The Request
Kim Jong-pil set his glass down on the table and, borrowing a little courage from the alcohol, spoke with unusual candor.
"President Lee, I am a soldier with no backing and no power."
Ki-jo nodded without a word.
"This isn't the first time I've come to you about my wife's uncle, and I still haven't repaid the kindness you showed me then. Someday I will settle that debt. I give you my word."
Ki-jo smiled.
"There's no need to repay me. I didn't really do anything for you last time, either. I only told the court the facts as they stood..."
"This time, please help me in earnest. I'm begging you."
Kim Jong-pil set both hands on his knees and bowed his head.
Hm...
Ki-jo had a fair idea of what was coming. A personnel request on behalf of his wife's uncle, Park Chung-hee.
Serving in military intelligence, Kim Jong-pil would have investigated Kwak Young-joo's circle with ruthless thoroughness—everyone standing in Park Chung-hee's way. And in the course of it, Ki-jo judged, he would have gathered information on Ki-jo himself.
At present he had grown close to Kwak Young-joo. That was hard to deny. And if Kim Jong-pil meant to ask something of Kwak through him, he would have to hear the man out. If Kwak Young-joo was a sun slowly setting, Park Chung-hee was the sun about to rise. To survive, he could not ignore the request.
"What is it you'd like me to do?"
Ki-jo asked.
"Please put in a word with that man Kwak Young-joo, so my wife's uncle, Brigadier General Park Chung-hee, can go to America to study. I'm asking you."
Young as he still was, Kim Jong-pil came straight to the point.
Ki-jo offered neither gesture nor reply. It was a plea that looked hopeless. Kwak Young-joo would never grant it.
"Just ask him to let the general leave for America. Tell him we want nothing else."
Kim Jong-pil pleaded again.
Ki-jo tried to read between the lines.
We want nothing else.
Those words sounded as if they had come from Park Chung-hee's own mouth. Blocked from promotion to major general, Park must have fallen into despair. In the history Ki-jo remembered, Paik Sun-yup had stood firmly at his side, and Defense Minister Kim Chung-yul's word had carried real weight. But in the world Ki-jo had returned to, Paik Sun-yup had already been cast into the wilderness, and Kwak Young-joo's power had only grown.
Park Chung-hee may have decided that if he remained in Korea he would not survive. He seemed to be looking into study in America, or at least a posting there as defense attaché. For a man in his position, it was understandable enough.
Ki-jo began with a light refusal.
"I am in no position to tell Commissioner Kwak what to do. If he tells me to come, I come. If he tells me to go, I go. I hope you won't misunderstand."
Disappointment crossed Kim Jong-pil's face, but that hardly mattered. First Ki-jo had to impress on him that he and Kwak Young-joo were not especially close. Only then could he survive after April 19, and after a military coup. He could not afford to be seen as a man in league with the old corrupt order.
"Even so, surely you have enough standing to raise the matter once, over drinks?"
Kim Jong-pil seemed to know that Ki-jo had entertained Kwak Young-joo more than once at Myeongwolgwan.
Of course he knew. A man trying to survive in a world this rough would be gathering every scrap of information he could.
Ki-jo decided to concede the point and push back hard.
"It's true I've bought drinks for the Commissioner and the Dongdaemun gang more than once. But why do you think I did it? Only because I wanted to stay alive. Not to curry favor and make more money."
"I know."
To his surprise, Kim Jong-pil understood the sincerity of it.
"I know what you did in the Gyeongsang region this summer. You spent a fortune doing good, and then you kept your name out of the papers and turned down nominations from every party."
Fortunately, he knew about last summer as well. Ki-jo's efforts had not been in vain.
"I never thought a man who does that kind of good was scheming something hand in glove with power. Only..."
Kim Jong-pil dropped his head, let out a sigh, and went on.
"It's too unfair. The injustice of it is why I came to see you..."
Perhaps the drink had loosened him; the words were utterly frank. Ki-jo was not the sort to turn cold on a man who had come to him after suffering an injustice. Turn your back on such a person, and you earned several times the resentment.
"I can mention it once. Whether he'll actually listen is another matter."
The moment Ki-jo hinted that he would grant the request, Kim Jong-pil lifted his head.
"That's enough. Just once, I beg you. If he refuses, that won't be your fault. We understand."
The word we snagged in Ki-jo's mind. We included Park Chung-hee.
He made a show of thinking it over, the better to impress on the man that this was no easy favor—and in truth he had no intention of granting it easily. Not everyone was like this, but when a request was granted too readily, people came to believe the request itself had been easy. That was human nature. Before Kim Jong-pil, he meant to make the thing look as difficult as possible.
"Major, there is one thing I'm curious about."
"If you're curious, ask. I'll answer."
"I don't know Brigadier General Park Chung-hee. I've said I'll take up your request, but I know nothing about the man, so I honestly can't tell whether helping you is truly the right thing."
For now he had to pretend ignorance of Park Chung-hee. It was the natural thing, besides. He might help out of goodwill, but he wanted to leave the impression that the help meant more if the man on the other end was a decent one.
Kim Jong-pil nodded, as if the reasoning made sense.
"Is it because of the rumors?"
"No. It isn't."
Ki-jo denied it at once. The question carried a nuance he did not care to touch: Is this because of the talk that Park Chung-hee is a Red? The brand of communist was Park's deepest complex. Graze that forbidden scale, and the calamity could be ruinous.
"What I want to know is why trouble has fallen on Brigadier General Park. I have no interest in his ideology. I don't care to know it. I only want to understand what reason the other side—Commissioner Kwak—is giving for blocking the general's way."
He shifted his ground and offered a practical reason, so it would seem that unless he knew why Kwak was blocking the promotion, he himself could hardly raise the subject.
Kim Jong-pil gave three reasons.
"First, in the last election the Liberal Party didn't get many votes out of the 5th Division, where Brigadier General Park was commander. He never forced his men to vote Liberal."
Ki-jo nodded.
"Second, while he had the 5th Division, a great many soldiers defected to the North. Failing to stop his men from crossing over is something a division commander ought to answer for. But soldiers fleeing north is also very much the fault of the rotten senior generals and the Liberal Party. How hopeless must the South have looked, how bleak must life have been, for men in uniform to go over to the enemy?"
Ki-jo was startled. He had not expected so dangerous a remark.
Once Kim Jong-pil became part of the establishment, he took a deeply conservative line. The young Kim Jong-pil of the 1950s was different. He was youth with his blood still hot, quick to bristle at the world's absurdities. Inwardly surprised by this unexpected side of him, Ki-jo kept it off his face and pressed his lips shut.
"So many defections only deepened the ideological suspicion around Brigadier General Park. But after he left the 5th Division, the number of defectors didn't change. The new commander simply covered it up. The army and the government won't admit it, but soldiers are still crossing north in large numbers."
Ki-jo put the question to the agitated man.
"What do you think the cause is?"
"Beatings and hunger."
Ki-jo nodded. He had already tasted that corruption at the Nonsan Training Center, where department chiefs still in their twenties had been hauled away. From men who had served in the fifties he had heard that bribes passed among the troops even in frontline units: pay, and you were treated well; fail to pay, and you took the stick and every kind of abuse.
Better to go north and be received as a defector than to starve or be beaten to death in the ROK Army. That must have been the last struggle of soldiers who had suffered enough. In the 1950s, in fact, the North treated its soldiers better than the South did, and it treated its Korean War veterans better, too.
"But those first two reasons probably weren't the decisive ones."
Kim Jong-pil spoke with force.
"Brigadier General Park never threw himself into the welfare projects."
"Welfare projects?"
Ki-jo asked, feigning ignorance. He knew well enough what they were. He had seen them in Chungcheong Province back when he was in the briquette business: soldiers cutting timber and selling it off.
"Yes. They were supposed to mobilize the troops, sell illegally logged wood, and send the money up the chain. General Park wouldn't do it. That money was meant for generals who weren't worth the stars on their shoulders, and for the Liberal Party. Because he didn't offer it up, they treat a perfectly sound man as useless."
Ki-jo felt a slight dizziness. Was this really the Kim Jong-pil he knew? The man looked as if it would be no surprise to see him rise in revolution tomorrow. Perhaps the revolutionary fervor he carried had been sprouting since the late 1950s.
Ki-jo answered only with silence.
He held his gaze on the floor for a long while before he spoke.
"I'll do it."
Kim Jong-pil asked the man who had broken the silence.
"You'll really help us?"
"Yes. I'll help."
At that, Kim Jong-pil seized Ki-jo's hand in both of his.
"Thank you. Thank you for understanding what we truly mean."
We was Kim Jong-pil and Park Chung-hee.
"Major Kim."
Ki-jo spoke his name.
"Yes, President Lee. Please, go on."
"Would you care for another beer?"
At the abrupt question, Kim Jong-pil let out a short laugh.
"Gladly. I'm the one asking the favor, so I ought to be buying..."
"Not at all. It's evening anyway, and I was just wishing I had someone to drink with."
Ki-jo told his secretary to bring plenty of beer, and had dishes sent over from Lee Seong-ryong's Cheonghaeru. He and Kim Jong-pil drank and ate and talked on. The fierce liquor Cheonghaeru had sent over left Kim Jong-pil fairly drunk. Ki-jo drank little, unnoticed, and kept a clear head.
Listening, he put his thoughts in order. For now, the request of Park Chung-hee—the man standing behind Kim Jong-pil—was one he absolutely had to grant. Park was in a worse position than in the history Ki-jo remembered, but when a person's fate was strong, a disadvantage of that degree could be overcome easily enough.
His sister-in-law Soon-young was proof. Her life had changed, and still the force of fate kept working. In this altered world she was carving out her path with a strength that had only grown. Even without meeting the widowed shipowner in Busan, she had somehow gotten her hands on an enormous freighter. And the sweets from Cheongsan Confectionery, which she had opened in Yeongdeungpo, were popular for being cheap and plentiful.
A person bound to a strong fate ran along that fate's track even when the world around them changed. That was what frightened Ki-jo most.
"President Lee, there's one thing..."
Drunk, Kim Jong-pil opened his mouth again.
Ki-jo listened carefully for whatever he was about to say.