Songdo’s Venice Merchant (1)
The rain that had fallen two days ago on the Imjin River must have reached here as well, because the fire had not spread to the tavern.
Taesu had carried out Son Yu-jak’s sister, worried the flames might leap over, and after setting her down he rolled his neck loose.
Only the proprietress had survived.
The man who’d taken a flying knee had a thick, tofu-like substance leaking out through his nose. Even with modern medicine, he was beyond saving.
As for the one kicked by the horse, his injuries were comparatively light, but he’d collapsed in the wrong place and inhaled far too much smoke.
So Taesu didn’t stop the Gangjakdari gang from hacking apart the two men whose last breaths were still hanging on by a thread. A quicker death would hurt less.
Of course, mercy wasn’t the only reason. These two were the very men who had killed Son Yu-jak’s mother and kidnapped his sister.
And the exploitation they’d carried out as the Gangjakdari gang’s managers was obvious without even looking. Son Yu-jak had said as much.
“They’d slap away even a spoonful of cold rice we begged for and beat us at the drop of a hat, sir. And among the gang, there were kids who were forced to suffer outrage over and over again.”
Taesu glanced at the two corpses, now in such a state they’d require a bucket just to clean up.
Then he lectured them again on suspiciously sourced biological knowledge.
“If you’re going to bury a body, you need to dig at least three meters... no, ten spans deep.”
“That deep?”
“Any shallower and flies will swarm, or stray dogs will dig it back up and expose it before long. A human corpse is no different from excrement of the same weight. Why else are latrines dug so deep, and yet the smell still escapes?”
[You really are teaching good things.]
In any case, it was certainly knowledge he’d use more often than trigonometric functions or Newton’s laws of motion.
Not one of the children complained, despite the harsh labor.
By now, Taesu was already an absolute leader who held their lives in his hands.
Asking Taesu for “permission to kill” had been symbolic. The permission to kill and the permission to die were one and the same. Taesu had thought of it only as “consent,” but to the Gangjakdari gang, it was “rule.”
Merely a rule they had chosen themselves.
While the children took turns digging, Taesu interrogated the only survivor, the proprietress.
After witnessing her fellow gang members torn apart alive right before her eyes, even she didn’t put up much resistance.
“If it’s money or white hemp, it’s in the granary. If you spare my life, I’ll hand over everything.”
“Whether you tell me or not, I was going to take it.”
Having smashed the proprietress’s bargaining chip, Taesu asked where the records, ledgers, and daily notes relating to Kim Sang-jun were kept.
Kim Sang-jun was different from these people.
Men in the light had to be caught with the tools of the light. He needed records of the bribes Kim Sang-jun had paid to high officials all this time, or proof of crimes such as smuggling and embezzling the ever-repaid grain fund—evidence, in other words, that definitely existed somewhere.
“There really aren’t any documents. Kim Sang-jun never trusted us in the first place. There’s no way he would’ve left anything behind here that could be used against him.”
“No, Kim Sang-jun wouldn’t.”
The first person to grasp the meaning behind Taesu’s ominous words was Son Yu-jak’s sister.
She had spent the longest time in close quarters with these people. She didn’t hide her hatred and shouted,
“I caught a glimpse of it! That whore was writing something down in the room and hiding it away!”
As the proprietress said, there was no way Kim Sang-jun had trusted a bunch of thugs like this enough to leave documents with them.
But precisely because of that, this tavern pack would have slipped the documents away or forged them themselves. To protect themselves when the end came and Kim Sang-jun tried to cut them loose.
Before long, Son Yu-jak darted off and brought back a bundle of papers he’d hidden deep inside the rice chest. While a smile spread across Taesu’s face, despair spread across the proprietress’s.
“You—you’re the least grateful little bitch of all! I should’ve done away with you while I still had the chance!”
[Just a moment ago she was like Choonhyang from Namwon, and now she’s turned into Baekmunru’s Yeobong-seon. If only she’d gone to a market and told stories for a living.]
The Mountain Spirit snorted.
[So he isn’t just talk, either. It would be one thing if he’d handed the papers over at once after saying they existed from the start, but once it’s come to this, I can’t let him live. He was planning to betray you even while surrendering, was he not?]
Taesu stroked his chin.
No, I’m not killing her. She’s useful.
[What? You filthy beast. Forget it. In my eyes, Cha Un-hong is a hundred times better.]
“......”
Without a word, Taesu had someone fetch the slave-transfer documents.
As this was the headquarters of a loan shark’s enforcers, there were plenty of slave papers with nothing but the names left blank, just like the merit certificates handed out to officials.
The proprietress made one final desperate struggle.
“I’m a fool, sir, and I don’t even know how to write my own name...”
That was an insult fit to make King Sejong, who had gone to the trouble of creating letters precisely for that purpose, rise up in fury from Yeongneung.
Taesu treated the proprietress much as Sejong would have treated a Jurchen.
“Then I’ll cut off your fingers with this axe. Put down your thumbprint.”
“I suddenly remember my name now.”
The price of that bodily waiver was zero jeon.
The bonus gift was the tavern itself and everything attached to it.
It was such an outrageous bargain that even Black Friday would’ve been envious, and the proprietress’s vision went black.
Although Taesu could have handled three people by himself, the reason he’d set the place on fire and caused such a commotion was precisely this.
No one would find it suspicious that the proprietress had made a quick sale of a tavern whose value had fallen because of a fire. That was simply prudent real-estate investing.
Taesu designated Son Yu-jak’s sister as the formal owner of the slaves and the tavern.
“Why am I the one...?”
“If you go back to the village, people will look at you suspiciously. They’ll want to know why you were released.”
The same neighbors who had never lifted a finger to help when she was being crushed by the loan sharks would only snicker and gossip. The warmth of human community was so intense it could burn.
Taesu wasn’t trying to run a charity, either.
The true owner would, naturally, be Taesu.
But even from his perspective, he still didn’t want his identity exposed openly just yet. There might still be someone investigating the mass disappearance case from Seungcheonpo on Ganghwado.
“I’m only putting your name on the papers, so why don’t you and your younger brother try to make a life here instead? You’ve got a usable maid too, don’t you? I saw her flipping jeon pretty well earlier.”
The siblings’ faces lit up. The “maid,” who was clearly in for a brutally strict education, turned white as a sheet.
* * *
Morning sunlight struck the thatched roof and burned gold.
Literary sensibility, too, seems to spring from owning a house. I stared at my first plot of land in Joseon with heartfelt emotion, even if, once again, it wasn’t registered under my name.
[Hm. It depends on the broker, but since this is Kaesong it won’t be all that cheap compared to the outskirts of Seoul. There’s vacant land inside the lot, so figure roughly thirty nyang per room, and if you count the stable too, the house alone must be worth two hundred nyang.]
Shut up. I don’t want you triggering my trauma over real-estate talk and ruining this moving moment.
Now I understand the Little Prince’s sorrow. The depraved adults, honestly.
What I want to say is not that I’ve acquired a dry little two-hundred-nyang restaurant, but that I’ve inherited a cradle of traditional culture, one that carries on the warmth of human kindness and that fragrant, homey smell of people.
[The warmth was the fire you set, and the smell of people was probably the stench of blood after you threw the place into chaos. No use pretending to be the way of a scholar when you’re just a merchant.]
I grimaced and looked back.
Annoyingly enough, there was proof of the Mountain Spirit’s words right there.
Son Yu-jak, who possessed about as much childlike innocence as a medicine for nonexistent illness, had come to report the inventory after calculating everything out.
“There’s about fifteen nyang in silver, as if they were about to offer it up to Kim Sang-jun soon enough, and five bales of white hemp, sir—two hundred bolts. There’s also several spans of western cotton cloth, which is said to be ten times as valuable as hemp. I haven’t even finished counting the copper coins yet.”
“...I see.”
“And there’s wine, sauces, and salted seafood in jars, and if you add the chickens, dogs, knives, cauldrons, and bowls...”
Anyone overhearing might think we’d seized a fortress.
It really was a great deal of wealth. With this alone, I could start a small-scale lending business.
Among it all, the most important assets were the documents I’d taken from the proprietress.
So how should I put these to use?
By the time the scene had more or less been cleaned up, the horses that had fled had also returned.
Huh. I’d thought I’d lost them for good, but the Gangjakdari swore it was true. Is that what they call homing instinct?
The children who had become Taesu Financial’s junior staff also looked delighted.
When the Mountain Spirit advised me to offer three meals a day and a shared boarding room as the terms of employment, I’d worried they’d all spit and run, but it seemed that was unfounded.
[Aren’t these kids the sort who never got so much as dog feed to eat, living on one meal every three days and eight meals in nine, sleeping in shanties under the walls or by the stream? If their luck was bad, they were dragged off by a tiger; if it was even worse, they were caught by humans, tied to a tree stump, their bellies split open, and the meat stripped right off. I hear there are no child livers left to sell anymore.]
I never dreamed there’d come a day when I’d feel grateful to an orphanage director.
The children were cheerful, too.
“Normally, Songdo errands boys don’t get paid a single coin—or even fed—until three years have passed. This is unbelievably generous!”
“And if we bring in money well, they say some of it gets passed down to us too!”
“Then I’ve got confidence. They can kill us on the Songdo market streets, sure, but they can’t drive us out. What do you think the Gangjakdari gang is called Gangjakdari for!”
The sharpest of the enthusiastic first class of employees seemed to be Yu-jak.
Rising overnight from the lowest rung of the Gangjakdari caste to, in name and reality, an executive-level position, Yu-jak came with his sister and bowed to me.
“We should thank you for saving our friends, of course, but more than that, our whole family would’ve been uprooted and erased if it weren’t for you, brother-in-law.”
That brother-in-law excuse was only for outsiders, wasn’t it? You don’t need to use it when it’s just us.
[What a foolish boy. Why would he bring his sister here to have her bow? Does he not know even the manners a child would understand?]
I don’t want to know.
I looked at Yu-jak’s sister, meaning to ask her to testify that nothing improper had happened.
But, maddeningly, the young lady turned her face slightly aside and blushed.
“...Since I touched an unrelated man’s bare skin, there’s nothing to be done.”
Before I knew it, the Gangjakdari bastards had gathered around and were whistling, so I went around thumping each one of them in the head. My only regret was that I couldn’t thump the Mountain Spirit for whistling along with them.
To divert the attention of these sex-starved idiots—and especially to keep Yu-jak from getting any dangerous ideas—I had no choice but to think of another errand.
“Go run an errand for me. You know the wealthy house called Cha Un-hong’s place, right?”
“Of course. I’ve been there often enough with my father.”
* * *
Taesu had three major reasons for sending Son Yu-jak.
First, he couldn’t know when Kim Sang-jun’s gang might counterattack, so Taesu needed to stay and guard the tavern.
Second, to help shape Son Yu-jak—who was of roughly the same generation as Taesu, socially speaking, as Taesu’s current social age was around eighteen—into a close subordinate, he wanted him to be introduced to his business partner.
And lastly, at this point it seemed better for both sides if Taesu did not openly appear to be coming and going from Cha Un-hong’s house.
So he was startled when Cha Un-hong, who had come in person, appeared before him along with Gap-yeon.
“...You can just come out like this?”
Both of them understood that he was leaving out the words, “without even crossdressing.”
But Cha Un-hong wasn’t intimidated. If anything, she lifted her chin as though to show herself off.
“It’s right next to the local market. Even if I weren’t here, I’m out in the market often enough. I’m not some yangban’s daughter. Besides...”
The one who seemed intimidated was the nominal owner here, Son Yu-jak’s sister.
Cha Un-hong glanced at her and said,
“She’s the owner here, isn’t she? Isn’t that right? No matter whether you were carried around the room or given drinks there, the tavern owner is still the proprietress.”
It seemed best not to say, “She looks about the same age as you.”
Apparently Son Yu-jak had gone and said something wrong.
Trying to explain it would only make things more ridiculous. After glancing up at the sky once, Taesu had a new slave—not a “new master,” since he judged it better not to be seen—bring out lunch.
Cha Un-hong ate the jeon with obvious relish.
She even asked for alcohol, so he let her have that too.
Taesu thought she must have been irritated because she was hungry. Once she’d finished eating, she looked fairly cheerful, so that didn’t seem unreasonable.
“When we first met, we ate lunch like this then, too.”
“You didn’t come here just to get a free meal, did you? Since you’re here anyway, take a look through these documents and tell me if there’s anything useful.”
They were the loan-shark gang’s administrative papers, the ones he couldn’t safely send with Son Yu-jak.
After sending the table away and taking a puff from her favorite Cheongcheon incense again, Cha Un-hong skimmed them quickly.
Taesu, who likewise understood the contents in broad strokes thanks to the Mountain Spirit, asked,
“You said this Kim Sang-jun was an influential man in Kaesong. Couldn’t we use the Seoul backers he was trading with to pressure them into reopening the murder investigation and punishing him?”
“There are records of goods exchanged with those Seoul officials, yes. There’s even Jangdong House—Kim Jwa-geun. But this much is what everyone does. If we came at them with this, they’d just crush us flat and that would be the end of it. Kim Jwa-geun probably wouldn’t even know we existed.”
When it comes to punishing a man in power, judicial evidence is meaningless.
More precisely, the order is reversed. The balance of power has to be overturned enough that punishment becomes possible; only then can evidence be used. In dramas, a single secret document doesn’t bring a powerful man crashing down.
If that were possible, the current king, I Hwan, would have killed Kim Jwa-geun at least ten times over.
Taesu felt a little disappointed.
But Cha Un-hong did not.
“So we end it here in Kaesong. Conveniently enough, there’s something usable.”
“What is it?”
“This man is an offshoot teacher at Sungkyunkwan. I’ll have to look into it more, so I’ll go back and send word. Before I do, grant me two promises.”
“Go on.”
Cha Un-hong extended two fingers.
“Send those siblings home once this is over. If Kim Sang-jun’s gone, the neighbors won’t go poking their noses in for no reason. Given your circumstances, it’s fine if the papers list that woman as the owner, but if you really make her run the place as a tavern proprietress, you’ll ruin an innocent girl’s marriage prospects. Surely you don’t mean to become the sort of kept man that foolish little child was babbling about?”
Taesu let out a groan. He could guess what Son Yu-jak had gone and said.
“I won’t.”
“Second, even if Kim Sang-jun is driven out, you mustn’t kill him recklessly. He’s not some market thug, but a yangban—and not just any yangban, but a ninth-rank officeholder in the court. If you split his head open with an axe, things will get messy. Plenty of us have been wronged by Kim Sang-jun too, and we’ve been waiting for our chance, but taking his life on the spot would be difficult.”
This wasn’t just resentment over the countless people he had ruined through fraudulent gambling.
Kim Sang-jun was, in a sense, the representative figure of yangban forces intruding into Kaesong’s long-established merchant world.
They’d sneered at merchants as beneath them once upon a time, but as money came to matter more and more, the yangban had begun shamelessly hovering around, hoping to land positions as guild officers or merchants’ intermediaries.
If things continued this way, the poison of private lending would seep into Kaesong’s rotating credit network, in which Cha Un-hong also participated, and from there the commercial world would be gradually swallowed whole and reduced to a convenient source of cash for the local aristocracy.
In the collapse of Joseon’s status system in the nineteenth century, the trouble wasn’t limited to the upper classes.
If Cha Un-hong stepped in now and soundly crushed a yangban, she could reinforce the commercial guilds of Kaesong even more strongly.
Thanks to Taesu having taken care of the competing ginseng brokers on Ganghwado, Cha Un-hong’s influence had already expanded considerably.
If Kim Sang-jun were dealt with as well, it could be called a running start toward a grander enterprise.
That said, this required careful handling. Judging by Taesu’s temper, he might just kill the man with his axe without asking questions, so she was warning him in advance.
But Taesu bared his teeth.
“I don’t like that.”
Writer’s Note
1. Employees hired by merchants in the late Joseon period did not receive wages or expenses in the modern sense. If the employer was kind, they’d at most share lunch. Only after years of unpaid labor proved their trustworthiness would the merchant pay wages or divide up capital, and this custom also existed in Uiju and continued into the early twentieth century.