Lee Jeong-jae
It was the first day of October, the season when the five grains ripen and the trees of Gyeongbokgung Palace are said to put on their five colors. In a DBC studio, Ki-jo watched the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra play.
They were performing Ahn Eak-tai's Korea Fantasy, the work from which the national anthem itself had come. The broadcast was Chang Key-young's idea. DBC's co-president meant to put a symphony orchestra on television for the first time in the Republic, and he meant it with KBS squarely in view. Chang, who had a way of seeing around corners, had been saying for some time that KBS would enter the television business before long. Better that DBC strike first, he insisted, before KBS—already keeping a symphony orchestra of its own—could steal the march.
The first movement ended, and a commercial filled the intermission. His secretary came over.
"Sir, the chairman of the Dongdaemun Merchants' Association is here."
"All right."
Ki-jo left the studio and made for the president's office. Lee Jeong-jae was already there, waiting on the sofa.
"You've come, Chairman?"
"Just arrived, President Lee. I heard you were taking in the symphony, so I thought I'd be the one showing up late."
"The first movement happened to end just now."
"Splendid, President Lee. The first symphony ever carried on Korean television... Every time I look, you're writing history."
"Co-president Chang Key-young planned it. I only watched from the side."
"Don't stand there like that. Sit beside me. Anyone looking in would think I'm the man who runs this station. Ha ha ha."
Ki-jo sat down across from him, and Jeong-jae sent every bodyguard out of the office. He had the look of a man with something confidential to say.
"President Lee, nothing weighing on you?"
"What hardship could there be for a man who only runs a business?"
Ki-jo said it modestly, and Jeong-jae laughed, easy and unguarded.
"Ha—you really are something. A man comes back from all that good work down south this summer and won't even let it show, sitting here quiet as you please. It pains me to watch. If it were me, I'd have been boasting of it in every neighborhood I passed..."
A strange business. Of all people, it was the political gangster Lee Jeong-jae who alone seemed to grasp what Ki-jo's flood-prevention and recovery work had been worth. Ki-jo knew why the man had been watching him. Jeong-jae had launched flood-recovery projects of his own in his hometown of Icheon, in Gyeonggi Province, laying the ground to run in the general election of May 12, 1958.
"How much did you spend, all told?"
"Not a great deal."
"Come on, tell me. I'd put it somewhere around twenty or thirty million hwan."
"About that."
Jeong-jae gave a rough laugh.
"What—you just spent it? Just like that? Way I hear it, you turned down a Liberal Party nomination and a Democratic Party nomination both..."
True to a man obsessed with politics, he was thoroughly briefed on the nomination gossip. Ki-jo was startled that talk of him had already spread through political circles. He had a fair idea who had spread it. The very people who had offered the nominations, most likely. He had dared refuse what they put in front of him, so both sides had put the word out to make sure he could never come begging their parties for a nomination again. If he changed his mind and stood for the Assembly, he would have no choice but to stand as an independent. A petty little revenge, of a sort.
"Politics? A man in my position? I don't think just anyone can be a politician."
Even to Jeong-jae's face, he made it certain: he had no mind for politics. Let that resolve travel out through Jeong-jae's mouth and turn into rumor all over again.
"People, honestly. What's so grand about a little politics? Anyone can do it. In this country, politics and business aren't kept apart. You want to run a business, you need political power too."
"I'm afraid I don't understand these things, Chairman."
"Ha—never heard of the Geonjung Friendship Society?"
"I haven't."
Jeong-jae looked at him as if the ignorance were a pity.
"It's a company run by Hong Young-chul, a Yonhi College man. Schooled as far as a man can be schooled, and what does he do? Leads a crew of fists and locks up the bids on the surplus goods the U.S. Army is dumping. Isn't that the way of it?"
As always, Ki-jo knew, and pretended he did not.
"That Hong Young-chul is really something. Eighty percent of the profit, they say, split evenly among the Liberal Party, the police, the Counterintelligence Corps, and the military police. He's cut me in before, too."
"Has he?"
"Keeps twenty percent for himself. Even that must leave him plenty, mind you. Still—draw politicians, officials, and the fists into one circle, and there's no way you can fail."
When Hong Young-chul entered a bid for U.S. military surplus, no one else dared take part. Whenever he bid, it was either uncontested, or his rival deliberately named some absurd price and knocked himself out of the running.
"Anyway, if you're telling me you've no interest in politics at all, it's a shame..."
The face that said it looked nothing like regret.
"Truly nothing hard on you these days?"
"Nothing, Chairman."
"You're fighting Lee Byung-chull over seasoning, aren't you?"
"Fighting? We're only competing with each other."
"From what I hear, it's no game. Prize giveaways on both sides, salesmen getting into it with each other, gifts to the shopkeepers so they'll put your goods out front. That the way of it?"
It was true that both sides were dangling premiums, and that salesmen who ran into each other on the street would lock eyes until the staring turned into a fight. The barrage of gifts aimed at shopkeepers, though, was Cheil Jedang's doing. Cheongsan Seasoning took the quieter road, slipping the owners a commission under the table whenever their seasoning sold well.
"Want me to sweep out a Cheil Jedang sales office for you? I could leave the place such a wreck they couldn't do business for a month or two."
The offer brought the violence at Jangchungdan Park back to him. Pull a stunt like that, and Cheongsan Seasoning would wither just as the Liberal Party had withered.
"No, Chairman. Even competing with Cheil Jedang, we make a living. It's all right."
"Ha—that's because you've got no greed in you, President Lee. If it were me, I'd kidnap Lee Byung-chull and scare the life out of him. See to it he never touched the seasoning business again. Ha ha ha."
Jeong-jae laughed, big and hearty. Ki-jo smiled in return, but he doubted why this political thug would volunteer for a job that brought him nothing.
The answer was not long in coming.
"President Lee, I'd like the television signal to reach Icheon, too..."
Ki-jo nodded. Jeong-jae was pouring tremendous effort into standing for election from his hometown. Every bit of money he made in Dongdaemun Market, he was scattering across Icheon. He never missed a wedding or a funeral in the area. He had even loaded a truck with rubber jump-ropes, gathered the children of Icheon County, and, while they played, taught them a song.
This time, Lee Jeong-jae.
Vote for Lee Jeong-jae,
Lee Jeong-jae, who works for Icheon.
And that was not all.
There were people who could pass through Dongdaemun without the gangsters picking a fight. Jeong-jae had laid down the law to his men.
"If they're from Icheon, you help them. No exceptions. Anyone who lays a hand on them, I won't let it go."
So the rumor went that if the gangsters around Dongdaemun started trouble, a single sentence was enough to make them back off.
"What's the matter with you? I'm from Icheon!"
Jeong-jae, he was sure, had come with a plan to seed Icheon with the televisions sold in Dongdaemun Market.
"Chairman. I'll see to it the broadcast signal reaches Icheon."
"You will? You're not overreaching on my account?"
"And if I overreach a little, what of it?"
Ki-jo smiled, bright and open, and Jeong-jae's face lit in turn. There was nothing overreaching about it. Equipment bought in America to widen DBC's reach had already arrived, and the work of extending the signal across all of Gyeonggi Province was underway. At the same time he was pushing to establish DBC regional stations in Busan, Daegu, Jeonju, Gwangju, and Daejeon. Jeong-jae, who knew none of this, was simply pleased, believing Ki-jo was bringing the broadcast as far as Icheon for his sake.
"President Lee, thank you. If there's ever anything I can do for you, just ask. Any time. Don't stand on ceremony."
"I will, Chairman."
"Ha. President Lee, you really are... a waste, a man like you..."
What he regretted was that he could not make Ki-jo entirely his own.
For an hour or so they talked over the way the world was turning. Then Ki-jo saw him off, sat down at his desk, and thought about what was coming.
In the end, Lee Jeong-jae would never stand for the National Assembly from Icheon. Lee Ki-poong would see to that with a piece of meanness. The tide they called yeochon-yado—the ruling party entrenched in the villages, the opposition entrenched in the cities—was only growing stronger, and Ki-poong's own district, Seodaemun Eul, was beginning to look unwinnable. So he would flick out a tongue and swallow Icheon whole, the very ground Jeong-jae had so carefully prepared. When Jeong-jae fought back in a fury, Ki-poong would set Kwak Young-joo on him to smother the complaint. Ki-poong's doing would drive Kwak Young-joo and Lee Jeong-jae apart, and for the crime of defying Lee Ki-poong, Jeong-jae would be made to step down as boss of the Dongdaemun Gang. On the surface only. His hold over the gang would remain exactly what it had been.
Turning that course over in his mind, Ki-jo wondered what stance he ought to take. Easy terms with Jeong-jae, and a bond with Kwak Young-joo that did not loosen. Holding the balance between the two of them—that was the thing.
He was still settling his thoughts when the secretary came in to say a visitor had arrived.
"He wouldn't say what he does. He only gave his name."
"What name?"
"A Mr. Kim Jong-pil."
In an instant Ki-jo took the measure of where history stood. Kim Jong-pil was a major now, assigned to intelligence work in the army. Next year he would take up as chief of the planning section in the Intelligence Staff at Army Headquarters and rise to lieutenant colonel. Park Chung-hee had graduated from the Army College in March and was lingering as a brigadier general, left without a proper posting, his footing uneasy.
In the original history, graduation from the Army College would have placed him before the board for promotion to major general. Kwak Young-joo would oppose it, raising the matter of Park's ideology and the matter of his marriage, and yet after no small tangle Park would pin a major general's stars to his collar all the same. Knowing that things now stood worse than in that original history, Ki-jo spoke to his secretary.
"All right. We'll go out together."
He left the office with the secretary and greeted Kim Jong-pil, who was standing in the outer room.
"Hello. It's been a long time."
Early in 1954, beneath a guard tower at an American army post—three years since he had last met Kim Jong-pil. That time, Jong-pil had come looking for him in order to save Park Chung-hee, his wife's uncle. The reason now, surely, was the same.
"An honor that you remember me. Major Kim Jong-pil."
"Please, come in."
He sent Jong-pil into the office ahead of him, then spoke quickly to the secretary.
"Two bottles of cold beer. Nothing to eat with them."
"Yes, sir."
The request for beer threw the secretary for a moment. Then he hurried off.
Ki-jo went in and sat across from Kim Jong-pil on the sofa. Jong-pil was looking at him with an awkward expression. It was the first time they had met in a bright room, and that was probably why.
"When we met in the pitch dark, I couldn't tell. You look quite young."
Kim Jong-pil, four years Ki-jo's senior, said it with a smile. Seeing the young Jong-pil from so close was a novelty for Ki-jo as well. This was a man who, in the youth Ki-jo remembered, had gone about in sunglasses so often that he rarely let anyone see his face.
"A handsome man. It was too dark then for me to know."
He answered half in jest and half in earnest. A laugh passed between them, and the secretary came in with a tray—two bottles of beer, and glasses.
"I thought we might have a cold glass first, and talk after."
At the offer of beer, Jong-pil laughed without a word. Ki-jo thought the man must be burning up inside. If Jong-pil had come to him in person, it was because Park Chung-hee's promotion was going worse than it had in the original history. He was making allowance for that, for a mouth that would not easily open, so the words might come out on the strength of a drink.
He poured, and Jong-pil's face brightened. They filled each other's glasses with the cold beer and, saying nothing, drank them off in a single go. When Jong-pil's glass was empty, Ki-jo poured him another. They killed the second round the same way. This time a long, satisfied ahh left both their mouths at once.
"The beer is wonderfully cold."
Jong-pil sounded like a man whose tension had eased a little.
"Refreshing, isn't it? Then tell me why you've come to see me—just as refreshingly."
Ki-jo said it with a smile.