A Strange Fellow
James Hausman had not always been James Hausman.
His true name was John Otto Hausman. Wanting to be a soldier, he had enlisted at sixteen under his older brother's name, and from that day on he had worn it as his own. Soldiering must have been his vocation. Starting as a private, he made sergeant in four years, second lieutenant the year after that, and captain within six months—a captain before he had been in uniform five years.
He fought in the Second World War, throwing himself with relish into battle against the people of his German father's country, and was wounded just before the fighting ended, returning to America. After the war he drifted through idle posts until 1946, when he was sent to Korea and charged with standing up a Korean army. He was to build a modern military in a small, poor country that had been a Japanese colony. In his own fashion, he carried the mission out faithfully. He scraped together men who had received something like formal training in the Japanese and Manchurian armies and drilled American doctrine into them. Before long they were calling him the father of the Korean army.
The officers he raised became generals who distinguished themselves in the Korean War, and President Syngman Rhee placed enormous trust in him. When Hausman once had to leave Korea for a time, Rhee had said, with open regret:
"I don't need any other military adviser. The only man I need is you, Hausman."
Was that trust confined to the Korean army and the Korean president? It was not. When the Korean War broke out, the generals who rushed over from the mainland looked for Hausman first.
"So you're the captain they told me I had to meet if I ever came to Korea?"
Even Lieutenant General Walker, the fierce commander who brought the Eighth Army to Korea, sought his counsel. Someone had to handle the Korean forces, and the only man who knew them, and knew how to manage them, was Hausman. He understood perfectly well that he held the confidence of both sides. That was why he lived inside the compound of Eighth Army headquarters. He was no longer a soldier, but he believed he belonged there, where the armies of both nations could find him without trouble.
And yet one young Korean was different. Born in 1930, he was only twenty-six by American reckoning, and he had been unusual from the first meeting. He had not even eaten the steak Hausman set before him. He had the nerve to pay for it and walk out. Every other Korean tied to Hausman strained for one more audience. This one never came back. Hausman had authorized him to draw on two hundred and eighty thousand dollars whenever he liked, and the man had not spent a cent.
What kind of fellow is this...
To Hausman, Lee Ki-jo was a strange one. Curious, he looked into what the man was doing. It was a sight. The strange fellow was in the garbage business. Perhaps because he had hauled Eighth Army freight and built bases, he was clever enough to deal with the Eighth Army directly, without going through Hausman at all. In the end he won the contract to handle refuse for the entire U.S. Eighth Army, and the man who closed the deal was a short, thickset fellow named Cho Choong-hoon. The squat Korean had a great many friends inside the American military.
What was peculiar was that the garbage contract Ki-jo had landed did not make money. He was disposing of the trash that came out of the bases while taking almost nothing from the Army in return.
What in the world is this bastard up to...
Curiosity got the better of him. Hausman dug through the records and turned up one American connected to Ki-jo: Captain Cedric, who had served as aide-de-camp to Major General Will Martin of the 7th Division. His commander had gone home to the States, but Cedric was still in Korea, assigned to Eighth Army headquarters. Hausman summoned him and told him to find out what business Lee Ki-jo was running. A few hours later Captain Cedric reported what he had learned.
"Did you see the man yourself?"
"Yes, sir. Colonel."
Inside the Eighth Army compound, Hausman went by colonel.
"What's he doing with the Army's garbage?"
Hausman had half expected him to be boiling the food waste from the bases into the red soup Koreans loved. He knew they were already doing it, and he figured a sharp businessman would trade on the free ingredients coming out of American units.
"He says they burn what can't be used and sort out what can, for a recycling operation."
"Recycling?"
"Yes, sir. He's hiring the people who used to pick through the trash around the bases and paying them wages. From what I saw, it doesn't look like much of a living."
Cedric spoke plainly about the impression Ki-jo had left on him.
"And the food waste?"
"He says he's built a pig farm in Yangju and is feeding it to the hogs."
"A pig farm?"
Hausman felt as if he had been caught flat-footed.
Aren't Koreans in a state where they ought to be snatching the food out of the pigs' mouths? And he's feeding it to the pigs?
He thought a moment, then asked:
"Then tell me this. Aren't the people who used to scavenge food around the bases going hungry?"
"He says he's given them work."
"What kind of work?"
"He's built a bakery. Teaching them to make bread, and turning it out, too."
"A bakery...?"
Hausman was dumbfounded. Why not leave them to pick over the scraps coming out of the bases? A bakery? Did Koreans even have the money to buy bread?
"What kind of bread?"
"School-lunch bread, he says. Made from the wheat flour and cornmeal coming in as aid."
"So he hired the beggars rooting through garbage around the bases in order to bake lunch bread?"
"Yes, sir. Orphans and the poor from around the bases."
Well. Look at this.
Hausman called up the latest file on Ki-jo. The young Korean was launching one moneylosing venture after another. A television station nine months in the red. A fresh campaign to find separated families over his own broadcast network. The loose running of a bus company whose profits were doubtful. And now, on top of all that, a lunch-bread bakery staffed with orphans and paupers. Was this something a man in his right mind would do? He decided he had better see the fellow again himself.
"Captain Cedric."
"Yes, Colonel."
"Bring that Lee Ki-jo to me."
"Now, sir?"
"Why not?"
"No reason, sir. I'll bring him."
Leaving the office, Cedric remembered going all the way out to the countryside of North Gyeongsang a few years earlier to fetch Ki-jo. The memory of ignoring the Korean army's attempts to stop them and forcing the Han River bridge brought a thin smile to his face.
Ki-jo was near Eighth Army headquarters in Yongsan, walking through the bakery he had built for the poor of the district and encouraging the children learning the trade there. To call it a bakery was generous. A few large ovens and a table for making bread were the whole of it—by later standards, no more than a big neighborhood bake shop. Even so, Ki-jo was satisfied. He felt a particular pride whenever he looked at the boys who had come to his factory to learn a skill.
In the 1950s there had been something like technical schools for boys who could not attend school, or who were orphans. The government had built them, and the only trade they taught was shining shoes. There were no jobs to give the children anyway, so the vocational education of the day was to raise up shoe-shine boys, hand them a wooden box with polish and brushes, and send them into the streets to earn their own money. Landing a place as an American houseboy counted as getting ahead. Most of them failed to make a living shining shoes and slid onto the wrong road—dragged into begging rings, or forming gangs of their own. In the Seoul of those years there really were a great many boy gangs made up of teenage boys.
Ki-jo wanted those boys to stay off that road, learn a decent trade, and work in a factory or open a shop of their own. For now, teaching them to bake was the best he could do. He watched with quiet pleasure as a boy who had once torn into steak in his car worked dough with clean hands.
He had the children who lived nearby come into the bakery. When they arrived they were washed clean first, then set to handling the dough. The factory fed them and let them watch over the older boys' shoulders as the bread was made. With nothing to play with and nothing to see, they came, watched all day, and went home—and when they left, he let them take bread the factory had baked.
He was stroking the boy's hair when Captain Cedric came back in.
"I'm back, Mr. Lee."
Cedric spread his arms and grinned, his face saying plainly that orders had left him no choice.
"Colonel Hausman says to bring you."
"I'm not going."
Ki-jo's answer was flat. Cedric stepped closer.
"Mr. Lee, don't do this to me. Hausman's going to keep after me. He isn't even my commanding officer, and he hauls me in whenever he likes. I appeal to my actual superior, and all I get is that if the colonel calls, I go."
Put that way, it softened Ki-jo.
"All right. Tell him I'll come see him myself."
"Hmm..."
Cedric thought a moment.
"Give me a firm promise that you'll come within a few days. Otherwise I..."
"Understood. Tell him I'll come in a week."
"Couldn't you move it up a little?"
"That would be difficult. I'll come in seven days."
"All right, Mr. Lee. I'll pass it along."
Cedric shook his hand and returned to headquarters.
Ki-jo finished his round of the bakery, stepped out through the front gate, and looked toward Eighth Army headquarters. He knew a mood ought not to become a manner, but whenever he thought of Hausman, anger surged up from somewhere deep.
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
That was his creed. But he was human, and there were times he could not live up to it. He was slowly cooling the anger. At the same time, he was preparing something to show Hausman. He could not give the man up. The account that held CIA money was, by its mere existence, a sturdy shield, and not even the government could touch it lightly. He did not want to lose that protection. Ki-jo narrowed his eyes at the Yongsan headquarters where Hausman lived, then turned back to the factory.
Exactly one week later, he went to see him. The moment he stepped into the office at Eighth Army headquarters, he greeted Hausman with a bright face.
"Adviser Hausman. I'm here."
The warmth of it loosened Hausman's temper a little. He had meant to take the man down a peg the instant he walked in, but the bright smile made him set the plan aside.
"What have you brought?"
Ki-jo was carrying a paper bag stuffed full.
"Bread. Would you care to try some?"
Hausman frowned at what he produced. He did not need to taste it. It was like the relief bread handed out to the poor in the Depression—coarse, bone-dry, without a trace of moisture.
"Bread made by Korea's war orphans. Children who aren't orphans helped, of course."
"And?"
"It's good. Please, try it."
"No."
Seeing him again, Hausman was freshly incredulous. The man was nothing like the file Frank, the CIA officer, had written.
A creative, capable businessman, they said, and all he's managed is bread like this... Is he a little soft in the head? What on earth is supposed to be special about him?
He looked at Ki-jo holding the bag and felt nothing but contempt. It was time, he decided, to cut this idiot of a Korean loose from the CIA. Korea had plenty of businessmen capable enough for the Agency to back, and shrewd to the point of being vile. There was a truckload of men who would sell their souls to the devil for dollars. Better to join hands with that sort.
"That two hundred and eighty thousand I told you to spend—seems you have no use for it. The funds of ours sitting in your account..."
"I haven't spent them because I haven't needed to."
Ki-jo had the nerve to cut him off. Hausman was dumbfounded.
This insolent little bastard. Has he lost his mind and decided he wants to die...?
Just as he was about to snap, Ki-jo spoke.
"I've been making something with my own money that I think you'll like, Adviser. If you can spare an afternoon, I'll show it to you."
Something I'd like...?
Anger rose in Hausman, and so did curiosity.
What in Korea could I possibly like?
He wondered what, in this filthy, stinking, goddamned backwater of a country, could possibly satisfy him.