The Broadcasting Business (4)
Gijo's step was light as he left the HLKZ-TV station and turned toward Euljiro. The deficit had come in exactly where he had expected, and he had found a way to get more televisions into people's homes. History was running true to the original timeline.
Two days earlier, on July 14, 1956, Walter Dowling had arrived to take up his post as the fourth United States ambassador to Korea. And why did that matter? For the past nine months, the country had had no American ambassador at all.
Syngman Rhee had withdrawn his confidence from William Lacy, the third ambassador, and in October of 1955 Lacy had gone home. The president of Korea had driven the American ambassador out for speaking against the excessive taxes levied on American trading firms doing business in the country.
With no ambassador in place, it stood to reason that the CIA operating in Korea could not throw its weight around. All the while the post sat empty, Frank's power had visibly withered. But the ambassador was back, and with him the season in which Frank could exert himself again.
I haven't asked Frank for a single favor all this time. This once, I mean to.
Gijo had been biding his moment. He had been saddled with the station against his will; the Korean government would not help, and Frank, who had promised he would, had stayed lukewarm. It was time, he thought, to swallow his pride and ask a favor.
Reaching the American Cultural Center in Euljiro, he went straight to Frank and spoke the moment he was through the office door.
"Frank. The boss is here, so it's time to get to work, isn't it?"
"Come in, Mr. Lee. The station's doing all right, I hope?"
Frank smiled, but it was the smile of a man with something on his conscience.
"If you're curious, have a look at this."
Gijo held out a chart the sign painter had drawn. At his urging, the Dongducheon sign painter had closed up shop and come on as art director at HLKZ-TV. Frank ran his eye down a month of the station's figures and pursed his lips.
"Two hundred thousand dollars in operating funds, ten thousand a month in the red. You'll last nineteen months."
Shameless, when it suited him—true to the CIA. What he meant was that a year and seven months still remained, and the numbers might yet turn around.
"Of course. RCA's in no hurry. A company that clears hundreds of millions a year isn't going to blink at a paltry two hundred thousand, is it?"
RCA was one thing. Gijo looked at Frank with an expression that asked what he himself was supposed to do, having put in the same two hundred thousand.
Quick to take the hint, Frank scratched the side of his nose.
"What would you like me to do?"
About time you came out with it. Gijo grinned and laid before him the price list for televisions at the U.S. military PX, the one Shim Hansu had compiled.
"Mm." Frank stroked his chin as he ran down the list. "Military-supply sets are cheap, I'll give you that."
"Of course they are. They come in from the States duty-free, and no Korean tariff sticks to them either. They'd run about a third of what an RCA set sells for here."
Frank set the list down, steepled his fingers, and asked.
"You're saying we should leak PX goods onto the Korean market?"
Gijo nodded.
Frank smoothed a hand over his brow.
"How many would we need to move?"
"Just three thousand."
"Three thousand? Dump that many at once, and who's going to buy them?"
"I will."
Frank stared at him the way a man stares at a fool who has shoved his entire stake into the pot.
"Hold on."
He seemed to be working the figures, so Gijo supplied the answer.
"Bring in the cheapest model, a twenty-one-inch, and three thousand sets come to only four hundred and fifty thousand dollars."
"Only four hundred and fifty thousand?"
Put so brazenly, it drew a dry laugh out of Frank.
"Now, Mr. Lee, let's think this through like rational men. All right. Say the CIA pulls three thousand cheap sets out of America as military supply and ships them to Korea. Say we stack them to the rafters in some warehouse in Incheon or Busan."
"That's as far as I need you to go. I'll handle everything after that."
"If you buy the whole lot, then of course the CIA doesn't lose a dime. But how do you plan to dispose of them? You already owe RCA two hundred thousand. Isn't the risk a little steep?"
"If the CIA will sell them to me at the official rate set by the Korean government, there's a way."
"Five hundred hwan to the dollar?"
"That's right. Then what I'd have to pay comes to two hundred and twenty-five million hwan."
"And you can actually pay that in hwan?" Frank asked, looking genuinely worried.
"I can. So long as you don't put a gun to my head and tell me to pay the street rate."
Gijo and Frank broke into the same short laugh.
"You can cover it selling seasoning and bricks, is that it?"
"Of course. We sell cement and coal now, too."
"Ha. And here I was, worrying over Korea's General Electric for nothing."
He was comparing Cheongsan to GE, the American giant that made a little of everything and sold it.
Scratching lightly at the back of his head, Frank asked.
"What happens in Korea if you get caught selling smuggled goods?"
"Hard to say. It depends on who's selling. A man with power sells and never gets caught. A man like me gets caught and goes straight to prison."
Frank nodded. He took the answer to mean that Gijo already knew a safe way to move the sets, and that eased him a little. He launched into an old story.
"I came to Korea in '52, you know."
It was already his fifth year in the country.
"My first assignment was to look into a company called Samsung Mulsan."
"What made you investigate them?"
"They were selling so much scrap iron to Japan. A Japanese paper ran a piece: Bought scrap from Korea, and there was a warship in it. That article turned the CIA's people in Japan and Korea upside down."
"So what came of it?"
Gijo was caught by the story.
"We worried Samsung Mulsan might be diverting Korean Army weapons and peddling them as scrap. Fortunately, no. When we looked into it, the warship was a Japanese vessel sunk off the Korean coast during the Second World War. Koreans had raised it and sold it right back to Japan. In the middle of a war, no less."
Gijo and Frank laughed aloud together.
"Later I took another look at Samsung Mulsan, and they'd grown seventeen times over." Frank tapped a finger on the desk. "Companies get big in wartime, Korean or American. Sometimes I think that if you'd been in business during the war, Mr. Lee, you might be even bigger than you are now."
"During the war I was nothing. I kept dying, for one thing."
He meant it. Frank, taking it for a joke, laughed long and hard.
"Ha ha ha. All right, Mr. Lee. I'll bring three thousand sets in through Incheon harbor."
Gijo had his help.
As he was leaving the office, Frank asked one last thing.
"These twenty-one-inch sets we're bringing in—what do they come to in Korean money?"
"Seventy-five thousand hwan."
Frank whistled at the figure and held up three fingers. A wage earner could buy one if he saved three months' pay.
Gijo shook his head and held up four. Frank's reckoning was right at seventy-five thousand hwan, but Gijo meant to add ten thousand in profit and sell at eighty-five. He had to guarantee a margin to the man who would move the smuggled sets.
Leaving Frank, Gijo walked even lighter than before. RCA's strategy was to run a station in order to sell televisions; his was the reverse—put cheap sets on the market first, and thereby keep the station alive. That strategy had just taken its first step. The Korean government had no intention of bringing television prices down, so the only course, irregular as it was, was to release a large volume of duty-free, low-priced sets through the U.S. military PX. He had already worked out a sure way to move the smuggled sets without the law laying a hand on him.
He did not go back to the company. He headed for the house in Jongno, to take Sunrye, now at full term, out to Mapo.
When he came in, Sunrye and Soon-young had the bags already packed. Sunrye's cheeks were flushed, glad at the thought of bearing her child in her mother's house.
"Are you ready?"
"Yes."
"And your sister?"
"Me too."
"You made the right choice, sister-in-law."
He was praising Soon-young for changing her mind—she who had resented her birth mother and wanted nothing to do with her.
He lashed the bundles to the roof of the freshly repaired jeep, settled Yeongsu and Soon-young in the back, and helped Sunrye into the seat beside him, carefully fastening her belt.
"The belt isn't too tight?"
"It's all right. It's comfortable."
He eased the passenger door shut, climbed in behind the wheel, and drove slowly toward Yeomni-dong.
In Mapo, seeing her birth mother for the first time, Soon-young fell into the woman's arms and wept without restraint. Blood was a strange thing. She had never once laid eyes on her, had never known a mother's tenderness, and yet the moment she saw a face so like her sister's the tears came and she clung to her. Sunrye cried at the sight of it, and the tip of Gijo's nose stung.
After he had carried Sunrye's things into the room across the courtyard, swept clean for her, he thanked his mother-in-law's husband.
"Father-in-law. Thank you."
Called father-in-law, the man looked grateful and awkward at once.
"I'll think of Sunrye as my own daughter and look after her well. Don't you worry."
"I've been so busy I'm never home. I'm in no position to care for her myself."
"Men who work out in the world are all like that. Heh heh."
The man who had become Gijo's father-in-law laughed.
In his previous life Gijo had had no wife's family, and he was truly grateful that Sunrye's birth mother and her husband had become the elders of one. He had meant to spend 1956, the year their second child would be born, as a husband who stayed close to home, but the unforeseen broadcasting business had only made him busier. When he had no room left to look after Sunrye, the elders in Mapo stepped in, and that gave him room to breathe. Simply knowing there would be parents to care for her when the baby came was enough to steady him. What a difference it made, having parents or having none.
He ate lunch in Mapo with a happy Sunrye and Soon-young, then came home alone. Soon-young had decided to stay a few days with her sister. She would keep Yeongsu there with her, and afterward take him on to Hannam-dong.
The empty house was desolate past bearing. With Sunrye and Yeongsu gone, his eleventh life came back to him—that stretch of bitter, crushing loneliness. He could not stand to stay, and so he set out for Myeongwolgwan.
At Myeongwolgwan he sat down with Lee Seong-ryong.
"Business has been coming back to life lately, thanks to Yeongsu's daddy. Ho ho ho."
She looked at him with eyes that all but dripped honey, marveling that any one person could be so much help.
"Had business been bad?"
"Don't even start. During the election the Liberal Party put out that smear—that Candidate Shin Ik-hee kept twelve mistresses right here at Myeongwolgwan."
"They did."
"And because of it, not just the Liberal Party crowd but the civil servants cut us off cold. Word got around that Myeongwolgwan was the house where the Democratic Party kept its mistresses. A whole month of business, ruined. Honestly."
Remembering the May just past, Seong-ryong shuddered as if at a nightmare.
"Still, once the election was over and Yeongsu's daddy sent the artists and the entertainers our way, the image got better. Ho ho ho."
Gijo had been sending Myeongdong's entertainers to Myeongwolgwan often, to lift their spirits while he prepared HLKZ-TV to go on the air.
"Word got out that if you came to Myeongwolgwan you could see famous singers and movie stars, and would you believe it, even women started poking their heads into our place."
That ho-ho of hers never once let up through the whole of the talk.
"But what brings you here? Sunrye must be nearly due."
Gijo told her why he had come, and her eyes went perfectly round.
"You're going to bring Lee Jeong-jae here? To my place?"
"Yes. I need to talk a little business with him."
"If Hwa-ryong finds out he'll go straight through the roof... You know it as well as I do, Yeongsu's daddy. My brother and Lee Jeong-jae are like cat and dog..."
"Help me. Just this once."
"All right. I'll arrange it so Hwa-ryong never knows."
Seong-ryong could not refuse him.
It isn't as if Yeongsu's daddy has helped me only once or twice. How could I say no...
She set her jaw.