Episode 47: The Jeonse Scammers
The place I hurried to after the call was a cluster of low-rise villas in Junggae-dong, Seoul.
The man on the other end was my maternal uncle, my mother's youngest brother. The siblings were spaced far apart, so he was only a little over ten years older than I was.
He had been raising my two younger cousins in Uijeongbu, and the year the eldest started high school he had rented a three-room villa in Junggae-dong and moved. I remembered him saying it was newly built, a good place. Now the second child had followed the first into university through early admissions, and he meant to go back to Uijeongbu.
Except.
"You think I can hand the money over if I don't have it? Let that place go to auction and you're the only ones out on the street. So drop whatever else you're thinking and buy the house. How about it? Right now."
The jeonse deposit—the lump sum a Korean tenant pays up front in place of monthly rent—had already climbed to nearly a hundred percent of what the place was worth. Dig a little deeper and the landlord had piled a mortgage on top of that, which left the unit ineligible for jeonse guarantee insurance.
No new tenant, of course, was about to walk in and put up that kind of money with nothing insuring it. The landlord had stopped paying the interest, and notice had already gone out that the villa would be sent to auction. The man himself was long gone. He had flown overseas.
When my uncle looked into it after the fact, he found more than twenty units in that same villa in the same shape as his. None of those families could leave. They were stuck living there, bound to the building.
And lately an outrageous offer had come through a real estate office.
"The owner isn't paying the mortgage, so the whole villa is about to be auctioned off as one. If you want to keep the home you're in, your only choice is to buy it at the current jeonse price. If you're willing, I'll have a word with the owner and see if I can knock ten or twenty million won off. What do you say?"
All through the neighborhood, villa deposits were already higher than the houses themselves. They were being told, in plain speech, to swallow a tin-can house—underwater, hollow, worth less than the money already sunk in it.
Cornered, my uncle called his older sister. My mother.
"Choong-sik works at a big company, doesn't he? Isn't there something he can do?"
Mother and uncle both had come up from the countryside and spent their lives doing nothing but work. That was why they had a habit of looking at me, the one who had gotten into a major corporation, as if I were some cheat-code character who could solve anything.
But what could a corporate employee actually do in a mess like this? A lawyer, a prosecutor—that would be different. In the real world an office worker is only an office worker: a salaried nobody who happens to draw a paycheck from a company that's a little better known, a little more stable.
If I were still an ordinary office worker.
But I'm not. Not now.
"I'll look into it."
I said that to my mother, and the first place I called was a law office. The attorney handling my divorce would at least sit for a simple consultation without tacking on another fee. I already had a fair guess what the answer would be.
"As things stand, the owner's taken the 'do whatever you want' line, so there isn't really a way. You can sue. If he files for bankruptcy, that's the end of it. And he's abroad, you said? There's no practical way to enforce a sentence either. Push it into a formal criminal case and he's even more likely to hide the assets and play dumb. Once someone decides to pay for it with his own hide, you're out of options."
What a fucking law.
No wonder those criminal bastards kept their chins up and went right back to the same filthy work. Again. And again.
I knew the lawful route now. Time to weigh the abilities I had newly come into.
Information first.
I called the errand service I had used before, back when I needed my wife's affair caught in the act. I hid my name and my number. The job was the jeonse scammer's whereabouts.
Three days after I wired a retainer of five million won, they called.
"This is an Instagram the daughter of that household posted recently. Look closely and there's a person reflected in the window. That person is definitely the wife. The photo was taken in Los Angeles, where the daughter attends school overseas. If you want us to confirm it on the ground, travel expenses are separate."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. So—here's the address and a contact. You'll settle the balance in cash, correct?"
"They don't seem to be short of money, though. The daughters are at an expensive private university. I checked the address, and it's one of those wealthy pockets where white families cluster. They're in a two-story house with a pool. Rent alone runs past five million won a month. The fact that they're still living there means the money's there, and since an account can be traced, they've probably withdrawn all of it and are holding cash."
I told them I understood and paid the rest.
I had put my hand to it. I was going to see the end of it.
I got on a plane for the United States at once.
Los Angeles. I stepped off the direct flight, rented a car, and drove straight to the address they had given me.
It was a quiet neighborhood. House after house stood at a comfortable distance, two stories each, every lawn trimmed as if it had been painted, each facade a little different from the next. Watching it slide past the windshield was like driving through a scene from an American movie.
I drifted by the house the navigation pointed out and took in the grounds from the corner of my eye. Someone was living there and keeping it up. The exterior was clean. Once I had the location fixed, I drove out of the neighborhood.
Thirty-odd minutes later I parked at a big shopping center downtown, ate, and waited for the day to pass.
Evening came. Unlike Korea, night arrives early where America is thin on the ground.
I slipped into an alley gone dim, made sure no one was around, and let my shape disappear. Invisibility up, and levitation with it. I threw myself toward the house I had marked.
A two-story house with a stately, old-fashioned face. From inside, laughter, and threaded through it the occasional snatch of familiar Korean.
I launched myself up and checked the second-floor windows. A few tries, and then—
Screee—
I found one that wasn't latched, eased it open, and slipped inside.
Down on the first floor a middle-aged man and woman sat at the dining table with a girl in her early twenties who had to be their daughter, the three of them talking back and forth. My invisibility was nearly spent. I tucked myself behind a pillar at the rear of the dining room, let the veil drop, and listened.
"You're going to Korea this winter?"
"Yeah. My friends all said they're going to look into internships. Korean conglomerates pay well."
"You think you can manage on your own? Mom can't go with you."
"Why not? I can just walk in, can't I? The tenants won't even know you and Dad entered the country."
"You never know, dear. If somebody files a report, you might get flagged trying to leave."
"Your mother's right. The world's gone crazy lately. Those tenant bastards mouth off at landlords. In the old days they'd come begging and you'd still think twice about handing the deposit back."
"God, seriously. It's their own property. They should look after it themselves. Why are they like this? Actual idiots."
"That's how people with nothing always are. Beggar mentality. What else."
"That's what I'm saying. I told you we should've invested in apartments, not some villa. A villa? How embarrassing is a villa? I can't even answer when people ask. Kids here won't give an apartment the time of day unless it's Gangnam."
"You think I didn't want to? Still, this is what's paying your tuition and the rent here. Your dad is."
"Right. And you'll understand when you're older. Money's safest when you gather it like this, in small change. Let the pile get big and the tenants get a louder voice. They grow a thicker skull and then you're in trouble. Poor people talk too much, that's all. The upside is there's no blowback later. They're nobodies. Thrash all they want, the most they do is file a police report. And the deposits aren't large enough for the police to care."
"Ugh, whatever. So I'm supposed to go in alone? To Korea? You sold all the houses before you came, didn't you? Where am I supposed to stay?"
"Don't worry about that. I'll book you a hotel. It'll be inconvenient for a while. Live with it."
"Oh my God. Unless it's something in Gangnam, don't even bring it up. I'm not about to embarrass myself in front of my friends for nothing."
"Even so, don't flash it. Nothing good comes of people finding out Dad has money. Spend cash. Only cash."
"What am I, a child? Relax. It's not like this is my first time."
That was enough. I'd heard what I needed to confirm.
"Yeah. I can't listen to any more of this."
The plan had been to stay quiet, wait until they slept, and deal with them one at a time. I couldn't hold it. I came out from behind the pillar.
"Mom!"
"What—what is that!"
"Honey!"
Of course they startled. A man in sunglasses and a hood had just stepped out from behind the kitchen pillar. And there was a pistol in his hand.
"Shh. Scream from here on and I'll put a bullet in you."
"Y-you're Korean?"
"And? You thought I'd let you off because we're the same people?"
"W-why are you doing this? Money. If it's money, it's in my wallet. I'll give it to you. Just leave. I won't report it."
"Report what. First worry about getting out of here alive, mister."
The wife spoke as if she had been wronged.
"Why are you doing this to us? Huh? What did we ever do wrong?"
"Whether you did anything wrong, we'll get to that slowly. There's still plenty of time."
One advantage of American houses is the basement. For swallowing a loud noise, it was the best advantage of all.
I wired the three of them to chairs and got to work.
"My purpose is to collect the money. The money you hid after feeding off your tenants' backs."
"What? What do you—are you someone who lives in the villa? Th-then if this is about the deposit, just tell me which unit and I'll transfer it right away. Right now."
"That part's obvious. Before that, you're going to pay for the hurt you put in people's chests."
I laid a towel over his face and raised my fist. Then I drove it in without mercy.
Whud. Thud.
Ghk.
Open your mouth and the teeth go. Clamp it shut.
Whud. Whud. Whud. Thud.
I hammered the bound husband's face. The towel over it soaked through, red and wet. When I pulled it away, what showed was a face smashed to pulp and sheeted in blood. A mix of spit and blood ran from his nose and mouth and darkened the front of his chest.
"Hey. Now we start. Up to now was just me blowing off steam. From here it's the real game, so you'd better get your head on straight."
Wife and daughter saw the husband's blood-soaked face and broke into wails.
"Oh my God! Honey! Why—why are you doing this! Really! Honey! Are you all right! Honey!"
"Dad—! Waaaah—Dad—please, spare us... huuuuaaah—"
"Hm? You two don't have anything to worry about over here. You're next. And after that, you."
The wife took one look at me coming toward her with the towel in hand and went white.
"H-hey! What are you doing! Don't! Aaaah—!"
I dropped the towel over her face and poured the fists in, the same as before.
Whud. Thud-thud. Whud. Whud.
Shorter than the last. A woman's bones are weaker, and if I gave her the same and she died, that would be a problem.
When the ruined face of the wife—their mother—came clear, the daughter shrieked as if her mind had split.
"Aah! Mom! Dad! Give it all up! Hurry! Aah! Hurry, fuck! Aah!"
At his daughter's raw, breaking scream, the man couldn't hold any longer. He gave up the safe and the code.
"B-bedroom. Behind the painting. Inside. It's behind it."
"The number?"
"0819. August nineteenth. And star. Star."
The wife started screaming at him for saying it—how could he—and that was enough to tell me it wasn't a lie.
I went to the bedroom and found the safe. I punched the code into the keypad.
Chirrip.
The door opened. Dollars, tucked away neat as an offering.
Well. Talented, aren't they. What kind of talent hauls this much cash all the way here?
I pulled the bundles out and counted. A little over one and a half million dollars, by a rough tally.
But this couple had contracts on some forty villas. Add those deposits together and it came to far more than this. Still a long way to go. I was going to shake them until not a speck of dust was left.
I stowed the money in my pocket and went back down to the basement.