The Large Safe
In mid-May, a massive safe was delivered to the front of Cheongsan headquarters.
It was far too heavy to carry up the stairs, so the plan was to lash it with rope and haul it from the roof, drawing it in through the window of the secretarial office on the fourth floor. Seo-gwang and Han-su went out to keep order, minding the safety of anyone passing on the sidewalk while the safe was being winched aloft.
"This side is dangerous, so please go around by the road. Sorry for the inconvenience."
Cars were still few in those days, and people willingly detoured into the street. A few stopped on the sidewalk to watch the enormous safe climb. Once it had passed safely through the fourth-floor window, Seo-gwang and Han-su cleared away the barriers that had closed the walk.
"What on earth got into the president, keeping money in a safe...?"
Seo-gwang asked. Han-su shrugged.
"I know. He always liked depositing funds at the bank. I can't see why he'd put money in a safe that doesn't even earn interest. The safe alone must have cost a fortune."
"Exactly. You don't suppose he's building a slush fund, do you? Behind his wife's back."
When Seo-gwang tossed it off as a joke, Han-su's face went stiff.
"How does that even make sense? Trust you to say something like that, hyung."
"What? Do I look like a man who'd squirrel away a slush fund behind his wife's back? You take me for some henpecked husband?"
"Oh, so the president is the henpecked one?"
"No—I was joking. Can't you take a joke, Han-su?"
"I was joking too. You're the one who can't take a joke, hyung."
"Ha... look at this guy. Gets married, has a kid, and now he wants to stand as my equal. What, you're a grown man now?"
"I may be younger, but I think I've been more of an adult than you for a long time, hyung."
"What?"
Bickering all the way, Seo-gwang and Han-su climbed to the fourth floor.
Ma-ryang and Dae-ik, already up there, hauled on the rope tied to the safe, drew it inside, and lowered it onto the straw mats spread across the floor. They shifted the heavy thing with care so it would not scar the flooring, set it where it belonged, and only then wiped the sweat streaming down their faces. The weather had turned warm, and the labor had them sweating as if they had been caught in the rain.
"You've worked hard. Please, have some cold water."
Hyeon-gyeong brought glasses and handed them to Dae-ik and Ma-ryang.
"Save a glass for me too, Hyeon-gyeong."
Seo-gwang, who had appeared on the fourth floor before anyone quite noticed, smiled at her. When she passed him a glass, he held it out to Han-su.
"Our grown-up little brother should drink first."
Han-su yielded the glass back to Seo-gwang, who was still sulking.
"Even cold water has its pecking order. You ought to drink first, hyung."
"Right? I'm the one above you, aren't I? Ha!"
Pleased with himself, Seo-gwang tipped the water back in a single draught. The department heads caught their breath, then put the question to Dae-ik.
"Why did the president have a safe brought in?"
"He told us to secure three months of operating funds in cash."
"Three whole months?"
Seo-gwang was startled.
"Yes, and he gave the same order to the affiliates. He also said that everything we owe our suppliers is to be paid out within this month."
Dae-ik's answer only deepened their curiosity.
"Whatever the president does, he has a reason. But what on earth is this about?"
Seo-gwang scratched his head as he said it. Ki-jo, though, was over at the Hankook Ilbo, and with no way to ask him directly, the question only swelled.
Of late, Ki-jo had often been working at the Hankook Ilbo even in the mornings. That day, too, he was encouraging the economic reporters and trading views on the economy.
Ever since he had come back from his meeting with Kim Jae-chun, he had been intervening aggressively in the paper's economic coverage. He meant to stop the currency reform the Revolutionary Government was about to carry out.
His first move was to feed a rumor drifting through Myeongdong into a gossip column called Hearsay.
The source of that rumor was Ki-jo himself. He was bent on blocking a currency reform that now stood only weeks away.
The reform the Revolutionary Government was pushing would ruin the economy of the Republic of Korea. Simply printing a new currency and exchanging ten hwan for one won was not the problem. Alongside it, they meant to take a shocking measure that should never have been taken at all.
That measure was a deposit freeze. They intended to lock the money the people had entrusted to the banks into compulsory long-term savings, and to spend it as funds for economic development. In concrete terms, sixty-five percent of any deposit of ten million hwan or less would be frozen, and anything above ten million hwan would be frozen in full. The frozen deposits were to be replaced with shares in the Industrial Development Corporation, which would pay an annual dividend of fifteen percent.
A fifteen percent dividend would look generous in later years. At the time, it was nothing of the kind—merely the level of ordinary interest on a bank deposit or installment savings. They did offer a remedy for citizens who, stripped of their money by the state, suddenly needed cash: as much as half the frozen sum could be lent back as a loan. That, too, was an unrealistic answer.
He could not imagine whose head the idea had come from. It seemed to have started from the naive notion that one could scrape together the people's money and pour it into industrial development. And it was a method strangely communist and capitalist at once. Confiscating the deposits of the entire nation was communist. Forcibly making every citizen a shareholder in the nation's industry was capitalist. The Revolutionary Government, true to its name, had meant to save the economy by a truly revolutionary method.
That was why Ki-jo had brought the great safe into Cheongsan headquarters. It was also why he had pulled payments forward all the way through the settlement for the month after next, so his suppliers would not be driven into trouble. In the original history, the Revolutionary Government lifted the deposit freeze within a month. This time he could not know how it would go, and so he had prepared for three.
Through the Hankook Ilbo, he had already set his second operation in motion as well: publishing contributions from scholars hostile to currency reform. By way of a well-known professor of economics, he obtained an essay arguing that currency reform had never once truly succeeded, and ran it in the paper. The piece set out the miserable failures of countries around the world that had turned to currency reform in the hope of stopping inflation.
Even so, there was no reaction from the Blue House. The government was pushing the reform in such secrecy that those who knew of it could be counted on one hand, and still the Hankook Ilbo was shouting about it day after day—yet neither Chairman Park nor the KCIA responded. Ki-jo moved on to his third operation. He decided to go see Lee Byung-chull.
He met Lee at the Jangchung-dong residence and asked him to write a column. Before the JoongAng Ilbo was founded, Lee Byung-chull had often contributed economic columns to the Hankook Ilbo. In the study, Lee asked him a question.
"What is it you want me to say?"
"There's talk of a currency reform these days. What do you make of it, sir?"
"A currency reform, you say?"
Lee Byung-chull looked startled, as if the notion had come out of nowhere. Samsung was already short of funds. Through the April 19 uprising and the May 16 coup, vast sums had been clawed back under the name of penalty levies. Some of the burden had been eased by the building of plants and by payments made in stock, but because the company paid its taxes properly, there was no cushion left. In that condition, a currency reform would have been no different from telling Samsung to swallow poison.
"What kind of outrageous talk is that...? Did those words come out of a government man's mouth?"
When Ki-jo said the rumor was spreading through Myeongdong, Lee Byung-chull spoke as if something had just come clear.
"Ah... now I understand what Prime Minister Song Yo-chan was saying."
"What did Prime Minister Song say?"
"I told him we needed money to put up the plant and asked the government to help us out a little, and he says there'll be 'something good before long.' Thinking on it now, he may have meant the currency reform..."
Ki-jo was glad the man had caught the scent so early. In the original history, Lee Byung-chull never noticed until it was upon him, and right after the announcement he flung a hard word at Chairman Park: he knew it would bring trouble to many and profit to few. Startled, Chairman Park asked what ought to be done, and Lee told him it would be best to lift the measure at once. Park, perhaps judging that it was already too late, insisted that political trust had to be kept, and pushed ahead regardless.
Ki-jo expected that this man, the head of the Korean economy, would make his opposition known to the government. Lee Byung-chull readily agreed to the column.
"I ought to have a word with the people entertaining a notion as absurd as that."
Two days later, President Lee Byung-chull's column arrived at the Hankook Ilbo. His argument was very hard. If a currency reform were carried out at the present moment, he wrote, the Korean economy would take a mortal blow and collapse. Changing the old currency for the new would consume a great deal of time, and in the interval the flow of money—the economy's very bloodstream—would clog. In a recession like the present one, if those channels of money were blocked, even the great firms would suffer, and small and medium enterprises would be dealt a fatal wound.
Ki-jo marveled at a foresight that saw what was coming with such precision. In the event, when the Revolutionary Government exchanged the old notes for the new, it limited the conversion to five thousand hwan per citizen per day. Because of that, every morning hundreds of thousands of people across the country stood in long lines before the banks. The prediction that small and medium enterprises would be hit hardest was exact as well. After the reform, their operating rate fell to 42.5 percent, and the smaller and more fragile the firm, the worse the damage. The government had frozen even the money companies needed for production, so they could no longer buy the raw materials from which to make their goods. Short of credit compared with the great firms, the smaller ones were hounded for payment, and once they could no longer buy materials or parts on account, they simply went under.
Ki-jo could only think that Lee Byung-chull was, after all, Lee Byung-chull. The day the column by that grand prince of the Korean economy began to run in the paper, a call came from the Blue House. It was Lee Hu-rak.
"The Chairman would like to see you for a moment."
So Chairman Park had reacted at last. Ki-jo set out for the Blue House at once.
When he entered the office, cigarette smoke from Chairman Park filled the room, as it always did.
"Sit."
The Chairman looked to be in as foul a temper as he had been when Chang Key-young exposed Kim Jong-pil's plan to found a party. He smoked in silence with Ki-jo before him, then asked a question.
"What's the matter with you these days?"
Ki-jo answered as if he knew nothing.
"What do you mean?"
"That phrase. Currency reform. Why do you keep putting it in the paper?"
"You mean that? The mood in Myeongdong has been ugly lately, and a strange rumor was going around, so I grew curious about what a currency reform actually is, and what would happen if it were carried out. I only solicited a contribution."
"Hm..."
Chairman Park let out a low sound. A top-secret project known to only a handful even inside the government was circulating as street rumor, and as if it were not enough that the Hankook Ilbo was taking it up, Lee Byung-chull himself had come out against it. The man seemed to be burning inside.
"Why did President Lee Byung-chull send a piece to your paper? Did you ask him to?"
"Yes. I did."
"Why?"
"Because no one understands the real economy as thoroughly as he does. I wanted his opinion to settle the argument over currency reform."
When Ki-jo answered by borrowing Lee Byung-chull's authority, Chairman Park's eyes wavered. Ki-jo reckoned that the Chairman, too, must have hesitated a great deal, simply as a man, on the eve of the reform. What Park most wanted, in setting himself apart from the previous government, was the reconstruction of the economy, and the ambitious measure he had put forward to raise the funds for it was this currency reform. Now that people were saying it might wreck the national economy, it was only natural that he should be uneasy. A general election was only months away. If he ruined the economy, the result at the polls was bound to be poor.
Chairman Park sat with a cigarette between his lips and a clouded face, as if thinking in silence, and then he spoke.
"You're against the currency reform too?"
"Yes. I oppose it."
"Why?"
Chairman Park's gaze cut into him. Ki-jo was used to that sharpness. The Chairman's eyes grew keen not only when he was displeased, but when he was anxious. Ki-jo paid the look no mind and kept his calm. He had the feeling that this would be his only chance to persuade Chairman Park.