Martin Limon - The Door to Bitterness

Night had lain its purple blanket over the City of Inchon. As Ernie and I navigated the cobbled pedestrian lanes, yellow street lamps buzzed nervous greetings. Ahead, sandwiched between a row of brick buildings, loomed the dark opening to one of the many narrow alleys leading into the Yellow House. Ernie flashed me a thumbs-up, turned, and entered the gloom.

I followed.

A cold mist from the Yellow Sea began to roll into the city. Soon, we were wading through a blanket of fog. The walls seemed to lean forward, closing in around us.

I was still trying to figure if the crooks who robbed the Olympos Casino bought my badge and gun on the black market, or if they were somehow in on the theft of those items from the beginning.

As far as I knew, and as far as the Korean National Police knew, there was no black market in guns in Korea. The penalty was too harsh. Death, as a matter of fact. The only people daring enough to traffic in weaponry and explosives were the highly trained Communist agents who infiltrate into the south from North Korea. But that’s a military operation, conceived and controlled by the People’s Army in Pyongyang, and there’s no way a couple of miscreant GIs could’ve bought my gun and my badge from North Korean agents.

More probably, they’d obtained the. 45 and the badge from the smiling woman herself. But what’s the chance that a poor, half-caste prostitute would just happen to know two guys who were in the market for a pistol and were daring enough to rob the Olympos Casino? It was unlikely that she’d lured me into an alley, convinced some guys to bop me over the head and help her steal my gun and badge, and then- within a couple of days-just happened to find two buyers for those items who just happened to be planning a robbery.

More likely, the two thieves who robbed the Olympos Casino and shot Miss Han Ok-hi had been in cahoots with the smiling woman from the beginning. From the moment one of them came up with the evil idea until she drugged my glass of beer and lured me into that cold Itaewon alley, she’d been part of a team. A team with a plan.

I’d been targeted.

Would they have bopped Ernie over the head if they’d been given the chance?

Probably. But, as usual, Ernie was surrounded that night by a bevy of women. The smiling woman hadn’t bothered competing with that. Instead, she’d turned her star power on me. The lone and drunken and morose George Sueno. The perfect target for a beautiful blonde Asian woman with blue eyes and a smile that advertised madness.

And I’d walked right into her trap, like the fool that I am.

She said her name was Suk-ja.

She sat on a plump red cushion, wearing see-through pink silk panties and a frilly silk upper garment of the same material. Her face was overly made-up, but the goop couldn’t hide her ready smile and curious expression. While listening to Ernie talk, she alternately wrinkled her brow and contorted the lines around her full-lipped grin, until she looked like a white-faced mime performing in front of a close-up camera. But she wasn’t mugging for laughs; she was genuinely interested in what Ernie had to say and what he and I were doing here in House Number 59 in a narrow alley about as close to smack dab in the middle of the Yellow House area as it was possible to get. So far, House Number 59 was the sixth brothel we’d reconnoitered.

“You want girl?” Suk-ja asked.

“Maybe,” Ernie replied. “First we checky checky every woman.”

Ernie waved his hand to indicate the entire expanse of the neighborhood known as the Yellow House.

“You dingy dingy?” Suk-ja asked, circling her forefinger around her ear. “Too many woman. No have time checky checky all.”

Ernie shrugged, grinned, and glanced at me. “Maybe me and my chingu, we try.”

Suk-ja rolled her brown eyes. “Every GI think they big deal. Every GI think they number hana.”

She pressed one elbow against her crotch, stuck her forearm straight out, and fisted her palm.

“Too skoshi,” Ernie replied. Too small. “Me taaksan.”

He spread his open palms apart, as if describing a huge fish.

Suk-ja laughed and covered her mouth with both hands.

“Every GI same same,” she said. “All time bullshit.”

“No bullshit,” Ernie replied.

Suk-ja rolled her eyes toward the varnished rafter beams.

While they bantered, I’d been looking through the window at the shadowy figures pacing the narrow alley. Men. Hands in their pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, damp mist. Koreans? Greeks? Japanese? In the fog-filled gloom, I couldn’t tell.

Suk-ja wasn’t the only woman on display in this brightly lit room on this warm, vinyl-covered floor, wearing nothing but see-through undies. There were about a half-dozen girls seated near us, some of them listening absently to Ernie and Suk-ja’s conversation, others watching-like me-anxiously out the window. They for a customer. Me for a thief.

The other girls didn’t speak English as well as Suk-ja- she’d been here at the Yellow House for a few months already, she told us. When we’d first arrived at House Number 59, I’d asked the women in Korean, as casually as I could, if they’d seen an American, someone who looked like Ernie. They stared blankly, wishing they had, wishing they could earn some income to contribute to their ever-growing mountain of debt.

The mama-sans here charge them for everything: room and board, even the flimsy clothing on their backs. And once they amass a bill, which they inevitably do, the mama-sans charge interest on top of that.

Ernie didn’t flash his badge. We wanted to pretend that we were just two GIs on the town. Observe. See what we could find out. Gossip spreads fast in the Yellow House, and if the word was put out that two strangers were looking for a fugitive, chances are that the fugitive would disappear into the ocean mist.

The mama-san of House Number 59 wasn’t much help. She was suspicious of us from the start, what with our coats and white shirts and ties, and since we hadn’t spent any money yet she was doing everything she could to show us her displeasure: turning on a water faucet in the alley out back, clanging pots and pans loudly just as Ernie and Suk-ja started to talk, clearing her throat of what must’ve been huge wads of phlegm whenever she tottered through the room.

Soon she’d tell us to either choose a girl and cough up some dough or get lost.

I pulled on my earlobe and Ernie understood the signal: time for us to move on. There were, after all, over forty houses of prostitution registered in the Yellow House area, all of them numbered and inspected regularly by the Inchon Municipal Health Department. We had a lot of ground to cover before the midnight curfew.

We said our goodbyes and were halfway down the cement stairway to the front door, when Suk-ja, wooden sandals clomping, came running down after us. From the harsh yellow light streaming in from outside, her slim figure was outlined in perfect symmetry beneath her flimsy pink negligee. She grabbed Ernie’s elbow.

“You CID, right?”

So much for cover. Ernie was amused. “What makes you say that?”

“When you come in,” Suk-ja said, “you look at shoes.”

As in most Korean homes, one is obliged by custom to take off one’s shoes before entering. So at the entranceway to House Number 59, there was a large assortment of footwear. Each pair either brightly colored or spangled with glitter and sequins. There was only one pair of men’s shoes, not mass-produced like GI shoes, but handmade. About the right size for a Korean man. Maybe the mama-san’s husband or live-in boyfriend. But no evidence of Greek sailors. Or GIs.

“Yes,” Ernie said. “So what if we did?”

“You checky checky shoes,” Suk-ja replied, “because you wanna know who’s inside House Number 59. And then when you talk to me, this guy..” She pointed at me. “He don’t look at girls. He stare out window.” Suk-ja squinted, mimicking my gaze. “Checky checky every man who walk by. Either he like boy or he CID. Gotta be.”