The Reclusive Manager

Jo Sudeok studied the painting before him with meticulous care. There was no telling who had made it. His best guess was a portrait commissioned by some noble house.

Renaissance in its handling... which would put it at four hundred years, at the least.

And sure enough, the fine web of cracks peculiar to old oil paint had opened across every part of it. An oil painting needs retouching, for the sake of restoration, at least once a century. This one looked as if it had sailed well past that span.

An aura like this, from an oil painting cracked clean through?

It meant, beyond any doubt, that this was no ordinary work.

No. This is not the moment to be standing here.

Jo Sudeok snapped back to himself and set about searching for Dürer's work at once.

He had been digging hard through the warehouse for about ten minutes when—

"...Ah!"

In a desk drawer, he found a Dürer drawing.

Yes. This is the one.

A sigh of relief left him, and then Park Jihoon's face rose in his mind. Today ended here.

Report first.

Jo Sudeok hurried out of the warehouse.

Seoul. Hannam-dong.

Jo Sudeok's call came around one in the afternoon. I kept a separate clock set to Boston time. Over there, it was already past eleven at night.

A new painting. Anyone who failed to catch fire at a turn like that was no human being at all. Even so.

Calm down.

Suppose the Mona Lisa herself were sitting in that warehouse. What good would it do if the owner wouldn't sell? What I needed now was information on the man who owned the pictures.

Was he reading straight down a page of notes? Jo Sudeok talked for a good ten minutes without a single hitch. What stayed with me most was a catcher's mitt in a small size. If I had to name one thing more, it was the fat college notebooks packed tight along the bookshelf.

"You think he was writing down the games?"

At that point, it was close to fanaticism.

"And the warehouse?"

I held the receiver and sank quietly into thought. Taking mere scraps of information and weaving them into a story a man could understand—that, more than anything, was the work I had done all my life.

If they were works he'd collected himself... he wouldn't have piled them up in a warehouse like that.

Put the other way, the odds were high that someone had given them to him.

Hm.

Neglect them to that degree, and he'd have been better off throwing them out. And yet he hadn't been able to make up his mind so easily. Which meant—

I can't rule out that they're a dead man's effects.

I must have been lost in the thought alone for five minutes at least. What astonished me was that Jo Sudeok never said a word. He didn't ask whether something was wrong. He didn't fuss over why I'd gone quiet. Until I opened my mouth, he simply held the receiver in silence. Was he waiting on my judgment? I couldn't see into him, but he was not treating me like an eleven-year-old child. Yes. That much, at least, seemed clear.

It was after I had followed the thought for about ten minutes more.

"Professor, I'll go to Boston."

"I'm going, I said. Boston."

"No. Not immediately. There are a few things I need to prepare."

"In the meantime, there's something I'd like to ask of you."

I passed along a short list of instructions, the sort of errands that would take a good deal of shoe leather. Jo Sudeok didn't ask why. So I said it like a joke.

"Is it that you don't go asking about this and that because the graduate students will be doing the work anyway?"

"And the honest answer?"

Absolute trust. Words I had never once heard in my previous life. If ever there was a moment when it struck me, bone-deep, that I was living a second life, this was it.

"At all events, I'll be joining you shortly."

Ahem.

"Ha. I keep talking with Grandfather, so I suppose I've started picking it up."

With that I hurried the call to an end, then went looking for the driver who took me to school.

"Are you very busy?"

"No. How could I be?"

"Then, might I ask a favor?"

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"Of course. Just say the word."

I added a brief explanation, the way I had with Jo Sudeok. The driver smiled, small and easy.

"Oh, come now. A thing like that, one phone call will settle it. I'll head down to Gwangju right away."

"Please secure as much material as you possibly can."

"Of course. Whatever they've got and whatever they haven't, I'll scrape the lot together and bring it back."

I let out a long breath. The large preparations were finished. All that remained was permission to go to America.

What was Vice Chairman Park Jongin's number again?

I quickly opened the notebook lying beside the phone.

Park Jongin's nickname was the Reclusive Manager. He almost never appeared in public. Even on days when the group's presidents met, more often than not he sent a proxy in his place.

And no wonder. Set eyes on Vice Chairman Park Jongin, and the press and the shareholders alike had questions they asked as if with a single mouth.

Taken together, they were a demand that he produce a way to surpass his father's achievements.

Little by little, Park Jongin chose seclusion. Until Hyeon-gang's strategy for the future was complete, he would not step onto the front line, and the shareholders were glad of it. The elder chairman was still very much in his prime. For the time being, everyone seemed to want the Park Yonghak order to continue.

Half by his own will and half by the will of others, Park Jongin shut himself away in the annex and brooded on a vision for the next generation. The answer he came out with was electronics.

First he used every product already on the market. A month, at the short end. As long as a year. He learned each company's strengths and weaknesses in his own hands. Nor did he stop there. If a product was good, he asked why it was good, took the circuit board apart, and buried himself in the study of it. When something still escaped him, he sought out Hyeon-gang's engineers and sat through their lectures.

He repeated this for five years. At the end of it, he was certain the nation's future hung on semiconductors.

If Hyeon-gang was to grow into a company fit to compete with Sonus, then for the next twenty years it would have to pour everything it had into semiconductors.

The problem was money. A sum of investment large enough to shake the very pillars the company stood on. What shareholder would agree to that?

Not that there was no way at all. If the elder chairman himself stepped forward and proclaimed the age of semiconductors, the shareholders would swallow the bitter dose, tears and all, and follow however they could. But Chairman Park would not allow it. He agreed that an age of semiconductors was coming, and still he wanted his son to draw the shareholders' consent out with his own hands. He must have believed that was the road by which a man proved his ability.

And so Park Jongin was wearing himself out day and night, trying to secure the funds.

Perhaps that was why. The moment the office phone rang, he reached for it in a hurry. His gloves were smeared thick with oil from the machine he had been handling a moment before, but he paid it no mind.

"This is Park Jongin."

"How did it go?"

"..."

He had expected as much.

"Then what about selling my shares?"

"How much of a loss are we talking?"

"And it isn't as if there's some clever way around it. Isn't that so?"

"...?"

Perhaps because the usually gentle man had raised his voice.

Managing Director Yoo Jaewook hastily took the words back.

"Please look further into whether there's another way. I'll be in the office, so once you've found something, contact me anytime."

The call ended there. Park Jongin had just bent over a circuit board, trying to soothe the hollow feeling, when—

Ring-ring!

Perhaps there was something left unsaid. He lifted the receiver.

An unexpected voice came through. It was his son, Park Jihoon.

I walked the grass path, sunk in thoughts of my own.

Will this work?

A boy of barely eleven, asking to be sent to America. Even with an employee sent along...

It is pushing it.

I clicked my tongue. Ask Grandfather, and the thing would be settled in a single stroke.

And then what does that make my parents?

However urgent a matter, there is such a thing as order. The so-called bottom-up chain of report! Right. I hadn't done my military service for nothing. Ahem.

Aside from the practical wish not to earn dislike for no reason, I had a good impression of Vice Chairman Park Jongin. Because he was the businessman who made Hyeon-gang into a world-class company? Well, I couldn't rule that out entirely. More precisely, it was thanks to a single anecdote I had read in my previous life.

It would have been from his mid-thirties, when Park Jongin was assigned to a food affiliate. In the days when he oversaw the development of new menu items, from two weeks before any approval he ate nothing but sliced white bread, water, vitamins, and mineral supplements. He would sensitize his tongue that way, and only after a blind test—after he had named every ingredient that had been added—would he sign the papers.

Why go so far? Years later, Park Jongin recalled it like this.

When I saw the interview, I thought there must be some exaggeration in it. But after I actually met Park Jongin—

If anything, he was more so. Not a man who would fall short of the story.

My ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠liking for Vice Chairman Park Jongin rose a good deal higher. An old-fashioned rigidity that knew nothing of compromise. And if that rigidity reached even as far as me?

Forget a trip to America. Even a night away from home would be difficult.

What can you do. I would simply have to persuade him, one way or another.

My head was a tangle of thoughts when—

The voice came from one side of the garden. Had I misheard?

Startled, I turned my head, and there—

"...?"

Chairman Park Yonghak was standing.