The Door to Bitterness gsaeb-4

by Martin Limon

  There was no place else to go, so Ernie and I sat down on the wooden benches and waited. And slept, until just before dawn.

  Twenty minutes after we’d been woken up, the police station commander walked in. He was a young lieutenant named Cheon, rail thin, his khaki uniform pressed to a sharp crease. Most likely college educated. Probably a graduate of one of Korea’s military academies. As he listened to Ernie and me explain what we wanted, he was even less happy than Captain Lewis had been. No Korean cop likes to admit that, right under his nose, underage Korean girls were being herded out into the bushes to have sexual relations with American GIs. We asked him about the mama-san and where we could find her. She was the only lead we had to the smiling woman and the AWOL GI known as Bolt.

  Cheon pondered our request, probably trying to decide if he should just kick us out of his office. But if he did that, we would go to our superiors, they would contact his superiors, and then the shit would roll downhill, soiling both him and his little fiefdom. Less embarrassing to deal with the situation here, at our level, cop to cop. I had already worked through this line of reasoning but I waited for Lieutenant Cheon to figure it out.

  He did.

  Cheon grabbed his cap and told the desk sergeant he’d be back in a few minutes. Ernie and I followed him out the front door of the Uichon police station.

  The sky was brighter now, though still gray. The air was clean and sharp and cold, laced with the tang of growing things, sliced, and piled and festering in green sap.

  Somehow, amidst all this open countryside, the people of Uichon had constructed a slum. Arable land in Korea has always been precious. Although the peninsula is fertile and blessed with many lush river valleys, it is also ridged with mountain ranges and spotted with hills. Land that can be used for farming is scarce and conserved fiercely, even here in Uichon. Living space for humans is packed into constricted areas. The main drag of Uichon, with the two-lane MSR running down the middle, only stretched a block and a half. Behind that front line of buildings, the alleys dropped off into muddy pedestrian lanes. We tromped through one that headed downhill.

  Lieutenant Cheon led the way, stepping across mud puddles, hopping deftly from a flat stone to a leftover slat of lumber, keeping his highly polished boots as clean as possible. Ernie and I tried to follow in his footsteps, but we were less successful. Soon, my trousers were spattered with mud.

  A man pushing a cart filled with hay trundled past us, smiling a gap-toothed smile and bowing to Lieutenant Cheon. It was still too early for children to be up and about and on their way to school, and many of the homes behind the rickety wooden outer walls were dark. Occasionally we heard the scratch of wooden matches or the clang of a metal pot or the growl of an old man rising, clearing his throat.

  Lieutenant Cheon stopped at a wooden gate that had been stained black with grease. He pounded his fist and shouted, “Irrona-ya!” Wake up!

  He pounded repeatedly, until the splintered gate opened a crack.

  A woman wrapped in a heavy wool sweater, so frail she looked made of sticks, peered up at us. I recognized the eyes. The same phlegm-filled orbs we’d seen last night while crouching in the reeds outside the concertina wire that surrounded Charley Battery. Those eyes looked worried when she saw Ernie and me. More worried when she recognized Lieutenant Cheon.

  She pulled the wooden gate open. We entered.

  This hooch was more like what we were used to in Itaewon. Muddy courtyard with nothing but a rusty pump handle. A chicken coop with no chickens, and three hooches on a raised platform, the wood rough and rotting. One of the oil-papered sliding doors was open and inside lay a jumbled pile of blankets. One naked foot stuck out from beneath the coverings.

  “Better tell them to wake up,” I told the old woman in Korean. “We’re going to talk to everybody.”

  Ernie and I found two wooden stools. We sat on the flagstone edge of the courtyard beneath a tile-roofed overhang. The business girls came out, looking younger than ever. In the gray morning light, their naked faces showed pocks and blemishes invisible in moonlight. One of the girls had a milky eye, another a lame left foot. Gradually, this home for wayward girls was beginning to seem more like a hospice for the handicapped rather than a brothel for our brave American soldiers.

  I took a deep breath and held it, trying to control myself. Pity doesn’t help in a murder investigation.

  One by one the business girls studied the sketches, and one by one they stared at the mama-san in worried concern, unsure of what to do or say. By now, the old woman had slipped on pajama-like black trousers and a tunic and squatted in the courtyard beside us puffing on a stale-smelling Turtle Boat brand cigarette.

  I kept asking questions. The business girls stared, as if they didn’t understand.

  Lieutenant Cheon growled at them. “ Iyagi hei. Bali iyagi hei!” Speak. Speak quickly!

  He didn’t like loitering in a whorehouse for foreigners any longer than he had to. But his instructions made the girls grow more reticent. They were frightened now, like a pack of chipmunks cornered by a wolf.

  I caught Ernie’s attention and, out of Lieutenant Cheon’s line of sight, rolled my eyes.

  Ernie understood. Soon he was talking to Lieutenant Cheon, his arm around the man’s shoulder. Then he was walking him toward the courtyard gate. Together, they ducked outside.

  10

  The girls breathed a sigh of relief.

  The mama-san stared after the two men, her eyes squinting into tight wrinkles. Her only reaction was to puff even more smoke up from the foul-smelling tambay.

  “Ajjima,” I said. Aunt. “Who is this person?”

  I pointed at the sketch of the smiling woman.

  The old woman stared at the drawing. She continued to puff on her cigarette. Finally, she spoke.

  “I knew her mother,” she said. “Long time ago… so many men that time, chase me and chase her mother. No woman that time look better than us.”

  “You were jinhan chingu,” I said. Best friends.

  She nodded. “Nei. Jinhan chingu. We all time together. All time take man, best man. Man with most money.” She pointed at the top of her shoulder. “How you say?”

  “The man with the highest rank,” I answered.

  “Yes.” She waved her cigarette in the air. “Always top honcho. That’s who we take. We catch him and we make pay.”

  She clenched her hand into a bony fist.

  When this woman was young, the Korean War had been in full swing, and the country was swarming with foreign military officers, all of them away from their wives, all with extra combat pay and few opportunities to spend it.

  “Sajin issoyo?” I asked. Do you have photos?

  She smiled at that. Then she barked rapid commands in Korean to one of the girls. This girl was well-trained. She hopped up and scurried to a storage room next to the hooches. While she was inside, the mama-san barked more directions, and after a few minutes, the girl brought out a brown cardboard box wrapped with pink string. She set it in front of the mama-san and backed away.

  The mama-san stared at the box for a while, still puffing on her cigarette. Then, with trembling hands, she reached forward and untied the pink knot. When she opened the box, a small cloud of dust and dried moth’s wings puffed out. It smelled of ancient secrets. All buried now. Forgotten. Except for a few ugly things, of which this wicked old woman proceeded to speak.

  The Uichon mama-san told me that about three months ago, the smiling woman had come to her looking for a job.

  “Her mama die long time ago,” she said. “Nowhere to go.”

  “How old was she when her mother died?”

  “Fourteen, fifteen.”

  “How old is she now?”

  The mama-san shrugged. “Nineteen. Maybe twenty.”

  What had she done all those years? How had she survived? I shoved the questions out of my mind, because worrying wouldn’t help me put a stop to further killing.

  “What about her mother’s
family?” I asked. “After her mother died, didn’t they help?”

  “Family no see her mother many years. Mother yang kalbo.” Yang kalbo, a prostitute for foreigners. “They no wanna talk.”

  “And her father’s family?”

  The mama-san laughed. The laughter gave way to coughing, and then wheezing, as she tried to regain her breath through the cloud of cigarette smoke.

  “Her daddy GI,” she said. “Maybe meet her mama during Korean War. He long time go.”

  Long time go. That was the story for tens of thousands of foreign soldiers during and after the Korean War, most of them American. They fathered children, sometimes they even took care of them for a while, and then they left. Never to return. Never to do so much as send a Christmas card to their abandoned children. Of course, many Amerasian children were adopted, through the good offices of charitable organizations such as the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. But not all. A percentage of these Korean mothers, for one reason or another, did not put their children up for adoption.

  Now, twenty years after the end of the Korean War, more and more Amerasians were seen around Seoul. Usually working menial jobs: hauling bricks, digging ditches, delivering truckloads of charcoal briquettes to homes and businesses. They stood out in a crowd of Koreans because of their unusual body shapes or their long noses or their odd hair: either stringy light brown, or black and heavily curled.

  In school, few Amerasian children made it beyond the sixth grade. By definition, they came from poor families who couldn’t afford the tuition to go higher. More importantly, Amerasian children were taunted brutally in school, for their racial difference and for the circumstances of their birth.

  There were increasing numbers of Amerasians these days in the brothels. Wealthy Korean men and Japanese tourists liked them. So did American GIs. The girls, at least the better looking ones, were making money.

  When the Uichon mama-san took the smiling woman under her wing, there’d been only one job opportunity available to her.

  “She already know how to do,” the mama-san told me.

  She exhaled and a puff of smoke passed through the gaps in her black-edged teeth. “Before, her mama’s boyfriend teach her.”

  “Her mother’s boyfriend?” I was incredulous.

  “Yeah. Some GI.”

  “Didn’t her mother try to stop it?”

  “How? They need money. If boyfriend run away, no money.”

  My stomach churned but I picked up the sketch of the smiling woman anyway. I thought about her that night, sitting across from me at the cocktail table in the King Club in Itaewon. I remembered how she’d never stopped smiling. No matter what she said, or what I said, her smile remained constant. Eager to please. Offering no offense. Offering no resistance.

  How could men do such things?

  Roughly, I shoved the question out of my mind. Not for me to figure. I’m a cop. My job is to catch bad guys. Quickly, before my imagination conjured more pictures of grief, I willed myself to recall the murder scene in Songtan, the blood smeared on the floor, the broken antiques. And I thought of the now-deceased Han Ok-hi, back when she’d been in a coma under an oxygen tent in that hospital near the Yellow Sea.

  Better to think about the victims.

  The smiling woman I’d think about later.

  The Uichon mama-san barked roughly at her girls, telling one of them to break a pile of dried sticks, another to start a fire in the kitchen. They would eat this morning, not well, but something to fill the belly: rice gruel and dried turnip. More than some people.

  Ernie and Lieutenant Cheon were still outside somewhere, Ernie keeping the Commander of the Uichon Police Station busy to give me a chance to coax this old woman to talk candidly.

  She called one of her girls over and told her to sit on my lap. The girl’s face was pockmarked, but she was buxom and she giggled and kissed my neck. Her age? Eighteen if she was lucky. I knew what the mama-san wanted to do. She wanted to compromise me. Make me just another of her customers. Gently, I pushed the girl off my lap. With a full-lipped pout, she stared sullenly, then marched off.

  The Uichon mama-san scratched a wooden match on a dirty brick and lit up another Turtle Boat cigarette.

  The smiling woman’s name was Yun Ai-ja, she said. Love Child Yun.

  It was the name she’d used at the King Club. So it hadn’t been phony, but it wasn’t officially registered either. I didn’t interrupt; I let the old woman tell it her way.

  The family name was Yun. After her mother gave birth to Ai-ja, her firstborn, she asked her older brother to include the child on the Yun family register. Koreans don’t have individual birth certificates as we do in the States. Every live birth is instead recorded on a family register, along with all other members of the clan. And, without the permission of the senior male of the clan, no new name can be recorded. If the smiling woman’s mother had married a Korean man, both she and her new baby would’ve been recorded on her new husband’s family register. As it was, she had to beg her brother to grant her the honor of having her baby’s birth recorded with the family Yun.

  “He say no.”

  The Uichon mama-san shook her head sadly.

  “Miss Yun, everybody call her.” The Uichon mama-san was referring, once again, to the mother of the smiling woman. “She very famous in Itaewon. Everybody know her. Best looking woman.” She dragged out the word “best,” as the Koreans do when emphasizing a point. “Me,” the Uichon mama-san said, pointing to her nose, “I was her jinhan chin-gu.” Best friend. “Everybody call me Nam. Miss Yun and Miss Nam. All big shots call us anytime big party.”

  The Yun and Nam Show. They must’ve been something. The mama-san waved and shouted at one of her girls. “Sajin boja.” Show us the photos.

  The girl crouched in front of the small cardboard box that had been tied in pink ribbon, pulled out a handful of photos, and handed them to the Uichon mama-san. The old woman studied each photo judiciously, tossing some aside, handing those approved to me.

  The first was a black-and-white snapshot of two young Korean women wearing matching evening gowns. Even my untrained eye could tell that the gowns were cheap, but the women were knockouts. They stood in front of a wooden stage in what must’ve been some bar or small nightclub. Both women were too thin, gaunt around the cheeks, but good-looking nevertheless. I studied the shorter one, then looked at the Uichon mama-san squatting next to me. Smoke filtered through her flared nostrils, and the wrinkles around her eyes tightened. She seemed amused, watching me work it out. It dawned on me slowly. One of these good looking women, the shorter one, was her.

  “Onjie?” I said. When?

  “War almost finish. Some GI buy what you call… cloth… out of PX.”

  “Material,” I said.

  “Yes. Material. We makey.”

  So the evening gowns were homemade, as I had guessed.

  I held the photo out and pointed at the taller woman.

  “Ai-ja ohma,” she said. Ai-ja’s mother. The mother of the smiling woman.

  Where the Uichon mama-san had been cute in her youth, in a hard sort of way, this woman was truly beautiful. Her face was smooth and unblemished, oval-shaped, and her black hair hung like silk to her shoulders, framing doe-like eyes that stared at the camera lens with a mournful challenge.

  “That time,” the mama-san told me, “she already pregnant.”

  “With her daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t she give the baby up for adoption?”

  “No can do.”

  “Why not?”

  “Some woman,” the Uichon mama-san said, “no can do.”

  I thought of the smiling woman’s mad expression. “It would’ve been better for her daughter, don’t you think, if Miss Yun would’ve turned Ai-ja over for adoption? She could’ve grown up in the States or in Europe. She wouldn’t have ended up here, working for GIs.”

  Still squatting, the Uichon mama-san puffed on her cigarette for a long time. Fina
lly, she said, “Better, yes.” Then she pounded her fist on her chest. “But inside, never better.”

  “What happened to your friend, Ai-ja’s mother?” I asked.

  Without looking at me, the Uichon mama-san slid a skinny finger across her throat.

  “Killed?”

  “Die.”

  “What happened?”

  She told me, and I took notes, but not many. I kept thinking about Ernie stalling Lieutenant Cheon, and about Private Rodney K. Boltworks out there somewhere still on the loose. The story was upsetting, but it was all a long time ago. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with our current investigation, so finally I interrupted.

  “The daughter of Miss Yun, this young woman named Yun Ai-ja, where is she now?”

  The Uichon mama-san shrugged. “She go. GI beat her up, then her brother come.”

  I stopped her right there. “Her brother?”

  “Yes. Dong seing.” Younger brother.

  “What does he look like?”

  She described him. I took notes, trying not to let my excitement show. I pulled out the sketch of the man in sunglasses that Ernie and I had been calling “the dark GI.”

  “Is that him?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  So that was it. All three of the people involved in the robbery of the Olympos Casino and the murder of the blackjack dealer Han Ok-hi were identified. At last. Now we just had to catch them.

  “What happened after her brother arrived?” I asked.

  “He taaksan kullasso.” She raised two forefingers on either side of her head, indicating that he was angry.

  “Why?”

  “Ai-ja, she all hurt. Here, here, here.”

  She pointed at her face and shoulders and back.

  “Bruised,” I said.

  “Yes. GI punch many times.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Ai-ja no do nothing. Never make GI angry. She out in grass with crazy GI. He move far away from us. Nighttime, so my other girls plenty busy. First, I don’t hear nothing, then I hear fighting.”