Manners Make the Man
That night, at a café in the neighborhood, I met Olivia late.
"I slept all day."
Even so, the tiredness had not left her face. An outing pass every day, so she could work into the night, had not been enough; today she had been up until dawn on top of it.
And still Olivia began with the work.
"When's the shoot?"
"Tomorrow evening."
"The magazine cover, right?"
I nodded.
"Background?"
"Inside the shop."
"Models chosen?"
"Paver and Lukashi."
At my answer she shot me a look.
"It's not because you don't have the money."
"..."
"They're the designers, so they'd understand the clothes they made better than anyone. That the idea?"
"Something like that."
Was she picturing the set? Olivia propped her chin on her hand, then spoke.
"Not bad."
She grinned.
"Oh—since we're on models."
"...?"
"You know the leather jacket I designed. It's nearly finished."
"And?"
"It's menswear, so I can't model it."
She wasn't about to ask me to model. Was she?
She must have read my face, because she broke into a bright smile.
"Why not? You're tall, your shoulders are broad..."
"Then I'd have to show my face."
"Is that a problem?"
"For now."
"True. Secret-hideout concept, and then you flash the owner's face. That would be strange."
Thankfully, she seemed to understand.
"How long are you planning to keep it secret?"
"Who knows."
As if I needed the reminder. I had run into Tennessee today without meaning to. Once the magazine went out, a hint about the shop would be printed in it, and if he remembered today's meeting he might guess, roughly, where the place was—and who owned it.
Even so.
I had seen the limited D-Que in his hand. He would not be the first to go around running his mouth.
And besides.
I'm not hiding the shop for the rest of my life.
If word got out, I would run it as a shop that word had gotten out about. That was all.
I was turning this over when she asked.
"When does the magazine come out?"
"Three days, if we're fast."
"That soon?"
"The work's already finished. Make the cover, and all that's left is the printing."
"Even so, isn't three days too much of a rush?"
"Why?"
"They say you can't believe everything a printer tells you. Plenty of them swear they'll hit the date, then come back later asking for more money."
It was a hundred copies, give or take. Half a day at the outside. Maybe my face was too calm. A question mark the size of her head seemed to rise over it.
What else could I do? I had to clear it up.
"I own a small publishing house. So the printing side is familiar..."
"A publishing house? You own a publishing house?"
"..."
"Weren't you in distribution?"
"It's small. A hobby."
"Ah. So your hobby is running a publishing house."
That was not what I had meant.
Hm.
Keep talking, and the misunderstanding would only stack higher.
"It's late. Shall we get going?"
"As you say, Chairman."
Chair—Chairman?
Take that back...
For a man who wanted nothing to do with management and only wanted to spend money, it was the most dreadful title in the world. Thanks to it, I fled the café in a hurry.
A few days later, in Korea.
A single volume rested in Chairman Park Yonghak's hand.
The chief secretary standing opposite him opened his mouth with care.
"This is the magazine the young master made."
Park Yonghak looked down at the cover. The background was an interior. Two men stood apart, and the mood was anything but ordinary.
One of them leaned against a motorcycle—the bike Park Yonghak himself had given. The suit was crisp, but the tie, amusingly, had the look of leather. Nor was that all. A flight jacket hung on the bike as if forgotten there, and it pulled the eye: not a typical cut, but a style that kept a biker's loose freedom.
The man standing well away from him was dressed as the exact opposite. A black hood was pulled low, so the face did not properly show. Where the eyes ought to have been, a red logo stood in their place. He held a skateboard in a delinquent slouch, as if he might bolt for the door at any moment. They had pushed the rebel in him as far as it would go.
Above the two men, nothing alike, the name of the magazine was written large.
He turned the book over. A stamp had been driven into it, huge.
They did not mean to take money for it.
"The space on the cover is probably the young master's shop."
"Probably the shop?"
"Ah—yes. It hasn't opened yet, and the concept is a secret hideout, so we couldn't look inside. Truth be told, even getting this one copy here took quite a..."
"What, you want me to clap?"
"Ah. No, Chairman."
The chief secretary ducked his head at once.
Tsk.
It was not the secretary's fault. Even so, whenever the talk turned to his grandson, Park Yonghak had a way of growing strict for no good reason. He wiped the look from his face and slowly went through the magazine.
Hm.
The early pages were almost entirely fashion. Past the middle, it began to take up a way of living. Fashion was only one means of showing the person you were. Aside from clothes, how ought one express oneself? Or, before putting oneself forward at all, with what should the inside be filled? And the craft of laying all of that out, step by step, in sentences that had dignity.
Had he read the chairman's eyes? The chief secretary spoke, careful.
"Every manuscript was written by the young master himself."
"He means to put this out every week?"
"Yes. I was told it's a weekly."
"Does that make any sense?"
"It's the launch issue, so there's quite a lot, but after this they might cut the contents..."
"With that rascal's temper? As if he would."
Chairman Park kept at the pages for a long while after that. The more he looked, the more the magazine felt as if it had breeding.
Even so.
Good is not the same as read.
If a thing was to pass through people's mouths, they first had to be made to read a great deal of it. The problem was how. Call it not for sale and hand it out free, and they still would not all look. Think of the free sheets stuck up in front of a subway station. Most of them go straight into the trash. So you fill it with solid work and hold out on the romantic hope that someday they will notice?
Not a chance.
There had to be a point that seized a person. However well you made a thing, you still needed, quite apart from that, a piece of marketing fit to catch the public's eye. He was turning a page with that thought when—
What's this?
He looked at the title.
Chairman Park lifted his head in surprise, and the chief secretary added an explanation as if he had been waiting.
"So what—you've got to wait until the collected edition comes out?"
"Yes. And even that needs a translation. It seems one can only read it several months later than in Japan."
So that was the point they had struck: each week's installment, run in the back of the magazine. And in full color?
"The young master is a shareholder in the publishing house, is he not? More than that, he is personally acquainted with the author of Dragon Planet..."
"So they allowed it?"
"Yes. For now it isn't for sale, and they aren't even printing a hundred copies, so they seemed glad enough to permit that much."
Ha!
Make it as well as you like—what does it matter, if no one looks? He had barely sent that worried look when his grandson's secret weapon left Chairman Park feeling foolish.
A snort of a laugh.
Right. Park Jihoon was not someone you worried over, was he.
Chairman Park set the magazine closed, and the smile on him was a pleased one.
The next day.
Carl Bernstein left the dormitory late, as he usually did.
A classroom could be noisy right up until Carl walked in, and then it would go quiet as if the noise had been a lie. No one had ever ordered it. There was simply nothing to be gained by falling out of Carl's sight, so everyone watched him just enough. Thanks to that, the boy was treated nearly on the level of a teacher.
Today, too, a racket. But look. Let Carl merely step into the room, and that clamorous classroom...
A murmur. A din.
Huh? Why isn't anyone reacting?
Perhaps because it was the first time. Curiosity outran anger.
What? What were they doing, to be like this?
He looked around. Large lettering was stuck to the wall.
Beneath it, magazines stacked in neat piles.
Ha! All this fuss, just to look at trash like that?
It was then that classmates, noticing Carl late, began to lower their voices one by one. The room went still in an instant.
Rustle. Rustle.
Even so, the sound of pages turning poured from every side. These were students with their names on the rolls of the Royal School, and they lost their heads like this at the word free?
Carl picked up a magazine, his face full of scorn. He tossed it any which way onto the desk, then slowly sat. He opened it with an indifferent face. Two pages, a skim, and he would throw it aside as if it were nothing. He had certainly opened it in order to do that.
And yet.
One large line inside the magazine seized his eye.
What?
What sort of house was John Green? A proud lot. They had been offered a place in a department store any number of times, and had never so much as answered. And those people had not only joined hands with a private edit shop—they had gone and made an exclusive model?
Impossible.
Of course he took it for false advertising. In a magazine scattered for free, what, frankly, could you not write? But the moment he saw the photograph set large on the page, he had to take the suspicion back.
This is no amateur's work.
Launching a brand of his own, Carl had been handed countless proposals. Quite a few of them had been sneakers. Not one design among them was better than this shoe. A professional, and among professionals the highest tier. A person like that would hardly go about trading on the name of John Green.
Then all of this is real?
As if something had hold of him, Carl began to turn the pages. A moment ago he had been tearing his classmates down for losing their heads over anything free, and now he had his nose in the magazine, reading on.
How long passed that way.
Carl raised his head as if he had come to a certainty.
Ultimate?
Yes. He would bring this one in. Bring the person who had made this, and have them grow the brand.
Where do I call?
And yet there was no contact. There was not even the location of the shop.
Ha!
In its place, a hint about the shop had been written.
What was this!
It isn't even a child's game.
Carl shot up from his seat at once. The bell for the start of class rang out across the room.
I have to bring him in. No matter what.
That was the only thought filling his head.