Burger Landing (1)
Her name was Trish O'Connor.
Sean O'Connor’s younger sister, the baby of the O'Connor family, and one of WST’s most famous reporters.
No, by now she was known not just at WST, but as one of the most famous journalists in all of America.
She had started by exposing the rot at a Thomas Motors event, then dug into the truth behind Facenote, and finally hit the jackpot with her in-depth reporting on the heiress fraud scandal.
In practical terms, she was the editor-in-chief who kept WST fed.
“If you were coming with us, you should’ve told me in advance.”
“I snuck over because I wanted to surprise you.”
“You certainly did surprise me.”
I really hadn’t expected it at all.
There was no way Trish would be coming along too.
“Did you take vacation days?”
“It’s a business trip. Covering O'Connor Burger’s entry into Korea, Continue Capital’s Korean branch, K-pop, and a few other things. You’ll help me out, right?”
“Of course. Tell me if you need anything.”
When I’d said I was going to Korea on vacation, the company had apparently just filed it as a business trip.
A temporary foreign correspondent, I supposed.
Trish looked thrilled as she went on.
“I’m looking forward to it.”
“To what?”
“You said you’d show me around when I came to Korea.”
“Did I?”
Had I really said that?
“I already made a list of all the places I want to go!”
She looked far more excited about playing than about working.
Sean O'Connor let out a small sigh.
“Sorry. I meant to come alone, but my sister insisted on tagging along.”
“……”
Wait.
Why did that sound familiar?
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Even in first class, a flight over ten hours was exhausting. On top of that, there was the time difference.
I took Sean and Trish straight to their hotel.
The place they were staying was the presidential suite at JR Blackwood Hotel in Gangnam.
“Wow! We can really use this?”
“Of course.”
Officially, I’d booked it for Sean. There was no reason his sister couldn’t share it.
Trish kept wandering from one corner of the room to another, exclaiming in delight.
“I’m glad I came along after all. There’s a pool here too, right?”
“Naturally.”
“I’ll have to try it later. Good thing I brought a swimsuit, just in case.”
Unlike Sean, who looked worn out from the long flight, Trish seemed to be overflowing with energy.
Sean watched his sister with a wry smile.
I said to him,
“You’ve got your hands full.”
“Not at all. Compared to how she used to be, she’s incredibly well-behaved now.”
Thinking of him as an older brother with a younger sister, I felt a strange sense of kinship.
No. Maybe sympathy was the better word.
“How’s Mr. Domingo doing?”
“He’s well. Busier than I am, actually. He wanted to come along this time too, but he had to stay behind for work and was pretty disappointed.”
If a franchise was going to grow, good food alone wasn’t enough. Maybe not a Ray Kroc, but you still needed someone with a real business sense.
Fortunately, Fernando Domingo handled that role faithfully for O'Connor Burger.
“Let’s go eat already.”
At Trish’s words, Sean shook his head.
“No, I’m going to wash up and rest for a bit.”
“Then tell big brother to get some rest and let’s go by ourselves.”
“You sure you don’t want to rest?”
“Of course.”
Trish grabbed my arm and tugged me along.
“So, what do you want to eat?”
“If we’re in Korea, we should have Korean food.”
I thought for a moment about places I could take Trish.
Fortunately, by then I’d already been to most of the expensive, famous restaurants worth seeing at least once. As I sifted through my memory, one fusion hanjeongsik place came to mind immediately.
“Let’s go.”
We got in the car and headed to the restaurant.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Popular, high-end restaurants are fiercely competitive when it comes to reservations.
Some are booked solid for months.
But a few places keep one or two tables open for VIPs. Since I’d been introduced there once before, making a reservation was easy.
This was the same restaurant I’d come to with Sung Yoon-ah before.
Trish looked around, eyes darting everywhere.
“Isn’t this place expensive?”
“It’s fine. Not that expensive.”
In truth, it was a bit expensive.
Enough that the prices would make you blink.
We ate while talking.
“I thought you’d be back in the States pretty quickly. Why are you in Korea for so long? Seriously, I came all the way here because of that.”
“I’ve been busy. But wait, did you come all this way just to see me?”
“Not exactly, but... anyway! You’re not planning to stay in Korea forever, are you?”
“I’ll have to head back to the States soon enough.”
Before long, I’d built a life base in America too.
I wanted to see David and Syd as well.
“How have you been, Trish?”
“Same as always. Reporting, taking photos, writing articles. And then...”
“And then?”
“Well, I was going to tell you later, when the time was right.”
The way she said it made it obvious her mouth had been itching to spill the secret.
“Then tell me later.”
I said that and went back to eating, but Trish didn’t say a word.
When I looked up, she was pouting.
“What? You really aren’t curious?”
I smiled.
“No, I’m actually curious. Go on, tell me.”
As if she’d been waiting for those words, Trish said,
“I’m writing a book.”
“A book?”
“Yes. A publisher approached me first.”
“What’s it about?”
“Emily Chloe.”
I thought of the Emily Chloe I’d met at the year-end party.
She was the con artist who’d posed as a French heiress and scammed her way through high society.
“Weren’t you already done with that in your articles?”
“Articles are compressed and objective, aren’t they? There’s so much that couldn’t fit into them. So they suggested I turn all that into a book. Apparently a lot of people want to know more about the story.”
I thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Makes sense. It’s the kind of story people pay attention to.”
It hadn’t become a huge sensation in Korea, but the heiress fraud scandal was a major issue in the States.
People envy the upper class even as they resent them.
So when an article exposed the hollowness of their image, it became a massive hit. Naturally it would do well as a book too.
“Have you talked to Emily Chloe about the book?”
“I already have all the materials I need, so I don’t really need her cooperation to write it. Still, just in case, I went to see her at the detention center.”
“What did she say?”
“When I told her she could become even more famous, she eagerly agreed to cooperate. She even started talking about things she’d never mentioned before.”
“Ah...”
Common sense said people wanted to hide their mistakes and crimes.
Who would enjoy having their criminal record spread across the world in articles and books?
But that was only the thinking of ordinary people like me.
A clout chaser’s logic ran differently.
Emily Chloe was the clout chaser of all clout chasers.
If there had been a “Best Clout Chaser Awards” for the world’s top attention-seeker, she would have won the grand prize without question.
She had wanted fame as an heiress and failed. So she’d chosen instead to become famous as a con artist who toyed with the upper class.
...What, exactly, was a clout chaser?
“Oh! So you’re debuting as an author now?”
Trish said it casually, as if dropping a hint.
“Hmm, well, something like that.”
She still seemed a little embarrassed by the word author.
I was impressed.
“Wow. So now I should call you Trish O'Connor the reporter no longer, but Trish O'Connor the author? No, wait—Trish O'Connor the great literary giant?”
At that, she gave me a sidelong glance.
“Are you teasing me right now?”
“Of course not. Congratulations.”
“Hmph. Thanks. But I’m worried whether it’ll sell.”
“That’s nothing to worry about. It looks like it’ll sell like crazy.”
Given how well her articles had done, the book’s success was practically guaranteed.
With America’s population, the publishing market was more than ten times larger than Korea’s.
And because it was an English-language market, there was no need for translation; it could be exported straight to Britain, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.
That was why bestselling American authors made money on a scale that defied imagination.
The biggest names bought luxury homes in Manhattan and Beverly Hills and drove Ferraris and Bentleys.
“The publisher seems to think so too. Do you know how much my advance was?”
“How much?”
“Five hundred thousand dollars. They’re planning a first print run of 300,000 copies.”
“300,000?”
Even if I didn’t know much about the American publishing industry, that had to be enormous.
“They’re projecting initial sales of around one million copies.”
“Then why print only 300,000?”
“Because there’s e-books.”
“Ah, right.”
“And it’ll be released simultaneously in fifteen countries.”
“So they’ve already sold the foreign rights too?”
“Yep. Korea’s included as well.”
Trish grinned proudly.
“I’m rich now.”
“Oh! Congratulations.”
Even so, Trish wasn’t the type to place much importance on money.
If she wanted, she could quit journalism and join O'Connor Burger. She’d probably make far more money that way.
And yet she still stayed at WST because she took pride in being a journalist and genuinely loved the work.
More than money, she cared about doing what she wanted to do. That was admirable.
“Honestly, writing a book has been a dream of mine for a long time.”
“Journalists do end up writing books a lot.”
“It’s all thanks to you, Miru.”
“Thanks to me?”
“You told me to look into Emily Chloe, remember?”
“Ah...”
In my first run through this life, the Emily Chloe article had been written by another reporter.
But this time, Trish had landed the scoop largely because of my help.
Come to think of it...
“If this goes well, it could be turned into a drama or even a movie.”
“With Emily Chloe as the main character?”
I shook my head.
“No. You’d be the main character.”
At that, Trish looked a little flustered.
“Huh? Me?”
“Yeah. A story about a reporter exposing Emily Chloe and the illusion of New York high society sounds a lot more interesting, doesn’t it?”
“W-well, I guess so... but me as the main character?”
Trish blushed and didn’t know what to do with herself.
Anyone watching would think she was debuting into show business.
Of course, she wouldn’t actually be the one appearing on screen—the role would go to a professional actress.
“So how much have you written?”
“About eighty percent.”
“Already?”
That fast?
A writer who was slow with their hands, always late, and forever disappearing into delays and hiatuses would have been green with envy hearing that pace.
“I already had all the source material, so I didn’t need to do any extra reporting, and the articles I’d already written were basically the first draft. The revisions are mostly done, and I’m just polishing as I go. I kept working on it on my laptop during the flight here too. The publisher is going to choose the photos for me. I want to get it out before Emily’s verdict comes down.”
Trish winked.
“When the book comes out, I’ll sign the first copy and give it to you.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
After finishing our meal, we headed outside.
Trish stretched her arms high and said,
“Ah! That was good.”
“How was it?”
“Yeah. It was really good.”
Fusion hanjeongsik did seem to suit foreign tastes. There had been several foreigners in the restaurant earlier too.
“And I already like Korean food. I eat it pretty often in New York too.”
“Hmm.”
I’d eaten it a few times in the States too.
But Korean food sold in America was, in the end, made to fit American palates. It might look Korean, but most of the menu items were things I’d never even heard of in Korea.
“Now that your stomach’s full, where do you want to go next?”
At my question, Trish answered at once.
“Yeouido.”
“There isn’t much to see there.”
“Yeouido is Korea’s Wall Street. Since I came here as a Wall Street Times reporter, I should see Yeouido first.”
So there was a deeper reason after all.
I nodded.
“Fine. I’ll show you around.”