The Dockworker
Wang-chul clenched the fist resting on his knee and forced the words out.
"Cheongsan's biggest problem is that you mean to use gangsters for the hauling."
At the rebuke, Ki-jo let a faint smile touch his mouth. Wang-chul, unable to read what the smile meant, only looked unsettled.
"The other night, when we had dinner, Director Jang and I spoke of Lee Hwa-ryong and Assemblyman Kim Doo-han. Has that been sitting badly with you?"
"Yes, sir. If there's any way around it, I'd rather you didn't."
Ki-jo nodded. He had brought those two names up that evening for a reason: to take Ko Wang-chul's measure. He had wanted to see what the man would do when told that gangsters would be used to move the beer. That Wang-chul stood against it was enough to satisfy him.
"We won't be using gangsters."
"You mean that?"
"Of course. Hauling Seoul gangsters down to Busan to keep the Busan gangsters off us would be the cheapest trick in the book."
The tension went out of Wang-chul, and a bashful smile found his face.
"Let out-of-town muscle set one foot in Busan and the whole city will be up in arms. Cheongsan Transport might never be allowed through those gates again."
"I'm relieved, sir. I thought you were only thinking of getting the goods there in one piece."
"I lived in Busan for three years. Worked the piers as a dockhand. I know how people feel down there."
"You were a dockworker, sir?"
"All through the war I worked the docks. If Cheongsan showed up with Seoul gangsters in tow, the dockhands would refuse our cargo. Cheongsan Shipping keeps its base in Busan. That would be a disaster."
"I never knew you'd done hard labor. I had you down for a young master out of a rich house."
Misunderstandings of that kind had followed Ki-jo all his life.
"Kind of you to see me so. Then that matter's settled?"
"Yes, sir. I'll go on to the next problem."
"There's another?"
"There is. Ahem. Ahem."
Ki-jo learned one of Wang-chul's habits then. Whenever the man had something important to say, he cleared his throat first.
"The Burucks we're using for the beer haven't got the power. We ought to put Cheongsan's cargo trucks to proper use."
"And why is that?"
"Once a beer truck is inside Busan, the surest way to stop it is to block the road."
"Block the road... I see."
"I know the stretches the gangsters like to close. The easiest way is to throw trucks across in a hurry, and if you mean to shove those trucks aside, you've got to have something with the muscle of a military truck."
Ki-jo was quietly pleased. Wang-chul had already turned the Busan run over in his mind from half a dozen angles. He had been thinking that way even before he was regular staff; now that he was a proper director, all that remained was to put real weight behind him.
"If we're going to clear obstacles, the trucks ought to be modified a little. Can it be done?"
Instead of answering, Ki-jo fetched a sheet of paper and held out his fountain pen.
"Draw it."
Wang-chul sketched a triangular wedge onto the nose of a truck.
"Bolt a piece of iron as hard as railroad rail across the front, like this, and shoving an obstacle out of the way gets a great deal easier."
Ki-jo studied the drawing with care, then nodded. Beneath the sketch he wrote a few words.
Trucks to be modified after consultation with Director Ko.
— Lee Ki-jo
He signed beneath the line.
"Take this paper and go to Yeoncheon with Director Jang and Director Shim."
"Yeoncheon?"
"There's a Cheongsan maintenance shop there. If something needs altering, tell the shop foreman. Ask for Foreman Yeom. He's a very capable man."
Ki-jo had already been generous with his pay. To be backed now, openly and without hesitation, flushed Wang-chul with excitement. He shot to his feet and cried out.
"Sir! I'll take the Busan haul on my shoulders and see it through! You're trusting me with this — I won't break a single bottle of beer!"
"Haha. Sit down, Director Ko. Raise your voice like that and the people outside will think we're in here fighting."
"I'm sorry, sir!"
Wang-chul sat again.
"Let me come back to that first worry of yours. We won't use the Seoul gangsters. But one or two men who used to run with the fists may be coming into the company."
"Ah. Is that so?"
"Director Jang will bring only men who've quit that life and mean to live straight. Don't trouble yourself over it."
"Then it is true that you and Director Jang know those brawlers."
"We happened to meet them, nothing more. I've never done a gangster's work."
"Haha. I never even imagined such a thing. I only found it strange that you kept company with men like that. You seem so far from that world."
"I'm no fonder of gangsters than you are, Director Ko."
Watching the thin smile on Ki-jo's face, Wang-chul turned the thought over. This man was nothing like the transport bosses he had known. President Lee Ki-jo had an open, generous cast of mind. He seemed already to have caught the scent of Wang-chul's private life, and yet he showed neither curiosity nor any wish to meddle.
Wang-chul meant to settle with the women he had in every corner of the country, dividing five years of his wages among them as compensation. He had always liked women, and in his years of drifting he had been introduced to a good many and had set up house with them. His looks were only passable, but a driver's pay ran high and he had a ready tongue, so keeping company with women had never been difficult. He wanted that life finished. No child had come of it yet. This, he believed, was the time to put the mistake right.
"Director Ko — may I step outside and announce the contract?"
"Of course, sir."
Ki-jo led him out and, before the staff, made it known that a five-year contract had been signed and that Ko Wang-chul was now a director of Cheongsan Transport.
They applauded, glad to see a veteran bound to the company for the long term. At first his habit of poking into everything and talking too freely had been a nuisance, and the boasting thick enough to sour them; once they worked beside him, they saw a man of real ability and a generous heart.
The employees swarmed him, caught hold of him, and dragged him off to one side.
"Huh? Huh? What's all this?"
One of them, an arm around the flustered man's waist, said, "You're a director now. You've got to report it to heaven."
"Report it to heaven? You want me filing papers with the Jade Emperor? What are you trying to do?"
"All right — one, two, three!"
They tossed him.
"Waaaah!"
Heaved clean off the ground, Wang-chul yelled. The men who had worked the brick factory had strength to spare. However he shouted for them to stop, they launched him high into the air again and again, without mercy.
When Wang-chul's initiation as director was done, Ki-jo gave Ma-ryang his last instructions and went to Seoul Station. He took the last train alone, bound for Busan.
The Busan haul was set for January 12. If Ki-jo arrived on the ninth, the Cheongsan Transport trucks leaving Bupyeong would reach Busan on the thirteenth. The time he had in which to make his plan real came to three days, and no more.
Seated on the train for Busan, he watched the dark beyond the window and called up his eleventh past life. Even among those memories, this one was bleak. It had happened at seven in the morning on July 1, 1954.
He was going into the worksite when several trucks suddenly roared up and a hundred-odd thugs spilled out of them. They laid into the laborers heading in for work with clubs and fists, striking whoever they met, and Ki-jo, with no time to dodge and no notion of why, was beaten down with the rest. A club came for his head. He threw up his right arm just in time. When he dropped, clutching that arm, the men struck him with the clubs and kicked him where he lay.
He lost consciousness under the sudden assault. Someone was shaking him awake.
"Hey. Come on. Wake up. Hey!"
Ki-jo opened his eyes. A man with blood running from his scalp had one hand pressed to his own head and was shaking Ki-jo with the other. Even with his eyes open, Ki-jo could not remember why he was lying on the ground. He began, slowly, to push himself up, and someone shouted.
"Lee! Don't move! Your arm's broken!"
He looked down at the right arm. It hung limp, and the palm was turned at an angle that was not an angle a hand should hold.
They took him to a hospital and treated him. He was sitting on a chair there when the police arrived. At first he assumed they had come to look into the attack. They had not. They went among the men who were still comparatively sound and urged them to come along to the station. Ki-jo did not want to go. If the injured had to be questioned, it could be done at the hospital; there was no reason to drag them off to a police station. When he refused — and he was one of those who still looked relatively whole — two officers seized him and took him in.
Hauled to the station, he was ordered to give a statement about what had happened that morning, and the absurdity of it left him blank. He was the one who had been hurt, yet the police handled him as if he were the man who had done the hurting. When he protested, they lost their tempers and shouted.
"You're a Free Labor Union man, aren't you!"
"I'm not in any union."
"Don't lie to me! This was Free Labor Union men jumping members of the Korean Labor Union and beating them!"
"I don't belong to a union, and I didn't hit anyone. I was coming on shift, just going into the yard, when all of a sudden—"
"Still won't show a scrap of remorse. A few meals of prison rice ought to clear your head."
The false charge was bad. Worse, and more hopeless, was the broken arm that meant he could not work. Whether they threw him in jail without cause or let him walk, nothing about that changed. The arm was broken. Work was gone either way. Poverty had a way of making ordinary thought impossible. There were the hospital fees, too. Unless someone else paid them, they would fall to him, and he did not know how large they would be.
He refused the statement they tried to force on him, right to the end. He could not say he had done a thing he had not done. The police pressing him and Ki-jo refusing them were both wearing down when Oh Yang-soo arrived.
Sunrye, shaken by word of a brawl on the Busan docks, had hurried to the piers and failed to find him. She had gone to Yang-soo, and Yang-soo had put the word around among men he knew until he learned which station was holding Ki-jo. A harbor pilot, he begged them to let the man go on his own guarantee. He was the one who had gotten Ki-jo the job on the docks in the first place, he told them, and he himself belonged to the Korean Federation of Trade Unions — so the claim that Ki-jo was Free Labor Union did not even make sense. Only after a long bout of pleading did the police let him out.
Coming out of the station, Yang-soo looked at him with a face full of pity.
"I can't make head or tail of this. What is this country coming to?"
Ki-jo gave him no answer. He walked with his head bowed.
"I asked around. They say a high official of the Liberal Party in Busan put them up to it. After the last general election he wanted the dock interests handed to the Federation men who back the Liberal Party, so he turned the gangsters loose. And the police look the other way and go chasing the wrong people."
Beside Yang-soo pouring it all out, Ki-jo walked with his eyes on the ground. All he could think of was how he was going to keep his family fed.
"Doesn't it eat at you? You never even joined a union, and you're the one who got hurt. Aren't you angry?"
"With my arm broken, I can't think of anything..."
He looked at Yang-soo and smiled, bitter and thin. The sight of that face nearly broke Yang-soo into tears.
"Don't you worry! I'll put up the rice to feed your household!"
Ki-jo bent his head low before him and thanked him. It was less joy than shame that made him bow.
Two days later an investigative committee of three, Kim Doo-han among them, came down to Busan. Once National Assemblymen were on the ground looking into the truth of it, the police released the victims they had locked up. A month or so after that, the man who had ordered the terror appeared. He offered not a word of apology — only a promise that it would not happen again — and with that the case was closed.
It was a typical mess of the 1950s. Politicians had their hands in it, but at the root it was a fight between unions over who ate. Whether a union backed the Liberal Party or not, it was sunk deep in the concessions on the docks. The whole thing had broken out as a trial of strength over who would hold Pier 3.
It was no accident that the bleak memory had surfaced. He was going to Busan for the very purpose of meeting the men of the dock unions.