A Chairman Who Does It All Alone
“I was already planning to break it on my way out.”
I curled a finger toward Kim Museong, and like a dog wagging its tail the moment its master called, he came over to me.
“Red Dog.”
“Yes.”
It was over. Red Dog would never bare his teeth at me again.
Thug loyalty. Hot-blooded brotherhood between men. Loyalty to the organization. Those things only existed in movies. Reality was uglier than film and stranger than fiction, and modern South Korea laid that bare in the cruelest way possible.
“Kim Baekho was the brother you served, so I’m not going to tell you to finish him off personally. But Han Suyeong is different, isn’t he?”
“Give me the order, and I’ll carry it out without a word of complaint.”
“I don’t trust a man who’s betrayed someone once. But you’re different, aren’t you?”
“……”
“You had ambition. You just waited for your time under Baekho. And you’d never met anyone truly worth serving.”
“……”
“That’s how I’ll take it. There’s a company called YS Holdings. It’s cooked the books from the start, and its shares have been split up so messily that nobody can find them easily, but the real owner is sitting right here: Han Suyeong. If you look into it a little, you’ll find out exactly who Han Suyeong is.”
“Was Han Suyeong Brother Baekho’s sponsor?”
Red Dog really was quick on the uptake.
“Yeah. YS Holdings is the company that bought up most of the bad debts from Johwa Group’s affiliates. They call them bad debts, but they’re really treasures that can fetch full price if you know what you’re doing. By tomorrow, I want you to have all the shares transferred from Han Suyeong.”
“Understood. Is it enough if I just get the shares?”
He was asking whether he could kill him.
I gave a heavy nod.
Whether Red Dog erased Han Suyeong from the world or handled him in some more fitting way was up to his own ability. If he ended up doing things differently from what I expected, then even if I had to dirty my own hands, I would cut the roots of that bad blood called Han Suyeong off before it could grow any further.
It was both a test of Kim Museong himself and an experiment to see whether the future I knew could still change because of my choices.
“Yes, sir. You’ve trusted me with something big. I won’t disappoint you.”
“And...”
I took the knife Gilwoo had taken from Kim Baekho and handed it to Kim Museong.
“Let Kim Baekho retire with only one arm.”
“Thank you. The name Baekho Faction will never show its face on the streets of Yeongdeungpo again.”
“Gilwoo.”
“Yes.”
I took out my phone and texted our home address to Gilwoo’s.
“Finish things up with Mr. Kim and come over before ten.”
“Understood.”
On the way home, it hadn’t really been long at all, but it still felt like I was returning after a long time.
When I stepped inside, Mother turned off the TV with the remote.
“Have you eaten?”
“I have.”
“You say that, but it looks like you haven’t eaten at all and have only been working. Wait here. I’ll set something out for you.”
Mother could tell just by looking at my face.
Whether I was in a good mood or a bad one. Whether I was hungry or hurting somewhere. She knew all of it.
“It’s fine. One of my military juniors said he’d be here at ten, so I’m going to wash up a bit and have a drink with him when he arrives.”
“Really? A junior is coming over?”
For once, because I wasn’t saying I was busy and hiding away with my stubborn determination to somehow make a living, Mother couldn’t hide her delight at the thought of me seeing someone from my old life.
“That’s wonderful. Don’t stay out too late, and if you’re going to sleep somewhere else, tell me beforehand.”
“I might end up staying out. But I’ll be back early tomorrow, so don’t worry about me and go to bed first.”
“All right. Hearing you say that makes me feel a little more at ease.”
Mother had always been like that.
Even if she wore herself out waiting for me and fell asleep on the sofa, she always kept the lights on in the house.
And whenever I slipped out without a word, even if she was worried sick, she would wait without calling once, afraid of bothering me while I was working.
I took her old, wrinkled hand in mine after a long time.
“Don’t worry, Mom. I won’t make you worry anymore.”
“All right, Jaehyun. It’s almost ten already. I should head to bed.”
“Go on to sleep, Mom.”
After making sure I was home, Mother went to bed with a satisfied expression. I’d told Gilwoo to come by ten, but it looked like he was running a little late.
Ding-dong.
The doorbell rang.
Through the black-and-white screen of the intercom, a blurry figure could be seen pressing the button.
It was Gilwoo.
“Let’s go.”
“Huh? You’re not coming in?”
“Mother’s asleep.”
“I even bought a present because I wanted to see your mother after so long.”
Gilwoo grumbled and set the shopping bag in his hand down by the front door.
“What’s all that?”
“Nothing much. I had a pack of herbal medicine ordered ahead of time.”
For a soldier’s salary, that was no small thing...
Gilwoo shrugged, looking absurdly pleased with himself.
“Thanks.”
“Why are you talking like that? What am I supposed to do with thanks over something like this? You’re making me embarrassed.”
“Your little brother?”
“Gilhyeon? He’s doing fine. The bastard said congratulations and tough luck over the phone, and that was it. My own damn brother gets discharged, and that’s all he had to say. Rotten little punk. I busted my ass so he could study.”
Even while he talked like that, Gilwoo’s face softened at the mention of his brother. Like me, he had grown up without parents, and his only family, the one person he was proud of, was his younger brother, Shin Gilhyeon.
Shin Gilhyeon.
He was the sort of man who would succeed even without Gilwoo’s help. In high school, he’d been selected for a government-sponsored study-abroad program because of his grades and gone on to Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan.
He was a student there now, but in the future he would finish a master’s degree at KAIST and earn his doctorate from MIT.
After that, he would join the early team at “Desla,” the electric-car company that would turn the global industrial order upside down, come back to Korea with money and fame in hand, and become a professor at Seoul Municipal University.
Of course, there would be a rather dangerous crisis along the way, but it was the kind of problem I could handle without much trouble.
“Studying abroad in Japan as a Korean isn’t exactly easy. Gilhyeon there is on scholarship too, isn’t he?”
“That’s right. He entered as second in his class, and he’s never once failed to rank first in his major.”
Gilwoo’s shoulders straightened with pride as he boasted about his younger brother.
As we walked and talked, before long we reached the pork-skin barbecue place I often went to.
“Ah, this place is great. I haven’t been here in ages.”
Gilwoo looked delighted, sniffing at the smell of meat drifting out from the shop.
“Let’s go in.”
“Welcome. Two of you?”
“Yeah. Two orders of pork belly, two orders of marinated ribs, and we’ll order the pork skin later.”
“Yes, thank you as always.”
“Huh?”
“You come here often. Mom told me to make sure I remember the regulars.”
A female part-timer who looked like she’d only just entered college took our order while blurting out the shop’s inner workings without any filter at all.
“What would you like to drink?”
“A bottle of Clear Dew soju, please. And a bottle of beer, too.”
“Yes~!”
A little while later.
“Ahhh, now that’s the taste. It’s not just good because it’s civilian food—this place is genuinely delicious.”
That was Gilwoo’s heartfelt exclamation as he shoved a big bite of perfectly grilled pork belly into his mouth.
“Pour me a drink.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was Gilwoo’s discharge day, and it swept past like a storm.
“Congratulations on getting discharged.”
“Thank you.”
“How’s the battalion commander? Nothing happened to him, right?”
“Ah, he’ll be promoted soon. He’s going to the operations section at Special Warfare Command, so his future’s set now. He worked hard all this time, so he deserves a good posting.”
“Good for him. What about Kyungsoo?”
“The Third Company commander? He’s the same as always. West Point graduate, proud as hell. He’s practically one of us now, but that pride isn’t going anywhere. Still, he talks about you a lot.”
“Why?”
“After you got discharged, Third Company, which was forever stuck in second place, made top team this year. Of course he’s happy. So instead of looking back, he starts acting all smug, saying things like, ‘It’d be more fun if Do Jaehyun, our senior company commander, were still around; now it’s just an empty field.’ Damn it, if our new platoon leader hadn’t been such a clueless idiot, we’d have flattened Third Company just fine...”
Gilwoo drained his soju as he remembered his final training days in the army.
“Still, now that I’m discharged, what does it matter to me? Whether they come in first or go to war, I’m a civilian. Isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
After that we kept up with the small talk for a while, and once the alcohol had started to warm him up, Gilwoo finally got to the point.
“Hyung.”
“Yeah?”
“The army, honestly, is just a place where they professionally teach you how to kill people. By gun, by knife, whatever...”
“You drunk? Why are you suddenly talking nonsense?”
“If you tell me to go, I go. No questions, no complaints. Same with today. I don’t care whether the guy I hit was a bad guy or not. You must have had a reason for doing that, right? I was thinking that even if the guy I hit was some innocent bastard with no fault at all, if we just left him alone he’d probably end up causing trouble sooner or later.”
Gilwoo kept talking as he poured soju into my glass.
“It was weird enough that I suddenly ended up becoming the boss of a loan-shark outfit, and then you went around crushing gangsters. That Han Suyeong guy from earlier? Red Dog followed him to the office and looked into it, and he turned out to be the youngest son of the Johwa Group chairman. The hidden youngest son, too.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Of course I was. Wouldn’t you be? I’ve been thinking for a while now that I have no idea what you’re thinking, hyung.”
“Really?”
“That elite Third Company commander from West Point says the exact same thing whenever he talks about you. Ah, was that a different story?”
“What does he say?”
“He told me not to try figuring out what you’re thinking. Apparently, if someone’s thoughts are too big, they end up looking like they don’t have any at all. Heh.”
“Drink as much as you want.”
After that, Gilwoo didn’t bring up a single word about what had happened today. All night long, we talked only about the old days—how we’d suffered and trained together, how we’d been sent to actual overseas operational zones, and how we’d repeatedly walked the edge of death.
“Take this.”
Before we parted after leaving the bar, I took a thin envelope from inside my jacket and handed it to Gilwoo.
“What is it?”
Gilwoo opened it without thinking, then his eyes went wide.
He couldn’t help it. Inside were five checks, each for ten million won.
“Use half for yourself and the other half as company capital. You’re the representative, after all.”
“Hyung, if you do this, I’m going to be hurt. I didn’t come to you just to get money...”
“Listen to the end, you punk.”
Gilwoo, who had been about to say something else, shut his mouth.
“Let’s do it the old way.”
“The old way?”
“I make the decisions. You just follow me.”
“That’s obvious.”
“Then that’s settled. The 25 million won is advance pay. From now on, how am I supposed to know what kind of work I’ll have you doing? Don’t wait until later to complain that your salary’s too small.”
“Come on, do you really think I’d say that? A salary of 25 million won a year is by no means small—huh? Did I hear that wrong?”
“What part?”
“You said salary.”
“You heard me right. I’m heading out first. Sleep in tomorrow and come to the Red Dog Faction office by one.”
“Hey, hyung, wait.”
Gilwoo reached out in a panic, but I just waved him off and pulled away from him.
After I got home, changed clothes, and stepped back out through the front door, a black luxury sedan was already waiting for me in front of the house.
“Have you eaten?”
The moment I stepped out, the sedan’s doors opened at once, and three broad-shouldered men rushed over and bowed deeply.
Thankfully, nobody else was around to see it.
“...Red Dog sent you?”
“Yes, Boss. Brother Red Dog sent us.”
“Don’t embarrass the neighborhood. Next time, don’t greet me like that. If you really want to, do it after you get in the car.”
“Yes!”
“...And cut your voices down to a quarter of what they are now.”
“...Yes.”
It took about an hour. Because it was rush hour, the traffic was a little heavy.
“You’ve arrived, Boss.”
By the time the car I was riding in reached a shabby alley in Yeongdeungpo, Red Dog and Black Bear were waiting there with everyone in the organization.
“Let’s go inside.”
“Yes.”
“Bring Gomchi and Dooshik in too. Everyone else waits downstairs.”
“Yes, hyung.”
The office wasn’t that large, so Black Bear picked out only the members high enough in the hierarchy and followed after Red Dog.
“Allow me to offer my formal greeting, Boss.”
The title Boss was a little irritating, but it was still better than being called hyung by gangsters older than I was.
“Black Bear, to your side—Gomchi, Dooshik, Taehyung, Gangho...”
“It’s good to meet you, Boss!”
At Red Dog’s introduction, the mid-level bosses who served as the organization’s action leaders all bowed at once.
“First, let’s settle the titles.”
“Yes, Boss.”
“Don’t call me Boss. Call me Chairman.”
“Huh? Chairman? Not representative or president? Boss, I’m not trying to be rude. But this line of work...”
“What, because of my age? Because I’m not even thirty yet, Chairman doesn’t sound right?”
“Th-that’s not it...”
“We’ll make it sound right.”
“Huh?”
“The word Chairman will fit. It won’t take long.”
“I understand, Chairman.”
“Bring me the ledgers.”
“I already had them organized, Chairman.”
Red Dog had spent the night before driving tax accountants and auditors half mad until they put everything together: the assets of Yeonhui Credit Union, which the Red Dog Faction ran; the business sites and hidden money belonging to Kim Baekho’s Baekho Faction; and even the ledgers for Han Suyeong’s YS Holdings.
“You worked hard. I didn’t think you’d finish all this in one night.”
“Not at all, Chairman. If you’re going to do something, you do it properly.”
“Good. Let’s take a look. While I go through the books, let’s reorganize the organization a bit.”
“Reorganize it...? You don’t mean disband us, do you?”
“How long are you going to keep living as gangsters, calling each other hyung and acting like brothers?”
“...”
“Keep that kind of thing for private settings and leave the structure as it is there. But in public, change it. Anyone who’s been in the business for less than three months becomes an In-turn. Anyone over three months is Sawon. If anyone wants out, let him go.”
“Understood, Chairman.”
“Once they’ve been Sawon for a year, make them Juim. After two years, Daeri. After five, manager. After that, anything above Chajang, Kim Representative can decide for himself.”
“Yes.”
Seeing that he understood at least part of what I meant, Kim Museong nodded and pulled out a pen to jot down the rank system I’d just laid out.
“What about Kim Baekho and Han Suyeong?”
“...”
“The thing is, we need your permission if we’re going to dispose of them.”
“My permission?”
“Yes.”
Kim Museong spoke with a heavy expression.
“Neither of them can be left alive.”