The Lucky Man
Late in June, with the completion ceremony for the Cheongsan Fertilizer Plant safely behind him and his mind light at last, Kijo went to Myeongwolgwan for the first time in a long while.
He had come to see Lee Hwa-ryong and Lee Seong-ryong, the brother and sister who had taken the killing frost of May 16 full in the face.
In this history, too, Lee Hwa-ryong had slipped the blade the revolutionary military was swinging as it swept the gangsters off the streets. He had been a gangster, yes—but a pure gangster, and that was what had saved his life. Unlike Lee Jeong-jae or Lim Hwa-soo, he had never mixed himself up in politics, and he kept an unexpected streak of humanity, treating artists and men of letters with respect. Among thugs, people said Lee Hwa-ryong was not a bad sort.
Petty cases of violence had followed him like a fate he could not shake, but if you heard the reason, most of it was violence that made a kind of sense by the standards of the day. He beat a reporter and was hauled in—because the man had been going around slandering him, and he had chased him down and hit him in a fit of temper. He beat a detective and was hauled in—because the detective had walked into the theater without paying and then lied that he had come in on an investigation. He beat a man pasting up film posters and was hauled in—because the fellow had stuck another movie's poster over his own. In an age generous toward violence, it left people room to mutter that a gangster might do as much, and that for a gangster, he had had his reasons.
So Lee Hwa-ryong had never drawn a heavy sentence for violence. This time, though, he was due to be caught up in something more serious, and Kijo wanted to warn him.
When he arrived at Myeongwolgwan, a different air was moving through the place. Small wonder. After the revolution, Myeongwolgwan had changed its trade and become an ordinary restaurant. The revolutionary government had forbidden civil servants to set foot in the yojeong—the old high-end kisaeng banquet houses—and ordered that any official caught in one be dismissed on the spot. Officials of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, long used to being lavishly entertained, were punished more harshly still. Even if a man took nothing from a businessman, paid for his own liquor, and merely sat a woman down beside him, he was punished all the same.
Colonel Kim of the Marines, sent in as aide to the Minister of Commerce and Industry, came to work with his rank insignia still on his collar, combat boots on his feet, and a pistol at his hip, and he policed officials' visits to the banquet houses with the persistence of an intelligence investigation. He was famous for reducing the Textile Section—the ministry's proudest bureau—to a wasteland. Let a single report come in that a man had been to a bar at night, and he cut him loose, until only two junior clerks were left alive in the whole section. As if firing civil servants were his mission on earth, Colonel Kim roamed every restaurant and drinking house in Seoul, taking in reports of unpaid tabs. At first the owners were delighted and filed their claims, thinking the revolutionary government meant to collect the officials' debts for them. Only later, when they learned that the men who had run those tabs had been dismissed, did they go pale with fright.
If ordinary bars were treated like that, the banquet houses were past speaking of. Civil servants were not the only guests at the Myeongwolgwan Lee Seong-ryong ran, but a great share of the takings had come from entertaining them. Let an official so much as step through the door and an anonymous denunciation went in, his head rolled, or an inspection squad descended and started questioning even the ordinary customers at their drinks. There was no doing business under that. So some of the houses shut their doors entirely, and others, like Myeongwolgwan, converted into ordinary restaurants.
Kijo was sorry to find the genial manager of the old Myeongwolgwan gone. He followed the familiar corridor and opened the door to Lee Seong-ryong's room. Lee Hwa-ryong was already there. Kijo smiled brightly and offered his greetings, and both of them rose to welcome him.
"President Lee. You're here."
"Aigoo, our President Lee. It's been too long."
They each caught him by an arm and drew him into the room.
"Have you both been well?"
At that, brother and sister sighed as one.
"Don't even ask. I did a fine trade under the Liberal Party, and under Chang Myon too, and this time I've had to throw up both hands. If it were up to my heart I'd clear Myeongwolgwan out and run only Cheonghaeru, but too many mouths depend on the place. Even at a loss, I keep it open."
Kijo nodded.
"And you, Brother. Are you all right?"
Asked that, Hwa-ryong stared at the ceiling for a moment as if he were looking at some far mountain, then spoke.
"Came back from the dead, I did. A little more and I'd have been paraded through the streets of Seoul right beside Lee Jeong-jae..."
Kijo nodded to him as well—a man who had slipped free of death. Lee Seong-ryong knew how close her brother had come to disaster. She gave a hard nod of her own and said,
"President Lee, you must be hungry. The food will be in any moment."
The words were hardly out before the door opened and the dishes came in. The women in white aprons carrying the food were all kisaeng of Myeongwolgwan, every one of them in plain everyday clothes instead of the splendid hanbok they had once worn. Seeing Kijo, the former kisaeng brightened and greeted him. Lee Seong-ryong had a sharp word for the girls making eyes at him.
"You. You there. Still think you're kisaeng, do you? Carry on like that and the soldiers will decide you're still in the trade and shut this place down. No smiling. Just be courteous!"
At the rebuke the women answered yes and withdrew. When the door had closed, Lee Seong-ryong said,
"Aigu. Where are girls who used to be kisaeng supposed to go and find work? I'll just keep them under my wing and put them to work as hagobi."
Hagobi—the old Japanese word for the servers who carried the food.
"Where has the manager gone?"
When Kijo asked after the man who was nowhere to be seen, Lee Seong-ryong said,
"He's working as a kitchen hand. He's got nowhere else to go either, so he's doing that much."
"I see..."
Kijo thought it a mercy. At that age it would have been hard to find work anywhere; that the man could stay on at Myeongwolgwan was something to be glad of.
"Come on, now. Eat."
At the urging of Lee Seong-ryong, the eldest of them, Kijo took up his spoon. As they ate, with a little drink alongside, Lee Hwa-ryong told him what had passed in the meantime.
"I saw the fertilizer-plant ceremony on the Daehan News the other day. The state newsreel."
"Did you?"
"I did. Vice Chairman Park was up there."
"Yes. The Chairman and the Vice Chairman of the Supreme Council came together."
Kijo thought back to the day of the ceremony. Park Chung-hee had stood at the podium and spoken in that terse way of his.
For four thousand years our people have suffered under a poverty that sickens the soul. A few lived well, and went on living well, but most of the nation was shut inside a yoke it could hardly escape, never far from the brink of starvation.
The farmers who grow the rice out in the countryside, above all—however hard they labored, they might fatten someone else's belly, but they could not fill their own hungry stomachs, nor their families'.
That we could borrow foreign capital and foreign skill and raise a fertilizer plant in Ulsan is a great stroke of luck for our people, and a chance to overcome hunger.
I ask the men and women who work in this plant not to forget that the fertilizer you produce will spread through farmland across the country, end the hunger of the whole nation, and lift the desperate lot of our farmers. Press on in the spirit of those who carry out a national undertaking.
It was not a long speech, but the people below the platform sent up a fierce applause. Most of them were workers of rural birth, and residents of Ulsan—people who could feel the truth of what Park Chung-hee had said down to the bone.
He was still in the memory of that day when Lee Hwa-ryong spoke.
"I'll tell you something. The sight of that man gives me the chills..."
He set his chopsticks down as if the food had lost its savor. Lee Seong-ryong started and turned on her brother.
"You—did something happen between you and General Park Chung-hee? Why didn't you tell me?"
Pressed like that, Lee Hwa-ryong let out a sigh and went on.
"I'll tell you now, Sister, so hear me out."
He began the story he had kept even from her.
"I met a man from the revolutionary government. A Colonel Park Chi-ok. He sent for me, so I went. They were hauling in Lee Jeong-jae and every gangster in Seoul, and I figured my turn had come."
Lee Seong-ryong set down her own chopsticks and looked at her brother with a grave face.
"He said he'd already met Executive Director Kang, the man who works under me."
"And what did Director Kang say about you?"
"Good things. Don't go worrying ahead of time. Sister, just sit still a minute."
Scowling at his sister, who jumped at every word, Lee Hwa-ryong pressed on.
"We ate for a good long while, and the feeling came over me—ah, this man isn't going to take me in. Director Kang had spoken well of me, and the colonel knows a Brigadier General Song Chan-ho, and once that man heard my story he thought well of me too. So I drank with an easy mind, and when I stepped out to the toilet for a moment, the paratroopers closed in around me and arrested me. That's what they did."
"What? They acted like they weren't going to take you, and then they took you? What kind of cheap, rotten bastards are those?"
Lee Seong-ryong was fairly steaming. Lee Hwa-ryong said,
"Well now. I wasn't taken for good, was I? I'm sitting here."
"That's true enough..."
Once she had settled again, he went on.
"They did drag me off to the unit, but Colonel Park Chi-ok came soon enough and dressed his men down. A fine-looking fellow, that one. He told the men who'd hauled me in on their own say-so that today he had his own dignity to think of, so they were to send Lee Hwa-ryong home; tomorrow they could investigate again, and if I was judged a gangster, hand me over to the investigative authorities, and if not, let me go. That's what he said."
He tossed back a cup of liquor and continued.
"So I went home that day, and the next day I walked into the airborne unit on my own two feet and took the questioning. They looked into me for a few days, and then they let me go."
"Thank heaven. Thank heaven. You nearly died too. But why didn't your wife tell me any of this...?"
"I told her not to. I was afraid you'd kick up a storm, the way you're doing now."
"All right. All right."
Lee Seong-ryong swept a hand down her chest in relief. She poured for her brother, and took a cup herself. Kijo followed them and drank a glass of soju.
"Found out later that Colonel Park Chi-ok caught hell from Vice Chairman Park Chung-hee for letting me go. And the reason was that Kim Jong-pil—General Park's nephew by marriage—filed a report saying my release looked strange."
"Good heavens. The KCIA director, the one who goes around in sunglasses? You'd better watch yourself, Hwa-ryong."
"I'll have to be careful, sure. For a while I'm going to live quiet as a dead mouse. Those soldiers scare me. How's a man supposed to stretch his legs out and sleep..."
Under the Liberal Party he had fought Lee Jeong-jae and Lim Hwa-soo, Lee Ki-poong's creatures, without a moment's hesitation. This time he seemed to have learned a sharper caution.
Kijo, who had listened in silence, offered him a quiet piece of advice.
"Brother, they may question you again over that business."
"Truly?"
Lee Seong-ryong asked it in a start. Lee Hwa-ryong's eyes went wide as well.
"From what I know, before long a purge will blow through the revolutionary officers themselves. Brigadier General Song Chan-ho and Colonel Park Chi-ok may be investigated for letting you go. If they ask you, just say you were curious what would become of the gangsters they'd already taken, and that was the only reason you met them."
"Met them just because I was curious?"
"Yes. Say only that."
"Well... all right."
The thought of being interrogated by soldiers without blood or tears seemed to dizzy him. Lee Hwa-ryong gave a small, uneasy tilt of his head.
Kijo knew what was coming for him. As Park Chung-hee struck at Chang Do-young and his faction, he would clear out the fifth class of the Korea Military Academy. Park Chi-ok had led the paratroopers into Seoul on the day of the revolution, but he had a record of talking back when Park Chung-hee demanded a faster deployment. Tangled up besides with Mun Jae-jun of the fifth class, who was working to check Kim Jong-pil, he would be pressed on further charges, and the release of Lee Hwa-ryong would be painted over with the accusation that he had taken a bribe to let the man go.
Mun Jae-jun himself had been a first-rank contributor, leading the artillery of VI Corps to seize Army Headquarters on the day of the revolution and helping the coup succeed. Even so, he joined the power game between Park Chung-hee and Chang Do-young, and the friction between the fifth and eighth classes of the Academy, and he would be swept away with the rest.
Lee Hwa-ryong would be caught in that civil war inside the revolutionary camp and placed under arrest. In the original history he was sentenced to six years. But in May 1963, under a special amnesty marking the second anniversary of May 16, the sentence was reduced, and he was released along with ordinary convicts. Set against the gangster bosses of Seoul, who were executed or served long years in prison after the revolution, it was a light punishment. That it ended there, even after he had been dragged into the revolutionary faction's struggle for power, could be called luck. That he had stood against the political gangsters Lee Jeong-jae and Lim Hwa-soo in the days of the Liberal Party also became a mitigating circumstance that saved his life.
"President Lee, how did you come to hear something like that?"
When Lee Seong-ryong asked, her brother answered in Kijo's place.
"Our President Lee built the biggest fertilizer plant in the Orient, didn't he? And plenty of the revolutionary officers came to the completion ceremony, so he must have heard a thing or two. Isn't that right, President Lee?"
He brushed past it and covered for him. When a woman asked a question that was awkward to answer, it was the way of men to look out for one another.
"Yes, Brother. I heard it in passing."
"Well, once people take power, they winnow out the chaff. That's politicians for you. Isn't there a saying—once the rabbit's dead, they boil the hunting dog? Let soldiers do politics, and they boil the dog just the same."
Lee Hwa-ryong had the future exactly right. His sister had a word for him then, airing his classical learning.
"If you're that clever, why'd you become a gangster? You ought to have been a professor at Seoul National."
At that, Lee Hwa-ryong's face went red. Kijo and Lee Seong-ryong laughed, and he laughed with them.
Kijo was certain that Lee Hwa-ryong, who had left his mark on an age, would survive this history by luck as well. A man's fortune, sometimes, was a stronger thing than the situation he was in.