10

David Credit Information Company was located in the E—Building at the northern end of Mapo Bridge. The twenty-five-story building had three entrances: one door in front, one to the left that opened on to a park, and one to the right that opened on to a sidewalk. According to the directory in the first-floor lobby, the building housed a total of thirty-two businesses: the first and second floors were occupied by a bank while the third through eighth floors were mostly medical clinics, which meant that the building got a large number of visitors throughout the day. David Credit took up the entire seventeenth floor and had a security system that prevented anyone but employees from entering any part of it except for the customer service department.

A little past eight thirty in the morning, the subway station exit was crowded with people on their way to work. Su-ho Lee appeared right on schedule. He never headed up to the office right away but instead would pop into a food place next door to buy some kimbap or grab a snack from the convenience store in front of the park. Judging by the fact that he ate breakfast on the go every day, Se-oh had assumed at first that he lived alone. But now she knew most people grabbed breakfast on the go. She decided against jumping to any hasty conclusions whatsoever when it came to Su-ho Lee. Thinking she knew anything for certain was likely to cause her trouble.

Her goal was to learn as much as she could about him. She would collect data, compile statistics, extract probabilities. She would turn him into a subject from which assumptions and predictions could be safely drawn. She wanted her plan to succeed. That was what sustained Se-oh in the present, in which her past was lost to her entirely and her inner self had completely vanished.

She kept losing him at lunchtime. It was impossible to keep her eye on all three entrances at the same time, and she couldn’t just stalk every single man dressed like him on the off-chance that it would be Su-ho. In fact, there was always the possibility of him not coming out of the building at all. There were several restaurants down on the first basement floor.

He usually went to lunch alone; other times he was in a group of up to four people. They appeared to be always the same people. He never met anyone separately for lunch. As a group, they usually went out for hangover soup, and on hot days they ate cold noodles.

Whenever she missed him on his way out to a restaurant, she waited in the park. Twice a week or so, he would stop by a convenience store after lunch and then head there. Usually, he bought cigarettes and coffee or yogurt.

To one side of the park was playground equipment, including a slide and a seesaw; to the other was some simple exercise equipment. There were plenty of benches, too. Su-ho always sat on the side of the park with the exercise equipment, where he would chain-smoke for the remainder of his lunch break before returning to the office via the entrance closest to the sidewalk. Around 2:00 p.m., he would reappear at the building’s front entrance and head out somewhere. That was when his real work began in earnest.

She joined him on his subway rides, through every transfer. She seldom got lucky enough to be able to follow him to the end. It was so easy to lose him. He walked fast. And there were many days when she couldn’t find a good hiding spot from which to keep an eye on him. She’d lose him while trying to avoid being spotted by him on his way back.

Each time she found herself wandering through yet another unfamiliar neighborhood and braving the afternoon heat in order to tail Su-ho, she wondered where this had all begun. Not that everything necessarily had to have a beginning and an end. But Se-oh was sure that there must have been some clear starting point. A single point that had determined everything. A point of divergence from everything that had come before. A point in time that she could look back on after much more time had passed and say that that was the point from which everything had changed.

Was it the moment she’d heard the name Su-ho Lee? As soon as she heard Detective Kim say his name, Se-oh had immediately inferred that Su-ho was responsible for the explosion at #157. Once the thought was in her head, no other hypotheses would present themselves.

While tailing Su-ho, she thought mostly about her father. She thought a little about herself, too. She’d thought she’d known her father well. She’d believed that he would never have made the choice he’d been accused of making. She’d had no reason to think otherwise. She had been confident in what she believed.

But no longer. She was beginning to understand that the life she’d known up until now was an uncertain thing, always abruptly halting or changing direction and sliding toward parts unknown.

Since there was a starting point, there also had to be an end point. In other words, there was now a future that could not be predicted. She had no idea whether it would leave her happy or sad. Life would run its course regardless, with some purpose or resolution, determination or will to action. It was better than being stagnant.

In the meantime, Se-oh had pictured what Su-ho would look and sound like, had imagined his school background, his hobbies, his family and friends. She’d thought about him so much that when she finally did lay eyes on him for the first time, she was certain she had the wrong person. The Su-ho that she’d imagined had broad shoulders, a well-defined chest, forearms that bulged with muscles below his rolled-up sleeves, large, thick hands that could palm a basketball, black hair, and a tanned face.

But the real Su-ho Lee was not large or intimidating or menacing. He wasn’t even tall enough to tower over anyone. No one would feel scared crossing paths with him. He spit a lot, but he came off as more scruffy than criminal. He didn’t swagger around giving people the hairy eyeball, or size everyone and everything up with daggers in his eyes. He didn’t wear his hair in a militant crewcut. He didn’t pair suits with T-shirts and sneakers. His eyes were neither shifty nor bulging. His voice was not gravelly.

He stood maybe five eight at most. He always wore black shoes. The soles must have been made of some soft material, as they made no sound as he walked. He was small-framed and skinny. He wore plastic-framed glasses that were a different color on the inside rim than the outside, and he was habitually pushing them back up his nose. Whenever he talked to his coworkers, he spoke slowly and let his sentences trail off.

He alternated between two suits. Both pairs of pants were so loose on him that the legs looked empty. But not because he was too skinny; the pants were simply the wrong size. The jacket shoulders extended far past his actual shoulders in an outdated style no longer sold in stores. Perhaps he had lost weight very suddenly and hadn’t yet had the chance to have the pants or jacket taken in. He rarely bothered to adjust his clothes after shouldering his bag, so one side of his jacket was usually hitched up all the way to his waist. He wore a loud tie, too, which made him look old and like a hick.

Up close, he smelled faintly of sweat and cigarettes. Emerging from the subway station in the mornings, his hair would look relatively well-combed only to end up disheveled and greasy by afternoon. The dandruff on his jacket was visible. Overdue for a trim, the hair at the back of his head curled up in a slight ducktail. He looked tired, worn down.

But contrary to his air of virtuous exhaustion, Su-ho Lee was not a good person. To put a finer point on it, he was tired because he was not good. He tormented others relentlessly, assailing them with words chosen to coerce and annoy. He badgered them so much to pay off their debts, it seemed as if he were taking revenge for having an unrewarding job. He demanded that they take responsibility while laying claim to their property, and threatened them by casually mentioning the names of their loved ones. He mocked people who’d labored their whole lives with no respite only to be left with nothing but debt. And in so doing, he filled them with resentment toward their families who couldn’t help, or left them feeling remorse for becoming a burden. He made them hate the simple, earnest lives they’d once led.

But perhaps it wasn’t the fault of his disposition or temperament; he didn’t act purely of his own volition or react according to his mood. Most likely he was obeying the strictures of his job, his training, or the general attitude of the company, which emphasized the efficient carrying out of business above all else. That had to be it. Or else he’d deluded himself into thinking that terrorizing your targets through sarcasm and mockery and blame and profanity would improve his collection rate.

But even so, the things a person said and did had a way of ruining them little by little. Whoever he was in the beginning, Su-ho Lee had long since been corrupted. He did not choose his words or shape his actions to meet the demands of his job; rather, the job he’d found suited him.

Detective Kim had suggested that human beings weren’t inherently evil. That they were capable of being honest and well-intentioned and putting others first. Despite the terrible things that happened in the world and the uncertainty of it all, one of the few truths was that, deep down, people were good. But knowing that made no difference to a mind made up. To take action, Se-oh would have to ignore the truth. Because, above all, people are always doing what they said they “would never” do. Because hitting people, lying to them, toying with them, conning them out of their money, threatening them until they thought they were better off dead? That was also what people did.