The Housing Business
After his meeting with Lee Hwa-ryong, Ki-jo bought several houses in Jongno and brought his family up from Eundae-ri, and so their life in Seoul began in earnest.
The house for his own household and the house for Ma-ryang's stood side by side. Ki-jo had the wall between them taken down, so that two front gates remained but the yards were one—a single home in all but name.
He gave Seo-gwang and Seok-mun a house apiece, that they might live with their families, and he gave the bachelors Han-su and Dae-ik one house to share between them. It was much as a father might portion out homes among sons grown to manhood: he had bought houses for his own people. The single room in the back courtyard, where the six men had once slept shoulder to shoulder, they would keep from now on as the night-duty room.
Once they had homes in Seoul and their families about them, the men settled, and settled more deeply. That was what Ki-jo had wanted. A man whose roof is sure can give himself to his work; so it has always been. He had wanted it above all for Ma-ryang. Through the whole of the campaign Ma-ryang would be living among gangsters, and Ki-jo, fearing the life might coarsen him, had called Soon-young up to Seoul. He wanted a rhythm to the man's days—to lie down at night beside Soon-young, to eat what she set on the table, to go out in the morning and come home after dark to a house where she was waiting. That, he believed, would help Ma-ryang keep hold of himself for as long as he had to live among thugs.
Ki-jo repeated to him, word for word, the talk he had had with Lee Hwa-ryong. Ma-ryang understood at once.
"No trouble. All I've got to do is see that Kim Doo-han never takes me for the man who'll come after him. Simple as that."
"That's right. That's the heart of it."
Ki-jo had not a moment's doubt that Ma-ryang would manage the thing. Even so, he meant to put a measure of his own to use.
"For the length of the campaign, draw what you need from the money in the small safe. No need to say a word of it to Dae-ik."
He nodded toward the safe in the side room. It held five hundred thousand hwan—roughly five hundred million won in the money of a later day.
"You're telling me to spend a sum like that however I please?"
"I am. Spend it freely. On Kim Doo-han's men."
Ma-ryang nodded. Nothing more needed saying. He had taken Ki-jo's meaning whole.
On the first of May, Kim Doo-han opened a campaign office in a building near Umigwan. When Ki-jo and Ma-ryang came to see it, Doo-han brightened and made much of them both.
"Mr. Lee, welcome! I hear you moved every one of the families into Jongno, just so they could vote for this Kim Doo-han. Hahaha!"
Every house Ki-jo had bought for the Cheongsan staff did lie in Jongno-eul, the very district where Kim Doo-han was standing. They were close to the Seoul office, and he had been able to buy them from Gansong a little under the market; that was the whole of it. If Doo-han preferred to read the thing his own way, there was nothing to be done.
Had Ki-jo truly meant to deliver him a bloc of votes, he would have registered the people of Eundae-ri and the hands at the Cheongsan plant as residents of Jongno on paper, and handed the man six hundred ballots. But a Kim Doo-han fever was already running through the district, campaign songs on every tongue, and he saw no need.
In the history as it had first run, Kim Doo-han had won by a bare 1.2 percent. This time the women's vote will swell. Five percent, and room to spare—won't that do it? So Ki-jo reckoned.
Watching the man glow at the mere sight of him and of Ma-ryang, he felt a tangle of things. He had promised to help with the election, and he had taken a great deal of help in his turn; yet the sense that Doo-han coveted Ma-ryang would not let him rest easy.
Unlike Ma-ryang, he had nothing in particular to do at the office. He traded a few civil words with Doo-han, passed over the speech he had drafted, and made his excuses.
"I should be going."
"Are you busy?"
"I'm meeting the president of Cheongsan Development. The housing business."
"Ah—the estate you spoke of, up on the Hannam-dong hill?"
"Yes. That's the one."
"You haven't a house left over, by any chance? If you have, I'll buy one myself."
The offer brought Ki-jo up short. Let a gang boss into a luxury estate and the moneyed would leave; a National Assembly pin on the man's lapel would not change a thing. He arranged his expression with care.
"The sales are already closed, I'm afraid. The proprietress of Myeongwolgwan sold them off almost before I could turn around."
"Ah, that's right—you went in with Brother Hwa-ryong's sister. Haha. Very well. If a cancellation comes free later, you must tell me."
"I will."
Ki-jo got to his feet. His eyes met Ma-ryang's.
"Ma-ryang, you attend Assemblyman Kim properly. Not the slightest slip in the way you serve him."
"Yes, brother."
To anyone watching, it would have looked like the tenderest concern for Kim Doo-han.
After Ki-jo had left the campaign office, Doo-han called his men together.
"For the whole of this campaign, every matter is left to my brother, Jang Ma-ryang. I have stood for the National Assembly, and that means I keep my distance from the business of Jongno. Every report comes to Brother Ma-ryang, and my orders go out through him. You hear me?"
"Yes, boss!"
At that first order, Jang Ma-ryang knew that Ki-jo had read the man aright. The design showed through plainly enough: over the course of the campaign, he was to be settled in as second-in-command.
He felt it, and still he looked over Kim Doo-han's men with an easy face. The question of rank had been settled back in January, in Myeongdong. Had he not, alone, laid out the eight best men Doo-han kept?
In the same moment he felt the man's gaze resting on him, warm with pride. As one man to another, he was a little sorry. But he was preparing a turn Kim Doo-han had not imagined.
He had not the least intention of becoming a gangster.
Back at the office, Ki-jo found Lee Man-ik waiting for him. The work at the American base in Dongducheon was all but finished, and it was time to give his mind to the fine houses.
He took the jeep he had lately bought, and the two of them set out for Hannam-dong. A signboard stood at the foot of the hill. They pulled up before it and studied the bird's-eye rendering a sign painter had made of the estate, setting the picture against the ground itself and judging where each of the great houses would stand.
The land was already Ki-jo's, and Lee Seong-ryong, having taken deposits, had presold twenty of the houses. She was the mistress of a large kye, one of the old rotating-credit circles, and no small one: she had gathered into it the wives of professors, of businessmen, and of high officials, turned great sums through their hands, and sold the houses among them. For placing the twenty, Ki-jo had promised her a house of her own and a commission of ten percent on the price of every one she sold.
Holding the rendering on the board against the real slope, he named the weakness of the place.
"Mountains behind, water in front, and a southern face—you could hardly ask for better ground to set houses on. The road is the trouble. Let it rain, and that grade will turn to mire. I don't see a car or a man getting up and down it easily."
Lee Man-ik set the worry aside.
"There is cement to spare from the Seventh Division work. The division commander has said we may take what is left of the stock with the shorter life."
"Has he? That's very good."
So they could lay a cement road, and people would be able to come and go on the Hannam-dong hill in comfort.
"How does the brick market stand these days, Chairman?"
"The fight for share is already over, to my mind. Taking Seoul is only a matter of time."
"Just as one would expect of you, Chairman."
When Man-ik lifted him up, Ki-jo turned the credit back.
"Not at all. I drove it through on the faith of the dollars the base work will bring in. The credit belongs to you, President Lee, for carrying the job so well."
They praised one another, and drove the jeep on up to the crest.
From the summit the Han lay open below them, the whole reach of it in a single glance. Here, surely, was ground where the wealthy might gather and live. Only the roads were a little poor. There was no bridge through to Gangnam, and the way into the heart of Seoul was nothing but a long loop around—but the rich had cars, and so it was no great matter. In time the government would pave those roads and drive the Namsan Tunnel through, and even that fault would mend.
Small shortcomings and all, perhaps it was because Hannam-dong was a propitious site by the old measure of geomancy. From the 1950s onward, the houses of the chaebol would come clustering here, one after another.
Lee Man-ik, who had been standing in the cool wind and letting the sweat dry, asked him why he had not sold the other ten.
"I mean to sell those myself, later on. My brother-in-law and I will be living here as well."
Already, in his own mind, Ki-jo had chosen who would have the finest lots in Hannam-dong. In the original history, formidable men had set their roots there: Lee Byung-chull of Samsung, Cho Choong-hoon of Hanjin, Koo In-hwoi of LG, Chung Ju-yung of Hyundai. Ki-jo had taken the ground first. Anyone who wished to live in Hannam-dong would have no choice but to buy the land from him, and what he wanted, on that hill, was a natural meeting place with all of them.
From what Sunrye had told him, Ma-ryang would prosper only if he lived beside a great river—and so a house in Hannam-dong seemed almost a matter of fate.
He asked Man-ik about the laborers who would build there.
"I have chosen only the skilled and the steady."
"How many is that?"
"About two hundred."
"Well done."
Ki-jo was well satisfied to see the men of Cheongsan Development, under Man-ik's hand, being tempered into a picked company. They would be the vanguard: on the domestic works that Hyundai Construction took up, and beyond them, when Cheongsan Development went out into Thailand, Vietnam, and the Middle East.
So long as he kept his good understanding with Chung Ju-yung, the construction side gave him nothing to fear. Chung held his credit as dear as his life, and he would never tear up a contract made with Ki-jo. Beyond that faith in the man, Ki-jo meant to build a strength of capital so great that Hyundai would not dare treat Cheongsan lightly. Chung Ju-yung would in time become the greatest of the chaebol, but clear through the 1960s misfortune would come down upon misfortune, and Hyundai's purse would stay thin the whole way. Ki-jo was confident he could bring Hyundai to look on Cheongsan as a partner it could not bear to lose.
He turned slowly through every quarter—east, west, south, and north—and drew in his mind the wealthy neighborhood that was to be.
The look around was finished, and they were about to take the jeep back down the hill, when Man-ik spoke.
"Chairman, I have heard of late that the government means to bring in foreign loans and carry out a public housing program."
"Ah. Is that so?"
Ki-jo knew it already. What Lee Man-ik was speaking of was the rehabilitation housing—the reconstruction houses.
From the mid-1950s, Seoul would fall into a grim shortage of homes. The war had destroyed the houses that were, and people pouring into the city in search of work would multiply the plank-built shanties. The government and the city of Seoul would roll up their sleeves. With loans and aid brought in from abroad, they would put up houses of seven to nine pyeong—little more than 250 to 320 square feet—and estates of that rehabilitation housing would rise in Cheongnyangni in Dongdaemun-gu, in Jeongneung-dong in Seongbuk-gu, in Mangwon-dong in Mapo-gu, in Ihwa-dong, and elsewhere.
"The word is that the work will be carried out through the Korea Housing Corporation. Would it be well, do you think, for us to take a part in it?"
"It's a sound idea. The margin will be thin, but once a construction company runs out of work, nothing is left but the spending. I think you're right."
"May I take charge of our bid to be chosen among the subcontractors? I formed connections in a good many places during my years in the service, and I believe some help can be had from them."
"Please do."
Ki-jo gave his leave, and he was thoroughly pleased. Man-ik was shedding the air of a soldier who did nothing but carry out orders, and coming at last into himself as the president of a civilian firm. These were men who had served with the Army engineers; to build rehabilitation housing cheap and fast would be, for them, no harder than sitting down to a meal.
Even if the estates themselves returned no profit, there was advantage simply in taking part. Ki-jo was earning handsomely just now, and the talk in the streets had him earning still more than he did. At such a time it was no bad thing to join a public work that barely paid, and leave a favorable impression on officials and men of power. In the 1950s, a name for making too much money could bring trouble from every quarter, and a man had to be seen to give. He had come to the point of earning enough that he must begin to mind how it looked.
He asked one thing more of Man-ik.
"I know you're pressed, but would you also see to the school building in the city?"
"The schools, Chairman?"
"Yes. I saw children taking their lessons out of doors for want of classrooms, and it was a hard sight. As it happens a little brick is coming into store, and I mean to give it toward putting up schoolhouses. Brick alone would make a thin showing, so I would like you to go yourself and let the gift be seen—and to send laborers along with it."
"I understand you, Chairman."
The schools of the city had lost their buildings in the chaos of the war, and the children were being taught under canvas. Seen again, now that he had come back, the sight ached no less.
As he rode from Hannam-dong toward Gwanghwamun, Ki-jo told himself there was only one difficulty left: that Ma-ryang, when he had finished helping Doo-han, should come back to the company with nothing gone amiss.