The Consigned Deposit
The American Cultural Center, on Euljiro in Seoul.
Back from Japan, Ki-jo was explaining to Frank how he had recovered the ship. Frank, curious for a solid week, listened and then gave him his honest opinion.
"Making AMKO Tungsten the plaintiff was a sound strategy. So was driving the other side into a corner with no room to breathe. That's how negotiation is done."
Even so, Frank judged that there had been a hole in Ki-jo's method.
"The grounds for the suit were a little absurd. Even so, it's fine. America is drowning in lawsuits more ridiculous than that."
Ki-jo laughed at that. The proof that the ship belonged to Daehan Shipping was solid enough, but AMKO's case had been pure nonsense—nothing more than an inflated claim for damages and a bluff about securing a preliminary injunction to bar the vessel from port, an order that would never actually have been granted. It had worked only because this was Japan, a Japan that shrank before the United States and hung its survival on exports there. And because Tanaka had leaned hard on the president of the Japanese shipping company.
"I still don't understand why that washed-up politician would do something so contrary to his own country's interests."
Ki-jo was sorry he could not explain it to the curious Frank. In 1972, Kakuei Tanaka and Kenji Osano would take billions of yen in bribes and bring Lockheed aircraft into Japan. The pair had always been that kind of men—men for whom the money that found its way into their own pockets mattered more than any proper use of the public purse.
"So we can call it a success thanks to this Tanaka."
"He was the key man on this job."
"Was he the negotiator you mentioned?"
"No. He was originally a lawyer for AMKO. I'd heard he was exceptionally capable, so I brought him along, and all he did was sightsee around Japan and go home."
"I envy him."
Buried under stacks of paper, Frank looked genuinely envious.
"You pulled it off again with the bare minimum of help from me."
"Not at all. The order you found, Frankie, was what decided it."
"What's so hard about finding a single document? Hand it to a librarian and they'll bring it to you."
Still brushing it off, Frank laced both hands behind his head.
"Fifty-six is nearly gone. Another fifteen days and it'll be 1957."
Frank, who had come to Korea in 1952, was entering his sixth year. Slipping briefly into reflection, he asked Ki-jo a question.
"Did you finish everything you'd planned for '56? In '55 you pulled off the vertical integration, didn't you?"
"Hard to say. Things I never planned kept breaking out one after another. I could barely think straight."
"Even so, you got done what needed doing, didn't you?"
"No."
Frank was faintly thrown. Ki-jo had done meaningful work—finding separated families among it—and still he claimed something remained unfinished.
"Wasn't that a little too blunt?"
"Was it? Ha. If you'll help me, Frankie, I think I can finish what I couldn't manage this year."
"You think so...?"
Frank hesitated. These days he had no margin left for helping Ki-jo. It was year's end, and the intelligence reports that had to go home to headquarters were endless; add even one small task and his days felt ready to come crashing down. And yet he kept wanting to know. What had Lee Ki-jo failed to accomplish this year, that he should regret it so? He was far too curious.
"What is it?"
Frank threw open Pandora's box.
"Off Niigata, in Japan, there's a place called Sado Island."
"Sado Island..."
"Yes. There's a mine there—the Sado Mine. When Korea was a Japanese colony, they forcibly mobilized Koreans and set them to work."
"The way the Nazis did in the Second World War?"
"That's right. And right now the Japanese government is holding the unpaid wages of the 1,141 Korean laborers who worked in that mine."
The instant he heard it, Frank wanted to turn the clock back ten seconds.
"I see. Ah—I had an appointment with the USIS director. Let's talk again next time."
Ki-jo stared straight through the dodge.
"I'll wait until you've finished."
Ki-jo did not leave the room. He sat on the sofa and opened a newspaper, and a sigh escaped Frank.
"Lee, go on. The appointment was a lie."
Ki-jo grinned and set the paper down.
"Mitsubishi, which ran the Sado Mine, lodged the unpaid wages with the Japanese government as a consignment deposit. They handed the money over in 1949, so it's nearly ten years now."
"What happens once it passes ten?"
"The statutory period expires and the money goes into the Japanese national treasury. About two years are left. I want to get it out."
In the history he remembered, those unpaid wages had slid straight into the Japanese government's pocket.
Ha... Lee Ki-jo's got his hooks in me again.
This was a matter for one government to settle with another, and here he was, a nobody of a CIA officer, being asked to take it on. Frank blamed himself for opening Pandora's box. At the same time he wondered when Ki-jo had grown this shameless. It seemed to date from the day he had asked to be called Frankie.
"Lee, you know what a consignment is, don't you?"
"Of course."
"Mitsubishi is a kind of debtor, and the creditors are the laborers who never got their wages. It's a dealing between them. Hard for the CIA to step in."
"I know."
"And the way I see it, Mitsubishi wants to pay those wages and the Koreans simply aren't taking the money. Either that, or the Korean government has no mind to collect it."
"Because the sum is too small."
"Ah..."
Frank's lips parted slightly, the look of a man thinking, so that's how it was.
"That could be."
Ki-jo nodded for him.
"Even so—better that Koreans receive it than that it disappears into the Japanese treasury. That's the idea?"
Ki-jo nodded again.
But the money itself was not the true object. If they recovered it now, the Japanese government would be unable, later, to talk its way out. At the slightest provocation Tokyo claimed there had been no forced mobilization of comfort women, that forced labor itself had never occurred. The Sado Mine was no exception. Now, while the deposit still existed, the Japanese government had to pay it out if the fact was to remain in the historical record. At the very least, proof had to survive that Mitsubishi had withheld wages during the war. Only then would there be evidence of forced labor.
Frank turned it over for a while, then spoke with the hint of a smile.
"Very well, Master. Your wish is my command."
Out of nowhere, he was doing an impression of the genie of the lamp.
"Step through that door, go to Gyeongmudae, and you'll find a white-haired old man living there. Ask that old man to recover the deposit the Japanese government is holding."
This time it was Ki-jo's face that went blank. A moment later the two of them were snickering.
"Lee, did you actually think this through before you brought it to me?"
"Of course."
Ki-jo laid out the plan he had shaped while walking the grounds of the Sado Mine.
"Frankie, first, immigrate every forced laborer in Korea to the United States."
"What?"
Frank put on an exaggerated face and deliberately let the ballpoint in his hand drop.
"Look, Lee. That remedy sounds an awful lot like the one Director Martin once dreamed up to keep you alive."
"Exactly. Wasn't Director Martin a true genius? Let's follow the method a genius proposed."
"Heh..."
Frank let out a hollow laugh.
"Lee, say there are a thousand forced laborers left in the South. To move every one of them to America... hmm..."
To make a mass immigration possible, he said, CIA headquarters would have to draw up a major operation—something on the order of training a special unit to invade a small country like Cuba. In a word, it was difficult.
Ki-jo gave a short laugh.
"Then give American citizenship to exactly one man, and have him go collect the deposit the Japanese government is holding."
Hooked again...
Frank was speechless. Lately, more and more, he had the feeling that Ki-jo had set him on the palm of his hand and was amusing himself. He didn't actually mind. Ki-jo did not carry himself like a man of twenty-six. Koreans looked young to begin with, and yet everything Ki-jo said and did was a sly old snake. He would open with an impossible favor, then quietly swap it for an easy one, until a reason to refuse became hard to find. Hadn't Frank himself, with his own mouth, allowed that one or two might be possible?
"Ha... All right. Exactly one, is it?"
"Yes. Exactly one."
"Fine. I understand. But as you can see, I have far too much to do this year."
Frank spread his arms toward the stacks of paper piled on the desk.
"Then do it for me next year instead—and find me a newspaper that will run the piece. American Forced to Labor in Japan During the Second World War Recovers His Back Wages from the Japanese Government."
Ki-jo drove in again without pause.
"All right. Let's leave it here for today."
Frank said it with one hand clasped over his head.
"Thank you, Frankie."
"So long as you know it, Lee."
Ki-jo left the room smiling.
After he had gone, Frank let out a single sigh.
How on earth did I end up meeting that man...
He thought of Ki-jo, forever stirring up some outrageous scheme and making nothing but strange requests, and a faint smile touched his mouth. Next year Frank would have to leave Korea. For five years he had done nothing but rigid, arid work. But the three years alongside Ki-jo had been full of interesting things. He had lived through events he never could have imagined, and he had found himself marveling at Ki-jo's startling ideas.
Lee Ki-jo was adept at making money, and yet—how to put it—he never gave the impression of being obsessed with the making of money itself. And he possessed a strange kind of charm.
Frank set the end of a French-made BIC pen between his teeth.
The man coming in after me isn't going to sit well with Lee. That worries me...
Posted to Korea for more than five years, Frank had to return home. Word was that a hard-line hawk, an intelligence officer risen from the military, was slated to take his place. The name was James Hausman—a man who stood, in a sense, as Frank's senior.
Arriving in Korea in 1946, he had passed on American training, American organization, and American doctrine to the Korean Constabulary, and for that he was called the father of the South Korean military. He was, at the same time, the belligerent figure who had urged merciless suppression when the operation to wipe out the partisans unfolded on Jeju Island in 1947. He had driven extra rounds into the skulls of men already executed, and he had filmed what was believed to be the slaughter of civilians and used the footage as a training aid.
When the American ambassador condemned him for ordering the execution of some twenty citizens of Jeju, he had answered like this.
James Hausman had been nothing but an Army captain, yet for as long as he was in Korea he basked in Syngman Rhee's lavish favor. He entered Gyeongmudae at will, met Rhee alone, and even sat in on cabinet meetings—a man the American ambassador himself could not handle lightly.
That man had gone back to the United States, and now he was coming to Korea again. Acknowledged for the power he wielded here on the strength of Rhee's absolute trust, he was shedding the uniform, joining the CIA, and returning.
Frank shook off his thoughts of that infamous successor and turned them to the favor Ki-jo had just asked. He decided to treat it as the last gift he could give before going home to America, and to do everything in his power.
When Ki-jo stepped out of USIS, his steps were heavy. He knew as well as anyone that the time was coming for Frank to leave Korea. That was why he had laid request upon request before the man departed. He was sorry, but there was nothing else for it. Once Frank was gone, he thought, it would grow much harder to draw on the help of the American embassy.
He walked from Euljiro toward Jongno, taking in the look of 1956 as it ebbed. Young and old, men and women, were savoring the year's end—and at the same time the jobless and the beggars drifted like ghosts through the cold wind along the streets of Seoul.
Korea was still poor, and still hungry.
The one small mercy was that in 1957 some four hundred million dollars' worth of aid grain would come into the country. Unable to think what else to do with its surplus crops, America would pour them into Korea rather than dump them into the sea. On the strength of that, cheap foods made of wheat flour—enough to fill a belly—would come into fashion. Rice prices would collapse in turn, and the income of Eundae-ri would shrink, but what mattered was that the hunger of hungry people would ease.
With the sunset on him, Ki-jo made for the house in Jongno. As he walked, he settled on his aim for 1957: to do something about hunger. The moment he thought of Yeong-su, who would start school the very next year, he saw children going to class with empty stomachs.
When he passed through the gate of the Jongno house, Yeong-su, who had been playing with the puppy in the yard, came running.
"Dad!"
At the brightness of the boy's voice, something in Ki-jo brightened too. He gathered Yeong-su in tight, then hoisted him up and carried him into the room.
His second child, Yeong-eun, was squirming on the warm quilt.
"Dear, wash your hands before you come in. I'll heat some water."
At Sunrye's word he turned toward the kitchen.
The water in the pot over the kitchen hearth was still cold. He dipped it up with a gourd ladle, just as it was, and washed his hands, his face, and his feet. So taken up was he with the thought of touching Yeong-eun's cheek with clean hands that he never even noticed the water was cold.