Hearing the Answer Through Another's Mouth
Not long after Kim Seong-ho left the study, Chief of Staff Hwang Do-beom stepped inside.
His eyes caught the sheet of calligraphy paper on the table and the characters written across it—Matching Doors and Gates—before he approached Lee Tak-hyeon.
Lee Tak-hyeon took out another cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and asked Hwang,
"The kids all gone?"
"Yes. I confirmed that even Mun-jong has left before coming up."
Hwang pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit the Chairman's cigarette. Then, carefully, he asked the man drawing on the smoke,
"Chairman. Shall we try to stop the default first?"
"How do you propose we stop it?"
Lee Tak-hyeon leaned back against the chair with a listless look and regarded Hwang.
Hwang reported the plan the Secretariat had prepared.
"The notes coming due at Muan Bank weren't settled, and that led straight into bankruptcy, didn't it? Muan Bank itself is a lost cause, but the real problem is the rest of the creditors all calling their debts at once. So I was thinking we gather the creditor group and ask them to hold off on recovering funds for a while."
"And you think they'll listen just because we say so?"
"Yes."
Hwang nodded, studied Lee Tak-hyeon's face, and pressed on.
"I already sounded out a few banks. Every one of them responded positively. What should we do?"
"Leave it."
Lee Tak-hyeon exhaled a long stream of smoke.
"No need for us to step in and save those bastards. Plenty of other people will be eager to do the saving without us."
"Then the three hundred billion…"
"Sit on it. If we let it sit, there will come a day when we can put it to use."
Hwang nodded at the Chairman's words.
Unlike the Dubo Group, the Ilhyeon Group was not going to collapse overnight for lack of three hundred billion won. Lee Tak-hyeon was already thinking of how that frozen sum could one day be turned into something far larger.
Hwang glanced once more toward the calligraphy paper and said,
"Then… haven't we pushed Mun-jong and Sang-jong into too tight a corner? In a single day they could never find a real solution."
"Only when they're backed into a corner do they start being careful. They treat a hundred billion, two hundred billion like pocket change just because it isn't money they earned themselves."
Lee Tak-hyeon wore a look of clear dissatisfaction and turned his eyes toward the calligraphy paper Hwang had noticed earlier. He gave a low laugh.
"And that one will finally get his head on straight, too."
"Do you think he understood?"
Lee Tak-hyeon chuckled lightly.
"From everything I've seen so far, he understood more than enough… The real question is how far he has decided he is allowed to go. If that line he has drawn for himself stretches farther than I expect…"
"…Then what do you intend to do?"
Hwang swallowed dryly and waited for the next words.
Lee Tak-hyeon kept his gaze on the calligraphy paper, the ink now dry and the characters standing out sharp and clear.
"Gyeong-eun will be sad."
Hwang's mouth fell open for a moment; he could find nothing to say. He squeezed his eyes shut and prayed inwardly that Kim Seong-ho would not, under any circumstances, cross the line Lee Tak-hyeon had drawn.
Lee Mun-jong and Lee Sang-jong returned the next day looking as though their faces had been cut in half overnight. Standing before Lee Tak-hyeon, they laid out every solution they had managed to invent.
"Dubo Construction has an apartment complex nearing completion. Swapping that for the money we put in seems like the cleanest option. The site is…"
Sang-jong reported everything he and the executives of Ilhyeon Construction had hammered out through the night. Lee Tak-hyeon listened with the same listless expression, nodding now and then. When Sang-jong finished, the Chairman flicked a hand toward Mun-jong.
"Your turn."
Sang-jong, unable to tell whether he had pleased his father or not, shuffled back to his seat looking awkward. Mun-jong took the empty spot and began to present his own plan.
"I believe we must start seizing assets before any of the other creditors move. There are already dozens of known creditors. If we lag even a little, we risk losing every last won. We have to move fast and…"
Lee Tak-hyeon listened in silence, then let out a short, derisive snort. Sang-jong clenched both fists.
He still had no idea whether his own idea had been liked or hated, but he could see with perfect clarity that the Chairman did not care for Mun-jong's. That was enough.
I only have to do better than my brother.
This was not an absolute evaluation; it was relative. He did not need a perfect hundred. One point higher than Mun-jong was victory. Feeling certain he had won this round, Sang-jong exhaled in quiet relief.
Of course Lee Tak-hyeon had read every flicker of that thought. And Kim Seong-ho, reading Sang-jong just as clearly, felt the same instinctive certainty: the next question would come to him.
Seong-ho sorted his thoughts at once. The moment he finished, Lee Tak-hyeon's question landed exactly as expected.
"Kim, do you have any ideas of your own?"
Mun-jong had not even reached his seat again when the Chairman turned the question on Seong-ho—an indirect but unmistakable verdict on the plan Mun-jong had just offered.
Seong-ho rose, walked to the spot where the two brothers had stood, and opened his mouth.
"I have not prepared any separate proposal."
"I never told you to prepare one, so that much I understand. But the fact that you stood up means that even if you brought nothing with you, something has just occurred to you here and now. Am I right?"
Lee Tak-hyeon had read the intention in the simple act of standing. Seong-ho clicked his tongue inwardly at the man's acuity and answered,
"Yes. While listening to my brothers-in-law, something occurred to me, so I stepped forward to speak."
"Then speak."
At the Chairman's gesture, Seong-ho began.
"I believe for now it is better to wait."
"Wait? You mean wait until the entire three hundred billion is gone?"
Both Sang-jong, who had been tense at Seong-ho's appearance, and Mun-jong, who had been irritated, now wore matching smirks. Seong-ho had just offered the answer Lee Tak-hyeon hated most. And just as they expected, the Chairman's face hardened.
Yet Seong-ho already knew, from the previous life, exactly what choice Lee Tak-hyeon would make.
Even if the amount is different, the choice itself will not change.
In the last life they had sunk only a hundred billion into Dubo Steel; this time the stake was three hundred billion and the risk correspondingly greater. Still, Seong-ho did not believe Lee Tak-hyeon would choose differently. So, in a calm, even voice, he began to speak the very decision the Chairman had made before.
"The moment this affair hits the press it will draw enormous attention. The scale of the bankruptcy will be the largest since the founding of the Republic, and the number of entangled creditors is unprecedented. Under those conditions, rushing in would be a poor judgment."
"So you are saying we should just throw away three hundred billion?"
"That is not what I mean."
"Then what?"
Lee Tak-hyeon's posture was nothing like the silent listening he had given Mun-jong and Sang-jong. His face remained stony, and he kept firing questions at Seong-ho alone.
Any other man might have flinched. Seong-ho answered without the slightest ruffle of composure.
"I believe the best we can do is take one step back and watch how the situation develops."
"And if we lose every last won while we watch?"
"Then I believe there is nothing we can do about it."
"Nothing we can do?"
Sang-jong almost burst out laughing, forgetting how cowed he had been only moments earlier. Seong-ho seemed to be selecting, one after another, every answer the Chairman despised most. Mun-jong, however, saw something subtler shifting across Lee Tak-hyeon's face.
Is he… not angry?
Normally an ashtray or a water glass should already have been flying. Instead the Chairman merely repeated the question and stared at Seong-ho without blinking. Mun-jong could not tell whether the man was restraining himself because Seong-ho was not his blood, or whether the answers were simply so outrageous that words had failed him.
Seong-ho, unlike the two brothers, read the Chairman's expression in a single glance and knew exactly what he was thinking.
He wants me to scratch the itch for him. Understood. I will say the words he wishes to say.
From the previous life he already knew the decision had been made. Instructions had already gone out through the Secretariat; today's gathering was merely so Lee Tak-hyeon could hear what his sons thought. Finding not a single child who shared his own view must have grated on him. That was why, last time, the Chairman himself had launched into a long, elaborate explanation of the choice he intended to make.
This time was different.
For a moment Seong-ho and Lee Tak-hyeon locked eyes across empty air. Then Seong-ho's mouth opened.
"The default cannot be avoided, and the scale of the money involved will not change. Everything connected to the Dubo Group is about to turn into a mud pit that will thrash the entire country. Everyone already knows we are among Dubo's debtors. There is no need for us to jump into that mud of our own free will."
Lee Tak-hyeon slapped his knee.
"Well said."
Mun-jong, Sang-jong, and every other family member who had been watching in silence stared at the Chairman with startled eyes. Sang-jong pointed a finger at Seong-ho and demanded,
"Chairman. Did you just say 'well said' to Kim?"
"I did. That is exactly the answer I wanted."
"But you told us to find a way to recover the three hundred billion! How is sitting on our hands and watching the whole sum disappear supposed to be a good answer…"
"You dense fool."
Lee Tak-hyeon cut him off and looked at him with open contempt.
"Did it never occur to you that I might rather lose the three hundred billion than move to recover it? And where in that statement did you hear him say we should simply throw the money away?"
"Then…"
"Thanks to the noise you made, there is not a soul left who does not know we are creditors of Dubo Steel. Watching how the other creditors respond under those conditions is not the same as throwing the money away!"
"Just sitting and watching… how is that any kind of solution?"
Ignoring Sang-jong's still-indignant face, Lee Tak-hyeon turned his gaze back to Seong-ho and silently ordered him to continue. Seong-ho caught the signal and spoke again.
"Dubo Steel will not go under."
"What?"
"What did you say?"
Mun-jong and Sang-jong both snapped their heads toward him. Seong-ho explained for their benefit.
"It will default, but it will not go under. The company itself will not disappear."
"What kind of nonsense is that—default but not go under?"
Sang-jong nearly jumped out of his seat. Seong-ho understood the reaction. In this era, default was still treated as synonymous with total ruin. But having lived through the years that followed, Seong-ho knew default did not always end in liquidation. He began to explain.
"The impact on the Korean economy would be far too large for it simply to die. Too many interests became tangled during the loan process as well. Politics, the bureaucracy, the financial sector—the very core of the country is knotted up with the Dubo loans like a ball of thread. It will not end with a clean corporate death."
"Then what happens?"
"If the company truly collapses, every interested party will be strung up together like dried fish. But if they strip out the bad assets, dress the rest up, and sell it off somewhere else, only the managers will be punished. The people who made the bad loans will simply become the victims of a fraud."
"You're saying…"
Sang-jong stared at him, dumbfounded. Seong-ho looked around at everyone seated in the room.
"So one way or another, they will try to normalize anything that still has value and sell it. The courts will block full bankruptcy, the government will offer support, and the creditors will band together to keep the company from dissolving into thin air—because that is the only way to minimize their losses. Until then, we simply remain creditors and wait quietly in the rear. And while we wait…"
Seong-ho turned his eyes to Lee Tak-hyeon and, looking straight at him, delivered the final words the Chairman wanted to hear.
"An opportunity will come. An opportunity to acquire Dubo Steel."
Lee Tak-hyeon clapped his hands. He was genuinely delighted that Seong-ho had spoken, cleanly and without hesitation, the very thoughts he himself had wanted to voice.
Seong-ho bowed his head under the applause. But his eyes held no joy at all. Everything he had said was only what Lee Tak-hyeon had wanted to say. Seong-ho already knew it was not the best move available in the present situation.