same plain female I had seen in the crime folder in the Songtan Police Station: Jo Kyong-ah, the retired black marketeer who’d been murdered in her home by person or persons unknown.
All my concentration focused on Haggler Lee and the photograph and the ancient ritual that he performed.
Four dark shapes emerged from the rows of piled merchandise. Men. All holding something in their hands. Cudgels? Knives? From this distance, I couldn’t be sure.
Shoe leather shuffled off to my right, probably Ernie.
The dark figures floated past and headed unerringly toward Ernie’s last hiding place.
The blast of a. 45 reverberated throughout the warehouse.
Haggler Lee sat on a silk cushion, shaking his head in dismay. “Why you shoot?” he asked Ernie. “Scare everybody?”
“Your men were coming after me,” Ernie said, his neck a little too stiff.
“They only checky checky. See who’s in warehouse.”
The single shot fired from Ernie’s. 45 had, in fact, frightened the crap out of everybody, especially me. Ernie had held Haggler Lee’s thugs at gunpoint until I determined that they were armed with nothing more than clubs and knives. When they put those away, we agreed to a truce and Ernie slipped his. 45 back into his shoulder holster.
We sat on the raised wooden floor in the middle of Haggler Lee’s inventory. Haggler Lee clapped his hands. A young Korean woman clad in traditional dress shuffled out of the darkness, slipped off her sandals and stepped up onto the platform. She set between us a small tray holding a round brass pot of hot water, a box of Lipton Tea bags, and a jar of Taster’s Choice freeze-dried coffee. I took coffee, black. Ernie, too. He stirred sugar into his. The woman had a smooth, pleasant round face and was as cute as a porcelain doll and Ernie couldn’t take his eyes off her. Both she and Haggler Lee ignored this rudeness. She bowed and backed away.
“Nice setup you got here, Lee,” Ernie said.
Haggler Lee nodded and sipped from an earthenware cup. He was a frail man with long, tapered fingernails. In his traditional silk vest and pantaloons, he looked more like an ancient Confucian scholar than the head of a black-market operation. I waited until he set the cup down to ask my question.
“What are you so nervous about, Lee?”
He smiled at that.
“Besides your friend’s pistol,” he said, “only one thing.
Someone murdered a very close friend of mine.”
“Jo Kyong-ah,” I said.
“Exactly. Before, long time ago, she black-market honcho. When I come Itaewon, she helped me set up business.”
Lee wasn’t afraid to talk about illegal matters with a couple of GI cops. Although he was black-marketeering, almost exclusively, goods purchased from 8th Army PXs and commissaries, we had no jurisdiction over him. Of course, he had underlings handle all the day-to-day transactions but even if Ernie and I had caught Haggler Lee red-handed buying PX goods from a GI, we would have been unable to arrest him. We could arrest the GI, for violation of 8th Army prohibitions against selling duty-free goods to an unauthorized individual. And we’d busted many GIs for just such an offense and, in some cases, testified at their courts-martial. But Haggler Lee we couldn’t touch.
The Korean National Police could arrest him but wouldn’t. To keep the 8th Army honchos happy, they sometimes ran in some of the low-level Korean black marketeers, held them for an hour or two, and filed their equivalent of misdemeanor charges against them. Usually, the black marke-teers paid a fine and were back in business the next day.
If the purpose of black-market restrictions was to protect the Korean economy, why didn’t the KNPs take it more seriously? My theory was that a Korean just can’t fault another Korean for trying to make a buck in a nonviolent way. Besides, everybody in the country-everybody who could afford it-bought American-made cigarettes and whiskey and imported foodstuffs; that included the rich, movie stars, and even politicians, those self-same politicians who signed treaties to limit the importation of such items.
The honchos at 8th Army, however, took black-marketing seriously. Why? They didn’t want low-ranking enlisted GIs making money that way. Some GIs I’d arrested had made upwards of $40,000 per year black- marketeering. When a GI makes that kind of money, the brass loses control. It’s hard to keep a young man enthusiastic about fighting war games in the snow and mud when he’s making more than twice as much as the Captain barking orders at him. That’s what 8th Army was fighting against, primarily. The loss of control over their own troops.
And if anything could tempt a GI to lose his dedication to duty, it was the easy money to be made on the black market in Itaewon.
Ernie and I never black-marketeered. It wasn’t a moral thing. It was just that we both hated shopping. For Ernie, it was insulting to be in the PX and have a sweet-voiced announcer over an intercom refer to him as a “shopper.” It enraged him. Even buying a bar of soap was a trial. I wasn’t much better. Commercialism never appealed to me. And besides, we both had plenty of money. I cleared over $400 per month, more money than I’d ever seen when I was being shuffled between foster homes as a kid. Ernie had one more stripe than me and consequently he cleared $50 more per month. What we made, we spent on booze and women. Occasionally, when we got lucky, we received those things free. So who needed money?
I finished my coffee and asked Lee, “Why are you worried? Someone murdered Jo Kyong-ah thirty miles from here, in Songtan. What does that have to do with you?”
“Revenge,” he said.
I waited for him to explain.
“In the black-market business some customers, when they run out of money, come to us for loans. Sometimes we give them loans. Have to. Otherwise people very angry. But I hate to give loans. Always causes trouble.”
“People don’t want to pay you back,” Ernie said.
Haggler Lee nodded.
Ernie continued. “Because they think you’re making so much profit off what they sell you out of the PX, that it’s unfair for you to ask them to pay back the loan. So when you either collect or deny them another loan, they hate you.
Over the years, you pick up a lot of enemies.”
Lee nodded again.
“So,” I said, “you think a disgruntled customer murdered Jo Kyong-ah, and you’re worried that the same customer might come after you.”
Haggler Lee said, “Sometimes people crazy about money.”
I glanced at the piled goods in this dark warehouse and tried to calculate the cash they must represent. Tens of thousands of U.S. dollars, I imagined, and Haggler Lee was accusing other people of being “crazy about money.”
“Who would’ve hated Jo Kyong-ah,” I asked, “enough to kill her?”
“Lot of people.”
“You, for instance?” Ernie said.
Lee shook his head vehemently. “No. She never cheat me.
She can’t.”
“Why not?”
Lee straightened his back and thrust out his narrow chest. “I’m business man.”
That explained that.
“So who else?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Who would know?”
Lee thought about that, then shook his head. “I don’t know.”
I pulled out the three sketches and laid them on the floor in front of Lee. “Do you recognize any of these people?”
