Fists in Politics (2)
At the foot of Mount Bugak stood a haunted house. Lee Jeong-jae had withdrawn into the abandoned place, where people rarely passed, and was living there in quiet.
When Kijo stepped into the yard, Jeong-jae welcomed him in a white hanbok.
"President Lee. Do come in."
His face was badly worn.
"Chairman, why a place like this..."
Kijo played the man in the dark about the times, the man who had no idea what had happened. He let his face show only that he found it strange — the place Jeong-jae was living now was too far out of the way, too dilapidated.
"Haha. So it doesn't look like a place a man ought to live, even to you, President Lee?"
Jeong-jae seemed to have wanted his lodging to leave exactly that impression. He was cosplaying a self-imposed exile, and he was doing it in order to stay alive.
On April 10, the deadline for candidate registration — the day Lee Ki-poong had come looking for him in Icheon — Jeong-jae had blocked Sindun Pass, the road running from Seoul toward Icheon. He had mobilized a hundred-odd gangsters and held the pass shut the entire day, all to keep Lee Ki-poong from registering. He must have known that what he had done was to bar a king's progress. Even so, he had been mad with the hunger to become a National Assemblyman himself.
That day, no one crossed Sindun Pass. Lee Ki-poong, bound for Icheon, had in the end been forced to take a detour, and so managed to register only barely, with twenty minutes left before the deadline. A little lateness would never have moved anyone to dare reject an application Lee Ki-poong held out. But a man insulted like that was not going to sit still. He was only enduring it because lynching Jeong-jae, or removing him, on the eve of an election would cost him as well.
Kijo took in the haggard face and the desolate surroundings, then asked.
"Is there anything I might do to help you, Chairman?"
Jeong-jae had called him because there was something he wanted; Kijo simply moved first.
"A favor? Nothing of the sort. I called you because I wanted to see a good man's face. And it's been lonely, with no one to talk to."
Jeong-jae smiled, working hard at looking unconcerned. Watching him, Kijo thought, Everything's moving faster...
It wasn't only the companies whose pace had quickened with his return. The people around him were moving faster, too. In the original history, Lee Jeong-jae had stayed at odds with Lee Ki-poong all through the election, and only after it ended had he gone into seclusion and tried to apologize. This time he had withdrawn at once. Blocking the Sindun Pass road seemed to sit very badly with him.
"How do you like the pond?" Jeong-jae asked.
In front of the haunted house where he was staying lay a pond in the shape of the Korean peninsula. It didn't look as if it had always been there. It looked like a pond he had dug himself.
"It looks exactly like a map of the country."
"Doesn't it?"
Jeong-jae looked pleased. Kijo thought the man was still dreaming of the presidency. He had lowered himself into a haunted house on a deep, lonely mountainside, and yet the ambition to be king of this country someday had taken form in that pond.
Before it, Jeong-jae talked on and on. The air was good once you came into Mount Bugak, he said, and one's thoughts grew clear; now that he had cast off vain desire and returned to nature, his own faults rose up before him. He strung out words he didn't mean. Then, abruptly, he said this.
"I think I did something terrible to Chairman Lee. Even now I'd like to help with his campaign, but I don't know whether he'll understand that my heart is loyal..."
It sounded like something he wanted Kijo to carry to someone. When he had finished, he led Kijo inside.
Unlike the exterior, which looked ready to collapse at any moment, the room where Jeong-jae actually lived had been made fit enough for a person to stay in. What caught the eye first was a radio with dry-cell batteries lashed to it by rubber bands. He might carry himself like a man who had left the world, but here was proof his mind was still out in it. There was another piece of evidence that laid his heart bare: cigarette butts heaped high in the ashtray. Those, at least, did not look staged.
While Kijo's eyes were on the ashtray, Jeong-jae asked.
"President Lee, do you remember when you got on the wrong side of Brother Young-joo?"
He was calling back the time Kwak Young-joo had slapped Kijo over a request from Park Chung-hee.
"Yes, I remember, Chairman. I was truly grateful then. Thank you."
"Brother Young-joo was furious that day. I was terribly worried you might get hurt. Why else would I have gone so far as to grab him by the wrist? Haha..."
It was the first time Jeong-jae's expression had looked servile. Even a man who had overflowed with charisma, once driven into a corner, seemed to have no choice. It was pathetic, and it was pitiful. Careful not to let his own feelings show, Kijo spoke.
"If Superintendent Kwak or Chairman Lee ever saw you living like this, it would surely pain them."
At that, Jeong-jae squeezed his eyes shut and lifted his face. As acting went, it was passable. When he opened his eyes again they had gone moist.
"Thank you. I wish everyone in the world were as considerate as you, President Lee."
From a corner of the little room he brought out a box, held it out, and said.
"Please call at Chairman Lee's house and deliver this. It is my heart, toward the Chairman."
Kijo took the jewel box. He thought he knew what would be inside. In the original history, Lee Jeong-jae had presented Lee Ki-poong's wife, Park Maria, with a diamond ring worth twenty million hwan. He had gone to the house himself to attempt a reconciliation, but Park Maria had flung the ring to the floor, and she had said this.
"Take that filthy ring back, and don't you ever think of setting foot in this house again."
She never forgave the man who had blocked her husband's road. Kijo had a feeling that carrying the diamond there himself would change nothing.
As though he had gotten what he wanted, Jeong-jae spoke with a face grown noticeably easier.
"I tried so hard to serve Chairman Lee as I would a father, and yet the world never goes the way one's heart wishes."
He lit a cigarette.
"Our family has lived in Icheon for thirteen generations. I'm an Icheon man to the bone..."
Kijo nodded for him.
"Chairman Lee, by comparison — all he has is the grave of an ancestor six generations back, sitting in Icheon. That's the whole of it. The man who served as county magistrate is his sixth cousin, and there are fourth cousins living there too, but he isn't a man whose bond with Icheon runs any deeper than mine."
A little more at ease, he let a sliver of his grievance against Lee Ki-poong show.
"President Lee, do you know how many villages there are in Icheon County?"
"I'm afraid I don't, Chairman."
"Two hundred and ninety-six. Two hundred and ninety-six. And in every one of those villages there was a man ready to stand with me. Because for years I settled every petition that arose in Icheon. Haha."
Kijo knew that much. Lee Jeong-jae had come and gone from Icheon constantly. He gathered the poor and elderly and threw them joint banquets for their sixtieth year; he bought bicycles for the township heads and their deputies; he held memorial rites for the people of Icheon killed in the Korean War. To the county's poor students he gave scholarships, and saw them all the way into university. Set faction aside, set personal allegiance aside, and Lee Jeong-jae had more right than Lee Ki-poong to be Icheon's assemblyman.
"And was that all I did? I saw to it that a man from Icheon didn't walk the streets of Seoul taking beatings, and when newlyweds married in Icheon, I was the one who officiated... haha."
He still looked full of lingering attachment to a run in Icheon. For as long as it took to smoke a single cigarette he talked the way a man boasts of a dead child, and then he said.
"President Lee. Don't look to me for your cues. Back Lim Hwa-soo."
His eyes were nothing like they had been a moment before. They were the sharp eyes of a gang boss, and Kijo looked at him with a face that said, What?
"Do as I say. A quarter of Dongdaemun is Hwa-soo's. My own share is half, of course, but with things as they are for me, I have no choice but to leave it in his hands..."
The largest stake in the Dongdaemun Gang belonged to Lee Jeong-jae. Jo Yeol-seung and Lim Hwa-soo each held a quarter.
"But isn't there Brother Ji-gwang, and Brother Tae-ryeon?"
Kijo pretended to know nothing of the gang's inner arrangements. In the official order, Lee Jeong-jae stood first, Jo Yeol-seung — captain of the A-frame porters — second, and Lim Hwa-soo third. Yu Ji-gwang and Kim Tae-ryeon were closer to action captains. Their standing only looked high because they served as Jeong-jae's trusted men.
"Haha. Our in-law, Ji-gwang, hasn't the strength for that. Nor does Tae-ryeon."
Jeong-jae set another cigarette between his lips. Kijo lit it for him.
"For now, Dongdaemun has to go to Hwa-soo. He's the one with ties into politics."
"I understand, Chairman."
Kijo said it as if he had only just grasped something he hadn't known.
"Hwa-soo came to see me the other day and said so himself. Asked me to give him Ji-gwang... haha."
"What do you mean by that?"
"He wants my backing, what else. Ji-gwang runs a special detachment, you see."
"A special detachment?"
"There is such a thing. Haha."
Kijo knew about Yu Ji-gwang's special detachment. It was an organization of eleven men at the level of mid-rank bosses; when Yu gave them an order, each could gather ten or twenty fighters. In effect he could mobilize some two hundred loyal men — force enough to seize a whole district of Seoul. Yu had been running that organization as a personal guard for Lee Jeong-jae, his senior from the same hometown and his in-law.
When Lim Hwa-soo said give me Yu Ji-gwang, he was asking for a guarantee of safety. Through Yu, Jeong-jae could drive him out whenever he pleased. It was why Jeong-jae could still exert influence inside the organization even after stepping back from the Dongdaemun Gang. In practice he had controlled the gang's interior through Yu Ji-gwang, and through Lim Hwa-soo he had gone on lobbying the Liberal Party.
Believing he still had a reasonably solid plan in hand, Jeong-jae said.
"You don't need to behave any differently than before, President Lee. Get along with Hwa-soo, and go on with Ji-gwang and Tae-ryeon just as you do now."
"Yes, Chairman."
Having taken the request, Kijo left the little stage of Jeong-jae's self-imposed exile.
The calculations and the passion with which the man was angling for a comeback were stronger than Kijo had expected. But there was something he did not know. The ship had already sailed, and his bond with Lee Ki-poong was broken glass. Lee Jeong-jae could never go back to what he had been.
He had done the one thing a man must never do to someone who holds power. You can take a beating from the powerful, but you must never bare your teeth at them on a whim. Only then is your future assured. Having reigned as the first man of an organization, he could hardly have failed to know that — and yet he had been unable to hold down a single moment's rage.
Kijo went back down the footpath he had climbed behind Jeong-jae's men, took the jeep, and returned to the head office on Sejong-ro. On the way he found himself comparing Kim Doo-han and Lee Jeong-jae, quite naturally. The two were headed in opposite directions. One had fought the world from ground you could still call justice. The other, in order to climb, had seized a rope of power that had nothing to do with justice at all. Neither had much of an eye for what lay ahead, and yet Kim Doo-han was the better of the two, if only by a little.
It seemed to come down to temperament. Through a long life as a gangster, Doo-han had learned in his bones that only by taking his stand where the cause was sound could a gangster keep his honor and leave men behind him. Lee Jeong-jae had chosen the practical path: cling only where there was profit, make the money, and hold the organization together by the power of that money. They had simply grown up along different roads. If the two of them had been businessmen, Kim Doo-han would have gone under and Lee Jeong-jae would have flourished. But what they were, at the root, was gangsters — and gangsters were men whose safety held only so long as they moved inside a range that ordinary people, people weaker than themselves, could understand.
Kijo got out in front of the office and pressed a little spending money on Jeong-jae's two men.
"Thank you, President Lee."
Both of them bowed deeply. A shameful heat rose in him, as if he had just made himself into one of their hangers-on.
Seeing them off, he found himself wishing 1958 would pass quickly. Storm clouds of a recession out of America were rolling in, and it was a year in which Korean politics was sliding into a pit. The strange thing was that a baby boom would break out in a time like this. The fruit of the love sown in the good year of '57 was drawing near its bursting.