“How do you know that?”
She studied me. Weighing possibilities.
“You will do,” she said, and took a step backward.
“Wait,” I said. “Don’t kill any more people. We can work something out for you. I know about your mom. About how she was cheated by Jo Kyong-ah. About how the VD guy dragged her away from you and your brother. I will testify on your behalf. The judge will be lenient. You can’t go on killing.”
She stopped, still smiling, but her leer now conveyed rage. Her neck was glowing crimson and she was about to blow her top.
“My mom?” she said. “My mom? You know nothing about her!”
With that she took two quick steps into the dark and was gone.
I leapt at the wire, clinging to the rusted coils, staring across the drainage ditch into the alley beyond. But she was in the wind.
The Yoju City Hall of Records was an old wooden building, probably built during the period of Japanese colonization, that had somehow survived the Korean War. Mementoes and plaques lined the walls, commemorating kings of the Yi Dynasty and victories over invaders stretching back to battles that were fought against Hideyoshi’s invading army during the Sixteenth Century. I was staring at a hand-crafted bronze helmet when Ernie elbowed me in the ribs.
“This guy going to take all day?” he asked.
“It takes a while,” I said. “All this stuff is filed on paper, the old-fashioned way. The archives down in the basement must be enormous.”
“You’d love to look at them, wouldn’t you?”
“Damn right.”
Ernie rolled his eyes. “Figures.”
Since seeing the smiling woman in that back alley yesterday afternoon, I’d been in what psychologists might call a dream state. I’d managed to make my way out of the catacombs and re-enter the land of the living, but as I did so, I started to doubt if I’d really seen her, or if I’d just imagined the whole thing. Of course, I knew it was real. It’s just that what she and her brother were doing seemed so unreal. Unreal, until you saw the blood.
Naturally, when in a dream state, I did what I always do-I wandered into a bar. By the time Ernie found me, I was pretty well gone. He slapped my face a little and made me drink some barley tea and drove me back to the compound in his jeep. Somehow, that night, I managed eight hours of sleep for the first time in a long time. The next morning, after a cup of hot Joe at the snack bar, it came to me what we had to do.
“We gotta find out more about her family,” I said to Ernie.
“Her family? Why?”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, Agent Bascom, that’s what this entire mess is about. Family. And yesterday, that’s what seemed to enrage her. When I mentioned her mother.”
In one of the files at the 121 Evacuation Hospital, Specialist Fairbanks had kept a copy of the Ministry of Health records ordering the pick up of Miss Yun Yong-min, the mother of the smiling woman. According to the background information provided, Yoju was the kohyang, the ancestral home, of Miss Yun.
“If we’re going to head off the next killing,” I said, “we’re going to have to find out more about the smiling woman’s family.”
What I didn’t tell Ernie about the encounter yesterday was what the woman had said about having a job for me to do. I’m not sure why I didn’t.
When the bespectacled Korean man who was the Yoju Clerk of Records emerged from the creaking staircase, he plopped an enormous leather-bound ledger on the counter. Photocopying was conducted in another office and would take a half hour, he said, but I told him I didn’t need it. I just wanted to study the documents and take some notes.
Why had I started thinking in terms of family? A few things. The piece of cardboard that Specialist Fairbanks had been forced to bow to. A photograph maybe. Of an ancestor? And then someone joined the killer while Fairbanks was being forced to perform the seibei ceremony. The smiling woman, I presumed. She’d been present when her brother murdered Fairbanks. Had she been present when Jo Kyong-ah was similarly killed? I was starting to think that she had. These two were turning murder into a family affair.
18
The Uichon mama-san had told me that when Miss Yun’s older brother refused to register her first child-her smiling daughter-on the family register, Miss Yun registered by herself as the head of her own family. No father, no grandparents, nothing. This is unusual in Korea, because the mantle of “head of the family” passes from father to oldest son to younger sons, to first daughter, to younger daughters, and finally to mother-in that order.
When one family member is seen to be shaming the rest of the family, they are sometimes banished from their hallowed place on the register. They’re forced to return to their kohyang, the ancestral home, and request a new family register under their name alone. Apparently, that’s what Miss Yun had done.
The family register the records clerk placed in front of me was the register where Miss Yun, the mother, was recorded. At the top were the stern-faced black and white photos of her father-the smiling woman’s grandfather. Below, Miss Yun’s mother-the smiling woman’s grandmother. Both of them were marked deceased. Listed next were three sons. The first two were also deceased. I checked the dates. They had both died during the Korean War, a number of years before their parents. The only surviving son was Yun Guang-min. The photo showed him as a child of twelve years, stern-faced and sullen.
Yun Guang-min was older than his sister, Miss Yun, and had to be in late middle-age by now. His face was square, with high cheekbones, and bore little resemblance to the smooth contoured lines of his younger sister’s face.
Miss Yun was the only daughter listed. She was a late child. Of all the faces on the family register, hers was the only beautiful one in the bunch.
“Seen enough?” Ernie asked.
“One more thing.” I spoke to the clerk, explaining in Korean what I wanted. He nodded, took the ledger back, and returned it to the archives down in the basement.
“What is it now?” Ernie said.
“You’ll see.”
When the clerk returned, he brought a newer book, already open to a page that had the photo of a now-adult Yun Guang-min. Below him was his wife, a cute heart-faced young woman, and below that, four children. After his older brothers and parents passed away, Yun Guang-min opened his own family register with himself as head of the family. By tradition, his unmarried sister should’ve been listed on his register but, of course, she wasn’t. Even Ernie understood why.
“His sister’s children were half-Miguk,” he said. “He didn’t want anything to do with her.”
“Right. He turned his back on all of them. And did nothing to help when she was working the streets and slowly dying of tuberculosis.”
Yun Guang-min’s treatment of his younger sister was harsh, no question about it, but not all that unusual. Sure, most people continue to support their daughter or sister, even if they’re pregnant with a GI’s baby. But other Koreans, the more traditional ones, didn’t always act with such equanimity. There’d been cases, recorded by the Koreans themselves, in which a woman with a GI baby had been hanged by her father or brothers. The police, when they investigated, often wrote the whole thing off as suicide.
“I suppose,” Ernie said, “this uncle will be the next victim on the smiling woman’s hit list.”
“Maybe.”
“We’d better warn him.”
“No need,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s already been warned.”
“Already warned? How?”
