of furniture, and against the far wall were two large photographs, lined in black, of a wrinkled-looking man and a plain-faced woman.

  “My parents,” Suk-ja said. “They die long time ago.”

  “What’s that smell?” I asked.

  “Pine needles,” Suk-ja answered. “We roast them at Chusok time. Makes house smell good. How you say? Cozy.”

  The brother lined up the children first. The infant in his small crib. The two toddlers knelt on the floor, bowing their heads three times to the photographs of their grandparents in front of them. Then it was our turn. Suk-ja moved the crib, and we four adults knelt. She motioned for me to watch her. She placed her slender hands—thumb and forefinger touching—flat on the floor in front of her. Her brother chanted something I couldn’t quite catch, and then they bowed, touching their foreheads to the floor. Quickly, I mimicked their movement. The brother chanted again and we bowed. In all, we repeated this three times.

  Then Suk-ja’s brother brought in a rectangular table. I helped him unfold the legs, while his wife carried in the food: cabbage kimchee, steamed rice, tofu stew, roast mackerel, strips of dried turnip. Before we ate, a plate of song-pyun was placed in front of the photographs.

  Suk-ja’s brother motioned for us to dig in. I picked up my chopsticks and inhaled deeply of the clean scent of roasted pine needles. How wonderful it was to be welcomed by such a warm family. They were poor, they suffered through much, but they had each other.

  I set down a slice of kimchee. Suddenly my hunger left me. Everything rushed together in my brain: Chusok, the warm family setting, the scent of pine needles, the dumplings, the photograph of ancestors.

  I turned to Suk-ja. “What’s next?” I asked.

  She stared at me blankly.

  “At Chusok,” I said. “You first roast pine needles, then you bow to your ancestors, then you serve them songpyun. What’s the next step?”

  “Oh. Understand. Next step is we take food for us and dumplings for the dead up to Happy Mountain.”

  “Happy Mountain?”

  “Yeah. You know, place where dead people live.”

  “The cemetery,” I said. Then I corrected myself. “The burial mounds.”

  In Korea, people are buried in mounds, six-foot-high round hills. Not flat graves. The idea is the dead can sit there and gaze out upon pleasant surroundings.

  “Yes. Place where ancestors live. We have picnic there, perform ceremony again.”

  “Will you go today?”

  “No. Too far. My parents’ home in Taej
on. Many people go daytime. All train, bus, too crowded.”

  “How about going at night?”

  Suk-ja’s eyes widened. “At night? Too many ghosts.

  Anyway, my parents, how you say, burned?”

  “Cremated,” I said.

  “Yeah. Cremated. We keep ashes before, but I think my oldest sister in Taejon, she take them.”

  “So does anybody go to the grave mounds at night?”

  “No, no. Nobody go. But today, during daytime, many people will be at all the cemeteries around Korea. On Chusok, bury places very crowded.”

  I rose from the table, apologizing to Suk-ja’s older brother and his wife and then to Suk-ja.

  “Where you go?”

  “This case we’ve been working on, it has to do with Chusok. Everything about it has to do with Chusok. I was just too dumb to see it.”

  Each crime scene ran through my mind, like a movie film fast-forwarding through the projector. And now, when I compared those scenes to what I had learned here with Suk-ja’s family, they all made a weird sort of sense.

  First, Captain Noh, the Korean cop in the village of Songtan, didn’t want to explain to me the significance of the roasted pine needles at the murder site of Jo Kyong-ah. He thought someone was mocking Korean custom, and he didn’t want to admit such a loss of face to foreigners like me and Ernie. Second, both Jo Kyong-ah, and later Specialist Five Arthur Q. Fairbanks, had been forced to kneel face-down in an awkward position, as if they were performing the seibei bowing ceremony. Third, Haggler Lee’s young serving girl was found with songpyun dumplings shoved in her mouth— the next step in the Chusok ceremonies.

  The final step? Grave mounds.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “I go with you.”

  I didn’t argue.

  I had to find Ernie. Even if that meant interrupting his tryst with his old girlfriend, Miss Na.

  The proprietor of the Silver Dragon mokkolli house was a rotund man with a bushy black mustache and a white apron tied around his waist. As soon as I walked in the door, he looked perplexed. Then he pulled out a sheet of lined notebook paper and handed it to me.