“Smart move,” Ernie said. “A dark man alone would blend in with the Koreans easier.”
“And the other guy?”
“If he had taken that cab to Seoul, he would’ve never made it past the road blocks.”
“So he’s still here?”
“Maybe.”
“If you were a GI, hot, holed up in Inchon, where would you hide?”
“Some place where money talks,” Ernie said, “and some place where there are plenty of foreigners and where people don’t read the newspapers much.”
There was only one place in Inchon that met that description. We both thought of it at the same time: The Yellow House.
The Yellow House was not a house. It was an area near the main entrance to the Port of Inchon set aside specifically for the entertainment of foreign sailors. Jammed with brothels, the entire fifteen-or twenty-acre area was as densely packed as the Casbah.
“Won’t the KNPs check it out?” I asked.
“When they have time,” Ernie said, “but not now, they’re overextended. Besides, it would take a small army to search every little hovel in every little hooch in the Yellow House.”
“We’re a small army.”
“That we are.”
Ernie started up the jeep, backed away from the United Seaman’s Service Club, and gunned the engine hard, swerving on dirty pavement, heading south toward what was perhaps the most notorious den of iniquity in the Far East: the Yellow House.
Last spring, on a bright sunny day, Ernie and I had cruised in his open-topped jeep through the narrow lanes of the Yellow House. The two-and three-story brothels loomed on either side, and since it was late morning, the girls were out and about, not sitting in lingerie behind brightly lit display windows, as they were required to do at night. Instead they wore their regular clothes: house dresses, blue jeans, tight-fitting T-shirts. There were no foreign sailors about, so they were outside, their black hair tied up and held by silver clasps, munching on snacks or playing badminton or gossiping with their neighbors. Some of them held plastic pans propped against their hips, filled with soap and shampoo and washcloths, sauntering on their way to the public bathhouse. When Ernie and I approached, driving slowly through the narrow lanes in the jeep, they shouted, and more of them swarmed out of the brothels, and then they were all headed toward us like young girls on their way to a rock concert.
Quickly, our jeep was surrounded. Ernie shifted into low gear and barely crept forward. All the girls laughed and reached into the open-topped jeep and some pinched us and then squealed when we slapped their hands away. Others down the lane gazed out of their second-and third-story windows, waving and yelling at us.
You’d think they’d be sick of men, in their line of work. But to them young GIs are like saviors. Their usual clientele is surly merchant marines, most from Greece or the Philippines or Indonesia or other countries just as poor as Korea. They pinch every penny and pinch more than that. American GIs are the only men who have something in common with the girls who work the Yellow House: they’re young, naive, caught in a world not of their own choosing, and quickly finding out, sometimes painfully, what life’s struggle is about. GIs are for the most part clean and healthy, and they have more disposable income than the merchant marines. Most important of all, some GIs are young enough and foolish enough that they just might take one of the Yellow House girls away from all this. It’s happened before, plenty of times, and that is why, on that fine spring day, the fresh round faces of the young whores of the Yellow House were so playful when they saw Ernie and me. And so full of hope.
This time, Ernie parked the jeep two blocks away from the Yellow House, and we approached on foot. Ernie checked the. 45 under his coat. Without thinking, I checked mine and was momentarily shocked to find my shoulder holster empty. Then I remembered. He had it, the dark thief.
Did Ernie and I have a plan? Not exactly. We’d enter the Yellow House as we normally did, sniff around, pretend to be shopping for a girl. Try not to raise any alarms. Try not to scare away the thief. We wouldn’t Bogart our way into the Yellow House like twenty or thirty KNPs would. And while we were shopping for girls, we’d look for anything unusual. Anything that might give us a lead.
Night had lain its purple blanket over the City of Inchon. As Ernie and I navigated the cobbled pedestrian lanes, yellow street lamps buzzed nervous greetings. Ahead, sandwiched between a row of brick buildings, loomed the dark opening to one of the many narrow alleys leading into the Yellow House. Ernie flashed me a thumbs-up, turned, and entered the gloom.
I followed.
A cold mist from the Yellow Sea began to roll into the city. Soon, we were wading through a blanket of fog. The walls seemed to lean forward, closing in around us.
I was still trying to figure if the crooks who robbed the Olympos Casino bought my badge and gun on the black market, or if they were somehow in on the theft of those items from the beginning.
As far as I knew, and as far as the Korean National Police knew, there was no black market in guns in Korea. The penalty was too harsh. Death, as a matter of fact. The only people daring enough to traffic in weaponry and explosives were the highly trained Communist agents who infiltrate into the south from North Korea. But that’s a military operation, conceived and controlled by the People’s Army in Pyongyang, and there’s no way a couple of miscreant GIs could’ve bought my gun and my badge from North Korean agents.
More probably, they’d obtained the. 45 and the badge from the smiling woman herself. But what’s the chance that a poor, half-caste prostitute would just happen to know two guys who were in the market for a pistol and were daring enough to rob the Olympos Casino? It was unlikely that she’d lured me into an alley, convinced some guys to bop me over the head and help her steal my gun and badge, and then- within a couple of days-just happened to find two buyers for those items who just happened to be planning a robbery.
More likely, the two thieves who robbed the Olympos Casino and shot Miss Han Ok-hi had been in cahoots with the smiling woman from the beginning. From the moment one of them came up with the evil idea until she drugged my glass of beer and lured me into that cold Itaewon alley, she’d been part of a team. A team with a plan.
I’d been targeted.
Would they have bopped Ernie over the head if they’d been given the chance?
Probably. But, as usual, Ernie was surrounded that night by a bevy of women. The smiling woman hadn’t bothered competing with that. Instead, she’d turned her star power on me. The lone and drunken and morose George Sueno. The perfect target for a beautiful blonde Asian woman with blue eyes and a smile that advertised madness.
And I’d walked right into her trap, like the fool that I am.
She said her name was Suk-ja.
She sat on a plump red cushion, wearing see-through pink silk panties and a frilly silk upper garment of the same material. Her face was overly made-up, but the goop couldn’t hide her ready smile and curious expression. While listening to Ernie talk, she alternately wrinkled her brow and contorted the lines around her full-lipped grin, until she looked like a white-faced mime performing in front of a close-up camera. But she wasn’t mugging for laughs; she was genuinely interested in what Ernie had to say and what he and I were doing here in House Number 59 in a narrow alley about as close to smack dab in the middle of the Yellow House area as it was possible to get. So far, House Number 59 was the sixth brothel we’d reconnoitered.
“You want girl?” Suk-ja asked.
“Maybe,” Ernie replied. “First we checky checky every woman.”
Ernie waved his hand to indicate the entire expanse of the neighborhood known as the Yellow House.
“You dingy dingy?” Suk-ja asked, circling her forefinger around her ear. “Too many woman. No have time checky checky all.”
Ernie shrugged, grinned, and glanced at me. “Maybe me and my chingu, we try.”
Suk-ja rolled her brown eyes. “Every GI think they big deal. Every GI think they number hana.”
She pressed one elbow against her crotch, stuck her forearm straight out, and fisted her palm.
“Too skoshi,” Ernie replied. Too small. “Me taaksan.”
He spread his open palms apart, as if describing a huge fish.
Suk-ja laughed and covered her mouth with both hands.
