The One Who Has Something to Protect (7)
I watched how Shim Kyung-taek took it.
Set beside reading the future, it was hardly difficult work. His fingers scrabbled over the laptop on the table. His eyes darted, then squeezed shut as he let go of the breath he'd been holding. No article with his name on it. Not yet.
That wash of relief made me want, badly, to call Reporter Park Woo-jung.
Lips smooth enough never to have known a crack twitched. Under the cuff of that handsome suit, veins stood out along the fist he'd locked tight. The sharp gaze found its mark soon enough. Me, of course.
"Who."
Shim Kyung-taek glared and bore down.
"That reporter. Who. Call them this instant and tell them not to write it."
"I couldn't. That's why I came."
I forced it—forced a regretful face—and made a show of checking my watch.
"I wanted to apologize before the piece ran."
"You insane bastard! You think an apology ends this?!"
Right. And you, knowing exactly that, tossed out an apology and called it finished. You insane bastard.
I went on with a blank face.
"Still, I didn't go so far as to give them your name, so..."
"The second reporters get their teeth in, my name comes out! You little shit—can you even tell up from down? Do you have any idea what you've done?!"
Of course I did.
"If this leaks to the press..."
Shim Kyung-taek bit his lip and roared.
"Who's the reporter you talked to? Which paper? Give me a name!"
The angry voice and the bullying tone were meant to threaten me, but he'd chosen wrong. The more unhinged he got, the colder my head became.
I licked my dry lips. Maybe a little further.
"But honestly, what you said was the truth, wasn't it."
I grumbled it like a complaint. Shim Kyung-taek's face was a sight. I wanted to photograph it and send it to Lee Songha. I had a feeling she'd enjoy it.
"What did you say, you bastard?"
Bastard, bastard, from the very start. A professor, and that was the extent of his vocabulary. A former stage actor who taught acting, and he couldn't even see through a clumsy performance like mine—just flushing red and going white by turns. His skill was starting to look questionable, too.
"Once the premiere airs, the whole world will see how good Songha is, and then the reporters will be in our ears asking why we didn't put her in front of a camera sooner. People who don't know anything will only curse the company, so from the company's side I was simply passing along the facts..."
"The company's side?!"
Shim Kyung-taek finally shot up off the sofa.
"If this hits the press, W&U gets turned upside down even worse! You think this is some minor problem?! You think when it comes out the mud only sticks to my face?! I was only asked to—!"
Go on. Keep talking. What, exactly, was this thing that would blow everything open if it came out. Whose face, besides his, the mud was meant to reach.
I watched him steadily, and he spat a few curses, as if he'd said something he shouldn't have. Too late to seal his mouth now. Suspicion had hardened into certainty a long time ago. All that remained was to press him until the evidence came out.
Solid evidence.
Baek Han-sung rose in my mind without warning. A man who never raised his voice and never lost his ease, and still bore down on you simply by sitting across the table. If it were CEO Baek Han-sung in this seat instead of me, what face would he wear, and in what voice would he speak?
"The way you talk, it sounds as if there's some private matter that must not reach the press. It even sounds as if someone at W&U is tied up in it."
A shrill voice flew back at once.
"Why do you keep poking into things that don't concern you?! Don't make this any bigger—while it can still be cleaned up, give me that reporter's name and outlet and get out! I'll handle the rest myself, talking directly to the— the W&U team leader!"
"I'm not so sure."
I straightened the shoulders I'd been hunching and leaned back into the sofa, unhurried.
"A company problem I don't understand matters less to me than Songha's. She's my responsibility."
"I keep giving you rope, you bastard, and you keep dragging up old business?!"
Old business?
"Not knowing is better for Lee Songha, too! She's already landed a project and she's acting! It all worked out, so why do you keep making a nuisance of yourself?!"
Strength gathered in my hand. If I were even a little more impulsive, I might already have thrown a punch.
In the future, more than twenty years on, Bureau Chief Park had said it. Lee Songha started acting after she turned thirty. If I hadn't seen that future—if things that might have been chance and might have been fate hadn't stacked until Lee Songha began acting again—she really might have wasted ten years caught in a trauma that wasn't even funny, exactly as that future had it.
The twenty-year-old Lee Songha I knew loved acting with everything she had, and never stopped working because she wanted to be better. What had those ten years of the Lee Songha I didn't know been like? Thinking of that, I didn't want to hear another word of this man's bullshit.
"Someone people call Professor shouldn't talk that way."
I quit arranging my face. I didn't even turn over what I ought to say. It all simply came naturally.
Shim Kyung-taek sat perched, awkward, and looked at the young man in front of him.
He couldn't even remember the name. If the kid hadn't caused a disaster, they never would have sat facing each other for a conversation this long. Until a moment ago he'd meant to grind the moron down until he learned which reporter the boy had run his mouth in front of. After that he'd pass it to the person who shared the secret, and in the end W&U would clean up the mess on its own. He'd never have to see this stupid kid again.
That was what he'd thought.
He felt something was wrong the moment the young man's face changed. The one who'd been rolling vacant eyes was suddenly looking at him like a man who'd been around this business a long time.
"Why did you do that to Songha? For what? For whom?"
The young man asked it slowly and took out his phone. He played a video and set it down in front of Shim Kyung-taek. On the small screen was a face in profile.
Lee Songha.
The rustle of script pages and the sound of lines being delivered came through vivid and clear. Footage of a script reading.
"Wh-why are you showing me this..."
Before Shim Kyung-taek could finish, the young man smiled.
"She's good, isn't she. The first time I saw Songha act, I thought every actor looked like that up close. They don't. The actors who read with her, the director, even a veteran with decades behind him. Everyone but you says Songha was born for it."
Shim Kyung-taek couldn't pull his eyes from Lee Songha acting on the screen. It was the feeling of finding a doll you'd smashed so it would never stand again, and thrown away, come back in one piece. The unease was hard to bear.
A voice both soft and cold bored into his ear.
"If I were you, I think I'd be in a hurry. Even now that reporter is wondering whether what you said was deliberate, and once it hits the press, cleanup is as good as impossible. You know that as well as I do. This is..."
The corner of the young man's mouth curved.
"...exactly the kind of story reporters lose their minds over."
"You— you..."
Shim Kyung-taek's eyes went red.
Every word of it was true. Once the article dropped, he'd be helpless. He'd drunk deep enough of this business to know. Right now any piece tied to Lee Songha was a spark tossed onto dry straw. It would burn through in an instant, and no one would even dare think of putting it out.
Shim Kyung-taek himself, and the student who had clung to him and begged.
As if reading the panic, the young man went on, almost coaxing.
"So wouldn't it be better to tell me about this company problem I don't know, and persuade me? After the article blows up, I'm only a manager who doesn't know the world and caused one accident. But you, Professor—your name is going to take a great deal of damage."
"You bastard, are you threatening me right now—!"
"Threatening?"
The young man smiled in a strange way.
"I've never tried threatening anyone."
The smile broke off. A heavy silence spread. The young man looked at Shim Kyung-taek without blinking.
It came faster than I'd expected. Son Chae-young's name, spilling out of Shim Kyung-taek's mouth. Oddly enough, he didn't look very worried about having let it slip. What he clung to was shutting the reporter's mouth, right now.
Which wasn't difficult. There was no reporter to shut.
Dialing someone, Shim Kyung-taek muttered, "I told you earlier. You'd have been better off never knowing. Just watch. You'll see what I meant soon enough..."
I didn't answer. I left the campus. I'd gotten everything I came for, and I had no wish to keep looking at that face.
I walked a long while, then leaned against a bare roadside tree. I checked the file of Shim Kyung-taek's recorded words and sent it to Kim Hyunjo. The phone rang at once, so I laid the situation out in brief: that Son Chae-young, after seeing Lee Songha act, had been eaten up by the stress and gone to Shim Kyung-taek to beg; and that Shim Kyung-taek, for the top-star favorite he was so proud of, had snapped Lee Songha's shoot so it could grow no further.
Curses came from the other end at first. Partway through, there was only silence. A little later we settled that Team Leader 3, and Lee Songha herself, would gather at the company to talk, and I hung up.
Hands in my coat pockets, I stepped into the stream of people hurrying past. An early-winter wind cut across my cheek.
So now I only had to wait for some decision to come down from above. The original plan was done. Drag into the light the suspicion that had sat uneasy all this time. Hook Shim Kyung-taek, and reel Son Chae-young's name out on the line behind him.
Walking slowly, I remembered what I'd just done. I had threatened a man.
The feeling was strange. Not because I had threatened someone, but because it had turned out to be nothing much. If anything, I didn't want to think about what came after. I might have poured words on Shim Kyung-taek more degrading than anything Lee Songha had been made to hear, or I might have asked Reporter Park Woo-jung to actually blow Son Chae-young's selfish little scheme open in the press.
If I weren't a mere manager. If I were like CEO Baek Han-sung as he was now, or like myself twenty-some years from now, a CEO in my own right. If I'd stood where that was possible.
On the way back to the company I bought a tiramisu the size of a man's head for Lee Songha. Before she learned what filthy, selfish dealing lay behind the trauma she'd been carrying, I wanted to feed her something she liked. Once she knew the truth, the shock would hit her harder than it hit me, and the anger would burn hotter than mine. Though if it was Songha, she might simply press it down inside her, quiet, the way she always had.
I stepped into the meeting room we'd set, and Lee Songha, already there, greeted me. She must have thought we were going to talk about the drama; she had the script for Cat Guardian Spirit hugged to her chest. Not that it was unusual. These days she carried the thing everywhere.
"You're here?"
"Yeah. Eat this before the chief and the team leader get here."
I held out the cake, and her face brightened at a stroke. Little time remained before the meeting, but for Lee Songha to finish off a whole cake, it was time to spare and then some.
"All of it? By myself?"
I nodded, and she stripped the box away in a rush. Then she stared, intent, at the body of the cake under its thick drift of cocoa. Anyone watching would have thought she was taking in a masterpiece. She seemed to weigh it—cake knife in one hand, fork in the other—then set the knife down. She drove the fork into the exact center as if she were shoveling, and lifted. The chunk teetered on the tines.
She had just, face bright with expectation, put the fork in her mouth when the meeting-room door banged open and two people stormed in.
Not Kim Hyunjo and Team Leader 3. Son Chae-young, and Chief Jo.
Not the faces of people who had come to apologize.
Son Chae-young flicked a glance at Lee Songha, cake still in her mouth, and came straight up to me. Chief Jo lingered in the doorway, visibly debating whether to hold her back, and in the end shut the door tight.
Son Chae-young demanded it with the momentum of a slap.
"What did you say to Teacher Shim? Who do you think you are, threatening him?!"
Wasn't there a name for this? The thief crying thief. It was so absurd a laugh came out of me.
"You're laughing?"
What followed really happened in a split second. Son Chae-young swung, truly meaning to rake my cheek. I, caught on surely not, surely not, threw my head back at the last moment and the hand missed. Lee Songha, more shocked than I was at the sight, flung the fork aside and stood.
In eyes that almost never stirred, a blue flame went up. And there was no time to stop her. Not that I wanted to.
Lee Songha seized the cake in her bare hand and threw it into Son Chae-young's face.