The Calm Before the Storm (2)
"The number you have dialed cannot be reached. After the tone, you will be connected to voicemail......"
Click.
I hung up and sagged back into the chair. That made four. Whatever had the lesson teacher who'd torn into Lee Songha so busy, he wasn't picking up.
The truth was, my head had been a snarled mess for a good while already. I stared blankly up at the ceiling. What were they saying up there right now? Had Sung Do-won arrived? How was the whole thing unfolding?
Every part of me wanted to bolt upstairs that instant, but I didn't know nearly enough to justify it. More precisely, I had plenty of fragments — just nothing solid enough to risk saying out loud.
"......Let me piece it together as best I can."
First, what was all but certain. Sung Do-won had taken part in a deviant sex party that included a married woman, and an anonymous man holding the evidence photos had reached W&U and Sung Do-won through a news outlet. Keep it out of the press and bury it quietly, he'd said, and it would cost them. W&U had tried to pay the man off and shut his mouth.
And in the end the story had broken anyway, hadn't it? Filthy rumors with nothing proven behind them had spread, and once word got out that W&U had covered up a cash deal — and that evidence photos existed — Sung Do-won's image hit the floor. Then, not long after, the whole situation flipped on its head. That was the point.
I could treat everything up to there as solid. It had come straight out of Director Park's mouth.
Second was what I'd gotten from Sung Do-won himself, in that glitching future. He'd said he might have been caught in their scheme, and that it might have ended his life as an actor. I'd file that under certain as well. I didn't think I'd done anything yet that would change that future.
The shade of that word scheme, set against Director Park saying the situation had reversed — it had made me suspect that Pure Star, Sung Do-won's old agency, had dug some kind of trap. But that was only my own guess. Nothing confirmed. And that was the part driving me up the wall.
If I could just be sure who the anonymous man was, I'd step in this second.
I'd hoped that around the time the incident broke, I'd see the future again. I'd tried everything under the sun, and the precognition showed no sign of surfacing.
So what could I actually say, at this point?
It seems like someone deliberately set Mr. Sung Do-won up to take the fall. This is going to sound insane, but please don't take the situation at face value — look at who's behind it. There are evidence photos, right? Those ought to be questioned, too.
No. That was completely unhinged. Worse, this was a moment when I was supposed to know nothing at all. If someone asked how I knew there were photos, I'd have nothing to say. Even if I papered over it with a lie, it had to stay inside what I could clean up afterward. This was the kind of lie that would birth another lie, and another, and swell like a snowball.
All right. Shift the angle.
I know it must feel like the worst possible moment right now, but once it's behind you, it'll have been nothing but a passing squall. The situation is going to flip soon. So you really don't need to worry.
No! That was just the talk of a madman. I'd practically be telling him to go buy a paper talisman.
I clutched at my hair and turned it over. Should I simply claim I had a shaman's gift? The cleanup afterward worried me, but it was the most convenient excuse I had. Not a bad card, either. They'd write me off as a raving lunatic for now, and then, if things played out the way I'd said, they'd have to reassess me. As the shaman manager. Ha.
"Aah......"
"What are you doing?"
I spun around, startled, and found Kim Hyunjo standing there, hollow-eyed.
"Chief. Hello."
"I told you to take today off. Why are you still here? Who knows when you'll get another chance to rest."
"I stopped by because I had something to say to the kids. But why are you—"
"I came in for the chiefs' meeting, and it got pushed. If you're done with your business, go home. The mood in the building is rotten today."
I swallowed hard and asked.
"Is it because of Sung Do-won?"
Kim Hyunjo flinched, pressed in close beside me, and shot the question right back.
"How do you know about that? Did a story go up?!"
"No. I overheard some other people talking in the elevator earlier. But......"
Right then, the precognition I'd been waiting for kicked in.
Before I had a second to adjust, I opened my ears wide to Director Park. Starting with the evidence photos — did that mean this picked up right where the last time left off?
"Those evidence photos."
"They were doctored."
Doctored? So someone really had tampered with the evidence photos.
"Sung Do-won did attend the party, but they never managed to get a usable shot. So they composited one, very carefully — and because he really had gone, his side was late realizing the photos were fake. After that, W&U said they'd sue the outlets, and the ones that had run the story without properly checking were turned upside down. Articles pulled one after another, corrections issued, a complete uproar. I took a mountain of complaint calls from Sung Do-won's fans myself back then."
Almost there. If I could just pin down who had done it—!
"Who would go so far as to forge photos for something like that?"
I could have dropped to the floor and bowed to Reporter Song.
"Well — some con-man paparazzo cooked up composite shots, tried to squeeze a bit of money out of Sung Do-won and W&U, and got caught red-handed...... That was how it was concluded, wasn't it?"
"That was the conclusion at the time."
The moment my future self agreed, Reporter Song tilted his head.
"So the real truth... was something else?"
"There's one hell of a story behind it."
"What kind of story?"
"The one actually behind that incident was..."
"Actually?"
"Sung Do-won's former agency."
Yes! I'd thought so. I'd thought exactly that. Hearing it land just the way I'd predicted sent a sharp thrill through me — like calling a movie's twist long before it arrived. Take the precognition away, and wasn't my instinct still pretty good?
"That was Pure Star, wasn't it? It was so long ago I can hardly remember."
Director Park was asking my future self. He couldn't remember because it was that long ago? Had Pure Star Entertainment gone under?
"That's right. Pure Star."
"That company had a grudge against Sung Do-won and W&U. So they ran a scheme to trash his image."
"Even so, going all the way to faking the photos..."
"I doubt they ever meant for those photos to reach the press in the first place."
"Huh?"
"It was enough if Sung Do-won and W&U believed them and made the deal. Sung Do-won threw a sex party with a married woman? You can swat that aside as tabloid trash. But a secret backroom payoff to keep evidence photos from leaking? That looks bad. Once the article runs, the suspicion hardens into fact and spreads in a heartbeat. It was an effective play. Even after the photos were revealed as fakes, the scratch on Sung Do-won's clean image stayed."
"Ah...... So even after the explanation came out, it still affected him. You said he was a top star, so if that popularity had lasted I'd know the name — but it's unfamiliar to me. I feel like I've heard it somewhere......"
"Hey."
My mind snapped back as if a light had been switched on.
"But what?"
"It's just......"
Right. That was it. An exposé about a celebrity's private life drew enormous attention, but the moment a correction went out, interest fell off a cliff. Celebrities saddled with ugly rumors worked the press and ran around insisting it wasn't true, and still there were people who went on believing the rumor. Repairing an image nicked like that would take an enormous effort.
Which meant that if I wanted to steer this incident the best way possible, I had to stop it before the article broke — before the thing had room to spread. When did the story break? A few days from now? Tomorrow? Or... surely not today?
"If you're tired, go home and rest. I've got things to do."
"Chief!"
I caught Kim Hyunjo in a hurry.
"What?"
"It's about Sung Do-won."
He glanced around before he answered.
"Whatever you heard, pretend you didn't. Don't go sticking your nose in."
"There's something that doesn't sit right with me."
"Yeah?"
"The Lemon Girls' manager. The one who works at Pure Star Entertainment — Sung Do-won's old agency..."
"That guy from before? What about him. You ran into him again?"
I felt bad using the man as an excuse — actually, thinking about it, I didn't feel all that bad. He'd shown up at the first Next K-Star taping just to pick a fight, and the next time I'd crossed him around the broadcast station, he'd glared daggers at me.
"When he came at me, he talked like he was telling me to just wait and see, and it didn't sound like he only meant the Neptune kids. Is that how they teach you to work at W&U? Bastards without a scrap of professional ethics. They won't come to their senses until they've been burned once..."
"What? He said that?"
"Looking back now, he definitely gave off the feeling that he was up to something."
I'd heard that a real con artist mixes ninety percent truth with ten percent lies. Well — if the person who'd actually been in the fight said that was how it felt, what was anyone going to do about it? Crack my skull open and check? My heart was hammering, but I put on the gravest face I could manage.
"This isn't something just the two of us should be sitting on. Come with me."
Where Kim Hyunjo couldn't see, I clenched a fist once, and stood. We rode the elevator up. In the short climb to the sixth floor I lined up what I was going to say. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but my head was humming, clean and quick.
A soft hiss. The elevator doors slid open.