The Snare
At Cheongnyangni Station, Ki-jo watched the machines of Cheongsan Heavy Equipment being loaded onto a train bound for Gyeongsang. Some had been taken apart and divided among several freight cars; left whole, they could never have cleared the tunnels. The loads were wrapped with care so nothing would be stolen or lost along the way, and employees of the company rode the train to watch over them.
Runs were few and the cargo was heavy, so getting the equipment stationed in the south would take more than a month. That freight space could be had at all was thanks to the master of Cheongnyangni Station. He knew the pains Ki-jo had taken over the domestic production of railway supplies, and he had exerted himself on their behalf.
The basic preparations against Typhoon Agnes were, by and large, complete.
On May 27, just as Ki-jo was catching his breath, Minister Lee Jong-rim sent for him. When he arrived at the office of the Minister of Transportation, Lee Jong-rim offered his hand.
"If there's anything you need from me, say so. Whatever I can do, I'll do."
Ki-jo thought he understood. In two days, on May 29, the minister would submit his resignation. Before that, he seemed to want to do whatever he still could. Ki-jo did not turn the question aside.
"Minister, are you thinking of resigning?"
Lee Jong-rim started, then broke into a broad laugh.
"Is it written on my face?"
"It is, Minister."
"Ha ha. Then the staff will all have seen it too."
A bitter smile crossed his face.
"Hold on to the end, Minister. Give them a reasonable share of what they want, and stay a little longer for the sake of the railways. Give them the flesh and keep the bone. Would that not do?"
Ki-jo did not know the precise reason for Lee Jong-rim's resignation. No record of it had survived into later years, and neither the man himself nor his family had passed down any private account. The exact cause was beyond knowing, yet Ki-jo was convinced it had to do with the grain-warehouse concessions administered by the Ministry of Transportation.
"It sounds as if you're telling me that since peace is best, I ought to muddle through on rough compromises..."
"That isn't what I mean. You have to keep your seat, Minister, so that—"
Seated on the sofa, Lee Jong-rim let out a long sigh.
"President Lee Ki-jo... I've already stooped to shameful methods. Because of me, a vice minister was dismissed..."
The frankness left Ki-jo with nothing to say. He already knew the story. When the great theft of railway supplies came to light in February of 1957, Lee Jong-rim had been summoned to Gyeongmudae. Pressed by Syngman Rhee, he had offered a line meant to slip the blame: the management of railway supplies, he said, belonged to the vice minister. When trouble arose in the administration or the army, Rhee had a habit of shielding the senior posts and cutting down the junior ones. He often remarked that purging high officials again and again damaged the nation's prestige, and the minister had made use of that habit.
Now Lee Jong-rim laid his shameful past out in the open.
"I was desperate then. I told myself I had to hold the post no matter what, so I could set railway administration to rights. So I used the vice minister as a shield."
"Wasn't it true, in fact, that the vice minister managed the supplies?"
"It was. I was convinced he was diverting them. But I had no proof."
In the 1950s, thieves swarmed the railways and the streets around the stations. Some stole the fine imported bituminous coal burned in the locomotives. Some stripped the wire used for the signals. Some carried parts out of the materials warehouses, melted them down, and sold the metal. It was a cauldron of confusion, and Lee Jong-rim looked worn to the bone. Large thefts that could hardly have happened without the collusion of railway officials never stopped, and plenty of men shook the minister by pulling strings through the government and the political world in pursuit of railway concessions. Ki-jo knew well enough that keeping one's sanity while serving as a minister in the 1950s was no easy thing.
"I've reached my limit. I'm ashamed to say it, but the colonial days were better. Then the only trouble was those Japanese bastards, and at least the railway ran as it should..."
Lee Jong-rim looked up at the ceiling and sighed deeply once more. Ki-jo judged that the man was sick to death of the disorder and corruption of the decade, and he let go of any thought of persuading him.
"Minister, the country is in turmoil because it is poor. Please don't blame yourself too much."
"Thank you, President Lee. I know. I simply can't hold on any longer. I'm already forty-five. It's time I set the work down and looked back over my life."
Forty-five was an age when a man ought to have been in the thick of his work, but measured against the life expectancy of the 1950s, it was a thing one might say. To live past sixty was to have lived long, and people rejoiced at it.
"During your tenure the industrial railway opened, and everyone says the railways are better than they were. All of it is thanks to you, Minister."
"Thank you."
He was sincerely grateful for the praise. As the talk drew toward its close, he asked once more.
"You're quite sure there's nothing you want of me?"
"There isn't, Minister."
"You won't say it, even at the end. You're different from other men..."
"What do you mean?"
"If others had held back from favors the way you have, I might have remained minister a while longer. Let a man have even a thread of connection to me, and he comes around with this request and that..."
The minister smiled at him.
"I've been talking idly. Go on, now. I'm truly grateful for all you've done to make railway supplies at home."
Ki-jo left the minister's office and returned to the broadcasting station.
The next day the Deokjeong Station Master came to see him. In his station master's uniform, his face bright, he thanked Ki-jo.
"Thanks to me? What do you mean?"
"Wasn't it you who put in a word with the minister? I was sure that's what it was..."
The day before, he had received a sudden order of appointment. He was to be station master of Dangin-ri Station in Mapo, leaving Deokjeong, where theft and trouble never ceased, for an easier post. The Dangin-ri Line, running between Yongsan Station and the Dangin-ri thermal power plant, was comparatively light work. Its chief business was hauling the imported bituminous coal gathered at Yongsan over to the plant.
Ki-jo remembered his meeting with Minister Lee Jong-rim, and the remark that he never asked for anything, even at the last. He put a question to the station master.
"Have you ever told the other station masters that you and I are kin?"
"That I did. A man ought to be proud, shouldn't he? I told them the husband of my young kinswoman had opened a coal mine out by Dogye Station and was running a briquette factory near Yongsan. I even bragged that he's president of DBC now..."
So that was it. Ki-jo nodded. The rumor must have reached the minister, and that was why, before resigning, he had asked whether there was anything Ki-jo wanted.
In those days the Gyeongwon Line saw more railway trouble than any other, and the stretch between Uijeongbu and Dongducheon was the worst of it. American military freight was the cause, and Deokjeong Station, lying between the two, could never stay clear of incidents. Ki-jo took the transfer for Lee Jong-rim's parting gift.
"Congratulations, Station Master."
"Thank you, Ki-jo. I can't help thinking this promotion is your doing."
"I couldn't say, Station Master."
"Anyway, now that I'm master at Dangin-ri, I can call often on my great-aunt in Mapo, and I'll see you and Sunrye from time to time. It's good to be close again."
"I'm glad of it too."
The station master finished his talk with Ki-jo and set off for Mapo to pay his respects to Sunrye's birth mother.
After he had gone, Ki-jo pored over the evening paper his secretary had brought. He had always read the papers closely, but of late he read them with greater care still.
There it is.
At last the news he had been waiting for was in print: a report in the Seoul Shinmun, a paper all but indistinguishable from an organ of the Liberal Party. Ki-jo fixed on the body of the article.
Junior Officers Gone Astray. Police Sweep Up an Officers' Crime Ring.
...There was a private circle called the Oseonghoe, the Five Star Society, formed by five officers of the Korea Military Academy's eleventh class, among them a Lieutenant Chun, a Lieutenant Roh, and a Lieutenant Kim. Unlike its beginnings, the circle degenerated into a criminal gang. They committed every manner of deplorable crime, diverting military supplies and selling them to civilians so as to enrich themselves. In particular, Lieutenant Chun, who headed the circle, trafficked in opium to a degree that shocked even the police who uncovered it...
Ki-jo read even what lay between the lines, weighing how thoroughly Kwak Young-joo had snared them. Chun Doo-hwan stood accused of trafficking in military supplies and in opium, and was under suspicion of abusing enlisted men. Roh Tae-woo, beyond the diversion of supplies, was charged with a drunk-driving hit-and-run, assaulting a subordinate, harassing a married woman, and illegal gambling. Kim Bok-dong, Choi Seong-taek, and Baek Un-taek were said to have piled an assortment of petty crimes atop the basic charge of diverting military goods.
That basic charge, at least, was a crime punished strictly in those days. Merchants of Dongdaemun Market had come forward as witnesses and testified that they regularly bought what the Oseonghoe officers were selling. Ki-jo could see the marks of Lee Jeong-jae's cooperation.
Saddled even with opium trafficking, Chun Doo-hwan would plainly draw the heaviest punishment. Laid over that was the beating of enlisted soldiers, a matter to which public feeling was acutely sensitive. There seemed no crack left through which he might crawl clear. Roh Tae-woo had been dressed chiefly in the charges of a man without shame. His honor was so badly wrecked that even if the other accusations fell away, he would have little choice but to leave the service of his own accord. And once Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo were locked up or stripped of their uniforms, Kim Bok-dong, Choi Seong-taek, and Baek Un-taek would be finished in the same stroke.
For the moment Ki-jo judged every charge to be a story the police had written. At the foot of the article was a line promising that, as soon as the investigation ended, the men would be delivered into the custody of the military police, and he marked that passage as well.
Kwak Young-joo was on poor terms with the army, but for a time he and Military Police Commander Won Yong-deok had ridden in the same boat. Both counted Kim Chang-ryong a rival, and they had once joined forces to keep him in check. A hint was enough between them; they had reached the point where they could trade cases and look after one another. Elder officers of Japanese-army background who, like Won Yong-deok, had not come up through the regular Military Academy did not look kindly on the cocky eleventh class. If Kwak Young-joo hung false charges on the Oseonghoe, hauled them in, and handed them over, Won would, mindful of their tie, concede part of the charges and send the men before a court-martial, or press them to take off the uniform. He had already been looking for a pretext to take the eleventh class in hand. This would give him a fine one.
"Hah..."
Ki-jo let out a breath of relief, and he marveled at the police's art of the snare. Unrelated crimes of moral squalor plastered on layer after layer, and a press campaign opened first through a paper friendly to the ruling party—there was something familiar in the method.
"At this rate, they'll never slip free..."
Satisfied, he turned his attention to one more soldier who had been swept up with the Oseonghoe and saddled with a false charge.
...Separately, on the basis of intelligence obtained in the Busan area, police plan to arrest a Lieutenant Kim on charges of embezzling military supplies and accepting bribes, and to hand him over to the military police. In particular, while guarding a facility of national importance, Lieutenant Kim took money under the table and admitted persons who were not authorized to enter, thereby harming the security of the nation. The nature of the offense, it must be said, is exceedingly grave...
It was Lieutenant Kim, chief of the guard, who had stood watch at the main gate of the Claymore factory. Ki-jo had promised to save him.
This man must not leave the uniform. He's a soldier this country cannot do without...
Ki-jo resolved to move quickly, and to help the Lieutenant Kim whom Kwak Young-joo had marked.