Unusual in Korea. For an unmarried woman to be successful enough to own a home and then, more unusual, to be proud of her unmarried status. Whoever lived here-or had lived here-was a person who didn’t give a damn what other people thought.
I ducked through the small doorway.
Opulence. That’s the word that jumped to my mind.
Usually-at least in Itaewon-these hooches behind big walls are not much to shout about. Wood or brick tile-roofed buildings, single story, with a dusty courtyard containing a chicken coop and an outside cement byonso, usually stenciled with the letters “W.C.”
But this place was something else.
The garden was well tended with neatly raked gravel, spotted with those stunted trees you see in Japanese travelogues, and in the center, a gurgling, stone-lined fountain. Golden fins splashed through water running blue. Arrayed along the walls, a row of three-foot-high earthenware jars stood at attention, freshly dusted, probably containing a bounty of cabbage and turnip and cucumber kimchee.
The raised floor of the hooch itself was freshly varnished and immaculately clean. To the left, a door opened into a large storeroom. The overhead bulb was switched on, splashing artificial light onto piles of cardboard boxes emblazoned with English and Japanese lettering. Each box touted the contents within: color TV sets, stereo components, electric fans, radios, tape recorders. Whoever lived here was running her own electronics shop. I stepped closer and inspected the boxes. None bore a Republic of Korea customs stamp.
Captain Noh and the other cops slipped off their shoes and stepped up onto the raised floor. As Ernie and I followed, the first thing I noticed was the odor of something burnt. Neither Captain Noh nor Ernie nor the other cops paid any attention to the smell, but I paused and inhaled deeply. The aroma was faint but unmistakable. Something cooked. Overcooked. Something natural, some sort of wood, or maybe an herb. Was it pine? I compared the odor swirling about me to the cloying sweetness of scented air freshener. This was much harsher. Sizzled sap. Nothing artificial about it.
The sliding doors leading to the main living room had been pulled open. Handle-level, the oil-paper in the latticework design was ripped open. Captain Noh pointed at the tear with his ballpoint pen.
“Somebody climb wall, break in here.”
Ernie knelt and examined the inner hasp. “Busted,” he said.
“Yes,” Captain Noh replied. “But look. No scratch.”
The metal hasp was still in pristine condition, but the wood around the hasp had been splintered inward.
“He didn’t use a tool,” Ernie said.
“Right. He just push.” Captain Noh mimicked the action of shoving the sliding door inward.
“That would’ve made a lot of noise,” Ernie said.
“Yes. Lot of noise.”
“So the people inside, they must’ve woken up.”
“Yes.” Captain Noh nodded. “Only one person inside. Woman. She wake up. She fight.”
In Korea, the custom was that if a burglar broke into a home, and the home was empty, he had every right to take whatever he wanted. After all, if the owner valued those possessions, he would’ve left someone home to guard them. If, however, someone inside the home made their presence known-by coughing or banging on doors, or otherwise preparing to confront the burglar-the burglar was obliged, by tradition, to withdraw. If the burglar was in the process of withdrawing and the homeowner chased and beat him, the homeowner could be charged with assault. On the other hand, if the burglar refused to withdraw when he discovered that someone was in the home, he was compounding his crime, and the punishment he could expect would increase by an order of magnitude.
This burglar was one of those Westernized criminals Captain Noh found so repugnant. The homeowner had risen, confronted him, and he had refused to withdraw. To say the least.
We followed Captain Noh deeper into the hooch.
The next room was immaculate. Delicate celadon vases on shelves, low mother-of-pearl cabinets displaying books and handcrafted artifacts that looked like antiques. Clocks, dolls in glass cases, brass incense burners, hand-painted porcelain dishware. Fragile works of art that wouldn’t last five minutes in the barracks I lived in. But nothing had been disturbed.
We walked down a short hallway.
The odor of burnt pine faded slightly. The source was behind me now, on the far side of the house. Possibly in the kitchen.
When we reached the end of the hallway, Captain Noh paused at a closed sliding door. He reached into his coat pocket, and the other two Korean cops did the same. They pulled out gauze face masks and slipped them over their noses and mouths. Captain Noh pulled out two more masks and handed one each to Ernie and me. Without comment, Ernie slipped his on. So did I.
Then Captain Noh passed out sets of white cotton gloves. When all our hands and fingers were properly attired, he slid back the oil-papered door.
The stench hit me first. Blood. I knew what it was because I’d smelled it before. There must’ve been a lot of it to put out such a powerful odor.
Why hadn’t I smelled it in the hallway? Because the woodwork in this home was handcrafted and everything, including the runners on the sliding doors, were shaped and planed and sealed with meticulous care.
Who was this woman who lived in such finery? Who owned so many precious things? And what did she have to do with the woman who stole my. 45 and my badge and the men who robbed the Olympos Casino in Inchon? Was she just a random victim, or was there some method to this madness?
No sense thinking about those things now. Time to observe, gather facts. There’d be time to sort them out later.
Captain Noh switched on a tinted glass lamp, suffusing the room in a purple glow.
Opulence again. An armoire, of the same expensive mother-of-pearl design. A low dressing table. No bed, just another varnished wood slat floor: ondol, heated by steam running through stone ducts below. A thick down-filled mat had been bunched up and skewed away from the center of the floor. A silk-covered comforter, hand-embroidered with white cranes rising from green reeds, was wadded in a corner, smeared with blood.
Here, in this room, there was no neatness. Dozens of vases and bottles and vials of lotion and unguents and creams had been stepped on and smashed against walls and smeared on the floor, mingling with the jellylike coagulated blood.
“She fought,” Captain Noh said. “Before they took her body away, I look.” He held up his own hand and picked at the space beneath his fingernails. “How you say? Skin?”
“Flesh,” Ernie corrected. “Beneath her fingernails. She scratched him?”
Ernie clawed the air like a tomcat.
“Yes. She scratch. She punch too. And bite. Knuckles bruised. Very dark. Two tooth broken.” He opened his mouth and pointed at his incisors.
“She did a number on the guy,” Ernie said.
Captain Noh stared blankly.
“She hurt him,” Ernie said.
Captain Noh nodded. “Yes. She hurt him. And he hurt her.”
Meanwhile, the other two cops were kneeling and studying the broken bric-a-brac around the room.
Everything was still dusted with fingerprint powder, and Captain Noh went on to explain that in the hours they had been waiting for us, not only had the body been taken away, but his technicians had already collected bits of flesh and broken fingernails and body hair. All evidence had been rushed to Seoul for evaluation in the main KNP lab. Results would start trickling in tomorrow.