"Who in God's name have you been marked by?"

"Sorry?"

"You're properly wound up in it……."

"Sunbae-nim, save me! Just get me out and I'll repay the kindness properly!"

The holding cells at Sokcho police station.

Against the hearing on the detention warrant, set for late in the afternoon, Yang Susan had retained an attorney.

It is Gi Dongchan, out of Yeonguk University's law faculty, retired as head of the criminal division of the Gangneung branch prosecutors.

The two are men who have kept close, the one serving the other as a sunbae.

Yang Susan pleaded with his sunbae Gi Dongchan.

Gi Dongchan's head has gone barer over the last few years.

With only a few strands of hair left, he is bald and makes no secret of it.

He is an ordinary middle-aged man of about a hundred and seventy centimetres, made to look slow by abdominal obesity.

He has a great deal of heat in him, so the muscles of his face sit unevenly and the grease runs on it in a sheen.

The look in the eyes beyond the unusually glittering gold-rimmed spectacles is far from just.

A Gangwon Province man, an attorney out of the courts, retired as a branch division head at Gangneung.

In that region he is called the Jo and Jang of the criminal bar.

An ordinary sort of case has its sentence cut sharply by one massage from Gi Dongchan.

He is the operator who, a year ago in Sokcho, got the son of an influential house — a man who had killed a couple outright driving drunk — out of the high court with a suspended sentence.

The man had already lost his licence for drink-driving once before, and even so Gi Dongchan turned three years at first instance into a suspended sentence on appeal.

The victims' side raged, but in the end it went up to the Supreme Court and came back confirmed.

That is how far Gi Dongchan's ability, taken on its own, is worth acknowledging.

There is a reason his nickname is Gi Ddongchan.

And this time Attorney…