At two in the afternoon, a white truck blocked the front of Serim Villa.
Two men climbed down from the cargo bed and headed up the stairs. Each time the wheels of their folding dolly struck an edge, a hollow clatter rang out. Listening from the third-floor window, Lee Sujin came out to her front door.
A suitcase stood beside the door.
It was the large one she had been unable to take the day before. Sujin had returned that morning to collect the rest of her things and respond to the landlord’s eviction notice. The blue tape wrapped around one side of its handle was visible even from a distance.
Jang Manseok stubbed out his cigarette at the foot of the stairs.
“Let’s finish this today. I’m a busy man too.”
Sujin gripped the railing.
“I told you I’d leave when you returned my deposit.”
“Did you give that money to me? You gave it to Mr. Ahn. I keep telling you, I never received it.”
“When I signed the lease, you said he was collecting it on your behalf.”
Jang Manseok smiled. It was the smile of an adult reasoning with a tiresome child.
“If you distrust me that much, sue me.”
In the café across the street, Minjae set down his straw.
Droplets ran down the outside of his cold coffee cup. From his window seat, he could see both the building entrance and the mouth of the alley. Jang Manseok’s words reached only Minjae with perfect clarity.
‘You heard that.’
[Yes. He stated that he had never received it.]
‘Now show them.’
***
Jang Manseok’s phone rang first.
It was Ahn Byeongcheol.
He did not answer. The broker always called with something pointless at times like this. When Sujin took out her phone upstairs, Jang Manseok raised his chin.
“Recording me? Go ahead. Have I said anything I shouldn’t?”
This time, one of the movers’ phones rang.
The man in front read the screen and stopped.
“Sir. Wasn’t a court enforcement officer supposed to be here for this job?”
“I told you I’d handle that.”
“You said you had a court judgment.”
Sujin lifted her head.
The man propped the dolly against the wall. Jang Manseok climbed two steps.
“If you came to work, then work. Don’t you want to get paid?”
“This isn’t what we agreed to. I won’t force my way into someone’s home.”
He called to his coworker. As the two came down, Jang Manseok had to move aside on the narrow stairs.
Just then, Ahn Byeongcheol called again.
This time, he answered.
“What is it?”
He heard someone gasping for breath on the other end.
“Chairman, have you seen the news?”
“What news?”
“My voice is in it.”
The door of the hair salon on the building’s first floor opened. A customer with a plastic coloring cape over her shoulders looked outside, phone in hand. Behind her, the salon owner recognized Jang Manseok and covered her mouth.
Jang Manseok lowered his phone to look at the screen.
The article Ahn Byeongcheol had sent showed the exterior of Serim Villa.
Below it appeared a familiar document.
A document he had certainly destroyed.
“This is fake.”
The words came out before anything else.
Ahn Byeongcheol kept babbling over the phone.
“I only explained it that way because you said there was nothing wrong with the deposits. I had no idea this money was—”
“Shut up.”
Jang Manseok ended the call.
The recording attached to the article began to play.
—They won’t all come asking at once when their leases expire anyway. We can cover it with the money coming in.
It was his own voice.
—Well, you do own several buildings, Chairman.
Ahn Byeongcheol’s laughter followed.
Jang Manseok stopped the playback. Someone on the street played the same recording. This time, he could not turn it off himself.
Sujin had come down from the third floor and stood holding her phone in both hands.
“That’s my lease.”
The two leases on the screen bore the same date and referred to the same unit. Beside the original Sujin had signed was a lease with a reduced deposit, used for a loan review.
Seventy-two million won had become forty-five million won.
“I never signed that.”
Jang Manseok reached out.
“Don’t go believing that. Let’s talk first—”
“Don’t touch me.”
Sujin stepped back.
Her voice was not thin with the effort of holding back tears.
***
Different locations unfolded within Minjae’s awareness.
At the real estate office, Ahn Byeongcheol locked the door. Jang Manseok’s brother-in-law opened the office safe. At the security firm, six employees were checking the same material with different tools.
Minjae could also see the results of the deletion work they had reported as successful.
Emptied storage. Reset devices. A recorder with even its communication cable unplugged.
The residual states of all those devices meshed with transactions outside them to form a single case. The system had done more than restore vanished sentences. It had placed alongside them the people who had trusted those words and sent money, the counters where the false documents had been used, and the accounts that had shared the profits.
The manager at the security firm muttered, looking stunned.
“There’s no way for it to get out.”
An employee held out the inspection results again. The verdict was that no recoverable data remained on the devices they had been hired to wipe. The firm’s most advanced AI had reached the same conclusion.
The manager enlarged the ledger in the article.
That record had existed only on Jang Manseok’s personal laptop, with its communications disabled. It had not even been among the devices they inspected.
“Who got this out?”
No one could answer.
Minjae took a sip of coffee.
‘They locked the door properly, then.’
[Yes. I did not require a door.]
The manager called his client.
Jang Manseok did not answer.
He was opening his banking app.
‘He’s moving the money.’
[He is attempting to. The asset preservation order and the financial institutions’ measures are already in place.]
The balance remained unchanged.
Jang Manseok lowered the amount and tapped again. When a notice appeared at the bottom of the screen, he switched to another bank.
Blocked again.
He was no longer looking at Sujin or the neighbors gathering around. He called his brother-in-law.
“Send it from your end. Now.”
Whatever the other man said made his jaw tighten.
“No, it’s in your name.”
His brother-in-law’s voice rose.
“You said having my name on it didn’t make it my money! You said that yesterday!”
Sujin did not look away when Jang Manseok turned his eyes on her. Nor did she lower the phone in her hand.
Jang Manseok ended the call.
His face had the look of a man searching for whoever was watching him. His gaze swept the mouth of the alley, the hair salon, then the upstairs windows.
Minjae did not move an inch from the café window.
Jang Manseok’s gaze passed over the glass.
The person he was looking for was not the unemployed man living in the studio across the street.
***
A black van slowed at the mouth of the alley.
Jang Manseok raised his hand. It was the car he usually called for trips to the airport. He snatched up the leather bag he had left in front of the building entrance.
The door did not open.
The driver’s window lowered a little.
“The police are right behind me.”
“Let me in, and we’ll talk. You’re blocking traffic.”
Two police cars stopped behind the van.
Jang Manseok adjusted his grip on the bag. Instead of waiting, he approached the detective getting out of the car.
“Good timing. People are spreading false information. I need you to deal with these people first.”
The detective checked Jang Manseok’s face.
“Are you Jang Manseok?”
“You must know who I am if you came here.”
“We have a warrant for your arrest.”
The bag handle twisted in his grip.
Jang Manseok looked at the warrant, then past the detective. As if someone might arrive late and set everything right.
He held on to his phone to the very end.
“Put Director Choi on. Give him my name. He’ll know.”
The retired civil servant who answered did not laugh as he usually did.
“Do not discuss that with me.”
“Just last month, you—”
The call ended.
When the detective took his wrist, Jang Manseok raised his voice for the first time.
“Did I run away? What have I done? This is my building!”
Metal clicked into place.
A passport wallet fell from his bag. The detective bent to pick it up.
Jang Manseok looked at it and closed his mouth.
The dolly came down from the third floor again. This time, Sujin’s belongings were not on it.
The two men loaded the empty dolly into the truck. One approached Sujin and offered her a business card.
“If you need to know what we were told to do today, I’ll tell you. I’m sorry.”
Even after taking the card, Sujin could not lower her hand for a moment.
Just before getting into the police car, Jang Manseok looked back at her.
The tenant who had always brought out her lease and tried to explain stood in the same spot.
She neither pulled her suitcase along nor stepped aside.
***
Minjae swirled the ice left at the bottom of his coffee cup.
‘His arrest isn’t the end of this.’
[Correct. Recovery of the victims’ losses is in progress.]
‘What about Sujin today?’
[No personnel remain to interfere with her occupancy. The access hardware replaced without authorization will also be restored. The first payments are being made from liquid assets whose holders have consented to their return.]
‘Suddenly they’re very agreeable.’
[They each claim that the money in their custody was not theirs.]
‘Then it should go back to its owners.’
[That is being done.]
Outside the café, a locksmith entered the building. After exchanging a few words with the detective, Sujin leaned back against the wall. Her knees seemed to have weakened as the tension left her.
Minjae bought a bottle of water at the counter before leaving.
Sujin recognized him when he crossed the street.
“Oh, hello.”
“I saw the news.”
He offered her the water. She accepted it but could not turn the cap for a while.
“They’re taking him away.”
“I saw.”
“They’re really taking him away.”
There was nothing strange about her saying it twice.
Sujin looked toward the end of the alley where the police car had disappeared. Only after confirming it did she drink.
“I thought I’d done something wrong.”
Minjae looked at her.
“Maybe I should have questioned things more when I signed. Maybe I got too angry on the phone. I couldn’t even tell my mom the whole story. I thought it had happened because I was stupid.”
“The person who scammed you was the one in the wrong.”
At his brief reply, Sujin’s lips trembled.
She looked down at the water bottle.
“I wished someone would tell me that.”
Minjae said nothing more.
The locksmith called Sujin from the doorway. Two new keys hung from a small ring.
She went over and accepted one.
She inserted the key and turned it, and the door opened. Standing at the threshold, Sujin gazed into her room for a long time.
Then her phone chimed.
She looked at the screen and went still. Her hand tightened on the door.
“The money…”
Minjae waited at the foot of the stairs.
Sujin opened her banking app. She checked the notification and the balance in turn, then tapped the transaction history again.
“Some of it’s come in.”
The hand holding up the screen trembled a little.
It was not the full seventy-two million won. But neither was it a promise to pay later, nor a request for more paperwork. It was money she could withdraw from her own account.
Sujin called her mother.
“Mom. I’m home.”
A brief silence passed.
“Yes. My room.”
She took one step through the open door.
“Come over tonight. Dinner’s on me.”
Minjae quietly descended the stairs.
Tonight, Sujin would not have to ask for a place to sleep at a friend’s home. She would not have to start packing at every sound outside her door.
He stepped into the alley and looked up at the third-floor window.
The window opened. Sujin hung a towel she had taken from her suitcase by the window to dry.
***
The repayments that began that day did not stop there.
The same records would appear in Oh Hanui’s follow-up report three days later, and in the conference room where the victims would gather the following week. But what waited until then was Jang Manseok’s remaining excuses, not the next chapter of those people’s lives.
Oh Hanui did more than read the released material. She listened to accounts of what had been said when the leases were signed, checked the receipts the tenants had kept, and visited other units Ahn Byeongcheol had brokered.
On camera, Ahn Byeongcheol said Jang Manseok had deceived him.
The reporter opened the ledger to the day he had separately received a portion of a deposit. There were also text messages he had sent a victim that very day.
—My deposit is safe, right?
—I personally checked. I take responsibility for it.
Looking at the screen, Ahn Byeongcheol picked up his water glass, then set it down.
“At the time, I…”
Even his unfinished answer made it into the report.
Questions about the anonymous source remained. But tracing the reporting back led only to verifiable originals. No trail led to whoever had gathered them.
Minjae’s name appeared nowhere.
In the conference room the following week, the savings Jang Manseok’s brother-in-law had insisted were earnings from his own business became part of the repayment funds.
Deposits had arrived even during periods when the business he described had not existed.
The senders were tenants.
The person who had taken title to a commercial property said he had paid for it. Jang Manseok said he had never received the money. When a call instructing them to transfer the assets was placed between the dates each claimed, this time they looked at one another.
The protective shells around the assets he had trusted were stripped away one by one.
***
Even in court, after the season had changed, Jang Manseok tried to wear the same expression he had worn at the beginning.
He said his business had merely run into temporary difficulties. He said he had never intended to keep the deposits. Clutching a sheet his lawyer had handed him, he read out an apology to the victims.
In the gallery, Sujin did not look at him.
She was looking at the repayment statement in her hands.
Jang Manseok’s vacation home had already been sold. The commercial property held under someone else’s name and his imported car had also been liquidated. The people he had showered with money to maintain his connections were busy downplaying their relationships with him on the witness stand.
His brother-in-law said he had trusted him because they were family, and Ahn Byeongcheol said he had followed orders.
Each time, Jang Manseok turned his head.
The people whose stories had matched so well when they were taking his money could no longer agree on a single sentence.
On the day he was sentenced to prison, he leaned forward toward the judge.
“If you take even the money I have left, what am I supposed to live on?”
Somewhere in the gallery, someone let out a short breath.
Jang Manseok closed his mouth too late.
The deposits of nineteen people were returned, down to the last unpaid portion. The moving expenses and temporary accommodation costs the victims had borne were included in the damages. The money he had claimed would fall short was made up from the sale of the house he had lived in.
As Sujin left the courthouse, Oh Hanui asked her a question.
“What do you most want to do now?”
“Buy curtains.”
The reporter lifted her head.
“I kept thinking I’d have to move, so I never bought any.”
By the time the convictions of Jang Manseok and his accomplices became final, no tenant was still waiting for their money back.
That weekend, pale green curtains went up on the third floor of Serim Villa.
Having signed a new lease with the new owner, Sujin tightened a screw in the shoe cabinet handle. Her expression was that of someone tending to something she would use for a long time. A key ring swung at her waist.
She no longer needed to hide the key in her palm as she had when she first got it back.
***
But all of that still lay ahead.
On the afternoon of Jang Manseok’s arrest, when Minjae returned to his room, there were no curtains in the third-floor window. Only the towel Sujin had hung out caught the sunlight.
He sat at his desk.
A little ice remained in the coffee he had brought from the café. When he took a sip, it tasted almost like water.
‘All the money that’s left. See it through to the end.’
[I will proceed. All assets to be recovered have been secured. Interference with occupancy and attempts at retaliation will continue to be blocked.]
Minjae opened his notebook.
Two in the afternoon. Serim Villa.
He drew a short line through Jang Manseok’s name beneath it. It was not a mark that meant he would forget the case. It meant he had carried out what he himself had decided to do today.
In the harbor on his monitor, the bakery door stood open.
A cat perched on a sack of flour blocked a customer from view. When Mora gestured for it to come down, only its tail moved, once.
Minjae wrote in his notepad.
Cat must not block customers.
[The cat is unlikely to agree with that opinion.]
‘Get me the final decision-maker.’
[Currently asleep on the sack.]
Minjae laughed.
The game he had spent years working on was already complete. He had seen enough of what he could check alone. Next, he needed someone who would move without being told where to look.
He took out his phone and tapped Kang Taeo’s name.
A voice burst out before the third ring.
“You alive?”
“Yeah.”
“If you’re alive, get in touch. Am I supposed to get your obituary through a delivery app?”
The sound of a kitchen exhaust fan came through the phone.
Smiling, Minjae pulled his chair closer.
“Hey. Take a look at a game for me.”
“The one you’ve been making?”
“Homeward Light.”
“If it’s another version where you can log in and there’s nothing to do, I’m beating you with a chicken bone.”
“There’s stuff to do this time.”
“How long will it take?”
Minjae looked at the screen.
Mora placed an empty box beside the sack. The cat opened its eyes, then went out of its way to move to a taller sack.
He took his hand off the mouse.
“Just until a chicken gets cold, for starters.”
“I’m holding you to that.”
“Come over tomorrow afternoon. I’ve got a laptop.”
“What about the chicken?”
“I’m buying.”
Taeo fell quiet for a moment, then laughed.
“All right. Then I’m bringing two.”
The call ended.
Minjae cleared the pile of notebooks off his desk and placed another chair opposite his own. He slipped a folded piece of paper beneath its wobbly leg.
Outside the window, a door closed.
He looked up. Sujin was locking her front door and coming down the stairs. In her hand was a shopping bag instead of a suitcase.
Minjae returned to his desk.
Tomorrow, someone would sit here and enter a city he had never seen before.
What Minjae wanted to show him was already moving there.
Join the discussion