Someone to Talk To
Back from Japan, Gijo met Chairman Park at the fertilizer plant in Ulsan.
The Chairman had no particular errand there. He was making the rounds of the factories raised on aid and foreign loans, and had decided to look in on Gijo's plant while he was at it. Gathering the fertilizer workers before him, he launched into a passionate speech.
"For fiscal year 1962, we intend to ask the ICA for an additional thirty million dollars in fertilizer funds."
A roar went up, and applause broke over the crowd. Small wonder. More than half of any extra thirty million would flow into the Cheongsan fertilizer plant, and it would go a long way toward paying down the loans taken from West Germany. Gijo was running a business that simply could not fail. Even the commercial credits could be repaid ahead of schedule.
Basking in the cheers, Chairman Park went on to deliver a scolding — though it was not aimed at the fertilizer workers.
"This autumn I went around the countryside, lending a hand with the work and watching how the harvest was coming along. Wherever I inspected officially, the reaping was done by the book. But I also traveled by car on purpose, without the helicopter, and went through the villages in secret — and there were paddies where the rice hadn't been properly brought in at all. That's what I'm telling you."
He got that far, then bit the words back a moment, as if his temper were about to boil over, and pressed on.
"I decided we shouldn't be handing out the fertilizer you people sweated blood to make just anywhere. Hardworking, honest households ought to get more of it, and the rest should get less. A group that will not help itself is useless, no matter how much you aid it. That is my conviction."
Applause broke out again.
When the speech was over, Chairman Park toured the plant, firing sharp questions as he went. The manager, who had gone all the way to West Germany to learn the technology, broke into a nervous sweat answering him. His voice shook, but he never once faltered — and when the inspection was done, the Chairman clapped him on the shoulder and grinned.
After the tour, Gijo sat down with him in the plant office.
"President Lee. I hear there's a fertilizer made specially for trees."
"There is. A slow-release solid compound fertilizer. It dissolves gradually."
"So Dr. Hyun Sin-gyu was right. Make some."
"We're already developing it."
At that, Chairman Park broke into a smile.
"You were already doing exactly the thing that pleases me, without being told."
Gijo knew how dead earnest the Chairman was about reforesting the country, and had set the tree fertilizer in motion long before.
"But listen. We're going to supply the forestry fertilizer free of charge. Won't the farmers just turn around and use it on their crops?"
"The first year, they might. But it's slow-release. Spread it on a paddy or a field and it does little good — they'll see that for themselves. I also think the authorities ought to instruct the farmers beforehand."
"Right. Next year I'm establishing a Rural Development Administration. We'll have it spread techniques to the farmers and keep a close watch on them, so agriculture gets a thorough looking-after."
Pleased with the talk, Chairman Park stayed on the subject of reforestation.
"The Forestry Act will be promulgated at the end of this year. After that I'll set up a Forest Service, and I mean to place it under the Ministry of Home Affairs, not Agriculture and Forestry. What good is it merely to plant trees? You have to police them hard, so nobody cuts them down. I'll fold the Forest Service into Home Affairs and raise a forestry police as well."
Gijo nodded.
The new Forestry Act would consolidate and strengthen the existing statutes on forests, and scrap the old forestry laws that had dragged on from the Joseon era through the Japanese occupation. Setting the new Forest Service not under Agriculture and Forestry but under the Ministry of Home Affairs, which controlled the police, was something he had done in the original history as well. Forestry police in steel helmets, rifles in hand, had ridden the mountains on horseback to stop illegal logging.
"And that Dr. Hyun Sin-gyu I mentioned. With money from American aid, he's bred something called a rigitaeda pine."
The rigitaeda pine was a cross of pitch pine and loblolly pine, a new species of Dr. Hyun's making. It took only the virtues of both parents: it grew well on poor soil, the timber was sound, and the trunk ran straight. Hardy against the cold and willing to grow even in sand, it was a tree that could thrive on the hills of the Republic of Korea, where the land was already sliding toward desert.
"We'll have to bring in black locust from Japan, too. Locust grows fast. Before coal is widely available, it would be good to make fuelwood forests of it."
As Chairman Park reeled off his command of trees and afforestation, Seong Dae-ik — standing at Gijo's side, taking the words down — was startled. Even so, seeing the Chairman treat Gijo without ceremony set his mind at ease. Facing the man for the first time, Dae-ik had been on edge the whole while, afraid something might go wrong.
"But listen. I've been around the factories that took American loans, and a shocking number of them are a disgrace."
Done with reforestation, the Chairman started in on something else.
"I went to the Honam Fertilizer plant, and they were using American-made goods right down to the brooms and the ladders. I asked why they were buying even that sort of thing as expensive imports, and they said the aid contract had been written that way from the start, so there was nothing they could do. Unbelievable."
He clicked his tongue.
"Still, I've seated Brigadier General Kim Jae-gyu as president of Honam Fertilizer, so he'll see the completion through. A capable man, and a clean one."
At the name Kim Jae-gyu, something lurched hard in Gijo's chest.
Kim Jae-gyu was eight years younger than Chairman Park, yet they were classmates from the Military Academy, and from the same hometown. He had not even taken part in the revolution. But in the course of winnowing the revolutionary core, the Chairman seemed to have decided that the only men he could trust were his classmates and his own hometown people, and had called Kim Jae-gyu in as a man who would be loyal to him.
Chairman Park, who could not have known what was passing through Gijo's mind, went on.
"And it isn't just that one place. I went to the glassworks in Yeongdeungpo, and the plant hasn't run in two years — yet there was some elderly American couple sitting in the office."
The husband, he explained, had been sent from the United States as a technical adviser, and the wife was serving as his secretary.
"I asked the owner. The husband draws twelve hundred dollars a month, the wife eight hundred, paid by USOM. That's how the aid contract reads."
Gijo nodded without a word. Beside him, hearing it, Dae-ik was astonished — that such a place existed, and that so much money could be made so easily.
"Before I came here I stopped at the shipyard on Yeongdo in Busan, and a machine brought over from America, worth a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, was just sitting there abandoned. I asked why. They said it came in as aid four years ago, but the whole unit never arrived — only part of it — so they can't even run the thing."
The Chairman lamented the slipshod way American aid was being run.
"From now on, even when we take aid, we can't simply accept whatever America hands us. We have to press our own views, and press them hard."
As if wondering whether he had complained too long, he gave a small smile.
"Sometimes I wonder if I carried out the revolution for nothing. Now that the country is in my hands, it feels as if I've been left with a thatched house after the thieves have already been through it."
He laughed, hollow, then glanced at Seong Dae-ik and hastily swallowed the smile. Dae-ik, who had been laughing along without a thought because the words were funny, stiffened his face at once.
"Let's talk, just the two of us."
At that, Gijo turned to Dae-ik.
"Wait outside."
"Yes, President."
Dae-ik bent at a right angle to Gijo and the Chairman, and left the office.
Stepping out, he had to mind the hard looks of the grim soldiers guarding Chairman Park, but his heart was not uneasy. Seeing the general who had overturned the country joke freely with his president had left him relieved. He came out of the building and, a good distance off, let out a long sigh to his heart's content.
Once Dae-ik was gone, Chairman Park sent his aides out as well — Park Jong-gyu, the security officer, among them — and began to speak with Gijo alone. He lit a cigarette, blew out a long stream of smoke, and said,
"I need you to help me."
"I will."
Gijo answered without hesitation. For now, the best course was to help the man run the country with everything he had.
"What would you like me to help with?"
Chairman Park grinned.
"All you have to do is listen."
"I can do that."
Gijo thought the Chairman must be lonely. Was there anyone around him to whom he could unburden a worry without guarding his words? Ask his subordinates whether he ought to do this or that, and he might look like a leader with no spine of his own. Ask the loyalist bloc of the Academy's eighth class, and he could end up bound to accept whatever advice they judged to be right. The Chairman seemed to be looking for an easy partner in conversation — someone who would not order him about.
"If you've something you want to say, say it straight. Don't watch my face."
"I understand."
Gijo resolved that if the Chairman wanted plain speech, he would give it. If the man could be steered even a little toward the right course, the country would be the better for it.
Silence held for a while. Then Chairman Park spoke.
"What did you make of what Kennedy said to me in the White House garden?"
Gijo answered honestly.
"It seemed to me Korea was an easy mark — and that he was looking down on you as well."
"Hm."
Chairman Park stared at him. There was something peculiar in those eyes: sharp, but not aggressive; full of thought, and yet impossible to read. Gijo tensed, unsure how the man would take this first piece of plain speech.
"You thought so too?"
Fortunately, the Chairman seemed to have felt the same. He laughed, unguarded.
"The papers called it a great success, and what have you. But you were there. You must have known the reality was nothing to be so proud of."
Gijo moved to shore him up; the Chairman had gone a little deflated.
"Not at all. You did well. Didn't you get a great deal out of the Americans?"
"Did I? I came away bitter. It felt as if all I'd done was take a pile of threats. When Kennedy said that if any force appeared threatening the present government, he would cut off PL 480 — the food aid — and put it in the joint communiqué, it sounded to me as if he were talking about me."
His face twisted for a moment, as if something had turned in his gut, and he went on.
"Why would Kennedy protect me out of any fondness? He was telling me, too, that if I didn't do as he said, he could cut the food."
The Chairman's reading was exact. In the original history, when he failed to keep his promise to hand power to a civilian government, Kennedy did in fact turn around the food-aid ships already bound for Korea.
Chairman Park drew the smoke deep and let it out, rubbing the corner of his eye with the heel of his palm.
"Next week the KCIA Director goes to America."
"Does he."
"As I understand it, he's going to negotiate the introduction of a nuclear power plant, and to meet his counterpart, the head of American intelligence. It won't be announced to the press. He'll go and come back quietly."
Having said it, the Chairman grimaced briefly, then smoothed his face.
"While the Director is in America, I suppose I'll have to do as Kennedy says."
He seemed determined not to give Kim Jong-pil any warning in advance. Tell him what he and Kennedy had said to each other outside, alone, and he would have to admit that America looked on Kim Jong-pil with disfavor — and that he himself had yielded to Kennedy. That would not have come easily.
Even so, Gijo thought it would be better to lay the details out before Kim Jong-pil left for America. But it was his own principle not to say a word on matters of power.
Chairman Park was a hard man to read, and yet for an instant his intention showed in his eyes. He seemed to mean, this time, to make the chain of command unmistakable to the eighth class of the Military Academy — and, at the same time, to show that the great affairs of the nation he would decide for himself. Gijo could not tell how the balance between the Chairman and the revolutionary faction might shift. The light in those eyes might have been anxiety, or resolve; it was impossible to say which.
"And another thing."
After another stretch of silence, Chairman Park spoke again.
"There's a rumor that the Chinese residents are hiding something on the order of a hundred billion hwan. What do you make of it?"
Gijo thought the Chairman was quietly tossing him problems that called for a decision, testing them one by one. This one was currency reform. He did not believe the Chairman should credit the tale Yu Won-sik had raised, of a hundred billion in underground Chinese funds. Trust a claim that absurd and push a currency reform through, and the only result would be worse side effects.
"If the Chinese residents really have money on that scale, why not put it to a test?"
"A test?"
"If they've piled up that much wealth, with inflation as bad as it is, they'll have put it into land as well. Spread a rumor that you mean to confiscate the real estate they hold, return it to the treasury, and spend it on economic development."
Chairman Park sank into thought.
"Real estate. After the revolution I had the assets of senior officials looked into, and the ones who'd built fortunes by corruption had bought houses and wouldn't even hang a nameplate on their own door. Hiding it tight."
He considered a while longer, then asked,
"If we put out a rumor like that, what do you think happens?"
"Listings in the choicest districts of Seoul will surge. Transaction prices will fall with them."
"And if the Chinese are holding more cash than property?"
"They'll scheme, one way or another, to turn it into dollars or gold and run for Japan, or for Free China — Taiwan."
"And if they do, what shows up?"
"The dollar will spike on the Myeongdong black market, and gold will dry up in the streets."
"That it would."
"Yes. If the story of a hundred billion hwan in Chinese funds is true, then one of three things is bound to happen: property falls, the dollar shoots up, or gold grows scarce."
Chairman Park stroked his chin, nodded, and grinned.
"Talking with you clears my head. Come by the Chairman's office often."
When Gijo did not at once agree, the Chairman asked,
"What is it? Does coming and going from the office make you uneasy?"
"It does."
"Then come to the official residence. You said it to me once before — that you wouldn't drink with me out in public, so if I wanted a drink with you, I should call you to the house."
That was what Gijo had told him back when he lived at the Shindang-dong Residence and had suggested they go out for a drink.
"Yes. I did say that."
"Then keep your word."
Chairman Park grinned, and Gijo smiled with him.