“What happens if you get caught cheating at poker?”
Had he never been caught before? At my question, Sin Haeryang only laughed lightly without a word. I guess he hadn’t been caught yet. If you pulled something like that in a poker game where people were betting their salaries, you’d probably get beaten half to death—or just die. Though I did wonder whether the people at that table could actually beat Sin Haeryang like that. The gambling cheat spoke as if it were only natural.
“There’s a limit to how much you can win with luck.”
I suppose so. Obviously. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Since Sin Haeryang had gone so far as to name Daehan through poker, I’d thought he was the sort of person who had every bit of luck there was. Was that prejudice too? Kim Jae-hui asked Sin Haeryang, sounding curious.
“Have you ever won entirely by luck?”
“Yes.”
“Which do you like better, winning by cheating or winning by luck?”
Sin Haeryang answered the question indifferently.
“They’re about the same. Either way, I won money.”
I think I’ve only ever seen cheating at gambling in action movies. So things like this really do happen in real life. I’ve rarely gotten good results when I’ve entrusted myself to luck, so I find it amazing that there are people who gamble. To think they can bet money they earned through blood, sweat, and tears on a card game. With people like this permanently stationed at gambling tables trying to cheat, someone like me would walk in clueless and only have my money taken.
“Do you actually use shills?”
At my curious question, Sin Haeryang shook his head and said,
“There’s no one on my team who could take on that role.”
“Doesn’t Jihyeok or Aeyeong help you?”
“······I’ve tried using both of them, but neither was much help. In Jihyeok’s case, it was more useful to have him standing behind me with a scowl. I don’t particularly want Aeyeong attending places like that.”
Sin Haeryang thought for a moment, then named an unexpected person among his team members.
“If someone on the team were to take on that role someday······I think Jihyeon would do well.”
Did he mean Lee Jihyeon from Engineer Team A? Lee Jihyeon seemed like she wouldn’t know a thing about poker or anything else.
“I don’t think Jihyeon is the type to do that sort of thing.”
“Yes. That’s why I think she’d be good at it.”
While I thought over Sin Haeryang’s words for a moment, Kim Jae-hui asked,
“Team Leader. What about our deputy team leader?”
“He’s too honest. You can tell what he’s thinking just by looking at his face.”
Kim Jae-hui pointed at himself with his thumb and asked Sin Haeryang,
“What about me?”
Sin Haeryang stared at Kim Jae-hui for a moment, then answered like a sigh.
“You stand out too much. They’d think a trap had been set. If you and I sat at the same table and you were looking at people with a smile, no one would want to play poker.”
“Mm. I barely know the rules of poker, though. Then what if I don’t smile?”
“They’d all run away without even sitting at the table.”
At Sin Haeryang’s serious words, I laughed quietly beside them. Both of them would probably look like professional swindlers trying to fleece whoever sat down at the table.
Especially with Kim Jae-hui, I even had the absurd thought that he might have some unknown device in his finger prosthesis and be hiding a few cards in it. Or he might give his opponents the impression that there was some hidden story behind his missing finger—that it had been cut off as punishment after he’d been caught cheating at poker countless times. In reality, he’d probably lost it in an accident like I had.
The nihilistic air Kim Jae-hui had, the tattoo climbing up around his neck, and his vivid red hair made him look like a master of poker. If he stayed still, he’d be perfect for cheating. He was, in fact, a member of a cult too.
“How······ No. It must be a trade secret, so I won’t ask about that. May I ask where you learned this?”
Now that I’d said it, I wondered if cheating at gambling counted as a trade secret too. Was this a technique included under intellectual property rights? Sin Haeryang, are you allowed to tell me this so freely? If I go around talking about it, won’t someone come arrest you or something?
“My maternal grandfather raised his grandchildren, and perhaps he got bored, because whenever he drank, he taught us things one by one.”
What kind of person was Sin Haeryang’s maternal grandfather that he taught a child gambling-cheating techniques while raising him? He drank next to the kids? Were there no adults around to stop him?
My grandfather seemed to have played hwatu at the nursing hospital. Surely there wasn’t some hwatu-playing technique sitting in my head without me knowing. Swallowing a sigh, I asked Sin Haeryang,
“Can anyone learn it?”
“The bigger your hands, the more advantageous it is.”
As if cheating at gambling were piano lessons, Sin Haeryang calmly spread out his hand and showed it to me. Since it was fascinating that the person I was asking answered so sincerely, I bombarded him with every question that came to mind.
“Did you ever cheat at gambling before coming to the undersea base?”
“You may not believe me, but I tried it for the first time here.”
Then he must have been terrified inside. When I skipped cram school once to go to a friend’s house, I thought my heart was going to stop from lying to my parents. Isn’t it scary to con a whole crowd of people?
“When people play poker, do they drink a lot, smoke a lot, and curse a lot?”
“Yes.”
“After you won, has an opponent ever asked you to give the money back?”
“Yes.”
“Then do you give it back?”
“I don’t.”
“Has anyone ever flipped the table while playing poker?”
“Yes.”
“Was it you, Team Leader Sin?”
“It wasn’t me.”
Have I watched too many movies? It seemed like when people got put at a disadvantage, they flipped tables and threw glasses of alcohol.
“Then what happens?”
“We play again, excluding the bastard who flipped the table.”
“If you win a lot of money, how do you carry it back? Do you bring a shopping basket or something?”
At that question, Sin Haeryang only laughed softly without answering. I guess my question was funny. I thought it was a reasonable question, but was it not?
“Why······ did you get into gambling?”
“At first, the goal was to recover money after I heard my previous team members had been forced to hand over six months’ salary. After I won the amount I wanted, I tried to stop attending, but all sorts of bastards started pestering me. Instead, I only attend once every three months.”
“Then have you lost before, Team Leader Sin?”
“Yes. And I also lose on purpose.”
So he wasn’t undefeated or anything. Well, it was a card game. If you won this round, you could lose the next.
“I heard you use the money you earn that way to buy engineer suits for your team members?”
Should I even call that money he earned? When Kim Jae-hui heard my question, he spread out his fingers and folded them one by one as he spoke.
“It’s not just the suits. We need gloves, shoes, hoods, vests, masks, and all sorts of equipment. Even just going to work normally, the things one person is wearing cost about ten million won. It’s a relief that the external undersea suits are shared, or we’d have gone bankrupt.”
“Then how did you manage before Team Leader Sin came?”
“They say they bought and wore only the cheapest things within the budget, sewed up or repaired damaged parts, and new employees used hand-me-downs from former employees.”
“Even things like gloves and shoes?”
“Yes.”
I think the doctor’s coat I use at Deep Blue costs less than twenty thousand won. I don’t know about medical gloves. I’ve never calculated the cost, but they’re probably a few hundred won, right? What if my predecessor’s feet were smaller than mine? Would I have to buy shoes with my own money then?
Walking around inside the undersea base probably wouldn’t be much of an issue even in ordinary sneakers, but engineers seemed to have to go outside the undersea base or continuously go to places where water was leaking.
Wouldn’t things corrode easily if they touched seawater? They might slip because of the water and get badly hurt too. I was about to ask why they hadn’t requested a bigger budget, but I felt like they probably already had several times, so I asked something else.
“Can you still work if you only buy the cheapest consumables like that?”
“You can. It just takes a lot more effort and makes things harder.”
Sin Haeryang shook his head at Kim Jae-hui’s opinion and said,
“You can think of the price of items used at sea as being about three times that of items used on land. On dry ground, you can walk around in shoes worth thirty thousand won, but underwater, you need shoes worth a hundred thousand won. It’s not just the slip resistance or insulation; the materials are different, so they dry much faster. The staff get injured less and can work more comfortably when they use reasonably priced equipment.”
Kim Jae-hui spoke as if it were someone else’s problem.
“People from other teams said that in the old days, Engineer Team A really went around looking like beggars.”
If they were going to throw people under the sea and make them work, shouldn’t they at least support them properly? As if he’d had an interesting experience, Kim Jae-hui began chattering to me.
“When I first came here, the shoes I bought new wore out in three months. I guess it was because I put them in seawater, then put them back in seawater as soon as they dried. Maybe it’s because we’re under the sea.”
“Can’t you dry them in sunlight?”
“You have to dry them in the shade. In the United States or Japan, they use contracts with companies that specialize in diving gear. I’m a little jealous of that.”
I guess the other teams lived comfortably. Well, that was why Team Leader Sato had been curious about Team A’s finances at the escape vessel port earlier.
What I was even more curious about was how Sin Haeryang, who knew absolutely nothing about engineering work, had managed to work here. I was a career hire, but Sin Haeryang had lied about his background to get hired, so how had he remained in the team leader position until now?
“From what you said earlier, Team Leader Sin, it sounds like you knew nothing about engineering work when you joined. You must have been assigned to work right away, so how did you handle the job?”
“When I joined, Team Leader Yang was missing, but fortunately Deputy Team Leader Jo remained. Since there was an unfinished manual that Team Leader Yang and the team leader before him had been making, I ordered Deputy Team Leader Jo to complete the manual.”
To my ears, it sounded like Sin Haeryang was saying he’d gone after Deputy Team Leader Jo the moment he joined the company. Kim Jae-hui imitated Sin Haeryang’s voice and said,
“Make it easy enough that even a middle schooler can follow it while looking at the manual. Otherwise, I’ll throw you to the shrimp as feed.”
Sin Haeryang denied Kim Jae-hui’s words, his voice lowered as much as possible.
“I didn’t say anything that harsh.”
I doubted it. I felt like he’d said something even worse than that.
“Aeyeong told me that when you were deputy team leader, Team Leader Sin, you worked Team Leader Jo to the bone. You can’t even do this? You can’t even do that? Why is this like this? Why is that like that? Why don’t you know how to do anything? Why don’t you know? I heard you beat him down with questions dozens of times a day, asking him all sorts of things. Especially whenever a manual was completed, I heard you put in repair requests to try it out yourself and actually did it.”