Ball Bearings
In the middle of May, Ki-jo was at work in the Claymore factory that had been stood up in Yeonji-dong. He took his meals and his bed at Oh Yang-soo's house, and commuted by jeep between Bumin-dong and Yeonji-dong.
Every time he passed through Seomyeon Rotary, January of 1955 came back to him. The ground where Ma-ryang, Wang-cheol, and Tae-sik had fought the gangsters, ready to die where they stood, lay perfectly peaceful now.
Could have lent a hand, back then...
Once the Claymore plant was up, the Americans changed. The same men who had stood with their hands clasped behind their backs, calling it a quarrel among Koreans and looking on, now sent armed troops to escort every load of plastic explosive from the 55th Quartermaster Depot out to Yeonji-dong. Whenever a U.S. Army truck carrying the stuff rolled through Seomyeon Rotary, military police shut three lanes of five and locked the circle down.
It was not only the Americans who had changed. The Korean Army had moved into the Yeonji-dong plant as well. The Counterintelligence Corps ordered the factory walls raised to three meters, and Ki-jo built the high fence in cement block. Signs declaring the place a military protected facility went up all along the walls, and guard posts sprang up in ten places. Soldiers controlled every coming and going at the main gate. Each time Ki-jo passed through, he felt—for the first time in his life—that the state itself was protecting him.
"Loyalty!"
The sentry on the gate recognized him and saluted before the barricade.
"Thank you for your trouble. Has the professor come in?"
"He never left, sir. He hasn't set foot out of the plant in days."
"Is that so..."
At the sentry's words Ki-jo bit his lip.
This is bad... Keep on like this and the professor's going to make himself ill...
The barricade swung open, and he drove in. He passed the Claymore line run by Korea Explosives and the plastics injection plant of Cheongsan Chemical, and went straight on to the bearing factory.
Outside it he saw Professor Kim Moon-hwan, head bowed, smoking. His hair was a wild tangle, and his wrinkled work clothes were soaked through with oil. The sight brought back the day the professor had declared he would make ball bearings himself.
Contrary to what Professor Kim had expected, turning out train wheels and springs at Cheongsan Heavy Industries had not proved technically demanding. Railroad officials who had resigned took materials obtained from Japan and researched and built as if their lives hung on it; prototypes came off one after another, and the improvements followed just as readily. They melted down ruined rail, scrap wheels, and spent springs and made the new ones out of the recycle, and it was not especially hard. It reached the point of bitter jokes—why had they been buying these things all this time, when they might have made them with their own hands long ago? Once matters stood like that, Professor Kim grew bored. Then word came that a ball-bearing plant was to be built, and he threw himself at it like a moth at a flame. Ki-jo tried to pull him back.
"Professor, this round is different. You ought to think it over carefully."
"I know that, President Lee. Making ball bearings takes cutting-edge precision work! That's exactly why I mean to do it!"
"You may go years without turning out a proper bearing."
"Of course we will! Do we know how to make chrome steel, or tungsten steel? Have we got the skill to machine a true sphere? We can't even make the grease to lubricate the things!"
"You understand it very well."
"So please. Just let me try to make them."
Ki-jo did his utmost to talk him down. In truth, it would not have mattered if they failed to produce a proper ball bearing for five years, or for seven. Even if what came out were weak, uneven, ugly little steel balls, there was no cause for despair. They had only to be loaded into Claymores. Until the day a true steel ball could be made—until the inner race and the outer race could be precision-machined—failure was allowed. What worried him was only that the stretch of failure might run far too long. It pained him to think how much of Professor Kim Moon-hwan's life would be ground away for the sake of a single ball bearing.
"President Lee, shall I quit the company? My wife's been carefully putting away the salary you pay me. Shall I take that, set up a little shop, and go out on my own?"
"Professor, why would you say something so hurtful? You mustn't..."
"Then you'll let me make them? We're finished talking, yes?"
And so Professor Kim Moon-hwan was given charge of the bearings. But now he was sunk in discouragement.
Ki-jo climbed out of the jeep and went over to him.
"Professor?"
"Hm? You're here?"
Whether from the morning sun or from having been up all night, the professor's face was knotted in a deep scowl. A cigarette hung from his right hand, and a steel ball sat in his left. When Ki-jo's eyes went to that hand, the professor opened it and showed him what he held.
"Still looks like this..."
Ki-jo smiled at the ugly little ball resting on the professor's palm.
"Pathetic, even to your eye, isn't it? I'm ashamed of myself. That this is all the man I amount to."
"What are you saying, Professor? It's excellent."
"You call this excellent? It isn't a perfect sphere. The surface is all uneven, and it's shaped like a drop of water, isn't it?"
Ki-jo picked one up and studied it. Just as the professor said, one end came to a slight point. It was a teardrop.
This is exactly right...
To Ki-jo's eye, the steel ball glinting in the sunlight looked nothing but beautiful. He had his own reason for being pleased.
Quite apart from making ball bearings, raising the penetrating power of a Claymore's projectiles meant lowering their drag. The projectiles of the Claymore, developed in the 1950s before aerodynamics had properly matured, were perfect spheres. People liked to think a sphere was the ideal shape, the one that met no resistance from the air. It was not. For the same cross-section, a sphere's drag ran to about half that of a flat plate, and contrary to common sense that was still a shape that caught a good deal of air. The dimples cut into a golf ball existed for the same reason: to ease the flaw in a perfect sphere and let it fly farther. The best form of all was the teardrop water made as it fell of its own accord. And the shape born of their lack of skill had, by pure accident, taken on the very form that could drive a projectile deeper.
"Professor, please don't melt these down again. Hand them over to Korea Explosives just as they are."
"Why are you so pleased over chaff...? I didn't make them because I wanted to make that."
"From now on, whenever something like this comes out, just send it along as it is."
"That so? Ah... all right..."
Professor Kim looked utterly baffled.
Ki-jo went inside the bearing plant with him. The floor was bare. There was nothing but a casting setup and a machine for grinding steel balls, and casting balls and then spinning them hard on a grinder was never going to be enough. The machines from Japan had not yet arrived, so all they could turn out were these homely teardrop balls. That steel of even this quality had come out of a shop no better than a neighborhood smithy struck him as something close to a miracle.
He told the professor about the machines and the technicians Hausman had promised to bring in from Japan, and begged him, over and over, not to work through the night.
"All right. I'll go home today."
After they had walked the plant once through, Ki-jo stepped outside. A soldier came running straight at him, sweat pouring off his face.
"Sir, you'd better come to the main gate for a moment."
"Why? Is something the matter?"
"He says he knows you, sir, and he's trying to walk straight into the plant."
"All right."
Ki-jo put the sentry in the jeep and headed for the gate. What met him there was not what he had expected. Police and soldiers were squared off in front of the entrance, and at the head of the policemen Kwak Young-joo was bellowing at the top of his lungs.
"You all want to die? You don't know who I am?"
"We can see you're a superintendent, sir, but this is a military protected facility. Even if the Commissioner of Public Safety himself came, no one enters without permission from above."
"What? You insolent little bastard? Not even if the Commissioner comes?"
"This place is under the Counterintelligence Corps. You absolutely cannot come in!"
"You bastards! I work at Gyeongmudae—are the Ministry of National Defense and Counterintelligence above Gyeongmudae? Whoever's got jurisdiction, if I say I'm going in, I'm going in!"
From inside the jeep, Ki-jo watched the guard commander and Kwak Young-joo go at each other.
What is that man doing here...
It seemed Kwak had wanted to bring the Busan precinct chiefs along and look the factory over. He must have assumed that a plant run by Lee Ki-jo would let him in whenever he pleased. The Claymore factory was not nearly so easy a place as he imagined. It was protected as a key national facility, and without clearance from the Ministry of National Defense or the Counterintelligence Corps, no one got through the gate. So he had no choice but to be humiliated in front of the soldiers.
Ki-jo let it run. The more face Kwak lost before the chiefs, the better. The angrier the soldiers made him, the more easily Ki-jo thought he could get what he wanted.
"One phone call from me to the Minister of National Defense and every last one of you is a dead man, you hear me!"
"If you have power like that, get the Minister's permission yourself. What is a high-ranking police officer doing, carrying on like this?"
Lieutenant Kim, commander of the guard, did not give an inch. Judging that if it went any further the lieutenant would be in real trouble, Ki-jo climbed out of the jeep, went straight to Kwak Young-joo, and bowed from the waist.
"Superintendent! You've come!"
When he bobbed that deep bow, the guards flinched. Ki-jo turned to them.
"What are you standing there for? Clear the barricade. This is the gentleman who attends His Excellency President Syngman Rhee at Gyeongmudae. A man of rank has arrived, and you've received him far too shabbily."
As the soldiers' spirit broke, Kwak swelled all the more.
"I've got every one of your names memorized! Counterintelligence or whatever you call yourselves, you all lose your heads tomorrow!"
Ki-jo apologized in the excited man's place.
"I'm sorry, Superintendent. This happened because I told them to keep the security strict. The fault is entirely mine."
He apologized again and again, and propped Kwak's face back up, and the man's temper seemed to loosen. Kwak turned on the soldiers.
"Ignorant army grunts who don't know the first thing about how the world works, throwing their weight around—pathetic! A thoroughly nasty business!"
Ki-jo put him in his own jeep and drove him into the plant. The Busan precinct chiefs who had come in attendance followed in their police cars. Ki-jo showed them through the factory, then received them lavishly in the president's office. Satisfied, Kwak laughed, a rough bark of a laugh.
"Maybe I should have sent word I was coming to see President Lee. I only wanted to give him a surprise. Ha!"
A likely story. Ki-jo snorted to himself. The man didn't even know what a Claymore was. He had simply trusted his backing at Gyeongmudae and tried to bull his way in.
Ki-jo offered him a modest smile.
"It was my own failing not to know you had come to Busan, Superintendent. By way of apology, allow me to take you to Jeongnan-gak this evening."
As if he had said exactly the right thing, the precinct chiefs nodded, gratified smiles on their faces.
"I was only going to have a quick drink with the chiefs today."
"Please bring them along. The round is on me."
"Yeah? Then today, President Lee, you handle it."
Kwak laughed brightly, as if the face he had crumpled was smoothed out at last. Ki-jo saw him and the chiefs off as far as the factory gate. Once the police cars had vanished down the road, he went over to Lieutenant Kim, the man who had barred Kwak from coming in.
"Lieutenant Kim. Please don't worry too much over what happened today."
"Worry? I only did my job. I couldn't let into a weapons plant anyone who wasn't cleared to enter."
Ki-jo had already decided the lieutenant was a good soldier.
"You came out of the Military Academy, didn't you, Lieutenant?"
"Yes. The eleventh class."
Ki-jo nodded.
"Should the army dismiss you over today's business, please don't worry too much even then. I'll find a way to save you, whatever it takes."
At that, even the upright Lieutenant Kim flinched. He had not known Kwak Young-joo was a man with power of that order.
"Does that superintendent really attend His Excellency the President?"
"He does."
The lieutenant's face went grave.
"Even so, you will go on working here. That much I can promise you."
A little crestfallen, Lieutenant Kim asked,
"I didn't exactly do anything wrong, did I...?"
"The... the country? Me...?"
Lieutenant Kim looked dazed by the sudden praise.
Ki-jo went back to the factory office and telephoned Oh Yang-soo at once.
Ki-jo: "Brother, it's me. Please reserve Jeongnan-gak for tonight—the whole house."
Oh Yang-soo: "The whole house?"
Ki-jo: "Yes. Tell them a distinguished guest has come down from Gyeongmudae."
Oh Yang-soo: "All right. I'll go myself."
Ki-jo hung up and smiled the quiet smile of a plan come together. He had needed a detonator—something to blow Kwak Young-joo's temper wide open—and one had appeared at just the right moment.
It was Lieutenant Kim.