Chapter XIII

“Does not everything depend on our interpretation

of the silence around us?” 
Lawrence Durrell

Youngbae entered the Choi central offices on the second floor of the CHOI building aiming to go to an exact place. The small employee’s cubicles were upholstered by post-its, calendars and sometimes adorned by artificial plants, which gave the room a kind of sober-austere feeling. The dark carpeted floor and the metallic walls gave the atmosphere a creepy coldness and plastic-smelling air slipped inside from the small windows at the walls. He walked through the small aisles to one of the last cubicles with a plate reading “Human Resources” at the back of the room.

“Chaelin,” he called the black-haired girl sitting at one of the desks. Her heavy eye-lined eyes defocused from the screen in front of her and looked at him, surprised while at the same time her body jumped as if she had been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing.

“Oh, Youngbae. You scared me!” she complained. “I am awaiting for the visit of one of the Sales Department managers and I thought it was you. Your voice sounds different,” she said quite rapidly, eating some letters between her words.

“I need a favor actually,” Youngbae explained, scratching the back of his neck in an undecided fashion, “But no one has to know about this,”

Chaelin stared at him, puzzled, while cleaning the mess she had made when she, in her sudden surprise, had jumped and one of her arms had pushed her bottle of water down to the floor.

“What do I gain from this?” she asked, raising one of her eyebrows and smirking knowingly. Youngbae sighed, already prepared for the blackmailing ways the woman used to have.

“A dinner? Wherever you want, I'll take you out,” he spurted out and looked at Chaelin, begging with his eyes.

The woman smiled widely and clapped with both her hands, expressing satisfaction as she spoke, “Deal.”

“Do you have the personal information from Choi Seunghyun’s back guards? I need it,” Youngbae broke her excitement as he went straight into business.

“The ones who where killed back then?” Chaelin asked with her eyes focused on her computer.

Youngbae only nodded, not willing to correct Chaelin from her mistake. It was too much to explain and he did not feel he had enough patience to talk about those things.

 “No, I don’t have it. It was erased from the personnel archives. Nothing. Not even a name remained,” she said, lifting her hands.

Youngbae frowned his eyebrows. How could it be possible? That indeed sounded strange. Two nights before he had received a call from Lee Seunghyun telling him he had doubts and was suspecting about something fishy happening with those back guards. “Something is not quite right,” he had said and then had proceeded to ask him for help. Personal information, names, addresses, he was now looking for those things and curiously there was nothing, not even a name in the company archives. It was indeed strange.

“But I can tell you something,” Chaelin suddenly whispered, lowering her voice and looking sideways to their surroundings as if making sure no one else was listening, “I know one of them survived. His name is Dong Byung. Why are you looking for him?”

Youngbae held her gaze for a moment, hesitant on saying more things than what he was supposed to. Chaelin, on the other hand, was studying him with her cat-like eyes questioningly.

“Look. I can’t tell you. But I really need to find him Chae… It's something big,” he said, as quietly as she, in a voice close to a whisper. The woman stared for a while and then smiled.

“Two dinners, Youngbae,” she declared, lifting both fingers in the air and then took one piece of paper and a pen and wrote something quickly. “This is his ex-wife address, she is a good friend of mine. I don’t know where he is; they both got divorced months after the incident. But she might tell you where can you find him. Don’t even dare to tell her I was the one who gave you her address!” she threatened him before giving him the piece of paper.

Youngbae nodded with his head and took the paper as if he was taking a piece of treasure, “Three dinners if I find him. I promise,” he said and smiled shyly.

Chaelin snorted but blushed faintly and only nodded with her head before focusing her eyes again onto the screen. Youngbae saved the piece of paper in one of his jacket pockets and walked to the last floor, the manager’s floor, where Jiyong was looking at some of the winter contracts with some clothing enterprises.

When he finally got inside the lift with no one else around, he pulled out his phone and typed a quick message to Seunghyun, instructing him about the place and the hour where they should met that day and sent it before entering to Jiyong’s -Choi Seunghyun’s- office. Once inside Jiyong gave him a tired smile and continued reading the sheets spread over his desk. But something in the way Jiyong moved his shoulders conveyed a faint, weak vibrancy.

“You look good today,” Youngbae commented.

“I feel ok,” Jiyong answered and outlined a sincere smile, the kind of smile that used to adorn his face before Choi Seunghyun’s had been killed. Youngbae looked astonished for an instant and for some strange reason, when he tried to find explanations as f how he was showing that smile, a name popped inside his mind. The name of the one man he had has just sent a message to before. It was as if his mind was playing his own game trying to resolve the puzzle in front of his eyes. Could it be?

He sat at the other side of the office and continued doing his work until six, when he left the building with a weak excuse Jiyong believed as he was too concentrated on his own things, and left a still too occupied Jiyong behind. He drove to Dongmyo Park where Seunghyun and him had agreed to meet. Youngbae was a difficult man, he was slow to trust in someone, but this Seunghyun had achieved in just one visit and two calls a kind of trust he could not even explain. Sometimes he wondered why someone who was supposed to live pretending and lying to his clients could be so trustworthy. Could it be the fact for Seunghyun lying was no longer satisfying or tempting enough, as he had to do so every moment of his life?

Youngbae walked through the stony corridors, sometimes dodging some children running and a pair of dogs until reaching one of the shrines inside the park. Sitting in front of one of them was the silhouette of a man, eyes focused on the images in front of him and the lines his right hand was doing over one notebook, he looked as if he was drawing the view.

“Seunghyun?” he asked and the man lifted his head, recognizing his name. “I’m sorry for making you wait,” Youngbae apologized and his eyes wandered to the notebook between the man’s hands. He achieved to catch a glimpse of what seemed a pencil sketch of the palace in front of them but Seunghyun closed firmly his notebook when he noticed Youngbae staring.

“Hello, big fists. Not planning on hitting me today?” Seunghyun asked smiling and pulled his body off the bench. Youngbae returned his smile and rolled his eyes, shaking his head.

“You are not going to forget that, aren’t you?” he asked. Seunghyun denied with his head and started walking.

“So… you were right,” Youngbae started saying, gaining a curious look from the man at his side. “Seems like someone erased every trace of both back guards from the company archives. There is nothing, not even their names left. I just got this,” he said and took the piece of paper out from his pocket and gave it to Seunghyun, the other man took it cautiously and read its content out loud.

“Dong Byung. Is this his address?”

“No. It is his ex-wife address. They got divorced after the incident. Its all I could find,” murmured Youngbae when he saw the other man frown.

“You think she will gave us some information?”

“We can try,” Youngbae shrugged. “Do you have time today? We can head to the address right now,” he asked.

Seunghyun looked at the hour on his wristwatch and then at the distance. Finally he sighed and nodded.

“I guess there’s no problem if I came back later than normal,” he murmured.

Youngbae decided not to ask what did he meant with “come back later than normal” as same as other questions arising inside his mind about his relationship with Jiyong. He instead focused on their actual problem to solve. They decided to leave Seunghyun’s car at the park and leave to the address with Youngbae’s one.

The address took them to one of the neighborhoods at the edge of the city. It was one of those dull neighborhoods, dirty and poor houses at each side of the street and weak lights outlining the old and rusty cars in front of the porches.

“I used to wander around here when I was younger,” Seunghyun suddenly commented, looking outside the car’s window with sadness. “Depressing, isn’t it? It takes away every hope from you”

Youngbae nodded weakly and observed Seunghyun’s profile. Sometimes he could see the same kind of loneliness and melancholy as Jiyong. It was as if both shared the same pain, the same anguish. But while Jiyong covered it by seriousness, with a weak protection mostly everyone could see when staring sternly, Seunghyun’s pain was harder to see for it was covered by kindness. Youngbae thought it was depressing the fact Seunghyun seemed to have given up on his own happiness and decided to give happiness to everyone else. It was as if he no longer aspired for it.

When they reached the address, they encountered a tiny house, with cement boards as garden and big trashcans as only decoration. The owner of the deplorable place was a woman between her thirties with grayish skin and a curved back that made her seem older than how she probably was. It probably was tiresome, the curse the woman had to deal with through her life and had dampened her spirit, Seunghyun mused.

“How can I help you?” she asked when they were already sat over a pair of broken chairs at the middle of an austere room with only a corroded table as dinning room. She offered them green tea served in white porcelain mugs that seemed inappropriate with the poorness of the rest of the place and smiled.

“We don’t want to take your time away,” Youngbae started saying, playing with the mug between his hands and gazing around to the dirty curtains and rug that carpeted the floor of the room. “We came to ask some things about your ex-husband,” he finally snapped and took a sip of the green tea.

The woman looked at both men in front of her and nodded with her head understandingly. “I thought so,” she murmured. “What do you want to know about Dong Byung? I will answer what I know,” she affirmed and her lips rose in a saddened gesture, one that did not go unnoticed to Seunghyun. It was that kind of smile that used to escape when thinking about better past times.

The woman did not wait for answers and started speaking about his husband, at least those things she knew, as if she wasn’t sure what could be of use and had decided to say everything and leave the choice and the work to screen through his story to her listeners.

“He was a good husband and a good father. Kind, hard working, loving… actually I still can’t hate him even if I had reasons to and even if I try to convince me of doing so every second of my life. You see… he changed so suddenly. Something happened that day, when this Choi guy who he worked for died… something that made him lose something, his sanity,” she said taking a finger to her temples and continued. “… He became irritable. Yes! That is it. He became unpredictable, always easy to get angered. But his anger, his anger was not directed towards us even if we were the victims of it. I know something was bothering him; he used to murmur in his sleep or sometimes could not even sleep. Isn’t that something particular of someone who has something bothering inside his mind?” she asked so suddenly that none of the men in front of her could say something to answer appropriately. So she continued, undisturbed by the lack of response.

“So one day he asked for our divorce. And I… I just had to accept because he wasn’t asking for my permission but telling me. He moved away to the other side of the city. I sometimes ask myself, “What happened? What could have been so strong, so pestering to make him abandon his wife and kids?” He loved them! For God sake, he loved them so much!” the woman stopped talking and stared at a pair of toys left abandoned at one corner of the room as if thinking about those past times when her husband used to still be there.

“Did he give any reason as of why he was leaving? Did something suspicious happen to move him to do what he did?” Seunghyun asked, with a bad taste in his mouth for being so inquisitive with the poor woman.

The woman shook his head. “He only said it was too much. “It’s too much, Hanna, too much” he said, I still hear him saying those words sometimes in my sleep. And there was those letters too, letter envelopes that he always hid from me. One day I manage to get a glimpse of them. The only thing written in the sender was “SH”… When I asked him about them he twisted his mouth annoyed and went out of the house for three days and came back asking me for divorce…”

 “SH?” Youngbae murmured and looked knowingly at Seunghyun. “What does those letters where about?”

The woman twisted her hands uncomfortable and averted her eyes for an instant as if she was ashamed of herself.

“I opened one once. They weren’t letters. I found 800 thousand won inside. I think it was dirty money. I mean, we have no financial problems, but he had been fired from his job after Choi Seunghyun’s death incident. But he was young and could have found easily another job, but he did not. Maybe he lost it and decided to embark on dirty jobs… Who knows!” the woman exclaimed and shrugged her shoulders defeated. “You know? I think he should have died that day. I think all this is our punishment; as if death was angry with him for dodging her and now is punishing us… him and his family. I am not a superstitious woman but I don’t know what else to believe.”

The woman then gave them the last address she had from her ex-husband and smiled at them, again with that sad smile of her and apologized for having no more relevant information to share. Youngbae seemed convinced enough, but Seunghyun as normal for him, felt strange that the woman had not even asked why they were asking for her husband. It was, he thought, as if the woman already had an idea of what they were searching for and was as same as them, puzzled to found what had destroyed the harmony of her own family.

Once in the car Youngbae gave him a look and opened his lips quite a few times without emitting a sound trying to find the right question to ask. Finally he spurted out.

“Do you think “SH” means Soo Hyuk?”

Seunghyun smiled faintly and shook his head. “I don’t think, I’m pretty sure,”

Youngbae nodded and tightened his hands around the stern-wheel absorbed in his thoughts. “Why?” he finally asked out loud more for himself than for Seunghyun, but the last one did answer his doubts.

“I know only one thing that can be bought that way,” Seunghyun said. “Silence.”

Hei! Thank you for reading this story. Special thanks to my new subscribers: Weraska, Nazusuru, Randomskee, Bunny_RL, Kriskiki, FarraFrida, laurisscaro, Galihmaulidia. 

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