“If you’re going to talk filth, get out! This minute!!”

Han Jiyun’s face set hard and she shouted it at him.

He is a mad old man who has done nothing but stuff years into himself.

Red eyes looking at her, cloudy and yellow, with something greasy laid over them.

Han Jiyun is plainly a married woman, with a husband and a grown son.

He had been an odd old man from the day of the lease.

But lately he had come round to the flower shop far more often.

He owned the building and she could not brush him off, so she let the nonsense go by — make me a coffee, is anything giving you trouble, we should have a drink some time.

She bore it when he laid out remarks with a bad feel to them.

But today he made a move that went past every line.

He came in warm with drink on top of it and made the play openly.

The old man did not trouble to hide the sly look on him, and laid out one insulting phrase after another.

Her husband is away on business in Busan and will not be back before tomorrow.

A flower shop up a back alley, and the fear stood right up in Han Jiyun.

Even so, she cannot just stand there.

The flower shop she had started in the hope it would help the household along.

He knows those circumstances, and made his move on the strength of them.

“Get out, is it? This building is mine! If anybody’s getting out, it’s you!!”

The old man’s eyes had turned over too.

A scene, in a shop that is open for business.

He’s mad!!

The building’s owner, staring hard at Han Jiyun out of eyes burning red.

Han Jiyun flinched back a step in fear.

“G-get out. I’ll report you!”

“Heh heh. Do as you like. Who do you think I am~ Anybody on the Sokcho patch who doesn’t know Kang Deuksu is a spy!”

The old man came on without budging at the warning and threw it back louder still.

This was not like the other times. The feel of it was wrong.

It was dangerous.

Kang Deuksu has an old body with a big frame on it, money behind that, and no joke of a presence about him at the best of times.

And on top of that he is a man of standing in the district.

Even if the police turned out this minute, the odds were good it would all be let go into nothing.

A faint tremor.

Driven into the corner, Han Jiyun faced the great bulk of the old man and shook.

“Heh heh heh heh…….”

A sly smile hung at the creased corner of Kang Deuksu’s mouth.

By the way he did it, this was certainly a habit worn into his body.

Han Jiyun, a married woman, reduced to the shape of a bird shut in a cage.

To Kang Deuksu, steeped in an old man’s greed, she was nothing but prey with no strength in it.

And just then.

Ding.

The wind chime fixed to the door rang clear.

And.

Both heads, set against each other, turned toward the door at once.

A flower shop up an alley late in the evening, sunk in the dark and hard to make out at all.

For neighbours there is nothing but a row of empty units, and at this hour in particular nobody comes.

And yet, at this time of night, a customer…….

“Mom! I’m here! Your son, Big Bear!!”

“Tae…… ung-a!!”

A— a son?

Kang Deuksu, who owns the building, was badly thrown.

The young customer who had just come through the door was the proprietress’s son, and at the word of it Kang Deuksu did not know where to put himself.

“……!!”

A voice growling like an actual bear, and it raised the skin on him.

Not a heavy build, but a good deal of height.

The young fellow looked slight enough from the outside, and the voice of him pressed on Kang Deuksu without seeming to.

The force in it was such that he had flinched the moment he heard it.

“Tae-ung-a……. Hk.”

Han Jiyun, shut into the corner, burst into tears at her son’s arrival.

Terror driven to its furthest point turned over into relief.

What…… is this little bastard?

Kang Deuksu’s eyes tightened a little and went busily about.

This was the son of Madam Han, his tenant, seen for the first time.

Set beside the young fellow, Kang Deuksu looked short.

Among men of his own years Kang Deuksu has a frame on him.

But Madam Han’s son, planted there in front of him, was tall enough that he had to crank his neck back to look up.

And the young one had his eyes wide and a hard, cutting stare in them.

The backs of Kang Deuksu’s knees went, as though he had come face to face with a beast of prey.

Gulp.

Kang Deuksu swallowed on a dry throat without meaning to, at a look with no fear anywhere in it.

He calls the proprietress Madam Han as a matter of course, and she is a young woman in her late forties, no more.

The same age as Kang Deuksu’s eldest daughter, and he is in his middle seventies.

A daughter is a daughter, and Madam Han had gone straight into his liking from the day of the first contract.

Skin like white jade, and a modest way of speaking.

A slight body that works on a man’s instinct to protect, and a quiet, decent look about her.

In this neighbourhood, where he has lived his whole life a native, that kind of face is hard to come by.

His wife was fierce enough, watching with both eyes wide, so he could not feed his eyes openly.

Kang Deuksu spent the whole of his young life an official of Sokcho City.

A native, he opened the connections up, put himself into one business and another, and took a great deal in bribes.

It was all down to that, the way he swelled the house’s fortunes past anything an official could dream of.

Sokcho developed more slowly than Gangneung, and there was that much less fear of anything becoming a problem.

It began when the armed infiltrators came ashore from the North and Sokcho’s trade was ruined in a moment.

He got the building of an acquaintance he was friendly with into his own hands.

A building he came by very nearly by taking it, working on the circumstances of a man who needed money quickly as the market went bad.

First he said he would put the title into his own name and get him a state support loan at a low rate.

The acquaintance had trusted Kang Deuksu like iron, and only learned afterwards that he had been struck properly across the back of the head.

The false contract, the one he had said was only for form’s sake, had transformed itself into the real one.

Even in those days the weight a local official carried was a very different thing from now.

Nobody readily came forward to stand witness.

The acquaintance could never properly get a hand to it afterwards, and was ill some years with the illness that comes of swallowing rage, and died.

In those days, in any district you like, the power of the officials who ate the state’s rice was overwhelming.

To put it coarsely, it was a time when a grade six section chief in a department that was doing well could pile up wealth enough that two generations would not starve.

A period when nothing at all moved without money passing behind it.

Kang Deuksu was dull and useless, and a genius at flattery.

A case of a man who did very well indeed out of a local cartel bound tight by sunbae and hoobae from school.

He came out of the service without trouble and lives his old age throwing his weight about as a man who owns a building.

The wife who used to watch him with her eyes rolling like a fierce beast is in a care home.

The moment the dementia was diagnosed he had her admitted.

With the watcher gone, Kang Deuksu has sunk himself into the whoring he never finished.

And now at last he has set his aim on the woman who keeps the flower shop in his own building, his own tenant.

A beauty out of Seoul, and rare to see in Sokcho.

He had shown his interest plainly enough, several times, and got nothing back at all.

There is a good-looking husband, but he is often away on business.

He looked into what the man does, and found him going about selling seafood with a partner who has the smell of a swindler on him.

The tenant’s finances had less and less left in them as it went.

He had come today meaning to finish it.

Two months from now the lease is up.

The Sokcho–Yangyang expressway went through and the price of land jumped.

Rents look set to double with it.

The proprietress was having a hard time of it, short of money, the flowers not selling.

Put the fear into her and she would give in quickly, he had thought.

Nearly all of those renting in the five-storey building bowed their heads in front of the man who owned it.

In Sokcho there is nothing Kang Deuksu need be afraid of.

And that man, faced with the proprietress’s son, was shaking.

“Mom.”

The proprietress’s son came over in long strides and put himself across between the two of them.

Han Jiyun felt the whole world go steady under her.

Somewhere along the way her son had grown this big.

Looking at her son’s back, Han Jiyun felt afresh that she had done nothing for him.

Moving to Sokcho with her husband was a thing she had always been sorry to Tae-ung for.

Life in Seoul had been hard and her health was not good.

When they first moved she took work in kitchens and work on the water now and then.

And afterwards the medicine cost more than the work had brought in.

Born and raised in Seoul, she was nothing but a frail middle-aged city woman who knew how to do nothing at all.

Her body being as weak as it was, she had the one son and lived only at home.

By good fortune, with help from somebody she knew, she set up the flower shop.

The position was no good for trade over the counter, so she put her weight on internet orders and delivery.

She had good hands, and made the bouquets prettily, and regulars came, and it earned pocket money at least.

But there was a limit to how far it would stretch to cover her son as well.

A situation in which she could give him no proper help with money.

Her husband’s partner had expanded the business greatly.

The loans came one after another, in her husband’s name as the partner.

Her son had stayed in Seoul and entered a first-rank private high school on the charity-case admission.

Her heart worried at it always, and there was nothing she could do for him as his mother.

She could not even get him a decent room of his own to keep himself in.

The rent, and a small allowance sent up to him, was the whole of it.

That money was what the flower shop brought in.

The old man knows it, and has put the fear on her openly and reached a filthy hand out.

A short body with the belly pushed out in front of it, heavy-looking as a toad: the perfect specimen of the crooked official retired.

There were a few people she knew round about, and that much made it bearable.

And the madam had a tight hold on her husband, so it had all gone by without much trouble.

But in the end the madam went into a care home with dementia, and old Kang Deuksu showed what he was.

He had been going about with his face flushed since the afternoon, and the feel of it had been wrong from then.

Off the heated face came a gust of drink with garlic mixed through it.

The sickness came up in her and she held it down.

Sokcho is where they barely got themselves settled, after a great deal of worrying at it.

Driven out of here there is nowhere they could properly…… go.

At the worst moment of it, without a word beforehand, her dependable son had come.

“Hk. Hh-huuk.”

The grief she had been holding down burst out all at once.

Han Jiyun could not stop the tears once they came.

Her son stood in the place her husband was not in, looking at her out of a hard, steady eye.

She tried to stop them and they would not do as she wanted.

She is the mother, the one who is supposed to protect her son, and instead, now, she is nothing but a woman with no strength in her.

“Y-you! What are you!”

Kang Deuksu, worked up, jabbed a finger at Ha Tae-ung and pressed him as though calling him to account.

One look was enough to say the boy was young, and Kang Deuksu took him for easy.

Kang Deuksu has never yet lost anything by shouting.

Knock the force out of him with one good shout, then slip away quietly. That was the plan.

But Madam Han’s son only looked at him out of eyes that were black through.

“And who might the grandad who’s lost his mind be, then?”

“Whaat? Lost his— his m-mind, gr-grandad??”

The young one was treating him as an old man gone senile, and Kang Deuksu’s eyes turned right over.

Say what you like, he is a big noise in Sokcho.

He is close enough with the mayor of Sokcho to meet him now and again.

And this young one dares!!

“Well, by the way you’re carrying on, you’ve either gone senile or you’re a grandad who’s lost his mind. What, would you rather I called you hyungnim?”

The young one sneered at him with no fear in him anywhere.

A way of speaking with no manners in it, neither respectful nor plainly familiar.

“S-senile? Oi! You green little bastard, do you know who I am!!”

Kang Deuksu, foul-tempered, roared it out.

He had meant to withdraw with some dignity, and the anger came up and showed what he was.

A few years younger and he would have put a fist through his mouth.

But the old body would not follow the temper.

“Who are you, then? Are you the chairman of Ilseong Group or something?”

“I-Ilseong? This fatherless bastard is making sport of his elders! I’m Kang Deuksu! Chairman of the Jungang-dong Merchants’ Association! Kang Deuksu!!”

The association is nothing much, and Kang Deuksu was enormously proud of the title of chairman.

Even members of the National Assembly came, once election season was on, and put expensive presents into his arms.

In the capital region who knows, but out in the provinces the title still works.

And now the son of a tenant proprietress with nothing to her name is putting shame on him.

Kang Deuksu’s eyes went fully over.

“Puhahahahahahahahahaha!”

Ha Tae-ung looked at the sight of him and suddenly broke into a wild laugh.

“T-Tae-ung-a!”

Han Jiyun too was thrown by her son like this.

She felt that the air of it was wrong.

There is grief and anger mixed into the wild laugh that broke so cleanly out of him.

Snap.

Ha Tae-ung’s laughter cut off as though it had been a lie.

A change of feeling in one instant.

“Grandad. I see a little of what’s coming…… and inside this year your house goes down to nothing. Flat, and far enough down that three generations will be out begging!!”

Ha Tae-ung spat the curse out without a moment’s hesitation.

“Shut your mouth! A beggar’s whelp, and where do you think you’re making threats! Get the shop out, now! People who don’t know a kindness when it’s given them don’t get one more day in my premises!!”

Kang Deuksu has years of power-tripping worn into his body.

It was the method he used best.

People with nothing bowed their heads at that one line, near enough every one of them.

He calculated that Han Jiyun, with no way ahead of her to live on, would step in and hold her son back.

He knew well enough how much trouble it would make for that household if the flower shop shut tomorrow.

But.

“Fine. We’ll be out tomorrow.”

“Wh-what did you say?”

“Now you know, so get out! Don’t stand in a flower shop giving off the stink of a corpse. Out, now!!”

“……!!”

(End of Chapter 82)