The Usual Santas

by Peter Lovesey

  “In the mud where he came from,” Ernie said.

  “All right,” I said. “Everybody has a job to do. Let’s go over it one more time.”

  We did. It was a simple plan, brutal but elegant. If we only had to grab Sooki and return her to her husband, life would’ve been easy. But it was more complicated than that. We had to assume that Huk and his boys knew about her family, knew where they lived, and they knew how to find them. That was their modus operandi and the secret of their control. Promise the women they trafficked that if they didn’t do exactly as they were told, their families would pay with their lives. So we had to liberate not only Sooki, but also her family from the threat of Huk and his gang of thugs.

  After the verbal rehearsal, I said, “Okay, everybody got it?”

  Three nods.

  “According to Mr. Kill, Huk’s office and his living quarters are on the third floor. That’s where I’m going. So don’t shoot me on the way down.”

  Strange waggled his cigarette holder.

  “And you better take off those damn shades,” I told him.

  “What? And ruin my style?”

  “To hell with your style,” Ernie said. “Do what the man says.”

  Strange took off his sunglasses and stuck them in the breast pocket of his fatigue shirt. Now I understood why he wore them. His eyes were like desiccated green olives lost in a moist excretion of dough.

  We climbed out of the jeep. Ernie took the lead, holding his .45 pointed at the sky. Riley and Strange ran after him across the street and the three of them burst into the entranceway to the Ichon-dong brothel. Once inside, Ernie blasted his whistle and started shouting. Riley and Strange fanned out upstairs to the second floor like we practiced. They were also shouting. It didn’t matter much what they said, because English would be incomprehensible to these people anyway. It was their job to make sure that everyone understood that this was a raid by the Military Police and to intimidate the customers and move them out while at the same time herding the girls into a safe place. It was Ernie’s job to find Sooki.

  My job was to grab Huk.

  The central staircase was made of cement. Korean men in various stages of undress flooded out, frantic to escape before we placed them under arrest. I pushed against the descending crowd, running upstairs two steps at a time. On the third floor, a long hallway greeted me. At first I didn’t see any doors. Just flimsy curtains and thin blankets hanging from a network of overhead wire. Inside these makeshift partitions, cots and mats were arrayed at odd angles and female clothing hung from metal hooks. At the end of the hallway loomed a wooden door. A cement wall partitioned this end of the third floor and this had to be Huk’s office and living quarters.

  I kicked the door in.

  He was standing, arms akimbo, staring right at me. He was a small man, wearing blue jeans and sneakers and some sort of red checkered shirt with long sleeves and a collar. If he put on a Stetson, he would’ve looked like a short Asian cowboy. His face was square, almost wider than it was long and the mangled scars on his face, from eyes to chin, seemed immobile. Dark eyes smoldered through squinting lids. His fists here clenched and he was slightly hunched over, as if prepared to take a blow.

  And, to my relief, he was unarmed.

  Behind him sat a rickety wooden desk and a diesel space heater and what appeared to be a pilfered army cot. The desk supported a large red phone atop a knitted pad. He reached for the phone. I fired a round into the wall.

  Apparently that convinced him I meant business. He held perfectly still.

  “Iriwara!” I told him, in very disrespectful Korean. Come here!

  He hesitated but then stepped slowly toward me. I ordered him to turn around and I cuffed his hands behind his back. Grabbing a knot of his curly black hair, I pushed him outside his office and held the .45 against his back as we stepped downstairs. Ernie had located Sooki. She was crying and covering her face.

  Strange and Riley joined us, both of them panting and sweating, their faces flushed red with victory. Mr. Kill had already warned the local KNPs to back off and not respond to any calls that might come from the Ichon-dong brothel. At least not too quickly. Still, I didn’t want to press our luck.

  “Kapshida!” I said. Let’s go.

  Everyone understood and we ran outside and down the stairs and across the dark street to the jeep.

  ***

  Ernie drove. I sat up front with Huk kneeling on the metal floor in front of the passenger seat. Every time he squirmed, I kicked him. Riley had left his green army sedan parked near the Han-gang Railroad Bridge. When we pulled up next to the sedan, Riley and Strange hopped out. They took Sooki with them. I thanked them for their help. Ernie warned them not to shoot themselves with their M-16s. As they drove off, Sooki sat in the back seat of the sedan, still crying.

  Ernie and I sat alone in the quiet night with Huk, watching the string of lights that spanned the bridge. A slowly rising moon illuminated a few small fishing boats straggling back to their home ports.

  “How soon until the next train?” Ernie asked.

  “One last train comes in from Pusan just before the midnight curfew. Should be along soon.”

  We pulled Huk out of the jeep. The expression on his face, such as it was, didn’t change. I spoke to him in Korean.

  “Sooki doesn’t belong to you anymore,” I told him. When he didn’t answer, I continued. “You will not bother her in the future and you will not bother her family. Do you understand?”

  Again, he just stared at me, eyes squinting, mangled face impassive. Ernie slugged him in the stomach. When he came up for air, the only change in his face was a bubbling gasp from his small round mouth.

  We walked him toward the railroad tracks. There was no one out here, just a few abandoned warehouses and what appeared to be cats prowling for rats.

  “You understand,” I told him. “You can’t get to us. We live on the US military compound. You have no power there. Your thugs can’t gain entry, and even if they could, it’s a big compound and they have no idea where to find us. We’re safe from you.” I shoved his narrow shoulders and he knelt into gravel. Deftly, Ernie pushed the tip of a short bicycle chain beneath a crosstie and, using the jeep’s crowbar, dug a pathway for the chain under the thick plank. Once it was through, he locked the two ends together and then, as Huk stared at his work, he unlocked one of his cuffs and looped it through the bicycle chain and relocked it with a snap.

  Huk now knelt in the center of the railroad tracks, like a worshiper waiting for the next train. Ernie switched on his flashlight to make sure Huk could fully appreciate his predicament. A trickle of sweat formed just above Huk’s eyebrow. He had yet to speak a word.

  I knelt next to him.

  “You must promise us not to hurt Sooki, not to hurt her husband, and not to hurt Sooki’s family. Once you do that, we will let you go.”

  Huk said nothing.

  “If you break your promise,” I continued, “then my friend and I will come after you. We know where your businesses are. We know how to find you. And the next time, we won’t be so nice. We will shoot you with one of these.” I pressed the business end of my .45 up against the twisted mass of flesh that was his nose. “The Korean National Police won’t care. Not about you. And they won’t care about us. They don’t like to bother the US Army. And their bosses in the Korean government don’t like to bother the US Army. No one will investigate your murder. No one will come on our compound to bother me or my friend. You will be dead. Someone else will take your place at the Golden Dragon and at the Ichon-dong brothel. Do you understand?”

  His oddly-shaped face still remained impassive and he said nothing.

  “Dumb shit,” Ernie said and kicked him.

  I stood up. I had to admit that he was one tough cookie and I could see why he’d risen to the top of the rack
ets. I was through wasting breath on him. Ernie and I walked back to the jeep. From this distance, about twenty yards, we watched Huk kneeling on the tracks.

  I had no idea what was going through his mind. He didn’t yank on the handcuffs, trying to get away. He just knelt there without moving.

  Ernie glanced behind us. “Maybe he figures somebody is going to come and save him,” he said.

  “No way. He doesn’t have thugs at the brothel because he doesn’t need them. He’s protected by the money he pays at a high level.”

  “Maybe those high-level people will catch wind of this and send the KNPs.”

  “I don’t think so. My guess is that the KNPs are just as pissed about this setup as we are. Mr. Kill warned them off and they’ll stay away. Even if the word comes down from on high that they need to save Huk, they’ll hesitate. They can always claim that they didn’t know where he was; which is true, they don’t know.”

  “So we just stand here and watch him die?” Ernie said.

  “That’s the plan.”

  He glanced at me. “Can you handle it?”

  “You saw those girls in the brothel,” I replied. “Some of them still had their schoolgirl haircuts, just barely out of middle school. Did they have cigarette burns on their forearms? Bruises on their shoulders? I didn’t have time to look, but I bet they did.”

  “They did,” Ernie said.

  “So I can stand here and watch this creep be run over and smashed into pieces.”

  Ernie grinned, staring at me, but said nothing further.

  In the distance, the train whistle sounded.

  ***

  The train from Pusan emerged along the banks of the Han River on the western side of the district known as Yongdungpo. The name Yongdungpo is composed of three Chinese characters that mean, literally, Eternally Rising Port. Or, more poetically, the Port of Eternal Ascension. Eighth Army had a supply depot over there for many years and there was a place GIs called the Green Door that old-timers told me was one of the raunchiest brothels in Korea. But that was controlled by a different organization, not Huk’s. Whether or not he was thinking about this while the train reached the bank of the Han River and turned east and then about two miles later made the left turn toward the railroad bridge, I didn’t know. But when the train did make the turn, we saw the front light of the locomotive shine almost halfway across the bridge. It was heading toward us at about thirty miles per hour, all the massive tonnage of it, and I calculated it would arrive on this side of the Han River in less than a minute.

  Ernie and I leaned against the jeep, arms crossed, waiting. I’m sure he was expecting me to crack first, but as it turned out, it wasn’t me, it was him.

  “Maybe we should unlock him,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “This is going to be messy. Blood and flesh and bone splashed all over the place.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I suppose it is going to be messy.”

  Ernie studied me. “Are you serious? Do you really want to go through with this?” When I didn’t answer, he glanced at the approaching train. A whistle sounded. “We don’t have much time.”

  I kept my arms crossed, my face impassive, and then we heard a choked yell.

  “Okay!”

  It was Huk. Just the one word but that was good enough for me. I ran forward, reaching in my right pocket for the keys. They weren’t there. And then I remembered. I’d given them to Ernie.

  I turned and shouted. “The keys!”

  But Ernie was already on it. He ran past me and knelt next to Huk and started fumbling with the handcuffs. The train was only a hundred yards away now, its front light so bright that both Ernie and Huk were illuminated by its fierce glow. A screaming whistle sounded a warning, shattering the night.

  Ernie continued to fumble with the keys. I was just about to run forward and snatch them from him and unlock the cuffs myself when I heard the snap. Ernie leapt off the tracks and rolled toward the stanchions on the edge of the bridge. Huk pulled away but for a moment the cuffs caught on something, and then frantically he jerked them up and down until something released and, like the rat that he was, he scurried toward the stanchions next to Ernie. Mesmerized, I realized that I had to back away too, and stepped quickly toward the end of the bridge until I was safely out of the path of the train.

  With a great whining and clattering, the train reached us and, like a monster of metal and steam, ground its great iron wheels past, parading the full length of its dragon-like body until it finally pulled away, shrieking regally, into the dark night.

  I ran along the tracks, grabbed Huk and retrieved my handcuffs. He remained kneeling on the edge of the tracks, facing the water below, his face and the back of his neck slathered in sweat. As a memento of our visit, I kicked him in the thigh. Hard. Like the tough little shit he was, he took it without a whimper.

  We left him there, clinging to the stanchion, staring into the river.

  On shaking legs, Ernie and I marched back to the jeep, jumped in, and drove away from the Han-gang Railroad Bridge.

  ***

  “You’re kidding me,” Ernie said.

  The next morning, we had just stepped through the entranceway to the Yongsan Main PX and stood gazing past rows of consumer goods and milling crowds of shoppers. Against the far wall, a dais had been set up for children to be introduced to Father Christmas.

  “Not him,” Ernie said.

  “Yes him,” I replied.

  “Not Strange.”

  Sergeant First Class Harvey, also known as Strange, sat on a throne in the center of the dais dressed in a fake white beard and a bright red Santa Claus outfit, greeting the children one by one.

  “I guess the Officers’ Wives Club doesn’t know he’s a pervert,” I said.

  We pushed our way through the crowds of shoppers until we stood in front of the dais. After one of the children hopped off his red-trousered lap, Strange looked over at us, and responded to the quizzical look in our eyes.

  “I was volunteered,” he said.

  One of the ladies controlling the tittering line of children sent another youngster up. Strange let out a “Ho ho ho!” and lifted the child to his lap.

  “Watch his hands,” Ernie whispered.

  We did. For about twenty minutes. Apparently he was on the up and up. So far.

  “I guess children aren’t his particular perversion,” Ernie told me.

  “Let’s watch him anyway.”

  I went back into the PX administrative offices and found a couple of straight-backed chairs. Ernie and I set them out of the way but close enough to the dais so we could keep an eye on Strange.

  “So Sooki’s all right?” Ernie asked, once we got settled.

  “Yeah. She begged me not to tell her husband what had happened. I promised I wouldn’t. Not all of it, anyway.”

  I had told Specialist Garfield that we’d broken Sooki out of the Golden Dragon and that had been good enough for him. He didn’t ask more questions. Maybe because he guessed he wouldn’t like the answers.

  “Huk is a complete shit,” Ernie said. “What makes you think he’ll keep his word?”

  “He knows what I said is true. He can’t get to us, not without a hell of a lot of expense and trouble. Even if he managed to take you and me out, he’d face the wrath of the KNPs and the Korean government, neither of which wants a big-time racketeer messing up their cozy relationship with the United States. Not worth it for a single girl in one of his brothels.”

  The United States government had not only provided South Korea with 50,000 troops to help in their defense against the Communist army up north but we also gave them millions of dollars in economic and military aide annually. If there was one thing every faction in the South Korean government agreed on, it was keeping the relationship with t
he United States pristine; without the slightest blemish.

  “So if we were bumped off,” Ernie said, “the KNPs and the Eighth Army honchos would go after Huk.”

  “Big time.”

  “It’s like in ’Nam,” Ernie told me. “The army treats you like shit when you’re alive. But once you’re dead, you become a hero.”

  “Right. They’d probably dedicate a plaque to us.”

  “The only way we’ll ever get one.” Ernie thought about it for a minute and then continued. “Okay, so Huk knows he can’t touch us. And after that performance on the Han-gang Railroad Bridge, he’s also convinced that if he messes with Sooki’s family, we’ll take him out. So he’ll leave her alone.”

  “It’s the smart business decision,” I said. “What’s one girl, more or less? And besides, nobody in the Seoul underworld knows what happened. He doesn’t lose face. As far as they’re concerned, the MPs raided the Ichon-dong brothel and he shrugged them off and he’s back in business the next day.”

  “He looks good.”

  “Right. And if he’s smart, he’ll leave it that way. Sooki told me that as soon as her husband’s tour is up, they’ll go back to the States and she’ll put in the paperwork to have her parents and her brother and sister join them.”

  “The sooner the better.”

  “Right. Because once we’re gone, who knows what Huk will do?”

  “Once we’re gone? What are you talking about? I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You already have your request in for extension?”

  “You better believe it. Riley hand-carried mine over to his pal Smitty at Eighth Army Personnel. How about yours?”

  “Already in.”

  Ernie surveyed the crowd of shoppers, and we watched Strange behave himself as we listened to the schmaltzy Christmas music wafting out of the PX sound system.

  “Everybody talks about being homesick at Christmas,” Ernie said. “They think that’s why GIs off themselves.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “For some,” he said. “Maybe for most. For me, I’ll only off myself if I end up back in some trailer park in the States and somebody reminds me of Korea.”