I shook my head negatively. “Actually,” I said, “I’m waiting for her to share them with me.”
Hilliard was incensed.
“What the hell you mean, coming over here at oh-dark-thirty in the morning and rousting me out of my crib?”
Actually, it wasn’t his crib. It was the room rented in a brothel behind the King Club by our favorite peg- legged business girl, Miss Kwon.
Ernie told Hilliard to go back into the hooch and keep quiet, which he did, grumbling to himself all the while. Wearing a cotton robe, Miss Kwon stepped into sandals and shuffled out onto the cement balcony where we could talk beneath the light of the moon. I pointed at her name on the nunnery’s list of orphans.
“Who are the others?” I said. “The women and the men.”
She started to cry. But after a few minutes, she started talking
It all made sense. Doc Yong was trying to keep Miss Kwon out of harm’s way so the actual killing of Horsehead and Water Doggy had been done by people, now grown, who had once been orphans on the Buddhist nun’s list. One man was a cab driver, the other a house painter. They were accompanied by a female chestnut vendor and two other women. Auntie Mee’s real name was also on the list of orphans. She had been one of the oldest of the children brought to the nunnery after the Itaewon Massacre and she’d been one of the first to leave. When Auntie Mee saw Doc Yong and the others return to Itaewon and take up jobs around town, she knew that something was up.
I finished questioning Miss Kwon. Then I told her what I suspected. She became hysterical. Hilliard rushed out of the room. Ernie held him back. I put my arm around Miss Kwon and whispered Korean in her ear. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s our secret.” Then I told her to return to her room.
“Please,” she said, grabbing my arm. “Think about them. When they were little children, they walk so far through snow. Mama and daddy dead. Think about that.”
“I will.”
Miss Kwon trudged slowly back into her hooch.
It was easy to see why the grown-up orphans of the Itaewon Massacre would want to take revenge on Horsehead and Water Doggy, and all of the Seven Dragons. Snake tried to send a warning to those unknown killers by murdering Auntie Mee. He ordered Aunite Mee’s murder be without bloodshed so she was strangled with a silk rope.
Who had murdered Two Bellies? At first I’d thought it was the remaining Seven Dragons. But that idea troubled me. Snake and his brethren could have frightened Two Bellies into leaving town. That would have been much safer than inviting a murder investigation.
The Seven Dragons were hoping Ernie and I wouldn’t find the bones, that they’d remain undisturbed for many decades to come. I concluded that Two Bellies had been made an offer she couldn’t refuse, as insurance. She was to follow us, and if we actually found the bones, steal them and turn them over to Snake. Miss Kwon suspected Two Bellies so she’d stayed close to her; pretended to help Two Bellies in return for a 10 percent cut of the reward the Seven Dragons were offering for the bones.
When, against all odds, Ernie and I did find the bones, Two Bellies was right behind us. And so was the resourceful Miss Kwon. When Two Bellies climbed inside the makeshift ossuarium and piled all the bones into a cardboard box, Miss Kwon knew that Two Bellies would turn the bones over to the Seven Dragons. She knew that when Ernie and I returned we would find an empty crypt and she also knew that the truth about the murder of Mori Di, and therefore the truth about the murder of her parents in the Itaewon Massacre, would never be revealed. This was more than she could bear. While Two Bellies was preoccupied with gathering the bones, Miss Kwon reached in, grabbed a clump of Two Bellies’ hair, and cleanly sliced her throat.
The move was one she’d learned when she was sent to work for the butcher family in the valley beneath the Temple of Constant Truth. She had used a hooked blade attached to a wooden handle, almost as sharp as a scalpel, the one she’d pilfered from her friends at the butcher shop counter in the Itaewon Market, the same type of blade that is used to slaughter hogs.
Conveniently, Two Bellies had already packed the bones into a square white box so Miss Kwon picked it up, tied it with the black ribbon Two Bellies had provided, and transported the remains to Doc Yong’s clinic for safekeeping. Doc Yong couldn’t turn the bones over to me because if she did, then I would have suspected her, or possibly her little friend Miss Kwon, of having murdered Two Bellies. Doc Yong was holding onto the bones, waiting for a more opportune time to allow them, somehow, to be brought to light.
Later that evening, filled with remorse for what she’d done, Miss Kwon leapt off the roof of the King Club. But, her survival instinct kept her alive and, for the most part, whole.
Then Horsehead and Water Doggy had been killed. Shortly thereafter, Doc Yong was kidnapped by Snake.
Doc Yong lay still.
Awake, but unwilling to talk to me. She was smart enough to know that I thought I’d figured it all out. We were holed up in a small room in a rundown tourist hotel on the eastern outskirts of Seoul in a district known as Kui-dong. In order to get her to talk, drastic measures were in order. I switched on the small lamp on the nightstand. Then I pulled out the photograph the nun at the Temple of Constant Truth had given to me and placed it beneath the glow of the green lamp.
“Is that her?”
“Yes.”
“She was beautiful.”
“Yes.”
The photo showed Moretti, in full uniform, standing with his arm around the tall, handsome Korean woman.
“My mom,” Doc Yong said. “She always told me, Mori Di, he good man. He come visit us, always bring nice things. Food, cooking oil, money for charcoal. He played with me, even helped me study English. When he was alive, everything good.”
We lay like that for a long time, both of us staring at the photograph. She didn’t cry, neither did I.
“It must’ve been rough for you when you went to the orphanage,” I said.
She nodded slowly. and then started to speak. “When she was old enough, Miss Kwon was sent to a butcher family to learn a trade. When there wasn’t enough work to do, the family would send her back. They didn’t want to feed her unless she could earn money for them. The nuns always took her back and fed her. Often, I watched over her. She was so little, so helpless, so lost. She wanted so much for the butcher family to accept her but they were poor and I suppose, they were cold-hearted. They never accepted Miss Kwon.”
I waited for Doc Yong to compose herself. Then I said, “When Auntie Mee left the nunnery, she relied on skills she’d learned from her mother and she became a fortune teller, famous and rich. But Miss Kwon didn’t have any such skill so she did what she had to do.” I paused for a moment, letting my words sink in. “But what about you? How did you become a doctor?”
Doc Yong smiled at the question but kept staring at the tattered wallpaper of the little room. From the faraway look on her face, the dingy furnishings might as well have been the stars of the Milky Way. Finally, she spoke.
“I did well in school,” she replied. “The nuns saw that I had the ability to learn so they scraped together the money to send me to middle school. Still, high school would’ve been out of reach. But someone stepped in to help.”
“Who? Certainly not the Seven Dragons?”
“No. Not them. Of course not. I doubt that they even knew we existed. It was someone else, someone who knew my mother.”
“A friend of Moretti’s?”
“No. From before that time. From when my father was alive. From when we lived in North Korea.”
After that, she didn’t want to talk anymore. I let her be.
As we lay there, I wondered what I was going to do. So far, nobody in law enforcement had put all this together except me and Ernie, and Ernie would go along with whatever I decided. Finally, I asked Doc Yong.
“Why did you start?”
“Start what?”
