Orders Come Pouring In
Just as Ki-jo had expected, the contractors began to pour in.
Tradesmen passing along Sejong-ro caught the signboard, stepped inside, and started asking about this and that. The cautious ones came into the office and, more often than not, put the question the same way.
"Never seen this company before. Where's your factory?"
The ones with mesaki—trade slang for a sharp nose and a quick read of a room—didn't bother with pleasantries.
"How many tens of thousands can you take an order for?"
Ki-jo had given Ma-ryang, Seo-gwang, Hansu, and Seok-mun strict orders not to quote a price for the bricks ahead of time. He himself had no idea what brick would fetch once the thaw came and construction got properly underway this year. One thing, at least, was certain: the price would fall below what history had originally set down. Bricks from the Cheongsan works were about to flood the market, and the five majors would not stand by and watch.
Joseon Ceramics. Gyeongseong Ceramics. Samjeon Brickworks. Mokchonok Brickworks. Yongsan Yeonwa.
Five great firms that had held their ground in Seoul since the colonial years. How far they would slash their prices to kill Cheongsan Brick, Ki-jo could not begin to guess.
They won't stop at the price. They'll stoop to every kind of interference without blinking.
He was braced for a war.
True to his instructions, the four men answered as if the only thing that mattered was getting the order on paper, price be damned. Affable Seo-gwang told every contractor who asked about cost the same thing.
"The price is something we'll only know when the time comes, isn't it? Just tell us the quantity you want. And if you'd write your name and a way to reach you on the order form."
In three days the advance orders they gathered came to nine hundred thousand bricks.
On the fifth day, the visitor Ki-jo had been expecting—sooner or later—walked in.
A man in a well-cut suit slipped into the office and swept the crowded room with his eyes. Ki-jo had been watching him from the moment he came through the door, careful not to show it. The man went straight to Shim Hansu, who looked the most approachable of the lot, and dropped into the chair before his desk.
"Who's the boss here?"
He drew a business card from his jacket and held it out to Hansu. Hansu brought the card to Ki-jo. It read Han Man-yong, vice president of Yongsan Yeonwa—of the five majors, the house nearest Ki-jo's office.
Ki-jo told them to show the man into the side room, then went in ahead of him. It was the room they used for meetings and consultations. There he waited. Shim Hansu brought Han Man-yong in, and Ki-jo asked for tea.
"A pleasure. I'm Lee Ki-jo, president of Cheongsan Brick."
"Han Man-yong, of Yongsan Yeonwa."
Expression, tone, bearing—there was not a crack in the arrogance anywhere. Even when Shim Hansu set a warm cup of leaf tea before him, Han Man-yong did not so much as glance at it.
"What brings you here?"
At the question Han Man-yong let out a short laugh.
"I was passing and stepped in. Quite a show you've got running. Taking orders with no set price, quantity only... That's a rather ill-mannered way to do business, that is."
Ill-mannered? Spoken to a man he was meeting for the first time, it was insolent enough to stop the breath in the throat. Then again, it must have looked amusing: a no-name outfit no one had ever heard of, planting an office square in the heart of Seoul and taking advance orders with the price left blank. Ki-jo's mouth crooked in a smile.
"And where might the factory be? Gwangju? Yangju?"
Han Man-yong named the two counties that ringed Seoul to the south and the north. He seemed to know, at least, that the works were not in the city. Had they been, they would already have shown up in that crowd's intelligence net.
"It's in Yeoncheon."
"Yeoncheon?"
The other man looked puzzled.
"Yeoncheon... Isn't that where the Reds used to live?"
"Was there ever land that belonged to the Reds from the start? It's Republic of Korea soil now."
Han Man-yong snorted. Once he understood the brickworks lay a long way off, the light in his eyes and the edge in his voice grew even more overbearing.
"You're going to make them out there and haul them all the way here? Bricks are heavier than they look, you know."
He had dropped every pretense of manners, and he chuckled as he said it. Ki-jo did not let the attitude touch him. He knew the man was doing it on purpose, trying to get a rise out of him.
"Why trouble yourself over someone else's business? You ought to be worrying about Yongsan Yeonwa. You must have taken heavy damage in the American bombing."
In the early days of the Korean War, while the People's Army occupied Seoul, American forces had sent B-29s over the city again and again in indiscriminate raids. Of the five majors, the house hit hardest by those bombers was Yongsan Yeonwa. Yongsan had been one of the fiercest battlegrounds in the city. When Ki-jo gave that nerve the lightest scrape, the man's eyes went sharp.
"Aigoo, and our young president even worries over us. I'm so honored I hardly know where to put myself."
Han Man-yong glared at Ki-jo while pretending nothing was wrong, but the jab seemed to have found a sore spot.
"I only mentioned it because, as a man in the same trade, I was concerned for Yongsan Yeonwa after the damage it took in the war."
"Damage? Concern? Ha—hahaha!"
Han Man-yong laughed as if it were the funniest thing he had heard in ages.
"Listen, president of Cheongsan Brick. Worry about your own company. Instead of sitting here taking useless advance orders, you should have come to Yongsan Yeonwa first. You should have paid your respects to our president. That's what you should have done."
What he meant was that the head of a newborn firm ought to go around the five majors with his head bowed, and become their man. Let the five majors set the price, and sell your bricks at that price. They would hand down the order not to undercut their own houses. Even under the insinuating threat, Ki-jo did not change color.
"When you go back, tell your president to stop by here sometime. I'd be curious to see what the president of Yongsan Yeonwa looks like myself."
A look flickered across Han Man-yong's face—well, look at this bastard—and was gone. As if hurrying to wipe away the trace of it, he forced out an exaggerated laugh.
"Ah, ah. I get it. I get it."
Get what?
"Still wet behind the ears, this young president, and he doesn't know how the world works? Some rich family's boy, is that it? Trusting in your money and figuring you'll shove your way in. That the idea?"
Han Man-yong snickered to himself. Ki-jo found it nothing but absurd to be mistaken for a rich man's son.
"Hey. President of Cheongsan Brick. The brick market isn't that soft a place. Looks to me like you jumped in thinking there was money in it. There's an order to this industry. Order! Break it, and you go down in one shot. Understand?"
Now he was threatening him outright. Ki-jo saw no profit in talking any further and brought the visit to a close.
"Order is something people make together, with their heads bent over the same table. It isn't something a few men gather and settle among themselves. I've heard what you came to say. You may go."
When Ki-jo showed him the door, Han Man-yong stared at him in silence, then stood. He left a few words behind, barely loud enough to catch.
"Arrogant little bastard..."
Having bestowed that high praise, Han Man-yong walked out of the side room.
Ki-jo sat on the sofa and watched him go. Then he poured the tea the man had never touched out the window.
When he came out of the side room, Ma-ryang broke off his consultation and came over. He had seen Han Man-yong leave with a hard face.
"Brother, what happened in there?"
"Nothing."
Ki-jo said it with a smile. But his eyes were not smiling, and Ma-ryang could tell something had passed.
"It's nearly lunch. Let's eat."
At that, Shim Hansu wrapped up his own consultation and steered the customer who had been waiting for him over to Oh Seok-mun, then hurried out the back door of the office. As the youngest there, it fell to him to get the meal ready. For three days the four men had been keeping bachelor quarters in Seoul, eating and sleeping in the little house built onto the back of the office.
After Hansu ate first and came back in, Ki-jo, Ma-ryang, and Seo-gwang went out the back. They crossed the small yard, stepped into the single room, and sat down before the table Hansu had laid.
"You must be hungry. Eat before it gets cold."
At Ki-jo's word, Ma-ryang and Seo-gwang took up their spoons and started in. Perhaps because he had lived on his own for a long time, Hansu was a good cook. It was only rice, soup, and kimchi, but he boiled a fine soup.
When they had finished, the three sat on the narrow wooden porch, smoked, and talked for a while.
"Sir, when does the U.S. Army job start?"
Seo-gwang asked.
"It should start next week."
"Then you'll be up in Dongducheon from here on."
"No. President Lee Man-ik will see to the work."
"Ah... the man who was engineer-in-chief?"
"Yes."
The American contract was nothing to worry over. It was already signed, and the site was theirs alone, wasn't it? There was no competition there at all. Work it straight, by the book, finish inside the set term, and that was the end of it. The brick market was another matter. A fierce fight was coming, and there was no telling what would happen in the middle of it. Ki-jo was giving the brick market something like nine parts of his attention to one for everything else.
Seo-gwang, full of questions, tossed out another.
"When does the brick factory start running?"
"We've already gone into trial production."
"Already?"
"Yes. Time flies, doesn't it?"
"No, sir. The factory's going up faster than the days are."
"That's all thanks to Professor Kim Moon-hwan. If it weren't for him, things wouldn't have moved this quickly."
Ma-ryang nodded. The men had worked hard, true enough, but if Professor Kim Moon-hwan had not driven the equipment installation through exactly on schedule, the whole job would have dragged on a great deal longer.
"We ought to get back in and take customers. Send some of them my way too. I'll take orders with you."
At Ki-jo's word the three got up and went into the office. Once they were inside, Oh Seok-mun came out the back door last of all, on his way to eat. Seok-mun, the oldest man in the office, had the last sitting—the one that let a man eat with the most leisure.
Two days after Han Man-yong of Yongsan Yeonwa had come and gone, an employee from the Cheongsan factory arrived at the office carrying three bricks. He had ridden the train, gotten off at Seoul Station, and walked the rest of the way, and he passed Ki-jo the three bricks he had wrapped in a bundle as carefully as if they were a baby in swaddling.
Ki-jo undid the cloth, looked the bricks over, and smiled. Ma-ryang, Seo-gwang, Hansu, and Seok-mun each took a turn handling them and studying them close.
"Ah... the finish on these is beautiful! And the edges are dead true."
Hansu marveled at how fine they looked. Seok-mun, who knew stone, turned a brick this way and that and ran his hands over it, then spoke to Ki-jo.
"Sir. This brick is hard and well-knit. Even at a glance, the strength ought to be even all the way through."
Ki-jo's confidence rose at that. He had known the bricks would come out well, but this was better than he had hoped. Of course they would have chosen the best pieces from the trial run to bring—but before long, bricks like these would be pouring off the line at a high yield.
He looked at the calendar and the clock on the office wall. Saturday, March 6, one in the afternoon. It was Gyeongchip, Awakening of Insects, the day when every living thing quickens and the frogs stir out of their winter sleep. Spring had already come. Five days earlier a grand ceremony marking the March First Movement had been held on Sejong-ro in front of the Central Government Building, and the people who attended had dressed lightly. Except for the odd cold snap that came to pinch the early blossoms, the weather had warmed, and anywhere out of the shade the ground was nearly all thawed.
Ki-jo wrapped the bricks back into the cloth as he spoke.
"I'll be stepping out for a while."
"Where you going?"
Ma-ryang asked.
"Over to Yeongdeungpo Brickworks."
"Yeongdeungpo Brickworks?"
Seo-gwang asked.
"Let me come with you, sir. I'll drive."
Whether he simply wanted a turn at the truck's wheel or not, he volunteered himself as chauffeur.
"Haha, no. I'll go on my own."
"Ah, come on... When you call on another company, it cuts a better figure if the driver takes the wheel and you sit back easy in the passenger seat."
"Hahaha. The place I'm going wouldn't take kindly to that. Better I go alone. I'll be on my way, then. It'll take some time, so don't wait for me."
With that he picked up the bundle of bricks and left the office. Ma-ryang watched him go and thought, Yeongdeungpo Brickworks—wasn't that the outfit that supplied the kiln bricks when we built the Cheongsan factory? He could not fathom why Ki-jo was going to see them.