How a Loan Shark Survives as an Actor — Episode 6
There was a simple reason I needed to dig up Yoo Seul-ho's past.
Was it to lay his lingering grudges to rest? No. Sorry, but I couldn't have cared less.
Then was it so I could pass as him perfectly and avoid drawing suspicion? No. Sorry, but I'd rather die than live as stifled a life as Yoo Seul-ho had.
In the end, it comes down to this—
It was for my own sake.
For the sake of the me who would go on living as Yoo Seul-ho — and, at the same time, so that I wouldn't find myself backed into whatever corner had driven the old Yoo Seul-ho to end his own life.
I needed to know, properly and in detail, what he had gone through. Only then could I navigate whatever crises were waiting for me down the road.
Which was exactly why, even with script rehearsals to run, a manager to keep in line, and an escape plan from that garbage agency to plot — with a dozen things screaming for my attention — I was still making room for this too.
The easiest place to start would be the people around him.
Surroundings first. That was Background Checks 101. You could learn nearly everything about a person just by watching who they met and where they went.
But I'd turned Yoo Seul-ho's phone inside out, and not a single close friend showed up in his contacts. Nobody he called regularly, nobody he texted.
I pulled the car out of the hotel's valet parking and combed through the navigation history, too. Aside from the hotel, his family home, and the agency, there wasn't a single place he frequented.
The manager probably won't be much help either.
I briefly considered playing crazy, blaming memory loss, and just asking the guy directly — but after a few days of observation, it was clear he barely knew anything about Yoo Seul-ho either. They'd only met when Yoo Seul-ho switched agencies last year, so a year was the absolute most he could offer.
Which leaves option two: social media.
SNS was where every modern person's weaknesses gathered in one place. A quick scroll told you exactly what image someone wanted to project to the world — and from there, you could map out their blackmail points. Having someone in your follower list was no guarantee you actually saw or spoke to them often, but even internet connections had their uses when you needed leverage. And yet…
How does a celebrity have no SNS?
Yoo Seul-ho wasn't running a single social media account. I searched high and low thinking he might at least have a burner finsta, but there wasn't even a trace of a registration. The man had never signed up in the first place.
Anyone looking at this would think I'd been doing time in a monastery.
I'd noticed it the first time I went through his phone: something about it felt deeply wrong. Even a basic portal search was difficult — everything except calls and texts was hidden away, tucked out of sight. I only managed to unlock the buried folders after considerable effort, and once I did, I had to wonder how the guy ever checked reactions to his own work.
This was the phone of a celebrity who had filmed at least four projects a year — dramas and movies combined — on a steady basis. I could hardly believe it.
Ugh.
Swallowing a sigh, I moved on to the next step and pulled his business registration records. Nothing unusual there either. I checked his financials as well — aside from a bank balance that was positively humble for a celebrity, it was all clean. No loans, nothing shady.
Nothing left to dig through at this hotel.
I'd gone so far as to sift through the trash, and come up empty. At this point, there was only one option left.
The best move available to a man trapped inside Yoo Seul-ho's body. And that was—
"Mindo Detective Agency, how may I help you?"
"Yes. I'd like a background check done on someone."
Using the detective agency — the loan shark's other business venture.
For a moneylender, background checks were an inseparable part of the trade. In a business where information was money, knowing secrets even the person himself didn't know was worth more than anything. Client management made such checks not just useful but fundamental.
And so the owner of the private lending firm Haru Finance had come up with a typically pragmatic idea: if we're going to dig into people's backgrounds anyway, why not make money doing it?
Unlike the lending operation, which served only celebrity clients, he ran a separate detective agency that opened its doors to ordinary customers as well. And every operative who worked at the two outfits genuinely revered the boss.
He'd taken in men who'd grown up being told they were rotten to the core — men with no future and no pedigree — without asking a single question. He'd gone hungry himself before he'd ever let one of them starve. Under its previous owner, the lending business had never thrived like this; after the boss took over, revenue climbed without pause. The kids who'd once been nothing but street punks were now heads of households, living lives they could be quietly proud of.
Every bit of it was thanks to the boss. Every single operative knew that.
And two weeks ago, that boss had been in a terrible accident.
It was a grief that sat heavy on the whole office. As if the heavens shared their mourning, a sorrowful rain had fallen without pause all day long.
Two weeks had passed since, and not one of them had managed to shake the heaviness in their chest.
The phone rang through the office, and Hwang Tae-jun — the youngest operative, who'd worn a gloomy expression for days on end — picked it up.
"Mindo Detective Agency, this is."
"Yes. I'd like a background check done on someone."
The caller got straight to business. Blunt one, aren't you.
Despite the grief in his heart, a body honed by years of hard work moved on instinct.
"Who would that be?"
Hwang Tae-jun pulled out a memo pad and readied his pen.
"Yoo Seul-ho. The actor."
"The actor, yes. And your relationship to the subject, if I may ask?"
"Do I really need to tell you that? I was under the impression client identities could be kept confidential on request."
The voice was soft, but the tone was harder than expected. Clients trying to hide their identity were an everyday occurrence, so Hwang Tae-jun simply nodded along and began running through the standard checklist.
Except the client answered with an ease that was, frankly, strange.
"Understood. We've confirmed the scope of the investigation. And, as you're aware, the subject is a public figure, so we have to factor in a certain amount of… liability on our end—"
"Triple the standard fee. Half up front, the balance upon review of the findings. Does that work for you?"
"…Yes. Let's do that."
Hwang Tae-jun, dazed, readjusted his grip on the receiver. The client knew the agency's procedures so well he might as well have worked in the industry himself.
"I want a detailed look at Yoo Seul-ho's mental state over the past three years, and whether he had any grievances with the people around him. Look into his parents especially."
"Y-yes, sir."
"Not the broadcast image, not the nice things his colleagues say for the cameras — the private man. What his parents say about their son when it's just the two of them. Specifically."
"Ah — yes. Um, could you go a little slower?"
The requests poured in without pause, faster than Hwang Tae-jun's pen could keep up. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the commanding rhythm of that voice felt oddly familiar — but he was too busy scrambling to take notes, and the thought evaporated on the spot.
"Um, the thing is — intercepting private conversations is beyond what our basic package covers, so…"
"That's exactly why I'm offering triple the fee. Plant a bug in the parents' house, put a man on their street, whatever — you sit tight until you've got the conversations I want. Are you telling me I have to teach you your own job?"
"Oh — right, of course. Yes. That is… I'm very sorry."
Hwang Tae-jun, blinking rapidly, finally blurted out an apology.
And the very instant he did, the colleague who'd been waiting on standby beside him smacked him hard on the back of the head.
"Ow!"
"Haha, our sincerest apologies. The employee you were just speaking with hasn't been quite himself lately."
His colleague snatched the receiver away and handled the call with flawless professionalism.
"Every case we take on is assigned a dedicated team immediately. GPS tracking, vehicle tailing, on-site surveillance — we deploy a full range of methods to secure the results you need. We currently have over ten similar cases in progress, all of which produced findings within two weeks."
It was a shameless stream of true-and-false claims, spun fast to clean up the youngest employee's mess.
Good grief, Hwang Tae-jun, you little punk.
Picking up the phone and ordering a background check on somebody was not the act of an ordinary man. It took a certain kind of nerve — and a fair amount of money besides. If the person answering the call hedged and trailed off like that, client trust could only crater.
He got chewed out by the big boss over this exact thing, and he still hasn't changed.
Hwang Tae-jun had been scolded by the boss more than once for the way he apologized at the drop of a hat, his voice wobbling all over the place. His colleague was just glad the boss couldn't see him now.
"Yes. Is Hwang— no, is the person who answered just now going to be handling my case?"
"Ah, all of our team members work every case together. But if you have concerns, we can proceed with certain staff excluded."
"That won't be necessary. Just do it fast, and do it right."
The voice on the other end of the line was bone-dry. For some reason it left the distinct impression that the caller found the whole outfit pathetic — but his colleague chalked it up to imagination and managed, barely, to end the call.
"You — Hwang Tae-jun, you little punk! How many times have I told you to quit apologizing to clients! Keep this up, some nightmare of a customer's going to catch you and demand a refund!"
"I'm sorry, hyung. It's just — with everything about the big boss, I can't get my head straight…."
"Excuses, excuses! What if the big boss had seen you just now?!"
His colleague railed at him one more time, then let out a long sigh.
"Well, anyway — first big job we've landed in a while. It's nothing but cheating spouses day in and day out, so this is the first celebrity background check we've ever gotten."
"Right? I think it's genuinely the first celebrity-related request that's ever come through the agency. If this person had called some other outfit, they'd have been scammed blind — honestly, they're lucky. Out of all the agencies in this city, the phone landed in our hands."
No place in the country was better suited to investigating celebrities than an outfit that ran a lending business for them on the side. As Hwang Tae-jun settled into real work, he couldn't help thinking what a fortunate soul this client must be, to have called without knowing any of that.
"Ha…."
At that very moment, the client in question — the current Yoo Seul-ho, former loan shark — had absolutely no idea he was being called lucky, muttering to himself right after hanging up:
"How many times have I told him to type client notes into the computer instead of scribbling on a memo pad, and the punk still won't fix it. Infuriating little idiot. Tch."
With a prayer that these hopeless fools would at least carry out the job properly, Yoo Seul-ho let out a long, deep sigh.
A few days later, the script reading for the drama Space of You and Me arrived.