A Dreamlike Proposal
The tigerish pressure rolling off the two knights-errant lasted only a moment. From the start, neither Jang Ma-ryang nor Kim Doo-han had meant Ki-jo any harm; their eyes, drawn tight from facing one another, had merely swung toward him. Kim Doo-han's gaze in particular lost a little of its force, thrown by the realization that he had misread who was master and who was man between Ki-jo and Ma-ryang. Ki-jo's pounding heart found its calm just as quickly.
Ma-ryang is here. No need to shake. They say that even with a tiger's jaws around you, you live if you keep your wits—but that's when there's one tiger. What do you do when there are two...?
He turned it over for a moment and settled on an answer. When there were two tigers, you survived by playing the tiger yourself. He set his weight into his legs, rose, and faced Kim Doo-han.
"My introduction comes late. Lee Ki-jo of Yangju, come down from Yeoncheon."
With that single sentence Kim Doo-han and Lee Ki-jo stood on the same footing, and Jang Ma-ryang dropped a step beneath them. Sensing how subtly the air had changed, Ki-jo pressed one step further.
"Ma-ryang, step outside a moment. The elders have things to discuss."
One of Ma-ryang's eyebrows shot up. But he had already tasted Ki-jo's quick wit once in the marketplace, and it was no great trouble to fall in with his rhythm.
"Aye. Understood."
Ma-ryang got to his feet, inclined his head to Ki-jo and to Kim Doo-han both, and spoke.
"You two talk. I'll keep the door."
What was unfolding before Kim Doo-han was so absurd, so far outside anything he had expected, that for a moment he could not gather his wits. When he had stepped into the tailor's shop, the rank his animal instincts had read was plain: Jang Ma-ryang stood far above. Ki-jo had looked like nothing more than an ordinary man traveling in the company of an exceptional giant. And yet this Lee Ki-jo, who seemed no older than his mid-twenties, was taking a grown man's deference from Jang Ma-ryang—a man in his thirties—and working him like his own hands and feet?
Lee Ki-jo. There's something to this one...
He could not help the thought. Otherwise the scene in front of him was impossible to explain.
Lee Ki-jo sat down before him with perfect ease, and the man who rose just then in his mind was the actor Cho Seung-woo. Strangely, whenever he needed to perform, Cho Seung-woo surfaced. In the marketplace it had been Goni from Tazza; here in the tailor's shop, it was Kim Won-bong from Assassination.
"I failed to see the man in front of me and made a blunder. My apologies, Mr. Lee."
Kim Doo-han offered his hand as he said it.
"It's quite all right. We mistook your younger brothers for street punks and acted accordingly, so let us call it even and forget the matter."
"Just as I thought—Ma-ryang didn't do that on his own. You told him to, didn't you, Mr. Lee? Hahaha!"
Ki-jo was faintly startled that Kim Doo-han had leapt straight to a conclusion of his own, but he let it stand.
"Well, Ma-ryang and I are as close as blood brothers. What's in my heart is in his, you might say..."
He wore the smooth, roguish ease of Cho Seung-woo on the screen, and grinned.
"Well, I've been in this life a long while, and I know a few men like you who'd rather their faces not be known. Most of them put a kagemusha out in front, just as you have... haha."
Kagemusha? A false lord—a shadow standing in for the real one? Well. Let him think what he likes.
Instead of answering, Ki-jo smiled again, slow and thin.
"I heard you turned the opium over to hospitals, pharmacies, and herbal clinics, for medical use. Hearing that, I took you for a man of judgment."
"Well, I heard medicine was short on the market, so I released the opium."
"I know. Had you passed it to the addicts, the margin would have swelled three or four times over. I'm well aware you gave that profit up."
"In China, perhaps. In one's own country, it couldn't be done."
Without meaning to, Ki-jo had stepped over the line. Lost in the performance, the stories he had picked up from Ma-ryang on the road to Seoul tangled themselves into the lie and came out with it.
"Were you in China before the Liberation?"
"Ah, well... Manchuria, Nanjing, Shanghai, Chongqing. I drifted all over. The Japanese army was on my heels..."
"If you were in Shanghai or Chongqing, you must have met the late Baekbeom—Kim Gu—as well."
"I saw his face briefly in Chongqing, and we drank a cup of tea. He asked me then to join him in the independence struggle..."
"Master Baekbeom made you an offer like that? Then did you share his cause?"
"No. I refused."
"Why? Why didn't you join him?"
"I was afraid I might die..."
At Ki-jo's answer, Kim Doo-han laughed, loud and open-hearted.
"You are a remarkably honest man, Mr. Lee! I respect you, Mr. Lee!"
Ki-jo laughed along, though nothing could have sat worse with him. Still, if he meant to walk out of Myeongdong in one piece, the only choice was to keep acting.
"When did you come to Korea?"
Kim Doo-han asked, and here Ki-jo had to take the history he knew and braid it into a lie of his own making.
"Not long ago. When China went communist I went to Taiwan with the Generalissimo, then came through Japan into Busan."
"Ah... so you served under President Chiang Kai-shek as well."
"Not exactly under him. I merely helped the gentleman with a thing or two."
"Then the opium—President Chiang provided it?"
"When I said I meant to return to the homeland, he saw me off with it. The President himself had been driven off the continent and was hard up; he said opium was all he had to give, and handed me a bundle..."
"Opium is the best of it. Worth more than gold of the same weight."
The moment he heard those words, a memory Ki-jo had let slip came back to him. The 1950s were an age of inflation. The value of money fell by the day. Whatever the opium brought in would have to be turned into gold.
"Mr. Lee, meeting like this must be fate. Won't you have a drink with me before you go?"
Kim Doo-han seemed to want them on friendly terms. Ki-jo wanted no such thing. He had no idea when the lies he had told might come apart.
"Public business and private leave me little leisure..."
"Of course. I've caught hold of your sleeve too suddenly. Haha."
Kim Doo-han laughed, a little abashed, then his face turned serious.
"Then, Mr. Lee, I'll be blunt and make one request of you, here and now."
"A request?"
Ki-jo felt the thing growing larger by the moment. But once your foot was on the accelerator, you did not take your hands off the wheel. A car that had surged did not answer the brakes.
"I'll hear you out, at least. Speak."
"You haven't been back in Korea long, so you may not know—but this May there is an election for the National Assembly."
"I know."
Lee Ki-jo knew that Kim Doo-han would stand in that year's election and take a seat.
"You've already heard the rumor that I mean to run?"
Ki-jo gave a slow nod.
"Then I'll speak freely. Help me with my campaign, and I will grant you one thing you want."
It felt like a gift dropped in his lap. Whether Ki-jo helped him or not, the man was destined for the Assembly. Wasn't this saying that merely setting one foot in would be enough to get him whatever he desired?
"You'll give me what I want?"
"Name it. Right here."
There was one thing he wanted desperately just now. A truck. If he could only lay hands on a truck, he could drive the development of the Cheongsan land at full speed. Cheongsan—the ground he thought of as Yeoncheon's future, Yeoncheon's own Gangnam—would yield a very different profit depending on whether a truck was there or not.
"Can you get me a single U.S. Army truck?"
"A U.S. Army truck..."
Ki-jo knew that in the days of the American military government, Kim Doo-han had once landed a service contract with a U.S. unit. He had seen it in the drama Rustic Period—that absurd scene in which the man, on nothing but raw nerve, bellowed "Four dollars!" and made a fortune. Even now he could bring his influence to bear on the American troops stationed in Seoul, and a single truck the army had shoved into some corner of a base was something he could spirit away if he truly set his mind to it.
"Good. You have my word."
Kim Doo-han agreed without a moment's hesitation.
He'll actually do it?
A line tossed out on a whim had landed solid, and the one thrown by it was Lee Ki-jo. He recovered his composure and asked.
"How, exactly, would you have Ma-ryang and me help you?"
"I'm about to become a public man, and getting tangled in fights will be nothing but a headache. But I can't spend the whole time dodging them either... If Jang Ma-ryang guards me through the campaign, and steps in to fight in my place when a fight can't be avoided, that will be enough."
Wait a moment... Kim Doo-han runs as an independent and wins, and the Liberal Party, wanting to block him, can turn other gangsters loose on him—men like Lee Jeong-jae.
Ki-jo weighed the gain against the loss. Taking the offer was profit, no question. The problem was Jang Ma-ryang. It had to be his choice. Only if he agreed could Ki-jo accept, and only then, once the election was over, would a truck be theirs.
Through the glass of the display window his eyes met Jang Ma-ryang's. Ma-ryang was watching him. He looked straight back and nodded.
He's nodding...? What does he know...
Ki-jo wondered what the nod was meant to say. Then he caught the signal Ma-ryang sent, and understood. Ma-ryang mimed hauling a steering wheel this way and that, then flashed an OK with his fingers.
When Kim Doo-han ducked his head to light a cigarette, Ki-jo shaped a question with his mouth.
Take the offer?
Ma-ryang nodded, large and clear.
So Ma-ryang can read a man's lips...
Gladness went through him. He turned to Kim Doo-han, the cigarette now lit between the man's fingers, and spoke.