The Door to Bitterness (25 page)

“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 Taejon. 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.

This one folded in the shape of a turtle.

I unfolded it. It was written in hanmun, Chinese characters, and said only: Hyodo. Filial piety.

I remembered the words because they were the first two Chinese characters my Korean language teacher had written on the chalkboard. The basis, she’d told us, upon which Confucian society is built.

In Korean, I asked, “Who gave this to you?”

“She said American man come. Tall American man. Dark hair. Like you.”

“What did she look like?”

“Korean, but not Korean. Light-colored hair.”

“Half-American?”

“I think so.”

“Smiling strangely?”

His eyes widened. “How you know?”

I asked him if he’d seen Ernie or any other American GIs. He said no. GIs seldom found their way into this dirt-floored mokkolli house and when they did, it was late at night and they were too drunk to know where they were.

Suk-ja and I thanked him and walked out the door.

Next door to the Seven Dragon mokkolli house was a noodle shop with a parking area for cabs. Unchon Siktang the sign said: Driver’s eatery. The cabbies could catch a quick bowl of steaming noodles while one of the young men out front hosed down their cabs and washed them off. There were three of these young men, all wearing rubber boots that reached almost to their knees. I asked each of them if they’d seen any GIs in the area today. None had.

We entered the noodle shop.

A stout woman with a bandana over her hair said she’d seen a GI approaching through the back alley. Maybe he was heading for the mokkolli house next door but she couldn’t be sure. I described Ernie to her, and she said yes, that was what he looked like.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“Back there.” She pointed. “He stop for a few minutes. Waiting. Then black car pull up. Window open. He lean in. Talk. Then he raise both hands to sky, like praying.”

“Praying?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Then what did he do?”

“He get in car. They go.”

“Did you report this to anybody?”

“Report? No. Why report? I no want trouble here at Unchon Siktang.”

I asked her a few more questions, and then jotted down her name and told her we’d be talking to her again soon.

“Abduct?” Captain Kim pronounced the word awkwardly. “You mean somebody take go?”

“Yes. In a black Hyundai sedan. Ernie’s hands were raised, as if somebody inside the car was holding a gun on him.”

Captain Kim studied my face. “Maybe your gun.”

I nodded.

“That’s why you feel so bad.”

I nodded again.

“This woman, Miss Na, you know her full name?”

I didn’t. And that made it impossible for us to check to see if she’d actually returned to Korea as Ernie had been told in the note. Was this a setup? Had somebody known about Ernie’s old flame, and then used her name to induce him to meet them at a certain place and time? Captain Kim told Suk-ja and me to sit down and try to relax while he made a few phone calls.

I used the phone at the other desk and finally got through to the Charge of Quarters at the barracks where Ernie and I lived. I waited as he wandered down the hallway and checked with the houseboy. No, Ernie wasn’t in, and nobody’d seen him since this morning. I called the CID Detachment. Riley was in catching up on paperwork. I told him what I suspected.

“Ernie’s been abducted?”

“Maybe. Don’t say anything yet. I can’t be sure.”

“Sure you’re sure. It’s this case you been working on. That nutty broad is smarter than you and Bascom put together.”

I told Riley where I was and told him, if Ernie showed up, to have him find me immediately. And I made him promise not to tell anybody. Not yet. Not until I was sure.

When I hung up the phone, Captain Kim was staring at me. Then he told me about the news from Yoju.

If Ernie thought there was any way to escape without being shot, he would’ve tried it.”

“Maybe not,” Suk-ja said. “Maybe he want go.”

This was possible, although I didn’t want to admit it out loud. Ernie was crazy enough to think he could turn the tables on whoever had the nerve to try to take him captive.

Captain Kim said that near the outskirts of Yoju, at the burial mounds, a huge crowd had gathered for the traditional Chusok ceremonies. Mr. Yun Guang-min, the owner of the Olympos, had gone there this morning in his chauffer driven Hyundai sedan. That made sense, because his ancestral home was Yoju and he, like everyone else, was visiting the burial sites of his parents in order to pay his respects. Only one guard traveled with him and the chauffeur.

Along the route, Mr. Yun saw a warm chestnut stand on the side of the road, and he made his driver stop. He loved chestnuts and bought enough to feed a small army. He explained to anyone listening that, when he was young, his family had been too poor to afford them, no matter how much he craved them. He laughed and said that all his relatives teased him about how crazy he was for warm chestnuts.

The chestnut vendor shot the bodyguard in the chest. The vendor was a woman, her hair covered with a bandana. While her partner waved his automatic pistol around, she ordered the driver out of the car, took his keys. Her male accomplice forced Mr. Yun into the driver’s seat, and she and the accomplice climbed in back.

The vehicle made a U-turn and headed northwest, in the general direction of Seoul.

The KNPs had the sedan’s license plate: a bulletin had been issued. With the roads jammed on Chusok, it was unlikely the sedan would be spotted.

Had the black Hyundai been the same car that Ernie climbed into?

I thought so. The smiling woman and her brother were going for two victims. They were going to make sure that this would be a Chusok to be remembered.

22

Would it do any good to notify 8th Army? No. They had no way of doing a better job than the Korean cops. In fact, if a pack of cowboy MPs barged in while I was trying to save Ernie, they’d only get somebody killed.

I was on my own on this. And I had to find him.

“Where would they have taken Mr. Yun?” I asked Captain Kim.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s Chusok,” I said, trying to think it through. “Like all Koreans, they want to visit their ancestors. Their ancestors are in Yoju, the same as their uncle, Mr. Yun.”

Suk-ja crinkled her nose. “They no like them.”

She was right. She was exactly right. The smiling woman and her brother had been ostracized by their own family. They wouldn’t want to worship ancestors who had turned their backs on them. So who would they worship? The one ancestor who hadn’t turned away. Who had stood by them always. Their mother.

Where was she buried?

Probably, she hadn’t been. The Uichon mama-san had told me the smiling woman carried with her a white box wrapped with black ribbon. That almost certainly contained the ashes of her deceased mother. To worship her, all they had to do was set the box on a table and bow.

At the murder site of Jo Kyong-ah, the black marketeer, she’d been forced to bow in front of a table partially cleared. Had the smiling woman and her brother forced Miss Jo to bow to the box containing their deceased mother’s ashes?

When Specialist 5 Arthur Q. Fairbanks was executed, the killer had set a cardboard-like paper against the pump handle and forced Fairbanks to bow three times. A photograph of Miss Yun, the mother? And then another person had entered the courtyard. His sister carrying the white box containing their mother’s ashes? Then Fairbanks was killed.

I pulled out the photo Jimmy had given me. Miss Yun Yong-min, her daughter, and her son. Such a pathetic little family. Three people, all alone in the world. If I was correct, there was no set site for the smiling woman and her brother to pay homage at the shrine of their deceased mom. They could’ve taken Ernie and Mr. Yun anywhere.

I
t was late afternoon. The sun would go down soon and the lights of Itaewon would blink to life as they had for so many years since the end of the Korean War. But tonight, they’d blink on without Ernie Bascom.

Suk-ja and I stood out on the street, waiting. A motor bike putt-putted up the street. A red helmet flashed by. I watched as Jimmy the photographer parked his bike in front of the King Club, his boxy camera with flash slung over his shoulder, ready for another night’s work.

Then I knew.

I grabbed Suk-ja’s hand. “Come on.”

I dragged Suk-ja across and stopped Jimmy before he could enter the swinging doors of the King Club. I pulled out the photo he had given me and asked him some questions. Jimmy’s memory was excellent, and he pointed to the big wooden arch under which Miss Yun and her two children had posed, all three smiling bravely. Together, we recited the name of the Buddhist temple where he’d flashed the photo: Hei-un Sa. The Temple of Sea and Cloud. Jimmy gave us directions.

Suk-ja and I thanked him and waved down a cab.

Before we left Itaewon, Suk-ja insisted on stopping at a pay phone to place a call. To her brother, she said. While I waited in the cab, I watched her chatting away, unable to hear what she was saying. It didn’t matter. I figured I already knew who she was calling and what she’d be saying. Still, I worked on finding a way to believe that I was wrong about her and that she really was talking to her brother.

With the passenger door ajar so the inside light would stay on, Suk-ja and the cab driver studied a map of Kyongi Province.

“Over there,” she said, pointing.

We had already traveled many miles east of the outskirts of Seoul, and I knew from driving these areas during daylight that we weren’t far from the Han River Estuary. The map indicated we were close to the temple, and the driver agreed with her. I closed the door as he restarted the engine. He drove down the bumpy, unpaved country road.

Litter lined the sides, and muddy tire tracks were everywhere. It had been a busy day out here, but with the crowds of Chusok worshipers back in the city, the area was desolate and barren. Wind swirled inland from the cold sea.

Why did I believe that the smiling woman and her brother would come out here for their Chusok ceremony? Because they’d been happy here. They’d visited with their mother when she was alive, many times, according to Jimmy. It was the logical place to finally bury her ashes. But as Jimmy had warned me, land—even a small burial mound—could be expensive. Hundreds of dollars. Even thousands, if the mound had an unobstructed view of the sea.

The terrain started to rise. According to the map, the cemetery tended by the Buddhist monks was located on the bluffs along the River Han, at a spot where the Han meets the Imjin River and they flood out into the Yellow Sea. During the day, the view must’ve been beautiful beyond compare.

Maybe that’s what all this was about. Maybe the robbery of the Olympos Casino, in the minds of the smiling woman and her brother, hadn’t been a robbery at all. Maybe they had just decided to claim their inheritance. An inheritance from an uncle who should’ve, by Korean custom, taken care of them from the day they were born. And maybe their desire for money was not so they could splurge on the finer things in life, but to buy their mother a burial plot that would give her the respect in death that she was never afforded in life.

Maybe, if you looked at it their way, this entire crime spree—starting with bopping me over the head and proceeding to murder after murder—could be seen as an act of filial piety of unparalleled proportions. I might be wrong. But if I was right, the smiling woman and her brother would be here tonight.

The cab’s shock absorbers groaned as we bounced over a muddy ridge. We were north of Kimpo International Airport, even farther north of the port city of Inchon. In churning waters beyond rocky cliffs, the theoretical demarcation line between North and South Korea ran through the center of the Han River Estuary. A few of the small islands on the northern side, I knew, were patrolled and heavily fortified by the northern Communist regime.

The wind was whipping up. A few splats of rain fell onto dirt.

“Andei,” said the driver. No good.

He was right. If the wind blew in rain clouds off the Yellow Sea, these dirt roads would turn to mud in a matter of minutes.

The driver slowed, wanting to turn back.

“Jokum to,” I said. A little farther.

He sighed and kept driving.

The road started to rise more steeply. Lightning flashed over the Yellow Sea. I spotted the outline of grave mounds dotting the hills.

The driver stopped, backed up, and started to turn around.

“All right,” I said. “All right.”

I climbed out. Suk-ja too.

“You go back,” I said. “I have to find Ernie and I have to move fast.”

I paid the cab driver. More rain spattered his windshield.

He wanted to get out before the roads turned to mud. I told Suk-ja to climb inside.

“No. I go with you.”

“No!” This time I shouted. “I have to go quickly and quietly. I can’t slow down and worry about you.”

In the reflected glow from the headlights, I saw her face fall. She lowered her eyes.

“Okay, Geogi. Sorry I bother you.”

“No bother.” I patted her on the shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

She glanced at me, eyes flashing with anger. Then she climbed back in the cab, and the driver rolled forward. I stood watching them until the headlights reached the main road. The cab turned and sped off around a bend out of sight.

The roiling clouds came fast, pushed inland by a stiff breeze. All about me was becoming darker. The only light came from the swirling beam of a distant lighthouse, and the occasional flash of lightning over the water.

I walked uphill, toward the grave mounds.

The cloud cover broke for a few seconds and, as if to light my way, a Chusok moon, as full as the calm face of a Buddhist saint, shone.

* * *

When I was a kid in East L.A., the worst part was not having parents. Poverty, hunger, all those things you can stand— but without parents, you’re nothing.

Some of my foster parents were all right, some not so right. But I always knew that I lacked something fundamental that other kids had. A place to belong. A person to love you. A spot that was all yours and yours alone in this vast empty universe.

That’s what ancestor worship was all about. Why the Koreans made such a big deal about it. It told them who they were, where they belonged, how they fit into this gigantic puzzle we call human life. I envied them their dedication, and although I usually didn’t admit it to myself, I longed to join them.

But I had no place in it. Before I was old enough to start school, my mother died in childbirth, along with the sibling she was laboring to bear. Shortly afterwards, I’m told, my father ran off to Mexico, never to return.

At Suk-ja’s brother’s house, they’d set up two photographs of the ancestors of her nephews and nieces. I envied those kids. At least they knew who their parents were.

I would never know mine. Not personally. But somehow, whenever I was in trouble, I felt that my mother was near.

Walking beside me.

The grave mounds rolled like an undulating sea to the cliffs overlooking the confluence of the Han and the Imjin Rivers. There was movement behind one of the mounds, of that I was sure. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I could differentiate one shadow from another. Occasionally, I could even hear the sound of murmuring voices, floating out to me on the salt-tanged wind.

I was freezing—cold and damp. The rain had fallen intermittently, coming in squalls of sudden pellets, but I’d been out here long enough to be soaked. My teeth chattered.

How I wished I had a weapon. If I hadn’t been so stubborn, I could’ve checked out a replacement pistol from the CID arms room. But that would’ve entailed filling out paperwork, and walking it from Staff Sergeant Riley’s office to the First Sergeant’s office and then the Provost Marshal’s Office, facing smirking clerks all the way. I not only didn’t have the time, I didn’t have the stomach to run such a humiliating gauntlet without punching somebody square in the nose. So I lived without. A decision I now regretted.

Crouch-walking through the mud, I edged closer to the high mound near the edge of the cliff.

Someone screamed. A male. Anguished. And I recognized the voice: Ernie.

I was at the side of the mound now. A human figure lay against it. The head bobbed forward occasionally. Ernie? Tied up?

Standing in front of him was a man. Standing still. Waiting. Kong, the son. Brother of the smiling woman.

Almost certainly he was armed. There were twenty yards between us. How to cover that without being spotted and gunned down? Only one way. Lightning.

When it flashed again, I would be blinded. But so would the man standing over Ernie. Before he could spot me or take aim, I’d be on him. That was my only chance.

The tall shadow stepped forward and once again Ernie screamed.

I crouched, flexing my knees, waiting to spring. No lightning. The wind picked up. More rain, but no flash.

All around me loomed burial mounds. Some had stone urns on top for burning incense. Others supported statuettes, likenesses of the dead in the cold ground below. Their stone eyes seemed to be watching. Smiling. Amused at my puny efforts.

The wind howled. More droplets of rain. It dribbled down the back of my neck. I worked my way forward.

A flash and lightening filled the world. I was on my feet, moving, trying to pick up traction in the sloshing mud. I ran. In the flash, I’d seen someone near Ernie, lying face down, unmoving, looking for all the world like a corpse. Was it Uncle Yun Guang-min?

And then my vision cleared, and I saw him: Brother Kong, in all his glory. His arm at his side, holding something long and heavy. He turned his startled eyes toward me. His hand came up, the barrel of the .45 still not pointing directly at me. With a great leap, I was on him. Punching, ripping, kneeing, screaming.

Ernie shouted. What, I didn’t know. The gun lay in the mud now and the wide-eyed man beneath me stared up into a fist plunging toward his mouth. I punched him again and again. Blood ran, out of his nose, and mouth, and ear. He stopped struggling. His head lolled to the side. I could now hear what Ernie was saying.

“Untie me, goddamn it! Untie me!”

I grabbed my .45, shoved it in my pocket and stood, legs wobbly. The man didn’t move. He was out cold. I turned, staggered forward, and knelt beside Ernie.

The red light of the Chusok moon peeked out from behind storm clouds. I could see that my assumptions had been correct. Lying next to Ernie in the mud, the back of his head blown open in a bloody pulp, was Mr. Yun Guang-min, former owner of the Olympos Hotel and Casino.

“Wires,” Ernie said. “In knots. He kept pulling on them, tightening them around my wrists and ankles. Hurt like a mother. Untie them, will ya?”

“Okay, okay.”

I studied the knots as best I could in the dark, going mainly by feel, listening for any movement behind me. Finally, I twisted the tightly wrapped wire but, as Ernie groaned, I realized that I was twisting the wrong way. I reversed the torque and the wires popped free. Ernie reached across and unknotted his other hand.