“Don’t move!” I shouted, trying not to gag at the stink. “CID!”
The three workers in the back hopped off the bed of the truck and took off running, splattering shit and mud in their wake.
Ernie ran after them.
People emerged from the gateways lining the street, gaping in awe at the mess, covering their mouths and noses with their hands.
The driver of the honey truck was ranting, shaking his fist at Ernie and the trash truck driver and anyone else who would listen.
Each time I took a breath I felt like throwing up, but I held it.
Instead, I jumped up onto the running board of the trash truck and jerked open the door.
The driver clutched the top of the steering wheel, face buried against two gloved hands.
“CID!” I said. “Climb out of the cab.”
When he didn’t move I jabbed him in the ribs.
“You’re in a world of shit. Don’t make it worse.”
I grabbed the driver by the shoulder and jerked. With surprising force the body pulled back and the head shot up.
“Manji-jima sikkya!” Don’t touch me, you bastard!
The face was wrinkled, but the skin appeared soft and there was no stubble of a beard. Climbing out of the cab, a clawlike hand ripped back the wool cap and a flood of gray hair tumbled out.
“Keep hands to yourself, Charley,” she said in perfect GI English. “You don’t know how treat lady?”
Ernie splashed back through the mud, breathing heavily.
“They got away,” he said and glanced at the driver. “Who the hell is this?”
“Nice talk, GI,” she said.
Ernie looked at me. “I’ll be damned. A broad.”
“A lady,” the driver said. She glanced at the mess. “Smell so bad around here maybe gag maggot.”
The snow had stopped. As if it too didn’t want to drop into the filth spewed by the honey truck.
I grabbed the lady by the elbow and we sloshed through the sucking muck.
Her name was Nam Byong-suk. We booked her at the Camp Market MP Station, then escorted her to one of the interrogation rooms. Apparently the aroma of the honey truck still lingered in the air around us because the office pukes backed away from us, crinkling their noses, as the three of us paraded down the hallway.
Once we were alone, Ernie offered Nam Byong-suk a stick of gum and I fetched her a cup of coffee. From somewhere within the folds of her filthy jacket she produced a cigarette and I struck a match for her. She took a long drag and blew smoke into the air.
I was right in my evaluation of her. All she really wanted was for us to treat her like a lady. Once we did that, she started to talk.
“I used to be a business girl,” she said. “The best-looking girl in Itaewon.”
“How’d you get into this line of work?” Ernie asked.
“I can’t tell you.” She sipped on her coffee.
“This is serious business,” I said. “You’re about to lose your job.”
“No sweat. I get another one.”
“It’s not so easy to find a job in Korea.”
“It is for me.”
“Because you work for the slicky boys?”
She glanced at me slyly. “Slicky boys?” She sipped on her coffee.
“That’s who you work for, don’t you?” “Ernie asked.
“Not your business.”
“Sure it is,” I said. “Between us only. You must cooperate with us. If not, the slicky boys’ business here will be shut down. Your boss will lose a lot of money and he’ll be very angry.”
“We want to talk to your boss,” Ernie said.
“Not boss,” Nam Byong-suk said. “King.”
“King?”
“Yes.”
I watched as her puckered lips worked away on the cigarette. The room filled with the reek of cheap tobacco laced with the memory of the honey truck.
I asked, “You mean there’s a king of the slicky boys?”
“Of course. How else you think he can control all slicky boys? Without king, without strong man, everybody slicky anything. Pretty soon GI honcho get mad, pretty soon no can slicky anything, pretty soon no more money.”
“The King of the Slicky Boys,” I said. There was reverence in my voice. She liked that. “Tell us about this king.”
“His name is So Boncho-ga.”
I nodded. At the time I didn’t know what boncho-ga meant but I looked it up later: herbalist. She wanted us to call him Herbalist So.
“Where can we find him?” I asked.
“No can find. His place is in…” Slicky Girl Nam turned to Ernie, loosely cupping her fist and poking her forefinger into the hole. “What you call this one?”
“Asshole,” Ernie said.
“No. Place where bakchui live.”
Ernie looked at her blankly. I rummaged in my memory for the word and found it. Bakchui. Bats.
“A place where bats live,” I said. “A cave.”
“Yes,” she said. “Cave.”
“The king lives in a cave?”
Slicky Girl Nam nodded triumphantly. “Yes. A cave. He still does. In Itaewon.”
“A cave in Itaewon?” I couldn’t believe it. The entire district was packed with hooches and nightclubs and chop-houses. And every inch of it had been crawled over by GI’s at least a million times. “Where is it?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Nobody know. It’s big secret.”
Ernie and I looked at each other and then back at her. She waved her cigarette in the air.
“No bullshit. King live in big cave. Have-what you call? — rats and bats and everything. Beneath Itaewon.”
The slicky boys lived underground, she said, like moles. And they came up at night to steal whatever they wanted.
“How can I get in touch with him?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Many years I don’t see.”
“But you work for him.”
“Many people work for him. Still we don’t see him. Somebody tell us what to do, we do.”
Layers of command, insulating the top boss. It made sense. I thought of trying to work my way back, one slicky boy manager at a time. It wouldn’t work. They’d never talk to us. Not unless we found leverage to force them to spill their guts, and that would take too much time.
“Who would know how to contact this Mr. So?”
“You no can talk to him.”
“Why not?”
“You foreigner, right?”
“Right.”
“No foreign bastard ever talk to King of the Slicky Boys.”
“Why not?”
“He don’t like. If you ever talk to him, if you ever see his face, then you die.”
She sliced her forefinger across her throat.
Ernie chomped on his gum furiously. “Knock off the bullshit, Nam. We’re CID agents. This Slicky Boy So is nothing but a thief. We’ll talk to him whenever the hell we want to talk to him.”
