“All in!”

Shff.

One man takes out every chip he is holding and sets them on the table.

A private room of some thirty square metres.

No clock and no window.

Walls in a deep blue and a few pictures hung on them, and that is all.

Under a low light hung from the ceiling, one woman dealer and six men are sunk in a card game.

The game is Texas hold’em.

They sit round the dealer, and chips are heaped high in the middle of the round table in front of them.

One middle-aged man among them checked the last card and, when his turn came, called all in.

A game that has run a full ten hours.

Tiredness stands plain on every face.

Skin greasy and shining, hair gone limp, and worn-out bodies steeped in the air of a dim room.

Anybody would see the look of ruined men.

And the eyes alone burned bright.

The casino’s official highest chip is the million-won one.

But this is the VIP room.

Unofficially, gold chips of ten million won are used here as well.

Rattlllle.

Some seventy chips the man pushed out toppled over in the middle of the round table.

Seven hundred million won in cash!

He shook out every last thing he had left and went all in.

“Call!”

Another man called.

The last hand caught fire.

Rattle.

Another seven hundred million went on.

With the two men’s all-ins added to what was already laid down, the pot came to two billion in one stroke.

This hand is mine!

The man looked at the chips piled in the middle of the table, not hiding the burn in his eyes.

His name is Yang Susan.

He is the chief carrying on the family business, Pacific Fisheries.

Pacific Fisheries was once a big player with the east coast fishing trade in its grip.

His father Yang Hochung handled great money on pollack and squid and sand lance.

In those days Pacific Fisheries took charge of better than twenty per cent of the east coast catch delivered into the wholesale markets nationwide.

Which is why the eldest son, got in the fullest of the boom, was given the name Susan — the word for the fisheries trade itself.

But after his father Yang Hochung died, Pacific Fisheries began to fall.

The son Yang Susan took up the family business and ate it away by degrees.

The national wholesale share dropped to a single figure and sat down there.

Even the connections that had been bonds in his father Yang Hochung’s day abandoned Yang Susan.

There were some assets his father had swelled, and that much is what has held out until now.

Cold stores scattered here and there across the east coast towns remained.

And now even those are being sold off or pledged, a block or two at a time.

Yang Susan has hated his own name since childhood.

The teasing began as light play among children — that he smelled of raw fish.

He demanded a change of name several times and his father never once allowed it.

Yang Susan has carried a grievance against Yang Hochung since then, and swallowed it down for the sake of the money of a father who ran Pacific Fisheries.

He had a good head, went up to Yeonguk University to read business, and won his father’s confidence.

After graduating he joined his father’s company as a matter of course.

The times had changed enough that the business needed changing with them.

But his father held to the old way and disregarded Yang Susan’s proposals.

He could not persuade a father armed with the theory that a pine caterpillar must eat pine needles, and they kept to the old way.

Then, a few years on, his father Yang Hochung met his death of an acute myocardial infarction.

Yang Susan came suddenly into the choice property for the reason that he was the eldest son.

He expanded several businesses he had not been able to push under his father’s shadow.

The result, of course, was a bust every time.

With the strain at its height, the place he happened to set foot in was the Jeongseon casino.

It was a swamp.

The first stakes were a few million won.

Small money laid for amusement, and he won some and lost some.

And at some point the stakes went past the hundred-million mark.

By then he was already an addict.

The few times he took a whole pot with a great sum laid on it, the dopamine went right up to its top.

After that he became a casino VIP.

Hundreds of millions a month were thrown down in stakes alone.

The company’s business he flung aside.

Yang Susan’s life has come to the point where he all but lives in the casino.

The company’s finances began to lean over visibly.

Now there is no rising from the dead.

Not long before it came to this, he put a friend into a directorship at the company.

A friend of outstanding ability, and an appointment on which he had staked the company’s last hope.

The man, sick to the back teeth of life in Seoul, answered Yang Susan’s call at once.

And all the while Yang Susan, in league with the finance director who is his mistress, went on making free with the company’s money.

What he lacked in gambling money he put a hand out for to his wife’s family, under the name of business capital.

The stakes grew and grew.

A hole once broken in a jar cannot be stopped.

Later his wife learned that Yang Susan gambled and went back to her parents.

It is plain the company will come apart in mid-air before long.

Before that could happen, Yang Susan drew in private lending as well, for one shot.

And this moment today is the all-in for that final contest.

“Chief Yang. Good hand, by the look of it?”

A man who had folded and become a spectator said it from across the table, looking at Yang Susan.

A man still wearing sunglasses in a dark room, so that his eyes cannot be made out.

“You’ll be handing out something for the losers, though?”

Another man, bone-thin and in his early forties, who had folded early in the game, cut in laughing.

Most of them know one another’s faces.

The number of VIPs who come and go at the casino is not large.

Most of them are addicted.

That their own money, which is like blood to them, is melting away into the casino’s cut, they overlooked.

“Don’t worry. I’ll see you all right, and thickly. Haha.”

Mad bastards! Lying there talking about a share for the losers.

Yang Susan, who had made himself the winner already, sneered inwardly.

The hand he holds is a finisher.

Three red diamonds laid out on the board.

Add the two hidden cards, the king and the five of diamonds, and the flush is made.

That it is not an ace flush leaves something uneasy in him, but it is all right.

A royal flush or a straight flush cannot be fitted together out of it, so there is no chance of either.

There is no two pair either, so a full house is unlikely.

To beat him, an ace flush is needed.

A vanishingly thin probability!

The man who took the all-in and called is the son of a land-rich Sokcho house.

His name is Hwang Yeongcheol, and his byname is Hwang Daepo — Hwang the Cannon.

A vulgar creature who boasted with his own mouth that the women call him the cannon for his vigour.

Three wins and three losses against him, and none of them a hand the size of today’s.

“Will you open first?”

Hwang Yeongcheol said it to Yang Susan.

A concession of a kind.

“It made on the last card. Hahaha.”

Yang Susan, colour up in his face, gave them a slow grin.

And showed the two cards he had kept hidden.

The king and the five of diamonds.

“Oh!”

“There it is!!”

The other players watching let out cries.

A hand like this is rare even for them.

They see hands in the hundreds of millions several times a day, and one on the order of two billion is exceedingly rare.

“Today I’ll be…….”

Before the dealer could move, Yang Susan put an arm out and carried an open palm toward the chips.

“Chief Yang. You’ll want to see mine as well?”

A rank smile spread at the corner of Hwang Yeongcheol’s mouth.

And one card opened.

The two of diamonds!

Gulp.

Yang Susan swallowed on a dry throat.

A thick foreboding ran down the line of his back.

Shff. Tap.

Hwang Yeongcheol turned the one card remaining face up and tossed it into the middle of the table.

“Gah!”

“Ah!”

“Ohhhhh!”

The cries broke out of the onlookers’ mouths all together.

The ace of diamonds, the thinnest thing there was to hope for, landed flat beside the chips.

An ace flush!

“…….”

Yang Susan’s face, his arm still out in his joy, went white.

A nightmare he would give anything to wake from!

“Kh…….”

A pressed-down groan forced its way out between Yang Susan’s lips.

Pacific Fisheries: report.

The title alone is not ordinary.

Ha Donghwi was thrown by the moment.

Before coming home he had heard from his wife, roughly, what had been happening.

Their son Tae-ung had won the lottery and brought home enormous presents out of filial duty!

Ha Tae-ung, of age right enough, and still a high-school pupil.

Every time Ha Donghwi faced his son he had been sorry.

His son is blood of Haryun Group, one of the country’s ten great chaebol, and went up to high school on the charity-case admission.

For the crime of choosing love, his son has not had what he ought to have had.

And he does not regret choosing his wife.

Only, what the house did to his son he cannot forgive.

They committed something enormous against a small child.

A crime they committed against his son for the reason that he had gone to see his mother while she was ill.

The culprit was never found, of course.

But Ha Donghwi knows his brothers were behind it.

His father is a pitiless man, and not one who would go so far as that against his own blood.

It is possible because it was his brothers, whose eyes had turned at the thought of a claim on a share when the property came to be divided.

He sent a letter to the sister he had been close with, saying he would not come again.

After that happened, Ha Donghwi denied of his own accord that he was Haryun blood, and forgot it.

He knew when his mother died, and he bore it, weeping tears of blood.

He had not the strength to protect his only son if he broke the promise.

The time went by like that.

He wanted off the Seoul patch.

By chance a contemporary from university asked him to join his business.

The move to Sokcho was decided that way.

They left, and left their son, a high-school pupil, in Seoul.

For a better future for his son, he had to make his friend’s business his own and see it through.

He took the sales directorship.

Ha Donghwi had read business and worked on a sales team at a mid-sized company.

Work he had done before, so it fitted exactly.

Pacific Fisheries is a name reasonably well known on the east coast fishing side.

He took the sales directorship and ran in every direction.

Against the feel of a market judged to have turned into a red ocean, to Ha Donghwi it looked like a blue one.

The cold stores Pacific Fisheries owned were large in scale and many.

Given working capital behind it, the conditions were enough to import foreign catch as well and widen the market.

For two years he ran about like a madman.

And strangely the company’s funds kept shrinking.

Somehow the choice assets were pledged.

There was even a rumour going about that it would fail.

The friend who was chief said there was no need to worry.

He was full of confidence, saying an indirect investment venture was on the point of hitting it enormous.

Ha Donghwi believed his friend.

He even stood surety for the company’s operating funds.

Ha Donghwi wanted to bring the last flame of his life into flower.

But lately he has sensed something wrong.

Through the fishing trade a rumour has spread wide that the chief is not to be trusted.

This is a friend he drank with in his student days, and worked the pain of life off with in songs.

He did not want to suspect him on rumour alone.

And yet…….

Gambling…….

The report his son handed him sets down the particulars on Chief Yang Susan.

His post, and his present situation with it, are set out in a single clear view.

The company account has been in the minus a long time.

The company has been kept up on loans of every kind, and on rolling one bill over into the next.

As things stand it would not be strange if it went under tomorrow.

He remembered the outcry from traders on his accounts, every time he went out selling in the provinces, that payments were coming in late.

The money situation has been visibly worse these last few months.

And astonishingly, the company’s finance director was his friend’s mistress.

In league with her he had been embezzling the company’s money and squandering it as gambling funds.

A faint tremor.

Ha Donghwi shook as though a cold had struck him.

His lips opened without his knowing.

“Son…… of a bitch!”

(End of Chapter 90)