“Made in the U.S.A.,” Ernie said. “Good stuff.”
What we were looking at was what GIs called “reds.” Barbiturates. Downers. A drug designed to relax you and put you to sleep. Taken responsibly, they’re a perfectly legitimate medication. Taken irresponsibly, they can be lethal.
I asked the pharmacist again: how many reds would it take to knock out a GI as big as me who’d already been drinking? Knock him out so he could walk around for a short while, but in a few minutes be out cold.
The pharmacist told me it wasn’t a good idea to drink and, at the same time, consume this drug. But if you did, probably two or three would be enough to incapacitate a man my size-if, that is, he’d already downed a lot of alcohol.
Then we showed him the sketches.
Ernie and I had played this routine in over a dozen pharmacies. This one was about three blocks from the nightclub and brothel area of Itaewon, but still close enough to attract an occasional GI customer. Theoretically, all Korean pharmacies are off limits to 8th Army GIs. Nobody pays much attention to the rule, however. Particularly since there are so many goodies in these yak bangs that GIs crave-and also because the rule was unenforceable. There aren’t enough MPs to monitor every pharmacy in the Republic of Korea.
The man and his wife studied the sketches with interest. When the wife saw the smiling woman, her mouth opened in surprise.
“Boassoyo,” she said. I’ve seen her. She glanced at her husband. “Dok kattun kot sasso.” She bought the same things, she said, pointing at the red capsules.
Then her husband remembered. “Yes,” he told me. “She asked me the same question. How many would it take to knock out a big man who’d been drinking? I told her. Two. Maybe three.”
“The same woman?” I asked again.
“Yes. I’m sure. She bought the same medicine as this.”
“How long ago was she in here?”
He frowned and looked at his wife.
“Maybe one week,” she said in Korean.
That sounded about right. This pharmacy must’ve provided the medicine she’d used on me.
“When you told her two or three capsules,” I said, “how many did she buy?”
The pharmacist smiled. “That, I remember. She bought six. Twice as many as I recommended.” Then his face turned grave. “I told her to be very careful.”
I translated for Ernie.
The pharmacist interrupted. “She asked me to do an odd thing. She asked me to open all the capsules and pour the powder inside one wrapper.”
“I did that,” his wife said proudly. “My husband is very smart, but he’s also very clumsy.”
The pharmacist smiled as if he hadn’t heard her.
I translated this exchange also.
Ernie slapped me on the back. “The Dragon Lady was careful, all right,” he said. “She wanted to make sure you wouldn’t wake up while she was robbing you. Good thing you’re so big. Six reds on top of all that booze might’ve killed a lesser man.”
It might’ve killed me too. But it didn’t.
I asked the couple if they’d ever seen the woman again. They shook their heads emphatically. Never before and never since.
We thanked our friendly local pharmacists and left.
We stood on the streets of Itaewon. Gusts of cold wind threw whirlwinds of brown and yellow and red leaves into the heart of the nightclub district. I strained to see the stars, but could only make out a few. Mainly because of the glare from the main drag of Itaewon, which was likewise spangled with flashing neon: red dragons and golden butterflies, and even one sign with a blue and pink rotating yin and yang symbol.
Why had we returned to Itaewon when the two women had been killed in Inchon and Songtan? Because all the evidence so far pointed back to these hallowed grounds.
I’d been robbed here, my badge and my. 45 stolen.
The casino robbery was only a thirty-minute train ride away on the most heavily traveled commuter run in Korea.
According to the KNP report from Songtan, the second victim, Miss Jo Kyong-ah, had been arrested numerous times over the last twenty years for black marketing. Where? Itaewon. A few months ago, she’d retired and moved to Songtan.
My final reason: Yun Ai-ja and her younger brother grew up here, in Itaewon. And their mother, while raising them, had worked for years as an Itaewon business girl.
Packs of GIs roamed the streets, their clean-shaven jaws chomping on chewing gum, their shiny eyes studying everything around them. Business girls stood in covered doorways, or in the beaded entranceways to the bars and nightclubs. They laughed and joked and called out to the GIs as they passed.
“Haggler Lee,” Ernie said. “That’s who we ought to talk to first.”
Ernie was right. Haggler Lee was the biggest black market honcho in Itaewon. He’d been here for at least a decade. Since the murdered woman in Songtan, Jo Kyong-ah, had once worked the black market in Itaewon, Haggler Lee must know something about her.
“A surprise visit,” I said. “Catch him off guard.”
Ernie nodded, and we tromped up a dark alley, away from the nightclub district. We turned down one lane and up another. These roadways were only wide enough for one car at a time, but I knew from experience that a PX taxi could navigate up here easily. If somebody dropped off a load of duty-free military commissary and PX goods, cops like me and Ernie couldn’t sneak up on them in our jeep. Which is why we did a lot of work in Itaewon on foot.
We turned down another cobbled street, and there before us stood the dark warehouse of Haggler Lee. Kukchei
13
Suchulip Gongsu. International Import Export.
We walked around the side of the old brick building and squeezed through a passageway just wide enough to walk through single-file. At the end of the building, a candle flickered inside a dirty window.
Someone coughed. Ernie motioned for quiet. He edged closer to the back door of the warehouse.
Candlelight cast odd figures on the cement flooring. We heard urgent mumbling inside. Korean, but from this distance I could understand none of it.
Ernie knelt low. He peeked around the open door, then quickly pulled back. Motioning me forward, we entered the warehouse. After a few steps, we found cover behind a plastic-sheeted pallet of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Swirling dust clouds fogged my vision and made me want to cough. I fought the urge. Crouching, Ernie whispered in my ear.
“Move closer,” he said. “So you can hear what they’re talking about.”
I nodded and, as quietly as I could, I duck-walked my way to the far wall of the warehouse. I found a gap in the piled merchandise and worked my way toward the voices.
When I was close enough, I peered around a pile of cardboard boxes full of Del Monte canned peaches. There, on a raised ondol floor, sat Haggler Lee-on his knees, as was his custom-wearing the traditional turquoise blue silk vest and white pantaloons of an ancient Korean patriarch. Lee, I guessed, was only in his early forties, but he acted as if he were a grandfather of venerable age. Maybe he thought it gave his black-market operation more class. Maybe he was just an old-fashioned guy. Who knows? What I did know was that the mumbling we’d heard wasn’t conversation. It was chanting, coming from Haggler Lee. In front of him on a low table was a framed photograph, edged with black ribbon. On either side of the photograph, candles flickered. Lee mumbled some more, and then bowed, placing two palms flat in front of him and pressing his forehead to the floor.
I inched forward, hoping to catch a glimpse of the photograph. Squinting, I recognized the face. It was the
