The restaurant owner’s husband chimed in, “You young people don’t seem to know the ways of the world very well. But if you can’t do this little thing, it can become a miserable life for all of us.” He glared at them meaningfully as he said this.
The man in black, standing next to the restaurant owner and her husband, nodded. Then, wordlessly, he smiled.
“Excuse me,” said the young woman’s husband to the three of them, “but the exchange of a ‘premium’ is only a traditional practice between renters, is it not? It has nothing to do with the landlord in official legal terms. And thirty million won is not a small sum of money. Would you be so willing to part with it?”
Even as the young woman was half-listening to her husband’s trembling voice as he used the proper honorifics and formal speech while trying to reason with the extortionists and their black-clad “assistant” （or, rather, their hired thug）， she was watching the child. The child was in the corner of the store, sweeping her fingers along the wall, then fiddling with the pot of fake flowers by the door, but she did not venture outside. When their eyes met, the child smiled. The young woman returned the smile.
On the seventh year of her marriage, she managed to repay all her loans. Her in-laws had helped out a little （or a lot, really）， but in the end, she had paid them off. Hearing that the best way to raise your children in one place was to have a larger home to begin with, she may have gone in over her head when she bought their first apartment, and she had to quickly adjust to the bitter feeling of going to the banks and giving them almost every cent they earned for seven long years. But it was money well spent in the end. After those seven years, the apartment finally belonged in its entirety to herself and her husband, and she decided they should sell it and move to a neighborhood which was cheaper and quieter. And so, on the eighth year of their marriage, she bought a mixed-use building in a cheap part of town.
She hadn’t been entirely happy with it. “Pleased” would’ve been an overstatement. The times she and her husband had made surveying expeditions into various parts of the city had been fun. The neighborhood they had settled on was quiet, not too expensive, and most of the people who lived there had the aura of calm that came from having been there for decades. As most of the inhabitants were rather elderly, the real estate agent （whose sign still used the old-fashioned term bokdeokbang, or “fortune-gainer”） seemed somewhat perplexed that such a young couple would come in itching to buy an entire building with cash.
But the woman was finally happy. How thrilling it was to buy one’s own place with one’s own money for the first time! Not to mention the fact that she wanted to leave their apartment as soon as possible. There, from the parking lot to the elevators, every time she ran into a neighbor there was tedious talk of land prices, house prices, petitions from the wives’ association, and exhortations to attend meetings of said association, exhortations that bordered on harassment.
She knew she was not “being clever.” Where these people learned such tricks to being clever, she didn’t know, nor did she want to know. Making as much money as quickly as possible, buying a larger house and more expensive car, sending your children to expensive English-language kindergartens and competitive private schools, and going on expensive family vacations abroad every season may seem like a prosperous life to some. But it wasn’t the life she wanted. She wanted a quiet and peaceful life and sought a modest yet warm community where she could live out her days in harmony with her neighbors. She thought she had finally found such a place.
Except she did not like the building from the start.
It’s an old building in an old neighborhood, she thought as she kept trying to convince herself. It was the price of an apartment, and if she wanted to buy a whole building, small as it was, there was no choice but to go with a more dilapidated one, no matter how uninspired the location. The building was much cheaper than most other places, was situated at the entrance to an alley that led to a main road, and wasn’t so far from the subway or bus stops—so perhaps it wasn’t that uninspired a location, either. After briefly consulting with her husband, and a short moment of hesitation, she made her decision to buy.
The real problems began after the woman and her husband bought the building.
It had four floors aboveground and a larger-than-expected basement. There was a café on the first floor and a small rented-out office on the second. The third floor had just lost its tenant and was empty, and the fourth floor had been where the owner had lived according to the “fortune-gainer.” Saying it would be improper to barge into an apartment where someone was still living, the fortune-gainer showed them the empty third floor instead. To not ask questions or demand answers and simply look at what was being shown before signing on the dotted line was a fatal mistake that even rookies like them could’ve avoided.