Well, Well. Quite the Companion, Aren't You (1)
But now what?
Being hauled out of that hell of boredom — a hell that had seemed as if it would never, ever end — was all well and good. The problem was the attitude of the man who'd called me over. Anyone could see Choi Chulhoon was itching to pick a fight.
No. Not looked like he was itching. He was itching. Coming at a man on first meeting with ex-con bastard was no different from saying let's take this outside. What a bind.
Back when I was a gangster, I wouldn't have had to spare a thought for anything else. Hit back, and be done with it. But from the moment I walked into prison seven years ago, I had resolved to quit the life. I'd taken a ten-year sentence without a word of complaint, all to wash the past clean — so coming out in seven and starting the gangster business up again would be proving, with my own two hands, that those seven years of hardship had meant nothing.
The years between had been an ordeal of endurance. Years for being born again as someone new. Years for living with my eyes fixed on a tomorrow that belonged to neither yesterday nor today. Taking a fight thrown in my face this openly, and simply accepting it, was the one thing I absolutely could not do.
Right. Talk it out. Never once in my life had I tried conversation when a fight came knocking, but I was a person too. Surely we could settle this with words.
Nothing in the world plants a thicker prejudice in a man's eyes than an ex-con's record. Even so, I had a track record of my own — I'd managed to befriend Section Chief Kim, a man who'd been that hostile toward me even while I was a prisoner. If I laid myself bare this time as well, and let him see what kind of person I really was, I could clear up the misunderstanding that I was some gangster bastard mad for blood and brawls, and the two of us could get along.
All right. Let's try talking. Ask to settle it with words first, and the modern man who'll still throw the opening punch is a rare breed! And even if he did swing, if I just took the hit, the sheer absurdity of it would freeze his fist — and then we'd talk.
I was bracing to eat one punch, just opening my mouth toward Choi Chulhoon, when—
"The hell are you doing? You coming in or not?"
"Huh? Wha—?"
I snapped back to myself at the thoroughly displeased sound of his voice, and found we were standing in front of a sauna entrance.
"I don't acknowledge you, so go on — make me. Whether you're a filthy ex-con no better than trash, or a victim who got framed, like Brother Lee Sung says."
Choi Chulhoon twisted his plain, forgettable face into the fiercest expression it could manage, jerked a thumb at the sauna entrance behind him, and finished.
"Right here. In this sauna... the one place a man can have an honest conversation."
The situation was sliding somewhere I hadn't pictured at all.
When Choi Chulhoon heard from Jung Baro, president of Bareungil Entertainment, that a manager was being assigned, he felt as if he might lift clean off the ground and fly.
A manager. A manager — for him!
An entertainer being given a manager was never strange. If anything, it was only to be expected. But for a no-name like Choi Chulhoon, having a manager attached was anything but a given. A manager meant you had to pull in far more money than the expenses that manager created. Set aside brand-new idols and other rookies of that stripe, and a manager was something reserved for an entertainer in demand — a badge that declared, in so many words, I make my living in this industry.
Which was why, to Choi Chulhoon — a nobody whose only work on air was sitting as a panelist in the dead hours before dawn, with a script that consisted of nothing but gasps like "Ooh..." and "Whoa!" — the word manager had seemed to share no fate with him at all.
And suddenly he was getting one? Good heavens!
From the moment the news reached him, a doubt like but why would they give a manager to me? never even had room to form. To him, a manager was a token of success so dreamlike he had only ever seen it in dreams. He was convinced that if he jumped out the window right now, he would soar like a bird. That was how happy he was. His heart had blown past a flutter and was hammering, adrenaline flooding every inch of his body.
Yes. Right up until he heard that the manager in question was a former gangster — an ex-con with attempted murder on his record.
He'd heard what Brother Lee Sung had said. That the man was a victim who'd been framed. That he was a little brother Lee Sung addressed as his own, the two of them on familiar brotherly terms. Words like that, though, were not enough to accept him.
And no wonder. Kang Jinhyuk was a former gangster, an ex-con, a man convicted of attempted murder. The stain was far too large to meet with an oh, I see, nice to meet you and let it go.
So Choi Chulhoon decided to put him to the test. He had long held a personal doctrine that if you wanted to know what kind of man someone was, hauling him to a sauna was the surest way there was — and so he hauled Kang Jinhyuk to a sauna, and arrived at this very moment, standing beside him as he fretted and fidgeted in front of the lockers.
"Hmm... well. I don't know what I'm supposed to say."
Unlike Choi Chulhoon, who had stripped to the skin without so much as a scrap of underwear and stood there displaying a body of gleaming muscle, Kang Jinhyuk had yet to peel off a single outer layer, and was floundering. Choi Chulhoon looked at him and let out a snort, pitched loud enough to be heard on purpose.
"Ha. What's the matter with you? Embarrassed, are you?"
One of the things Choi Chulhoon despised most in this world was people who used their bodies like a canvas. Tattoos he could barely tolerate — and only if they were small enough to hide beneath a palm, or if they spelled out a family name. Anything beyond that, he wrote off as unfilial: people who failed to treasure the precious body their parents had given them. And that, precisely, was one of the reasons he hated gangsters.
"What, you got landscapes and the like drawn all over you too? Took the precious flesh your parents handed down and used it like a sketchpad, and now you're a little reluctant to show it to people?"
Because gangsters — and a gangster's gangster vicious enough to commit something as serious as attempted murder, especially — usually had beasts or landscapes inked over their entire bodies. That was simply how it went.
Still, shame beat brazenness. If the man had stripped without knowing enough to be ashamed, and flashed his tattoos, Choi would have torn into him on the spot. He had the standing to do it, too. President Jung Baro had ceded him the authority in person. Never mind your talent as an entertainer — your eye for people is solid. I'll give you the right to fire that manager.
Not that any of that meant he could stomach a gangster bastard plastered in full-body tattoos. The man had only cleared one small hurdle. Far too early to let his guard down.
He was turning that over — what pretext he ought to seize next, if he wanted to crush the bastard fair and square — when the mouth Kang Jinhyuk had kept shut finally opened.
"It's not that I'm embarrassed, exactly. And it's not that I've got landscapes drawn on me, either. It's just... my body's a bit of a mess. People tend to get startled when they see it."
"What?"
The moment he heard it, Choi Chulhoon's eyes lit like a hunter who had just found his prey. What, so he inked beasts instead of landscapes? Hold on. So he isn't embarrassed after all? Walked right into it, you bastard!
"Still, standing around here stalling doesn't do much good. Coming to a sauna and not washing would be ridiculous, so..."
But Kang Jinhyuk only muttered it in the voice of a man with no other choice — and then he started undressing, and his body came into view.
"Uh... uhh...?"
Every scheme Choi Chulhoon had been turning over in his head slammed to a halt. There was nothing for it but to go blank.
Splash!
"Haaah... Wow. A bathhouse. How long's it actually been? Seven years."
The moment I finished my shower and sank into the hot water, I felt seven years of settled fatigue sluice off me like melting snow. If I was going to unwind, I meant to do it properly — so I stretched out in the tub and let a thin, drawn-out groan slip free. That was when Choi Chulhoon, all the bluster knocked out of him, crept in timidly and took the spot beside me.
Splash.
"...Those scars. They real?"
Out of nowhere. He was staring at the scars carved over my whole body as he asked.
Real? Were there scars in this world that weren't?
Hmm. Now that I thought about it, maybe there were. I had a memory, from my gangster days, of personally beating the hell out of a man who'd decided a scar like a knife-cut across the eye looked cool, and gone and gotten himself a tattoo that merely looked like one.
"Yeah. They're real. Not exactly something to boast about."
The scars etched into my body, though, were no tattoos. They were the genuine article — every one of them impressive enough, even to me, that I could have kindly explained, scar by scar, exactly how it had come to be there.
"Th-then... that big one. The scar slashed diagonal across your chest..."
My scars must have had him more than a little curious. He was just asking, carefully, when the interruption came.
"Boss, once we're done with the sauna, we heading there again?"
"Course we are. Ain't that why we came to the sauna in the first place? You gotta scrub down proper, head to toe, and put your heart into it. That's how you land a big fish."
"I know I shouldn't be like this. But every time we go, I get so hard downstairs I can barely take it, boss."
"Bwahahaha! Damn right, damn right. How pretty does that bitch have to be? Honestly, I'd love to sneak off and have a go at her myself... but do that, and the blood'll fly. Nothing for it. All right — wash up, boys!"
"Yes, boss!"
Splash!
Without so much as showering first, three hulking men hurled themselves into the tub, bellowing talk so foul you could smell it just from listening.
"...Tattoos. Full-body tattoos, at that...!"
True to the mutter slipping out of Choi Chulhoon, every one of the three had pictures crammed across his entire body. That part came free of charge.