Martin Limon - The Door to Bitterness

“What time did you open?” I asked the bartender.

“Bar open eleven hundred hours.”

So this drunk had arrived here shortly after eleven a.m., during or shortly after the robbery of the Olympos Casino.

“Did the KNPs talk to him?” I asked.

The bartender crinkled his nose in disgust. “They no like.”

I was seeing a lot of crinkled noses today. Even a dedicated Korean cop is reluctant to talk to Americans. Especially drunk ones. They’re trouble. Either they start shouting and throwing their weight around or, if you arrest them, heat comes down from on high, asking why are you ruining the delicate interplay of Korean American relations. I could tell from the reek of the man’s breath that he’d probably been drunk since this morning and would’ve been considered an unreliable witness anyway.

Ernie and I glanced at one another, and he nodded and stepped forward. Using his left hand, Ernie held the back of the man’s head down on the cocktail table. With his right, he slipped a wrinkled wallet out of the drunk’s hip pocket. He handed it to me.

I rifled through the contents until I found a military ID.

“Retiree,” I said. “U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer. Wallace, Hubert K.”

Ernie shook Hubert K. Wallace awake. The startled man stared up at us with red-rimmed eyes. Confused. The bartender handed me a glass of water; I handed it to Ernie. Instead of offering the man a drink, Ernie tossed the contents of the glass flush into the face of retired CPO Hubert K. Wallace.

The man sputtered and sat up, clawing moisture out of his eyes, fully awake now.

“What the…”

“Okay, Wally,” Ernie said. “Give. What’d you see this morning?”

“See?”

“When you came in for your hair of the dog shortly after eleven hundred hours. You must’ve seen something. Something unusual going on at the Olympos.”

“Oh, yeah,” Wallace replied. “You mean those two guys.”

Ernie and I tensed. Wallace rubbed more water out of his eye sockets and continued.

“In a hurry,” Wallace said, “both of them. A big bag under their arm.”

“Under whose arm? The light-skinned guy or the dark one?”

Wallace crinkled his forehead. “The dark one, I think.”

“Where’d they go?”

“The dark one ran north.”

“Toward the train station?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“And the light one?” Ernie asked.

“He came here.”

“Here?” I said. “To the Seaman’s Club?”

“Well, not inside. There was a cab parked outside. He jumped in the back, said something to the driver.”

“Did you hear what he said?”

“No. I was too far away.”

“Which way did the car go?”

“South.”

“Toward the Port of Inchon?”

“Yeah. Toward the port.”

We questioned Wallace a little longer, but that was all he knew. Still, we’d come up with a witness. I jotted down the particulars from his military ID and prodded him for his address and told him that we might need to question him later. He asked us to buy him a drink.

“Things are a little tight right now,” he explained.

Ernie complied, slapping a buck on the bar.

Outside in the jeep we talked it over.

“The dark guy must’ve taken the money and jumped on the train to Seoul,” I said. “Before the KNPs had time to react.”

During the day, commuter trains from Inchon to Seoul depart about every fifteen minutes.

“Smart move,” Ernie said. “A dark man alone would blend in with the Koreans easier.”

“And the other guy?”

“If he had taken that cab to Seoul, he would’ve never made it past the road blocks.”

“So he’s still here?”

“Maybe.”

“If you were a GI, hot, holed up in Inchon, where would you hide?”

“Some place where money talks,” Ernie said, “and some place where there are plenty of foreigners and where people don’t read the newspapers much.”

There was only one place in Inchon that met that description. We both thought of it at the same time: The Yellow House.

The Yellow House was not a house. It was an area near the main entrance to the Port of Inchon set aside specifically for the entertainment of foreign sailors. Jammed with brothels, the entire fifteen-or twenty-acre area was as densely packed as the Casbah.

“Won’t the KNPs check it out?” I asked.

“When they have time,” Ernie said, “but not now, they’re overextended. Besides, it would take a small army to search every little hovel in every little hooch in the Yellow House.”

“We’re a small army.”

“That we are.”

Ernie started up the jeep, backed away from the United Seaman’s Service Club, and gunned the engine hard, swerving on dirty pavement, heading south toward what was perhaps the most notorious den of iniquity in the Far East: the Yellow House.

Last spring, on a bright sunny day, Ernie and I had cruised in his open-topped jeep through the narrow lanes of the Yellow House. The two-and three-story brothels loomed on either side, and since it was late morning, the girls were out and about, not sitting in lingerie behind brightly lit display windows, as they were required to do at night. Instead they wore their regular clothes: house dresses, blue jeans, tight-fitting T-shirts. There were no foreign sailors about, so they were outside, their black hair tied up and held by silver clasps, munching on snacks or playing badminton or gossiping with their neighbors. Some of them held plastic pans propped against their hips, filled with soap and shampoo and washcloths, sauntering on their way to the public bathhouse. When Ernie and I approached, driving slowly through the narrow lanes in the jeep, they shouted, and more of them swarmed out of the brothels, and then they were all headed toward us like young girls on their way to a rock concert.

Quickly, our jeep was surrounded. Ernie shifted into low gear and barely crept forward. All the girls laughed and reached into the open-topped jeep and some pinched us and then squealed when we slapped their hands away. Others down the lane gazed out of their second-and third-story windows, waving and yelling at us.

You’d think they’d be sick of men, in their line of work. But to them young GIs are like saviors. Their usual clientele is surly merchant marines, most from Greece or the Philippines or Indonesia or other countries just as poor as Korea. They pinch every penny and pinch more than that. American GIs are the only men who have something in common with the girls who work the Yellow House: they’re young, naive, caught in a world not of their own choosing, and quickly finding out, sometimes painfully, what life’s struggle is about. GIs are for the most part clean and healthy, and they have more disposable income than the merchant marines. Most important of all, some GIs are young enough and foolish enough that they just might take one of the Yellow House girls away from all this. It’s happened before, plenty of times, and that is why, on that fine spring day, the fresh round faces of the young whores of the Yellow House were so playful when they saw Ernie and me. And so full of hope.

This time, Ernie parked the jeep two blocks away from the Yellow House, and we approached on foot. Ernie checked the. 45 under his coat. Without thinking, I checked mine and was momentarily shocked to find my shoulder holster empty. Then I remembered. He had it, the dark thief.

Did Ernie and I have a plan? Not exactly. We’d enter the Yellow House as we normally did, sniff around, pretend to be shopping for a girl. Try not to raise any alarms. Try not to scare away the thief. We wouldn’t Bogart our way into the Yellow House like twenty or thirty KNPs would. And while we were shopping for girls, we’d look for anything unusual. Anything that might give us a lead.