Slicky Boys

by Martin Limón

Itaewon

George Sueño and his partner Ernie Bascom are both grateful to the army. What for? For George it is because he has a real life, money coming in, and having a job to do. He and Ernie are CID investigators for the 8th  United States Army in Seoul, Korea. They wear suits and do important work, something George never thought he would do growing up in East LA. Ernie's Chicago youth also left much to be desired.

After work these two friends and partners spend their free time in Itaewon, a seedy part of town filled with bars and business women. On this  occasion they do a favor for one of the girls they met and it results in the death of a British soldier. It turned out that he was a little shady and as the CID investigators they need to find his murder before they themselves are in hot water for perhaps leading him to his death.

Part of the investigation reveals connection to a wide spread systematic thievery of the American enclaves. After the devastation of the Korean war twenty years before people were desperate and and starving. In the middle of these wastelands were American military settlements surrounded by barbed wire, and these were the only places with food, clothing and shelter. The people would barter with the GI's for the wealth they held be it so small as a used bar of soap. Others were more aggressive using thievery. 'Slick boys' is what the GI's called them and it was softened to slicky boys by the Koreans. Many were exactly that, boys of 6 to 10 years old. They would slip through the wire and take anything that could fit in their pockets.

8th Army PX

In George Sueño's time they were very organized and he was going to find out just how much. What he found impressed him because it a way there was a certain honor to the way the  losses to the American compounds was always kept just below what the US Government allotted for.No greed was permitted. In this way they also hid from investigations.

As Sueño's investigation proceeds he feels that he is becoming wrapped in the tentacles of a giant squid. There  are more brutal murders and the partners find far reaching fingers in the pie such as the North Koreans, the Korean Police, the Korean and the US Navy. The case is dragging them down to the deeps of evil.  On the surface at least part of the problem is the lose of military secrets.

Sueño has to lower himself to abide by the dictates of common thieves but this did not really bother him. He was from East LA and he had been fighting his way up from the bottom all his life. His strength in his relations with the Koreans is that he is one of the few who bothered to learn the language, to learn about the culture and to understand the desperate circumstances that force people into certain ways of life.




Martin Limón takes us to a Korea that is fascinating, exciting and very complex. He uses a bit of the history of the people he writes about to make us appreciate a very different oriental culture that has suffered for for the last centuries.