Coming out of the meeting room, Mun-jong looked at Seong-ho and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Brother.”
Seong-ho glanced around a moment. Confirming that some distance had opened up from the other siblings, he said in a low voice, “Whatever you’d said, you were in a position where you’d inevitably fall out of the chairman’s favor.”
“No — if anything, had I brought back the proper right answer, I might have earned praise greater than what you got.”
Mun-jong looked at him with suspicion. “Don’t tell me you kept it from me because you’ve got some other scheme.”
Watching Mun-jong’s suspicious streak start to flare, Seong-ho shook his head. “Brother. I’m a Kim.”
“Exactly!”
Mun-jong grabbed Seong-ho by the collar and growled. “Exactly — so don’t get any funny ideas. If you knew what to say to Father, you should have told me. Not gone and said it to Father yourself!”
He yanked the gripped collar toward himself. “If you hadn’t fed me that strange talk in the first place, I’d have opposed what Sang-jong was pushing — and then today’s praise would’ve gone to me, not you.”
“Brother. Isn’t that already water under the bridge?”
“Water under the bridge to you, maybe. Not to me yet.”
Forgetting they were still right outside the meeting room, where Tak-hyeon might hear, Mun-jong pressed harder.
Gyeong-eun, who’d gone ahead, found it strange that Seong-ho wasn’t following and looked back — and, spotting him caught in Mun-jong’s grip, cried out in shock. “Brother! What are you doing right now!”
She wedged her body between the two of them, trying to pry them apart. “Let go! Let go of him! If you don’t, I’ll tell Dad this instant!”
At Gyeong-eun’s threat to run into the meeting room and tell Tak-hyeon if he didn’t release his grip, Mun-jong finally loosened his hand.
Seong-ho rubbed his throbbing throat once and said, “As it happens, the chairman told me separately to support you well, Brother.”
“And yet you don’t listen?”
Gesturing to the heartbroken Gyeong-eun — pained at the mark on his neck — that he was all right, Seong-ho said to Mun-jong, “As I said a moment ago, whatever you’d said, you couldn’t have avoided a scolding. Even if you’d said exactly what I said.”
“You’re telling me I’d have been scolded even saying the very same thing you did?”
“Yes. He’d have asked why a man who knows so well raised the investment from the 100 billion originally budgeted all the way to 300 billion.”
At that, Mun-jong lost his words. Because the Tak-hyeon he knew would surely say exactly that.
Seong-ho gave Mun-jong’s back a light push to get him walking forward, and said in a low voice, “Endure it for now, however angry you are. I took a scolding too — for not stopping you when you raised the investment to 300 billion.”
At that, Mun-jong looked at Seong-ho’s face beside him with surprise.
Meeting the gaze that asked whether it was true, Seong-ho nodded. “Yes. The chairman knew everything. And he’d already prepared how to respond, given the orders to the secretariat, and then gathered us. He didn’t set it up expecting you and second brother to bring some brilliant scheme.”
“…He just wanted to vent his anger.”
Mun-jong nodded, a look of finally understanding on his face.
Seong-ho gestured for Gyeong-eun to keep a little distance and follow, and said to Mun-jong in a low voice, “I’m on your side, Brother. Don’t forget it.”
His heart softened, Mun-jong looked at Seong-ho with an apologetic expression, unlike at the start. “I’m sorry about that. You told me from the beginning you were on my side.”
“Why would I make things hard for you, or try to earn praise from the chairman on my own account? I was nothing more than the chairman’s loudspeaker.”
“You only said what Father wanted to say, in his place?”
“Yes.”
Mun-jong gazed at Seong-ho’s face with a look asking whether that was true.
Meeting his gaze, Seong-ho thought to himself, It’s not a lie — but you’ll interpret it another way.
The one who spoke Tak-hyeon’s wishes in his place.
Just as Seong-ho intended, Mun-jong interpreted it differently.
Father told him to say that at today’s gathering?
It didn’t occur to Mun-jong that Seong-ho had read Tak-hyeon’s mind and said it himself. The Tak-hyeon he knew wasn’t a man to reveal his thoughts to others, and he didn’t think Seong-ho had the ability to do such a thing anyway.
No wonder. I thought the way they traded words in perfect step and he even clapped his hands…
Looking back now, Mun-jong figured they couldn’t have been so perfectly in sync unless it had been arranged in advance.
Watching Mun-jong’s doubt seem to clear at last, Seong-ho smiled inwardly and thought, Now he’ll serve as my shield of his own accord, won’t he?
Who Sang-jong, seething, would attack first was obvious. The only person in the Ilhyeon house it was safe to touch was Seong-ho himself, so he knew very well an attack would come. That was why he’d spoken up — to set Mun-jong as his shield.
As far as Mun-jong was concerned, thinking Seong-ho was moving as Tak-hyeon’s loudspeaker, having such a man relay Tak-hyeon’s intentions to him would be a great help in what lay ahead — so he’d take Seong-ho’s side.
Mun-jong laid a hand on Seong-ho’s shoulder. “Forget today’s business. I’ll look after you well from now on, so don’t worry about a thing, Kim.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Bowing his head slightly, Seong-ho watched Mun-jong’s back as he walked ahead and said inwardly, That’s right. A fight suits two.
Sang-jong, out to attack Seong-ho, and Mun-jong, out to protect him. The actual party in question — Seong-ho — smiled without a word at the thought of stepping back and watching the two of them fight.
Bang!
At the sight of Sang-jong coming in and slamming the door as if to break it, his wife Min-yeong Oh asked with a thoroughly tense face, “Why? What happened?”
“Why is it me they’re all itching to devour!”
“Who is?”
“Who else!” Stopping in the living room, Sang-jong shouted as he yanked his tie loose. “Every last person in this family is dying to eat me alive!”
Min-yeong knitted her brows. “Did something happen?”
To Min-yeong, carefully asking for the whole story, Sang-jong gave a brief account of the day’s events.
Hearing it, Min-yeong said in an irritated voice, as if she’d known it would come to this. “What did I tell you? I said it’d be like this, didn’t I? Father isn’t keeping the youngest miss’s household close for nothing. And frankly, what did the youngest son-in-law do so well that the youngest miss gets the hotel? They’re all things received as payment for playing Father’s puppet.”
“I really can’t leave him be in that house.”
“That’s why I said we should have put them out ages ago.” Min-yeong stamped her feet, insisting she’d been right. “I thought something smelled off. Think about it. From the moment Father tied the youngest miss to some nobody off the street, he had this very situation in mind — using a Nonsan bumpkin to pressure you and your brother.”
“I think the same.”
Sang-jong had thought it strange from the start. That a man who’d hauled snack bags at Ilhyeon Distribution suddenly not only normalized a collapsing company through restructuring but made it turn a huge profit in one stroke — that alone felt fishy.
“Father set it all up, and that Nonsan bumpkin just danced out front.”
“Exactly. No matter what got into him, there’s no way a person changes that suddenly and posts results like that.”
“With him in Pyeongchang-dong, Father will keep pushing him out front to torment me — I can’t leave it that way. I’ve got to put him out.”
Sang-jong nodded, seeming to have made up his mind completely. Just as Seong-ho had anticipated, he was moving to pick a fight first with the most manageable target in the Ilhyeon house.
His mind set, Sang-jong turned his head and began looking for something.
Watching him, Min-yeong was seized with unease. “What are you doing? Don’t tell me — no?”
“Jun-myeong and Dong-myeong are both home, aren’t they?”
“Dear!”
At the sight of Sang-jong looking for his sons, Min-yeong cried out in alarm. She blocked his path and shook her head. “No! Why are you taking your temper out on the children again!”
“What? Move aside!”
Shoving the blocking Min-yeong down, Sang-jong opened the golf bag standing in a corner of the living room.
Min-yeong scrambled up and threw herself at him. “If you do that again, I won’t stand for it!”
“Oh yeah? So today you want to go first, is that it?”
“Dear!”
Sang-jong pulled a 5-iron from the golf bag. When the club came out, Min-yeong shut her eyes tight. Sang-jong snorted at the sight of her and swung the club at her thigh.
“Agh!”
Struck on the thigh, Min-yeong sank straight to the floor.
Passing the weeping Min-yeong, Sang-jong walked toward the room where the children were, calling for them. “Jun-myeong! Dong-myeong! Daddy’s in a bit of a bad mood.”
Weeping, Min-yeong clutched her barely working leg and tried to stop him. But Sang-jong had already gone into the children’s room…
For some while, Min-yeong’s sobs and the children’s screams carried on in Sang-jong’s house.
[Dubo Steel Insolvent]
The front pages of every daily newspaper were blanketed with the Dubo Steel story.
The bad debt of Dubo Steel — core affiliate of the 14th-ranked Dubo Group — was said to reach 5.7 trillion, worse than had been known. And even that was a creditors’ estimate, not Dubo Steel’s own announcement, with reports adding that the actual scale of the bad debt couldn’t even be gauged. This snowballing bad debt, it was said, had a strong chance of spreading beyond Dubo Steel to the whole of the Dubo Group.
People couldn’t understand how a single company could generate bad debt exceeding 5 trillion. A bad-debt scale not several times its own size but dozens of times over was impossible to produce through any normal process.
Simultaneously with the insolvency announcement, the government moved swiftly. It convened the more than fifty creditors to confirm the scale of debt and filed for bankruptcy protection with the court, straining to keep the situation from spreading like dominoes.
Gyeong-eun speared an apple with a fork and held it out to Seong-ho, asking him about the Dubo Steel coverage on the screen. “Anyway, the government’s promised to support the subcontractors, so this should keep it from spreading, right?”
“We’d have to hope so.”
Gyeong-eun gazed at his face — answering not yes or no but hope. Because the answer, unlike his usual clear-cut ones, gave her an unease that this might not end easily.
Just then the intercom in the room where they stayed rang.
Beep— beep—
“Yes.”
Lifting the intercom to her ear, Gyeong-eun listened a moment without a word, said she understood, and hung up.
“What is it?”
“Dad says he’d like to talk with you a while, and to come down.”
Cocking her head since the intercom first rang, Gyeong-eun pointed at it. “It’s never once rung before.”
Looking at it, she turned to Seong-ho. “The staff always come find us in person, so I’d forgotten we even use it… And on top of that, Dad — who never in his life consults anyone about anything — saying first that he wants to talk with you… Seong-ho. Do you have any guess what it might be about?”
At her words, Seong-ho rose. Glancing at the TV, where the Dubo Steel news had ended and a story about how the dramas these days were too vulgar was now playing, he said, “I have a rough idea, yes.”
(End of Chapter 67)