At six on Friday morning, the courts still wore the face of the night.
Han Seo-yun stopped in front of the iron gate of the district tennis courts to catch her breath. Her exhaled breath spread white in the air. The caretaker always unlocked the gate at five-thirty, and beyond it, fog hung low over the three courts. The white tape along the top of the net drooped like wet laundry. When she shrugged her bag strap higher, the frame of her racket knocked against some spot along her spine. The damp artificial turf rustled under her shoes. It was a long way from sunrise, yet one side of the sky was slowly thinning, like ink dissolving in water.
Tomorrow was the District Mayor's Cup, the amateur tournament. From the Dawn Court Tennis Club, the pair of Kang Tae-oh and Oh Min-jae were entered in men's doubles. They were said to be the favorites. Seo-yun wasn't a player but part of the cheering section, and a beginner of only two months at that. On days when her serve cleared the net, she got praised. Still, when she saw the notice the club secretary, Sun-deok sunbae, had posted in the group chat, she had set an alarm on purpose. *Tournament's tomorrow! Self-check practice today at 6 a.m., come if you can. The youngest members, please help pick up balls~* Being called one of the youngest had, strangely, felt good. By day she made her living fixing other people's writing at a publishing house. She was used to hunting for mistakes. She was not used to being anyone's youngest.
Light was leaking from the direction of the locker room.
"Sunbae?"
Tae-oh was standing in front of the bench. In his black tracksuit with the cap pulled low, his back looked strangely rigid. Normally Tae-oh was the type who made a lap of the courts the moment he arrived, shouting at the top of his lungs. Today he was silent. At his feet lay a racket bag, its zipper open.
"Oh, Seo-yun-ssi. You're early."
The face he turned had no smile. Only then did Seo-yun notice what was in his hand.
It was a racket. No, it was what had been a racket.
A thin crack ran across the frame, right where the head met the throat. It was as fine as a hair, but when she ran a finger along it, it was unmistakably a split. More striking were the strings. The main strings, which should have been strung taut, had been severed in the middle in several places and hung tangled. As if someone had swept straight across the center of the racket in a single pass. The fingertips gripping it trembled, just slightly.
"What is this, Sunbae?"
"I put it in my locker after practice yesterday. Wanted to hit with it one last time this morning." Tae-oh started to laugh and stopped. "I've had it seven years. I adjusted the tension to fit my hand more times than I can count. Min-jae hyung and I went to two tournaments with this racket, and we came second both times. This year hyung was the one who said we should really go for it."
"What about the locker? Was it locked?"
"It was locked. I opened it with my own key. The lock and the door were fine. The only keys to the lockers are mine and the master keys, so..." Tae-oh's voice trailed off. "Who would do something like this?"
With Tae-oh's permission, Seo-yun made a slow circuit of the inside of the locker room. The door of locker seventeen stood half open, and the loop of the padlock was intact. There was no sign of anyone having forced or twisted it, not even a scratch. Not a single scrap of string lay on the floor. Of course there wouldn't be, since every severed string was still hanging from the racket, but that very cleanliness nagged at her. It felt less like the room of someone who had fled in a hurry than the room of someone who had tidied up before leaving. The small ventilation window near the ceiling was latched from the inside.
Outside again, Seo-yun went back over yesterday. It was a habit. When something odd happened, she walked through the previous day's scenes from the beginning, much like reading a proof from the first page again. Practice had started at seven and ended at nine. She had left a little before nine, and on her way out she had seen Tae-oh carrying his racket bag toward the locker room. On the bench had been Sun-deok sunbae's box of snacks, and beside it Min-jae sunbae's bag and a pharmacy bag. For some reason Min-jae sunbae had played only behind the baseline that day. Usually he was the one who shot out at the net like lightning.
Trivial scenes, all of them. Because they were trivial, they had simply piled up in her head.
Tae-oh took out his phone and left a short message in the group chat. *Early practice canceled. Trouble with the locker, will explain later.* In under twenty seconds a reply came from Sun-deok sunbae. *Oh my goodness, what happened? I'm coming right now.* Seo-yun glanced at the screen, then looked up at the sound of footsteps from the direction of the stairs. Someone coming down while holding the iron railing. It was Oh Min-jae. Descending one step at a time, carefully, he looked slow today. Seo-yun put it down to the early-morning chill and let it go.
"Why's everyone just standing around? No practice?"
Min-jae came over smiling, then saw the racket in Tae-oh's hand and stopped. The smile slowly drained from his face.
"That's..."
"The one I left in my locker yesterday."
Min-jae said nothing for a long while. He took the racket from Tae-oh, ran a finger along the crack in the frame, and picked up one of the severed strings. If his eyes looked red, it must have been the fluorescent light of early morning.
"Let's postpone the tournament."
That was the first thing out of his mouth.
"Hyung, it's the district tournament. It's tomorrow. It isn't the kind of tournament you can postpone."
"What are you going to do with that racket? You tuned it to fit your hand."
"I have a spare. It's just a different head size."
"Then it's even worse. The tension's different, the feel's different. And restringing a new one by tomorrow..." Min-jae trailed off. "Anyway, if you go out like this, you're the only one who loses."
Tae-oh didn't answer. He pressed his lips together and only stared at the racket. Seo-yun couldn't tell whether that silence was anger held in or hurt swallowed down. She remembered Tae-oh saying at the last practice that he really wanted to win this year, as if it were a joke. He'd said it like a joke, but not in the tone of one.
"Seo-yun-ssi, did you notice anything strange yesterday before you left?" Tae-oh asked abruptly.
"Only that you went to the locker room with your bag, Sunbae. After that I left right away too."
"I stayed a bit longer to tidy up, then went home. Nothing unusual happened," Min-jae added quietly.
Tae-oh nodded. No one held on to that remark for long.
"May I take a look for a moment?"
Seo-yun spoke, and the two of them turned at the same time.
"The racket. I won't touch it, just look."
Tae-oh held it out without a word. Seo-yun didn't take it. She bent at the waist and examined the ends of the severed strings under the fluorescent light.
At first she assumed someone had cut it with scissors. It was the easiest thought. But something was off. A string cut with scissors gets caught once between the blades before it parts, so its end is crushed flat or frays like down. Seo-yun knew that kind of cut. She had once snipped through an old pair of earphone cords with scissors. But the ends of these strings were different. Each had been cut in a single stroke, at a slant, so smoothly that the direction the blade had passed through was still plain to see. The slanted cross-sections were as even as a freshly sharpened pencil lead.
A memory surfaced. A Sunday a month ago, in the club storeroom, Min-jae restringing a junior member's racket. The tool he'd used then had been a small red-handled thing like a pair of nippers. He had pulled the string taut and set the blade against it, and it had parted without a sound.
"This wasn't cut with scissors. It's a stringing cutter. The red-handled one in the storeroom."
The two of them stared at Seo-yun. Min-jae spoke first.
"Seo-yun-ssi, how do you know that..."
"I saw you using it, Sunbae, when you restrung that junior's racket. The cut ends are identical. One stroke, slanted like this."
"She's right," Tae-oh said in a low voice. He said it before Min-jae could. "You can't get a cut like this with scissors. Whoever cut it used a proper tool."
Which meant someone had come on purpose, knowing exactly what they were doing, bringing the tool with them, and had wrecked this racket. It was neither an accident nor a prank.
"Sunbae, how many people in the club know how to string a racket?"
Instead of answering, Tae-oh looked once at Min-jae. Min-jae smiled awkwardly and raised a hand.
"Not me. You know that. Why would I?"
"I know it isn't you, hyung." Tae-oh gave a short laugh. The end of it curled bitterly. "There are only two people in our club who know how to string a racket. Min-jae hyung, and Jin-ho."
"Jin-ho-ssi?"
"Seo Jin-ho. He left three months ago. After a huge fight with me."
Out in the morning fog, from somewhere far off, came the sound of a train. Seo-yun took out her notebook and slowly wrote down that name.