stepped up to House Number 17 and pounded on the locked door until the mama-san opened up. I explained that we wanted to talk to the girl who’d spent time yesterday with the criminal who’d escaped last night. She agreed but asked for ten more dollars. I turned her down flat. When she complained, I told her that if she preferred, I would call Lieutenant Won of the Korean National Police and she and the girl could both talk to him downtown. That was enough to make the frowning mama-san open the door and let us in. She told us to wait and went upstairs to fetch the girl.
Five minutes later, the frightened young woman knelt on the warm vinyl floor in the front room, dressed in lumpy blue jeans and three layers of upper garments, topped off with a thick wool sweater that she clutched across her chest.
When we’d seen her last night, she’d been naked and screaming, while bullets whizzed past her head.
Her name was Mi-ja, she told me. Beautiful Child. I held out the sketch of the Caucasian man who’d robbed the Olympos Casino.
When she reached for it, her hand shook, as it had last night when she’d attempted to cover her nakedness. Before she grabbed hold of the flimsy construction paper, she closed her eyes and pushed it away.
“Come on, Mi-ja,” Ernie said. “You have to look at it sometime.”
Apparently, Mi-ja didn’t understand. So far, she hadn’t done anything other than kneel before us and bow her head. I spoke soothingly in Korean, asking her to just take a look at the sketch. She kept her face down, and then I realized that she was crying.
I explained that more people would be hurt if she didn’t help us capture this guy.
Without looking up, Mi-ja raised the left sleeve of her sweater. There, in a straight row, red and angry, were half a dozen holes in her flesh. All about the size of the tip of a burning cigarette. She continued to hold out her arm. Nobody spoke. Nobody breathed.
Slowly, I reached out my hand, feeling the ache of the slice in my side, and, as gently as I could, I touched the fingertips of her hand with mine. We lingered like that for a few seconds, flesh on flesh, and then Mi-ja pulled her arm back and rolled down her sleeve.
I held out the sketch again. This time she took it, sat it in her lap. While she studied it, fat tears splashed against the deft pencil lines. Finally, she handed the sketch back to me. Then she nodded.
It was him.
When she finally started to talk, she told me everything.
Hundreds of commuters, maybe thousands, stood in orderly lines along the cement passenger platform next to the tracks of the Inchon Main Train Station. They were silent, barely shuffling their feet. Occasionally someone coughed.
The cut in my side didn’t hurt much. Actually, my head hurt more, and my stomach still roiled from last night’s soju.
Another blast of cold, salted mist rolled in from the Yellow Sea. Then a buzzer sounded, and the tracks rumbled, and a few seconds later a train rolled up, brightly lit inside. It stopped, two dozen doors slid open, and the people standing on the platform rushed in, spreading themselves quickly over the seats and benches.
“Seems like the whole damn city works in Seoul,” Ernie said.
I braced myself against a metal railing, supporting about half my weight with my arm, trying to keep the pressure off the slice below my armpit.
6
“Any Miguks?” I asked.
“Not that I could see.”
Ernie had just returned from a stroll down the loading ramp, reconnoitering the crowd. But in the dim morning light and with so many people, it was difficult. The Korean National Police were out in force. Lieutenant Won figured that the Caucasian fugitive who’d gotten away from us last night might use the morning rush hour of workers commuting to Seoul to escape from Inchon. The roadblocks had been called off. The KNPs had decided it was too disruptive to keep them on this morning. Our only chance was to get very lucky here at the train station. So far, luck didn’t seem to be going our way.
In an hour, the rush hour had subsided. I bought a copy of the Korea Herald, an English language daily. Miss Han Ok-hi, the young casino worker who’d been shot, was still in critical condition, according to the report.
Before we reached the train station, Ernie and I flashed the sketches of the two thieves and the smiling woman to all the vendors who sold newspapers and dried cuttlefish and warm barley tea outside on the street in front of the station. None recognized anyone in the sketches, and all claimed to have been asked the same questions by the Korean National Police yesterday. But our persistence paid off.
One old woman pushing a wooden cart supporting a cast iron stove shouted her lungs out trying to interest passersby in warm chestnuts. When I showed her the sketches of the two men, she claimed to have been shown copies yesterday by a Korean policeman. She hadn’t recognized the two men then; she still didn’t recognize them today. But the new sketch, the sketch of the smiling woman, intrigued her.
“Boasso,” she said, gravely nodding her head. I’ve seen her. “Before noon yesterday,” she continued, “rushing toward a train. I noticed her because she was tall and had a wool scarf tied over her head which I thought was unusual for such a young woman. And she clutched a canvas bag.”
“That’s the only reason you noticed her?” I asked.
The woman blushed slightly.
“Also,” she said, “she’s different.”
“How so?”
“Like you guys,” the old woman said. “Maybe she’s American.”
“Was she alone?”
“No. Someone was with her. A man, I think, but I didn’t pay attention.”
They’d hurried right past her and hadn’t stopped to buy chestnuts. Still, the half-American blonde Korean woman had been unusual enough for the old chestnut vendor to notice.
“Had you ever seen her before?” I asked the old woman.
“Never,” she said. “And not since. But if I spot her again, I’ll grab her and hold her for the police.”
Her eyes gleamed as she told me that. Something about her enthusiasm made me feel uneasy. I shivered in the cold morning air.
I boarded the next train for Seoul.
Ernie would drive the jeep to Seoul yok, the Seoul Train Station and pick me up there.
Why was I taking the train back to Seoul? I wanted to experience what the smiling woman had experienced. I wanted to put myself in the place of two people-one of them clutching a bag full of stolen cash, the other knowing he’d just shot an innocent woman-and see what they’d seen on the train ride back to Seoul.
People glanced at me as I boarded, but most were polite and turned away. I strode up and down a few of the cars, just to get a feel for the train. Wooden benches lined either side of the compartments, and in the center two rows of leather straps hung from metal railings. The train wasn’t too crowded now since it was past 8 a.m., so I found a spot on a bench and plopped down to watch the scenery roll by.
Ernie and I had pretty much nailed the sequence of events. At least to my satisfaction.
The smiling woman, along with two male accomplices, had decided to rob the Olympos Hotel and Casino. To make it easier to bluff their way into the casino’s cashier cage, they needed law enforcement badges and a weapon of some sort. They cased Itaewon. For how long, I don’t know, but eventually the smiling woman found her chance and managed to sit alone with an armed man: me. That’s when she slipped something into my beer. In the alley, her accomplices knocked me over the head, stole my badge and my. 45, and three days later, robbed the Olympos Casino.
After the robbery, the two men split up. One of them fleeing for the anonymity of the Yellow House, the other keeping the money and joining the smiling woman for the train ride back to Seoul. Why the train? It would be leaving right away, it wouldn’t be subject to KNP roadblocks, and the police would be looking for two men traveling together-not a man and a woman.
