Ernie leaned next to me and poked his head outside, gazing at the narrow rock ledge that wound around the corner of the building.
“We’re going out there?”
“Watch your footing,” I said. “And hang onto the rocks along the wall.”
We heard voices and the pounding of footsteps behind us. Ernie glanced down at his. 45, and then out at the ledge again. “Okay,” he said. “You go first. I want a clear shot at those bastards if they come after us.”
“Right.”
I stepped through. The ledge was about two feet wide but seemed narrower once I was on it. Below, wild surf crashed into jagged rock, launching leaps of white foam that slapped onto my trousers and kept the ledge moist and slippery. Along the cliff wall, jagged outcroppings of rock were also slippery, but they provided reassuring handholds. I stepped along gingerly until there was enough space for Ernie to emerge from the door and close it behind him. Together, we sidled along the wall. The corner of the building was about twenty yards away. We were halfway there, when the door behind us popped open.
A man stuck his head out. One of the bodyguards. Ernie popped a round off at him, and started to teeter away from the cliff face. Holding onto a slippery chunk of granite, I grabbed the back of Ernie’s coat. He regained his balance and leaned against the rock wall.
The bodyguard peered cautiously at us.
“Move it!” Ernie shouted.
I did, stepping as quickly as I dared toward the corner which would shield us. We were nearly there when I heard grunting ahead.
I froze.
“What’s wrong, dammit?” Ernie yelled.
He looked past me and saw what I saw-another bodyguard. This one held a pistol pointed at us.
I crouched.
Ernie leaned around me and popped off a round at the man’s hand. He missed. The gunman pulled back behind the cover of the rock ledge.
Behind us, another thug stuck his head out of the fire escape door. Ernie leveled his pistol at him, and the man ducked back.
“We’re screwed,” Ernie said. “We can’t go forward, we can’t go back.”
“Yeah. You might be right.
“Does anybody know we’re here?” Ernie said.
“I didn’t call Riley. You?”
“No,” Ernie said. “So there probably won’t even be an investigation.”
“Probably not. They’ll just figure we deserted.”
“Maybe we should have. It would’ve been a lot more fun.”
I glanced down at the churning sea. When the waves rolled in, the water rose. It covered the jagged rocks. Ten yards out, the water was fairly deep.
“There’s one way,” I said.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m not.”
The arm with the pistol stuck out around the edge of the building again. I leaned back and Ernie fired across my chest. The hand retreated hastily.
“How many more rounds?” I said.
“Six,” Ernie panted.
“Save ‘em.”
“What for?”
“For later.”
With that, I took a deep breath, waited for a wave to crash into the rocks, and leapt off the edge of the Olympos Hotel and Casino into the waters of the Yellow Sea.
21
Ernie splashed in behind me. When I’d recovered from the initial shock of the cold, I swam straight out to sea. Past the surf, in waters that were relatively calm, we floated for what seemed like an hour but might’ve been only ten or fifteen minutes. On the ledge above, Yun Guang-min’s hoods shouted and pointed, but none of them had the nerve to dive in after us.
Fog rolled in, cutting off all sight of land. Ernie and I stuck together, but after a while, we thought we weren’t going to make it. Our body temperatures were lowering rapidly, and we were no longer sure of the way to shore. When a dark shape appeared out of the mist, we swam toward it, shouting.
A grizzled old Korean fisherman stood with his son in the stern of their small wooden craft. Handling a single oar, they pulled us aboard. After resting a few minutes and offering the old fisherman much thanks, he obligingly freighted us north, a mile beyond the sparkling lights of the City of Inchon. Still past the breakers, we thanked the fisherman and his son once again. Then we tied our soggy shoes around our necks and swam in. We waded onto a gravelly beach behind a line of warehouses and sloshed our way to a city street, where we waved down a cab driver who proved willing to accept extra money to take us to Seoul.
Still wet but glad to be back in Itaewon’s precincts, we went straight to the police station. I was anxious to relay my newfound information to Captain Kim. Inside the station, we were ushered quickly into his office.
The place reeked of fermented kimchee and stale cigarette smoke. Korean cigarettes have a peculiar odor, pungent and disagreeable, as if someone had let the tobacco leaves rot before bothering to pulverize them. Still, the odor cleansed my nostrils of crusted salt.
Wearing an immaculately pressed khaki uniform, the Commander of the Itaewon station first insisted that we take off all our clothes and ordered towels brought in. We dried and covered ourselves with the towels. Captain Kim further ordered our clothing taken to a nearby laundry to be dried and pressed. Meanwhile, Ernie and I sat on folding metal chairs, teeth chattering, trying to warm up.
I began to talk.
Kim listened patiently as I told him that the owner of the Olympos Casino had tried to have us killed. We had no jurisdiction in a Korean casino-we knew that. But when Captain Kim discovered that we’d been trespassing, and that no grievous harm had been done, he discounted the whole affair.
“Next time, tell me first,” he said.
There were no grounds to press charges. And Captain Kim wasn’t about to make accusations against a man as powerful as the owner without evidence any less convincing than two American bodies.
“Too bad we weren’t shot dead,” Ernie said.
I went on to the next subject. I explained to Captain Kim that Yun Guang-min and our killer-on-a-rampage were related, and that I expected Uncle Yun to be the next hit on the killer’s list.
When I was finished, I braced for follow-up questions, maybe some attempt to shoot holes in my conjectures. After all, Korean cops, like cops anywhere in the world, are reluctant to accuse the rich of wrongdoing of any kind. Instead of responding, positively or negatively, Captain Kim said only, “I show you.”
Ernie and I glanced at one another. When our clothes came back, we dressed and followed Captain Kim out of the station. He headed away from the nightclub district and trudged up clean walkways that led toward the fancy apartment buildings in an area of Seoul known as Hannam-dong.
We climbed higher and higher. Soggy leather squished beneath my feet.
Ernie leaned over and asked, “Where the hell’s he taking us?”
“I don’t know.” I wasn’t liking this one bit. A cold chill began to grow in the pit of my stomach.
Captain Kim hadn’t been impressed with my brilliant detective work, and he sure hadn’t been impressed with my theories about the Family Yun.
Dumplings.
Not the fried yakimandu I’d eaten with Ernie in the Seven Club, but a soft kind, kneaded from rice flour and steamed in a large pot. A kind that Captain Kim told me Koreans call songpyun.
“For Chusok,” Captain Kim explained-the autumn moon festival.
“When is it?” I said.
“Tomorrow.” He looked at me with disdain, as if I should’ve known.
He was right: I should’ve known. Chusok is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the eighth month by the lunar calendar. Therefore, it falls on a different day every year on the Western calendar. Still, I should’ve realized. But with all the goings on, I’d lost track. And besides, who could think with what was laid out in front of me?
She was so young. So beautiful in her hand-embroidered silk dress. Blue cranes rising from green reeds adorned a background of pure white. A purity that had been splashed with blood.
Dumplings, the songpyun, had been stuffed in her mouth. And then, or maybe before that, her throat had been cut.