Before They Hook Me for Good
On the plane bound for Korea.
"An awful lot happened, didn't it."
At Jo Sudeok's words, I let a small smile show.
It did.
The plan had been to blow money like water and rest. That was the original idea. From the moment someone handed me a Bugatti, though, things had started to feel off.
Buying Meiyo was still more or less on the rails, wasn't it?
Then nostalgia grabbed me, and without warning I swerved into acquiring Manchester United... and signed the Capsulemon deal to plug the hole in the money.
There's no telling where this story ends.
Still, there were plenty of good memories. I had watched the famous Michael Jordan play with my own eyes. And, as luck would have it, I had seen Mike Tyson fight from the very front row.
"How was it for you, Professor?"
"Me? Anywhere with you, Boss..."
"Not that."
"I mean it."
"Come on."
"You may not realize it, Boss..."
"...?"
"Travel with you, and impossible things keep happening, don't they? It's rough while you're in it. Afterward, though, the memories stay. A ridiculous number of them."
He wasn't entirely wrong. I wandered wherever the mood took me, and at every stop I burned through a few hundred million won on a whim. Spectacles like that were not easy to come by.
I let out a short breath of a laugh and turned my eyes to the window. We had left the runway far behind; all I could see was cloud and sea. Two hours, and we would be there.
I ought to greet Grandfather first, shouldn't I?
It had been a long time. Perhaps that was why his face came back to me, and why the face reflected in the glass wore a small smile.
A few hours later, the Hannam-dong House.
"You want to buy Hyeon-gang FC?"
"Yes."
"You get back from a trip, and the first thing out of your mouth is this cloud-chasing nonsense?"
"..."
"Made as much as you're going to make, so now you've set your mind on things that don't pay?"
"It doesn't make money?"
"Wages go out, and nobody's in the stands. How are you supposed to make money off that?"
Baseball had a decent following. The football league, in those days, drew almost no interest at all.
"Then will you just give it to me?"
"What?"
"You said there's no crowd and all that goes out is salary. You're going to charge me to hand that over?"
It was only a thought that had just occurred to me. Someday... was Grandfather going to hit me?
If he hits me, I'll take it. What else can I do?
Until then, though, I meant to keep this character going.
"From here on, let Hyeon-gang focus on baseball, and turn the football over to JH. If that still stings, I'll put the Hyeon-gang logo dead center on the jersey."
Instead of getting angry, Grandfather studied me hard. The look on his face asked what I was scheming now.
"Boy... what did you see in America, to be talking like this?"
"How do you know I went to America?"
"What?"
"So far I've only told you about Japan."
The moment the talk turned against him—
Knock, knock.
As if on cue, a knock came at the perfect time. Grandfather turned his head, glad of the interruption, and the Chief Secretary peeked through the crack of the door.
"Several cars were just delivered. I wondered if you, Chairman..."
"What kind of talk is that?"
The question didn't last. Both of their gazes drifted, naturally, to me.
"What is all this?"
Grandfather's reaction was lukewarm. When it came to loving automobiles, he would have been offended to place second, and his devotion to classic cars in particular was famous. To eyes like his, even a Porsche couldn't help being just a Porsche.
"I saw it in Japan. It was pretty."
"So a middle schooler bought a car?"
"They only get more expensive. So I bought it early."
"Japan. You mean Chairman Dazai?"
"Yes."
"A man like that gets a good car in his hands and doesn't let go..."
For some reason Grandfather let the sentence trail away. Hmm. His eyes went to the Alfa Romeo parked at the back, and then he turned to me, startled.
"That's an 8C, isn't it?"
"They explained it. I don't really remember..."
He looked the car over carefully, and could not hold the admiration in.
"A '31 that actually raced, and it's this clean?"
"Is it?"
"What did you pay for it?"
"All in, about eight billion won..."
It felt a little wrong to say so, but even if I had named ten billion, Grandfather looked ready to stamp his seal on the spot. Unlike with the Porsche, his face was dead serious. If he was already this shocked, what was the last car going to do to him? Ahem.
My prediction landed exactly. In front of the 1938 Bugatti—
"..."
Grandfather stood there for minutes without moving. I had thought it was no ordinary thing, Chairman Dazai keeping a separate collection underground. Even to Grandfather, this was clearly no ordinary car.
After staring a hole through it for a long time, the first thing he said when he broke the silence was this.
"You really did go see Chairman Dazai?"
"Yes."
"And that man sold you this?"
"He didn't sell it."
"...?"
"He told me to just take it."
"He said what?"
"Even when I offered to pay, he absolutely refused..."
He had said it was the same principle as not being able to buy a thing out of a museum.
"He said a gift was the only way, so I thought it over and just accepted."
Grandfather's eyes were still fixed on the Bugatti. The air in the room said that if someone asked fifteen billion won for it, he would have agreed on the spot.
Hmm.
Sell it off under the name of filial piety?
I was enjoying that private little fantasy when Grandfather produced an answer I had never once expected.
One year and six months later, the Hyeon-gang FC Youth Ground.
Every Sunday I played club football—if you could call it a club.
In my previous life I had been about as far from ball sports as a person could get. All through middle and high school, P.E. meant reading a book on the shaded stairs. The outcast among outcasts, and now I was on a football team?
I'm supposed to be dreaming of owning Manchester United!
I ought to at least run around on a pitch myself. The football I had started that way had now gone a full year, all four seasons.
"Jihoon! Left side!"
"Get wider!"
My side was called FC National, a team retired national-team players had put together for the sake of staying in touch. I was the only one among them who hadn't come up as a player. And how had an ordinary person even gotten in... I had met them a few times over lending out the ground, and somehow that had turned into a membership. Heh.
"Jihoon! Stick to him!"
"Stick to him? Get away from him!"
At first the older men had been stiff around me, a third-generation chaebol.
"What are you doing! Listen to me!"
"Don't listen to that bastard!"
Maybe it was because I had been so agreeable. These days they treated me as casually as somebody else's son. Fine by me.
Anyway.
"Jihoon!"
Someone shouted my name.
Crack!
A pass fired as if it were a shot. I was supposed to receive that?
"Sorry! Too long!"
Not long. Too hard!
I ran anyway. Head ducked low, a hard start, and then breath driven hard from the very first strides. It was a way of running a pro coach had taught me.
Papapapa!
It worked better than I had expected.
Skrrt. Tap.
I even stretched into a tackle and just managed to pin the ball.
"Well, look at you."
"Youth. That's youth for you."
The older men—uncles, if that was the word—sounded half envious. A year of hard training had taught me one thing.
Tap. Tap.
My body was fairly well made for sport. My feet would never stand comparison with a real player's. But a burst of speed, or a sudden change of direction, was up around the level of a decent track athlete. Even so.
Thud!
"What kind of pass was that!"
"I told you to keep it low!"
The touch at the toe of my boot was still below standard. Ugh. So on this team I was used as a one-tool player: knock it ahead, and run.
Tweet! Tweet! Tweeeet!
Haaah. I had run the full ninety minutes and never once taken a shot. Was that even real?
What could I do. Times like this called for a purely spiritual victory.
My stamina's the best one here!
It wasn't even a lie. The uncles were all sprawled across the grass. I was the only one still standing upright. Being sixteen probably accounted for most of it, but I was fairly confident in my fitness all the same. Football was Sundays only. The other six days I gave to boxing, which meant running ten kilometers a day, and as for lung capacity alone... ah, but why boxing all of a sudden, before any of that?
The reason was simple. Tyson's fight would not leave my head. And so I was living six days boxing and one day playing football, a life closer to a full-time athlete's—or to Kim Jong-kook, the singer who seemed to live in a gym—than to anything else.
"Thank you for the hard work. I'll head out first."
"Eat before you go, you brat!"
"I'm sorry. I've got something to do."
Follow them, and I would be pouring drinks in broad daylight. I had already sweated; I meant to shower fast and escape.
Hm?
A man from the chairman's office came striding toward me.
"The Chairman is asking for you."
"Why?"
"Judging by the fact that he's at Hyeon-gang Motors headquarters..."
"..."
The heir was my older brother. I was there to support my brother. Lately that rule had been cracking, little by little. It had started happening more often once my brother entered high school, and now, on the excuse that his exam years had begun, Grandfather was openly pushing management on me. Of course I was still on the run, waving our old agreement in front of me. He only wanted me to take the auto company—just that one thing—to lighten my brother's load. That was not something I could refuse forever.
So go on, then. Just take the motors and see what happens!
Do this one more thing. Not forever—only hold it for a little while, in my place... oh, very smooth.
And that's how the ring goes through your nose for good.
What could I do. I could see the future clear as day, so I had no choice but to prepare a way of my own.
I turned to the man from the office.
"I've still got some work left."
"..."
"It may take a while before I can go see Grandfather."
"You need to arrive by three at the latest..."
That left me plenty of time. I finished my shower and headed for the office inside the ground. On the desk, documents waiting for a signature were stacked several layers deep. A football club usually had little in the way of business. I had gone and stirred the work up myself (...), and the pile of things to approve kept growing.
The first document concerned the choice of a turf-management company. The usual practice was to hand it off, more or less, to a domestic firm, but I had a Spanish company looking after not only the professional pitch but the youth ground as well. It cost a fair amount. If you wanted technical football, though, the grass had to be right. I signed quickly and checked the second document.
It was about transferring a Hyeon-gang youth player to Belgium. Both clubs were mine anyway, so a single signature completed the move. Do well in Belgium, and it would be France; do well in France, and someday Manchester United? United was not mine yet, of course. Ahem.
Come to think of it, how was United getting along these days? Since the subject had come up, I picked up the receiver. The call was for Baker, in England. Perhaps because he was rushing about on business, it would not connect, and so I had to leave a message in his voicemail. It was not a long one. How the mood was over there. Whether the players were performing. Whether Jinu the Gaucho, in particular, was all right. Things of that sort.
I was just about to set the receiver down.
"..."
The moment I hung up, I would have to go to Hyeon-gang Motors headquarters. Perhaps that was why. After a brief hesitation, I added one more line.
"Could you look into studying abroad for me? England. Not football. As an ordinary student."