Lobbyist Choi
The day after he went to see Grandma Baek, a call came from Lee Seong-ryong.
Seong-ryong was still unsettled by the talk she had had with Dan Sa-cheon.
"What on earth happened yesterday? The deal fell through, and yet Chairman Dan asks me to tell Yeongsu's dad that if he has business next time, he should come find him in person..."
"I couldn't say. I don't really know myself."
"I'm in a fog myself... The way Chairman Dan put it, it sounded like he'd help if you needed him later. If he's going to help, why not help now? What is that man thinking..."
"Well, we'll know when we get there. Ha ha."
Gijo thought back to the moment before he had left the teahouse the day before, when his eyes had met Dan Sa-cheon's. The man had been watching him with a look that gave nothing away. When Gijo dipped his head, ever so slightly, Dan Sa-cheon nodded in return. He couldn't say exactly what it meant — only that he didn't feel the man thought ill of him.
"Anyway, setting that aside — I finally found someone to handle the government work."
"Already?"
"I've only put a feeler out for now. They say an answer should come before long. If it comes through, make good use of it."
"Thank you, Boss."
"Oh, don't thank me. Though I'll be honest — I don't really know who this person is either."
"You don't?"
"I've seen too many people puff themselves up, claiming they've got strings into the government, so I worked myself hard trying to connect you to the genuine article. I barely managed to track down someone they call first-rate and made contact, but..."
"They don't have to be first-rate. If they can just lay a bridge, that's enough."
"No. If you're going to deal with the government, you have to go through someone truly solid."
Seong-ryong was right. Gijo had only said it because he felt bad for being so particular, when he was the one who had asked her to find someone. He trusted her eye for people.
"They say people just call him 'Choi.' I don't know the man, but in that world they rate him the very best. He has a way of getting even the hardest things done."
Who?
No such person lived in Gijo's memory. He had nothing on any famous lobbyist of the fifties who bore the surname Choi. The man might never have been exposed in public, or he might have slipped quietly out of the historical record.
"Thank you, Boss Lee. For going to the trouble."
"Don't talk like that. I've already come out ahead thanks to Yeongsu's dad... Listen. When a high-up came into the shop, I slipped in a little question."
"What did you ask?"
"I asked a gentleman at the Bank of Korea whether I ought to break up my gye early — the rotating savings club I belong to — and he said I'd be wise to."
"Did he?"
"It was the same thing Yeongsu's dad told me. He said the government means to put measures in around the end of the year to get prices under control, and that the money market could tighten because of it. Ho ho. How did Yeongsu's dad know a thing like that ahead of time?"
"What would I know? It's only a hunch."
"Whether it's a hunch or information, if it's solid, the worth is the same. Anyway, Yeongsu's dad — when word comes from this Mr. Choi, handle it well."
Seong-ryong pressed the point.
"Understood, Boss."
"I'll hang up, then."
Gijo set the receiver down, turned their conversation over once more, and pressed his seal to the papers Seong Dae-ik had brought up. They were documents raising the margins for the brickworks that had consigned their sales to Cheongsan Brick. Until now he had let them take home little more than break-even. The time had come to lift their share of the profit. The partner firms had to be kept alive, and they needed room to brace for the credit squeeze that would hit in early 1955. He told Seogwang to pass along a word of advice: if any of the firms carried debt, they should pay it down ahead of time.
A few days later, a boy slipped into the office.
"Kid. What are you doing coming in here?"
At Ma-ryang's question the boy ran his eyes over the adults in the room, then walked straight to Gijo.
"Mister. This."
What he held out was a pocket matchbox. Gijo looked it over.
"Who sent you on this errand?"
"A mister in a fedora."
"All right. Thank you. You can go."
He sent the boy off, then told the five department heads, "I'm stepping out for a bit. Carry on with the work."
He made for the Jongno teahouse named on the matchbox. Near Danseongsa, at the Hollywood Teahouse, Gijo took an empty table and waited, unhurried. The child with the matches had almost certainly been sent by the man Seong-ryong had told him about — the one called Choi. But Gijo did not look for him inside the room. The boy's story of a man in a fedora might well have been a lie. Someone working so hard not to show himself would never have had a child pass along a detail like that.
Concluding that the other party had summoned him in order to watch, Gijo ordered a coffee and sat back at his ease.
If you want to observe me, then observe me all you like.
And while he sat, he tried to reason the man out. If he truly was a Choi, as people said, the odds were high he came from Gyeongsang. The great Choi lineage traced its roots to Gyeongju. There were Chois whose ancestral seat was Haeju or Gangneung, and Chois in Jeolla and Chungcheong as well, but his instinct pulled toward Gyeongsang. If a man had been able to wield influence over political and official circles after the Korean War, he would have begun building that power in Busan, the provisional capital during the refugee years.
He was turning this over, about to put a light to his cigarette, when a woman dropped into the seat across from him without warning.
"Waiting for someone?"
Gijo set the lighter down and looked at her. She had the air of an après girl.
Après girl — from the French après-guerre, "after the war," joined to the English girl. In the 1950s the name was given to a new kind of woman who refused to live by the old Confucian virtues, took her pleasure in life, and held free and unrestrained ideas about sex.
She drew a cigarette from the pack Gijo had left on the table, set it between her lips, and looked him full in the face.
"No matches?"
He handed her the teahouse matchbox he was carrying. She took it and let out a short laugh. Then she struck a match, lit the cigarette, and spoke.
"I believe I'm the one who sent this matchbox..."
She passed the matches back.
"There ought to be two headless matchsticks in there."
Gijo checked the sticks inside. She was right.
"You are waiting for someone, aren't you?"
She asked again. Gijo didn't answer. A lobbyist who kept his face unknown, he thought, would not care for anyone who named him so freely.
"Tight-lipped, aren't you, mister... I never did like the quiet ones."
Even as she said it, her eyes were bright with interest.
"You'll have to talk to me if you want to be put in touch with him. Call me a carrier pigeon, if you like."
Without a word, Gijo laid the price of the coffee on the table and stood. Then he walked straight outside. The après girl watched him go and smiled faintly. She took the banknote he had left up to the counter, borrowed the telephone, and spoke to whoever answered.
"He was just here, and he's gone. Yes. Yes. He simply left, quietly. Didn't say a word. Didn't let anything show. Yes. Understood."
She hung up and left the teahouse as well.
For ten days after that, no word came from Lobbyist Choi. Gijo decided that was simply the end of it, and that he would go himself to the Shipping Bureau of the Ministry of Transportation and the Mining Bureau of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
On November 12, Syngman Rhee would approve tungsten for export, and the real work of shipping it would begin. Little time remained. If he meant to export tungsten to Roberts's firm and land a charter contract with Daehan Shipping, he had to move. Park Hee-jun and Roberts had already sent word that they had established a company in the United States under the name AMKO Tungsten. From here on, Gijo had to work in an official capacity — as head of Cheongsan Shipping, and as AMKO Tungsten's agency in Korea.
But when he presented himself at the Shipping Bureau and the Mining Bureau, the civil servants who received him were cold and nothing more. He had expected as much. Even so, working without a lobbyist was no easy thing.
"See here. I've never heard of a company called AMKO Tungsten. This firm you've joined hands with — you're certain it actually exists?"
To the skeptical official, Gijo presented documents issued by Roberts's bank, stating that the bank guaranteed AMKO's investment in Korea. The man skimmed them, studied the papers a moment with a flicker of interest, and spoke.
"We'll inquire at the American embassy as to whether this bank truly exists in the United States. Come back in a week."
Gijo felt the limit of facing officialdom with neither connections nor a bribe. Give him one chance to explain AMKO's investment in Korea and he could bring them around. That chance was not given.
A week later he returned to the Mining Bureau expecting little, and sensed a different air.
"Welcome. We reviewed the documents you submitted last time. Every one of the companies proved to be real. The gentlemen upstairs are looking on this favorably."
It was the same at the Shipping Bureau.
"Well, I'll be. I hear you keep a twelve-thousand-ton freighter down in Busan. The Changseong, wasn't it? Word around Busan is she's a splendid ship."
Even the Shipping Bureau officials who had sneered at Cheongsan Shipping for having no record to its name were all courtesy toward him now.
Finishing his rounds of the ministries, Gijo started back toward the office, wondering what on earth had happened.
Can a man's manner change like this inside of a week...?
He was walking along, still turning it over, when someone spoke to him.
"Excuse me, mister. Could you tell me the way?"
He looked at the person asking. A woman, dressed in a hanbok.
"Where are you headed?"
"I'd like to see Changgyeongwon, but I don't know which way to go."
They were standing before Gwanghwamun. Gijo pointed east.
"If you keep straight along this way..."
He was directing her on toward Yulgok-ro when she asked.
"While you're at it, would you take me all the way to Changgyeongwon?"
At that, he studied her. She smiled.
"Don't you remember me?"
He realized then who she was — the woman making such an absurd request. The après girl. The woman from the Jongno teahouse, with her permed hair, her heavy makeup, her dress printed with flowers. That woman. She had let her hair down, put on a hanbok, and come to him with a plain, unpainted face. No wonder he hadn't known her.
"Come on, then."
He set off with her toward Changgyeongwon, and all the way there she kept at him.
"Did your business work out?"
"Why did you leave that day without saying a word?"
"You don't trust me, is that why you won't talk?"
Through the unending volley of questions, Gijo gave no answer.
"Still not a word. Anyone looking on would take me for some crazy bitch muttering to herself."
At last the après girl gave up. When they reached Changgyeongwon, she spoke.
"Go on ahead to the bear cage."
As he drew near the pen, there was a man in a fedora standing before the iron bars, just as she had said. Gijo quietly took a place beside him and looked at the bear shut inside the cage. For a while the two men watched the animal without speaking. The one in the fedora broke the silence.
"They say that when the keepers came back after the war, not a single animal was left at Changgyeongwon."
Gijo nodded, and the man went on.
"The animals were caught and eaten by the people who had stayed in Seoul, or they hid from human beings and starved. Humans are cruel, aren't they?"
The animals in Changgyeongwon now — the bears, the raccoon dogs, the roe deer, the leopard cats — were creatures soldiers had caught after the Korean War and sent on to the zoo.
"There was no helping it, back then."
At last Gijo spoke. The man smiled and set a cigarette between his lips, and Gijo lit it for him with the lighter. It was an age when a man could smoke as he pleased, zoo or anywhere else. The man blew out a stream of smoke.
"Did the officials treat you well?"
"Thanks to you. I'm grateful. I'd like to repay the kindness."
From the moment he had met the après girl at Gwanghwamun, he had known this was the man who had turned the officials around.
"I don't take money for a first commission."
At the unexpected answer Gijo started to turn and look at him, then stopped. It seemed the way to show respect. Choi was a man who hated to be known. The fedora was pulled low over his face.
"Instead — I don't know whether the day will come — there may be something I'll ask of you. When that time arrives, I hope you'll grant it."
"I won't forget what I owe."
"Owe? Ha ha."
The man laughed.
"Why must it be a debt? In the living of a life, can't people help one another quite apart from money?"
"Because a debt has to be paid, no matter who the other person is."
"Hm... I see. Very well. I'll look forward to good news. All I've done is open a door that was shut against you. The rest is yours to settle."
"Thank you."
At Gijo's answer, the man touched the brim of his hat in place of a bow and took his leave.
After he was gone, Gijo made a circuit of the zoo, turning over who the man might be. Who was this person called Choi? No ordinary man, that was certain. To move the government without taking payment meant either he was a considerable power in his own right, or someone very large stood behind him. Was that why he never showed himself near Gwanghwamun, where the government offices clustered, and kept sending the après girl in his stead?
And what would he ask later, in return for doing that first commission for nothing? He seemed to be on familiar terms with high officials, and to have means of his own besides. What was it he feared? Gijo thought the man was sketching some future in his mind, and gathering friends who could help him if that future, against the odds, ever came to pass. Weren't more friends the better? And a friend did not have to be the stronger one to be of help. The man who had saved Lee Byung-chull of Samsung during the Korean War had been his own driver, Wi Dae-sik.
While these thoughts turned over, Gijo came full circle through Changgyeongwon and stood once more before the bear cage. All that remained for him now was to persuade the officials. The preparations were complete. As Lobbyist Choi had said, the gate of the arena had merely been shut, and the player had been unable to step inside.