Eyes That Cannot See What Is Real
Kijo explained to Hausman just how Lieutenant Kim had been reduced to that state.
Hausman, who knew the Korean army, the police, and the bureaucracy inside out, understood at once.
"So you're telling me this was the doing of that duck bastard up at Gyeongmudae?"
He called Kwak Young-joo a duck. The surname Kwak sat close enough to a duck's quack that the nickname seemed to have stuck.
"Yes. If you simply pull Lieutenant Kim out, Advisor, I will be the one left in difficulty."
"Then what do you want me to do?"
"When the naval military police release Lieutenant Kim for lack of suspicion, please use the American MPs to take custody of him."
"Isn't that the same thing? Whether I pull him now or pull him later."
"It is not. You must have Lieutenant Kim detained on a greater charge, Advisor."
"What are you talking about? Spell it out."
Kijo laid his plan before Hausman.
When he had heard it through, Hausman said just one thing.
"So, Kijo—you don't want those rotten little ducks coming after you for payback. That's why you want it done this way, yeah?"
"Yes."
"All right. That MP duck is a problem in his own right, though. Still running around stirring up trouble."
The MP duck was Won Yong-deok, commander in chief of the Military Police. This time the joke seemed to turn on the last syllable of his name—deok—which, to Hausman's ear, sat near enough to duck.
Kijo knew why Hausman disliked Won Yong-deok. Among the Korean generals the Americans despised, Won was forever contending for first or second place, and the cause of that hatred was the release of the anti-communist prisoners of war. It was Won Yong-deok who had taken the lead in the release Syngman Rhee carried out. In the dead of night he had mobilized the military police, overpowered the American troops at the camps by force, locked them away, and turned the anti-communist prisoners loose.
"When Syngman Rhee used that rotten duck to set those prisoners free, all hell broke loose..."
Hausman shook his head.
Kijo knew why. American displeasure had not been the end of it. In June of 1953, the armistice talks, then drawing toward their close, had nearly been smashed to pieces—because China had misunderstood. Beijing concluded that South Korea had done it in order to spirit Chinese prisoners away, and launched a retaliatory attack. Mao Zedong himself gave the order: kill as many South Korean soldiers as there were Chinese prisoners Korea had made off with.
And so the Battle of Kumsong broke out. Beneath a massive Chinese offensive, a month of savage fighting raged around Hwacheon and Kimhwa in Gangwon Province. In that span the Americans expended more artillery shells than at any other point in the war, and the casualties ran to thirty thousand on each side—sixty thousand in all. It was a vast and meaningless engagement, fought with the armistice already within sight.
"You wouldn't have known this, Kijo, but Korea nearly got herself a new president over that..."
Kijo pretended he did not know, pretended he would rather not know. He knew.
The release of the anti-communist prisoners had dealt a profound shock not only to the UN Command but to the United States itself. Allied soldiers imprisoning Americans and freeing prisoners however they pleased—nothing of the kind had ever happened in American history. The men the Korean army had turned loose were men who might attack American troops at any moment.
Dwight Eisenhower, inaugurated as president on January 20, 1953, set down the affair—coming less than six months into his term—in these words:
"In all my eight years as president, that was the only time I was woken from sleep."
It was a shock appalling enough to start even Eisenhower from his bed. He lamented that America had lost a friend and gained an enemy. Sick to death of Syngman Rhee, he wrote in his diary that had Japan not been strategically vital, he would have pulled out of Korea altogether.
Eisenhower was not the only one in a fury. Winston Churchill of Britain heard the news while shaving and was so astonished he cut his own face. Churchill, who had sent British troops to Korea, immediately denounced Syngman Rhee as a traitor. In his anger he dispatched a secret message to Eisenhower, asking that Rhee be arrested at once or else dragged down from the presidency.
Eisenhower weighed it in earnest. Secretary of State Dulles was incensed as well, declaring that Korea had stabbed America in the back, and the UN commander, Clark, judged that Rhee had opened the gates of hell.
Eisenhower gave serious thought to putting Plan Everready into effect. The plan had been drawn up because of the "bellicose" Syngman Rhee, forever singing of unification by a march to the north. Should the Korean army show signs of advancing north on Rhee's orders, Rhee was to be seized and confined, martial law declared, and either Chang Myon or Paik Sun-yup set in the leader's place to bring Korea back to stability. It was an emergency plan.
Kijo studied Hausman's face with care. When the man said it had nearly been an affair in which Korea's president was replaced, a glint of loathing showed through. Hausman seemed to despise not only Won Yong-deok, but Syngman Rhee himself.
He was nothing more than an operative sent to make use of a Rhee who listened to him—not a man who meant well by the Republic of Korea, or by Rhee. To the end, he was only a soldier turned intelligence agent who had come to Korea for America's sake. Kijo thought that was as it should be. What reason did an American have to worry over Korea from the heart?
He was thinking this when Hausman spoke.
"Fine. We'll do it your way. If you go through with it and those ducks still take a bite out of you, call me. I'll handle it."
"Thank you, Advisor."
Kijo was grateful, and yet he did not believe the goodwill sprang from anywhere else. He thought it was because he was of some use to America, or at least was not a man who would do her harm. Or perhaps simply because he had taken Hausman's fancy.
In any case, having won Hausman's cooperation on the heels of Admiral Sohn Won-yil's, Kijo could breathe again.
A few days later, word came through Oh Yang-soo that Lieutenant Kim Seong-jin would be released the following day. Kijo contacted Hausman at once, and Hausman sent not an ordinary American MP, but the CID.
The CID—the Criminal Investigation Division—that Hausman dispatched was of a rather particular character. By the 1950s it had remade itself into a specialist body for determining whether men employed by defense contractors were spies.
The agents waiting before the main gate of the naval military police arrested Lieutenant Kim the moment he stepped through it, and a brief scuffle followed between the Korean police and the CID. But when the CID pressed the charge that Lieutenant Kim had stolen weapons intelligence from the Claymore plant and passed it to North Korea, the naval military police gave ground. Arrested on an allegation outside the scope of what they themselves had investigated, they handed him over to the Americans without protest.
And so Lieutenant Kim, now bearing a heavier charge than before, was delivered into American custody. That was as far as the first stage of the design Kijo had drawn.
He was relieved, for the moment, that Hausman had taken the man into his hands—but what came next was the problem. The question was how Kwak Young-joo, or Won Yong-deok, would receive the news that the Americans had carried off an active-duty army lieutenant.
A few hours after it happened, a call came for Kijo. It was Kwak Young-joo.
"Kijo. Was this your doing?"
Kwak, whose ties to the Americans ran deep the other way, had his suspicions fixed on Kijo. For the moment, Kijo played dumb.
"What do you mean, sir?"
"I'm asking if you handed Kim Seong-jin over to the Americans. You punk!"
Things were not going to plan. He was about to unroll the excuse he had prepared when Kwak went on.
"Crueler than you look, this one..."
"Sir? What do you mean?"
"Hey. I don't care how it is—you tie that Kim Seong-jin bastard up as a spy, and then what?"
"Sir? What do you—"
"I know, damn it! You did it because you wanted to show loyalty to me! Even so, a man doesn't do that. You've got to keep to the line."
"I don't really—"
"Kijo. You hand him to the Americans as a spy and that bastard's life is finished. They'll drag him off to the States to serve his time. He could be in for life."
"That's..."
Kijo delayed his answer, straining to make out the true intent behind this sudden concern for Lieutenant Kim Seong-jin.
"Enough! It's already done. I only meant to knock a little sense into the kid, and what is this? You've gone and wrecked a man's whole life. Don't do it again, Kijo."
When Kwak spoke his name at the last, Kijo was certain.
Kwak Young-joo is in a good mood right now.
It was a habit of his, when he was pleased, to call the other man softly by his name. Kijo decided to begin with an apology.
"Superintendent, sir. I'm sorry..."
"Enough of that. There you go again, calling me Superintendent. I don't like it."
"I'm sorry, hyung."
He could picture Kwak on the far end of the line, swallowing a laugh. And why shouldn't he? Lieutenant Kim was the man who had shamed him in front of the Busan police chiefs. He had wanted to deal with the fellow properly, and now he was under the happy delusion that a way had opened to settle it to his heart's content without ever dirtying his own hands.
"Kijo, I understand how you feel, so if you can save the bastard, save him."
Kwak said it as if offering genteel counsel. It was a cat thinking of a mouse. The more he sounded that way, the more Kijo answered with the air of a man who would rather not save Lieutenant Kim at all.
"I'll see if a way can be found."
"All right, Kijo..."
Kwak, who had been making as if to hang up, hurried on.
"Kijo."
"Yes, hyung."
"You saw the paper, didn't you?"
He seemed to be asking whether Kijo had seen the article on the Oseonghoe arrests.
"Yes, I saw it."
"Those ones. A dishonorable discharge, at the least. You satisfied?"
"Of course. Thank you."
"You're satisfied, so that's that. Let me ask you one more favor."
"Please, go ahead."
"It's Mi-hyang, you see..."
"Speak freely, hyung."
"Right. Mi-hyang says she wants to quit Myeongwolgwan and go to school. Says she wants to learn French at the university."
"Ah, yes. That's possible. If she is selected as Miss Korea, support for her studies is guaranteed."
"Thing is, the girl doesn't even have an elementary school diploma."
"If she earns her qualifications step by step through the equivalency examinations, she can qualify for admission."
"Yeah, well. How's a man supposed to stop a kid who says she wants to study? You look after it, Kijo."
"I understand."
Kijo decided he would grant this second request as well. As Kwak said, if a person wanted to study, there was no reason to stand in the way.
When he set the receiver down, a deep sigh of relief escaped him.
Turning Kwak's words over and taking the measure of the situation, he judged that the matter of Lieutenant Kim Seong-jin was entirely resolved. Keep the lieutenant with the American military police for a few days, he thought, and then pull him out.
Kijo gathered up the gift he had prepared beforehand and left the broadcasting station. He was bound for Kwak Young-joo's house.
When he arrived and knocked, Kwak's wife opened the door a cautious little way.
"Hello. My name is Lee Ki-jo."
She seemed not to know him at all.
"I'm the president of DBC Broadcasting. I had a television sent to your home the other day."
"Ah... yes, hello. Thanks to you, we've been enjoying the television."
Only then did she place him. She smiled brightly and offered a polite greeting.
Looking at her—a typical woman of the 1950s, her whole life given over to supporting her husband—Kijo felt his heart grow heavy. She would hardly know what her husband was doing out in the world. Most likely she believed only that he was a man who served His Excellency the President with loyalty.
"He's at work just now, so it's only the children and me at home. I can't very well ask you in. If you tell me what you've come for, I'll pass it along later."
No sooner had she finished than Kwak's children came out into the yard. They stood beside their mother and looked at him with curious eyes, and the sight ached. They were wholly innocent children, without the least notion that in a few years their father would vanish like dew on the execution ground.
"I've brought a gift for the Superintendent."
"A gift? You needn't have. If he learns I accepted it, I'll catch it from him."
Kwak's wife called her husband "the Elder." Even in those days, when a husband's authority stood high, it was an extreme honorific, and the trouble on her face was entirely genuine.
It was an age when bribes were commonplace. Kwak had accepted Kijo's, and yet he seemed to have forbidden his wife from taking any. Come to think of it, the house itself was neither particularly large nor showy.
Kijo recalled what he had once studied of the man. There were rumors that he had partaken fairly freely of sexual favors—being introduced to actresses through Lim Hwa-soo, and the like. There were records, too, that he had stepped into the interests of the Dongdaemun Faction and looked after his younger sworn brothers. But of the personal graft so commonly seen among the powerful of that time, hardly any document remained.
Was that the last of Kwak Young-joo's conscience? As a policeman, as a loyal retainer attending the president at his side, he might have restrained his private gain as far as he could, and tried, in his own fashion, to live cleanly.
To the wife who was refusing the gift, Kijo held out two small boxes.
"It isn't much. Just Miwon seasoning and some sweets that our company makes. I hoped the Superintendent might stir the Miwon into his soup, and that the children might have the sweets."
At the word sweets, Kwak's young children lit up. His wife, as if she had wanted the Miwon after all, let her hand start forward and then stop.
"Please, just have a look."
Kijo set the paper bag down, drew out a box, and showed her the inside himself. Finding neither a lump of gold nor a wad of cash, she smiled.
"Thank you. I'll be sure to tell him."
"Not at all. You don't need to mention it. I've been so much in the Superintendent's debt that I wanted to repay him, and so I came."
"Even so..."
She looked for a moment at the gift in her hands, then asked him, "He isn't difficult with you, is he? Even at home he's such a stern, upright man..."
"Not at all, ma'am. He has always treated me warmly, and he is fair both as a man and in his work. He has never made things hard for me in the least."
Kijo waved the suggestion away as he spoke in Kwak's defense.
"I'm glad, then..."
She smiled, relieved.
"I'll be going, then."
He took his leave and drew away from Kwak's family. He heard the gate shut, and as he turned, delighted voices rose from inside the wall.
"Wow! We got cookies and candy because of Father?"
"Wow! Our dad is the best!"
"Yes. Let us thank your father. You must ask his permission before you eat any."
"Yes, Mom!"
The talk between mother and children left a bitter taste.
Not long after he returned to the station, another call came. Kwak again.
"Kijo, it's me. I hear you sent a gift to the house?"
"Yes, Superintendent."
"There you go again. You won't call me hyung."
"I'm sorry, hyung."
"Kijo. Don't do that from now on. You'll give the family bad habits."
"I'll bear it in mind."
"Good. Don't ever do it again—and you remember what I told you earlier, don't you?"
Kwak had no thought for his own precious children, nor for the wife of his lean years, who looked to no one but him. He was looking after the wrong woman entirely.
"Yes. I remember."
"Look after Mi-hyang, Kijo."
"Yes, Superintendent."
Kwak hung up.
Nothing came out of Kijo but a sigh.
Kwak Young-joo had eyes that could not see what was real.
That, in the end, was why he was headed for ruin.