The Premiere
On January 31, Ki-jo arrived at the International Theater with the entertainers of Cheongsan Heungeop. To the ten invitation tickets Lim Hwa-soo had sent him, he had bought fifty more, and he brought every performer on the roster.
Lim Hwa-soo and Lee Jeong-jae were waiting in the lobby. After his clash with Lee Ki-poong over Icheon, Lee Jeong-jae had withdrawn to Mount Bukhan to lie low, and he had only lately returned to the world by joining the Anti-Communist Youth Corps. He had been made head of its Dongdaemun chapter.
Ki-jo weighed the moment, then greeted Lee Jeong-jae first and presented the company's entertainers to Lim Hwa-soo.
"Well, now — you brought the whole lot. Thank you, little brother."
Lim Hwa-soo winked and clapped him on the shoulder.
Lee Jeong-jae ran his eye along the line of Cheongsan Heungeop performers.
"Nothing but people of real ability. Standing before all of you, I don't feel like a crane among chickens. I feel like a chicken set down among cranes. Ha ha ha."
At so polished a compliment the entertainers laughed and bowed. They knew perfectly well what sort of men Lim Hwa-soo and Lee Jeong-jae were.
Lim Hwa-soo looked them over in his turn.
"Tae-sik. Lee Bong-jo didn't come? I've got something to say to him."
"He's ill, so he couldn't come out today. I'll tell him to pay you a visit before long."
"See that you do."
Lim Hwa-soo's gaze lingered on Tae-sik, the man who worked under Ki-jo, as if he were not quite finished looking. Given half a chance, he seemed to want him for his own firm, Korea Entertainment Co.
"May I ask why you're looking for Bong-jo, sir?"
"I thought I'd trust him with the film score. Nobody handles a saxophone the way Bong-jo does, and he's a handsome fellow besides. If it comes to it, try debuting him as an actor. I think he'd do."
"Ha — I don't believe he could act. Bong-jo was born a musician."
"Nonsense. Give it a try. Look at Frank Sinatra. Sings beautifully, and acts just as well."
"Yes, sir. If he has any thought of acting, I'll tell him he ought to bring it to you himself."
When the two of them had finished, Ki-jo led the entertainers into the auditorium. Before the screening began, he leaned toward Tae-sik and asked, under his breath,
"Is Mr. Lee Bong-jo really too sick to come?"
"No, President. What happened was..."
On Ki-jo's orders, Tae-sik had required every affiliated entertainer who was married to submit a certificate of marital status. Even into the late 1950s, plenty of couples lived as husband and wife without ever registering the marriage. Ki-jo's sister-in-law, Soon-young, had done just that through her first marriage, and in the end had walked out on her own two feet.
Leaving a marriage unregistered had its uses. If a spouse proved hopeless, one could part ways without the fuss of a formal divorce. The drawbacks were worse. A woman might bear a man's children and build a life with him, only for him to take up with someone new, register that union, and leave his true wife a concubine overnight. So the government and the YWCA alike were campaigning to urge people to file their marriages.
At any rate, once Tae-sik had the certificates in hand, he let the list of the married circulate among the roster. He did not post it. He spread it by word of mouth.
"Aigoo, this Lee Bong-jo — already married. Looks every inch the bachelor, and he's got a child besides. Ha ha ha."
In that fashion he went about, spilling it freely to the staff and the signed entertainers. This, too, Ki-jo had ordered.
All at once Hyun-mi and Lee Bong-jo turned cold. He had hidden that he was a married man and drawn close to her with his kindness, and now the truth was out. Hearing the account, Ki-jo smiled faintly.
"Good. Next time, look into common-law marriages as well."
"Yes, President."
Ki-jo believed Hyun-mi would be happier married to a man with whom she could build an honest life. Lee Bong-jo, too, would be spared so wretched an old age if he stayed with his lawful wife, No Jeon-suk. The one son and three daughters born between them would all grow into remarkable people. Every one of them would finish at a prestigious university and, taking after mother and father, would be striking to look at as well.
The son, while still a student in the law faculty at Seoul National University, would pass the judicial examination in second place and graduate at the head of his class — a true prodigy. The three daughters would graduate from Ewha Womans University and Sookmyung Women's University, and become a doctor, a professor, and the wife of an executive at a great corporation. To lose a family like that over a wrong committed in youth would be a terrible waste. Even if he and No Jeon-suk did not get on so well, Ki-jo reckoned that keeping the household together would spare him the end that otherwise waited: living alone, every tooth gone, blowing a saxophone through a set of dentures until he died unnoticed in a flophouse room.
When the house was full and the hour came, an emcee stepped out and made his greetings. He introduced the leads of Fatty and Skinny, and Lim Hwa-soo came on to the audience's applause. The man shone from head to foot, as befitted someone living at the very height of his life. Because that glory was already nearing its end, the brilliance he gave off wore a more pitiful light.
The film ran. It was ordinary — the typical slapstick Yang Hun and Yang Seok-cheon had repeated countless times, a story in which the heroes suffered, overcame, and in the end grew happy together with everyone around them. But Ki-jo knew this picture, too, would succeed. People in the 1950s wanted, if only inside a theater, to forget the grind of their lives and watch a tale in which everybody came out happy.
Midway through the screening, Kim Tae-ryeon came up to Ki-jo and murmured,
"Let's talk for a minute."
Ki-jo rose and left the auditorium. He followed Kim Tae-ryeon to the president's office of the International Theater, where Lee Jeong-jae was waiting alone. He seemed to want a quiet word somewhere Lim Hwa-soo was not.
"Have a seat, President Lee."
Ki-jo sat and looked at him. Beside the sofa lay an issue of Sasanggye — The World of Thought. It did not look like a magazine the president of the International Theater would keep. It looked like Lee Jeong-jae's.
"Was the film any good?"
The question itself gave off the feeling that he had been bored. Ki-jo said it had been enjoyable. Even so, his eyes kept straying to Sasanggye.
It was not a magazine a man like Lee Jeong-jae ought to have been reading. Learned he certainly was, but Sasanggye sat poorly with his far-right politics. And this was the August 1958 issue — the number that carried Ham Seok-heon's celebrated essay, Only a Thinking People Can Live.
When Ki-jo's gaze fixed on the magazine, Lee Jeong-jae smiled.
"Ah, that. I read it while I was up on Mount Bugak. Rather good, I thought."
The remark was unexpected.
"I've memorized the piece Mr. Ham contributed to the magazine."
And he began to recite the passage he had learned by heart.
We may say that we were liberated from Japan, and yet true liberation has not come to us in the slightest. What is more wretched than before is this: where once we had a single master, now we have two, or three. The South calls the North a puppet of the Soviet Union and Communist China, and the North calls the South a puppet of America, so that all that exists are puppets, and there is no country. We are a people without a nation.
He stopped there, smiled thinly, and went on with the recitation.
The war of June 25 was a game of puppets. In the age of the people, the people ought to have lived; the people died, and so what could they become but the puppets of others? The fault began, from the very first, with the Jeonju Yi.
It was a dangerous passage — the very lines for which Ham Seok-heon had been arrested under the National Security Act. To hear Lee Jeong-jae pour them out so smoothly left Ki-jo wondering what on earth this was.
"A truly fine piece of writing, wouldn't you say? That the country went wrong because of the Jeonju Yi — I find that quite true..."
Ki-jo nodded. So it was that last sentence that caught him.
Lee Jeong-jae was of the Gwangju Yi clan. The Jeonju Yi, Syngman Rhee and Lee Ki-poong among them, were the royal house of Joseon in its entirety. Ki-jo wondered whether resentment toward Lee Ki-poong had shifted the man's politics, just a little — and whether that resentment had begun to turn as far as Syngman Rhee. But that was still only a guess.
Lee Jeong-jae held the Dongdaemun District chapter of the Korean Anti-Communist Youth Corps. The two things did not fit.
He gave Ki-jo the smile of a man who had seen through the world.
Ki-jo did not know why Lee Jeong-jae would say something so dangerous to him. It sounded almost like an invitation to plot treason together.
"Did what I said shock you?"
Ki-jo hesitated over an answer. He could see, too, that Lee Jeong-jae was a more intellectual man, and a more ambitious one, than he had known, and that this intelligence seemed to be warning that standing with the Liberal Party was no longer right. But he could not risk a dangerous word in front of a man who looked ready to turn on Lee Ki-poong and Syngman Rhee. More than four hundred days remained before the two of them would fall. Agree too hastily, and there was no telling what might follow. He chose the most harmless thing he could say.
"Forgive me. My mind wandered for a moment, and I didn't catch what you said, Chairman."
Lee Jeong-jae laughed outright.
"Ha ha ha. I can read you, President Lee. You're badly rattled just now — wondering why on earth that Lee Jeong-jae is talking this way. I opened my heart to you because there's no one around me to whom I can say such things."
Of all the people near him, he said, Ki-jo was the most close-mouthed.
"Living alone on the mountain, I did a great deal of thinking. I looked back over my life, and I thought about how I ought to live from here."
He drew a deep lungful of cigarette smoke and let it out.
"I think I've changed. But I can't let it show that I've changed, and I can't say it openly to anyone, and it has been more than I can bear."
"You don't seem changed to me, Chairman. You still look strong."
Lee Jeong-jae gave a short laugh.
"We'll say that's so. The world doesn't look changed either, does it? And yet, in truth, everything is changing. People and the world alike — little by little."
Ki-jo watched him smile, and his feelings tangled. If everything ran as history had it, this man would die. He would be summoned before the revolutionary tribunal of the military government, saddled with a false charge, and sentenced to death.
A jurist who read the military government's indictment of Lee Jeong-jae had said,
"Is this really all they could find to charge Lee Jeong-jae with? I'd have thought there was more. Why couldn't they write down anything else?"
He was speaking of an indictment so trivial that the death sentence itself was baffling. On charges of that order, the man should have drawn a few years in prison, or even a sentence suspended. Through the 1950s he had indeed run plenty of operations to obstruct the opposition, but he had not harmed the demonstrators during the April 19 uprising. All of that had belonged to Lim Hwa-soo's side. Prison he might have had to serve. Death he need not have met. Watching a man like that was no pleasant thing.
Cho Bong-am and Lee Jeong-jae had lived utterly different lives, yet both were men who would be made sacrifices of politics and put to death. Ki-jo knew a way for Lee Jeong-jae to survive. He was in no position to tell him.
While he was turning that human question over, Lim Hwa-soo came bursting in.
"Brother, what are you doing in here? Is the film no good?"
He had become the top man of the Dongdaemun Gang, and still he was scrupulously polite to Lee Jeong-jae — because of Yu Ji-gwang and Kim Tae-ryeon, men inside the organization who could overturn him whenever they pleased.
"No. It's good. I had a private favor to ask of President Lee."
"A private favor?"
Lim Hwa-soo glanced at Ki-jo.
"It's... that actress. Um Aeng-ran."
"Ah! The new actress at Cheongsan Heungeop?"
"I wanted to meet her once, on my own..."
Lee Jeong-jae had steered the talk in an entirely different direction. Lim Hwa-soo snickered.
"President Lee, put them in touch, and make it quick."
"Yes. I'll see to it."
Ki-jo said so, and looked at Lee Jeong-jae, who tipped his chin ever so slightly, the look of a man saying he had done well.
"I came looking because I didn't see you in the hall, Brother. I'll leave you to your talk."
Lim Hwa-soo went out. Even after he was gone, Ki-jo and Lee Jeong-jae said nothing for a while. Ki-jo hoped the man would open a way to survival for himself. Nineteen fifty-nine was the last stretch of time in which a chance to live would be offered him. There would not be many moments left in which to jump from the Liberal Party — that train racing toward the cliff.