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.
I kept asking questions. The business girls stared, as if they didn’t understand.
Lieutenant Cheon growled at them. “ Iyagi hei. Bali iyagi hei!” Speak. Speak quickly!
He didn’t like loitering in a whorehouse for foreigners any longer than he had to. But his instructions made the girls grow more reticent. They were frightened now, like a pack of chipmunks cornered by a wolf.
I caught Ernie’s attention and, out of Lieutenant Cheon’s line of sight, rolled my eyes.
Ernie understood. Soon he was talking to Lieutenant Cheon, his arm around the man’s shoulder. Then he was walking him toward the courtyard gate. Together, they ducked outside.
10
The girls breathed a sigh of relief.
The mama-san stared after the two men, her eyes squinting into tight wrinkles. Her only reaction was to puff even more smoke up from the foul-smelling tambay.
“Ajjima,” I said. Aunt. “Who is this person?”
I pointed at the sketch of the smiling woman.
The old woman stared at the drawing. She continued to puff on her cigarette. Finally, she spoke.
“I knew her mother,” she said. “Long time ago… so many men that time, chase me and chase her mother. No woman that time look better than us.”
“You were jinhan chingu,” I said. Best friends.
She nodded. “Nei. Jinhan chingu. We all time together. All time take man, best man. Man with most money.” She pointed at the top of her shoulder. “How you say?”
“The man with the highest rank,” I answered.
“Yes.” She waved her cigarette in the air. “Always top honcho. That’s who we take. We catch him and we make pay.”
She clenched her hand into a bony fist.
When this woman was young, the Korean War had been in full swing, and the country was swarming with foreign military officers, all of them away from their wives, all with extra combat pay and few opportunities to spend it.
“Sajin issoyo?” I asked. Do you have photos?
She smiled at that. Then she barked rapid commands in Korean to one of the girls. This girl was well-trained. She hopped up and scurried to a storage room next to the hooches. While she was inside, the mama-san barked more directions, and after a few minutes, the girl brought out a brown cardboard box wrapped with pink string. She set it in front of the mama-san and backed away.
The mama-san stared at the box for a while, still puffing on her cigarette. Then, with trembling hands, she reached forward and untied the pink knot. When she opened the box, a small cloud of dust and dried moth’s wings puffed out. It smelled of ancient secrets. All buried now. Forgotten. Except for a few ugly things, of which this wicked old woman proceeded to speak.
The Uichon mama-san told me that about three months ago, the smiling woman had come to her looking for a job.
“Her mama die long time ago,” she said. “Nowhere to go.”
“How old was she when her mother died?”
“Fourteen, fifteen.”
“How old is she now?”
The mama-san shrugged. “Nineteen. Maybe twenty.”
What had she done all those years? How had she survived? I shoved the questions out of my mind, because worrying wouldn’t help me put a stop to further killing.
“What about her mother’s family?” I asked. “After her mother died, didn’t they help?”
“Family no see her mother many years. Mother yang kalbo.” Yang kalbo, a prostitute for foreigners. “They no wanna talk.”
“And her father’s family?”
The mama-san laughed. The laughter gave way to coughing, and then wheezing, as she tried to regain her breath through the cloud of cigarette smoke.
“Her daddy GI,” she said. “Maybe meet her mama during Korean War. He long time go.”
Long time go. That was the story for tens of thousands of foreign soldiers during and after the Korean War, most of them American. They fathered children, sometimes they even took care of them for a while, and then they left. Never to return. Never to do so much as send a Christmas card to their abandoned children. Of course, many Amerasian children were adopted, through the good offices of charitable organizations such as the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. But not all. A percentage of these Korean mothers, for one reason or another, did not put their children up for adoption.
Now, twenty years after the end of the Korean War, more and more Amerasians were seen around Seoul. Usually working menial jobs: hauling bricks, digging ditches, delivering truckloads of charcoal briquettes to homes and businesses. They stood out in a crowd of Koreans because of their unusual body shapes or their long noses or their odd hair: either stringy light brown, or black and heavily curled.
In school, few Amerasian children made it beyond the sixth grade. By definition, they came from poor families who couldn’t afford the tuition to go higher. More importantly, Amerasian children were taunted brutally in school, for their racial difference and for the circumstances of their birth.
There were increasing numbers of Amerasians these days in the brothels. Wealthy Korean men and Japanese tourists liked them. So did American GIs. The girls, at least the better looking ones, were making money.
When the Uichon mama-san took the smiling woman under her wing, there’d been only one job opportunity available to her.
“She already know how to do,” the mama-san told me.
She exhaled and a puff of smoke passed through the gaps in her black-edged teeth. “Before, her mama’s boyfriend teach her.”
“Her mother’s boyfriend?” I was incredulous.
“Yeah. Some GI.”
“Didn’t her mother try to stop it?”
“How? They need money. If boyfriend run away, no money.”
My stomach churned but I picked up the sketch of the smiling woman anyway. I thought about her that night, sitting across from me at the cocktail table in the King Club in Itaewon. I remembered how she’d never stopped smiling. No matter what she said, or what I said, her smile remained constant. Eager to please. Offering no offense. Offering no resistance.
How could men do such things?
Roughly, I shoved the question out of my mind. Not for me to figure. I’m a cop. My job is to catch bad guys. Quickly, before my imagination conjured more pictures of grief, I willed myself to recall the murder scene in Songtan, the blood smeared on the floor, the broken antiques. And I thought of the now-deceased Han Ok-hi, back when she’d been in a coma under an oxygen tent in that hospital near the Yellow Sea.
Better to think about the victims.
The smiling woman I’d think about later.
The Uichon mama-san barked roughly at her girls, telling one of them to break a pile of dried sticks, another to start a fire in the kitchen. They would eat this morning, not well, but something to fill the belly: rice gruel and dried turnip. More than some people.
Ernie and Lieutenant Cheon were still outside somewhere, Ernie keeping the Commander of the Uichon Police Station busy to give me a chance to coax this old woman to talk candidly.
She called one of her girls over and told her to sit on my lap. The girl’s face was pockmarked, but she was buxom and she giggled and kissed my neck. Her age? Eighteen if she was lucky. I knew what the mama-san wanted to do. She wanted to compromise me. Make me just another of her customers. Gently, I pushed the girl off my lap. With a full-lipped pout, she stared sullenly, then marched off.