This Really Is Quite the Parachute Appointment. (2)
An entertainment agency, generally speaking, is a company that supports an entertainer's work so it can proceed without a hitch. In Korea, though, an agency goes a step further than that. It doesn't merely offer support—it scouts talent, trains it, and raises performers from the ground up. In that sense, the place is practically the foundation of the profession itself.
For a place like that to have no entertainers at all was no different from a barn without a cow.
"Hold on... if there aren't any signed entertainers, how is that an agency?"
I asked it dumbfounded, and Hyung lifted one eyebrow, correcting the misunderstanding.
"I said there were no idols. I never said there were no entertainers."
"Ah."
So they simply hadn't made an idol group yet. Fine. If the agency had people signed to it, that wasn't really a problem. If anything, for someone like me—whose dream had been to be involved from the very first step of building an idol group—an agency that lacked only idols, and had everything else, was ideal.
Hiring a manager when you had no entertainers would be absurd. Working as manager for the talent already there, then wedging myself in later, once they decided to produce an idol group, felt natural. And good.
About this industry, I was still ignorant of nearly everything. Honestly, I was next to a complete idiot. Learning how a broadcast station actually ran while managing entertainers would be far more useful. Section Chief Kim had bought me books on the entertainment world from time to time, but those alone were nowhere near enough. That much was plain.
I nodded and was just driving my spoon into the rice soup, cooled a little by then, when Hyung spoke—sounding like a man who couldn't quite look me in the eye—and the words stopped my hand.
"Thing is... there's only one signed entertainer."
"What? Uh... the young lady, by any chance?"
One signed entertainer, and she came to mind at once. The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. Of course it wasn't her.
"Of course it isn't Byul. Byul still has time left on her contract with her original agency. I put up the money, that's all, and as far as anyone outside knows, there's no connection to my agency whatsoever."
"Figures. Then who is it?"
"Mm... even if I told you, you wouldn't know him. He's not that famous. The way people talk these days, you'd have to call him a serious no-name... I suppose?"
"A no-name?"
"Yeah. Not a mouse dropping's worth of real popularity on him. Name recognition scraping the floor. That kind of guy."
Hyung was not a man who lied. More precisely, except in the moments when a lie was forced on him, he was not a man who would put one in his mouth. He was not a man who changed easily, either. Five years without seeing him, and I still didn't believe that nature of his had shifted. This wasn't a situation that called for a lie, so the odds were high that what he was saying now was the truth.
Which meant this really was someone whose recognition had hit bedrock—a person who'd shown a face on television a handful of times, and nothing more.
Still, an entertainer was an entertainer. If they'd been on TV, I might at least have heard the name. I asked carefully.
"Even so, I might have heard the name. Could you tell me that much, at least?"
"Choi Chulhoon."
"Don't know him."
I wasn't talking nonsense. It was a name I was hearing for the first time in my life.
"Right?"
"Could you show me a photo? I might not know the name, but I could still recognize the face..."
"A photo? Hang on. A search won't turn anything up... There is a group shot we took to mark the day I first founded the agency. Here."
Hyung tapped the screen with an index finger thicker than an ordinary thumb, then held the phone out as if to say, go on, take a look.
"See him? That's Choi Chulhoon. The one with the shaved head."
His finger found the only man in the photo not dressed in a suit or office wear—a shaved-head, muscular figure in casual clothes, standing among the staff.
I studied the face in the picture, then nodded.
"A face I've genuinely never seen in my life."
"Right?"
Of course, I'd spent seven years in prison, and the television in the shared cell only ever ran the news and censored broadcasts, so failing to recognize an entertainer's face was, in a way, only natural. Even accounting for that, though, this man in the photo—this entertainer named Choi Chulhoon—had one problem.
Which was...
"His features are genuinely plain. It's rare to see someone stay that plain even with a shaved head."
"Right? Ask me to call his face to mind these days, and I still can't quite do it."
Back when I was a gangster, I'd seen no shortage of thugs who shaved their heads bald, insisting a gangster ought to look like one. Even the mildest faces usually turned mean, and memorable, once the hair came off. This man was plainness at its absolute peak.
"How did someone with a face like that become an entertainer? Isn't looks everything in that business?"
"Exactly. That's why the body's good."
"That much is true."
In the photo, Choi Chulhoon wore long sleeves, but a single layer of cloth couldn't hide all that rugged muscle. It was as if an artist had sculpted a bodybuilder's physique and then stuck a child's snowman of a face on top of it. The strange imbalance drew the eye—only a little, but it did.
"With a body like that, he could win a bodybuilding competition."
"He did. A small one, but he placed, apparently."
That was something. But he'd placed in a competition and still didn't come up in a search? Just how unpopular was he?
"Anyway, he's the only entertainer signed to our agency. He goes on one show as a panelist... but he's got no gift for talk, and the face is plain, so he just shows up. They say the plain looks actually set the other guests off, or something like that."
"Still, he is appearing on a broadcast. That's one piece of good news."
Even so, there was no way an agency could keep itself alive on a single entertainer who appeared on one show—and not as anyone with a name, just a panelist who flashed his face in the corner of the screen now and then. Every other cost of keeping the lights on was probably being covered by the young lady. By Hyung's own account, so that I wouldn't be snatched away by someone else.
"Well. Enough about this guy. On to the work. If I parachute you in as a manager this time, you'll have to work as his road manager. Not that there's much to do besides going out once a week."
"I see."
"Even once a week, you'll get a taste of broadcast work. It'll be no small help. Of course, that'll depend on you..."
Hyung paused, swept a look across my face, let out a short scoff, and went on.
"But you're the type who'll figure it out on your own. I'll knock off the old-fogey lectures."
"Yes. Then tomorrow I'll get to see you as the agency's president?"
"Hm? No? I'm not the agency president. There's a president already. I'm not even an employee, come to that. I'm worked to death as it is over at Lee Sung Security—I don't have the room to run an agency on top of it."
"What? But you said you founded the agency."
"I did. I founded it. But what do I know? All I'm good for is work you do with your body. So I handed the whole thing over to a guy who could actually do the job and who saw it the way I did. Me, I'm... an investor. That's the position."
The work might have changed, but I'd assumed I could stand beside Hyung again the way I used to, and I hadn't given it a second thought. And now the agency president was someone else.
I knew more about Hyung than I didn't. This president, though, was a name I was hearing for the first time, and I had nothing on him at all. If he'd seen eye to eye with Hyung, he probably wasn't a bad man. Even so, it weighed on me.
"I'm an ex-con. Is this president really going to welcome me kindly?"
Because I was a man with a red line drawn through his life—an ex-convict, and not just any ex-convict. A violent offender who had committed attempted murder.
Even if the attempted murder wasn't the truth of it, I was already an attempted murderer on paper. Parachuting a man like that into the company was as good as swearing I'd be marked from day one. There was no version of this where I didn't stick in someone's craw.
Hyung, though, brushed the whole thing aside as if it weren't worth a thought, voice booming and easy.
"If he doesn't welcome you nicely, what's he gonna do about it? I own the building, and I've got more shares than he does."
"So you're pulling rank."
"Bwahaha! Power's there to be used, isn't it? I built that agency so I wouldn't lose you in the first place. That's why I handed him full authority. The shares are still mine, of course. Anyway—walk in without a worry, Jinhyuk."
If Hyung himself were the president, even a parachute appointment wouldn't be something I'd need to sweat. But he didn't so much as involve himself in the agency.
"Is this for real."
However much he brought the power of a landlord and an investor to bear, there was no overturning the stink carried by the words parachute hire and ex-con. By his own account, once he'd slotted me in, he wouldn't even look in on the place. And if the staff had spent a year or so around him, there was no chance they hadn't already figured out what kind of man he was.
The moment I walked into that agency, I'd be met with every kind of sidelong glare. That much was certain. Just picturing it pulled a sigh out of me on its own.
"This is really... going to be rough."
"Hahahaha! What, you think that'll be rougher than gangster work? You might catch dirty looks, but at least you won't have to worry about catching a knife!"
"Haa..."
Honestly, taking the knife would sit easier.
It really would.