The Door to Bitterness by Martin Limon

who was the Commanding Officer, to the First Sergeant himself, down to the lowliest private. No one was absent without leave, the First Sergeant told us, and everyone had been at their assigned duty stations at eleven hundred hours this morning. We showed him and the Charge of Quarters the sketches of the two thieves the KNPs had provided. Both claimed to have never seen those men before.
    On our own, we compared the sketches to the photos on the personnel roster. No obvious matches. But the sketches were nondescript. Almost blurry. As would’ve been the recollections of a handful of casino employees who probably spent most of their time during the robbery staring at the barrels of the pistols pointed at them. The one sketch was of a generic Caucasian. Pug nose, square face, short hair, eyes unseen behind opaque shades. The other was even less specific. Dark man, dark hair, dark shades. He could be a curly-haired Korean, a Hispanic, a swarthy Caucasian, or even a light-skinned black.
    A group of American witnesses might’ve been able to figure out the man’s race. But to Koreans, all GIs are part of one race: foreigners. It was becoming apparent to me that these sketches were not going to be much help.
    The Charge of Quarters even decided to be a smartass about the whole thing.
    “These guys look more like you two than anybody else,” he said.
    Ernie and I ignored him. I unrolled the sketch of the smiling woman. Both men leaned forward, mouths open, and for a moment I thought they might drool. When the CQ reached for the sketch, I slapped his hand away.
    “Hey!” he said.
    “Have you seen her or not?”
    They both shook their heads and the CQ said, “I wish I had.”
    I thanked the First Sergeant for his cooperation. In response, he grunted.
    The United Seaman’s Service Club was our next stop. All the employees—the cooks, the waitresses, the bartenders—were Koreans, except for the American manager. He was a chubby, bald, middle-aged ex-merchant marine originally from New Jersey, and he definitely did not match the two young faces in the sketches. He claimed the KNPs had already been

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    by and questioned everyone in the club about the robbery. Still, at that time, they didn’t have the sketches. We showed the charcoal-limned faces to all the employees, and they all claimed they had never seen them before. The only ships in port currently were one Panamanian vessel manned by Filipinos, one Greek ship manned by Greeks, and a Japanese ship manned by Japanese. None of the crews frequented the United Seaman’s Service Club. The Filipinos and the Greeks because they were poor. The Japanese because they didn’t appreciate the food.
    “Tonight’s special is prime rib,” the manager told us.
    Ernie and I declined. No time for chow.
    Then I unrolled the sketch of the smiling woman and showed it around. The Korean men seemed mildly interested, but the women uniformly crinkled their noses. I asked what was wrong. Most of the women wouldn’t answer, but one rotund waitress waggled her finger at the sketch and said, “She not Korean.”
    “What is she?” I asked.
    “Maybe . . .” She started to say something but then thought better of it and shook her head. “I don’t know.”
    Everyone denied having seen the smiling woman.
    In the cocktail lounge, an elderly Caucasian man lay with his face down on a table near the juke box. The man was red-nosed, unshaven, and snoring.
    The Korean bartender stood at attention behind the bar.
    “How long has this guy been here?” I asked him.
    “We open, most tick he come.”
    “Most tick” is a GI corruption of the Japanese word mosukoshi, which means “in a little while” or “soon” combined with an English expression of time, as in “ticktock.” Therefore, “most tick.”
    “What time did you open?” I asked the bartender.
    “Bar open eleven hundred hours.”
    So this drunk had arrived here shortly after eleven a.m., during or shortly after the robbery of the