Martin Limon: The Door to Bitterness

Her brother started to rouse himself.

“Pretty soon he wake up,” the smiling woman said. “He all the time wake up. Even big GI knock him down, my brother he tough. He all time wake up.”

The moon hovered behind her head, and her smile was as bright and broad as the red face of the lunar orb. But the storm clouds off the sea were on the move again. They rolled inland and started to blot out the moonlight. The darkness deepened, and more drops of rain splattered the mud.

“And then VD honcho come,” the smiling woman said. “What’s his name?”

“Fairbanks,” I said.

Ernie’s eyes darted, looking for escape, but even Ernie knew he couldn’t outrun a bullet.

“Yes, Fairbanks,” the smiling woman said. “He come. Say my mother have TB. She say ‘bullshit.’ We cry, we scream, we punch but they take her anyway. Where? We don’t know. Me and brother, we don’t know.”

Her smile was broader than ever now. So broad that I honestly believed the flesh on her face might rip open.

“So me and my brother,” she said, “we run away from, how you say? Koai-won?”

“Orphanage,” I said.

“Yeah. We live on streets of Seoul. My brother, he run fast. Sometimes he see old people with money, he grab money and run. Or he grab food and run away, but sometimes KNP catch, lock him up, but next day let him go. I wait outside, then we together again. Later,” she said, “I start make money again the way my mother’s boyfriend teach me.”

At her feet, her brother groaned. He raised his head from the mud, shook it, looked around, and sprang to his feet, flinging loose wire from his wrist. Without speaking, his sister gave him the pistol. He grabbed it and aimed it at me and then Ernie.

“Kei sikkya,” he spat. Born of dogs.

The smiling woman said something to him in rapid Korean. He backed up a step.

“Here,” she said, pointing at the burial mound. “Me and brother get money and we pay at temple for this place to put my mother.” That explained why she no longer had the white box wrapped in black ribbon. “Bald men come and say a lot of thing I no can understand and they light fire and wave, what you call?”

“Incense,” I said.

“Yes. Incense. And they do lot of pray and we put mother in ground.”

Then she stepped away and I could see what rested against the side of the burial mound. A photograph. I strained to make it out. The rain came down harder.

“My mother,” the woman said. “She was beautiful, right? All GI likey.” Her smile was a mad leer.

Her brother growled. She turned to him. “Anyway, we do now.”

“Do what?” Ernie said.

“You,” she pointed at Ernie with the barrel of the. 45. “You lie down here. In mud.”

She pointed at the side of the burial mound, near her brother, just a few feet from the dead body of Mr. Yun. The brother waved his. 45 also, and Ernie complied, lying down face first at the edge of the mound.

“You,” she said. “You Sueno, you face my mother.”

She knew my name. I was surprised at that. I shouldn’t have been. These two had done their homework. Why did they want me and Ernie? Maybe because Ernie was fair, like the smiling woman, and I was dark, like her brother. We were stand-ins in this ceremony we were about to perform for the fathers they’d never known. That was what she’d meant in the back alleys of Itaewon when she told me she had a job for me.

I shuffled sideways until I was standing before the photograph.

“Now,” she snarled. “You do seibei.”

She wanted me to lower myself to my knees and bow to her mother. I hesitated, thinking about it.

“Now!” she screamed, her face angry, but smiling. When I still didn’t move, her brother jacked a round into the chamber, moving a bullet inches closer to Ernie’s head.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

She chanted some singsong Korean. Not the ancient ritualistic incantations I had heard earlier at Suk-ja’s brother’s house. Simpler words. Words I could understand.

“This man, this GI, pays homage to you, Mother, for all the bad things he did to you.”

I knelt, but didn’t bow my head to the ground.

“He looks like my brother’s father,” she said. “That’s why we have chosen him to take his place in sacrificing to you.”

I glanced at Ernie. His eyes were wide with fear. I nodded my head slightly.

“Bow!” the woman shouted.

“The hell he will,” Ernie said.

“Sikkya,” the brother hissed, and stepped closer to him.

“You’re both nuts,” Ernie continued. “You understand?

Dingy dingy.”

It was luck, nothing more. I rose to a kneeling position and moved at the brother, preoccupied with Ernie. I knew Ernie would lunge at the woman. Not a move we’d rehearsed. But in general, if you make a play for someone who has the drop on you, go for the opposite person. Counter block, as they say in football. You go for the one guarding your partner, your partner goes for the one guarding you.

We had to try something. When she’d said sacrifice, both Ernie and I knew it was all over. These two were crazy beyond redemption. And they were desperate. They knew the KNPs would catch them soon enough, so there was no bargaining with them.

They’d be executed for their crimes. Hanged. Their fate was beyond doubt and they knew it, but if they could take revenge on all the GIs who’d abused them and their mom over the years, now was their opportunity.

On Chusok, no less.

Kong swiveled. I was dead. Just as that reality was sinking in, Ernie lunged toward the woman.

But as he did so, the world exploded into light. Lightning.

I dove to my right, landed on my knees, leapt back to my feet. I plowed into the brother and he was on the ground again. He went down easy; he’d been hurt the first time. I had the. 45.

Ernie clutched the woman from behind, a forearm around her neck.

At the bottom of the hill, gears churned. Around a bend, headlights flashed. The lights turned toward us, a line of them. As the beam from one pair of headlights flashed on the vehicle in front of them, I could read the stenciled hangul.

Kyongchal, it said. Korean National Police.

The vehicles formed a line at the bottom of the hill, and uniformed officers climbed out. Behind them, leaping out of a taxi was Suk-ja. My relief at seeing her was quickly overcome by the men who climbed out of the cab with her. The two missing bodyguards of the late Mr. Yun.

Suk-ja had been working for them all along. She’d been sent to follow my investigation, hoping to get a line on the whereabouts of the smiling woman and her brother, so Mr. Yun’s thugs could put an end to them.

Where else would she have found the money to buy her freedom from the Yellow House? Only from the casino owner, Mr. Yun. And the phone call she’d made earlier this evening from Itaewon. To Yun’s thugs.

While Ernie and I searched for the smiling woman and her brother, what else had Yun’s minions done? They’d murdered Haggler Lee’s serving girl. She hadn’t been shot with my. 45. Her throat had been cut. Nothing like the other killings. Probably the brother had bought the dumplings, delivered them to Haggler Lee’s apartment, and, pretending to be a delivery boy, gained entry. Why kill the serving girl? He hadn’t. He’d waited there with her, holding her hostage. Hoping for Haggler Lee’s return so he could have Lee perform his ceremony. And then he would have been ritualistically murdered like all the others. But he’d been interrupted. Suk-ja had earlier tipped off Mr. Yun’s thugs that Ernie and I thought Haggler Lee would be the next victim. Yun’s thugs barged in. But the brother ran to the balcony and escaped down the vine-covered trellis. That’s why the window was broken outwards and the vines had been pulled down to the ground. The man they sought had vanished. Yun’s bodyguards hoped the serving girl knew something. They tortured her with burning cigarettes. Nothing. So they killed her.