“How are the preparations coming along?”
“What preparations are there to make?”
His head was foggy with fever, and the insolent answer slipped out of his mouth.
Instead of replying, Park Shineok exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke. Sensing the displeasure in that unwelcome breath, Eunhyung hurried to add something, as though regretting his impertinence.
“I'm an orphan. All I have to do is put my own affairs in order.”
“You little bastard, don't say things like that. Hurts my feelings. How are you an orphan? Isn't your father sitting right here?”
Already in a better mood, Park Shineok let out a hearty laugh and tapped the ash from his cigar.
With his elbows resting on his knees and his body leaning forward, Eunhyung gave a feeble laugh along with him.
A father.
Eunhyung thought of the several fathers who had passed through his life.
First, he thought of the original one. His biological father, the man who had supplied the sperm.
Who was he?
Even the woman who had given birth to him probably didn't know. That must have been why she had abandoned a newborn baby, its umbilical cord not yet detached, in some corner of a marketplace.
Naturally, he had ended up in an orphanage. He had been given the director's surname and the name Eunhyung. He had learned to walk and outgrown diapers.
“He's from the orphanage.”
“A little bastard without a mother or father.”
From the time he entered elementary school, those words had followed him around like a nickname.
The origin of the nickname wasn't a lie, and there was nothing he could do about it, so he let it be.
The event that truly shook the foundations of his existence, however, came from somewhere entirely unexpected.
“Hey, the director wants you.”
Around the time Choi Eunhyung entered middle school, the director began summoning him once or twice a week.
Inside the dim director's office, he was instructed to stand by the window like a doll.
After standing there for roughly ten minutes without understanding why, he would be given spending money. There were no beatings, no unreasonable demands. It was an easy way to earn a little money.
Then, one day much like any other, a gust of wind pushed through a gap in the window that had not been properly shut, sweeping the curtains aside.
Late-afternoon sunlight flooded the director's office.
Choi Eunhyung could never forget the murderous rage he felt that day.
The look in the graying director's eyes as he seemed to lick the boy's slender silhouette with his gaze. His flushed, excited face. The thick hand moving busily at his crotch.
“From now on, you can call me Father.”
Even after being caught masturbating, the director behaved with the shamelessness of a man who knew nothing of embarrassment.
If anything, he seemed to regard the discovery as a stroke of good fortune. He began keeping Eunhyung even closer, assigning him all sorts of small errands.
Once Eunhyung began wearing the black, high-collared school uniform, those errands started keeping him out later and later.
It was near the end of his seventeenth year that he learned the director was a man hopelessly addicted to gambling.
“Son, your father's hit the jackpot today.”
At some point, the director had begun taking Eunhyung along to gambling sessions with a man whose features he could never quite remember. Soon the director was bringing home thick bundles of money.
Eunhyung instinctively knew that the man who casually bestowed thirty thousand won on him for fetching cigarettes was a professional cardsharp.
And on the night that man, too, put his hand inside the front of his trousers—
On that night, beneath a brilliantly shining full moon—
Choi Eunhyung committed his first murder.
“What's this?”
A boy suddenly appeared before the middle-aged Park Shineok as he was leaving the gambling den.
Dressed neatly in a school military-training uniform, the boy lowered his head slightly and spoke in a composed voice.
“My father… has committed an offense.”
In one hand, the boy held a heavy duffel bag stuffed with bundles of cash.
In the other, he held the cardsharp's severed, bloodless hand.
His bangs were long enough to fall into his eyes, but the fierce gaze occasionally visible beneath them was remarkably calm. Only a few drops of blood stained his military-training uniform.
Seventeen, soon to be eighteen.
What had Park Shineok seen in that boy?
Eunhyung rode in his car for a long time through the darkness.
By the time he began to feel carsick, they had arrived at a small Buddhist temple. There, an elderly monk examined his face from one angle and then another.
“Where did you find such a blade? Sharpen it well and put it to use.”
“Is that so?”
“He'll die at thirty.”
Eunhyung blinked.
What the fuck is this bastard saying, right in front of me?
The boy's eyes, sharpened by the blood he had shed, glared at the monk like piercing blades.
But the monk remained mild and unperturbed, continuing to pronounce his dreadful prediction without the slightest hesitation.
“There is no life for him beyond thirty. I cannot see any at all.”
Then he beckoned Park Shineok closer with a small movement of his hand.
Park Shineok approached hesitantly, and the monk cupped a hand around his ear and whispered something.
After their brief, private conversation, the monk pressed his palms together and took his leave.
Park Shineok bowed even more deeply than the monk had.
Watching his back, Eunhyung wanted to protest.
What's wrong with that damned fake monk? Why is he saying such horrible things about someone who's perfectly healthy?
He wanted to complain like a spoiled child, but Park Shineok merely reassured him.
“That monk's never been wrong.”
“…”
“I'll make sure you have an interesting life from now on.”
Think of me as your father.
Park Shineok patted Eunhyung's back, which had already grown broad.
Eunhyung, suddenly feeling as though everything were far away, parted his lips slightly.
Father.
Another father?
And what sort of harm will you do to me this time?
Park Shineok really did take Choi Eunhyung in, feeding him and raising him.
As soon as Eunhyung turned twenty, he was sent into the field.
With his formidable skills, his nerve, and the chairman's favor, it was only a matter of time before he became a powerful figure in the organization.
Of course, there were those who occasionally tried to undermine him, using his appearance or youth as an excuse.
Whenever that happened, Choi Eunhyung became even more merciless, surrounding himself with increasingly terrifying rumors.
It was a means of survival that had little to do with what he actually wanted.
“Hey, maid! We've got aspirin in the house, don't we? Give Manager Choi some.”
Park Shineok was particularly fond of Choi Eunhyung's seemingly purposeless cruelty.
He looked after him so attentively that he even called Eunhyung the grown son he'd acquired in his old age.
Of his three fathers, then, Park Shineok was perhaps the closest thing to a father in any meaningful sense.
Choi Eunhyung did whatever Park Shineok told him to do.
If he was ordered to kill, he killed.
When recruiting members for the organization, he followed Park Shineok's instructions and took them to see the elderly monk.
He had his doubts, but he had to do it.
Because not a single one of the monk's predictions had failed to come true.
He had once scoffed at the monk's ridiculous claims that one man, who didn't even have a driver's license, would cause a traffic accident at twenty-five, and that another, a man twice Eunhyung's size, would die of illness at twenty-three.
But then he had watched an organization member, drunk out of his mind, sail through the air in a great arc from his motorcycle.
How old was that guy again?
As Eunhyung stood there, dazedly trying to work it out, he suddenly remembered that another member of the organization, who had died unexpectedly of acute leukemia the previous year, had been twenty-three.
After that, there was no avoiding belief in the curse-like prediction that he himself would die at thirty.
He had truly believed it.
Believed it absolutely.
Until recently.
***
“What are you looking at?”
“…I was going to take away your water glass.”
A young maid kept hovering around him, making a nuisance of herself.
Eunhyung snapped at her irritably and tossed back his aspirin.
Everything before his feverish eyes seemed to waver.
His throat had been bothering him for several days, but he hadn't wanted to make a fuss, so he hadn't gone to the hospital or bought any medicine.
The result was a miserable feverish cold.
Still, it would be over after a few days of suffering.
“Excuse me. Um, excuse me. Just a moment.”
The maid, having noticed his condition, became quite troublesome.
She fussed about how his hair would smell if he didn't dry it, then gently rubbed his hair with a dry towel.
Choi Eunhyung had never once complained of being sick, not to his colleagues and not even to the boss himself.
And now he was allowing a child, a maid in someone else's house no less, to tend to him.
Leave me alone.
The words hovered in his mouth, but he lacked even the energy to force his voice up from the depths of his throat.
At the same time, Eunhyung was a little surprised to discover that being cared for was not nearly as repulsive a sensation as he had expected.
“How many people have you killed?”
The question sent his vision, which had only just begun to clear, swimming all over again.
Was he simply being oversensitive?
It sounded almost as though she were asking how many days he had left before his own death.
Eunhyung slowly turned his head and looked over his shoulder.
A round-faced, innocent-looking girl was blinking at him with open curiosity.
That's all you're curious about, isn't it?
You wouldn't care what it's like to live by the blade, knowing the day you're supposed to die has already been decided.
His reply came out needlessly spiteful.
“Got someone you want killed?”
“N-no.”
“I'm expensive.”
“I… I don't have anyone I want to kill.”
“Then why ask?”
Even while stammering, she managed to answer him back at every turn.
The maid pursed her lips and muttered a protest.
“Am I not even allowed to ask?”
She's right.
There's no crime in asking a question.
What good would blaming you do? I'm the one who lived this kind of life because I believed every word of that damned fake monk.
Eunhyung took the towel from her hands.
“That's enough. Go on.”
The maid bowed, and he heard her quick little footsteps as she hurried away.
Suddenly, he wanted to shout after her retreating figure.
I'm not going to die.
They say I'm not going to die.
When the endless nightmares and sleepless nights had driven him to the very brink of madness, he had finally sought out a renowned shaman as a possible way out.
And according to that shaman, the only reason his life had been shortened was that his father had been steadily shaving years off it.
In truth, he was fated to live a fucking long life.
All I have to do is go to prison.
If he spent two full cycles of the four seasons behind sturdy walls, some woman would take his doomed fate upon herself in his place.
After that, he would even find a woman who would devote herself to him alone.
They would have children together and live out their lives in close, affectionate companionship.
Of course, there was no certainty.
He might simply be wasting two of the roughly three years he had left to live.
But only time would tell which of them, the fake monk or the shaman, possessed the greater gift of prophecy.
Naturally, he had not breathed a word of this to Park Shineok, who revered the elderly monk's pronouncements as absolute truth.
To hope for a future that contradicted the prophecy would be nothing short of treason.
As Eunhyung revisited the wretched circumstances of his fate, his frustration suddenly spilled over onto the innocent maid.
“Stop worrying about other people and get those injuries treated. A girl who gets scars where everyone can see them will never find a husband.”