“Who is Tae-ung-gun’s grandfather?”

The family dinner had come to an end.

There are eyes on a family like this one, so all of them had moved to the Seongbuk-dong house and taken the meal there.

The rest of them have gone back to their own houses.

Lee Seokpil, the eldest, had come quietly to the study to ask it.

He has lived in the same house as his father since his marriage.

“Tsk, tsk.”

Chairman Lee Dojung gave him a look of despair in place of an answer.

“……”

Who on earth…… is he?

However he turned it over, Lee Seokpil could not easily arrive at it.

Ha Tae-ung’s grandfather, whom his father appears to know for certain.

He ran through one group and another, and no house would connect.

Naturally, arriving at one particular man off the surname Ha alone is not difficult.

But this is a young man with no connection to that quarter at all.

The youngest of Haryun Group, as the press has him, is a university student.

“Have you still not placed Ha Tae-ung?”

“No, Father……”

“A young man carrying the surname Ha. If a boy has been brought up in a household as well as that one has, what sort of house would it be?”

“Father. Surely you don’t have Chairman Ha Cheolgon in mind? But the youngest grandson of that house is a university student. Ha Tae-ung is certainly not of Chairman Ha’s direct line.”

Lee Seokpil keeps a fair grasp of how things turn in the political world.

He is not fool enough to believe a thing with his eyes shut.

“Is that so?”

“I had the secretariat look into it, just in case.”

“Hmm……”

A short sound came out of the chairman, and he fell silent on it.

Ha Tae-ung, who had stood in front of him without one rough corner to him, and squarely at that.

No. There is no mistaking it. He is Chairman Ha Cheolgon’s blood.

Lee Dojung’s cold sense of things was certain of it.

Beneath a father who is a tiger there can be no son who is a dog.

The command the boy let show without meaning to, and the restraint in everything he did, displayed the Ha family’s blood plainly enough.

“There will be something hidden behind it.”

“Behind it?”

In its grip on the press, the Haryun house has long stood at a level nobody would dare imitate.

What gets out about the members of the family is controlled thoroughly, at group level.

Apart from the sons who sit at president level now, nothing about the grandchildren can be found on any portal site either.

Such personal information as exists runs to the eldest grandson, who joined the group, and no further.

“Don’t try to dig deep. When the time comes you’ll know all of it.”

Chairman Lee Dojung was quietly looking forward to going on meeting him.

He took it for a bond that would not end at once.

There is an unseen order to things that only Lee Dojung feels.

Meeting Ha Tae-ung was tied in a bond heaven had settled. Of that he was sure.

Which must be why the benefactors who gave the group its footing in the early days had come back to him.

It felt to him like standing in the same natural current he had stood in then.

There is no possibility whatever that Ha Tae-ung came at him by design.

This is the kind of necessity that chance leads by the hand and makes.

The friend of a granddaughter who keeps nobody beside her.

That they are in the same class is a surprise, and so is a meeting at a golf course halfway house, which is not a common thing.

Two or three things falling together at a single point is exceedingly rare.

“I understand.”

Lee Seokpil answered his father’s instruction shortly.

He may not dig into Ha Tae-ung’s background himself, but there is no chance his brothers will sit still.

There was no need to put his father out of humour here and now.

“That aside…… you need guarantees to raise the PF money going into the flat redevelopment?”

Of the three sons, Chairman Lee Dojung has generally put his weight behind the eldest.

The eldest, who has charge of Oyang Construction, the choice asset of the group.

Government agency work is the core of it, but lately they have gone into building flats as well.

The trouble is that the PF market has been contracting of late.

“So long as the units sell there’s no problem at all. And with rates high the other affiliates stand to profit too.”

The press is building the opinion that there is a bubble on it.

But in this country there is still no business to set beside speculating in property.

Win the tender from LH, put up a decent block of flats, and the net profit that falls out of it alone runs past thirty per cent.

The one problem, if it is a problem, is that a certain amount of money goes in up front.

Lately one or two construction firms have overreached themselves in expanding and something has gone off.

And it is true that the PF market took a hit in the aftermath.

Oyang Group’s finances are solid, and if the affiliates simply guarantee the PF raising, the thing will go through without strain.

“Quite. For the time being there is nothing above the land trade.”

Lee Dojung has never quite been able to shake a regret he keeps returning to.

There were several chances in the past to grow the group.

Chances to build bulk through early investment in construction, and through acquisition.

And each time he had cut the teaching of the elder before him into himself, and put the appetite down.

Thought about now, they were chances it is impossible not to grieve over.

There is no time left for hesitating or hanging back.

“I’ll take that as permission and push it forward.”

“Do that.”

“Thank you, Father.”

Lee Seokpil trusts deeply in a father who trusts him.

The years being what they are, the separation of the affiliates is being pushed forward by degrees.

The bulk has to be grown so that his brothers’ shares can be cut out of it as well.

None of them will have much complaint, but Lee Seokjong, the youngest, sits on Lee Seokpil’s mind.

It is no more than rumour yet, but word has been going quietly about that he is eyeing the eldest’s seat.

The youngest has had an unusual appetite in him since he was small.

Until the separation is safely finished, all he wants is for his father to come to no harm.

Beep.

A touch of the one-pass key and the door opened.

It has been a full day, and a satisfying one.

My first time out on a field, and the round meant something.

I had my first time properly.

The fellow professionals who designed the round to get at Pro An Hyeonju took one on the chin.

Running into Lee Hyoju’s family by chance was more surprising still.

And her ill-bred cousins got a proper wiping while I was at it.

Oyang Group will be a great help to me going forward.

Thanks to Lee Hyoju I came to know Chairman Lee Dojung without forcing anything.

A large harvest, brought home to my house.

“Oh!”

Stepping into the entrance, there was a faint, clean scent.

Mixed into the air, and natural with it.

“Neat.”

A pale blue mat has been laid at the door.

Outdoor slippers and indoor slippers, set out in a row.

Shff.

I opened the shoe cupboard.

“She has taste. As I thought.”

Several pairs of shoes and trainers, arranged.

A range of them, prepared so there is something to put on with jeans, with a tracksuit, with a suit.

I put the slippers on and went in.

I had dropped Pro An Hyeonju near her house and come the whole way home to the Signiel.

Through the window Seoul’s night spread out in a panorama.

“She’s put in automatic curtains.”

The living room had nothing in it at all when I left the house.

A large six-seater couch stands in it now.

Curtains in a blue, slightly heavy, with a blackout to them, and the modern couch sat well against them.

The overall tone of the place is light and full of life.

“Wine as well?”

The wine cellar, which was empty, has been filled.

Champagne, reds, whites, all sorts of it.

She is a person with taste, as I said.

“…… And the kitchen set is to my liking.”

The kitchen things are set for four as a base.

Plates and mugs and the rest laid out in the cupboard.

The frying pans, and every small implement down from them, are all designer.

Ranks of designer tableware, some of which I don’t even recognise.

Set against the level I lived at in a rooftop room, it is thoroughly luxurious.

Footsteps. Steady ones.

I headed for the bedroom.

The door half open.

“……!!”

Through the gap, a king-sized bed.

Made up in an ivory bedding set that looks light and warm.

“Even the toiletries…… Perfect.”

On a dresser to one side, expensive men’s toiletries standing in a row.

I didn’t put a single thing there myself, and I am satisfied with all of it.

A house set up perfectly inside half a day.

Yu Areum, shopper at Hyundo Department Store, has staged it to sit as comfortably as a space I had been living in from the start.

My hands came together of their own accord at the taste of it, and the eye.

The cost does not worry me.

A billion won a day is piling up.

Pop!

I took a bottle of champagne out of the cellar and opened it.

A sharp fizz, and a sweet scent came up quietly along with it.

I filled a glass and stood at the window.

The centre of Seoul, a city with no night in it, looked like something else.

Now that there is room to breathe, the city comes at you more beautifully by night than by day.

The hour when every appetite a human being has opens its eyes.

And out of that beautiful night, Haryun Group’s tower comes into the eye more sharply than anything else.

“Grandfather. Are you well today, too.”

This moment, which nobody in the Ha family could imagine.

I am here, with them below me, looking down.

“I met the chairman of Oyang Group today. Look forward to it. It’s a very good bond — the sort that will have you clutching the back of your neck.”

The bond made today is not a light one.

I saw a clear golden aura off Chairman Lee Dojung.

It set plainly against the third son, who carried a deep grey.

The eldest, and the second, who is Lee Hyoju’s father, were not badly coloured either.

I hadn’t intended the occasion, but a bond that comes in its season has to be ridden at the right rhythm.

I put the years of working life to use and spread out the whole art of entertaining.

How deep a bond goes depends on what I do with it.

I began fitting the entertaining skills on back in my service.

An ordinary conscript in the Special Forces branch was not a common thing.

The teams were made up of officers and non-commissioned officers.

One or two ordinary conscripts to a team like that, and no more.

The skill was built handling them, with a reading of a room at the hundredth dan.

Once I joined the company, surviving took the same thing.

I went into a project at the level of grinding my soul into it to make it succeed.

To bring an engineering professor round, once, I went so far as to get hold of the thing his son wanted and have it delivered as a birthday present.

The entertaining skills, picked up from every direction, saw daylight on the field today.

“Doa Ilbo……”

Doa Ilbo, tied to Oyang Group by blood.

The power of a national daily with close to a hundred years behind it is not to be disregarded.

And Doa Ilbo owns a general-programming channel besides.

When the battle with Haryun Group comes, it will be a great help.

“A step a day…… and I will come up to you, Grandfather.”

The Ha family as they lodged in a child’s eye and never wore away.

The people who drove the three of us into a wretched life and in the end had my father killed.

Swallow.

I drank the cold champagne.

A glass raised to what is coming……

I emptied it in one.

(End of Chapter 46)