Chun Doo-hwan
Gijo drove to Daegu himself, with Dae-ik beside him. Dae-ik sat with his hat jammed low over his brow, plainly uncomfortable. Part of it was that Gijo had taken the wheel in his place. The rest was what Gijo had asked of him.
"Dae-ik. Still uneasy?"
"I don't know if I can do it well," Dae-ik answered, his voice tight.
"You will. Say as little as you can, and if he asks you anything, just give him a light nod."
Before they left for Daegu, Gijo had proposed they switch roles. Once they reached Cheil Industries, Dae-ik would pretend to be the president of Cheongsan, and Gijo would play the driver. He wanted to see what sort of man Chun Doo-hwan really was. To anyone above him, Gijo was sure, the man would be scrupulously correct. His true face would show itself to someone beneath him.
Dae-ik, though, was thoroughly ill at ease with the arrangement, the tension written plain on him. Now and then Gijo glanced over and smiled. If anyone could carry it off, it was Dae-ik. No one had kept closer to his side. No one, in the course of assisting him, had watched more carefully how he spoke, what look came over his face, what gesture he reached for in a given moment.
They pulled up before Cheil, and the gate guard asked their business. Gijo rolled the window down.
"We've come from Seoul. Tell them the president of Cheongsan is here, and they'll know who you mean."
The guard looked at Gijo stiffly. At the name of Cheongsan his eyes went wide, and he bowed to Dae-ik in the passenger seat.
"Good day, sir. Welcome to Cheil Industries. Headquarters sent word. You must be tired after so long a journey."
He was moving to open the main gate when a man came out through the side door, the one used only on foot. He was short, his forehead bared clean and high, his eyes small and sharp.
So this is Chun Doo-hwan.
Gijo studied his face. The man looked a little tense himself. Some well-known businessman up in Seoul was saying he knew him—him, barely started at Cheil—and had asked that he show them around. He could not have made head or tail of it. His own president would have charged him to look after the visitors properly, and that weight must have sat heavy.
Face rigid, he came up along the side where Dae-ik sat and bowed. Dae-ik went blank for a moment, then gathered himself and gave Chun the slightest nod.
"Chun Doo-hwan, sir. It's an honor to receive you. I'll ride ahead on a motorcycle and escort you in."
Each word came distinct and clean. Years as an officer had drilled into his body the proper way to attend a superior. Tone, expression, movement—all of it was regulation-sharp.
The main gate swung wide. Chun hurried to a motorcycle he had left inside the grounds, mounted it, started the engine, and drew up a few meters ahead of the jeep. White gloves on his hands, he signaled their departure the way a military policeman would, in sharp cuts of the hand.
Gijo followed the escort at an easy pace. Chun began the tour along the line of manufacture, so they might walk the plant in the order of the work itself—spinning, dyeing, finishing, weaving.
He had prepared. Standing at the elbow of Dae-ik, who was playing the president of Cheongsan, he set the factory out in one smooth, unbroken flow.
"This machine was made by Spinnbau of Hamburg, in West Germany."
Dae-ik clasped his hands behind his back and gave a light nod. A bolt of cloth, rolled tight, was feeding into another machine, and he watched it go.
"And what machine is this?"
He asked it with a fair show of dignity. A laugh nearly got the better of Gijo. Do I truly sound like that?
Chun took up the explanation at his side.
"This is the machine that decides the quality of Cheil's suiting cloth. A high-speed Sulzer loom."
"I see." Dae-ik nodded.
They walked the vast length of the floor. Dae-ik stopped before one machine, looked it over with care, and said, "This doesn't appear to be a Spinnbau."
The answer sprang out of Chun at once. "The principal machines in the Cheil plant are Spinnbau, but the auxiliary equipment was bought in Britain, Italy, France, and elsewhere. For every machine we purchase only whatever gives the finest performance in the world, and so it came out this way."
"Excellent."
Hat still low, Dae-ik smiled faintly and looked at him. Their eyes met. Chun lowered his gaze and inclined his head, and Gijo saw the tension in Dae-ik let go a little. He stepped in close and spoke into the man's ear.
"In about ten minutes, leave as if something urgent has come up. Drive the jeep yourself."
The plant was one roar of machinery. Chun could not have heard a word. Dae-ik nodded slowly. The scene had been set between them beforehand, and he was not thrown.
Once they were outside, Dae-ik glanced at his wristwatch and turned to Gijo.
"Dae-ik, there's somewhere I have to get to at once. You look over the rest of the process and report back to me."
He carried the long line off cleanly, without a quaver in his voice. Gijo gave him the answer they had agreed on.
"Yes, sir. I'll look it over carefully and report to you later."
When the line was done, Dae-ik turned to Chun and offered his hand. Chun took it at once, in both of his.
"Thank you for showing us through today. I heard you left the army after a hard run of trouble, Mr. Chun. I was sorry to hear it. But to see you working so well in this place—it's a fine thing."
He brought the last long speech home as well.
Chun bent his head as if the words were more than he deserved. "Thank you, sir. That you would know my humble circumstances, and say you took an interest in them—it is an honor."
"Good. See that my man can look over the rest of the factory properly."
"Yes, sir!"
He had not been long out of the army. He answered with his body held rigid, a line officer before his commander.
This time Gijo climbed into the passenger seat. They followed Chun's motorcycle back to the main gate, and there Gijo got out.
"Go safely, sir. I'll see you in Seoul."
He bowed. Dae-ik lifted a hand. Chun bowed to that same hand with scrupulous courtesy.
"Please travel carefully, sir. I hope I may have the honor of receiving you again."
Gijo and Doo-hwan stood at the gate until Dae-ik's jeep dwindled and was gone. Only then did they let the tension go.
Chun was the first to offer his name again. "Let me introduce myself properly. Chun Doo-hwan, dormitory supervisor at Cheil Industries."
"I'm the driver. Seong Dae-ik. I'll be in your care."
"Ah, so you're the man who drives the president's car. Must be something, serving a gentleman like that. Come on—we'll shake on it first."
Chun had a name for easy friendliness. He smiled and put his hand out, and when Gijo took it in both of his, Chun was just as quick to match him, two hands to two. Gijo put on a slow, awkward air on purpose. Chun smiled at that.
"How old are you? How long have you been at the work?"
"Twenty-four. Not long."
Sure of his boyish face, Gijo had taken years off his age and trimmed his history to match. Chun nodded, looking him over.
"Do you smoke?"
"I do."
"Can't smoke inside the plant. We'll have one out here, then go in."
"All right."
They smoked against the factory wall, a little way off from Cheil's main gate. Chun cocked his weight onto one leg and let himself settle. A green driver, barely started in the job—around a man like that, he could be at ease.
Gijo used the opening. "You seem older than I am. Please speak however's easy."
Chun gave him a glance and grinned. "Shall I? I'm from the first class of the regular Military Academy, only I went in a little late. Even among the classmates I studied with, there were fellows who called me older brother. I had a harder time of it than they did. If it's easier on me to drop the formal talk, I'll drop it."
"Please do. It's easier for me too."
"All right. All right."
Born in 1931, a year younger than Gijo, he clapped him on the shoulder and laughed wide open.
He smoked with evident pleasure, then asked, "I skipped the worsted and the woolen earlier. Want to have a look at those too?"
Gijo was curious why he had cut the two processes on his own say-so. "What are worsted and woolen?"
"Oh, that. You pick out the short fiber, line the long stuff up nice and even, and draw it off into yarn. The wool flies like crazy in there. Higher-ups hate looking at that sort of thing. I know. I did my time in the army."
"I can believe it. It would get all over a man's suit, wouldn't it?"
"That's it. Even our President Lee Byung-chull changes into other clothes when he visits the worsted and woolen rooms. Wool flying all over the place, his face screwed right up. Hahaha."
The laugh came rough. "Your president looked like a fastidious sort himself, so I left it out."
"You were right to."
Gijo played along.
"Have another?"
Chun held out a second cigarette. Gijo took it, and took the light that followed. As he drew in the smoke, Chun asked, "How do you figure your president knows about me, kid? I've never once laid eyes on the man. Do you know?"
Gijo turned it over quickly. "Our president reads the papers very carefully. And he knows a good many people in the police. On the way here he said it himself. An officer who was done an injustice, he said, is working at this plant."
"So that's how it is..."
Chun's face darkened a little, as if his own case had come back to him. His right arm seemed to have gone numb. Again and again he closed the fist and opened it.
"Is your right hand troubling you?"
"Ah. This?" He held the hand up. "Dae-ik. Don't you ever let them torture you. That's not a thing a man can come through."
He said it on a short, bitter breath of a laugh. Then a hard ache seemed to run the length of the arm, and for a moment the pain showed plain. It looked like what the army's Counterintelligence Corps had left in him.
He sighed, wiped the sweat from his brow, and asked, "You're not going in to see the worsted and the woolen, are you?"
"No. I don't care for wool flying around either."
"Good. Gets right down in your ears, too. Put a mask on and it's hot, and you can't breathe. Smart man. Come on with me. We'll look at the mill girls' dormitory."
"All right."
Gijo agreed at once. They finished what was left of the cigarettes and went into the plant together. He sat on the back of Chun's motorcycle with his hands at the man's waist, and so they came to the dormitory.
Two-story buildings of red brick stood in a row, gabled roofs over them. It was the height of the shift, and the dormitory that housed a thousand mill girls and more stood empty. Chun fetched a ring of keys from the supervisor's office, unlocked one room, and showed him in. Four bunk beds. Eight lived there, and there was no mirror—nothing in the room but a rack for clothes, and the beds. Bare as it was, Gijo caught himself thinking that in the fifties even this much had been something.
He looked the place over slowly. Chun pointed at a radiator.
"Look at that, Dae-ik. President Lee Byung-chull had the heat put in so the girls wouldn't freeze come winter."
"My. That's impressive."
Gijo made a show of marveling. Cheongsan had put the same thing in earlier than Lee Byung-chull ever had, in the company housing at the brick factory and in the dormitory for the bus conductresses.
"Impressive, isn't it? A country girl says she's been taken on at Cheil, and the whole village throws a feast. And not just the girls. The men who work here are the same way. They clock out and walk home still wearing the work clothes with the Cheil mark on the chest."
"Why's that?"
"Hahaha. Put on a Cheil jacket and walk into a bar around here. You'll find out. Want to step out with me right now for a drink?"
"Right now?"
"Sure. You're a guest, and I was ordered to look after you proper. I take you out for a glass, nobody says a word."
There was a headlong streak in him. Let him judge a process something the higher-ups would dislike, and he cut it out on his own authority without a second thought. Middle of a working day, and he was ready to walk a man outside and buy him a drink. If he decided a thing was permitted him, he did it without hesitation. Give him any authority at all, and he seemed bent on using it for all it was worth.
Gijo wanted every side of him.
"Then I'll trust you, and follow."
"Haha. More brass than he looks, the little bastard. We've got a corner where we fit. Yeah, let's go. What's the fun in gawking at rooms where the girls sleep? Wait here a minute. I'll fetch us work jackets."
Gijo put on the Cheil jumper Doo-hwan brought back, and the two of them rode the motorcycle out through the gates. Chun took him to a bar near Chimsan-dong, where the Cheil plant stood.