The Door to Bitterness (13 page)

“I’ll bet,” Ernie said. “How long has he been gone?”

“Ask mama-san. She knows.”

The old woman and her girls slid back even further into the grass. I told her in Korean to stay right where she was.

“What do you mean?” Ernie asked Taggard.

“Bolt was the first one out here.”

“Bolt?”

“Yeah. That’s what we called Boltworks. Every time we were in the field, he’d find mama-san and her girls. Had a nose for pussy until he smelled the wrong kind.”

Ernie shoved the tip of the .45 back toward his nose. “Go on,” he said.

On the other side of the wall of grass, I noticed some movement of lights. Probably just the perimeter guards.

“Why you want me to tell you?” Taggard said. “Ask mama-san.”

“I’m asking you,” Ernie replied.

Taggard sighed. A gentleman, hugely inconvenienced.

“Boltworks came out here for one particular girl.”

“Pretty?”

“Better than these pug-nosed bitches. Boltworks was greedy. Kept her all to himself, alone, way over there in the grass all night.”

Taggard pointed vaguely into the distance.

“Didn’t Boltworks have guard duty?”

“He didn’t mess with that shit. Told somebody else to pull it for him.”

“Paid them?”

“Hell no. Boltworks was crazy. Guys’d pull his guard duty just so he wouldn’t mess with them. Not me though.

I wasn’t afraid of him.”

“Tell me about the girl.”

“He used to take her every time we came out to Nightmare Range. Give mama-san here some tambay or something.” Cigarettes. “And then one night we heard a lot of noise. Not screaming or crying or anything like that, but fighting. A couple of the other guys went over, and they found the girl bloodied up. She was too pretty, almost blonde, you know. She crazy though. Still smiling. That big smile of hers she always had no matter what.”

I felt dizzy for a moment. The smiling woman, the one who’d sat at a table with me in the King Club in Itaewon, the woman who’d drugged me, the woman who’d escorted the dark GI onto the train at Inchon Station—that’s who he was talking about.

“So what happened to Boltworks?” Ernie asked.

“Mama-san here wanted more money, for the blonde girl’s hospital bills and shit like that, but Boltworks told her to go screw herself. Then she took her girls and left and the next time we came out to Nightmare Range, she and her little bitches weren’t out here. Everybody was pissed, but nobody said nothing to Boltworks.”

“Too scared?”

“They were. Not me.”

“And that’s it?” Ernie said.

“I told you, ask the mama-san.”

“I’m asking you.”

Taggard shrugged. “You going to turn me in, or what?”

“Depending,” Ernie said. “Talk.”

“So we come back to Nightmare Range and suddenly mama-san’s back, with new girls and everything, and the blonde girl, she back, smiling as usual and she takes Boltworks by the hand and leads him out into the high grass and . . . ”

As if a bolt of lightning had struck, the world was suddenly full of light. I covered my eyes, cursing myself for not staying alert.

“Freeze!” a voice shouted.

Shading my eyes from the glare of a half-dozen beams of light, I could still make out dark shadows standing in front of us. A few of them held long, dark objects. Rifles.

Ernie lifted his .45 straight up in the air.

“Set it down, mister,” a voice said. “Slow and easy.”

He did.

S
omething poked me in the arm.

With an effort, I opened my eyes. Something was pressing against my hip, my elbow and shoulder, and my neck was twisted at an awkward angle.

I looked up to find a stern-faced Korean man glaring at me. Wearing khaki. I sat upright.

Where was I?

Then I remembered. We were in the police station in the village of Uichon. Was I locked up? No. This was the police station lobby, in front of the desk sergeant’s counter. Both Ernie and I had passed out on the wooden benches against the front wall. There were no hotels in Uichon; not even a yoguan, a Korean inn. So the local KNPs had allowed us to sleep here rather than in our open-topped jeep.

Ernie sat up and rubbed his eyes. The Korean cop stared, making sure we were awake. He was a slightly cross-eyed young man and the dull curiosity in his eyes made me understand how a gorilla in a cage at the zoo must feel when being stared at by tourists. The young cop turned and walked back behind the partition, where his desk overlooked the public entrance. Cold air poured in through open doors. Outside, the barest glimmer of gray appeared at the edges of a dark sky.

“I feel like shit,” Ernie said.

“Don’t ask me how you look.”

Last night, while we were busy interviewing Private Taggard in the tall grass, the perimeter guards around the Charley Battery encampment had noticed something amiss. They’d alerted their commander, one Captain Floyd Lewis, and he’d organized a detail of men and surrounded us before we knew what was happening. After taking Ernie’s .45, Lewis marched us back inside the Charley Battery area and sat us down on folding stools inside the ten-man tent that served as temporary Command Post.

I tried to tell him that the business girls outside the wire were getting away, but all he said was, “What business girls?”

Typically, he pretended he hadn’t seen the women, and he also pretended that he didn’t know what was going on outside his concertina wire. The brass monkey act: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. The road to advancement in the United States Army. Captain Lewis was much more concerned with the fact that Ernie had pulled a gun on one of his soldiers.

We showed him our identification and told him why we were here. When Ernie mentioned General Armbrewster’s name, Captain Lewis fired up his communications equipment. After a few minutes, he received confirmation via radio that he was to provide us with full cooperation. Butt first, Lewis handed Ernie his gun back.

After slipping the .45 into his shoulder holster, Ernie pulled out the three sketches and laid them on the wooden field table.

Taggard flinched. “What the hell did he do?”

Instead of answering, Ernie said, “You know him?”

“That’s Bolt.”

Taggard pointed at the sketch of the man we’d been calling “the Caucasian GI.” We now had a name to go with the face: Private First Class Rodney K. Boltworks, absent without leave from Charley Battery, 2nd of the 17th Field Artillery.

“How about her?” Ernie asked Taggard studied the sketch of the smiling woman.

“She looks a little more cleaned up now,” he said. “But that’s her. The blond bitch who used to work outside the wire.”

“She’d been one of them?” Ernie asked.

“Yeah,” Taggard answered. “Same crew. Same mama-san. Everything.”

“What happened to her?”

Taggard shook his head slowly. “Bolt liked her. Used to hog her, matter of fact, like I was telling you. Not give the rest of us a shot. Got so bad he started beating on her when she complained about not making enough money. Then one night a couple months ago, he took her out in the bushes, and while he was out there, somebody started beating on him.”

Taggard grinned at the memory. One of his front teeth was missing.

“Who?” I asked.

“Don’t know. But Bolt was bruised up pretty bad. Must’ve been a good fight. Wouldn’t tell us who did it to him.”

“And the girl?”

“She disappeared. Later that night, so did Bolt.”

Captain Lewis stood with his arms crossed, rocking on his heels, not liking this testimony at all. He was a tall, lean man with a short crew cut.

“How about it, Captain?” Ernie asked. “Is that when Rodney Boltworks disappeared?”

“Almost two months ago. July seventeenth,” he said. “While we were camped in this area. Haven’t seen him since.”

I spoke to Taggard. “So Boltworks goes out in the bush with this business girl. He gets in a fight with somebody who wastes him pretty bad. He limps back to the encampment and, later that night, he disappears?”

“Exactly what happened.”

“Why?” I said.

Taggard grinned again.

“Why?” Taggard repeated. “I don’t know for sure, but I think he liked it.”

“Liked what?”

Taggard’s grin grew wider. “I think he liked the ass-kicking he got.”

Ernie and I glanced at one another, not sure how to proceed on that line of questioning. Ernie pointed at the sketch of the dark man with the curly brown hair.

“Do you know who this guy is?”

Taggard shook his head. So did Captain Lewis.

I wasn’t surprised. The sketch was pretty vague. A dark man with an oval-shaped face and opaque sunglasses covering his eyes. He could’ve been a Korean, an American. He could’ve been a lot of things.

We prevailed on the good captain to bring every soldier in Charley Battery into the Command tent, one at a time. We paraded them past the three sketches. To a man, everyone knew Boltworks. A handful recognized the smiling woman, but not one recognized the dark man with the curly brown hair.

Afterwards, Ernie and I drove back to Uichon and asked the night duty officer at the Korean National Police Station to help us find the mama-san and the girls who worked the encampments in this area. The guy was adamant. He would give us no information, not without clearing it with his superiors. And since it was already past the midnight curfew, we would have to wait until morning to talk to the commander of the Uichon police station.

There was no place else to go, so Ernie and I sat down on the wooden benches and waited. And slept, until just before dawn.

Twenty minutes after we’d been woken up, the police station commander walked in. He was a young lieutenant named Cheon, rail thin, his khaki uniform pressed to a sharp crease. Most likely college educated. Probably a graduate of one of Korea’s military academies. As he listened to Ernie and me explain what we wanted, he was even less happy than Captain Lewis had been. No Korean cop likes to admit that, right under his nose, underage Korean girls were being herded out into the bushes to have sexual relations with American GIs. We asked him about the mama-san and where we could find her. She was the only lead we had to the smiling woman and the AWOL GI known as Bolt.

Cheon pondered our request, probably trying to decide if he should just kick us out of his office. But if he did that, we would go to our superiors, they would contact his superiors, and then the shit would roll downhill, soiling both him and his little fiefdom. Less embarrassing to deal with the situation here, at our level, cop to cop. I had already worked through this line of reasoning but I waited for Lieutenant Cheon to figure it out.

He did.

Cheon grabbed his cap and told the desk sergeant he’d be back in a few minutes. Ernie and I followed him out the front door of the Uichon police station.

The sky was brighter now, though still gray. The air was clean and sharp and cold, laced with the tang of growing things, sliced, and piled and festering in green sap.

Somehow, amidst all this open countryside, the people of Uichon had constructed a slum. Arable land in Korea has always been precious. Although the peninsula is fertile and blessed with many lush river valleys, it is also ridged with mountain ranges and spotted with hills. Land that can be used for farming is scarce and conserved fiercely, even here in Uichon. Living space for humans is packed into constricted areas. The main drag of Uichon, with the two-lane MSR running down the middle, only stretched a block and a half. Behind that front line of buildings, the alleys dropped off into muddy pedestrian lanes. We tromped through one that headed downhill.

Lieutenant Cheon led the way, stepping across mud puddles, hopping deftly from a flat stone to a leftover slat of lumber, keeping his highly polished boots as clean as possible. Ernie and I tried to follow in his footsteps, but we were less successful. Soon, my trousers were spattered with mud.

A man pushing a cart filled with hay trundled past us, smiling a gap-toothed smile and bowing to Lieutenant Cheon. It was still too early for children to be up and about and on their way to school, and many of the homes behind the rickety wooden outer walls were dark. Occasionally we heard the scratch of wooden matches or the clang of a metal pot or the growl of an old man rising, clearing his throat.

Lieutenant Cheon stopped at a wooden gate that had been stained black with grease. He pounded his fist and shouted, “Irrona-ya!” Wake up!

He pounded repeatedly, until the splintered gate opened a crack.

A woman wrapped in a heavy wool sweater, so frail she looked made of sticks, peered up at us. I recognized the eyes. The same phlegm-filled orbs we’d seen last night while crouching in the reeds outside the concertina wire that surrounded Charley Battery. Those eyes looked worried when she saw Ernie and me. More worried when she recognized Lieutenant Cheon.

She pulled the wooden gate open. We entered.

This hooch was more like what we were used to in Itaewon. Muddy courtyard with nothing but a rusty pump handle. A chicken coop with no chickens, and three hooches on a raised platform, the wood rough and rotting. One of the oil-papered sliding doors was open and inside lay a jumbled pile of blankets. One naked foot stuck out from beneath the coverings.

“Better tell them to wake up,” I told the old woman in Korean. “We’re going to talk to everybody.”

Ernie and I found two wooden stools. We sat on the flagstone edge of the courtyard beneath a tile-roofed overhang. The business girls came out, looking younger than ever. In the gray morning light, their naked faces showed pocks and blemishes invisible in moonlight. One of the girls had a milky eye, another a lame left foot. Gradually, this home for wayward girls was beginning to seem more like a hospice for the handicapped rather than a brothel for our brave American soldiers.

I took a deep breath and held it, trying to control myself. Pity doesn’t help in a murder investigation.

One by one the business girls studied the sketches, and one by one they stared at the mama-san in worried concern, unsure of what to do or say. By now, the old woman had slipped on pajama-like black trousers and a tunic and squatted in the courtyard beside us puffing on a stale-smelling Turtle Boat brand cigarette.