There she was. Her hair piled up and longer than it had been when I’d seen her. Wearing a traditional Korean dress embroidered with white cranes. But it was her, all right. Miss Ku. No one could ever mistake that beautiful smile.
I checked her real name: Choi Yong-ran. Miss Ku must be her stage name. And the name she uses when duping unsuspecting CID agents in Itaewon. Many Koreans change names when they change professions. Especially when the profession is somewhat unsavory. Like being a kisaeng.
It was easier finding her folder in the steel filing cabinet because everything was in order according to the hangul alphabet. Rather than jotting anything down, I just stuck the folder under my coat next to the little snub-nosed. 38.
By now, pandemonium reigned in the front room. Some of the Korean men were arguing with one another, and the Nurse and the agency owner were still locked in a hair-pulling embrace. Ernie stood back out of the way. I nodded to him.
Stepping forward, I whipped out my CID badge. I held it high in the air.
“Nobody move!” I said. “You’re all under arrest!” I pointed at one of the men who seemed to be in the thick of things.
“What’s your name?” I demanded.
He seemed intimidated by the show of authority and pointed with his forefinger to his nose.
“Yes, you,” I said, still using English, figuring it would keep them off-balance. “What’s your name?”
“Hong,” he said.
“Good.” I stepped forward and patted him on the shoulder.
By now Ernie had somehow extricated the Nurse from the agency owner’s grasp. She charged again but Ernie straight-armed her and held her back.
“Mr. Hong, I’m putting you in charge.”
Ernie knew what to do. He thrust the writhing and screaming agency owner into Mr. Hong’s arms.
“Hold her, now,” I said.
He nodded. The enraged woman almost wriggled out of his grasp but another man stepped forward to assist.
Ernie dragged the screaming Nurse out the doorway and down the hallway. Following them, I stopped and turned to the stunned crowd.
“The police will be here any minute. No one move.”
Ernie didn’t bother with the elevator but found the doorway to the stairs and pushed through it. I was right behind him. The Nurse started to calm down, realizing now that disappearing was the wisest course of action. She moved quickly down the cement steps.
“Good thinking, pal,” Ernie said.
“Koreans respect authority,” I answered. “Someone taking charge. And when you spout it out in English, they’re confused. Backs them off for a minute.”
Boots pounded on cement. Coming up toward us. Running.
“The police,” Ernie said.
The Nurse clung to him. The KNP’s would arrest her without questions if they found out what happened.
I shoved past them. “Let me go first.”
When the footsteps were two flights below me, I shouted.
“Kyongchal!” Police.
I rushed down the stairs, holding up my badge. Two young troopers in khaki uniforms stopped when they saw me, both panting heavily.
This time I spoke Korean. “Mipalkun Honbyong,” I said. Eighth Army Military Police. “There’s a crazy woman upstairs on the twelfth floor. Already one person has been attacked. We’re escorting the victim to the hospital now.”
They nodded.
“Hurry! Up to the twelfth floor. What are you waiting for?”
The policemen shoved past me and Ernie and the Nurse.
We trotted downstairs, out the front door, and after sprinting through a couple of alleys, waved down a taxi.
21
Her silk shirt swirled like whirring jade. The beautiful young woman banged away at a circle of suspended drums as if she were trying to disturb the slumber of long-dead kings. As the rhythm increased she twirled ever faster. I thought she’d go mad with dizziness.
Ernie snapped his gum beside me.
“Does she take off her clothes?”
The Nurse elbowed him.
“No, Ernie,” I said. “This is classical Korean kisaeng. The real thing. Ancient arts. These girls are dancers and musicians and poets. Not strippers.”
“So what’s the difference?”
“Jesus. There’s no talking to you.”
We stood in a carpeted hallway. Beyond us spread a ballroom dotted with linen-draped cocktail tables. Leather-upholstered booths lined the walls. A small stage shoved into a corner supported the spinning kisaeng.
The joint was in the brightly lit downtown district of Mukyo-dong. Outside, a hand-carved sign in elegant Chinese script told it alclass="underline" The House of the Tiger Lady. A kisaeng house. Reserved for the rich.
“This place sucks,” Ernie said.
He despises opulence.
You’re just suspicious of any place that doesn’t have sawdust on the floors,” I said.
No one had noticed us yet. Elegant young women, wearing the traditional Korean chima-chogori-long, billowing skirts and short, loose-sleeved tunics-paraded across the room like brightly colored flowers of pink and red and sky blue, bowing and serving the men in the audience. All the customers were Korean businessmen in expensive suits. Not a foreigner in the crowd. Not even a Japanese.
The folder I had pilfered from the Shooting Star Talent Agency confirmed my suspicion that Choi Yong-ran- alias, Miss Ku-wasn’t what she’d claimed to be. She had graduated from middle school but after that, instead of her continuing on to high school, her family had enrolled her in a music training conservatory. Forget college. Despite what she’d told us in the teahouse in Itaewon, she was no more a graduate of Ewha University than I was an Ivy Leaguer with a trust fund.
After finishing up at the music conservatory, she landed a few jobs as a kisaeng and most recently the gig at the House of the Tiger Lady.
The folder didn’t tell me much about her personal life. Just the names of her parents-her father deceased- and the fact that she had been born and raised in Kyong-sang Province, outside the city of Miryang, a predominantly rural area 180 miles southeast of Seoul.
Now she was here, playing the kayagum in front of wealthy men. A long way from the rice paddies of home.
A tall woman on the other side of the ballroom caught my eye. A magnificent lavender gown embroidered with white cranes flowed down her body. She stared right at us and barked a couple of orders to two girls who also looked at us but quickly turned away. The woman, smiling and bowing to one of the customers, excused herself and made her way around the back of the crowd, heading toward us.
“We’ve been spotted,” I said.
“Good.”
The Nurse clung tighter to Ernie. Despite her protestations about not feeling self-conscious when accompanied by two foreigners, I could tell she felt out of place in Mukyo-dong. This was the most elegant district of Seoul. Here, upscale shops and lavishly dressed women and boutiques sported the latest in Paris fashions. The Nurse’s plain dress and straight hairstyle made her stand out, especially in the Tiger Lady’s kisaeng house.
I turned to Ernie. “Any of these girls look like Miss Ku?”
“Not so far.”
The young woman finished her drum solo to thunderous applause. Stage curtains closed. The serving kisaeng poured the men more scotch, and while they conversed we backed deeper into the shadows. Ernie gazed down the hallway.
“Plenty of rooms. Convenient.”
“Cost you an arm and a leg, though.”
“Hey, what’s money?”
I knew it. Once he gave the place a chance, he started to like it. Ernie was a sawdust kind of guy but if he ever inherited a million dollars, he’d develop expensive tastes fast enough.
When the woman in lavender appeared at the mouth of the hallway she spread her long red nails and looked as if she longed to scratch our eyes out.
“Weikurei?” she demanded. “What you do here?”
A little English. She hasn’t always catered to Koreans, I thought.
I pulled out my badge and flashed it in front of her face.