“Where’s Byeong-hwa?” she demanded.
“Byeong-hwa? He’s in hell. If you want to see him, you’ll have to go look for him there yourself.”
Gyeong-ae was overcome with fear. Trying to get out of there by any means possible, she made a fuss, argued, and even tried to win them over by drinking what they forced on her. But when she made a break for the door, one of them barred the way. She hated their disparaging remarks about Byeong-hwa. Their demand that she hand over the money, however, sent a chill through her.
The very sound of the word money made her dizzy. Had all her secrets been revealed? Had Byeong-hwa also been kidnapped? Were these men police snitches? Gyeong-ae was relieved when they insisted that she hand over the secret funds from the police.
“How long have you been frequenting the Police Affairs Bureau? We hear they gave you five thousand won. You gave two thousand to Byeong-hwa to open the business, so you’ve still got three. Give it to us, and we’ll pretend we know nothing about it — we’ll forget about the whole thing and let you go home. No one would know, not even our boss.”
As they kept at her, threatening and coaxing, she laughed at them, careful not to show any fear.
“Let’s go find Kim Byeong-hwa,” Gyeong-ae said, as if willing to go along with their plan. “You can sort this out with him yourself.”
They wouldn’t hear of it, though. They continued to threaten her and started slapping her around. After two or three hours of abuse, they whispered to each other — most likely because they had run out of intimidation tactics — that they’d go fetch Byeong-hwa.
Then they began to quarreclass="underline" “You go!” “I’m not going.” At last, the man who had lured Gyeong-ae to the restaurant went out tentatively, claiming that he was not as drunk as his partner. After a while, he came back with an older man. As the target of the drunkards’ harassment, Gyeong-ae at first thought it was good that someone sober had been brought in, but then her heart lurched at the thought that perhaps this man was their boss.
When the older man, striding in, caught sight of the dishes and glasses strewn about on the table, he flew off the handle. “So you’re rolling in money, aren’t you? That’s why you’ve been drinking so much? Get out of here!”
Watching the underlings slink away, retreating as if to the nearest hole, Gyeong-ae felt she could trust this newcomer.
The man told Gyeong-ae to sit down and asked, “When did you get here?”
In spite Gyeong-ae’s revulsion, there was something about his low-key manner that she found reassuring.
“Are you the one who made them lie to get me here? Who the hell are you?”
“A friend of Kim Byeong-hwa. I’m very sorry about all this, and I’ll let you go if you give me a clear answer to one question: Where did Byeong-hwa’s money come from?”
“How would I know? What do you hope to gain, dragging me here to ask such a stupid question?”
“It’s far from stupid. I want to know the truth.”
“I told you — I don’t know.”
“Then tell me this. The man who visited you a while ago — where is he now?”
Gyeong-ae’s heart sank, and she broke out into a sweat. He interrogated her, first coaxing, then threatening. He slapped her several times and acted as if he might kill her on the spot. He shouted, “I’m not going to let a bitch like you seduce and corrupt Kim Byeong-hwa.”
From the passion in his words, he could have been one of Byeong-hwa’s comrades, but who knew whether he was just pretending to be a kindred spirit to get the information he wanted? She made up her mind not to breathe a word even if she were beaten to death.
The man continued to harass her for another hour, until a young man, whom she had not seen previously, looked in. Her interrogator told her to stay put and left the room. A moment later he returned. “I need to leave, but we’ll see each other again soon. Think hard in the meantime. You will tell me the truth then!” He turned and went away, to her astonishment.
Perhaps he had received a message that Byeong-hwa had been brought in, Gyeong-ae wondered in hindsight.
Having listened quietly to Gyeong-ae’s account while on his back, Byeong-hwa uttered quietly, “I’m sorry that you had to go through such a thing.”
But Gyeong-ae’s ordeal wasn’t over — she had been captured by the drunken gang again. “Just as I was leaving, I saw the two guys jump out from nowhere — I couldn’t do a thing. It was useless to provoke them, so I pleaded with them and was able to calm them a bit. Then I offered to pay the bill for their drinks. Only then did they loosen their grip on me.”
“So they pummeled you and you bought them drinks,” Pil-sun’s mother commented, unable to suppress her outrage. She sat massaging her husband’s lower back.
“Never mind about that.” Stroking her swollen cheek, Gyeong-ae asked, “Why couldn’t they agree on what they wanted to know, even among themselves?”
“You mean why were the two guys talking about secret funds while their boss had other ideas?” asked Byeong-hwa, who understood her right away. “Only a couple of people are privy to the whole story. The underlings will say anything that pops into their heads. Besides, those two were no comrades of mine. They’re good-for-nothings who knock around and get themselves involved in a lot of bad business.”
“I suspected as much. I wondered why they looked so uncertain when they badgered me about secret funds. They didn’t know a thing.” Gyeong-ae’s eyes found Byeong-hwa’s.
“How can those guys do anything right?” Deok-gi asked. “There must be professional brokers in their midst.”
“They’re not the brains of the outfit — they’re the muscle,” Byeong-hwa explained. “The bosses need guys like them. Nobody can do it alone. As for what happened today, they needed some young bait, a modern young man, somewhat rough, but with enough experience with women to be able to lure Gyeong-ae to the restaurant. If your goal is to spread the rumor that Kim Byeong-hwa has pocketed secret funds, using these fellows works better than running an ad in the papers. Those idiots have squandered all their family assets — they don’t have enough money to buy a drink, let alone eat in restaurants. They get the cold shoulder at gisaeng houses, and even playing billiards is beyond their means. They can’t stay home all day, so they run around Seoul as if it were their playground, sponging off whatever acquaintances they can. If you whisper something to them, it will spread immediately, faster than the morning headlines. And there’s no better source of information than those guys when you want to gather rumors. I started this grocery business to feed and cultivate such people.”
“I see that you’re a generous Red,” observed Deok-gi. “But there’s a saying that your own trusted ax can chop off your foot. Looks like you’d better grow eyes in the back of your head.”
“I intend to be careful. But if I manage to get through to these bastards, I might even be able to find a real comrade or two among the lot.”
Jang Hun
Whenever Pil-sun’s father let out a groan of pain, those sitting around him stopped talking and looked up at the clock, wondering why it was taking so long for the doctor to arrive.
Pil-sun’s father had been taken hostage simply because Byeong-hwa had been late coming home. Unlike Gyeong-ae, he wasn’t harassed at the house where he was held and had been treated as an elder, though he was considered incompetent among activist circles. When asked questions, he told them as much as he knew and defended Byeong-hwa. He told them he was helping the young man, though he was uncertain as to what his plans were. He claimed that he wasn’t keeping an eye on Sanhaejin merely to stave off hunger, though as the saying goes, hunger is as scary as the Police Bureau. Meanwhile, Byeong-hwa had been brought in and had started arguing with the owner of the house. They were eventually released without further incident.