Notes

Soundtrack (all the songs are on Youtube, just in case you would maybe like to listen to some saxophone, synthware and piano) :

Deep Blue (The Midnight, Slowed + Reverb - main love theme, saxophone and eighties vibes)

Lovely (Billie Eilish ft. Khalid - second theme song in my head for Woon)

The Sixth Station (Joe Hisaishi - magnificient piano, when Woon is the car and going to the warehouse)

Half Heart (Angelo Badalamenti - saxophone and smooth jazz vibes, when Woon discovers the painting)


ACT ONE : THE KING


PART ONE : EVAPORATION


« I said I never felt my heart like this
She said I never felt my body
I always thought the point of love was just
To keep from, to keep from
Falling into the deep blue, the deep blue
Falling into the deep blue, the deep blue »

(The Midnight, « Deep Blue »)


Go Hyang knocked on the door of his office at five o'clock in the afternoon. They didn't have an appointment, but she was his deputy director, and one of the great and noble tasks, also called advantage, involved by such a function was usually to be able to approach the president of the company to tell him about the events without having to go through their two respective agendas in order to agree on a common date and a suitable time.

Needless to say, it would have taken an eternity, and Woon felt he was already wasting enough time fighting with his associates to find common meeting moments, which was far from being a piece of cake and which at times looked like playing a chess game at a much too professional level, to have to stick to the same refrain within his own company. It wasn't that such situations were unusual at the Sky Corporation either, but an effort had been made to minimize the embarrassment for everyone, and in general, meetings were run relatively smoothly and without any particular conflicts.

It was also worth noting that the company had experienced much more hectic meetings to be formalized when one could not come due to a tight deadline. Everyone knew how to work things out and how to be flexible with each other. This last quality was indispensable in the profession, and particularly in an organization conceived as the one Woon had been in charge of for nearly ten years.

His deputy director, or more precisely his right-hand woman, hit the door with exactly four sharp and rhythmic knocks, and when he allowed her in, she slipped into the wooded room, smelling of incense and green tea, furnished with black, charcoal-grey, brown leather and chrome surfaces, with the graceful fluidity of a panther, minus the yellow eyes. Her long black hair, pulled into a sophisticated and austere bun, revealed her beautiful face with its slender features, and when her eyes landed on Woon, they didn't flinch for a moment or betray the slightest anguish.

Most of the people who were employed at the Sky Corporation, whether it was about its public activities or the darker, more threatening sideline that few employees on the whole knew about, feared Woon consistently and respectfully, and most often looked at him with a visceral look of anxiety when he summoned them to talk about turnover or specific tasks to be performed. Under his displayed indifference, Woon suspected it was hard to really blame them.

Apart from the reputation he had acquired in his present management position, which, according to the very words of his workers, was that of a man who was "distant, but polite and attentive", and possibly, when tongues were loosened by alcohol or, more rarely, by mutual trust, "cold as an ice bucket" (a qualifier to which he had grown accustomed, having always been more or less described in this way, In the course of his life, even by his comrades in the orphanage, even by Dong Soo, but more in the tone of a joke than of an insult), those of his employees who had seen him through the looking glass had particularly vivid memories of his methods, his behavior, and his philosophy.

The sound of Go Hyang's high heels rattled softly on the office floor. Woon had made the decision to have it installed on the very day of his rise to the presidency, the day after the death of former chairman Chun. It was a remarkable parquet floor, made of very dark oak, almost black, which cracked deliciously at the slightest step and sagged with a seductive languor when someone placed a foot on it.

The former presidential office, which used to be in the present meeting room on the top floor of the Tower, had been occupied for twenty-seven years by Chun and was covered with a smooth carpet, but Woon had always hated the furnishings and aesthetics, which was why he had moved to a smaller, but completely unused and free office at the end of the east wing of the hallway, which he could arrange as he liked.

Once Chun was out of the competition, officially murdered by a street gang whose trail had strangely still not been found and whose testimonies and information all contradicted each other in a very singular way, unofficially executed according to traditional mafia rites that demanded the price of blood and a whole bunch of other symbolic and above all formidably radical nonsense to climb the steps, Woon had immersed himself, certainly in his work, but also in a kind of frenzy of interior decoration that his subordinates had found unusual, and that a qualified psychiatrist, having seen much more destructive behaviors and horrors pass by, would undoubtedly have described as a coping mechanism like any other.

In fact, therefore, Woon had redecorated his office. In reality, he had grieved in his own way. Good fences made formidably good neighbors, thank you very much.

He was immersed in the company's latest unofficial transactions, and had hardly looked up at Go Hyang when she had stopped in front of his desk. She was dressed in a perfectly fitted black and carmine suit, rigorously elegant, with subtle touches of color that hinted at a less rigid, more independent personality. Her ears glowed with real rubies, whose sparkles glowed furiously every time she turned her head.

Since her promotion following Woon's nomination, or rather inheritance, as head of the Sky Corporation, she had tripled her salary, and by extension doubled her expenses. Financial comfort fit her like a glove, and hadn't impaired her judgment or views. She remained a trusted, discreet ally with wise, prudent advices, and she was as capable of obtaining sensitive, hard-to-access information as she had been in the past.

She was even more effective, having a whole swarm of undersecretaries at her disposal whose skills and abilities were just waiting to flourish under her command. One shall not abuse of the nice things, she had once pointed out to him, some time after taking in hand her aspiring spies, while Woon was asking her why she was so keen to do things by herself.

She bowed down before him, but didn't hand him any documents, and Woon concluded that she wasn't coming for his reading or signature, but to deliver a message. With a brief, lazy gesture, he made her understand that she could speak, while deciphering the benefits of a contract signed with another jewelry company in Japan, which promised the Sky Corporation a gain monumental enough to allow them to have appetizers delivered by the best caterer in the capital for at least six months, three times a day.

"They found another painting," Go Hyang announced with a neutral voice.

(Your name means cloud, right ?)

Woon dropped his accounts, deigned to look at the seductive, inexpressive and calm face, like the surface of a lake in the middle of winter, of his deputy director. He couldn't see what she was thinking, because it was strictly impossible, and fortunate in a way, to be able to clearly read people's minds, but he guessed it just as well.

Everyone on the other side of the company, the side in the dark, the side that the media knew differently, more or less knew where the paintings came from, who the author was, and while they weren't strictly speaking informed in detail about the situation underlying them, they were nonetheless perceptive and experienced enough to draw their own conclusions. Go Hyang awaited his answer, hands folded in front of her, docile but not pliable, obedient and devoted, but not blind and ignorant.

She observed him patiently, and just as he knew what she was thinking, she herself surely had to suspect the paths his own thoughts were taking and the nature of his thoughts.

"Where?" He asked her without taking his eyes off her, without even batting an eyelash, because sometimes it only took a blink of an eye for the masks to fall off and the intentions to be revealed in a look (hold that thought kid).

"An old warehouse in the middle of the countryside, about twenty kilometers from Daejeon. I've already looked at the route. It's a two-hour drive."

She handed him a large-format photograph, showing a rather small building, immeasurably ugly, grayish, with a tin roof and rust on the walls. It was visibly surrounded by fields, and the only human construction visible in the photograph.

"Who sent it?" Woon asked while returning the document to Go Hyang.

"Joo Bong. They had some work to do in the area. That's how they spotted it. That, and then the messages."

"Having work to do", in the Sky Corporation's business jargon, was a convenient and politically correct way of referring to all of the company's unrecorded activities, which involved most commonly nine-millimeter calibers, insults against mothers, and, in the most folkloric cases, fireworks with grenades. An alternative expression had been put forward in the form of " making business together" or "making a deal". For the public face of the organization, the designations were often much less sought after, much more descriptive, and above all considerably more tedious.

Go Hyang then presented him, printed on another sheet of paper, the screenshots of the text messages received by the phones of Joo-Bong and the two others who had accompanied him for the trading operation of which they were the executors. The messages showed nothing more than GPS coordinates, with no additional details. She told him that the three men, once their transaction had been successfully completed, had contacted her to inform her of the reception of the text messages, and to let her know that they were on their way to the location, as they had become accustomed to doing whenever they received a communication of this nature.

Over the years, the phenomenon had become a routine. In the early days, everyone was suspicious, going in with a stockpile of weapons that would have put the army to shame, moving forward cautiously in well-trained groups ready to fire at the slightest movement or suspicious noise. But since then, as the messages had multiplied and their outcome was always, invariably the same, people had relaxed and stopped fearing their shadow whenever they appeared, never with anything more than coordinates. Woon didn't receive them.

He had the others, the ones that were full of words, sweetness, unanswered questions. Did you like it ? they would always say, and his own answers were always the same, "yes", because it was true, because he always loved the paintings, and the bitter and exhausted, insatiable, much too tender things, that they revived in him.

The pattern was doomed to repeat itself ad infinitum, like the cogs of an old machine, still in service, unable to stop. Each time, Go Hyang came to see him, told him "we found a painting", showed him the place, always lost, decayed, godforsaken holes, dark and abandoned places in which suddenly arose images without colors, but whose style and outlines were well known to the Sky Corporation, but also to the authorities.

They called him the Artist, but others, clever brats without any real imagination or critical spirit, called him "the loony one". Woon called him Dong Soo, as he had always done. He stood up from his chair, putting the screenshots of the text messages on the flat surface of his desk, a massive piece that he had had built almost custom-made by a craftsman he had known in the village where he had grown up, in the south of the country.

"Is the car ready?" he asked Go Hyang, knowing fully well what she was going to answer.

"Since the photographs were received," she informed him with a complacent smile.

She knew his habits, his ways, his tendencies and, to some extent, the shadows of his heart. No one in the company had ever gotten this close to Woon, but that was primarily because he had never allowed them to do so. Go Hyang herself was not quite as expert as she wanted to think she was, and she was well aware of that fact.

She simply knew a little bit more, but there were also mountains of details and precisions that she was not aware of, and that she could never take possession of, because those territories were instinctively hostile to her, and belonged to two people in all, the first one being Woon, and the second one Dong Soo.

"You come with me," he ordered while putting on his coat, a long severe black overcoat that he had bought on sale totally by chance three years ago, and that had become in the meantime one of his distinctive signs in the mob world, and that the dumbest ones assumed to have been terribly expensive and designed by a French couturier.

"I'm ready," Go Hyang said.

She was, without a doubt. Woon thought she had betrayed him one day, ten years earlier, when she had tried to protect him and had attacked Dong Soo and then Cho-Rip. She had since understood where the limits were. He had ensured it.

x

The Sky Corporation was the public face presented by the Heuksa Chorong organization to the rest of the world, especially to the police and legal institutions both inside and outside South Korea. For all of these entities, the company had been in the luxury jewelry business for more than a century, and had been founded by a respectable elder who had developed an interest in setting gemstones and showcasing their fires on graceful and aristocratic supports.

Where the majority of the great companies and more generally the big names in the field presented convoluted pieces, sometimes outrageously charged, sparkling, anarchic and perfectly un-wearable on a daily basis, the Sky Corporation wanted to be more traditional in its approach, more elegant, more refined. The firm and its directors had developed an image intensely linked to Korean and broader Asian values and traditions, where legends and myths were exploited in detail to produce slender and airy creations, a thousand miles away from the expensive and heavy jewelry offered by their competitors.

In one hundred years, they had produced about fifty collections, two per year according to the seasons, following the formal calendar, and each of them had received an increasingly warm and enthusiastic welcome, propelling the organization directly to the status of a leading South Korean jewelry company and complimenting the originality and delicacy of their work. They had their admissions in the most prestigious exhibitions, the media had devoted reports to them and the newspapers had written highly flattering articles about them.

Successive managements had long been praised for their artistic rigor and choices, while the ingenuity of the manufacturers and the company's immaculate reputation for scandals were commended. In other words, they were well regarded by everyone, despite a few small rumors here and there that had been so quickly stifled that one almost thought they had never been uttered.

The company worked with some of the country's most gifted artisan jewelers, and for the past two decades or so, it also sought the assistance of foreign manufacturers, as well as the skillful and meticulous advice and expertise of several renowned French and British specialists. Fashion critics rarely complained about their designs, preferring to spread their appreciation between the lines of their often incendiary articles for other brands.

They had their own store, located in Gangnam, on the first floor of the high tower where the organization had taken up residence after spending almost fifty years in a small, almost invisible store in the bukcheon district, but which the arrival of tourists, and more particularly of a wealthy population, had finally brought out of hiding and gradually attracted towards the metallic peaks of Gangnam. The manufacturers they had partnered with were either operating directly in Seoul or in the surrounding districts and counties.

Some of them, however, with very specific functions, were much more distant, and one of Woon's responsibilities as chairman was to meet with them regularly to inform them about what was expected of them in terms of collections. They were in contact with gemologists, goldsmiths, jewellers to whom they passed on suggestions and who were responsible for making them tangible. They also had ties in the haute couture world, supplying pieces for fashion shows every year. They obtained their supplies from recognized diamond dealers, but also from specialists with a much more nebulous reputation, which was transmitted through non-traditional networks.

They had customers in almost every country in the world, with the exception of a few, and always found someone to please. Several times a year, Woon would board a private jet to negotiate in Europe, North and Central America, and the Middle East. And sometimes, in between discussions about sapphire brilliance, topaz golden brown, carnelian glamorous seduction, jade minauderies, there were other, lower, more secret conversations, far away from the Le Corbusier sofas and the great vintages, caviar toast, fake smiles, and displays of wealth.

Heuksa Chorong was the other name of the Sky Corporation, which in the end was nothing more than a varnish, a social disguise hiding an immensely complex and wide spider web, whose stringy branches reached every corner of South Korea without ever fully revealing itself. For each jewel displayed in a showcase, for each stone set on a necklace, a ring, a bracelet, there was a gun, a bag of drugs, a sham, threats.

Every single piece of jewelry produced by the company was drowned under a layer of blood so thick and greasy that even the best cleaner in the world couldn't get through it. The fault to probably the hundred years of existence, Woon sometimes thought. In truth, Heuksa Chorong had always existed, as had his brilliant, polished alter ego. It had always lurked in the dark, hiding under gems, gold and silver, sometimes coming out of long and frightfully sharp claws, but without ever fully revealing its face.

The principle of a good mafia was to know how to hide, and Heuksa Chorong had a century of experience to its credit. It was well-established, well-oiled, organized with almost mechanical perfection and rituals learned from the very beginning. Woon had acquired them very early, at the time of his integration at the age of twelve.

The car had left the company's underground parking lot with four passengers on board, including the driver. Woon and Gu Hyang sat in the back, as was the custom. In front, riding shotgun, was a young man, Shin In-Sik, whose handgun skills and composure had earned him to be spotted by Go Hyang, who had spoken to Woon, and then to join Woon's envied circle of close bodyguards. There were ten of them in all, men and women who had invariably proven themselves on the field and whom Woon knew were devoted to him.

There were mob bosses who ran their organizations primarily through fear, and while the method was good in the short term, it always ended up wearing itself out over long distances, leading to the birth of a desire for rebellion among subordinates and more frequent, sometimes fatal, betrayals. Chun had been tactful with his subordinates : he was a man known to be violent, but his employees rarely complained about him, unlike the group's associates, who regularly criticized his undisciplined behavior and taunting. Woon, more diplomatic, was more acceptable for them. It's because they think they can dominate you, Dong Soo had once told him during one of their exchanges, which was short in terms of sentence construction but long in terms of time, over the phone.

Most of them were old men, relics who had seen and dealt with Chun's rustic brutality. You're just a twink, one of them had said to him the first time he had seen him. Woon's barrel, pointed five minutes later between his two eyes, had done much to convince him otherwise. No one knows, Woon thought during these moments of humiliation, at each new mockery, at each remark about his physique or the delicacy of his features, no one knows, and they will all kick themselves over it. In fact, some of them, if they didn't kick themselves, had lost some of their fingers, paying the price for their stupidity with their amputation.

The vehicle was a Hyundai Genesis, one of the top-of-the-line models produced by the national brand. The organization's directors had always driven cars made in South Korea, underlining their cultural affiliation and patriotic identity. The Genesis was one of Chun's latest and undoubtedly most profitable acquisitions.

For his part, Woon had complied with protocol, but he had a more pronounced taste for foreign models and, leaving aside the overly eccentric and flashy Lamborghini, Aston Martin or Porsches, which filled him with a nameless and utterly inexplicable horror every time he saw one, giving him the irresistible urge to shoot them on the hood just to relax his nerves, he preferred older, more sober vehicles, like the Rolls-Royce and their "ghost" model, which seemed to slide across the ground like a striking spirit one would never have suspected.

You have British tastes, Dong Soo had once remarked to him, as they were leafing through a sports car magazine and exchanging their respective opinions on the models presented. Dong Soo was much more of an American in his preferences. They had wanted to travel together, when they were younger, to go to New York, Las Vegas, London, Paris. Since he was chairman of Heuksa Chorong, Woon had traveled to all the destinations, but alone. To compensate, he would send photos. And he also dreamed, a little, sometimes, when nobody was looking at him.

There were traffic jams on the road, as there always was in Seoul at this time of the day when people were leaving the offices and the alcoholic evenings between colleagues began. The tower that housed both the Sky Corporation's official store and its offices, a huge skyscraper with a spiked top, like an arrow that would have wished to pierce the sky, and whose glass facade reflected the clouds, was immersed in an ocean of other higher and more imposing buildings, whose signs were those of big names in the commercial world.

At that time of the day, during winter, when night was already falling, the towers were lighting up like blazes, and Woon could see them in the rear-view mirror, glowing in the fading light of the sun. It had been sunny all day, but the sky was now covered with gray clouds, and temperatures had dropped drastically below zero. The weather forecast predicted snowfall during the night, and street salting operations were already being deployed in Seoul.

It was quiet in the car, with little disturbance from the noise of the radio that was broadcasting the news. Woon kept his eyes glued to the passing landscape, while Go Hyang consulted her documents on her tablet, and the car sped off, rushing, toward the southern highway and Chungcheong Province, toward Daejeon, toward the paintings.

x

At the age of twelve, he had met Chun after his father had given him a monumental beating for having expressed the wish to go and practice martial arts in a specialized club. It was a known fact in the neighborhood that Yeo Cho-Sang, who was a janitor in a luxurious residence of the city of Yongin, was fond of drinking, and a fact less known than when, tired of ranting against his furniture or the emptiness, he mistook his son for a punching bag. Woon's mother had died when he was still a baby.

He only learned of the circumstances of her death very late, on the very same day he decided to join Heuksa Chorong. He had grown up as a calm, reserved child in a climate of constant tension, constantly walking on eggshells so as not to provoke his father's anger, which was not an easy task since the man sometimes threw tantrums over nothing, especially when Woon was around. He seemed to have an aversion towards his son that he had tried to justify by exclaiming one day "I saw you're going to become a killer ! ". Woon, who was peeling potatoes at that time, had put the statement on an umpteenth delusion due to his father's consumption of soju.

It was rare when he didn't see him with a bottle nearby, even at night. In truth, the bottle was probably the only friend of Yeo Cho-Sang, who otherwise never met anyone, never invited anyone, and lived a secluded existence in the tiny apartment that he and Woon owned on the top floor of an old, crumbling building in the poorest part of the city. A few steps away was the equivalent of a shantytown, where Woon had a friend until six years old, before the latter's family was able to pull themselves out of poverty and move out.

Woon's father had raised him with as little care and love as possible, leaving the child to fend for himself at an early age, and then relying on him for all the chores in the house. When Woon was seven years old, his father had attempted to take him out of school, but Woon's teacher, a kind and loving woman, had fought hard to keep him, and eventually won by pressuring Yeo Cho-Sang, threatening to call the police. At that time, his father's beatings were only moderate, and he had few bruises.

One day, he had broken one of his son's ribs by kicking him, but by some odious miracle he had managed to make the fracture look like a child's play accident once at the hospital. Woon never said anything, even when asked. He simply looked at his interlocutors with a cold, adult, terrifying stare, and then everyone who spoke to him would realize what was going on, but without the child's verbal testimony, it was strictly impossible to do anything about it.

Moreover, all those he had been with weren't always paying attention, or had seen him too little to really suspect his situation. You couldn't ask people to notice everything, and since Woon was as silent as a grave, unable to explain why without wanting to change the procedure, no one had ever come to take him away from his father's grasp to another family. Deep down, in retrospect, Woon also felt that part of him hadn't wanted to leave his father and his home, which were the only landmarks he had known since he was a child. And his father, on closer inspection, was a monster more often pathetic than truly frightening, as were many of the human monsters, the only ones that had ever ruled the Earth.

Woon's schooling had been irregular. He was a careful, eager to learn, and quiet student, whose teachers often spoke highly of, but he regularly missed classes, because some of the bruises that were too visible needed time to disappear, and he didn't want them to be seen and questioned. On the other hand, he was characterized by an inability (it was the very word written on one of his report cards that he had kept in a box at home, "inability") to form friendly relationships with the other children, and by physical and verbal abuse that was sometimes surprising and which worried his teachers and contrasted with his general attitude in class and his very correct grades in all subjects.

Attempts had been made to send him to the school psychologist, but their exchange had been reduced to an hour of total silence, leaving the professional frustrated and Woon horrified by the consultation, which had seemed prodigiously useless to him. He hadn't gone there since, in spite of good-willed attempts to do so. He had never been talkative, let alone with strangers.

The mere idea of venting his thoughts and anxieties to someone unknown had always seemed dreadful to him, especially since he had never done it with anyone close to him, including Dong Soo, and Dong Soo was undoubtedly the closest person to Woon in the whole world. As a result, he had kept his lips sealed on his upbringing with punches, and had now mastered mental compartmentalization to a near-perfect level, to the point that a psychiatrist would probably have torn their hair out over his case (or, at least, he liked to think so).

Other kids in the neighborhood either shunned him or, alternatively, despised him. Woon didn't care about them, because the others meant nothing to him, and he had always been able to play by himself. His father barely spoke to him when he was a baby. Most of the time he would put him on the floor, place one or two toys that his mother had bought for him before he was born next to him, and watch him distractedly while he drank a beer or a glass of stronger alcohol.

For a long time, Woon had wondered why Yeo Cho-Sang hadn't just tossed him out the window to get it over with once and for all, and every once in a while, when his father was really drunk, he would start to express some kind of incomprehensible regret, and his eyes would become filled with guilt. Woon thought he had felt pity for him in the early years. The repeated blows had ended up sweeping everything away, like a storm ripping the roofs off houses and razing their foundations. For his father, he had retained contempt, growing resentment, and visceral disgust. The rest was long gone, and if there were any traces of it, Woon didn't know where they were, and didn't want to look for them.

As for his mother, she was a nebulous, indistinct figure. There were pictures of her at home, which he had found stashed in a shoe box under his father's bed, while the latter was snoring, imbibed, on the living room couch watching some television program. His mother, in the photos, was smiling, embraced by a young man whom Woon hadn't recognized, and who ended up turning out to be Yeo Cho-Sang.

Looking at her, young and alive, Woon had considered she was a beautiful woman, and he had taken the photos with him the day he had left for Heuksa Chorong. They were now partitioned behind the secret safe of his penthouse, and only one of them had earned its place in a frame near his bed. He never really dared to look at it. It made him want to cry.

An outside observer might have been able to assert that Chun had arrived at the right time, in the right place, in other words, that he had possessed a positively remarkable sense of timing. Woon was kneeling on the ground, his forehead bleeding, and trying to open his hand with a stone he had picked up. He had just come out of a heated confrontation with a gang of boys his own age who had insulted and provoked him, and then beaten several of them when he had fought back against one of them with a punch.

Earlier, he had gone to find his father in the kitchen of their apartment, after hearing some women at the local grocery store claim, on seeing him, that he was the son of "the one who had killed his wife". When he had asked the question after returning home in a state of panic, full of incomprehension and deaf anger, his father had finally confessed. Yes, I killed her, there, you happy ? He had grumbled as if Woon was bothering him with his problems, and he wanted to get rid of him as soon as possible. In a fit of rage, with a scream, Woon had hit him with the first object that had reached his hand, an empty soju bottle.

It was made of glass, and had sounded hollow when it had hit Yeo Cho-Sang's skull. Blood had dripped over his father's eyes. Woon had fled, wishing for oblivion, isolation, was while leaving his building that he had encountered the group of boys, and later the leader of Heuksa Chorong, in the person of Chun.

x

As the road traveled away from the capital, the small family homes had gradually replaced the shiny buildings, the giant signs, and the mountains were now perfectly visible from all sides, powerful, motionless, peaceful like protective giants that hadn't been awakened for centuries. The sky had definitely turned gray, and the car was navigating between the great highways leading inland and south, and the narrower roads that crisscrossed between the fields and the small villages that abounded around the larger towns.

The geography of the country reflected the contrast between tradition and modernity, old and new, skyscrapers and hanoks. The millennia-old hills were now covered with tar, and the forests were filled with a procession of vehicles of all sizes that drove impatiently, those to the north, most of them to the south. The road was the same as the one leading to the village where the orphanage in which Woon had lived after his father's death was located. He hadn't taken it since what seemed like an eternity.

Following the succession of the landscape through his door window, cheek pressed against his closed fist, Woon remembered the tall silhouette of Chun, who had come to him the day he had learned the truth about his mother's death. The man had a stern, peculiar face, with kingly, eagle-like eyes, piercing beneath their first appearance of tiredness, and terribly fixed at times.

He was dressed in a black leather biker jacket that day, worn over a t-shirt bearing the effigy of a rock band that Woon had never heard of, and with dark jeans with holes in several places. His leather boots, with thick heels, echoed against the macadam like the trumpets of Jericho. He had a bandana wrapped around his long, greying hair, and his dark beard combined with all his other clothing attributes made him look like a biker. With his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans, he had stopped in front of Woon, who was angrily pressing the stone against his hand.

"What are you doing, kid?" he had asked him, very gently, in a slightly curious and amused tone.

Woon hadn't answered, because he had perfectly integrated the rule saying that children were not supposed to talk to strangers, and this one seemed much too singular not to apply the safety protocol. Seeing that the kid wasn't speaking to him, the man then knelt down, slowly, carefully, and asked his question again with the same gentleness.

"It's none of your business," Woon had spewed out, because it was true, and he didn't see why a stranger could give a damn about it.

"No, of course not," Chun had answered, without the slightest irritation. "Why don't we start with a less intrusive question, hmm ? Your name, for example?"

Woon hadn't said anything, ready to run for his life in case the guy decided to try anything dodgy. Like all kids his age, he'd heard enough horrible stories about kidnapped kids whose bodies had been found in a ditch to not be suspicious of the slightest expression of interest from a complete stranger.

Moreover, he had never seen the man around, because he thought he would have remembered his jacket and the phoenix design on his back, beautifully embroidered and colorful.

"You don't want to tell me," Chun had noted. "That's fine. I understand. But you have to take care of your hand. Otherwise, it's going to get infected."

Woon had shrugged his shoulders. The conversation had distracted him from his initial task, and the back of his hand was bleeding on the ground, covering the asphalt with a carmine red coating. It was throbbing terribly, and it had brought tears to his eyes as he was trying to tear it apart, his mind engulfed by anger, despair and pain. The man had straightened himself up.

"Look, I saw a drugstore nearby," he had said. "I'm going to go get something to clean that up, okay ? You can stay here, or you can leave if you want. I'll come back anyway."

Woon had stayed, dazed, tired, apathetic. He remembered feeling absolutely nothing after his breakdown, he remembered an atrocious, endless nothingness, then a sincere astonishment and a touch of gratitude at seeing the guy come back, carrying a plastic bag with the logo of the drugstore printed on it.

Woon had ended up sitting on the step of a small staircase behind him that led to a raised street above his own. People passed by without paying any attention to him, not even worrying about seeing a boy his age alone as night was about to fall in a neighborhood known for its misery, gangs and violence.

The man had seemed happy to see him there, and had greeted him with a simple, lazy hand gesture.

"I took what I could find," he had announced, settling down on the same step as Woon, "I think it will be okay. Wanna give me your hand?"

Woon had hesitated, vaguely, reflexively, before extending his bruised hand. The guy had grabbed it with his fingertips, but Woon had felt all the calluses of it.

"We'll start with antiseptic," the man warned him. "It's going to sting."

"I know," Woon had retorted without even realizing it.

"Good," the man had said. "You can talk."

He had poured antiseptic gel on a compress, and cleaned the wound gently, being careful not to press too hard so as not to hurt the kid. He looked gruff and wild, but had been remarkably careful with Woon, taking on a role that the child had never really known before, since his own father was the one who usually inflicted the blows. The wound was ugly, but not deep. Woon had hissed in pain when the compress had crept towards the center.

"Does it hurt?" the guy had asked him.

Woon had bitten his tongue, kept his opinions to himself, looked away, but when the man had interrupted his treatment and looked at him with an inquisitive look, he had finally given in, and nodded his head imperceptibly.

"Sorry," the guy had muttered, without meanness.

He had smiled, looking twenty years younger and almost handsome. His eyes seemed to know, to understand. Then, raising his hand, he had caressed Woon's cheek in a totally unexpected but gentle gesture, and Woon had felt something profoundly young reacting to this contact, to this loving and incomprehensible touch. One of his elementary school teachers had done the same one day.

He had been left alone in the classroom, refusing to go out to play with the others during recess, and she had caressed his cheek with the same compassion, the same willingness to soothe and be kind, and she had almost made him cry because he hadn't expected it. The tender gestures were infinitely more cruel and painful to him than all the blows in the world. He had grown up like that, and even today, at thirty-five years old, he was always on the verge of tears when someone (Dong Soo) touched him, even for just a moment, with love and kindness.

The guy had then given him a very light, barely painful tap on the same cheek he had caressed a second earlier, and this time Woon had understood the meaning (punishment).

"It's silly, what you did," he explained. "You know that, don't you?"

Woon had looked him straight in the eye, fearless, challenging him to say anything else. The man had seemed satisfied with his reaction, and had smiled at him differently, with more irony, before wrapping his hand in gauze and fixing it with plaster (I've always been very bad at manual jobs, he had joked to excuse the clumsiness of his bandage). Then he had given his hand back to him, and had sat next to him, watching people go by as if they had been two cows in a meadow.

He had taken a chrome flask out of his jacket pocket and drank some of its contents, without offering any to Woon (it's not for kids, he had said with a mocking grin). They had remained thus, staring at the others stonily, silently, while the day was getting darker. Finally, the guy had turned his head towards him and asked :

"Do you live around here?"

Woon had nodded his head again.

"Do you need someone to walk you home ? You're not going to hurt yourself again, are you?"

He had shaken his head.

"I live across the street," he had indicated, pointing at his building with his chin.

"With your parents?" the guy had inquired nonchalantly, because it was probably obvious that all the children in the world lived with their parents.

"My father," Woon had replied, and his voice must have contained venom, because the man had observed him for a long time after his remark.

He had then gently patted him on the top of his skull, which had annoyed Woon, who had associated the gesture with adults' attempts to belittle his words or silence him.

"It's late," the man had said. "Go home. You can keep all this."

He had pointed to the bag from the drugstore with its compresses, gauze and antiseptic gel.

Woon remembered that he had felt a terrible, deep hesitation at the idea of returning home to his father, slumped on the couch, his breath full of alcohol and his eyes full of hatred (I don't want to). The man had realized it, seeing him staring at the doors of the building without moving a muscle. He had laughed about it, a hoarse laugh, without malevolence.

"What's the matter ? You don't want to go home to your father?" he had asked, hitting the bull's-eye and knowing it most likely.

Woon hadn't confessed anything, hadn't shown anything. The guy had gotten up from his step, imposing, casting a long, slender shadow on the ground.

"You know, you can come with me, if you want," he had declared. "I've got some work to do around here. You can come with me, and then come back here. It's up to you. You can call me Chun, by the way."

He had shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and then proceeded to walk away, offering the vision of the phoenix sewn on the back of his jacket. The beast, in mid-flight, seemed to roar, and Woon could almost see the flames coming from its wings and the absolute freedom of the creature who obeyed nothing and no one (set me free let me burn).

Two things had crossed his mind : the first was the image of his father, his fists, his resentment, and the persistent pain that the bruises left in his body. The second had been Chun's, the hand he had put on his cheek, his look that expressed pity and a strange understanding, as if the man had known, somehow, what Woon was going through, having experienced it himself as a child.

I grew up in the slums of Seoul, you know, he had revealed to him a few years later, and my mother was a complete nutcase, unable to take care of herself or anyone else. We're a lot alike, you and I. Woon had followed the lanky silhouette of the guy, and obeyed his heart's ambitions.


« Isn't it lovely, all alone

Heart made of glass, my mind of stone

Tear me to pieces, skin and bones

Hello, welcome home »

( Billie Eilish ft. Khalid, « Lovely » )


Daejeon, a hundred kilometers southwest of Seoul, meant "big field", and it was a thunderous irony since the city was a cluster of towers and buildings that housed just over a million people, the exact opposite of a field, unless you were talking about a very, very big field. Woon had been there once or twice, on business, first legal, and then much less so. He had signed there a deal with another big mafia baron, which would have largely allowed Heuksa Chorong to equip itself with nuclear missiles, if he had wanted to (sometimes, when negotiating with morons, the idea would gently tempt him).

The object of the deal had been kilos of cocaine and just as many amphetamines. Woon, who had maneuvered smoothly with the boss, a nice guy and pleasantly open-minded for a gang leader, had added an giant stock of GHB to the bill, for both style and profit. The guy had asked some of his guys to test the merchandise on the spot, and was greatly satisfied with the overexcited, amorphous or disoriented states of the men, testifying to the good quality of the products. Heuksa Chorong doesn't sell junk, Woon had told him, quietly sitting on a mellow sofa that he still remembered, sipping a martini in a kind of parody of Jack Torrance in Stephen King's Shining.

He had ordered it without alcohol, because he liked to joke occasionally, and he loved to see the completely horrified faces of the waiters when he indicated his choice to them. He and Dong Soo had often done it during parties, when the others dragged them to nightclubs although they both hated them equally. If it was stupid, the strategy had always at least had the merit of entertaining them.

The idea was Dong Soo's : Woon shamelessly copied it, just as he knew that Dong Soo had stolen his " so, what do you think about organ trafficking ? ", which was a horrible method conceived to revive a conversation close to end, and that Woon had never dared to use in public, unlike his comrade whose scruples were much more tenuous.

On a guidebook, Woon had read that Daejeon was famous for its hot baths and for " muk ", a local specialty made from acorn jelly. The latter had been served to him during his successful meeting with the other mafia boss from Gwangju, and he had hated it, but had tried to keep a polite countenance during the tasting. When you were served during a transaction, it was highly recommended that you enjoyed it and kept your mouth shut. Tensions rose very quickly, regardless of the level of reception, education and location of the different groups.

The vast majority of them weren't in Seoul, but in the south, in the Joella region. Apart from Gwangju, Mokpo was an important mafia center, and Busan had seen the emergence of the Seven Stars, whose leaders, imprisoned since 2013, still had influence in the underworld, through their successors. Some groups were almost as old as Heuksa Chorong : the Double Dragons of Gwangju had existed for a little more than fifty years, and the HSS wasn't so bad either.

There was a tendency to believe that the older the organizations were, the more codified they were, but the reality offered a wider range of nuances, and some of the younger mafia were already drowning in traditions, oaths and rituals while their older sisters were showing more laxity in their practice, if the word could be used to refer to organized crime. In an older organization, more things had been passed on, and sometimes they were more relaxed than the younger ones, whose blood was boiling at the slightest mistake. Moreover, the old gangs were more rooted in the territory, better prepared, and therefore quieter compared to the new street mafias whose instability was the source of the violence committed in their name.

The warehouse where the painting was found was located twenty kilometers east of Daejeon, along the Gyeongbu Expressway, the second oldest and busiest road in the country, linking Seoul to Busan via Suwon, Daejeon, Gumi and Daegu. It was a rather sad and gloomy road, mostly crowded, but at times it passed through landscapes worth seeing. The warehouse was accessible by a small exit just before a gas station, which went through mountains and fields.

With a smooth steering wheel turn from the driver, the Genesis entered it without hesitation, and drove a short distance through the middle of the local outback, finally landing between two fields in a state of immeasurable disarray that the owners hadn't bothered with for a long time. Woon recognized the stems of the sunflowers, which gave very pretty panoramas in summer, but in winter simply offered a pitiful and dilapidated view, their large round heads bent down to the ground, without their golden petals to reflect the sunlight.

Joo-Bong was there, standing upright, and he greeted him with a respectful bow, as did the other two men who were there. They all wore suits and ties, and they all stood in stark contrast to the rusticity of the adjacent environment. Go Hyang joined them, making her way through the dirt with her high heels without the slightest discomfort or difficulty.

Woon, who had once worn high heels to infiltrate the hideout of a rival gang, which he and his subordinates had destroyed hours later, admired his deputy director for her technical skill : he himself had suffered martyrdom in those infernal shoes throughout his encounter with the leader of the rival group, and had never felt such euphoria while removing his shoes after having stuck a bullet in his skull, just as the old man's hand was resting on his thigh and the other one was moving with determination towards his false breast, undetectable nevertheless under the bustier of the black lace pencil dress he was wearing at the time. Dong Soo, to whom he had sent a selfie for posterity, had complimented his choice of clothing, which, according to him, gave him "legs to die for".

To say that the spot was in the middle of nowhere was an understatement. In reality, it was in the middle of the absolute nowhere, deserted, abandoned, completely devoured by nature and time, without anyone giving a damn. Places of this nature were legion in the country, where the economy had undergone a drastic increase in a short period of time, and where as a result activities had modernized so quickly that many rural buildings had been neglected during the transition.

The warehouse that Woon had in front of him was one of those, and rust, already visible on the pictures, snaked along the tin roof while cracks streaked along the walls. The double doors were open on a dark interior, and a smell of rusty metal and chemicals was coming out of it.

"Is it safe?" Woon asked Joo-Bong.

"Totally, boss. We checked the surrounding area, and we've been looking for traces of bomb or dynamite. Nothing to report, except for the painting."

Less than three years after Woon's betrayal, while still holding a permanent and recognized position as an NIS agent, Dong Soo had developed a parallel (and hidden) taste for explosives, and on several occasions, the places where paintings had been found had been blown up shortly after Woon's visit, as they had become empty and silent again.

Dong Soo never painted in public spaces : he chose his locations carefully, always isolated, and when they were in big cities, they were usually in deserted and lonely places that no one had visited for a long time. Thus, there were no victims caught in the event of explosions, unless passers-by were in the immediate vicinity, which had never been the case until now.

The interior of the warehouse was as dark as his first glimpse of it suggested, and Woon followed his lieutenant into it, the sides of his coat raising around him. Go Hyang accompanied them, peaceful, her heels clicking against the dirt and dust on the ground, as did the two henchmen who had made the journey with them. Those who were with Joo-Bong by the time of the discovery had stayed outside the doors, standing guard.

He led them to the back of the warehouse, which was still littered with barrels and mostly empty shelves. Tags covered the walls, and there was a platform with a two-part staircase leading to an upper floor. Joo-Bong's flashlight was a ghostly white beam in those dark, silent depths. Soon it met the back wall, and then black lines and curves, visibly drawn with a brush, appeared under a layer of paper that covered them like a master's canvas.

"That's how it was when we found it," Joo-Bong assured him. "We didn't remove the wallpaper, but I recognized the style from what was visible. He glued it back on top, just like the time in Seosan."

The wall was big, high. There was enough room for a work of almost monumental size, and Dong Soo had always liked physical challenges. To the left, illuminated by a beam of light from a broken window, was a moving platform, which had undoubtedly been used for the creation.

"Remove the paper," Woon commanded, with his eyes glued to the wall. "And take the projector in the trunk of the car."

They always took at least two of them whenever a painting was discovered, mainly because most of the places in which they were created lacked lighting.

Joo-Bong worked with the help of the driver of the car, and they started tearing the paper surface by hand, pulling at the pieces that came off, while Shin In-Sik went to retrieve the projector and illuminate the result. Woon, in spite of the darkness, could already distinguish its outline and general shape, and he slipped his gloved hands into his coat pockets, watching the silhouette of the painting reveal itself as his henchmen released it from its protection.

Once the projector was plugged in with an extension cord and aimed at the wall, the work presented itself in all its black and demented splendor, and its admirers contemplated it without exchanging a word, holding their flashlights to follow its lines, looking for a message, a meaning. Woon swallowed the painting with his eyes, devoured it, letting it engrave itself in the darkest and most inaccessible corners of his heart, in his nerves, in his flesh.

On the wall, he sat enthroned, all in black lines, empty spaces, perspectives, holding a gun pointed at the spectators, and on the top of his skull was a massive crown, resplendent with opulence, as he was about to pull the trigger and looked at his audience without tenderness or sympathy. In the twenty-three years that they had known each other, he had been Dong Soo's favorite subject of study, and from the sheet of paper, he had come to occupy larger and more unusual surfaces.

Hundreds of Woon, in postures of power, always superb, always threatening, reigned in the four corners of South Korea. The homage was obvious, the proof of love manifest, the obsession visible. Woon drowned in it every time, and he offered no resistance (make me your king).

x

Dong Soo had always liked to draw, as far back as Woon remembered. At the orphanage in Goesan district, built in a village about forty kilometers from Mungyeong locality in North Gyeongsang, the name of which persisted to escape Woon both because of a totally unjustified length but also because of a complexity that had never failed to leave him stunned, especially considering the size of the village's population, which must have barely approached a thousand inhabitants on feast days, but also its size, tightened as it was on itself like an armadillo to protect itself from predators outside, in the middle of a basin between the mountains, Dong Soo had covered the walls of his room with drawings and paintings over the years, representing absolutely anything and everything as long as he liked the model.

His studies swayed between landscapes, realistic and fantastic, manga or cartoon characters, people he knew, bodies, faces. Initially clumsy and indelicate, his stroke of pencil, then of brush, had ended up gaining in skill, but also in beauty. He had gone through phases during all the time Woon had spent with him. From the age of thirteen to fifteen, for example, he had mainly sketched figures of women, mythological creatures, including endless pokémons, when his Uncle Sa-Mo and Aunt Jang-mi, the owners of the establishment but also his legal guardians since the death of his parents, had offered him a console and his first videogame cartridge to celebrate his thirteenth and Woon had spent days and nights playing the game, living the fights as if they were real, wishing that they too could capture the little monsters that populated the imaginary territories that the gameboy's screen showed.

They had befriended a third boy, also at the orphanage, named Yang Cho-Rip, who always had tricks up his sleeve to get magazines on the subject and who liked more than anything to discuss planning of confrontation strategies, types and special abilities. Woon and especially Dong Soo, who had developed an almost religious reverence for the game and who, by the end of his first year of playing, knew absolutely everything there was to know about pokémons, how they worked and their universe, had had very lively discussions with their classmate, whose more timid and withdrawn nature would suddenly turn into the temperament of a lawyer as soon as he launched himself into a subject he was passionate about, a phenomenon that annoyed some people and exasperated others.

Cho-Rip had few friends at the orphanage, like Woon, but not for the same reasons. Woon was aloof by nature, but he had managed to earn the respect and admiration of his classmates through his martial arts skills and good grades at school. In addition, his friendship with Dong Soo and Dong Soo's tendency to show his teeth whenever someone said bad things about Woon made him globally accepted everywhere and by everyone.

Cho-Rip, on the other hand, was particularly gifted from an academic point of view, but otherwise had no special skills that would have made him more popular among his peers. He was discreet when left in a corner, but very talkative, and even too talkative when spoken to, as if he wasn't sure when to stop talking or when he would start to irritate his interlocutors. He had topics of conversation that, moreover, could seem boring for most people, because they were often very sharp and intellectual, or much too developed and analytical.

Dong Soo's aunt had once referred to him as "precocious," but Woon had found it difficult to grasp the meaning of the term, as he had associated it with overall superiority and success, and had compared it to Cho-Rip's inability to make friends. Beyond his speeches, Cho-Rip was a well-behaved and small child in a rural orphanage where almost all the residents dreamed of running outside, playing, exercising, fighting for a yes or no, and also paiting the town red once they turned fifteen.

Woon was cold, but was at an advantage because others thought he was cool, and so forgave him his inaccessibility. Moreover, he was the one who had built it. Cho-Rip, on the other hand, suffered from his own, and unfortunately had no particular attribute that could provoke the admiration of his companions.

In the warehouse, Woon followed the black lines of the painting with his eyes, shining under the projector light. Dong Soo had gone through his color phase at the age of twelve, but that one had been abandoned fairly quickly, as he had found he was more gifted simply by keeping the gray, black and white colors. Without really knowing how to explain why, he liked charcoal, pencil, white chalk, and india ink.

His style had become more refined by the time he was nineteen years old, and he had put aside the thundering watercolors, colored pencils and felt-tip pens, to turn to more simplicity and a desire to express himself through impressions, trying to reproduce with few colors and a few lines the profile of his models. Woon had posed for him, almost always without his knowledge. He didn't like to be photographed or drawn, and he had always refused when Dong Soo had offered to be his subject of study.

The latter had never insisted, but he had drawn him many times unbeknown to him, capturing a look, a posture, capturing him when he was working, when he was reading.

With the years, he had stopped asking him anything, but Woon had found one day at the orphanage, by chance, while looking for something completely different, in a large shoe box carefully hidden under Dong Soo's bed, what must have been hundreds of sketches of him, from all angles, mainly of his bust but sometimes of his whole body.

The first ones had been extremely clumsy and unflattering, but those of the last few years reached perfection and reverence, and Woon had found each of his features sketched on the paper, each of the folds and curves of his face. In the drawings, he was all shadow, secretive, mysterious and seductive, dominant and also strangely vulnerable, closed to others, captured for a moment, a fraction of a second. Woon had never seen himself like this, and as he was going through the sketches, rediscovering himself on the paper through the eye of his best friend, he had been taken by dizziness, and a mad and inexplicable urge to run down the stairs, to throw himself at Dong Soo's neck, to kiss him with the devotion of a lovesick boy.

No one had ever done that for him before. The paintings, each time they appeared, constantly awakened this desire, this need, to which Woon was completely subject to and which he was unable to understand, no doubt because it was one of those things that cannot be understood, but just needed to be accepted.

They had first appeared in 2012, two years after Woon's departure from the NIS, where he was completing his training as a profiler as part of his master's degree in criminology and police science, in conjunction with the Korean Institute of Criminology and the Korea National Police University. Dong Soo had enrolled at the same time as Woon, and was following a more traditional program, but one that would also allow him to join the intelligence service as a special agent upon completion of his studies.

Cho-Rip, meanwhile, had chosen a political science career path and obtained a place in Korea's most prestigious university, earning him a sudden and belated recognition from his peers. They had continued to see each other regularly throughout their academic years, but timetables had limited their meetings. When Dong Soo had asked Cho-Rip about his school, as he was almost the only one in the orphanage who had attended a SKY university, the latter had answered with such enthusiasm that he had scared them both :

"The classes are exciting," he had said in a professor tone, waving his hands, so much so that Woon had feared for the safety of his cup of coffee. "You can chat with everyone without any problem, and the other students are really nice, I've already made friends, we talk for hours, it's very stimulating!"

"What, it wasn't stimulating with us?" Dong Soo had teased him.

But then Cho-Rip's face had darkened, to the astonishment of his two comrades.

"No, of course not," he had declared then, after a hesitation, and in a rather cold way. "But it's not the same, that's all."

The university had unleashed something in Cho-Rip, or rather exacerbated habits that he had developed since childhood, and which had been fully accepted in this unique, elitist, deeply cerebral and almost mechanical environment. According to Sa-Mo, he came from a very wealthy family, and was the son of a business leader who had belonged to a long line of yangbans dating back to the seventeenth century, and who had built up a considerable fortune by integrating their family business into the very private circle of chaebols, which functioned in every way like the mafias, except that they were socially approved by society, which wasn't the case with the latter.

He had been sent to a country orphanage instead of a posh boarding school under the pretext that the rest of his family members could "absolutely not" take care of him, and that he had to "face real life" before he could access the power and honors to which his family tree entitled him. Rejected by the other kids and his family, more often mocked than respected, moderately appreciated by adults, he had finally found total acceptance when he entered college, and had therefore clung to it with all his might, integrating it into his identity, letting it shape and change it, model it, or rather rework its structure to better adapt it to that which his studies and ambitions demanded.

The effect was perfectly understandable, and at the same time terrible and tragic. From being a little too passionate, he had become pedantic, and from being shy, he had become implacable and noisy. At twenty-three, he had what it took to be a politician, with the mania for lengthy speeches and a desire to monopolize conversation that had ended up irremediably getting on the nerves of his former comrades, both Woon and Dong Soo, but especially the former, whose level of tolerance was much lower.

They had discussed it a couple of times. Dong Soo was fiercely loyal to those he esteemed and loved, and he had initially expressed some reservations about Woon's criticisms, which had been much more direct and frank than his comrade's embarrassed insinuations. Woon spoke little, generally speaking, but he was known to be sincere and to give his opinion honestly when necessary.

Dong Soo was more nuanced, more vague in his ideas. On certain subjects, he could sometimes show a worrying extremism, but on others, especially concerning his close relations, he was infinitely more measured, seeking to explain, justify, forgive, rather than condemn. This last characteristic had been a determining factor on more than one occasion, especially when Woon had joined Heuksa Chorong for good after the Yungneung mission fiasco.

"Don't you think he's a bit too much?" Woon had said one day, in the middle of the dishes, while Dong Soo was passing the sponge on the table after their dinner.

"No," Dong Soo had replied with a shrug. "I mean, he has changed, but that's good, isn't it ? He's doing what he likes and he has new friends, so it's normal that he's more confident. People change all the time. That's just the way it is."

But the conversation had obviously made its way into Dong Soo's reflections, and Woon had noticed that when they then had seen Cho-Rip again, Dong Soo was a little more reserved and rough with their classmate, as if Woon's remarks had opened his eyes regarding the change in his behavior. In fact, Woon sometimes expressed a thought that Dong Soo didn't always agree with, but which he then seemed to gradually adopt.

It's because he listens to you, Hwang Jin-Ju, a girl they had known in the village, who didn't live in the orphanage but whose father was a friend of Sa-Mo, had become friends with them, especially with Dong Soo, for whom she had had a prolonged crush throughout her adolescence and young adulthood. You're lucky, by the way, she added, because I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall most of all the time.

Years after this observation, Woon was looking at the new painting that Dong Soo had left for him on the warehouse wall, savoring its clean lines, its accuracy, and the strength and authority it radiated. His portrait stopped at the beginning of his waist, and looking down, Woon noticed a small line whose characters arranged together seemed to form a sentence, not a drawing. He moved closer, almost sticking his nose against the warehouse wall.

The characters, up close, turned out to be a series of numbers, divided not into one, but into four successive lines, much as Dong Soo had sometimes left some as a signature. They took the following form, and each number was separated by a dash :

015-043-066-069-028

009-201-026-002-133-084

197-038-148-023-078-031-101-063-114-093

107-095-034-102-193

They were accompanied by a smiley face, whose lower corner of the mouth had dripped in a blackish trace toward the ground.

"Find anything else, boss?" Joo-Bong asked him, as he was still illuminating details of the painting with his flashlight.

"Another set of numbers," Woon told him. "Is there internet around here?"

"No, there isn't. If you want a connection, you'll be better inside the car."

Woon took his cell phone out of his coat pocket, and photographed the numbers written one behind the other, close together like eccentric and absurd siblings. He then ordered his men to pack up the material, as he had just received a message from one of his lieutenants who had stayed at the company's offices, named Baek Myun, and who managed all the activities related to the circulation of counterfeits.

He was a reasonable man, with a humble and polite temperament, and a passionate lover of books. I wanted to be a bookseller when I was a kid, he had confessed to him when he had entered Heuksa Chorong at the age of thirty. He was about six years older than Woon, and the money he earned from his illegal duties had enabled him to acquire a well-stocked library, from which Woon had already picked up classic books, with leather and beautifully crafted covers, and whose interior had the inimitable, parchment-like smell of old books, which had survived through the ages.

The message warned Woon that an opposing gang leader, with whom they had been in opposition for nearly a decade, had been trying to reach him. I doubt it's just to see if you're having a good day, Baek Myun had ironically pointed out, punctuating his text with an indecisive smiley face that clashed atrociously with the rest of his usually distinguished and old-fashioned persona. The guy only accepted a video-conference, and refused to address a lieutenant.

Go Hyang had been suggested to him, but the man had nearly cried foul when learning that they were proposing to put him in touch with a woman, a scenario that recurred quite regularly in the underworld as well as in public affairs and which never failed to provoke his deputy director, his right-hand woman, or more exactly adviser if one followed the strict hierarchy of Mafia organizations, fits of temper that essentially translated into her playing with her pocket knife, a splendid weapon with a diamond-encrusted sheath that she used only in the most extreme cases, or to calm her nerves.

Like Woon, Go Hyang encouraged negotiation rather than direct conflict, but one could never be too cautious, and while it could still be conducted within the Sky Corporation framework, it was much harder to set up with Heuksa Chorong's competitors, whose preferences were more for blood feuds rather than cozy conversations by the fire between glasses of white wine.

Woon took one last look at the painting, embracing it wholeheartedly, finding it well done and beautiful, never understanding how it could be his own portrait, and then he turned around to get to the car waiting for him outside. His driver had already taken his place behind the wheel, and Joo-Bong was putting the spotlight back in the trunk, while his two companions were finishing their cigarettes.

Before going in, Woon searched the interior of the warehouse, especially the corners and heights of the walls, and finally found what he was looking for, stashed in the corner of the south wall, where the front doors were, and the east wall, which was the right side of the building. There, almost invisible if one didn't look too closely, had been placed a small camera whose design, unless known by the observer, was absolutely passe-partout and made it look like a very dark wall light. Woon knew it was on, and he knew who was watching the recording, because it was always the same pattern, the same steps, the same routine. He smiled at the screen, and then mimed sending a kiss towards the little device.

Only then did he emerge from the warehouse, and went to sit in the back of the Genesis, where Go Hyang had already taken her place. Let's go back, he announced. It was about to be eight o'clock, and he was beginning to get hungry, even though the prospect of having to deal with the outbursts of a jealous and on-the-decline baron somewhat spoilt his appetite. Go Hyang had taken a picture of the painting, and had already sent him the copy on his phone.

He took his agenda out of his inside coat pocket, opened it to a page of notes on which ideas had already been scribbled, took out the pen that he always carried around for as a point of principle, and loaded the photo of the numbers underneath the painting onto the screen of his phone. He knew the code, knew how to decipher it. He and Dong Soo had their symbols, their games, and with the numbers, their language.

Other people who had seen the paintings had been racking their brains for hours trying to crack the code, and the thought never failed to amuse Woon immensely, because he could read the numbers, and it was so stupid and so disconcertingly simple that he found the hours of work and effort that supposedly expert guys had put into it hilarious. Oh, if they knew, he thought each time, gloating, knowing full well that Dong Soo was having as much fun as he was using a code developed during their teenage years to send him messages. There were four lines this time. Which meant...

Four words

Woon opened the Naver application, and started typing the first letters of his search. He saw the address of the website, saved after repeated connections over the past decade, appear almost immediately, and once on it, he began the decryption as the car was starting up and entering the dirt road leading to the highway. 015, B. 043, O. 066, M.

He didn't know the list by heart, but since Dong Soo was using it regularly and trying to minimize changes in the associations, he had become more comfortable. 101, E. 114, T. He wrote quickly, using the automatic search function. The dirt road was quite long, full of potholes, and the car was moving cautiously. By the time they got halfway through, Woon had cracked the code.

As he lifted his agenda to read it more clearly, in the light of his door window, a loud bang resounded behind them. Surprised, but not completely either, the driver stopped the vehicle, interrupting the progress of Joo-Bong and his men, who were following them in their own car. They all turned to stare at the warehouse, and saw it, licked by the flames, disemboweled, a compact black smoke rising in volutes above its blown up carcass.

Woon didn't need to take a look at the sight. Before his eyes, the message was saying :

BOMBS

BURIED

UNDERNEATH

HONEY

There were exactly 898 Pokémons in 2020, and Dong Soo only ever used the first generations to code messages with their names, except when a letter wasn't available. Bastard, Woon thought, overflowing with a sickly, feverish affection, putting his agenda in his pocket. The bombs had been placed this time not directly in the warehouse, but underneath it, and probably in the earth around it. He ordered the driver to get back on the road.

No comments were made on the way back.


Indications

- Yungneung = the name of Crown Prince Sado's tomb.

- The Rolls-Royces "Phantom" is one of the most ancient and famous model of the brand.

- About the geographical locations of the mafias in South Korea as well as the names mentioned in this part = everything is true.

- NIS = really exists in South Korea, and means "National Intelligence Service" (aka = their FBI)

- Naver = Google in South Korea.