Sleeping with the Enemy
One by one, the men of the Dongdaemun gang gathered at Myeongwolgwan.
Lee Hwa-ryong learned of it too late. He came down on the house with the Myeongdong gang at his back, only to find the police drawn in a grim cordon all around Myeongwolgwan, and he had no choice but to turn on his heel.
Inside that ring of police, Kwak Young-joo of the Gyeongmudae Police sat drinking with the leaders of the Dongdaemun gang—Lee Jeong-jae, Yu Ji-gwang, Lim Hwa-soo, and Kim Tae-ryeon, the man they called Falling Blossoms, Flowing Water.
Kwak, whose heart's wish was to sport with Mi-hyang at Myeongwolgwan, was beaming. Ki-jo, for his part, passed cups back and forth and made awkward conversation with the Dongdaemun men.
"Hey, President Lee. Seeing you talk so warmly with my brothers puts my heart right at ease. You should have arranged a gathering like this long ago! Ha ha ha!"
At the swaggering words of a Kwak Young-joo riding high, the Dongdaemun men broke into great guffaws. Word had reached them that Lee Hwa-ryong had come as far as Myeongwolgwan and turned back in front of the police, and they seemed to taste the thrill of victory in it. That was the power of authority—a luxury the Dongdaemun gang could enjoy in the very heart of enemy ground, so long as they had a patron as solid as Kwak Young-joo behind them.
When Kwak slipped away to a private room with Mi-hyang, Ki-jo came to the point with Lee Jeong-jae.
"Chairman Lee."
He gave the title to the boss of the Dongdaemun gang, the man who also chaired the Dongdaemun Merchants' Association.
"I have a proposal I would like to put before you."
"Let's hear it."
Jeong-jae had the look of a man who could not quite bring himself to trust anyone tied to the Jongno gang and the Myeongdong gang.
"Dongdaemun's trade is every bit the equal of Myeongdong's. Isn't the reason Dongdaemun falls behind simply that it has no high-end goods?"
"Well... we were different from the start. The Japanese built Myeongdong up that way. Our Dongdaemun is a market the common people raised themselves."
For the 1950s, Lee Jeong-jae was a highly educated man—a high school graduate who had kept a cloth shop in Dongdaemun and even served with the police. His head was better than his fists. These days he held the Dongdaemun commercial district in his grip and ran it like a company. The extortion, the beatings, and the blackmail once visited on the merchants were gone, but he still skinned them of money, only with a finer hand. He bought land from Gwangjang Corporation for a song, parceled it out to the merchants at a steep price, and took an excessive profit by charging high rates for the electricity and telephone service supplied to the market.
"How long do you mean to leave Dongdaemun Market a market for common folk? You ought to be selling fine goods, the way Myeongdong does."
"Ha ha. Well, every market has its own character and its own strengths. Wouldn't you say?"
When Jeong-jae asked, the educated underbosses of the Dongdaemun gang nodded. Yu Ji-gwang had dropped out of the political science department at Dankook University and was a former army lieutenant. Falling Blossoms Kim Tae-ryeon was an elite who had studied, no less, at the College of Commerce at Seoul National University.
Contrary to the rumors about the Dongdaemun gang—and contrary to the image Ki-jo remembered from the television drama The Age of Wild Men, which he had watched in his previous life—the picture they presented was gentlemanly and intellectual. Even Lim Hwa-soo, who was little more than unlettered, made a show of playing the gentleman.
"Chairman Lee, markets change with the times. I would like Dongdaemun Market to handle cutting-edge goods."
"Cutting-edge... But isn't it a little awkward for the two of us to be discussing business?"
Ki-jo understood why Jeong-jae was putting the talk of money aside.
"Please, speak freely."
"All right, then. Ah... we're grateful to have been properly received here at Myeongwolgwan, and that's all well and good. But the truth is, this is Lee Hwa-ryong's territory, is it not? And you, as I understand it, are Big Brother Doo-han's man, and more than a little entangled with Hwa-ryong besides..."
He meant to begin by weighing the roots they each sprang from.
"Most of what you've heard is probably true."
Ki-jo granted him that much, then went on. "But I am not bound to Assemblyman Kim Doo-han or to Mr. Lee Hwa-ryong by business. Chance brought us together, and I have simply kept up the acquaintance."
Jeong-jae studied him for a long moment, chin lifted.
"So with me it's business, and with them it's friendship. Is that what you're saying?"
"Yes. And the broadcasting business I'm in was, in fact, something Chief Kwak pushed forward for me."
"Hm. I heard about that. They say you listen well to Big Brother."
"Yes. He has been very good to me. I call on him from time to time."
The mere thought of Kwak Young-joo brought curses up in him, but he let none of it show.
Turning over the tie between Ki-jo and his own sworn brother, Kwak Young-joo, Jeong-jae decided there was a point of contact with himself as well. With Kwak standing at his back, a man doing business on the scale of Lee Ki-jo was unlikely to try any tricks. One false move and he would lose everything. Jeong-jae had looked into him, after a fashion, and just as Ki-jo claimed, no money bound him to Lee Hwa-ryong. He had heard, though, that Ki-jo was fairly close with Hwa-ryong's older sister, Lee Seong-ryong... Perhaps that came only of having so many occasions, in the course of business, to entertain clients at a kisaeng house. In any case, the longer they talked, the more Ki-jo struck him as an educated man of their own kind.
"It's rude to ask this at a first meeting, but where did you go to school?"
"I was an orphan, so I never attended school. I studied English and mathematics under a missionary instead."
When Ki-jo spun the tale, Jeong-jae nodded. He had heard the rumor that Ki-jo, busy with business for the U.S. military, was in and out of the American embassy.
So that's why his English is so good... If he studied that hard under a missionary and the English pours out of him smooth as water, I can count him a high school graduate.
Little by little, he was taking a liking to the man.
"Let's hear the story, then."
The moment Jeong-jae lifted the bar, Ki-jo poured out the pitch he had prepared.
"I am assisting the U.S. Information Service in its work. They want to spread television through Korea, but the government is regulating the sets as luxury goods, and so..."
His explanation ran like this. The U.S. Information Service meant to release three thousand American televisions into Korea through the PX, and it needed a market that could absorb them. In Ki-jo's own judgment, Dongdaemun Market was the place. Sell them in Myeongdong, where a luxury trade had already taken root, at less than a quarter of the going price, and the merchants' resistance would be fierce. And so he meant to connect Lee Jeong-jae with the Service.
Summed up that way and set before him, it caught Jeong-jae's interest.
"You'll connect me with the U.S. Information Service? The Service and I would be dealing directly?"
"Yes. That's right."
By every rule Jeong-jae knew, a broker who took no commission in the middle was an absurdity. Ki-jo knew it too, and added a word of explanation.
"The Service has helped me a great deal in my business up to now. I am doing this by way of repaying that kindness."
"Are you? And the sales margin per set?"
"Ten thousand hwan apiece."
In that instant Jeong-jae could not hide the look of a man who found the deal rather thin. Sell all three thousand and the profit would still come only to thirty million hwan. To Lee Jeong-jae, whose measure had grown with the running of Dongdaemun Market, it was pocket money. Who, taking in at seventy-five thousand hwan a thing that sold on the street for somewhere around four hundred thousand, would not want to let it go for at least twice what he had paid? But Ki-jo judged that if the price climbed past eighty-five thousand hwan, the resistance in a buyer's mind would grow sharp.
"It's a bit thin..."
Of course it was. Ki-jo had expected nothing else.
"The selling price of the television cannot be changed from eighty-five thousand hwan a set. There is something, though, that you ought to consider."
"And what is that?"
"You can put a margin on the accessories that go with a television."
He explained that the antenna built into the set could be taken off and sold separately, and that television cabinets could be sold as well. In the fifties, the fashion was to keep a television inside a miniature wardrobe made of wood. The expensive sets even came already fitted into a chest. But the cheap ones they would bring over from America would be nothing more than a case around the picture tube. Talk it up—say it furnished a room, say a costly television had to be protected—and a television cabinet would sell well enough.
Lee Jeong-jae, who had already tried his hand at bundling steep management fees into what he sold at Dongdaemun Market, nodded. A television was a luxury good in any case. For anyone of the middle class and above, laying out another ten or twenty thousand hwan on account of a set was no great matter. If you could buy for eighty-five thousand hwan a television that sold on the open market for over four hundred thousand, would you begrudge a paltry few tens of thousands more?
"And please don't think of it as nothing more than a trade that leaves a profit. Think of it as raising the standing of Dongdaemun Market."
The market's staple trade was sundries, clothing, food and drink, and farm produce. It was no match for Myeongdong, thick with electronics and precision goods. Sell televisions there in quantity, and you could put life into the market and scratch the reputation that said electronics belonged to Myeongdong. For Lee Jeong-jae, who took as his rival not only the Myeongdong gang but the district of Myeongdong itself, it was a proposal to make the mouth water. He could pay back, too, the humiliation of hearing that people with money went to Myeongdong and did not come to Dongdaemun Market.
"I'll have a word with Big Brother."
He spoke of deciding after he had consulted Kwak Young-joo, but his face had already tipped halfway toward the partnership.
With the talk going well, the men of underboss rank began, little by little, to edge into the conversation. Lim Hwa-soo, whose business was film and the entertainment trade, showed the keenest interest in Ki-jo.
"President Lee. That broadcasting station in Jongno—I'd like some of the actors and singers I know to show their faces there."
He meant the entertainers he was raising. He wanted them put on the air.
"Of course. We're short of people to appear on television. If you know anyone, please send them."
Ki-jo agreed at once, and Lim Hwa-soo grinned.
"Shall I call Manager Won in now? If there's anyone you'd like to send, you can tell him directly."
"Manager Won?"
Ki-jo had Won Tae-sik, who had been waiting outside, shown into the room.
When Tae-sik stepped in, the Dongdaemun men hailed him like an old acquaintance.
"Oh! Won Tae-sik!"
"Tae-sik, you've been working at a broadcasting station?"
True to a man who got on easily with Seoul's gangsters without distinction of faction, he was welcomed all around.
"Tae-sik, take a cup from your brother."
"Yes, Brother. I'll take it with thanks."
Tae-sik went to his knees and drank off, draught after draught, the liquor the Dongdaemun men poured for him. Lim Hwa-soo drew him over to his side and set him to writing down the names of the actors and singers he wanted on the air.
When seven o'clock came, Ki-jo rose and, together with Tae-sik, carried the mother-of-pearl-inlaid cabinet from a corner of the room up to the drinking table.
"President Lee, why are you moving the cabinet?"
"This is a television cabinet."
"Is it?"
He opened it as he answered, and a black-and-white picture tube came into view. Ki-jo saw Lee Jeong-jae's eyes fasten greedily on the cabinet that housed the set, and on the antenna. It was a piece he had ordered made to his own design. He had set the television inside the mother-of-pearl cabinet to feed the vanity of the rich, and Jeong-jae, too, seemed already to be thinking that a set sold that way could fetch a higher price. For those who looked to the substance of a thing, the bare television at eighty-five thousand hwan; for those with money to spare, the same set nested in mother-of-pearl. Jeong-jae nodded.
The Dongdaemun men drank on with Ki-jo, cackling over the entertainment program HLKZ-TV was sending out.
"President Lee, who's that short little emcee?"
"A man by the name of Song Hae."
"He runs a show well, that one. Stocky little fellow, but he looks like he's got the gift."
"And that tall young comedian is funny too, isn't he?"
The man Lim Hwa-soo pointed out was Gu Bong-seo. Still unrisen, the one they called the youngest, Gu Bong-seo was showing off what tricks he had before the television camera and playing the clown for all he was worth.
When the drinking was done, the Dongdaemun gang returned to Dongdaemun under police escort. Ki-jo, who had seen them off at the door, turned to Tae-sik beside him.
"Did your talk with Lim Hwa-soo go well?"
"Yes, President. He was frantic to plant every last one of his own people."
Ki-jo nodded. At this rate, he thought, he could use the Dongdaemun gang to sell off the three thousand televisions without much trouble. No faction alive could lay a hand on the smuggling trade of a Dongdaemun crew with Kwak Young-joo braced behind it.
There had been a great roundup of smugglers in 1954. The count was four times that of the year before, but not because smuggling had suddenly swelled. Smugglers had always been plentiful; the police had simply made up their minds to catch them. Whether they chose to investigate or to look the other way, the number of arrests rose and fell with the choice. Let Kwak Young-joo bar the way, and the police would not so much as set a foot inside Dongdaemun Market.
Ki-jo sent Won Tae-sik on ahead and lingered at Myeongwolgwan. He waited until Kwak Young-joo, finished with what he had come to do, came out.
When Kwak stepped through the doors of Myeongwolgwan and saw him waiting, he grinned.
"You waited for me?"
"Yes, Chief."
Ki-jo bowed his head to the man who had climbed at such speed to chief of the Gyeongmudae Police. Kwak smiled, satisfied.
"Listen, President Lee. You got in the right line. Just you watch. I'll push you hard."
"Thank you, Chief."
Ki-jo bit down on what he felt and gave his thanks. He had a reason for bowing and scraping before Kwak Young-joo. There was one thing he was determined, without fail, to accomplish through the man. Until he brought it to pass, he was prepared to lay out liver and gall alike—to hold nothing of himself back.
After he had seen Kwak off, he walked slowly toward home. The house he was bound for stood empty, with neither Sunrye nor Yeongsu in it, but Ki-jo was not lonely. He carried a hope that could change the world.