Step or Be Stepped On (2)
Passing out from overwork and landing in a hospital, or getting beaten until something broke and landing in a hospital — it came to the same thing, didn't it? If anything, a bed earned by a beating seemed like the better deal. You could rest without reading anyone's mood, easy in your own mind. And you'd collect damages on top of it.
"You son of a bitch, you think you can keep working if you pull shit like this?!"
"Yeah. I think he can."
Cathartic to hear. Not my line, though.
I turned and found Kim Hyunjo walking up.
"He's going to keep doing the job just fine, so watch your own road. Your management was a fucking mess and that's why this fell apart — why are you over here chewing him out? Did he purposely liquor up the Lemon Girls kid who screwed up and then call the cops?"
"No... fuck, but still, honestly, this is too far."
"Get a load of this clown. What's too far? The chance was sitting right in front of you and you dropped it? Then that guy's the idiot. Don't pick a fight with someone who's doing his job. Get lost."
Whoa. How did that much force come out of a body that small?
Kim Hyunjo was exactly half the size of the Lemon Girls manager. One punch and he looked like he'd be carted off with every bone broken — and yet it was the Lemon Girls manager who wilted under his presence. The man couldn't swallow his anger. He huffed and seethed, but he never actually swung.
Had the talk of reporters actually landed?
Either way, we went back into the interview room. Behind us, the Lemon Girls manager was still glaring like he meant murder. Had I just poured oil on a house that was already burning? This didn't feel like it was going to end here.
"Feels like I'm about to take one in the back of the head."
"Ignore him."
"He wouldn't jump me on the way home or anything, right?"
"Relax. You barely go home these days anyway."
Thanks a lot.
"You any good in a fight?"
Kim Hyunjo asked it out of nowhere.
"Or did you play sports? Martial arts, something like that?"
"No. Exercise and I aren't really acquainted."
"Then is your family insanely rich? Somebody hits you once and ten lawyers show up?"
"What? Not even close."
"Then what are you counting on, poking that guy's temper? He's built like a wild boar."
"I still can't just stand there and take it. It's humiliating."
"More nerve than I expected. Even so, from now on, look at who you're dealing with before you dig in. Don't actually break something while you're busy keeping score of your pride."
He nagged for a good long while, then added one more thing.
"You can't get hospitalized. You know how busy we are."
"Yes... I know."
And his image had been so good until a moment ago. A devil, after all.
Hyunjo glanced back once and kept going.
"Especially don't get tangled up with that one just now. He's bad stock."
"I heard. The rumors aren't good..."
"It's not just him. Everyone above him is the same. Pure Star Entertainment itself is a company crawling with dirty rumors. Bump into them and all you get is filth, so it's better not to get involved at all."
I was nodding along when I stopped short.
Pure Star Entertainment?
"That manager just now — he's with Pure Star?"
"Yeah. You didn't know? Lemon Girls are Pure Star kids."
"Pure Star Entertainment. The one that used to manage Mr. Sung Do-won?"
"Right. Sung Do-won was run so ragged there that he walked the second his contract ended. Up till then he'd basically been the one feeding Pure Star, so they clung to him begging for a renewal... There was some noise when he moved over to us."
What was this? A thread connecting from somewhere I'd never expected.
The instant I thought it, the world went black.
Finally!
If I could have moved, I would have thrown both arms up and cheered three times over.
The future office I could have drawn with my eyes closed by now. My office, some twenty years on.
The last time I'd seen a future in which I sat across from Sung Do-won, the static had been so thick I could barely make anything out. Now it was perfectly clear, and the situation was familiar. I was still settled in a plush chair, and across from me Bureau Chief Park and Reporter Song were looking my way.
Bureau Chief Park... seeing her again like this, it was definitely Reporter Park Woo-jung.
She had aged, and her style had changed, but the features were identical. The strange part was that the face was unmistakably Park Woo-jung's, and yet the air around her belonged to someone else entirely. The weight of the years? A person could change this much.
"But you originally wanted to handle actors, didn't you, Mr. President?"
Reporter Song was the one who spoke.
I strained to catch everything I could hear, see, and feel — the words, of course, but the voices and the faces too.
"When you took on Neptune, didn't you ask to be moved to the actor team?"
"The atmosphere back then wasn't one where I could make a request like that. After I joined, a major incident blew up in the actor division."
A little more. Just a little more detail...
I listened with the feeling of my blood drying out.
"An incident?"
"The Sung Do-won sex scandal."
There it is!
The moment Sung Do-won's name left her mouth, I crowed inwardly. So the thing that had nearly ended his life as an actor was a sex scandal.
Wait. Was that really the kind of incident that could decide an entire acting career? Drugs, gambling, getting behind the wheel drunk — those I would have understood. Sex wasn't a crime. It was the sort of fuss that shook a few fans loose, nothing more. A man with that face, that body, and that much money, living in abstinence — wouldn't that be the abnormal thing?
Was this not an ordinary sex scandal? Had a video gotten out?
"Ah, that one was a real disaster."
Bureau Chief Park cut in, sharp as ever.
"A successful Hallyu star in his twenties — a pristine star who had never once had a dating rumor — threw a depraved sex party. And there was a married woman among them. A bomb like that went off, so at the time it was a truly enormous scandal."
Good God.
"Word was the married woman was the wife of some company chairman who had been sponsoring Sung Do-won since his rookie days. Word was he was a sexual deviant, a sex addict. Articles you couldn't even sort into fact or rumor poured out, multiplying on a publish-it-and-who-cares basis. Well. I wrote an absurd number of pieces on it myself back then, so I don't have much room to talk."
"Then you must have caught the backlash too, Chief."
My future self said it with a short, dry laugh.
"Of course. Haa... it was a war."
Backlash? A war? What did any of that mean?
I was frustrated enough for my blood to surge the wrong way, but fortunately Reporter Song asked in my place.
"What do you mean, backlash?"
"That scandal. It started when some anonymous man went through a media outlet and demanded a fortune from W&U and from Sung Do-won. An affair with a married woman, depraved sex — the kind of story the press would go feral for — so if they wanted it quietly buried, pay up."
"Ah..."
"The man had photos."
Photos?
"Photos?"
"Evidence photos. So W&U paid him and shut his mouth, but in the end the story broke anyway. All of it — that W&U had covered it with a cash deal, that the evidence photos had existed. That's why Sung Do-won's image hit the floor in an instant."
"Well, a scandal like that twenty years ago would have hit hard."
"It did. But before long, the whole thing flipped."
"What?"
"A backlash set in."
My mind snapped clear.
A few steps ahead, Kim Hyunjo was calling me.
What was this? It was over? This wasn't some gutter soap, and it had really just ended like that? Even the trashiest soap at least told you when the next episode aired. With this, I couldn't even guess when I'd see it again.
Were they trying to kill me with frustration?!
"You coming?"
"...Sorry. I got dizzy for a second."
"What? You all right?"
"Yes. I'll come in after a minute."
"Fine. Rest, and come in when you're okay."
I walked out of the studio with a blank look on my face and paced in front of it for a long while, settling myself down.
All right. Think about it positively.
Without the future-sight, I would have known nothing. But now I knew that before long Sung Do-won would be swept up in the worst kind of sex scandal, and that his image would crash to the bottom because of it. I also knew that, for reasons I still couldn't see, the situation would flip again.
A backlash setting in meant some other circumstance had come to light — that there was something capable of overturning Sung Do-won's sex scandal.
And the anonymous man who had demanded a deal from W&U and from Sung Do-won...
Why did Pure Star Entertainment keep sitting so wrong with me?
I was sure of it. Sung Do-won had said he'd gotten caught up in their scheme.
It was only a hunch, but let me think it through once.
If Sung Do-won had all but fed Pure Star Entertainment, they would have been in a foul mood when he left without renewing. While they were grinding their teeth at him and at W&U, their own girl group, Lemon Girls, caused an incident and blew a huge opportunity. And of all people, it was Neptune — under W&U — who scooped it right up. Pure Star's mood would have soured even further.
So, in the spirit of telling him to choke on it, they pulled something on Sung Do-won...
Plausible, wasn't it?
Sung Do-won had belonged to Pure Star ever since he was a rookie, so the people there stood a good chance of knowing his private life — and, deeper than that, his sex life. I didn't know how much of the sex scandal was true, but they might well have secretly taken a single photo that could serve as leverage.
The anonymous approach, because picking an open fight with W&U was a little much? Or because they were worried Sung Do-won might come back with the line that he wouldn't go down alone?
They'd said even the hush money had been dragged into the press. A backroom move like that was even worse for an image, so W&U and Sung Do-won got their faces smeared with mud, while Pure Star lost nothing, hid behind anonymity, and enjoyed itself to the fullest.
Well. Only a hypothesis, in the end.