‘The guy in the alley.”
“No.”
“One of the pair who jumped Kimiko. Smoking a tambei, in the alley next to the Lucky Seven.”
“What a coincidence,” Ernie said.
“Yeah.”
The King Club was packed: wall to wall with GIs, business girls, and a few American civilians. Ernie and I shooed a couple of business girls away and took a small table back in the darkest corner. A couple of waitresses came by to serve us but I waved them off until Miss Oh came close and then I grabbed her wrist and pulled her over and ordered two OBs.
She was still pissed but, after all, we were two customers in desperate need of beer and, as a cocktail waitress, it was her sworn duty to provide.
When she brought the beers back I made her wait for the money. ‘The only reason I walked out of here with Kimiko last night,” I said, ”is because of my job.”
She glowered at me.
“We all have to do things we don’t want to do sometimes. And I’m sorry if I made you feel bad. Let me buy you a drink, any kind you want.”
The sullen expression of her beautiful face didn’t change but her eyebrows lifted just slightly. She flounced away.
“You’re in for it now,” Ernie said.
A couple of minutes later she brought back something big and red and full of tropical growth.
‘Two thousand, two hundred won,” she said. Over four bucks.
GIs at other tables and business girls gazed at us. Smirking. Imagine me, Itaewon’s number-one Cheap Charlie, buying something ridiculous like this. But it was the price I had to pay to restore Miss Oh’s face. I forked over the money.
She bounded away happily. In a few moments she came back, put her metal cocktail tray down on our table, lifted the big tumbler, and sipped her drink. I was certain there wasn’t an ounce of hooch in it. She put the drink back down, smiled at us, and then went back to her appointed rounds.
“Looks like you’re back on the sleeping mat, pal.”
“At what a price.”
Ernie shrugged. “A few bucks.”
“It’s not the money. It’s the self-respect. Nobody but a dildo spends money on those sweetheart drinks.”
“Maybe you can join Dildos Anonymous.”
“You’re a world of help, you are.”
Later, when Miss Oh had returned, I asked her about the man I had seen with Lindbaugh.
‘The man at the Sloe-eyed Lady Club,” I said. ”He has an office upstairs or maybe he lives upstairs. I think he’s the honcho.”
She ran her fingers over my cheeks. “A lot of hair? Black?”
“Yes.”
“Kwok,” she whispered, her voice soft, as if she were in church.
Before Miss Oh told me about Kwok, she made me promise not to repeat the story to anyone. “If anyone talks about his daddy,” she said, “he gets taaksan angry.”
She held her forefingers to her head, as if she had grown horns.
Although Kwok didn’t like the subject discussed in his presence, apparently the demimonde of Itaewon was well aware of his mixed ancestry. His mother was a farm woman, seeking refuge with the rest of the country during the Korean War, when she and her family had run into a small, bedraggled contingent of Turkish soldiers. They were part of the United Nations forces sent over to protect the South Koreans from the attacking Northern Communists and their Chinese comrades. Kwok’s mother was raped. The result was the man who was now trying to take control of all the rackets in Itaewon.
After the war, when things had settled back to some sort of normalcy, the young woman with the half- Turkish baby didn’t have a chance of finding a husband. War had left young men in short supply and the Koreans can be sticklers on little items like racial purity. But the family of the young mother loved her, and they pooled all their money for a dowry. A charcoal carrier, whose tuberculosis and gimpy leg had kept him out of the war, was finally persuaded to accept the dowry-and the young woman and her half-Turkish baby who came with it.
His name was Kwok and he turned out to be a drunk. A vicious one. He squandered the dowry on rice liquor, gambling, and fancy women, and began to vent his rage on the young boy who had taken his name. He beat the boy for imagined offenses and made him do most of the work at the yontan yard and carry the charcoal briquettes to customers throughout the rural village. The boy carried them on a wooden A-frame strapped to his little back. His mother tried to protect him as much as she could but it was of little use.
Young Kwok grew up tough and immensely strong. He worked and cursed and drank like a man before he was ten years old. His mother contracted tuberculosis from his stepfather and by the time her son was thirteen, she had succumbed.
By now the young man was approaching his full growth and the gimpy elder Kwok had begun to fear him. Fear made him drink more and made him more vicious until, it was said, the young Kwok simply strangled him.
The official police report said that the elder Kwok had drowned in his own vomit. The police figured the young man had suffered enough, but he had brought shame on the village so they forced him to leave. Young Kwok hopped on a train and went off to Seoul, to receive his higher education on the streets. He was sixteen.
His strong-arm exploits, unorthodox in Korea, were terrifying and soon brought him to the attention of racketeers. They considered having him killed. He was affecting their operations. Instead, they decided to discipline him, and keep him on a leash, like an attack dog awaiting his master’s bidding. He acquiesced but ended up turning on a few of his immediate masters, gradually working his way up to the top of the syndicate until he was in a position to make a grab for control of Itaewon.
I said, “Do you think he will eat all of Itaewon?”
Purple light caressed Miss Oh’s body. “Yes,” she said. “He will win.” She stared off into the din of the bar. “You should see his eyes.”
10
I had told Ernie to meet me at the coffee shop of the Hamilton Hotel at six in the morning. He hadn’t been happy about it since it was Saturday and we were supposed to be off, but he had promised. Now he was late.
It was already six-twenty and I was sipping my second cup of instant coffee. I’d already paid the teenage girl in the waitress uniform over four hundred won. Miss Pak Ok-suk was beginning to get expensive and I wondered if she was worth it. I could have been asleep back at the hooch with Miss Oh. Certainly Lindbaugh had crashed, probably with one of those girls at the gisaeng party.
Last night I had answered Ernie’s grumbling with a conjecture. For all we knew, the guy waiting in the alley for Kimiko had been planning on killing her, and early this morning, when we went to check her out, we might stumble on a corpse.
But I didn’t think so. I figured if these hoodlums had wanted to waste Kimiko, they could have done it long before this, and if they had planned to kill her last night I doubted that they would have waited around in alleys to do it.
They were following her. For the same reason they had roughed her up before and searched her hooch. The problem was that I didn’t know what that reason was.
But the harassment had stopped, it seemed, and somehow Kimiko had come into money. We’d seen evidence of that. She was enjoying herself, putting on the dog at the Lucky Seven, a place that had barred her in the past and had just had one of its employees killed-Miss Pak Ok-suk. Kimiko had to hustle every night just to keep afloat. Suddenly she was flush and coasting.
Perhaps the old crone who ran the club didn’t feel like tussling with Kimiko any longer and let her come and
