However much money there is in the world, there are times when it’s no use at all.

It is the same logic as a bankbook weighing exactly the same no matter how much money is in it.

Like me, right now.

I could buy a sports car and still not be able to drive it.

Under the age of eighteen, I couldn’t get a license.

A sports car with a hired driver at the wheel means nothing.

I had the money to bring in a chef from a seven-star hotel, and neither the time nor the place for one.

Ah… the minor-and-high-schooler tag was making life way too hard.

“Fuck… er. The dog at my house eats better than this.”

“Bleugh! Damn soybean-paste soup! Day before yesterday, potato soybean-paste soup. Yesterday, dried-radish-green soybean-paste soup. Today, radish soybean-paste soup! I swear, now the smell alone turns my stomach.”

“Meat! There’s no meat…”

My friends took their trays — a few slices of kimchi, one lump of braised tofu, spinach, and soybean-paste soup — and lost their appetites in front of the food.

The main dish posted on today’s lunch menu had definitely been chicken.

Lambs charging into the cafeteria, cheering as they went.

Then standing there stunned at the side dishes on their trays.

One short notice saying the menu had changed for supply reasons, and that was that.

A dietitian who could turn out nothing better than this on 3,500 won a meal looked almost great to me.

The filth the head of the administrative office left behind has deep roots.

Rooting out filth was this hard.

A woman who looked like the madam of a bar was standing in front of the cafeteria in a dietitian’s uniform, grinning away.

She threw a few looks at the good-looking boys, too.

A woman who supposedly handled food, drowned in perfume, her fingers plastered with red polish.

The rumor that she was the head of the administrative office’s mistress was everywhere, and she was the one who had scorched the menu flat since my first year.

“Eat up, kids. You know soybean-paste soup is good for you? This is homemade paste, and it wasn’t easy to get.”

There was something sly about the mouth under all that red lipstick.

This was homemade paste? I had seen it that morning, clear as day.

Cheap canned paste, the kind only cafeterias use, coming off the supply truck.

“You bastards are spoiled. Nobody hungry? It tastes fine, what’s the problem.”

“Pig bastard! I’ve been eating this stuff and I don’t even get hard in the morning!”

“Yours is just low-performance, bastard. Heh heh.”

As always, Do-jung was already emptying his second tray.

Exactly what you’d expect from the guy they called the leftovers-disposal machine.

Dae-seon shouted at Do-jung.

Honestly, I had no real complaints.

For a man who had learned in Seoul what hunger actually was, whining in front of food would make me a son of a bitch.

But this was not okay.

Clack. I set my spoon down.

“Tae-san. Should we go get ramen?”

“You think you can get through the school store line at lunchtime?”

“…I’m hungry.”

When I put my spoon down, the guys got up with me.

They had eaten and they were still hungry.

The rice didn’t have any stickiness to it either.

Imported rice would have tasted better than this.

“You want meat?”

“I would sell my soul to the man who gives me meat!”

“I want to receive Lord Meat into my life!”

I threw the question out as I stood, and the guys answered with one voice.

The timing was good.

In place of his son, the board chairman was coming in to the school every single day.

Back when I was in the hospital, the board chairman had come to visit and said something.

That if I had anything to say, I should come to him anytime.

I carried my tray to the scrap station.

“Oh my, handsome. Why did you leave so much? You know you get punished for that after you die, don’t you?”

The red-lipped lady said it that way, but her eyes were smiling.

The less the kids ate, the more she meant to cut the portions.

“You’ve never been punished while you were alive, have you?”

I dumped my leftovers in the food-waste bin and asked the dietitian lady dryly.

“Of course not. Talking that way to a nice, pretty woman like me is rude.”

She was flirting with me, too.

Her tone came out thick and sticky, loaded with charm.

“Then try getting punished once. Instead of waiting until you’re dead.”

“Wh-what did you say!”

Her face turned vicious in an instant.

A person’s nature never goes anywhere, they say.

“That’s not how a person lives. And can’t you read a room?”

“Kid! Are you finished!”

“The head of the administrative office is doing well, I hope?”

“…”

One line, and the lady shut her mouth.

And I made my exit, nice and cool.

“Hey! You little shit!!!”

With the filthy cursing of the soybean-paste lady who loved soybean paste at my back.

Knock, knock.

“Who is it.”

“I’m a second-year student, Jang Tae-san!”

“Jang Tae-san? Ah! Send him in.”

The secretary who attended the board chairman showed me into his office.

The board chairman seemed to have just finished eating.

A simple lunch box brought from home.

Kimchi, peppers, lettuce and wrap sauce, and that was all.

It was a sad thing to see.

A man this plain in his habits, and the one crop he had failed at was his son; it was shaming him in his old age.

“Good afternoon, sir.”

“Come in.”

I bent at the waist and gave a polite bow. The habit from my working days came out on its own.

The board chairman watched me do it, pleased.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your meal.”

“Not at all. I’m finished. When you get old you don’t need much rice. Sit down there.”

I sat.

“So. What is this about?”

You could see the man’s character. There was room for the usual pleasantries, but he had caught that I had come with something to say.

“Please give us some meat.”

“Meat? You want meat to eat?”

“No. Not me. The other kids.”

“What is this about? Give the students meat?”

“Have you ever eaten the school lunch, sir?”

“…I only eat my wife’s cooking. Outside food doesn’t sit well with me.”

“Would you like to go and see it for yourself?”

“…Is there a problem?”

Anyone watching would have called me a student with no manners at all.

The old me could never have dreamed of it.

Just the news that the board chairman was coming had the whole school busy cleaning. To a student, a board chairman was a distant figure who turned up once a year to give a talk.

And here I was, telling that man to come down to the cafeteria. A master class in no manners.

I knew it, and there was nothing for it.

“The head of the administrative office’s mistress is here as our dietitian. And for the past year the school lunch has been dog food.”

“…!”

At the words dog food, the board chairman’s old eyes went wide.

The part about his son’s mistress, said to his face, seemed to hit him in the heart.

But I didn’t stop.

“The students pay 3,500 won a meal. Other schools are required to serve meat three days a week or more. There is no school in the world where you pay the lunch fee and eat nothing but soybean-paste soup. Kids have to eat to study. Sir, this is corruption in the school lunches. Please report it to the police formally.”

I couldn’t bring myself to add that I could press charges myself.

It didn’t matter to me whether it was this school or not.

I had plenty of money and my grades were high.

My friends had neither.

If it came to it, I even thought about just buying(?) the school.

How much could a country school cost, at the very most?

“Young Tae-san…”

“Yes, sir.”

“However young you are, words carry responsibility.”

“I have told you only what everyone but you already knows, sir. I don’t think it is right for a man to abuse his rat’s-tail of power for private gain. Doesn’t it go directly against the school’s founding principle, ‘Let us raise young people who are just and precious’?”

Even so, it involved his own child.

What I did next would depend on what the board chairman decided here.

Dealing with Hong Seong-hyeon had cost five hundred million won.

The money it took to move a big law firm was not small.

What I got for it was clean work.

If it came to it, I could turn the school over again.

I wasn’t afraid.

The Jang Tae-san of the past, the super weak party, no longer existed in this world.

“…”

The board chairman held my eyes for a long moment.

Looking wasn’t going to change anything.

I looked straight back at him and smiled.

“Chief Park!”

“Y-yes! Sir!”

The secretary, who had to have been outside the door with his ears up, answered, startled.

“Get me the principal and the vice principal, now!”

“Y-yes, understood!”

At the board chairman’s furious bellow, I heard the secretary take off at a run.

The finish had to be done right.

“I’ll leave the finish to you, then.”

I bowed my head deep and went into well-mannered-high-schooler mode.

There was only one thing I wanted.

That the dog-food lunches at every school in the country come piled with meat. That, and nothing else.

What I really wanted could not have been plainer.

“Boss, should I bury him?”

“You can handle it quietly, with nothing coming back on me?”

“Of course. Burying one high schooler is nothing at all. There are punks dying to get into the organization. All I have to do is mention it to the ones who would be handled as juveniles. At that age they’ve all got tempers on them, right? If you cover our backs, Boss, it’s easy.”

“Then bury him. I’ll give you two big ones.”

“Ah, Boss. Thank you kindly!”

In a private back room at a drinking house, Hong Jang-hyeok was talking with a man covered in tattoos.

He was the boss of the Yeokjeon Gang, which ran the city.

To practice law in the city you had to manage not just the people in power but the mobsters too.

In a tangle of connections like that, one wrong step could get you hurt.

And Hong Jang-hyeok and the boss of the Yeokjeon Gang had grown into an older-brother, younger-brother relationship.

He had taken on nearly every case the gang’s members picked up.

It was the crocodile and the plover. (TL Note: 악어와 악어새 — the crocodile and the bird that picks its teeth clean; a Korean image for two parties who feed off each other and cannot do without each other.)

And today Hong Jang-hyeok had bared the teeth he had been holding back.

Money was not the issue.

Every credential and every connection he had built up for a run at the National Assembly had been cut.

What his son had done would follow him like a tag for the rest of his life.

What he had left now was money and spite.

Jang Tae-san. I am going to kill you. Without fail.

Hong Jang-hyeok, throwing back the harsh whiskey in one swallow.

He ground his teeth good and hard, thinking of the high-school punk who had ruined him and his son.

(End of Chapter 21)