Direct overseas stock investment by individuals is banned inside Korea.

Under various laws such as the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act, direct trading was impossible.

Trading was only possible through a brokerage.

High commissions, and taxes on top of them.

Worse than that, I didn’t like the fact that a thieving power had my money’s movements mapped out.

They are certainly watching me right now, while I rake it in.

The Financial Supervisory Service is not stupid.

I hated the filthy political power that steers the civil servants.

Now, this year, a swindler who spouts nonsense about building a great waterway straight through this land of golden rivers and mountains becomes president.

Blinded by the property frenzy, the Republic of Korea chooses him as president.

In return, he shakes out and eats the people’s blood-taxes down to the last coin.

But this too is a fact only I know, which is a shame.

I wanted to be free of that whole chain.

For that I needed an overseas corporation and accounts.

And…

“Don’t worry. Buying up overseas corporations that exist in name only is the fastest way. A few in Central and South America and Costa Rica are enough. There’ll be some commission, but there is no better way than this.”

“Secrecy will be guaranteed, I take it?”

“Of course. It isn’t as if I do this business once or twice; it’s a method plenty of companies in every country use regularly. Corporate acquisition and merger is a normal transaction that has always existed. You pass the accounts through a corporation in a tax shelter region like Hong Kong, then on to corporations in what they call the tax paradises — the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands. And the final profits that arise, you transfer to a Swiss account.”

I met a professional operator.

A corporation broker, born in the shade and avoiding the sunlight.

The man called Yang Cheng, born on the Hong Kong mainland, answered briskly.

My schedule in Hong Kong was busy.

The HSBC bank approved a two-hundred-million-dollar loan.

Two hundred million dollars landed in my corporation’s account with a bang.

The interest rate was set at twenty-one percent.

They wore me down to get one percent more.

I signed coolly for the penny-pinchers and walked out.

That one percent isn’t the problem.

April 2007.

An event that announces the starting point of a global financial upheaval is about to break.

At that opening match I had to be an invisible starter.

“How much does one Hong Kong corporation cost? It has to be an investment corporation capable of financial investment or corporate acquisition and merger.”

“You have only to choose. Would five be enough?”

“Good. I’ll buy all of them.”

“Thank you!”

I have my own corporation, but I needed others too.

I wanted money transactions so complicated that nobody could catch on.

I worked in secret.

I looked into it through several routes.

I decided on the surest method, taking over ready-made corporations.

“You’ll have tax paradise corporations and accounts too, I assume?”

“Of course. There are plenty of piping-hot new corporations. They have a certain amount of corporate trading behind them too, so they won’t draw suspicion.”

Companies and individuals wanting slush funds were everywhere and plentiful.

Wherever demand exists, middlemen exist.

“To open a Swiss numbered account, do I have to go in person?”

“Yes. A Swiss numbered account guarantees secrecy above all else, so you have to go yourself. It’s good to run the funds through Liechtenstein once on the way. That route is the best there is for safety. Even if a tax investigation comes out of any country, put excuses here and there and they’ll be in litigation for years.”

His know-how was remarkable.

A Swiss numbered account is one of the secret accounts identified by a number rather than the depositor’s name.

Yang Cheng was as kind to me as he would be showing the route to a rich Chinese client.

“Five paradise corporations and accounts too, please.”

“Give me a few days and I’ll take care of it.”

“How much should I pay?”

“A hundred thousand US dollars per corporation. One million in total, but… I’ll do it for eight hundred thousand.”

A man who knows how to do business.

Even at a glance it’s a trade with over fifty percent left in it.

“Good. I’ll give you three hundred thousand in cash as a starting fee. The rest I’ll pay as soon as it’s completed.”

“Oh! A big man, as I thought!”

Even spending freely, I had money left over.

I didn’t idle while I was in Hong Kong.

Two hundred million dollars in hand.

At the January 2007 exchange rate the dollar moved between nine hundred and a thousand won.

At the time, Korea was in an uproar that the high exchange rate would wreck the national economy.

With roughly two hundred billion won, I opened a US brokerage account.

Once I was the representative of a corporation with capital to spare, opening the account was easy.

Unfortunately, my study of American stocks was stored only from after the April 2007 mortgage crisis broke.

Instead, all the futures indices remained in my head.

Crude oil, flying up into the sky, was my prey in particular.

From the end of 2006 OPEC cut output, and on February 1, 2007 they cut another five hundred thousand barrels a day. Right now is exactly the moment. The price now is fifty-seven dollars… it swings once, then on July 3, 2008 it prints a hundred and forty-five dollars and goes straight down to the floor after that. Every raw material does~.

I had something to feed on for a long investment.

Prey lay everywhere, singing catch me and eat me from every direction.

April 2 is a hot party day on the American market.

A delicious one was waiting for me with its belly bared.

Just thinking about it made my mouth water.

Until then I intend to grow the assets in safe futures.

In a rising market, futures long positions alone made enormous returns possible.

Add buying calls and selling puts to that and it’s the perfect divine move.

Since I know the changes ahead, I can throw myself boldly into rollover investment too.

The investment that was dangerous only for me was the safest.

There was no butterfly effect yet.

The ripple from the neighborhood cleanup project back home was small.

The money I had earned on the market didn’t disturb any company, any country, or the flow of the world.

“Here you are.”

I had drawn the cash knowing it would come to this.

Three hundred thousand dollars was thirty bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

It had to be a discreet transaction.

A funds transfer can leave a record.

“The records of the corporations I take over can be deleted immediately, correct? I’ll handle the management from then on.”

“Of course. The moment the transfer is made, we destroy every record and document.”

“Understood. Good luck with it, then.”

“Thank you, big man!”

“Let me know the documents you need by text. I’ll fax them to you.”

We exchanged warm greetings and I came out.

I walked faster.

Before I knew it, it was around quitting time.

It was time for my date with her in Hong Kong.

One day without seeing her and I miss her.

I want to see that clear smile with her even teeth showing.

The scent of enchantment that only a mature adult woman can give off, different from young schoolgirls.

Today too I wanted to be sweetly drunk on it.

It’s the side effect of a man with a high schooler’s body and the mental age of a man in his thirties.

I took a taxi.

“Where can I take you?”

“In front of Tsim Sha Tsui station, please.”

“Are you from Hong Kong?”

“No. I’m Korean.”

“Really? Then why is your Cantonese so natural?”

That’s the power of special tutoring~.

Cantonese carries about twice the tones of standard Chinese with its four.

It’s a rough language, particular to the coast.

Without my meaning it to, Cantonese came out naturally at the Hong Kong taxi driver’s words.

“Somebody I know taught me Cantonese.”

“Did they? You have a truly fine person for an acquaintance. Cantonese is a language that grows on you the more you use it. Heh heh.”

Cantonese, which feels much like the Busan dialect.

I talked cheerfully with the taxi driver on the way to Tsim Sha Tsui.

He grumbled that so many mainland Chinese had come over that house prices had risen and life was hard.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell him prices would roughly double from here.

I didn’t want to break his hope.

Worldwide low interest rates are polluting the world by degrees.

A toast of interest rates, held down for a good ten years and more, that will blow all at once.

For now it was no more than a dormant volcano, boiling up slowly over a long time.

“It’s raining…”

Winter rain came down on Hong Kong.

Clara pulled her feet back a little from the cold rain.

It’s a subtropical climate with no snow, so it rained, but in winter the air was bitterly cold.

Clara, off work, waited for a man.

The secretariat staff were murmuring about that man’s identity.

The rumor that an unidentified Korean man had concluded an investment contract with the director had flowed everywhere.

The exact content is secret.

She had accompanied him for several days.

The company had instructed that he be attended to specially, so she took the guide’s role.

He was a thoroughly enjoyable man.

Wherever he went he took it all in and enjoyed himself thoroughly.

Through Clara he went around conquering every good restaurant in Hong Kong.

He was dependable, but he was certainly younger than she was.

And yet his way of speaking was courteous beyond his age, and his knowledge was wide.

His language ability was outstanding too.

He gave directions to foreigners lost on the street in their own languages.

In a few days he knew all the roads, as if he had become a Hong Kong resident.

He’s a man with kindness soaked into him, a man with the basics.

Clara tasted the feeling of spending a vacation with a boyfriend.

Laughing and chatting with him, the stress she’d been under lately seemed to have all blown away.

He did steal glances at her legs now and then when she wore a miniskirt, but never openly.

If anything, the way his face reddened looked innocent.

Today he had been away, handling company business.

She works in the secretariat, but she doubles on financial investment work too.

She missed him from time to time.

Just thinking about that man, a smile bloomed at the corner of her mouth on its own.

Clara, twenty-six years old this year.

She was from Hong Kong, but she came out of business administration at the University of Chicago in America.

She learned a great deal from the Chicago School, which argues for neoliberalism.

She finished her master’s course there and joined the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank.

She has had a few experiences of romance in her life.

There was even an incident where men brawled over Clara.

Pressed by her master’s course and her work, she hadn’t dated in three years, but lately her heart had started to flutter again.

The man’s eyes were clear.

Now and then his gaze went blank and drifted somewhere else, and something like the traces of years came through in it.

A man who was young and also not young.

She had made a dinner appointment with him.

And then it rained.

A few drops fell on her coat.

She raised her head and looked at the sky.

Because of the fine dust blowing off the continent, Hong Kong’s sky was often unclear too.

It had changed a great deal since she was a child.

After the merger with China, the liberalism that had settled in Hong Kong was fading.

House prices rose and there were many restrictions on how you could act.

Bit by bit, Hong Kong was losing its past glory.

But for this moment of falling rain, the air seeping into her nose was fresh.

The smell of Hong Kong’s winter rain, tasted for the first time in a long while, was good.

In the blowing wind, the smell of the sea was mixed with the rain.

“I don’t think there’s any healing music that eases mind and body like the sound of rain in the late afternoon.”

The man she was waiting for came and stood beside her and said it.

His low but clear baritone was good to hear.

“Yes… I especially loved the sound of rain falling on the sea.”

Clara, who had lived in Hong Kong, loved the sound of rain on the sea in particular.

When she felt stifled she took her bicycle out to the shore.

“Would you have any interest in enjoying a fine dinner somewhere quiet, where you can see the sea in the rain?”

The man’s speech was courteous and there was a smile at his mouth.

“I’ll look forward to it, Daniel.”

Clara had disliked noisy parties from the start.

Under her French mother’s influence, she liked a soft, unhurried dinner.

Clara readily agreed to the man’s suggestion.

Friday evening, quitting time, in the rain.

On this day of all days every office worker let go of the string of tension and desperately wanted good food and a glass of something.

Tonight she wanted to soak her whole body in red wine.

It was dangerous, and she had a hot presentiment.

Clara turned her head and looked at the man.

He was smiling and looking at her with a gaze both warm and hot.

Heat rose in her body.

“Shall we go?”

The man held out his arm.

There was one umbrella in the man’s hand.

Clara linked her arm through his.

The arm was hard.

Then, naturally, the man’s arm took Clara’s slender waist, lightly.

She caught a good scent off him.

A pheromone scent full of powerful temptation.

Clara’s blood began to answer, hot.

An instinct she had forgotten.

Tonight looked like it would be a night without sleep.

Clara’s body pressed closer against the man’s strong arm.

Tap, tap, tap.

Thick raindrops bounced off the umbrella.

The two of them said nothing.

Hot and slow, they walked the rainy night streets of Hong Kong.

(End of Chapter 39)