“Tell me about Whitcomb,” I said.
Mr. Yim raised and lowered his thin shoulders. “He is a GI. Like all the rest.”
“But he’s British. Not American.”
“Same same.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
“Sometimes he go Itaewon. With friends. Maybe he catch girl. I don’t know.”
“No VD?”
“No.”
So Whitcomb never caught the clap. Otherwise Mr. Yim would’ve seen evidence of the drip-clotted green pus-in his shorts.
“Did he sleep here every night?”
“Yes. Every night.”
His dark brow crinkled.
“What is it?” I asked.
“He sleep here every night but sometime he come late.”
“Was he in bed when you arrived to work?”
“Not always.”
“What time do you report in?”
“Five o’clock.”
The curfew runs from midnight until four A.M., and the MP’s routinely open the compound gates for Korean workers at five o’clock in the morning. Houseboys have to report in early so they can shine the boots and shoes of their GI charges before reveille.
“Where did he go late at night? Out to Itaewon?”
“No.”
That surprised me.
“How do you know?”
“Because of clothes. When I come in he not in bunk. Bunk no messed up. He down in shower, washey washey. On his bunk is clothes.”
“What kind of clothes?”
“Strange clothes.”
“Can you show me?”
Mr. Yim got up and walked to Whitcomb’s footlocker. He opened it and rummaged through the rolled underwear and socks and towels. He pulled out three items: a pair of dark dungarees, a black pullover turtleneck sweater, and soft-soled, navy blue shoes made of an elastic-type canvas material.
Ernie looked at me. We’d gone through everything while the Sergeant Major was here, but these items of clothing hadn’t meant anything to us at the time. Now, when they were displayed together like this, they seemed a little more ominous.
“Maybe he made his own bunk,” I said. “And wore these clothes out to Itaewon.”
“No.” Mr. Yim said it firmly. “He no make own bunk. And he no sleep. He taaksan tired.”
Very tired.
“How often did this happen?”
“Two, maybe three times each month.”
“Near payday?”
He shook his head. “Anytime.”
Mr. Yim seemed lucid, calm, smart, sober. An excellent witness, except that I knew from experience that houseboys were so low on the social scale that nobody took their testimony seriously.
But I did. So did Ernie.
“What else can you tell us about Whitcomb?”
“No more. He potong GI.”
A regular soldier.
“Who killed him?”
Mr. Yim’s eyes widened. “Maybe gangster.”
“Gangsters?”
He nodded. “In Namdaemun many gangster.”
“Do you know any?”
He shook his head vehemently.
We talked for a while longer but Mr. Yim didn’t have much more to offer. His life was an endless chain of shining shoes, washing laundry, ironing fatigues, and putting up with GI bullshit. Cecil Whitcomb had been just one more link in those loops of iron that weighed heavily on his soul.
On the way out, Ernie offered him a stick of gum but Mr. Yim refused. Instead, he went back to sorting the folded underwear and placing each item in the proper footlocker.
8
Admin Sergeant Riley’s thin lips crawled over the edge of the porcelain mug. He glugged down some of the milky coffee, set the mug down, and pulled the pencil out from behind his ear.
“You were right, George. The stats on stolen office equipment have risen sharply over the last three months.”
“Up ten percent,” I said. “Prior to that, they ran steady for years.”
Riley shook his head. “Not the smooth operations we’re used to either. Crude. Clumsy. Doors broken. Windows shattered.”
“The slicky boys are going downhill,” I said.
Riley nodded.
“Slicky boys” was a term that had come into use during the Korean War, more than twenty years before. The entire peninsula, from the Yalu River on the border with China to the tip of the peninsula at the Port of Pusan, had been completely ravaged. Hardly a factory or a business enterprise of any sort still stood. Crops had been allowed to rot in the fields after terror-stricken families fled to evade the destruction by the armies that stormed back and forth across the land. People were desperate. People were starving.
In the midst of this desolation were a few military enclaves, surrounded by barbed wire and sandbags. The only places that had food, that had clothing, that had shelter.
Some of the people would barter with the GI’s for the wealth they held. They’d trade anything, even their bodies, for something as insignificant as a bar of soap.
Others took more direct action. These were the slicky boys.
“Slick boys” is what the GI’s called them, but the Korean tongue is incapable of ending a syllable in a harsh consonant. They must add a vowel. So “slick” became “slicky.” And the GI’s picked it up. “Slicky boys” stuck.
And some of them really were boys.
Six, seven, eight years old. They could more easily slip through the barbed wire and hide on the compound for hours and bring out something precious to their waiting families. A handful of dried potatoes, a can of preserved beans.
It didn’t take long for their activities to become organized and their thievery to become bolder. The disappearance of supplies and equipment became a serious problem during the war, and the American generals made sure that precious warehouses were heavily guarded. Armed soldiers were given orders to shoot.
As the war dragged on, desperation kept the slicky boys at their work in the military compounds. And there were many compounds to choose from. By 1952, the United Nations had sent soldiers from sixteen different countries to help defend the Republic of Korea from the Communist aggressors.
In one incident, a slicky boy broke into a stronghold of the Turkish Army and was captured. The Turks tried the twelve-year-old on the spot and convicted him of thievery. After being tortured for a few hours, the boy was
