The Signal Behind the Smile
“Uncle Magpie, am I seriously going to the company alone?!”
“Go on.”
Whether she pouted or not, I shut the door to the van and waved her off.
They said they were rewriting the papers related to Twice’s contract renewal today.
I had told her there was no need to rush, but Ye-ji had said she preferred to get things wrapped up in one clean sweep.
“…Yeah. That drive of hers is all Oh Ye-ji.”
I’d briefly considered going with her, but after checking the contract Han Rep had sent over and finding nothing wrong with it, I told her to handle it on her own.
Today, I was supposed to stop by the office, have lunch with the older woman, and then meet the labor attorney who had appeared on Come On Over.
“So if I make an inquiry by email, they won’t answer unless I pay a consultation fee first.”
I couldn’t believe there were people like that.
“I heard he’s a labor attorney who’s very business-friendly, but this is another level.”
The labor law firm he worked for apparently ran every kind of ad they could get their hands on, so booking a consultation was about as easy as plucking a star from the sky. But by sheer luck, a cancellation had opened up today, and after paying the consultation fee, I’d managed to secure a five o’clock slot.
With the lunch meeting leaving a gap in my schedule, I had time to kill.
“Until then, I should draft the complaint and talk with Han Rep about who we’ll name as lead counsel.”
Honestly, matters like this were usually handed off to a major law firm.
A solo private attorney couldn’t shoulder everything on their own; cases branched out in too many directions.
And yet Yuria’s Han Rep had entrusted the job to me, a mere individual.
“It’s because I’m Oh Ye-ji’s uncle. The real issue is how people are going to look at it.”
There was no doubt the major firms and C9 would be watching closely to see who Style Entertainment chose as lead counsel.
The law firms would be watching from the other side, hungry to take a bite out of us.
C9, because they were curious about the bastard who had dared to stand up to their advice.
“I don’t need to be lead counsel, but I do want to see Jo Ji-han’s face in court.”
I put the problem aside and opened my smartphone.
Rrring. Click.
The call-waiting tone cut off almost immediately.
“Attorney Cha.”
“Han Rep, are you busy?”
“Not at all. I was just about to call you, actually. Oh Ye-ji came by a little while ago.”
Han Rep said that the member without an agency had renewed her contract along with Ye-ji, and that the other members had also agreed to renew unless some special circumstance came up.
It’s like she climbed straight into my head.
It was reassuring work, enough to wash away my worries.
“And I hear you made quite a splash over at Style Entertainment.”
“…I just let them underestimate us.”
Han Rep chuckled along with me. “Yes, I’m sure that’s it.”
She never lost her smile.
Oh Ye-ji. What on earth did you say over there?
I made a mental note to send her a KakaoTalk message later, just in case she’d gone and blabbed something about me being sent there alone.
“Attorney Cha, shall we begin?”
“Yes. Thank you for waiting. This should make things much easier when we argue in court.”
“It’s for our artist, after all. By the way, you said you were meeting a labor attorney today at five, one who works in cooperation with Come On Over?”
“Yes.”
“If you don’t mind, would it be all right for our legal team to handle that matter?”
“I heard your department is short on hands. Isn’t there no need to add more to their workload?”
“Well, the team leader has files on that person.”
Hm?
He has files on him personally?
“Our legal team leader was apparently badly burned because of that labor attorney at his previous company.”
“...How did that happen?”
“He was put in charge of labor management, but they did it half-heartedly, so he ended up taking the blame. It wasn’t something the team leader himself did, but society has a way of pinning responsibility on someone anyway.”
So the labor attorney had been the trigger, and there had been blood spilled in some factional struggle.
“You’re telling me this is how you two end up meeting?”
“I thought the world was very small.”
“Then I’ll leave this matter to your legal team leader. I was already wondering if it might be better to name him as lead counsel.”
After checking his résumé, I could tell he wasn’t incompetent.
He’d worked at a law firm before being headhunted into a conglomerate’s legal department.
Apparently not expecting that answer, Han Rep fell silent for a moment.
“There’s no need to overthink it. I just want to show people that Yuria isn’t merely a company under C9’s label; it’s a company that can hold its own even without borrowing the C9 name.”
There was no hidden meaning beyond that. What mattered was the impression that we could resolve legal disputes on our own.
Even if we collaborated with another attorney.
There was the faintest sound, like a storm passing by.
“If you do that, though, the public won’t give credit to Attorney Cha’s career.”
“I’ve already got more than enough on my résumé.”
There weren’t many lawyers who had risen so quickly at Continent Law Firm. And I was one of those few.
After a laugh that carried no particular meaning, Han Rep gave in.
“Still, I’d like you to handle the argument in court, at least.”
She meant she wanted me seated at counsel table with the lead attorney.
“Understood. And please send my regards to the PR team. Thanks to them moving things along so smoothly, I can draft the complaint right away.”
I’d only dropped by for a moment to hand over the USB, but the PR team had been full of people with overwhelming energy.
According to Ye-ji, it was the kind of place where even an introvert would walk in and feel their life force being drained away—like one of those cosmetics shops she’d mentioned—and she wasn’t wrong.
Han Rep began humming about giving the PR team a bonus, then suddenly lowered her voice.
“This is a secret, but…”
I felt a strange sense of déjà vu, as though I’d heard those exact words before.
“Our PR team leader used to head the North American PR division at Pineapple. I scouted her when she came to Korea because she missed home and wanted to travel.”
“...Pineapple? You mean the company with the second-highest market cap in the world? She was the North American PR chief there?”
“Yes! I’m lucky, that’s true, but this time I really hit the jackpot. We were looking for a PR chief, and then one fell from the sky.”
You can just call that luck?
“No, but how do you even know each other?”
“Do you know New Universal Music?”
“The world’s number one music label and record distributor?”
“Back then I was on the A&R team at Interscope Records, and I got invited to the Pineapple Music Festival.”
“……?”
“That’s when we met. Her, the PR chief. There weren’t many Koreans in that circle, so we stayed in touch now and then. Then I came to Yuria, and the connection just carried over!”
...What kind of company is this?
I suddenly became afraid to ask how Han Rep had ended up at Yuria in the first place.
* * *
I returned home to find the air especially bleak that day.
I turned on the boiler.
Put water on in the coffee pot.
Then I pulled the script binder from the bookshelf.
“The immediate fires are all out.”
The day I’d brought the binder home, I’d exhausted my psychometry ability, which could be used twice a day, and hadn’t been able to use it again.
I used it in the editing room too.
My experience had increased, and the amount of time I could spend watching those memories had grown as well, but I never knew when or where I’d need it, so I’d left the binder untouched and postponed using my ability on it.
“Now I’ve finished comparing the footage and the script binder, and Ye-ji’s cleanup work is done too.”
I wondered what kind of scene the script binder would show me.
Focusing hard, I drew a breath.
Huff.
* * *
Static crackled.
Thud. Thud. Thud!
It was a peculiar dining bar where the entire ceiling shifted from an eerie violet to a deep red in time with the music.
There was even a dress code.
It had to be the private bar I’d only ever heard about in stories.
Whoever’s connected to PD Jo Ji-han should be here somewhere in this script binder.
There were far too many people.
Suppressing a sigh, I pushed through the crowd and scanned faces as I hurried along.
Where is it?
There.
And there.
No.
The clock kept ticking, but I still couldn’t find Jo Ji-han, let alone anyone holding a script binder.
Damn it.
For the moment, I moved to the terrace guarded by security.
It was only a little quieter than inside, and even here there was a crush of bodies.
But something about it was strange.
Fabric divided the space around the shallow pool at the center, and in some sections, people weren’t even allowed to approach the area.
The place was being divided by status both outside and in, and then subdivided again within that.
So this is where the VVIPs are.
For some reason, I had a vague feeling I might find a clue there.
I headed straight for it.
Passing through the hanging fabric, I slipped into a section where no one could bother me.
“……!”
Found you.
PD Jo Ji-han, showing the script binder to a foreign man.
I strained to hear what he was whispering.
“I wrote it a little more blatantly than before. Still, they won’t know over there. Korean has that dual-layered flavor you can’t really understand just from text.”
“Korean is like that, yes.”
The man watched the script binder Jo Ji-han was flipping through with visible interest.
Then he lifted a chilled champagne flute and idly swirled it around.
“Chairman, if you add just a touch more direction, it’ll get even messier. How does that sound?”
“Do you really think we can step on them? Even before, he gave us his blessing, but some remnants were still left behind. Wasn’t it his daughter?”
“Haha, and shared blood makes someone your child?”
Jo Ji-han curled his mouth upward like some kind of demon and clenched the script binder in both hands.
“We’ve already prepared a full anti-viral operation, all the way down to the counter-buzz agencies. We’ll seed the narrative before releasing the filming, so the reaction will come from overseas first.”
“Hmm. Still, I don’t think the result will satisfy us relative to the investment.”
He sounded a little hesitant as he only moistened his lips with the champagne.
“This time will be different. Style has agreed to help us willingly too.”
“...A man who’s usually so stubborn about how artists should be treated is helping you? Sounds like something’s going on internally.”
So this is about Ye-ji.
Tap.
The man set down his glass and looked at me instead of Jo Ji-han.
“Since even he has said so, I’ll trust you one more time. I’ll invest.”
“Thank you very much.”
As Jo Ji-han pressed a hand to his chest and bowed his head, the image cut off.
Click.
* * *
The vision ended.
He knows Style Entertainment’s president well.
That foreign chairman was definitely someone from the industry.
At once, a bad feeling began gnawing through my head.
“...Could it be the Dive chairman? No, if it is, this just got a lot bigger.”
I shoved the script binder aside and hurriedly searched for the person online.
There were no recent photos.
Only a few images from articles seven years old remained.
Come to think of it.
“He stopped appearing in public from around then on. After that accident in Japan.”
If his face had been injured and he’d undergone plastic surgery, some trace of his distinctive features would still remain.
His eyes slanted downward in drooping crescents, his nose bridge was blunt, and there had been a mole near the angular line of his jaw.
Even if all those individual features had disappeared, his bone structure was still different from the foreign man in the vision.
“Who the hell is he?”
Since I already had my phone open, I looked up other entertainment-company chairmen who might be relevant, but none of them matched.
If I had even some kind of shape to work with, like a reward from a mission, I could search on my own or hire a private investigator.
I’m not about to take a photo of the brain that watched a psychometry vision and do an image search.
It was maddening.
And then there was this too.
“Who was the ‘he’ the foreigner was talking about?”
The man called “he” by a VVIP.
One thing was certain: he was one of Jo Ji-han’s kind, and just as foul-smelling inside.
For now, I set it aside.
If I won this lawsuit, he’d show up eventually to save his fellow bastard Jo Ji-han.
If he’s not a card they’re willing to throw away.
Of course, it didn’t matter if he never showed up.
I’d just strike Jo Ji-han down first and then again after that.
I tapped Jo Ji-han’s profile in the list of related parties.
Then I scrolled down and clicked on the article.
A video of Jo Ji-han greeting people was displayed prominently.
“Got you.”
I rifled through the photographs I’d received as compensation from the filing cabinet.
I pulled out one image that had been bothering me for a while.
I compared the photo of the man with his hand tucked against his chest to the video.
Then I compared both against every article about Twice.
Whenever Jo Ji-han used that signature greeting, he always seemed to appear alongside some entertainment-industry scandal.
“He claimed that was his personal signature greeting, but it’s definitely not.”
Just from his tone, just from his eyes.
It was a signal telling someone that a job had gone smoothly.
For instance, the middle-aged man with the ponytail from the psychometry vision.
Or.
“Or that ‘he.’”