Lee Hwa-ryong
When Ki-jo asked to see Lee Hwa-ryong, Lee Seong-ryong agreed at once.
"Come to Myeongwolgwan this evening. I'll send for my brother."
Before he went to meet the man, Ki-jo stepped out into the office's back yard to set his thoughts in order. He sat on the wooden veranda of the single room and looked out over grass that had grown thick across the yard before he knew it. It was already the twenty-fifth of April. May was nearly upon them, and with it the time when he and Ma-ryang would have to throw themselves in earnest into helping Kim Doo-han's election.
The meeting with Lee Hwa-ryong was not merely a matter of carrying out Lee Ki-poong's request. There was a purpose more important than that. Once he had gathered his thoughts, Ki-jo made his way to Myeongwolgwan at the appointed hour.
Shown into a private room by the manager, he found the Count of Myeongdong, Lee Hwa-ryong, seated beside his elder sister, Lee Seong-ryong.
"Come in, President Lee."
Seong-ryong welcomed him warmly. Hwa-ryong only stared at Ki-jo with a stony face.
"What kind of manners is that toward a guest?"
She snapped the rebuke at her brother. Hwa-ryong paid it no mind and spoke with a hard expression.
"I'm Lee Hwa-ryong."
A bare introduction, thick with Pyongyang dialect, the surname itself bent northern in his mouth. That was his greeting.
"How do you do. I'm Lee Ki-jo of Cheongsan Development."
Once Ki-jo had taken his seat, Hwa-ryong asked, "Can't see what a Jongno man wants with me."
The misunderstanding followed him no matter whom he met. To Lee Hwa-ryong, Ki-jo was Jongno Faction. Everyone looked at him with different eyes.
"President Lee has nothing to do with gangster games. Don't misunderstand."
Anger at her brother must have gotten the better of her. From Lee Seong-ryong, who usually spoke in a Seoul accent, the Pyongyang dialect came out. If anyone in the room was seeing Ki-jo clearly, it was she.
The Pyongyang-born siblings began to bicker over him.
"Shouldn't you step out, Sister? Didn't you say the man had business with me?"
"I don't feel easy about it. I'm afraid you'll go crooked on President Lee, childish as you are."
"It's nothing. I'll hear only what needs hearing and say only what needs saying."
Ki-jo slipped into the gap between them.
"Please don't worry, ma'am. I came because I want to ask your brother for help."
"Help? What help would President Lee be asking of a gangster?"
Seong-ryong slighted her brother outright. Hwa-ryong's brow creased, as if his mood had soured.
"You're really all right if I stay?"
"It's all right."
She left the room with a reluctant face, and at that Hwa-ryong's expression actually softened. Just then he looked like a younger brother who put on a show of toughness only in front of his sister.
"You know exactly who I am?"
Before tearing open a fresh pack of cigarettes, he tapped it against his palm.
"I do."
The Pyongyang head-butter. A man of real ability who had taken Myeongdong without ever fighting Kim Doo-han. They called him the Count of Myeongdong, and he had sheltered the writers who gathered there. His methods were those of an ignorant thug, and yet, like Kim Doo-han, he was a fist who still had a streak of romance left in him.
"Sorry for meeting you the first time with a face like a cold wind. But I'll say this plain. If you're here to play games between the Jongno Faction and the Myeongdong Faction, you'd best just go."
From the start he drew a clear line. Whatever the truth of it, a man known as Jongno was being warned to act with loyalty. It was also, in the way of a gangster, a tone meant to crush the other man's spirit at the outset.
"I'm not Jongno, and I'm not here to play games."
"Then why'd you come looking for me?"
"Because I want to know how things really stand among Seoul's fists."
"How things really stand?"
Hwa-ryong stared at him, then abruptly took up the bottle of Western liquor and twisted off the cap.
"Have a drink first."
He filled Ki-jo's glass. The two of them each drank.
"My sister's drilled it into my ear till I'm deaf that you're a man worth trusting, so I'll take exactly two questions. You look educated. Don't use hard words. Ask so a man can understand."
He eased the latch on his heart a little.
"Thank you. What I most want to know is whether Lee Jeong-jae of the Dongdaemun Faction means to interfere with Assemblyman Kim Doo-han's election."
At that, Lee Hwa-ryong split his face with a great laugh.
"Has Jeong-jae lost his mind? That damned bastard, interfering with Doo-han's election?"
Honesty soaked the answer. Just as Ki-jo had expected. However closely Lee Jeong-jae had joined hands with the Liberal Party, his real trade was still that of a gangster. If Kim Doo-han became a National Assemblyman and left Jongno, a vacuum of power would open, and Jeong-jae's Dongdaemun Faction would have a golden chance to push its influence that way. Far from interfering with the election, Lee Jeong-jae was probably setting out a bowl of dawn-drawn prayer water every night and praying with both hands that Kim Doo-han would win. Would Kim Doo-han fail to know that? Impossible. So the claim that he needed Jang Ma-ryang for fear of being swept into violence during the campaign was a lie. There was clearly some other scheme, and Ki-jo had a fair guess as to what it was.
"What put that thought in your head?"
Hwa-ryong asked it back, as if the question interested him.
"Because Assemblyman Kim Doo-han asked my brother-in-law to guard him."
"Ah. That fellow. The one they say knocked Doo-han's boys flat on the Myeongdong streets."
"That's right."
"Either Doo-han's grown full of worries with the election coming, or he's got some other notion in his head..."
There was a bone in the remark.
"What's the second question?"
He popped into his mouth a piece of the candied fruit set out to go with the drink.
"There isn't one."
"There isn't?"
The jaw that had been biting the sweet paused.
"Fine. Then may I turn it around and ask you one?"
"You may."
"Have a drink first."
Hwa-ryong poured whiskey into Ki-jo's glass. But as befitted a man called the Count of Myeongdong, he did not fill it to the brim like a brute. He poured only enough that a man could still throw it back in one swallow if he chose. Rough and beastlike on the outside, he seemed to have a fine grain somewhere inside.
"Kyah..."
He wiped his mouth, making a show of how good the liquor was.
"Do you mean to take over the Jongno Faction once Kim Doo-han steps out?"
Why did people overestimate him the moment they laid eyes on him? Ki-jo was dumbfounded.
"That's absurd. I'm only a man who fires bricks and sells them."
"Eheh... How much is there in selling bricks? Taking Jongno would be better..."
Half right, and half wrong—and the sort of thing a man would say who thought gangstering his true calling. Ki-jo had no intention of monopolizing the brick market, jacking up the price, and raking in outrageous profits. He only wanted to knock down the big operators, set the market to rights, and then sell bricks at a fair price in keeping with the order of things. Thinking that way, he would make some money in bricks, but he was not dreaming of a fortune. The business he was planning in order to make a real fortune lay elsewhere.
Back to the point. What Lee Hwa-ryong had asked was whether Ki-jo meant to fill the seat Kim Doo-han would leave when he became an assemblyman and walked away from the Jongno Faction. He seemed to think that if Ki-jo put Ma-ryang out in front, he could do it and to spare.
"Wouldn't some share of the Jongno Faction pass naturally to the Dongdaemun Faction, or to the Myeongdong Faction?"
"You're seeing it right."
Hwa-ryong nodded.
"But would Doo-han want that? A certain share coming my way, he might stomach. He won't want it going to that animal Jeong-jae. He might be pinning his hopes on your brother-in-law."
Ki-jo agreed. He had already worried that the reason Kim Doo-han, who hardly needed a bodyguard, meant to keep Ma-ryang at his side through the campaign was to raise him as a second-in-command. Kim Doo-han might want to entrust Jongno to a man he could trust and who had real ability, then pull the strings from behind. He would hate to see the kingdom he had built with his youth broken apart, or handed to someone he didn't like. That feeling was humanly understandable. But the man who inherited his kingdom must not be Jang Ma-ryang. Ma-ryang was as good as Ki-jo's own brother.
Now the suspicion had hardened into certainty.
Lee Hwa-ryong, too, began to treat him with growing candor.
"If Doo-han tries to dump the Jongno Faction on your brother-in-law, what will you do?"
"I know my brother-in-law well. He is absolutely not a man who would become the head of a fist gang."
At that, Hwa-ryong laughed, a rough chuckle.
"That, you don't know. Nobody knows that."
Perhaps because he sensed that Ki-jo had no interest at all in the gangsters' interests, Hwa-ryong had by now completely loosened his stiff expression and begun to enjoy the talk. Ki-jo opened up with him, and the two of them settled into the ease of elder and younger brother.
"I've seen your brother-in-law myself. Looks like a wild beast, just as they say. A man like that keeps company with Doo-han, and before he knows it he can get pulled into this work."
"What are you saying? He's a henpecked husband, gripped tight by a young wife. He won't even get a foot into this business."
Henpecked.
For men of the 1950s, it was a fairly shameful name. Ki-jo had a reason for quietly cutting Ma-ryang down. He meant to break the fantasy the gangsters held of Jang Ma-ryang. Of course, Lee Hwa-ryong was the close-mouthed sort, so the talk would not spread everywhere.
"Is that true? A giant like that has a side like that?"
Hwa-ryong's face went serious.
"Of course. If you doubt it, ask your sister. She's close with Ma-ryang's wife."
"They say no man is without a weakness, and look at this—he's got a great one. If a man means to do big things, he ought to cultivate himself, set his house in order, govern the state, and bring peace under heaven. First he's got to get a firm hold of his woman, and yet... tsk."
Aigoo. These fossil men of the old days...
Ki-jo had known it from the moment Hwa-ryong started putting on airs in front of his own sister. He laughed along, and yet part of him found it pathetic. The men of old were manly, and there was a charm in that, but this compulsion to look strong in front of women was a problem.
They traded drinks and talked of this and that until Ki-jo rose, saying he had somewhere far to go tomorrow on business. He had confirmed the information he wanted, and he had even asked Lee Hwa-ryong to hold back on any revenge against Lee Jeong-jae. In particular, he advised him to be careful of Gwak Jae-seong, a detective at Jongno Police Station.
When Ki-jo left Myeongwolgwan, Lee Seong-ryong came looking for her brother. She had seen the two of them part smiling, and one worry had lifted. She turned on him.
"Why do you go treating a decent businessman like a gangster? My face was burning."
The scolding poured over him.
"Ah, it wasn't that. I heard Lee Ki-jo dumped a heap of Ajinomoto across Myeongdong and Jongno. Did it without so much as asking my leave, so my temper came up. And I thought he meant to ask me to partner with him in smuggling seasoning. A man rumored to be Jongno Faction doing that—how does that look?"
He poured out every misunderstanding he had held about Ki-jo. Hearing him, Seong-ryong seemed to feel her brother had had some cause, and her anger eased.
"President Lee smuggled Ajinomoto too?"
"Heard he flooded all of Seoul with it and ate the whole market."
"My word. So President Lee had a talent like that... That girl Sunrye, anyway. A face as innocent as they come, and she went and picked herself a thoroughly capable husband."
Rough in their words, warm at heart. Such were the siblings.
"Oh—right, Sister. Do you know Jang Ma-ryang's wife?"
"Soon-young? I do."
"They say Ma-ryang's henpecked..."
"That girl Soon-young doesn't have a lie in her either. A very blunt child. Says with her own mouth she's got her husband in a tight grip. Coax him gently with words, she told me, and he goes soft on the spot."
"Then what Lee Ki-jo said is right. He does seem an honest man, just as you told me."
"I ought to have a better eye for people than you. You listen here, and don't let my words go in one ear and out the other. Stay a gangster long enough and you'll go in a single blow, like Sirasoni. Remember what I say, and remember it well."
"Enough of that talk. I've got a scab the size of a cicada sitting in my ear."
"Hwa-ryong. What if I set you up with a shop and you went into trade? Even if your boys only guarded your own place, couldn't you eat well and live well?"
"Enough, Sister. A gangster's got to live like a gangster. Live like a peddler and you won't die in your own good time."
Seong-ryong's insides burned as she looked at her stubborn brother. How good it would be, she thought, if only he were like Ki-jo.
A person lives long by keeping the law with a clear head and making few enemies...
Lee Seong-ryong worried over the brother who walked the single road of a gangster's life.