“Andeiyo,” she said. Not permissible.
Ernie kept moving. She stood her ground.
“Andei,” she said again. “Sonnim issoyo.” Not permissible. There are guests.
Ernie understood that part. He pushed past her saying, “Screw your high-class sonnim. I’m a guest, too.”
Ernie had recovered from his initial reticence. And the way the two young women reacted to our presence had made him determined to make sure that everybody on the premises was aware that their cozy little pleasure dome had been defiled by the presence to two Miguks.
The entrance hallway ran through the building to another garden out back. But to the right, the sound of laughter and low male voices floated down a long varnished corridor. The odor of fried shrimp followed the voices like an oily cloud. Ernie pointed his nose toward the sound and pounded his way down the hallway. Light filtered through the first oil-papered door. He slid it open and stepped into the private room.
The hostess who had scurried away returned, this time with two burly young Korean men in suits. One glance told me that they were weightlifters. By the light of the overhead bulb, I could also see that the one standing closest to me had noticeable calluses on the knuckles of his right hand. Martial arts. No doubt.
I nodded toward the two men who stared at me impassively. Without showing fear-or at least hoping I wasn’t showing fear-I stepped forward and pulled out my credentials. I told them in Korean that I was from 8th Army CID, here as part of a criminal investigation.
Down the hallway, someone shouted.
I turned and ran, the two weightlifters right behind me.
Ernie stood inside the private room. It was about twelve tatami mats square. A low rectangular table occupied the middle of the room with eight or nine businessmen seated around it. Bulkogi and bottles of Scotch and boiled quail eggs overflowed the table. The businessmen had taken off their coats, which were hung on the wall behind them. Kisaeng sat next to them. Beautiful Korean women, most of them dressed fashionably, in Western skirts and blouses, as opposed to the traditional clothing of the two girls who had greeted us at the front door.
The faces of the Korean businessmen were flushed with booze. And maybe something else. Shock at the fact that some big yangnom, foreign lout, had barged his way into their private party. The oldest of the businessmen, the only one with streaks of gray in his hair, stood toe-to-toe with Ernie, shouting at him, waggling a short finger at Ernie’s pointed nose. For his part, Ernie yelled at the man in English while the man shouted back in Korean.
“Yoja,” Ernie was saying. “Woman. You know, Miguk woman.” He made wavy motions with his hands. “You arra?” You understand? “American MP woman.”
What the red-faced businessman shouted back was too rapid for me to decipher, but I do know that it was filled with invective. I grabbed Ernie by the elbow. “Come on.” When he seemed reluctant to leave, I said, “There are more rooms down the hallway.”
He shot a withering look of contempt at the enraged businessman and backed out of the room. Ernie proceeded down the long corridor, sliding open every oil-papered door, revealing groups of businessmen and other wealthy gentlemen drinking and enjoying themselves. Some of the kisaeng were dressed smartly in Western clothes, others wore the full traditional silk chima-chogori. But what we didn’t find, and what everyone denied knowledge of, was a Miguk yoja. An American woman.
The weightlifters had stayed close to us but so far they hadn’t made a move. I’m sure they were held back out of their respect-and fear-of my badge. But by now the entire Koryo Forest Inn was in an uproar and kisaeng and customers stood in the halls shouting. Ernie ignored them. He paraded up and down the corridor as if he owned the Koryo Forest Inn, the city of Byokjie, and the entire province in which it sat.
Finally, when he started to check the rooms out back, the weightlifters became fed up. One of them started to speak to Ernie in Korean, as if he wanted to reason with him, convince him to stop this disconcerting search through their little establishment. When the weightlifter reached out to touch Ernie’s arm, Ernie swiveled and shot a straight punch at the man’s nose. Within seconds, Ernie was flat on his back. Instead of jumping in to wrestle with the guy, I backed off a few steps, pulled my. 45, and aimed it at the two burly martial arts experts. They froze.
Down the corridor, the hubbub of outrage ceased, changing to a stunned silence. Ernie rose to his feet, dusted off his pants, and shot a long hard stare at the man who’d dropped him on his butt. For a moment, I was afraid he was going to repeat his stupidity. Instead, he regained his self-control. Before he lost it again, I motioned to him and he and I walked toward the front entrance. In Korean, I told everyone to stay put. Quickly, Ernie inspected the upstairs area and the empty side rooms that we hadn’t looked into yet and finally the gazebo out back that was used during the spring.
“Nothing,” he said when he returned.
“I guess that does it then.”
Speaking in Korean, I thanked everyone for their cooperation. Ernie and I backed out of the Koryo Forest Inn. The chauffeurs stopped smoking when we passed by. Together, we hustled down the gravel road.
“They’ll call the KNPs,” Ernie said.
“Yeah. Thanks to you.”
“Well, what did you want me to do? They weren’t answering your questions.”
“I hadn’t started asking questions.”
“Same difference.”
We returned to the jeep, Ernie started it up and we drove toward Reunification Road.
The time was ten minutes until midnight. Ten minutes until the midnight to four curfew. Ernie and I sat in the jeep in a cleared area next to Reunification Road that was normally used as a bus turnaround. For the last twenty minutes we’d been observing a steady stream of expensive sedans-Hyundais, Volvos, BMWs-streaming south, back toward Seoul.
Nobody was driving north.
“There must be a million of them,” Ernie said.
“Yeah. Which means a big demand for kisaeng.”
“Some of those gals back at the Koryo Forest Inn were good-looking hammers.”
“You noticed.”
“I did.”
The traffic in front of us started to thin. The vehicles that continued south were routinely breaking the speed limit, in a hurry to make it back to Seoul and get off the street before curfew.
“Here we are,” Ernie said. “Cold as shit, we haven’t uncovered anything new, and curfew’s about to descend on the entire world.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that I don’t want to sit here in this freaking jeep all night long.”
I thought about that for a minute. “Good point.”
“Glad you concur.” He waited for the silence to lengthen and then he raised his voice and said, “So what in the hell are we going to do about it?”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was thinking about the case.”
“The case? But we didn’t learn anything new tonight.”
“Sure we did.”
“Like what?”
“Like Jill Matthewson has never worked at the Koryo Forest Inn.”
“Great. That narrows down our search.”
“And during the hubbub you created, one of the kisaeng was holding on to another kisaeng’s arm, whispering to her.”
“Sweet. Whispering what?”
“Whispering ‘Chil Un Lim.’”
“What does that mean?”
“Forest of Seven Clouds, I think. But I’d have to see the Chinese characters to be sure.”
“You and your Chinese characters. So what do you make of it?
“The girl knew we were looking for an American woman, she whispered the name of a kisaeng house to her girlfriend. What do you think that means?”
“It means that she heard that a Miguk woman was working at that kisaeng house.”
